Okay everyone I am still alive, and still in Japan. Things seem to have been going pretty well for me overall recently, which is to say not particularly disastrous. I have been really busy but having a good time at school. I am starting to get to know my teachers and even some of my students and they are all really cool. I have been teaching classes and it seems really easy. The self-introductions I had to do were hard, but regular lessons seem easier because I don't have to independently plan 50 minutes of content for little buggers I have never met. Now I mostly have to act out little conversations in the textbook with the teacher, or read paragraphs over and over making the kids repeat. But it is fun. Some of the kids are really obnoxious, which is cool, but most of them are really quiet, which is also cool. In Japan education is usually much more of a one-way street, with the teachers lecturing and the students listening, so they sometimes have a hard time coping with the more interactive nature of English class. But they seem to do really well at English. If only I could do so well at Japanese. I started in Japanese 2 class at the local university, but it seems to be a little above me and very difficult. I have a hard time unterstading Japanese auditorily, but they seem to expect us to hear everything and just write it down and this is causing me great consternation. But I am sure I will learn something. I have mostly been studying a lot of kanji on my own time, because I love kanji.

September 11th came and went without incident here. People tried to ask me my feelings about and, while I appreciate the concern, it is a difficult thing to put into words in regular English so there is no way I could tell these people anythin more than, "it was sad." My school actually had a band concert that day, and they played a song for me, but it was a Sousa march and not the mournful dirge you might expect. But I actually thought it worked well.

Yesterday I went to a sumo match. My uncle, who is some sort of international shipping magnate, was in town and took me to the match with one of his clients. It was pretty cool, but I can't imagine going very often because it would get very boring. In the end it reminded me a little of horse racing, because the only way to be interested is to pick your favorite sumo guy and following him up through the ranks and so on. But if you don't follow the sport and know all the little dramas, it is just a bunch of fat people tossing salt and pushing each other around. It was definitely fun to see in person though.

Other than that, not too much is going on here, at least not worth reporting on. I still haven't really settled into my apartment yet so I don't feel at home in it, but that is my next goal. Monday is Old People's Day in Japan, so I have that day off and I am going to use it to fix up this place, at least a little bit. I do have DSL access now, so I should be able to post more regularly in the future, but you can feel free to reserve your enthusiasm until it actually happens. Oh, my friend Simon who lives downstairs does a lot of video work, and he has shot some really cool videos about life around here. Go check them out.