Day 199: Spring Term Placement Test 木曜日・2015年4月2日

Today was apparently the last sunny day for a while, and I was stuck inside redoing the placement test. Luckily I managed to complete the test in two hours rather than three this time, as the internet seemed to be working a lot faster.

It gave me my immediate results at the end, and I see that my kanji is now among the highest possible marks in the advanced level for students in the M-Program, which pleases me. I’ve definitely absorbed a lot of kanji just from looking at the names of places in the station, looking at Japanese advertisements everywhere, and so on. I think I’m quite good at remembering kanji.

On the other hand, my grammar is, as I thought, completely terrible. I was still on a mid-intermediate level but grammar is definitely something I need to work on this semester. Time to hit the books. I didn’t have much of a clue of what to do in Japanese tutor sessions so it was mainly just free talk for two and half hours, and while I learned some good words and phrases, it never had much direction.

Now that I’m tutoring all kinds of different people, I see that some of them use textbooks, so maybe I can start bringing textbooks to my tutor sessions. Could do an hour of grammar, an hour of studying a news article, and half an hour of free conversation. And prepare blogposts and/or essays each week for them to check. I think that’s a much more productive idea. Why couldn’t I have thought of all this stuff closer to the beginning of the year? I feel like I’ve lost 26 weeks of practice now. Still, better late than never. Teaching English to people has really put my own learning into perspective.

I’m also going to be preparing for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test in July as it’s cheaper to take the test here than in England. But I can only take one test at a time. I was presumed N4 level by my teachers in my first year of university, and I think I’m easily N3 now, maybe even N2 if I pushed myself hard enough, but I think you can only take one level test at a time so I’m going to go for N3 while I’m here and then N2 in December when I return to England. I’ve signed up to the JLPT site but I’ve not applied yet. I have until the end of the month. I just want to do the practice tests online and see what kind of level I’m at before I apply. Maybe I’m closer to N2 than I think. Though I doubt it.

I tutored several kids today. One girl read me Dr. Seuss books (Green Eggs and Ham and The Cat in the Hat), I presented an epic Harry Potter quiz consisting of 42 questions (6 questions per book) to the 8-year-old Potterhead (he got 40/42, amazing), and a new client was a 12-year-old boy who speaks really quickly and excitedly as he’s clearly very intelligent and has been learning English since he was born so he speaks it very naturally. We mainly talked about video games. He plays mainly Nintendo 3DS though, and I don’t have one. I play on my brother’s Xbox mostly. I heard my brother was going to buy an Xbox One with his own money though I don’t know if that plan has yet come to fruition.

I also tutored another little boy who is 7 years old, but he always gets frustrated about halfway through the lesson and loses interest. I don’t know if it’s because I rub him up the wrong way or if he just gets confused by the textbook tasks or if maybe he doesn’t want to study English. I can’t tell. I’ve had two lessons with him so far. To be fair, the textbook lessons are often not so clear. Even I have trouble identifying what they’re supposed to say/do.

Tomorrow is Day 200! Oh how time flies.

Day 198: Busy Brit (new blog!) 水曜日・2015年4月1日

It was raining when I woke up. The cherry blossoms have surely met their demise now. A very appropriate April Fool’s Joke played by Japanese weather.

But it’s the first day of the Japanese fiscal year, meaning everyone’s going back to school soon. I have to do my placement test again tomorrow, like I did at the start of the year. Hopefully it won’t take 3 hours again like last time, with the internet being so slow between each loading page. Wow, how the time flies. Was that really six months ago? I must have been because I do feel like I’ve been here an age, and other times I feel like I’ve barely been here at all. I’m leaving in five months’ time. Time here feels so much shorter now that I’ve passed the halfway mark.

Because it’s the first day of the Japanese fiscal year and I’ve had the idea in my head for a couple of days now, I decided to start a new blog. I was originally going to start it for when I finished this one, but I figured now’s as good a time as any to start. It’s the Japanese counterpart for this blog, only politer of course (and I’m not sure my sass would translate very well into Japanese anyway). Also, I’ll only updating it twice a week, on Wednesdays and Sundays, I’ve decided. I think I’ll have a specific topic in mind for each day. It’s easier to think of things to say when it’s only a weekly or biweekly blog as opposed to a daily one like this one, and I especially struggle for words on days when I do nothing.

That’s a bit of a contradictory segue to the name of my blog, which is “Isogashii Igirisujin” (“Busy Brit” in English). The name was of my own creation (you can tell by the audacious alliteration), yet somehow I feel like I’ve stolen it from Rachel. She’s much busier than me (you should have seen her holiday schedule) and is more deserving of the “Isogashii Igirisujin” title than me. It sounds like the kind of blog she would write. I think she has a Japanese blog, actually. I just don’t know how often she updates it. But I AM busy so I guess I deserve it too. I may not have been on adventure today, but I was working, and I wrote up my new blogpost in Japanese, so I’ve at least been productive. Now that I have this job I’ve not been watching videos at all. I’ve been cramming all my available time into writing stuff up and reading news articles. So I guess it’s still somewhat killing time, but in a more academic way.

Anyway! Here’s my new blog.

https://isogashiiigirisujin.wordpress.com/

It’s in Japanese, though. I don’t know how many of my readers know Japanese. But just putting it out there. It’s my little side project to practise my Japanese skills and to also reach out to a Japanese audience who may be interested in a foreigner’s perspective of Japan. I’m also thinking that if I write two blog posts a week it would be something for my tutor to correct for me, and it would mean I’m regularly practising Japanese writing twice a week. I write in Japanese all the time anyway, but it’s rare for me to write so much in one go.

Today I gave a self-introduction and talked about how I went and saw some sakura yesterday. I keep calling it “omoigakenai ohanami” (“unexpected flower-viewing”). I love the word omoigakenai because it’s the same word they use for the Japanese translation of the first Hobbit movie. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey becomes Hobitto: Omoigakenai Bouken, with “bouken” of course meaning “adventure”.

“Isogashii Igirisujin” is a much prettier blog because it has a sidebar with a picture of me sitting in the sakura tree from yesterday, and it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Aaaah.

Not really much to say today! Goodnight.

Day 195: Job satisfaction 日曜日・2015年3月29日

I ended up doing 12 bookings today (meaning 6 hours of work), over an 11-hour period, 11am-10pm. I barely noticed. I was genuinely enjoying myself.

To pump myself up I listened to some nostalgic songs, namely Busted, and was headbanging along to the anthems of my childhood. Disturbing now to listen back to their songs and realize I was singing along to songs with lyrical genius such as “I messed my pants/When we flew over France” as an eight-year-old. I don’t even care. Air-guitaring to “Crashed The Wedding” and “Thunderbirds Are Go” is life.

A Japanese song that Rachel sings in karaoke a lot,「いいんですか？」 (“Iin desu ka?”, “is it okay?”), is also good for pumping me up. I also like 「リンダリンダ」 (“Linda Linda”). Oh, and the Sex Pistols. Stuff with heavy electric guitar is best for pumping me up for 11 hours of work.

I had a whole range of customers. Some of them had double lessons for if they wanted to study articles or from a textbook, others wanted to just chat for a while about certain topics, and so on. My favourite client was an 8-year-old boy who loved Harry Potter, and we talked about nothing else for the whole lesson. On the spot I decided to quiz him, thinking of one question for each book, and he has a surprising eye for detail. Also his English was probably the best out of all the Japanese people I spoke to today, except perhaps for my last client who is 49-years-old and speaks Queen’s English, but this little boy spoke it so naturally and seemed incredibly mature and intelligent for his age. His mother then booked two more lessons for him with me this week, saying that he really enjoyed the Harry Potter quiz and that he wanted it to be the topic for his next lesson. The other lesson is to focus more on Roald Dahl and any other English books he’s read. If only someone had shown me French films and given me French books or something when I was that age. Or German books. Anything in another language. He’s apparently only been learning English for a year and a half and he speaks like a native child.

Another interesting client was a customer who reads The Economist and picked out an article speculating on whether the Chester constituency in the North West of England would vote Tory or Labour in the upcoming general elections. So, quite relevant to me. How thoughtful. This one was more intellectually challenging, and for that I am grateful. Lots of political and financial vocabulary.

I’m working for peanuts right now at ¥600 an hour (legally within the Japanese minimum wage bandwidth), but I don’t really mind. I’ve had over 10 bookings, I had 12 just today, so I can ask to upgrade from half-price campaign teacher to fully-paid ¥1200-an-hour teacher whenever I want, but like I mentioned before campaign tutors have more of the spotlight being cheaper and easier to find, so once I upgrade I’m going to stand out a lot less. There’s only a handful of half-price teachers to compete against, in contrast to 94 full-price teachers. So I’ll wait until I get a few regulars and a few more likes and reviews on my profile. Thinking of staying like this until I’ve settled into my new routine for the spring semester and I’m getting an average of 25-30 bookings a week. That may take up until my first pay day, in three weeks’ time, or I might make it a month.

I am SO tired now. Time for bed. Only two bookings for tomorrow so far. I should be going out in the evening and I can’t do the afternoon because my Japanese language lecturer is in town and wants to meet up with me and Jay for coffee and a chat about our progress.

Night night!

Day 194: Started out my part-time job. It’s going well (I think) 土曜日・2015年3月28日

I’m just going to type this up quickly as I have another tutor session to do in half an hour. I’ve already conducted three separate lessons over Skype today. Today was my first day, and I’m getting a steady amount of bookings. In fact, I’ve received so many bookings I could upgrade to full-price teacher right now, but then I’d lose my advertising that I get as a half-price rookie teacher. So I might stay on half-price lessons until I’m receiving 25 bookings a week or so then I don’t have to worry about getting the amount of bookings I need.

So far I’ve had a woman in her 30s, a man in his 30s, and a man in his 40s. Next is a man in his 50s. Tomorrow I have seven bookings so far, including lessons using source material, which I’ve not done yet. One booking is for an 8-year-old boy who apparently speaks really advanced English for his age, and loves Harry Potter, so we should get along well.

I’m enjoying work so far but maybe that’s because I’ve not done it with a textbook yet. I’m a bit nervous about that. Hopefully it’ll be okay. I also have to talk about current topics using CNN as a source. Well I’ve been keeping up with the news recently but it’s in the tutor guidelines not to stray into overly-opinionated territory.

After my third lesson I went to Bampaku Kinen Kouen again. In most areas of Japan the sakura hasn’t fully bloomed yet but in Bampaku the sakura is already wilting, which is a shame. Oh well, at least they’ll be blooming beautifully in other places. After wandering around the sakura gardens and the Japanese-style garden in Bampaku we went to go get sushi in Onohara then walked back up the hill. And I still have another tutor session. I’m exhausted.

Day 184: Ermahgerd jerb intervyer 水曜日・2015年3月18日

I had a job interview this morning. I wasn’t hungover (thank goodness) but I didn’t have very much sleep. It was over Skype again, this time with an English-speaking Japanese person, and it was more professional. I thought I fucked up the interview more than once (we were talking about books and she asked the awkward question whether I liked 50 Shades of Grey and though I initially tried I couldn’t keep my feelings hidden), but in the same day, I got an email saying I’d been accepted!

So I have a part-time job! Or, well, almost. I’ve not started yet. I’m in the process of setting up my professional profile, and I need to train myself by looking at the site’s guidebooks and so on. But then people can see my profile and select me as their teacher, if they want. Each lesson is 25 minutes long. For the first ten lessons I’m paid half as much as I would usually, like a trial period then when I’m a fully-fledged tutor I’ll be paid the normal amount. Minimum wage, but I can choose how many hours I do a week, and as it’s over Skype and I’m paid via Paypal, I can continue the job when I go back to England. The site is more professional-looking than the last one so I think they’ve found a way to employ people from all over the world rather than getting snagged by state laws. Or who knows, maybe that was an excuse not to hire me. Hehe. Well, I’ll never know.

Because of the time of my interview I didn’t go with some other girls to go see The Imitation Game. But I was happy to do nothing today. I wish I could have gone with them as they’re really nice people and I like them a lot but I needed to do stuff like the interview, also packing for Fukuoka as my flight is tomorrow.

However, I’m still not fully packed. Uh-oh. Also I caught the sun on my face yesterday, so my nose, cheeks and forehead are tinged pink, which is embarrassing.

Day 180: Insert darts and/or Robin Hood joke here 土曜日・2015年3月14日

I am always at my most productive when there’s the possibility of someone seeing my room.

I had a Skype interview for part-time hours on an online English tutoring site at 9pm (8am on the East Coast, where my interviewer was living). I made sure the area where the computer would be facing was impeccably tidy. Though the rest of my room was tidy-ish, I’d left a load of boxes out and so I kind of tucked them away into an unseen corner.

Before the interview I quickly ran off to the supermarket to get a few vegetables and some bread, as I was making vegetable soup. My soup turned out pretty chunky, making me wish I had one of those hand-blenders my mum uses when she makes soup. But it was pretty yummy. I sprinkled some cheese on it (bad for me, I know) and enjoyed dipping bread in it as I slathered each slice with American peanut butter that I’d found in the Umeda Hankyu international supermarket. Chunky. Wouldn’t have it any other way.

Whilst eating I pondered on what to watch as I finished rewatching Breaking Bad and I caught up with Better Call Saul. I thought about continuing with The Walking Dead as I stopped watching at some point through the new season, but eating my dinner doesn’t pair well with watching zombies chewing on flesh. Or any of the other gory things that have happened so far in the new season. The season premier made me want to vomit.

Instead I settled for rewatching some Sasameki Koto (“Whispered Words”), which is a GL/yuri anime I watched a few years ago, but it’s so cheesy, and the characters are so one-dimensional. At least it’s more tasteful than any BL/yaoi anime I’ve ever watched.

Because I’m thinking of doing a year abroad in Germany, perhaps I should rewatch Monster. Now THAT was a good anime. I bought the first manga volume in Japanese whilst I was here, though because of all the surgical terminology it’s really hard to read. But it’s a good mix of Japanese and German culture, so why not.

Berlin would be cool, as it’s the capital city and I’ve been there before, but if I could get into Munich via the Erasmus Program, that would be phenomenal. Have you SEEN Munich? It looks stunning.

Anyway, I had my Skype interview at 9pm. I think it went kind of well, but as it was quite a laid-back interview, maybe I got a little TOO relaxed. One could see me as brimming with British wit and charm, others might have seen me as an arrogant sod. But I should know by tomorrow whether or not I’ve got the job. Very fast work. I do hope I’m accepted. But maybe I should be a little more formal next time, no matter how laid-back they tell me it’s going to be. There’s confidence, and then there’s cockiness.

I also started talking my former host-family exchange partner, Reika. I went to Fukuoka three years ago and now that I’m going back I’m trying to meet up with people, including Reika, and she invited me to stay over at her house for one night, which I think would be fun! It’d be nice to meet the family again.

I should ask her if ICOCA cards work in Fukuoka.

Smell ya later.

Day 176: Homemade okonomiyaki and vegan blueberry ice cream 火曜日・2015年3月10日

I bought a 5kg bag of rice at the supermarket. Thought about buying a 10kg one, but it was kind of expensive, and the 5kg one was already heavy enough. Besides, I didn’t even get through the first 5kg bag within the almost-six months I’ve been here. Mainly because I got lazy and started microwaving all my rice. But I tested one of my frozen rice packs that I made yesterday, and it microwaved just fine, so I think I can keep doing that and save money, not to mention packaging. Also it’ll be good for when I go back to the UK, as I don’t know if they’ll have microwaveable rice of the same calibre.

My shopping for this week came to over ¥5,000. Ugh. Mind you, it included that 5kg bag of rice, which was about ¥1500. I’ve lost more than that weight since coming to Japan. It looks like a lot when you look at that huge bag of rice, same when you try to carry it, but that’s only a small fraction of what I weigh, and I don’t know if it’s really that noticeable.

I made a list of everything I’m going to cook this week. I’ve become quite good at running my fridge down, and I’m hoping I never have to waste food again if I can help it. Tomorrow I’m making “italian chicken” as my mum calls it, which is chicken thighs marinaded in white wine and vinegar with rosemary and mushrooms. This is so I can use the bones to make stock for soup, as I already have a leftover chicken bone in the fridge, but I don’t think it’s enough to make stock with.

To use up the rest of my eggs and the half-used packet of bacon, I made okonomiyaki for dinner tonight. No big deal I guess, but last time I made it I didn’t chop up the cabbage anywhere near thinly enough. This time I was able to use my food processor successfully, and so the batter turned out well. I mixed it with crab and then put the bacon on top as I was showed in Japanese Culture Club at my sixth form college a couple of years ago. Wow, was it really two years ago? Time flies.

I then used the food processor to make (vegan) blueberry ice cream. A frozen banana, and frozen blueberries. But I ended up adding milk to it, so it wasn’t quite vegan. Last time I made that kind of ice cream with Rachel we luckily had soy milk on hand, so it really was 100% vegan. I did buy some soy milk today, but only in a little carton so I could drink it once I got back from hauling all those heavy bags from the supermarket. The ice cream’s in the freezer now because I had to let the ingredients melt a lot to be able to process properly, and I don’t like melted ice cream. I’ll see how it fares after being frozen then eat it later.

I got an email back from the online English tutoring site, and I have an interview this Saturday. They’re Skyping me from the East Coast, 13 hours behind Japan. So I feel very big and important. Hahaha. They told me I speak very clearly and easily (my mum would probably scoff), so I really do hope I get the job. Even if I don’t earn that much, surely it’d be something good to put on my CV. And I think I do 10 hours a week max, so it should be easy enough to work into my schedule alongside my studies once school starts again. I could even try finding another part-time job to do alongside it, if I’m lucky. And because I’d be working from home, I could even continue the job once I move back to the UK.

There’s a U-Program leaving party tomorrow. U-Program students were only here for a year/a semester to do Japanese classes so that they could get better at the language before going on to become fully-fledged university students at universities all up and down Japan, mainly doing engineering, biology, chemistry, aerospace technology, robotics, all kinds of cool stuff. Needless to say, there are some amazingly intelligent people in the U-Program. Some are staying here in Osaka, and why not, seeing as Osaka is one of the best places to go for the sciences. Others are going to Kagoshima, Nagasaki, Kyoto, Tsukuba, all kinds of places.

Day after is the visual kei live. And then I may go to Nara the day after that. We’ll see.

Day 156: Cooking for the first time in like a month 水曜日・2015年2月18日

I only just finished Skyping about an hour ago, hence why this post is late. But despite not doing a lot today, I felt it was quite productive.

So, the things I gave up for Lent were “fatty” foods, unhealthy snacks, mayonnaise, and YouTube videos. I also decided to do 30 minutes of exercise a day.

I managed to avoid the fatty foods and unhealthy snacks, but I realized today when I was clearing out my fridge in preparation for Hokkaido that I still had a slice of white bread left, along with some salad, tomato, and ham, so I wanted to get rid of it, and I couldn’t have a dry sandwich, so I had to put mayonnaise on it in order to be able to eat it. So I unfortunately had to break one of my Lent resolutions on the first day. But after this, no mayonnaise. I’ll try and avoid making food that requires it, too. I like to put mayonnaise along with okonomiyaki sauce on top of takoyaki and okonomiyaki, so I’ll try not to make either of those for a while. It’s not like mayonnaise is the worst thing in the world to eat, but I only realized I was consuming so much when Rachel pointed it out to me one time at lunch. Almost everything on my plate was something with mayonnaise in it. Tuna salad, potato salad, root salad… all mayonnaise.

I DID manage to avoid YouTube surfing, as in staying on YouTube for hours of pointless surfing, but I didn’t avoid it altogether. When you click on Facebook articles, the articles usually include a YouTube video in it for demonstration purposes. But that’s okay. I don’t think it’s possible to entirely avoid ALL types of videos. The only thing I want to avoid doing is watching cat videos for hours when I’m trying to write an essay or something. I will watch TV shows, or films, but not surf through a stream of pointlessness, eating up my life. I survived a whole day without mindless surfing, and to my surprise, I don’t miss it much. I think it’s just a bad habit I’ve grown accustomed to. YouTube is killing my brain cells. Some time away will be good. Hopefully I will kick the habit completely by the time the 40 days are up.

As for exercise… eh, I did twenty minutes’ worth, not thirty. Not quite what I was after, but it’s better than a big fat zero.

But anyway, because I gave up YouTube, I managed to get a lot of written work/Hokkaido-related stuff done. Sorting out my itinerary, so on and so forth. It’s a very busy schedule. I regret so much not being able to go to the Sapporo Snow Festival. It looks fantastic. At SOME point in my life, I’ll make sure I can go.

I also got looking around for other part-time job opportunities. I applied to one job today which would be teaching English over Skype, coming up to 10 hours a week. Something like that would be ideal. No travel expenses, and it would be English conversation, which I have a lot of experience in helping Japanese students with. Instead of submitting a resume, I had to make a short, less-than-a-minute-long introduction video in slow, easy-to-understand English, and put it on YouTube, then link it in an email to the company. If they like it, they’ll give me an interview. They might not pick me though, as I speak English with a British accent, and most of the teachers on there speak American English. Japanese kids learn American English over British English. It’s the most widely-spoken English, after all. After all, 319million versus 64million… yeah, more American-English speakers in the world.

Still, I do need a job after all. Travelling around Japan is going to blow quite a hole in my finances, and yet I don’t just want to sit around doing nothing. I have six weeks off.

It’s been like a month since I last cooked properly. I’ve either been eating out in town, or picking up ready-meals at FamilyMart, or just heating up packets of rice and miso soup. But in order to use up the plethora of vegetables in my fridge, I made a delightful curry tonight. It contained lotus root (my favourite), broccoli, carrot, onion, radish (which I got for only ¥14 at the supermarket, amazing), mushroom, and tofu. Next time I might try adding potato and aubergine. The vegetables smelt so good frying in the pan and then boiling in the water before adding the curry blocks, that I could have just eaten them the way they were. But when I added the curry blocks, the smell turned even more delicious. I added two blocks, one block equating to one portion. Whenever I’ve made curry with Rachel, we’ve added too much water and the curry blocks take forever to dissolve and for the sauce to thicken, but today, it was much better, because I put only just enough water in to cover the veg. It took 7 minutes (rather than 30) for the sauce to thicken sufficiently.

Mmmm, it was delicious. Can’t wait for my second portion tomorrow. After that I’ll make spag bol and get rid of the rest of the carrots and mushrooms and so on.

In Hokkaido I hear there’s seafood ramen, which I can’t wait to try.

Anyway, night night!

Day 136: Vegan food; preparing for my interview 木曜日・2015年1月29日

I’ve been invited to go make sushi with Aiko-san on Saturday, I think, so I have that to look forward to!

Anyway, I went with Rachel and her friend who I’ll call Nyu, from China, and we went into Minoh so we could eat lunch at the vegan restaurant. There are only three choices for the main meal – curry, a burger, or soup. I was interested in the burger but it sounded like it was just a burger and nothing else, so I chose the minestrone soup, which came with garlic oil instead of butter to put on the crispy wholegrain bread rolls. The other two ordered the burgers, and I must say, they looked magnificent, like the kind of burger you might get at Nandos, piled high with toppings and stuck with a little stick to keep it all together. I think it had kitsune tofu in it, and the bread looked divine. I’ll have to get that next time.

Next I had a “soy milk chai blend”, which I thought would be hot tea, and I think it was, but it was served in a huge bowl, like soup. No wonder it had been ¥600. It was a little bitter as they hadn’t put sugar in it already, so I put it in myself, as well as cinnamon. Lovely. And I had vanilla and black sesame vegan ice cream for dessert. Really hit the spot.

After peeking into BookOff, we went back to campus, and I lounged about doing computer-y things like preparing for my interview tomorrow. I want to make sure I’m well rested and that I’m prepared for anything, but it’s my first interview for a job in a foreign country so naturally, I’m nervous.

I need my beauty sleep now so I’ll bid thee goodnight. Goodnight!

Day 116: About a third of the way through my year abroad 金曜日・2015年1月9日

There’s not much to say about today… well, I went to an Indian restaurant with Rachel, one of the Polish girls (I’ll call her June), a Japanese guy (Takashi), a Korean girl (Yuu), and an Indian guy (Singh). I ate so much, and drank so much, that I felt like an inflated water balloon when we were walking back up the hill towards campus.

It was fun. We were pretty loud in the restaurant. There came all sorts of starters, starting with some spiced fruits (apple, orange and pineapple), then a load of meaty things and pakora and so on, and samosa (definitely more real than the weird pastry things you get in TESCO, though I have to admit I like them in that style), and that turned out to only be the starter. They then gave us a HUGE platter of naan, in 3 flavours: potato, garlic, butter. Two types of curry to choose from: a vegetable yoghurt curry (with a bit of renkon in it, that Rachel stole.., meehhhh), and a meat chicken curry. Then for dessert, mango ice cream. I really couldn’t move by the end. We also had mango smoothies on da house.

So much fooooood… but it was delicious. So anyhow, a good experience, and apparently there’s a good Mexican restaurant around here too. Banzai!

June chatted to me a bit because she works at the company where I have an interview, so if I manage to get work there, she will become my sempai! I don’t call anyone sempai here. I suppose Risa’s kind-of my sempai if she was already here a year… and other students who’ve already been here a while? I don’t know. Maybe when I return to England and rejoin the Japanese society I can call the fourth-years “sempai”. Hehe.

So yeah! I guess I really am a third of the way through the year now. I could say Day 117 is the day, but if I have to come home early to work as a subwarden, then I’m probably well over a third of the way through.

Okay, if 116 is a third, that means I have 232 days left, which would be the 241st day of the year, which is apparently August 29th. Yeah, I’m probably going to have to come home before that. Or not. Depends on whether I land the job or not.

I’ve calmed down a bit on wanting to stay in Japan an extra year. I think I should just my year abroad as the less stressful, more fun experience, rather than drag it out and possibly spoil it. It helps that I now have plans for what I’m going to do when I return. And then I can always come back. I still don’t know if I want to do more studying. Maybe do a year course in Tokyo University, and then start working, or just start working immediately. Either way, I’m going to save up a lot of money during my last two years.

The world is my oyster~~~~

Anyway, much to do! Goodnight.