Is your cat earthquake proof? Is it? Lets find out!

http://japanite.com/is-your-cat-prepared-for-earthquake/

As I have mentioned before there is an indoor market / eatery in my new town and tonight i went there to get some sushi. There is only one place to get sushi there. It is a small tiny glass counter about as wide as two people and the chef is the biggest hardass ever. He is this short kinda older guy who has a death stare like no other. He reminds of a japanese soup nazi from Seinfeld. I have not heard him say one word in the 5 times or so that I have gotten sushi from his stand. When it is my turn he doesn't even look at me and i tell him my order and he makes it silently and then just sticks out his hand without telling me how much I have to pay him. But today, after 5 times of getting food from him when i walked up he gave me a slight nod and immediately got the take out box ready (because I always get take out). I have only see him say anything once and it was to the lady who runs the booth next to his. He said 3 words and she cracked up, which leads me to believe that he has every middle aged woman who works at this market wrapped around his stone faced finger. He rules.

Continued....

I think that I have decided to write a book called "How to pay a bunch of money and NEVER FUCKING PASS A DRIVING TEST". I am currently doing a lot of research. I went back to the toilet hole known as the Kochi Driving Center today and surprise surprise the ridiculous people who work there found another reason to fail me. I think that today's reason was either 1. I drive to well or 2. I am too sexy. One guy in my group passed and he seriously took turns at negative 2 mph which is apparently the correct way to drive....in backwards ass land maybe. At one point this guy waited at a stop sign for about 45 seconds looking to the left and the right. If that is what they want from me then fuck it, I am going to be a sideways looking, slow turning machine.

Yesterday was my day off as well and I did go to the market as I planned and got some peaches that are seriously so amazing. They are the juiciest peaches I have ever eaten in my life. So amazingly good. Next week I will buy double the amount that I got this weekend and eat them all immediately I am sure. I also decided to go for a bike ride cause the day was so nice and I found this really old stone stair case and decided to walk up it and found a huge hiking course, so that is pretty awesome. So if I have nothing to do I will head up there. I had already been riding my bike for a bit so I was pretty tired when I found the course so next time I will try to venture a bit further.

Right now on justin.tv I am watching this history channel special about gangs and I must say that it is actually amazingly interesting. Also sadly 2 of the 4 episodes that I have watched were based on Chicago gangs. It is really unfortunate that gang bangers decide to join gangs because the way that gangs are run and how bangers adapt to their environment and techniques that they think of in order to do what they are are sometimes ingenious. Especially one gang that was from Texas that only exists in prison. It is too bad these guys were not businessmen because they would be insanely rich and probably not in jail.

Time to study some Japanese.

I will start off my latest blog post with a bang. Today I saw a small, hunched backed, middle aged woman wearing a shirt that said the following: "For Rent(the t shirt had a picture of a for rent sign and in the white white rectangle at the bottom there was..) please call 1-453-Horny.
This is not the first time I have seen totally sexually explicit t shirts worn by people who I am sure have no idea what they are wearing. Like the 4 year old girl I saw wearing a "slut" t shirt the other day. So good / horrible.

The weekend has finally come, even though I shouldn't complain because my job is not difficult at all and last week was pretty easy for me I am happy to see the weekend arrive none the less. Tonight I am going to a restaurant with an alleged "south east Asian flair" but to me it looks like a small cafeteria in someones garage. But it is supposed to be really good and it is literally 1 minute walking from my apartment, so I hope that it is good so i can become a frequent patron. While I am on the topic of food I found a place that sells Johnsonville brats, which to everyone in America might not seem like a big deal but to me it was like finding a bag of money. I was seriously so happy and spent 10 minutes staring at them deciding if i wanted to buy the smoked or cheese filled. I went with smoked and regretted it almost instantly.

Sunday I really do not know what I am doing. I might just lay low or I might try to take the train to the river and go for a swim, but it all really depends on if i get drunk tonight or not. If i do then instead of going swimming in the river I will probably spend the day moaning and rolling around in my bed wishing I hadn`t drank so much. But there is really nothing to do in my town but drink and eat. I am surprised I have not turned into a fat alcoholic pig yet, but i am sure that is not far off. There is a Sunday market in Kochi and you can get veggies and fruits brutally cheap. So i always try to go there and even if i don`t buy anything the atmosphere is pretty great and you can at least get fresh lemonade or something like that, which is good for a hangover. My co worker Rosie turned me on to this drink at the large beer garden that is the local hangout for everyone who lives in this town. It has freshly squeezed (you watch the lady squeeze them) strawberries mixed with Japanese alcohol. It is awesome and will be all I drink whenever I am at the above mentioned beer garden.

to be continued. .....

This post will be a bit longer because I am not totally dead after work today and feel like posting something. Today I started work at a Jr. High school. I only go there twice a week for two classes but todays experience was so good I am considering trying to weasel a full time job out of it at the end of the year possibly. The high school that I am forced to wasted 4 hours of my life at every friday is seriously a garbage dump compared to this school. It made me honestly pity the students at the high school because the quality of education that they are getting is so much lower than this Jr. high school and the weird thing is that the high school is private. For example, the high school has no computers and no projectors for the classrooms. The Jr. high school had multiple projectors, these crazy magnetized projector screens that can be rolled up, and while they were setting up the projector I noticed that there was no computer but within 2 minutes of me letting the staff know there was no computer one had arrived in the classroom along with a member of the AV staff to set everything up. When the bell rang the students actually sat down instead of walking around shirtless (which routinely happens at the high school because the boys are trying to look tough), when they asked me a question they stood up. Also, there was a Japanese teacher in the room with me. Which makes an insane amount of difference. In the high school i have to waste so much time translating what i am trying to say to the students that the amount of time they actually hear me speak english is so minimal that it makes no difference. but at the Jr. High school the teacher translates in 10 seconds, the students understand perfectly and we move on.

The biggest difference that i noticed at the Jr. High school was the attitude of the staff. The teachers room at the Jr. High school was wide, lots of windows, spacious, the teachers were smiling, and greeted me with waves. Someone met me at the front door and everyone at least tried to speak english to me (the schools TA cant speak japanese). I made a powerpoint presentation about Chicago and the teacher who I assist told the vice principal, the principal, the head of the english dept. and other teachers I had made this presentation and when my class started seriously like 15 people who had free lessons, including the principal and vp and head of the english dept. came to my classroom to watch the presentation and when it was finished they left. It was just nice to be working at a place where the teachers actually cared about the students education and i think they realize what a native english speaker can add to a child's education and were excited that I had put the time in to make a presentation.

Last weekend was pretty fun. Other than the times when i contemplated suicide while waiting in the Japanese DMV. My friend Noriko was kind enough to come with me to the DMV and help me practice the course. After that we had lunch at a Denny's style restaurant and then went to one of the many rivers that run through my new city. I went swimming for a little bit in the river and after that she drove me to a bookstore that sold used english books and i got some old novel by Dan Brown that is not related to the Da Vinci Code. Then on monday i went back to the DMV and then went to the beach with a friend of mine. We got bento boxes, which are basically nothing more than pre made lunches with a variety of meats and veggies and then headed to the beach. There is a really delicious bento shop near my work that makes them fresh when you order them and they are only like 5 bucks. So good. The beach was nice. It was monday so there was basically nobody there and it was a beautiful sunny day about 75 degrees or so. There is no swimming at the beach we went to because i guess there is a huge drop off and the undertow is really dangerous so there is no surfing or swimming. The only other people at the beach was a group of old people who volunteer to clean up the beach and a group of vietnamese tourists. There is also an aquarium on the beach but we didn't go. It doesn't look very nice.

I think i might have my chicago card taken away but I am really enjoying living in a place where the main attraction is its nature. After living in big cities for basically my whole life I have learned to appreciate things like swimming in the river which unless you want some kind of rash is basically unheard of in chicago. Maybe I am becoming a softie.

So I took the driving test again last Monday and let me tell you it was like some hilarious teen movie where a kid is in desperate need of a license to drive to a party where he expects to lose his virginity to some girl. But instead of getting his license the main character falls prey to one hilarious wacky situation after another. I will just tell you about the test itself. There were three of us taking the test. Me, a Japanese girl and a Japanese guy. The instructor (who thought by yelling slowly inches from my face would somehow make me understand more of he was saying) made us all stand equal distance apart in a row. I was chosen to go first and literally without joking failed almost immediately. I tried to pull out of the spot with the emergency brake on and in Japan the turn signal is on the right of the wheel, not the left. The left side controls the windshield wiper. So not only did I try pulling out with the cars emergency brake still pulled up but I also accidental set off the windshield wipers. I started laughing but my stone faced instructor however did not find is as funny. So i ended up turning on the windshield wipers about 9 times but even if I didn't do that then I would have failed. The best was when I guess i dint stop long enough at a stop sign and he started yelling "stop stop stop stop stop" as if I was punching his mother in the face with brass knuckles. I think when all is said and done that I will end up killing at least one person who works at this driving center. It will not be pretty.

Amazing

http://gizmodo.com/5252014/japanese-marriage-bra-gently-nudges-men-toward-nuptials-with-boobs