Rain, rain, go away!

The past few weeks it has been raining almost constantly, with only the occasional day free of rain. It's kind of depressing. I miss the sunshine!!! However, saying that, I am currently sitting outside in the sun for the first time in I can't remember how long.  I think part of the problem is also that on the rare days that it has been sunny, I've been at work, and by the time I leave, it's already starting to get dark.  Not to mention, this rain business has been putting out serious setbacks to my apple picking plans. Horrible, just horrible. So, do me a favor and send some sunshine vibes in my direction, won't you?

So, let's see, what has been happening in the past couple weeks...

Hmm...oh! I bought a new phone! And switched companies, because the company I had been with was more expensive than the other two big phone companies here in Japan. Well, that and the fact that they had the worst, condescending, mildly foreigner hating, rude customer service. Whereas the other two companies went out of their way to speak nicely and come up with as many advantages as they could to get me to switch to their companies, even going so far as finding a staff member to speak in English with me. A luxury which the other company only extremely grudgingly found after exhausting, long conversations in Japanese. And then that staff member did his best to get me out of the store as quickly as he could.  But enough of that negativity. In the end, I switched companies, and even though the day I did that, their fluent English speaker was off, but they still tried their best when I couldn't understand. So I'm happy about my change.

And of course, I've been to a couple of street lives, (well when they're not cancelled because of the rain).  Recently who did I see?  I saw Colors to Cooks, FASE, and a new one...which I will talk about a little bit later in this post...

On the last day of September, we went out on a field trip at work.  We went back to Awaji-shima, to the same place where we planted rice, and this time the kids got to harvest the rice.  They did it with a kind of sickle/scythe? (sorry, I don't know the difference).  So, as a teacher I was having mild heart attacks each time one of my 3 year olds took the sickle.  Luckily though, there was a lot of staff to help out, and each staff member took a group of kids, and had only one sickle per group, so they had to do it individually, which is definitely safer than the image I had had of a herd of 3/4 year olds running around with sharp objects in hand.  No one got hurt and they had fun, so I guess it was all good.  Actually, it was kind of funny before we even got started, because they wanted to take a group picture, but the problem was, they wanted to take it in the wettest, muddiest area, so it was kind of hard for the kids to walk out there.  They kept falling over (and it was like dominoes), and the mud would suction on their boots so they couldn't move their feet.  So they cried.  And they cried when they fell in the mud.  I'm telling you, they would've been perfectly clean (or at least mostly) when we left the rice field if it hadn't been for that picture taking business. 

This weekend turned out to be quite nice. We had hoped to go apple picking on Saturday, but it was raining in the morning so we decided to go with our alternate plan of meeting up for waffles at lunch time. There was a kind of cafe that I had been to in Takamatsu, and I found out the same cafe was in Nishinomiya, in the Nishinomiya Gardens shopping mall. So we went there. The waffles were yummy!

When we were finished the 3 of us wandered around in some stores for a while (I actually found some boot cut jeans....do you know how hard that is here?) and got them for about 50% off!! Yay!! Good deal! After that, we went to Starbucks for something warm to drink (because we had gotten samples of this really nice berry herb tea from another store we walked by and it made us want something warm).  When we were finished in Starbucks, we all headed off our separate ways.

I was headed in the direction of home, and got on the local train (the other option was the express). But then they had an announcement for everyone to get off. Well, alright, express it was. But that train only went to Shukugawa, and then made everyone get off and left. The next couple trains that came in did the same thing, and they started telling people to take JR or Hanshin instead (the other train lines). So I started off for the Hanshin line station...but partway there I decided that because it wasn't raining and the sun was actually trying to peek through, I'd go for a bit of a walk and if I got tired or it started to rain, I'd go catch the train from wherever would be closest at the time. But it didn't rain. And I didn't get tired. So, I ended up walking all the way home from Shukugawa. To give that context, it was about 15km and took about 2.5 hours. It was kind of interesting though to walk all the way through an area where I usually zoom through on the train, however, at the same time, it wasn't that exciting of a walk because until I got close to where I live, I could just walk straight for the whole time.

To summarize my adventure...

Now, you'd think I would be tired after that right? But no, not at all. If anything, I had too much energy. So I picked up some food and went home for a bit. But still too much energy, so I actually ended up going out yet again, and didn't end up in bed until probably too late. But that's okay, because I just stayed in bed longer in the morning. No problem!

Sunday turned out to be relatively sunny, and so I took myself out for a walk. Originally, my plan had been to go to a garden, but it looked like they were doing a lot of work on it, so I didn't go in. I ended up walking down to Harborland, and found a new band to listen to! This one is called 'Take Cover' and they are playing some upbeat rock style music. It's different from what I've been listening to recently, but I like it!



Nice lighting for the clouds!

 

Take Cover

This kind of music...if you were curious.

Link here...