I have such thoughtful students!

I was having a pretty rotten week: my boss called me on my birthday to tell me that my school isn't renewing the lease on my apartment and, consequently, I now have EIGHT days to find a new place to live and move out of my home. Add that to various other stresses (ironically also caused by my employer) and I was left in tears. The next day one of the students I have known the entire year I've been here heard the news about both my birthday and my apartment. She offered her kindest sympathies. At the end of our conversation, I went out to get some lunch. Not even a full ten minutes after I arrived back at school, the staff called me to the front desk. My sweet student had gone out and returned with this:

I couldn't think of a nicer way that anyone could have made my day brighter!

A Sunday Afternoon in Tokyo

A while back I knew I had a long weekend coming up this month and made plans for a trip to Hiroshima this weekend. Unfortunately, those plans fell on the same days as a National holiday and it turns out the entire country has a 3-day weekend. Needless to say, tickets were booked solid. So here I am, with 5 days off work and nowhere to go. Today I ended up just visiting some places around Tokyo that I'd never been to before, and here are the pics:




Photos:

• Top left: the stunning-yet-controversial Yasukuni Shrine has a splendid little antiques market from sunrise to sundown every Sunday. (To see photos of the shrine, see my post from January 16th of this year.)
• Top right: after the shrine and a quick trip to Ueno I was off to Harajuku, a place known all over the world for its fashion. Sunday is a particularly interesting day to stop by, because that's when all the local young people "put on their Sunday best" and go out and let people take pictures of them. (But in this case, "best" actually means "weirdest".) I got there after most of them had gone, but this pic is one of my favorites out of the few that I took.
• Middle left: still at Harajuku. This man was doing some kind of weird interpretive dance in his boxer shorts and chanting. I think it goes without saying--though I'm going to go ahead and say it anyways--that this was one of the most intriguing attractions for the tourists.
• Middle right: a photo of the main street in Harajuku (Takeshita-dori) with all of the Sunday shoppers. Click on the photo to enlarge and take a look at how many people there are...
  
• Bottom left: concluded the afternoon with a trip over to Gakugei-daigaku (the area of Tokyo where my school is located) just in time to see the local annual harvest festival. Think of it as Thanksgiving for Buddhists, only without the turkey and football games.
• Bottom right: as in the previous photo, groups of (usually) young men carry portable shrines in a parade-like procession around the streets. Buddhists believe that this spreads the blessings of the god around the city.

P.S. by the way...speaking of Thanksgiving, mark your calendars; you're going to have something extra to be thankful for this year. :) A tentative visit back to PDX has been scheduled for the week of Nov. 20th to the 27th. I say tentative because there's a lot that hinges on how things go at my school over the next few weeks, but I'm keeping my hopes up...

It's rainy season...again.

The long awaited update

OK, so I officially haven't posted anything in a month. Sorry guys. This summer, especially August, has been particularly busy for me. But I'm happy to report that I have successfully renewed my visa and don't have to worry about being deported or anything like that. Things aren't going as smoothly at my current job, though, so there's a possibility that I'll be actively looking for a new job or maybe even checking into one-way tickets back to PDX (not my first choice, though). I'll try to keep things updated here.

But for now, here's a smattering of pictures that I've taken over the last couple weeks:




Photos:

• Top left: This is a picture of my friend Laura about 30 minutes before she went into surgery to have her tonsils removed. She's just giving you one last look at them. (Sorry Laura, I couldn't resist posting it.)
  
• Top right: Ran some errands in Shibuya one night and this is the sunset I had the pleasure of seeing. Honestly, it's one of the most beautiful I've seen recently.
  
• Bottom left: this one's just for kicks. I thought it was funny that they actually illustrated the poo. In true Japanese style, it looks so...neat.
  
• Bottom right: Azamino, which is the area of Yokohama where I live, had it's annual "matsuri", or summer festival. I got there just in time to see the fireworks!