Fall in Japan

First off, fall in Japan is just beautiful. In the last two weeks or so all of the trees have changed from green and are now either yellow, orange, or a rich red. The kids at Hikari no Kuni (where my first 2 pictures are at) have been having lots of fun throwing leaves up in the air mostly at me, which I guess is fun.... I've had many random leaves in my hair this week. I've also been putting together the annual PM class Halloween Party for the students I teach after lunch. I decorated a little room up with spider webs and played scary music with witches cackling and ghosts howling in the background. So far it's made one child cry. But like Taiwan Halloween is really only celebrated with children who take English lessons and the foreign teachers teach it and hold little parties. Thus it's almost impossible to find a costume and decorations. As you can see with my costume it's actually designed for a 6 year old, but whatever it worked. It's hard to see in the photo but I'm a spider. I had a little spider web cape and a purple and black spider for my front. We read a little Halloween book, played some bingo and pretended to go trick or treating. Overall lots of fun. Toshkey is the one in the dinosaur costume. He couldn't see for most of class and kept on bumping into things, it was entertaining.

Today I went on an adventure to a beautiful lake/ volcanic mountain about a 45 minute drive from my house. I took my trusty stead and drove the gang (Ai, Ericko, and Dyane). They're my friends that work at Peppy Kids. Ai and Ericko have a really good English ability as they both lived in Australia for a year, so they're lots of fun to hang out with. Dyane is my crazy "Genkey" meaning motivated/energetic friend from Vancouver. She graduated from UBC as well, and about a month ago she ran the half marathon here. She's a wild woman. It was her idea to go on the adventure today, and her plan was

to hike up the moutain to the volcano. But as the 3 of us (Ai, Ericko and I) are not hard core we took a democratic vote and decided to putter around the lake instead and go on some nice low key nature walks instead. We also went on a swan boat (like in Taiwan) and had lots of fun racing two Japanese couples. We won, as the boys were the only ones paddling in the other boat because the girls had on high heel boots and couldn't help. The driving aspect was very daunting as I'm still not a superb driver of standard cars yet, and I've only been driving to and from work. So today was a little scary, but good practice for me as I was driving up the mountain and parking on big hills. I'm still waiting for it to get fun to drive a standard, right now it's not so much fun.

Also I'm in the midst of planning some fun trips. For December I'm going to be going to Kyoto, Nara and Koya San for 7 days. I'll leave the 23rd and spend Christmas atop Koya San mountain which is a very sacred Buddhist spot here in Japan. Then onto to Nara for 2 days and feed the wild deer that roam free everywhere. Next onto Kyoto for 4 days to stalk Geisha and check out more temples. I'm really excited. Then for March I'm thinking of going to Thailand for a week with my friend Emma from Taiwan. That one is still in the works but I'll keep you updated on how it turns out.

All in all, I'm doing pretty good here. My Japanese is slowly coming along, and hopefully by x-mas I'll be able to speak sentences. We'll see.

-Lindsay