Memoirs of a White Chocolate Geisha: March 2009

It's teacher transfer time! Unfortunately all of my favourite people are leaving... which is awful. But as I would be leaving them in 4 months (WHOOOHOHOOHH) anyway, it's better to rip off the band-aid now. But it's still so hard saying goodbye to people when you're pretty certain that it's goodbye forever.

Matsuda先生, Nakani先生, me, & Aimi先生 ~
ありがとうございました！

So, a tribute to my favourite teachers at Ine who are leaving, Nakani-sensei the school nurse and Aimi-sensei, my JTE. Aimi sensei really inspried me to become a teacher and gave me a good grasp of how to teach English. So for that I will always remember her, and I wish her the best of luck at her new school.

At least it was a beautiful day outside, and I cleaned a bit more of the downstairs of my house. I'm looking forward to a time when the weather will allow me to live in the other 90% of my home.

A Boisterous Cloister of Oysters
by Rachel K. Sreebny

On Saturday morning I drove the 80 minutes from Ine across the Northern coast of the Sea of Japan to Kumihama. My area, Ine, is the eastern most part of the Tango Peninsula. And Kumihama is the western most part of the Kyoto Prefecture, so you can say I drove cross-prefecture! All to eat oyster for the first time ever.

It was an oyster enkai organized by the kindly ladies of Natanya's English Conversation Group. There were a variety of oysters along with oyster fried rice and oyster hot pot! It was a lot of fun and the minshoku (guest house) was really beautiful. It was on a small beach called 小天橋 or Shotenkyo which means "small heaven bridge" or something like that.

After eating oysters forever and getting a giant bag of oysters each (like... 30 of them) we all migrated to my favourite ice cream place. It's a small Jersey Cow farm called Sora, meaning sky, and they have fresh ice creams, cheeses and milk puddings there. We all got ice cream and then most of the ladies set off home and Natanya came along back to Ine with me.

everyone say "moo"

Natanya had a lot of venting to do about her frustrations with not re-contracting, then changing her mind and having no say in the decision. Her BOE won't let her and on top of it she has boy drama, so it was good that she came with.

We spent the night knitting, watching 30 Rock, drinking beer and eating even more ice cream. Then Natanya put on like... all of my clothes and we watched the Wrestler and talked about which My Little Pony Characters we'd be.

I'd be "Purl" and have a skein of yarn on my horse butt. Ian's blue and his name is cloudy. He has a beer on his butt and when you put him in warm water it turns into a broken heart. Natanya is Spanky and she's purple. Kate is light yellow and her name is sparkles. She has a cabin on her butt. Then Greg is black with red eyes and his name is "Darkness". Lastly is Yumi. She's white with rainbow hair and her name is Yummy. She has a pie on her hip. Hooray for imaginations!!!!

Today (Sunday) Kate drove up and we went on a hike around the coast of Ine. It was nice weather for it despite rainclouds and it was good to get some actual exercise after doing nothing but eating yesterday. We got a lot of great pictures so I'll let those say a few thousand words on my behalf.