One month from today I leave for that small island out in the southeastern Caribbean sea; my first time to leave Japan since I came here. Gonna be a long trip. I think from the time I leave on the train from Kofu until I get to St. Kitts is around 32 hours. Long long time to be on airplanes and in airports. Wendy better not run screaming from the wedding service, "No! No! I just can't do it!"
Should be fun once I get there though. I get to spend four or five days with only Ray, Judy, and Matt, which will be nothing short of fun. And then the rest of the folks storm the island and the festivities will get underway.
I still haven't worked out what sort of short toast I will be giving as the "bestman," but I am sure that whatever I come up with, most will walk away from that reception saying, "Hmmm."

I have to thank Matt and Rigel for responding to my pleas from the last post. It was mostly meant as a joke, but really I am not sure who is reading this thing anymore. I am glad they are though. I assume that my parents and Ray and Judy are still with me too. I mostly write this thing so that I will have some kind of document of my time here, but I do take a certain amount of delight in knowing that I have a few other readers.

Schools are going ok and the weeks are flowing by. Soon I will leave for St. Kitts and when I get back we will be on "summer break," meaning that the kids will be on break but the teachers will not. I will have about four or five weeks at the Kencho. Boring! But it will be better than last summer when I had to do that after having just gotten here. At least now I know that nothing is expected of me and can plan accordingly. Maybe during that time I will add many more words here.

Anyway, today I went to a new class and just talked about myself. One of the teachers at Yuda came to me and told me that I would not be teaching with Miki (the cute one) during fourth period and would instead be teaching with him. This was not welcome news due to the fact that I like Miki and look forward to teaching with her (did I mention she's a hottie?) and also because her students are just starting to warm to me and I need to go there as often as possible in order to make that class even more fun. But the decision was made and for fourth period I went to this new class. On the way he asked me if I could just introduce myself and then we would have a discussion, so I said, "Sure" and we went in.
This was a music class in the sense that these kids are specializing in music. There were only about 18 of them (all girls) and they seemed happy to have me there and were much more outgoing than most classes are upon my first meeting them. So I did my short self-intro and they asked a few questions and things went ok.
The funny part came when they asked me if I was married or single. I told them that I was not married but that I did have a girlfriend. I then went on to say, "She lives in Ichikawa." At this one I heard one of the girls say "Ichikawa koko?" (Ichikawa high school), so I said, "Yes, Ichikawa koko." But when I said this I noticed that there was a strange sort of buzz in the classroom all of a sudden; the girls all started to say things to each other in whispers and low voices. I was confused for about five seconds when the teacher laughed and asked me, "Is your girlfriend a student at Ichikawa koko?" And the girls looked at me like a herd of Thompson gazelles look at an approaching lion; not so much fear in their eyes as wonderment and expectation. So I laughed and they laughed and when the laughing died down a bit I said, "Yes, she's a student." At that the students stopped laughing and looked at me. I could see their thoughts in the air, "He's dating one of us!" "Is it true?" "How can I get such a suave boyfriend?"
But I only let that thought lie there about 3 seconds when I shook my head and said, "No, no, she's a teacher!" At this they all laughed again and we proceeded on with a short discussion of Amy and her nationality and where we met.
Dating a high school student? What do they think I am? Not that some of them aren't cute.

This week on the Discovery channel they have been running shows about WWII. I think they must be doing this because Sunday was the 60th anniversary of D-Day, as I am sure you know. I have always been a sometime viewer of historical documentaries, but I have to say that it is strange to see footage of the Pacific theater and then realize that I am in Japan.
Only 60 years ago we were at war with this country that I now call home. Men the age of my high school students were getting into planes with only enough fuel to get to their targets. I can't begin to know what was really going on at the time, and it is hard for me to imagine that guys like me were trying to kill them and guys like them were trying to kill guys like me. I can only be happy that I will never know the horrors that went on at that time.
These days it is someone else we are trying to kill and who is trying to kill us. And I still don't get it.
War is crap. And all the violence that humans enact against each other makes me think that we are not the superior species on this planet, if I may use the word superior. It proves to me that we really have not evolved far beyond the kill or be killed mentality that makes up much of the animal world. At least 99% of the time animals kill for food. We can't claim that.
Anyway, living in Japan and watching footage of WWII is a bit strange at times.

Ok, that's all for today. Time to make some dinner.