Still, it's not as bad as the chaps up the road in Aki City. They got paid to sit in a pleasant 15oC and watch a professional baseball team train (Hanshin Tigers). They regularly come to my rural part of Japan to train for the new season. I was going to go to a proper game this weekend but the tickets sold out.

Yes, so sometimes I feel like I'm exploiting the poor Japanese taxpayer. Not every day is like this of course but I'm really enjoying teaching recently and so it can get a bit dull sitting here all day. Especially when I have little motivation to study the language (I'm usually good at studying up until late Wednesday afternoon).

I found a really amusing blog that I've been reading most of today. It's called stuff white people like and has a sarcastic dig on subjects like: buying expensive sandwiches, organic food, having friends from ethnic minority backgrounds and yoga. I like a lot of it because they're all the things I hated about the pretentious and patronising students I encountered whilst at University. One of my favourite entries was one about people not owning a television. It was so spot on and exactly like a conversation I found myself in numerous times back in Glasgow. "Oh I threw my television away yah yah" said the annoying rich kids. Secretly I always hoped they'd choke on their honey sauteed, crushed Bolivian pepper, smoked Tibetan scented bagel whilst reading some obscure Siberian novel poignantly by the windowsill only to realise that the city had been occupied by giant crabs for that particular day and if they'd only have watched the news on television that morning then they'd have been saved. Oh dear, I worried myself a bit with that outburst.

Although it must be said that it is pretty obvious that 90% of the posts are attacking the lifestyles of hipster/affluent 20/30-somethings in certain areas of certain American cities. I actually stumbled across it after reading about it on a JET discussion forum. Some of them seemed to take things a bit too personally and were quite adamant that it was written by an "Asian-American with an inferiority complex to 'white' culture". Personally, I enjoyed reading the comments and the internal arguments that erupted from them. There were some genuinely interesting discussions on racial backgrounds, culture and stereotypes. However, there was an equal amount of morons smashing their face off the keyboards spouting xenophobic garbage at each other. You should give it a read.