Hello. My health has returned and Joey and I have been doing loads of stuff here. Yesterday we went on elephants, checked out some Buddha caves and drank some local whisky (Lao Lao) at a villiage. Today we got up and chilled by a river before visiting/swimming in a waterfall and kayaking a few miles down the river. Just between us... I had to do all the rowing. We're heading down to the capital tomorrow for New Year's Eve. Now we're off to this great restaurant to have Beerlao and dinner.

We arrived in a really nice town yesterday evening in northern Laos. It's a World Heritage site or something and looks very French whilst having Buddhist temples scattered about. It was a 6 hour drive through the mountains which were really beautiful during the day. Some parts looked like Scotland but others were just a lot more.... extreme. I liked the drive but the endless days of dying in Vang Vieng meant I was up last night being sick again. I started to get a bit down about it because the last 4 days have been miserable and I don't have the energy or motivation to do all the stuff here. Joey has been alright with it but I'm constantly feeling guilty that I'm buggering up the plans. That said... I don't think we're sure what kind of holiday we actually want. We keep alternating between backpacking and throwing away money whilst I've been pretty much sober and was disgusted with 18-30 English moron crowd that I saw in Vang Vieng. Yesterday we had a new plan to carry on north to China and make our way down to Hong Kong to catch the second part of our flight but the Visa looks impossible. Who knows what we'll do. It's still going well and I've tried to be positive but maybe I've been feeling a lot more sick than I've been letting on... which is saying something since I complain a lot. I'm going to go buy a new tshirt and a razor and then I'll probably pass out. Ill ill ill. Bye

Hello. I had brutal food poisioning last night and feel a little fragile. This is the day after I got sun stroke and passed out at like 7pm. I'm always sick on Christmas boo woo woo. I think Joey is starting to resent me a little bit... he's going to attack me soon. Still, here's the view from our window the other day.

Hello. I've been in Thailand for 1-2 days now. Bangkok is interesting but it's nothing I haven't seen before in other countries to be honest. It is quite unusual/disgusting to see 50 year old fat men walking about with young Thai women though. I've been enjoying the amazing food that seems to be available on every street. That has been the highlight so far along with the nice, comfortable weather and variety of food/drink that a holiday offers. Bloody Japan and their dull and monotonous bloody crap.

Anyway, my mate Joey is in the room probably having a bit of an adverse reaction to all the food he's stuffed in his face today. We just met up with some girls from Kochi for dinner and we're off to Laos tomorrow afternoon. A 12 hour train ride through the night.... woohoo.

Cheerio

Good evening blog. I'm in an alright mood today and can't be bothered going to bed just yet. I bought £7 worth of beef tonight and ate it all up with a nice Corona. Then I had a nice cup of tea with some Cadbury's chocolate. I'm like a king really. Recessions? Unemployment? Nah... I have steak and beer for my Monday night dinner. Cheers.

I began studying for my Japanese test held yesterday by getting drunk up in Umaji on Friday night. There was this chopstick game where you need to guess how many the other guy is holding... I didn't actually understand it. Anyway, they gave us free beer because we were foreign and then gave us massive bottles of sake to take away. I continued this trend on Saturday by moaning about being ill and watching Father Ted until returning home to study at about 9pm. I then woke up at 5am to drive Joey, Peter and I to Takamatsu for our tests. Kochi is too crap to get its own test centre so we had the joy of travelling really far just to fail miserably. We had to borrow Noah's car because our own ones might fall apart on the motorways. It was actually a really nice drive there and back. There was loads of snow on the mountains in the middle of Kochi and we saw the sunset on the return leg. I absolutely destroyed the kanji part of the test but stumbled miserably on the grammar (it's worth about half).

I was having lunch today at junior high school today and caught out some students giving me a bit of cheek in Japanese:

The conversation today went as follows:

Girl 1: This chicken is delicious!
Girl 2: I know I know!

Girl 1: Hanta ate all his school lunch for once!
Girl 3: Oh yeah! I think foreigners like chicken.

Me: chuckle chuckle

Girl 2: eeeeeeh did he just understand?
Girl 3: No! Hanta never understands!

Me: chuckle chuckle

Girl 2: He did he did!
Girl 3: Hanta... do you understand?

Me: Uh-uh

All: eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeehhhhhhhhhhhh

That last bit is the exact sound Japanese people make when they are mildy shocked at something. It's also the same reason I don't really watch the television here.

Anyway.... what else. Yes, my holiday is coming up very fast. I'm feeling a bit unprepared but I think it's going to be really good. I'm not actually that interested in the South Asian countries but I thought I might as well do it since I'm here. I just hope I can avoid middle aged sex tourists, getting shot in a Thai revolution and/or dying of malaria.... in a ditch.... covered in stereotypes and cliches of the country I'm in. Here's a random picture:

Hello. I am studying very hard at work this morning. I should really be planning for school later today but I don't actually care. They've decided that they can't be bothered team teaching anymore so I've got to do all the old stuff I used to. Only now... I don't care and want to study Japanese for my weekend test.

Anyway, I decided to write this blog to complain about my 'supervisor' again. He isn't playing with his spinning tops at work today but he's still annoying me. He's been standing at the photocopier for about 2 minutes whilst it has been beeping incessantly. He hasn't even tried to push a button... he's just standing there looking like a lost child in the supermarket. He moves with the grace of a sweaty octopus trying to unhook a bra. Alright... I stole that from somewhere but it's so fitting that I can't get it out of my head every time that I look at him.

Supervisor indeed.... I'm pretty sure his mum still lays his clothes out on his bed. His only duties this month are to pass on two sheets of paper to Noah and I. We haven't got either of them yet and even if I asked him now he would pass out with confusion as to what I meant.

In other news... I managed to read this off a blackboard yesterday. 食料品工業. It means the food industry or something. Woohoo. Here's a picture of me at Miyajima to add some colour. It's the famous shinto tori gate out in the water. It was very nice.

I just translated a letter from German into English for one of my adult students. Their daughter lives in Frankfurt so her fiance's mother sent her a thank you note. They think I'm amazing but I pretty much just used a dictionary for every third word. Still... it brought home to me how easy it is for a native English speaker to learn something like German or French. I could glance over the letter and get the basic idea of most of it. If someone presented me with the same letter in Japanese then it would take me all morning to get to that same level. I will never even begin to master Japanese. Anyway, here's the letter for you nosey lot:

Dear Junko,

Many, many thanks for all the nice things which Sachiko has given to me from you. When I opened them I felt as happy as a small child. Also, thank you for the exercise book. I can use it well. I will continue to study Japanese this autumn. I don't know much at the moment. Although I would like to practice what I have learned.

I hope you are well.

Greetings of love to you, your parents and your brother.

It looks like they're having a bit of political instability over there just now. Just in time for the airports to close and for me to get blown up in a revolution in about 3 weeks. I don't even want to go to Thailand but I need to fly to Bangkok so I can get up to Laos. Hopefully that'll work out or I'll lose lovely yen and will need to stay in Japan.

Did you like the painting of me? Every time I see it I am taken by surprise and slightly freaked.
Also, I saw the kanji for 'slave' today and the first part of it has the kanji for woman in it: 奴隷

I was having a peek in the exhibition hall at work last week. As I walking along I noticed a painting that looked a little out of place amongst all the Japanese portraits. On closer inspection I realised it was actually of Noah and I. After laughing for ages I suddenly started to get creeped out by the possibility of some mad stalker. No worries... it turns out it was drawn by one of the nice local mothers who speaks English. The sign underneath it called us 人気者 or 'popular people'. It's so true. Noah's dodgy tache is my favourite.

I feel like I haven't really been updating my blog in my second year here. A lot of it is to do with the fact I don't have the internet at work now and I find a lot of my time taken up. Both of these are good things though so I'm not complaining. There is also an element of things repeating themselves so I have less wide-eyed enthusiasm to write about everything. I am still trying to figure out what I want to do next year but it's pretty hard. A third year in Japan looks really appealing some days but then I have bad weeks that make me think again. I had a really bad cold last Thursday and I was stuck at elementary school for hours. These annoying teachers just talked to me all day about really simple lessons and seemed to wonder why I didn't really care. One of them even said to me that I had "lost my genki power". Genki being the overused word for energy/health. That made me a bit sad but I (unusually) don't blame myself for that. I helped Noah with his Halloween party in Tano last week as well which was just as hectic as last year. It went well though and I think the kids do actually enjoy it.

Anyway, I thought I would quickly go over the last three months of my life. I've done an awful lot actually. One of the massive benefits of being on JET is that the money accumulates so easily. I have free rent, low bills, cheap/crappy car.... and it's pretty much tax free. It's actually a bit of an effort to try and spend it all... which I have achieved recently. Here's what have been doing:

August

Scotland: Back to the home country. Spending my time eating and trying to escape to the countryside away from Glasgow/East Kilbride.

Germany and France: 2 days in Berlin and 1 in Cologne. I basically ignored exhaustion by filling my days with vast sums of history/culture and then drinking amazing beer with strangers from around the globe (errr Manchester and Detroit). My favourite bits include sausages everywhere, the whole of East Berlin and dancing to terrible Eurotrash in some old factory/club.

Then there was a cheeky two days in Paris. I didn't enjoy it anywhere near as much as Berlin but it lived up to the cliche of being a beautiful city. I saw all the touristy things and that but my favourite bit was buying a really nice dinner and then walking about the streets after it. Also, I enjoy telling French people that I am Scottish and not English. My school French/German was pretty woeful and I kept trying to speak Japanese. I watched Amelie and Goodbye, Lenin when I came home and recognised all the places I had been. I think I want to study History in Berlin.

September/October

I went to see my two favourite bands (Radiohead and Sigur Ros) in Osaka over two weekends. Taking a plane of course... as you do. Despite being massive let downs... they were still excellent and show the extend of my financial freedom. Last weekend I went to Hiroshima and spent loads on booze, boats and other delicious events. We went to the famous red tori shine that sits out on the water. In between that have been weekends of things like barbeques, beach events, film festivals, English camps and other assorted cultural/drinking things.

December

I'm off to Thailand and Laos over Christmas and New Year with my friend Joey. That's about the extent of the plan so far. I think I need to get a tetanus jag. It's gonna be great.

So basically.... it's good to be young, free and have a fair bit of cash to mess about with. I'm always complaining about Japan and my job but I actually really like living here for the majority of the time. I feel a lot of what I do here makes up for the rather dull University life I had of being responsible and working away like an ejjit. I'll upload some pictures when later.