I am sensei, hear me snor... uh, roar.

It was our last day of training today! There was lots of ‘Yay!’ a little bit of ‘Awww!’ and I heard “gambatte!” (which means ‘do your best’, and is interjected into conversation with regularity) more times than I care to remember.

Mostly we’re focusing on the ‘Yay!’ since we’re all totally excited about finally being able to stop living out of suitcases and settle down into our apartments. Personally I’m totally itching to finally get down to Sasebo and see what the place is like in person after reading and hearing about it for so long. I’m looking forward to getting some of the basics of my high-tech, information dependant and horrendously decadent life back; lack of stuff like a cell-phone, broadband connection and a set of speakers so my mp3’s sound decent is starting to grate; and I’m totally looking forward to getting back in contact with the rest of the world! (That means actually posting this stuff instead of just writing it out in Word)

Me with the AEON kids mascot (I forget, but I think he's called 'Muffy'). I love the fact that he has fangs... I can just imagine Buffy kicking his arse.

Anyway, we did our last round of information cramming today, nothing too strenuous, just some pre-school stuff (I don’t have any pre-school lessons anyway, which I’ve decided is cool… if only because it’s one less set of structures and materials I have to memorise). The Honbucho (regional manager) took us all out to lunch at a very nice Italian restaurant, which was very nice… we were all a little stressed, because, well, she’s the regional manager of this giant company we work for, but actually she was really nice and just asked a lot of questions about us all; it made meeting her for our ‘graduation ceremony’ a fair bit less scary too. Basically she just pinned our AEON badges on us, told us we were great and to ‘gambatte!’ then sent us out into the big scary world of teaching. Yaaay! We’re all officially *name*-sensei now!

The AEON class of April, 2007; (from left) Me, Lauren, Gerry (our training guru) and Christi. Don't we all look ever so spiffy?

We celebrated in the time honoured fashion of eating ramen, wandering the streets for a while, then walking into a pub. The fact that we had to be up, packed, dressed in formal attire and checked out by 10AM meant that the night wasn’t too wild, but it was a lot of fun nonetheless. Even though I know I’ll see them around soon I’ll really miss having Cristina and Lauren around, there’s nothing like having friends around to take the edge off the culture shock.

Right, I’m gonna sign off because I have the (aforementioned) early start and full day of (watching) teaching tomorrow. Wish me luck.

Gambatte!