Practice makes perfect...

Training, training, training; I’m pretty much into the rhythm of things now, the city streets are becoming familiar and I’m into the swing of how things work, getting intermittently stared at by strangers is still a little disconcerting, but even that is starting to feel like just a ‘part of life’, it’s not menacing after all, just curiosity. Being an ethnic minority is still kinda novel and fun, I can see how it could get on your nerves after a while though.

Practice lessons are running smoothly now to the extent that I was comfy today ‘mixing it up’ by teaching the students how to say “he’s a bit of a prat” in my class on ‘describing people’. The students are really fun to work with, they’re enthusiastic and just soak up whatever you give them to learn. It’s great to just chat with them in the lobby and hear them open up about their lives. The classes are really diverse too; two days ago I had a club DJ and yesterday a civil servant.

Mostly life for us is still divided between training, food shopping and sleeping, but on Thursday we managed to get out and hit a bar with Kelly (the teacher who Lauren is replacing) she had a lot of great advice about the job, the company and the country so that was excellent. I continue to be amazed / appalled by the price of alcohol, I asked for a scotch on the rocks and the barman poured a third of the bottle into my glass and charged me 500 yen (about $5) schooners of beer cost 100 yen, how this country maintains any order on weekends is a serious mystery.

This one's for my dad, it's a Fukuoka telegraph pole; it looks messy to me, but maybe it's a work of engineering genius... it doesn't look very earthquake-safe though, right?

Other wackiness includes:

- Being ‘forced’ into having my photo taken with a child and someone dressed as sonic the hedgehog. Why the childs mother wanted me in the photo is beyond me.

- Having to explain what a ‘caravel’ was to a businessman in-between classes, it turns out he reads history textbooks in English as a hobby. Hmmm… strange, but at least it's a hobby that doesn’t involve schoolgirls I suppose.

- Meeting Yorn, the drunk Swedish student who wanted to know ‘where the cool parties where’… I didn’t know, but by the looks of him he’d already been to a few ‘cool parties’ that night.

- Going down a side street and seeing a group of Japanese kids dressed in full-on ‘streetwear’ (like puff-jackets, backwards baseball caps and insanely baggy jeans) having what I can only assume was a ‘rap battle’ while their friends breakdanced in the street.

Today was a half day so I got to wander, I window shopped for a while then went down to the Fukuoka museum of Asian Art in the afternoon… it was about 80% Indian works, with the rest from Thailand (I guess the other nations of Asia will have to wait for representation) but very interesting. Bollywood posters are great!

Tomorrow we all have the day off, so we’re going to meet in the morning and try to plan another excursion. So much to do… no time to sleep.

Much Fukulove,

Shaun.