Is it Friday already? Well here is day four of blog bonanza. I am using these precious prep days to get everything together for the next school year. I have made an English magazine and CD library that the students can borrow mostly by burning my own CD collection. I sent the magazines to myself from Canada before I left and I pick up new ones every time I go to Tokyo. They are mainly Cosmo Girl, Our Canada, Martha Kids and various People magazines. The kids like to look at North American fashion. Any contributions of your old magazines are welcome! So today’s blog should pretty much bring us up to the present day, thus ending blog bonanza. Here is what Karen and I got up to this week:

Lauren and I took the airport limo back down to Tokyo to prevent multiple train and bus transfers with her luggage. We arrived without a hitch although the service takes a stupid route into Shinjuku station for no reason. We drove through Tokyo into Chiba. It was a nice looking drive though and we got to see Tokyo Disney and Mount Fuji. There was a poor little kid driving with us who was really car sick. He threw up pretty much the entire trip and his Dad didn’t really know how to properly look after him. We offered him water or to open the window but he said it was fine. He just kept giving the kid a hard candy to suck on. Hmmmmm, that didn’t really do the trick. We got to they airport around two and checked in and shopped for a while for some last minute souvenirs and then had a light lunch. Nothing to heavy so that Lauren didn’t have to suffer the same fate as that kid. Then it was time for her to go home and I waited at the gate for a while but she was quickly lost in the mass amount of people there so that I couldn’t see her anymore. I gave her family a quick call once her plane was off the ground to tell them everything was fine and then I went to pick up Karen. I don’t know if it was good planning or good luck but her flight arrived just 45 minutes after Lauren’s left. I picked her up as she came through the gate and then we were off for round two of Tokyo. We were thinking of going to Kyoto then but it was really expensive to do it for the short time we would have been there so we decided to do Tokyo instead. It got to see some different stuff from last weekend too. We went to a photography museum which was really awesome. We also went to Meiji shrine again and saw another wedding. Then we went through Harajuku district to see all the crazy teen goth kids. Karen got some great pictures of them too. Then we plunged into the Harajuku street bizarre for some shopping. I had an excellent crepe there. Then we moved to our second Ryokan called the Taito. This place wasn’t as nice as the first one but it was a cheap place to stay in the Asakusa area. It was raining quite a bit then which was a little crappy. Karen was pretty tuckered out from all the walking so she crashed for a bit at the ryokan. I watched some weird TV program about people eating cabbage and sat under the kotastu to warm up and dry my pants. Then I woke her up and we headed for dinner. There was a nice little izakaiya close by. An izakaiya is a small family owned Japanese pub that serves traditional food. I made Karen try the random food that I ordered and she liked it fairly well. You don’t think you’ll like a squid pancake until your actually eating it. It’s called okonomiyaki. This was a lot better option than the meal would saw in Shinjuku. I'm glad those lemons are in the picture because it gives you an idea of the size of that fish head. Good lord! Basically we shopped and went site seeing for most of the weekend and then headed back up to my neck of the woods. I was pretty tired and cranky from too much Tokyo by this point I must say but Karen didn’t take it too hard. I love Tokyo I ahve just been there a lot in recent days. Tokyo so green right now though. It is a nice change from the cool weather and bare trees back up in Nagano
I went back to work on Monday and Karen has taken various day trips to amuse herself since then. Tuesday was a public holiday for Vernal Equinox so we spent the day in Matsumoto. She also met Gokumikai, the conversation club that I go to. They were very interested to speak to her about her working habits back home and how much vacation time she thought was appropriate to take. The English vs. Japanese opinion varied greatly. Karen took a day trip on her own to Matsumoto Castle and various shopping ventures around town. I also gave her a quick tour out to all my schools. I basically did this in order to complain about how far I have to ride my bike. We took some lond over due picture of our local truck stop for my Dad and then headed home.

That pretty much brings us up to today. Karen is allergic to the ferrets but coping well. They haven’t even bit her yet. Today, I am bunking off work at lunch time because we have been invited to a tea ceremony by one of my elementary school teachers. Tea ceremony is pretty cool but the tea tastes pretty bitter. More adventures are in store for next week too. I am start a few new blog projects for school so I will be attaching them to my profile page soon. I am trying to do a childrens art exchange with other countries but we will see how it turns out.