back into the swing, again.

Over the past few weeks I've been settling into the routine of the new school semester. This can be a bit disorienting here since so many staff members have switched schools over the spring break. About every three years teachers are moved from their current schools to a new location that's sometimes so far that certain teachers must move away from their families in order to be closer to their newly assigned school. Right now I'm working with a teacher who has just finished a three-year stint living alone in a very small town in western Tokushima. When I asked about her experience living far away from her husband and young children, she replied, "It was my treasure."

So, the new school year looks like it's going to be a good one for me. I've met most of the new 7th graders at my three junior high schools and I've got a few new co-teachers that, thankfully, I get along with very well. A few weeks ago I had my first day teaching elementary school, something that I'll be doing about once a month now. The kids were the best and within an hour of stepping into Akinokami Elementary there were students riding on my back and racing me across the soccer field. Teaching feels really natural right now and I wonder if I'll continue with it whenever I leave Japan. Actually, I think a lot about what I'm going to do after this. It's strange how one day I can be so set on going back to America someday to live in a city again and other times I'll be intent on either staying in Japan for more than two years or be wanting to move to another continent to possibly be lucky enough to teach my native language again while absorbing (some of) a completely new one in the process. Well, this decision won't be faced anytime in the near future so I should save my actual worries for a time closer to that date.

Some more updates on things here- Hmm, let's see. My parents will be here in less than a week. We'll be seeing West Side Story (in Japanese) in a theatre close to Kyoto station and then they'll be following my life in the inaka (countryside) of Shikoku for a little while. I'm so used to my routine now that it'll be nice to have an outside perspective of it all once again. Also, last weekend I went out with the teachers at Naruto Kogyou Koukou (Naruto Technical High School) and had very memorable time, including a $100 round-trip cab ride to Tokushima City for the purpose of hanging out at a snack bar with a Russian waitress who spoke English. The woman turned out to be from Ukraine was nice enough to give me some Japanese language tips before we headed off to another snack bar (you're basically given consistent conversation from a hostess and pricey drinks at these places) where an older woman insisted that I give her my phone number so that I can speak English with her and her son sometime in the future. Six months ago this stuff would have been weird and kind of difficult to make sense of but now it simply signifies life as usual.

Avocadoes are in season here and I've been eating about two a day if I can find them ripe enough at the store. This has been making me really happy.

OK, that's about it for now.