I finally got my first paycheck and it's pretty nice. I hope that next month, the full paycheck will be a little more than double this paycheck. The school had normal periods until lunch, and i had class with the third years. We just checked the tests, but it seemed like they did better on this midterm, because people actually got like 80's and 90's with 98 as the highest. Though i saw a few thirties, the average was 69.4. After lunch, there was a Benrontaikai, or i think an essay reading contest for the last two periods. There were nine students that read about 4 and a half minutes each an essay they had written for summer break. We don't have these in America anymore. I guess it would be similar to a speech contest, but those are done away with in America. I notice more and more from what my parents have said about their school, and what i have experienced in both America and Japan, that America is cutting many of the programs and things that other countries still have. I recently read an article that talked about how some high schoolers are unable to do their signature and the parents were shocked, and then they asked the schools why. Apparently handwriting and penmanship is a thing of the past in English with the advent of the computer taking over every aspect of learning. I guess i shouldn't worry about my handwriting anymore then. I got home and saw a notice from the post office, so i should be getting the package from America tonight. Thank you very much, Mom. I really appreciate it a lot. I know i will need the jacket pretty soon. I just hope not too soon, because as soon as I need a jacket the snow will not be too far away. I have started to look at GRE practice, and i am glad that it is on the computer and that it will most likely be my second to last entrance exam. The last will will probably be for the foreign service. I am okay on the math and grammar for the most part. I just am always worried about the writing part. I wonder what BYU average GRE scores are for the linguistics department.

My new sofa chair

My kitchen

A whole room for laundry drying.

As per request i have included pics of my apartment with the new furniture. I have the new sofa and i have an entire room for drying my laundry and my garbage separation is in the closet. I did not have pictures of the bedroom, shower, and toilet because i already posted them. Now i still have a six mat room completely empty. All i have in there are plastic bags in the closet for my garbage. All like eight different types. I finally had some lessons at the middle school today. Test days are over. But tomorrow is when they will go over the tests in the classes, so still pretty boring. I stayed after school today to just hang out with the clubs. I played and hung out with the soccer club because they actually can talk while they are practicing. Baseball club is too far apart to talk to while practicing, and the field and track team is always running. There was like a massive amount of mosquitoes today, and i got bite like three good times and even had the bumps to prove it. I guess a change in blood types is attractive to their tastes.

Today was kind of slow since the middle school had tests all day. It's the same thing for tomorrow for the first two periods. I have elective English in the afternoon that i have to focus on conversation and i think that i have an okay lesson plan. I taught at the last elementary that i have to teach at for the first time today. Mitsuwa elementary is a little bit larger than Onari, but still it can't have more than 20 or so students in the entire school. My class only had 4 people in it. After school, i just drove down to Kuromatsunai and Oshamambe just to drive there. It was raining the entire hour and a half and has still continued into the night. There wasn't much in either of the cities, and i think i just totally drove past Oshamambe. I thought it would be bigger because the train to Hakodate has you change over there. Lunch was hayashi rice so it was pretty good. I found out from the missionaries that there is a Costco in Sapporo so the next time i go i might head on over there. I will just look around and if it looks like it might be worth it to buy anything there, then i might go ahead with the 42 dollar annual member fee. I would probably buy frozen stuff more than anything, and the two hour trip might be hard on the food. I guess double wrapping and maybe a cooler, or keeping the windows down the entire drive might help since its getting colder now. Then i need to explore Otaru more since there is a big shopping center to the west that i have never been.

Here is a pic of my little Kouro 香炉

I went to church today. I received the calling to pass out and pick up books from the pulpit for sacrament. I hope i can make it to the ward in the winter. Its like 32 bucks round trip to go each time by train, which would be the safest way to go. I went to Mister Donuts for lunch and had a very good curry pan and a honey churro. It is so good there. Mister donuts is my favorite doughnut store besides the Donut Days Bakery in Lexington. I hope i can save up enough points to get a mug from the store, only 114 left to go. I also went to the 100 yen store close by and go a cute little Kouro, and some okou, or an incense burner and incense. it was a hard choice between the scents, rose, jasmine, and marine blue were the top three but i went with Jasmine in the end. I got school next week, but the first few days is easy, i just have to go to the last elementary on my list and do a self introduction and then that's it. The middle school is having a test day tomorrow. Speaking of incense, i just love the smell of Japanese incense. I left some of it at home that i bought from my study abroad, and i have a sample pack and some pomegranate incense there, but i like it all. I wonder if there is a place somewhere close where i could see how it is made and even see if i could participate in some Koudou 香道, i think that's what it is called, the way of incense. It would be like the tea ceremony or the contest from the tales of Genji where they have a smelling contest to see who can tell the difference between five incense scents, sometimes not all different ones.

Bananas

Okay, i just woke up this morning and i found a bunch of little flies going around my raw food waste garbage can. I haven't taken it out in a few weeks, mainly because i didn't want to waste a big plastic bag that i have to pay for from the city and throw it out barely full. I guess i should have. Three weeks of banana peels and chicken skin and some vegetable peelings, and it was black and filled with those little fruit flies. I had to triple bag it and i put it out ahead of the Monday pickup. I just hope nobody hates me for it, though they seem lack in terms of the whole garbage leaving out early thing in the bins outside. It was rancid. I think i will stop buying bananas now, because those little flies seem to come from the peels themselves, so i just won't have them anymore. I also bought a vacuum cleaner today for 70 bucks. Its small and compact, and kind of powerful when you put it on the "high power" setting. I cleaned the toilet with a toothbrush from one of the hotels. I think i am moved it. I don't need anything else, though if i think i do i will probably just go and buy it. I did find a canister of Feta flavored Pringles in the grocery store. It was okay, and did have a cheese taste, but not as strong as feta should. At least it tasted like real cheese and not the disappointment of most cheese and cheese flavored items in Japan. Other than cheese, Japanese food flavorings are like dead on. Grapes and apple flavored tastes like ti supposed to and above all banana flavor tastes like banana, unlike the US, where banana flavored popsicles in my opinion are a crime against the tongue.

I haven't posted much in the last few days. I guess there hasn't been that much going on after the holidays. I just had school for the past few days and just regular teaching. I did teach at the elementary yesterday though and they kids seemed to have a lot of fun with the memory game i tried. Next week there are tests going on so i do not have much to teach for the first few days. But coming up next next week and the week after i have to teach something in the town hall, i think it is english to the elementary teachers, but i do not know the full details yet. It would be good to teach them, but i haven't encountered too much problems with them not knowing english. i think i am over my cold now.

Love Letter to Jesus' Body- I keep hearing "Rock me sexy Jesus" from Hamlet 2 when i read this

Some parachuters. I think they had fans attached, and they must have jumped off the mountain somehow, there were no planes

 

Poor horse, it looked exhausted

Soba Making

 

Apparently a group called "Cream" there was one guy in the audience that was doing all of their choreography along with them. Weird.

Susukino

Souvenirs

The great Hokkaido Danpa, and the Panda.

Cute little puppies. These stores are so sad. The puppies are all so young and i they are bred to be cute. i think if they don't sell them, they eventually just kill them probably, because they ain't cute.

I found Subway, it's on the Tanukikoji, around Nishi 3chome i think.

Prices were okay, though the footlong is probably not a foot long.

The full menu

Mrs. Claus Kimono.

Today i went up to Sapporo again. It is a two hour drive either way, and by the time i move back to the states, i think i will have driven more in Japan than i have in America. Oh well, i went up to see the Autumn fest. They had a lot of food stalls and crafts stalls. The craft stall pretty much all looked the same. The food was from all over the island. They even had the stall showing people how to make their own soba. They also had a stage where some singers performed. It was pretty good. Then i went down to Susukino and just walked around. I went inside Don Quijote to see what they had, because they usually have some cheap stuff and a lot of imported foods. It was a pretty good selection. I didn't buy anything except for Durian flavored haichu. It tastes like a non sour pineapple i guess. Probably not the real flavor, though japanese candy is the best bet for something to taste like the real thing. They did have mozzarella stick flavored pringles, i wonder if they would taste good. Then i walked down Tanukikoji which is basically a large strip mall and they had some good stores. I went into the indian looking ones because the incense just smells so good in there. Then i passed and went into a pet store. see the pic. They were cute, but people who had their own dogs and carried them on their shoulders were a lot cuter. then i came home. i have school tomorrow, it's the end of the five day weekend.

Today i was planning on going to a hot spring, but then i went outside and it was just so warm. It felt almost like a warm spring day. so i just decided to go driving through the mountains. i tried to get some pictures from my car, but there is really just no good place to stop on the mountain roads and take pictures until you see it and then there is no way to do a u-turn. Oh well. I drove over the mountains and up to Iwanai, a city in the bay. It was pretty nice. I went inside the grocery store just to see if thy had any good things there. They kind of did, they had a bigger selection of things, but still nothing worth going out of my way and buying. Then i went down to the beach and took some pictures. There was a group of fish going up from the sea into a river, and it looked liked they were about to spawn. Though i did see one of them get lost and pretty much beach itself on the rocks. Then i drove along the coast and saw this park with a high Athena fountain. I already posted the pics. Then from there i went up to Kutchan and went to the bookstore to see if anything looked good. It was a recycle comics store, but i did find a set of the Onmyoji comics. I flipped through it and it didn't look that interesting. It had some pictures of some Egyptian pharoahs for some odd reason in the last volume. Then i went to hotto motto for lunch. It was okay. Cheap, but okay. I did buy a Baum Kuchen and ate it for the first time from the grocery. It was pretty good. It felt like if it was coffee flavored, it would have been better. Then i went home and just rested in my new sofa. I am still a little, little sick, but i should be good by Thursday. I guess it was lucky to get sick on the holiday instead of having to take a day off for it from school. I guess you have to be pretty hygienic when you work at a school because kids are just breeding grounds for germs and colds. I will cut back on the high fives, and probably the Japanese to get them to speak more English. Though i just don't see any way around it. it's like they are scared to use it, they do not know the vocabulary probably for the things i want to talk about, and it is just so much easier and faster for me to speak to them in Japanese outside of class. I try very hard in class, but even then, sometimes they just do not get it. It was kind of interesting to see that in the 3A class, the teachers relative who is good at English, the kids would all look at this girl if they didn't know what i was saying, so that was kind of a clue for me to change the way i said things. I still have a lot to learn and teach.

I went up to sapporo yesterday and had a pretty good time there. I went to the big Odori Park there in the middle of the city. There was the autumn fest going on and they had lots of stalls for crafts. i didn't really see them, i was looking for them, but when i left i passed it. Odori park is really big it stretches from like center street to like 10th west almost and is a block across in width. I went up to the TV tower there and took some pictures. There was the Rainbow march going on, apparently marching for gay equality. Personally i can't tell the difference between the japanese ideas of masculinity and femininity in men. If high schoolers dressed the way they do in american high schools they would get beat up in an instant. The boys spend more time on their hair than the girls do. Oh well, under the park was a huge chikagai. It was pretty nice. I went to the mcdonalds there and had a tsukimi cheeseburger, which was basically a bacon cheeseburger with an egg on top. It was okay. The fries were too salty though, as usual. I left an hit traffic pretty bad going out. Though i did stop by the recycle shop outside of the city and bought a one person sofa for 89 dollars. i think i am pretty much moved in, now all i think i might need is a vacuum cleaner. oh well, i think i will try and go to a spa today.

pictures