Grilled Malady
Week 21
(no pictures this week due to students being the only subjects of the photos)
Week 21
(no pictures this week due to students being the only subjects of the photos)
Whew.
Man.
The constant blog updating, not to mention the departure of Sean in the last week has been wearing me out a bit. This update is actually for the week right after I returned from Thailand. Things are getting a bit skewed in so far as temporal sequence is concerned, but hopefully the situation will be remedied forthwith! Once I get Thailand and the next couple weeks out of the way I'm also gonna try switching up the styles of my writing, just for variety's sake. I just need more time!
Fortunately though, the week that is the subject of this particular post was fairly non-eventful. School was a bit busy, but not overly so. We were still spending much of our time arranging the details of the switch over after Sean departs. Wednesday afternoon saw me spending my overly long, and now non-existent, break sorting through photos of Thailand, of which there are still many, many more to be seen.
The rest of the week went by quite quickly. Sean's last day at Musashi Koganei was Saturday, and he was quite sad to go. He was losing a lot of students. I'd be pretty upset if I was in his situation. I offered him a free dinner out wherever he wanted, but he hasn't taken me up on the offer yet. Maybe this Saturday.
I also spent most of the week fighting off a pretty nasty cold. Since I haven't gotten to this juncture in the Thailand narrative yet, suffice it to say that Don picked up a pretty nasty cold about 3 days in to the trip and spread it to myself, Ryan and Melissa just in time for us to get sick back in Tokyo. I don't blame him at all though, sucks to be sick in paradise.
I lost my voice a couple times in class, and spent a few days sniffling around. The usual itchy-eyes symptom showed up only briefly on Monday though, which was nice. It's also good that the illness didn't impede my enjoyment of the most important event of the week: Sunday's good bye party for Sean!
Sunday began unusually early for me, which makes it two weekends in a row now. More on that in a later post. I met Sean and Kayoko down at the station a little past 10:30 in order to do the shopping for the Japanese BBQ we were about to have...If I remember correctly the ingredients were as follows:
Egg plant
Onion
Yakiniku (BBQ) sauce
noodles (lots)
Green pepper
Strip chicken
Strip beef
Strip pork
And a few other things that I forget at the moment
We then met a couple of our students who own cars and headed out to Koganei park. I parted ways in the parking lot to loop back to my humble abode in order to pick up some supplies that I'd stashed there the night before. After some exploring, I managed to locate the barbecue area, which coincidentally I have jogged by dozens of times but never realized that it was. My arrival occured much after the majority of the guests had arrived though...
There were about 25 of Sean's and my students there. I had a great time chatting to them all, especially some of Sean's students because it gave me a chance to meet them before I taught them for the first time the following week. Spent a lot of time hanging out beside the BBQ chatting with Keiko and Shinobu while enjoying fresh meat and veggies off the 'cue. The weather was pretty good, nothing amazing though. It rained slightly towards the end, which sent everyone scurrying for cover beneath the tents we rented.
Sean finished off the occasion with a nice speech which received a well deserved round of applause. We packed up and headed home soon thereafter, tired, but full and quite content.
Not too much else of note occurred. Monday saw me taking it REALLY easy and trying to recover from the Thailand trip. First day I felt like I really got a chance to relax in the past three weeks. I also had another interesting shopping episode.
Shopping can be absuredly difficult when you can't read the labels on anything in the store. I suffered from this last weekened when I attempted to purchase the ingredients for Bacon and Eggs. What I thought was strip bacon was, in fact, strip beef.
Which doesn't taste very good fried.
At all.
The eggs were good though.
And that was it for this week! Sorry, super short post. I should be getting back to more serious discussion of Thailand and whatnot later this week. I'll be writing the post for week 22 first though.
Yours eternally...
Ian "Mello Yello" Cantello
1 comment:
I finally got caught up with your blog, and it sounds like some pretty exciting stuff. I'm sorry you had some bad experiences in Thailand, and although I've never been I'm sure its a much greater difference. You really have to be aggressive in third world countries or you risk getting scammed completely. You can also usually haggle everything down. But yeah just don't grab anything that anyone tries to give you and don't look them in the eye unless you have to. Don't even acknowledge them.
Anyways, It sounds like you're getting to see the world which is pretty awesome I can't say that I'm not jealous. reading your last few post about Thailand has actually made me want to go somewhere exciting, Ottawa is nice in how stable it is... but it lacks atmosphere.
Anyways i'll eagerly await the next update.
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