too many speeches

Last weekend was a blur, spent mostly (as always) at Sanjo. Friday night we met for karaoke. Saturday, Fig and I did some shopping (wherein I spent too much money, but buying things I mostly needed, like cardigans) and then met my buddies for yet more karaoke. We like to sing and all, but we're beginning to run out of songs! We did manage to discover that we have almost the perfect range of voices to perform songs by the B-52's, though I'm not sure if that's awesome or scary. (Probably awesome. The way he sings, Alex Rogals pretty much IS the male B-52. It's hilarious.)

On Sunday, instead of sleeping in (as is always tempting), I got up even earlier than usual and hauled my sleepy self to the park next to my school by 8 a.m., where a crowd was congregating! The crowd was actually a tour group taking buses up to the town of Miyama for an 8km (roughly 5 mile) hike. Parenthetically, Miyama is famed for its abundance of thatched-roof houses, preserving a more traditionally rustic Japanese aesthetic. We managed a few photos during rest stops before and after the hike.

Anyway, I and my coworker, Kristin, had been invited along by Sumiko, the lovely Japanese woman who teaches us tea ceremony and calligraphy on Wednesdays. (For FREE.) There were about 130 people all together, most of them middle aged women. We divided into groups and tackled the mountain trail -- which contained a few feats of questionable safety -- with gusto! It was by far the coldest day since I've arrived in Japan, not to mention damp, but we had a good time. It felt nice to really get out and do something, and by that I mean something that didn't involve eating or shopping or neon lights. I was really tired by the time we got back to Sonobe just after five o'clock, but it was a good kind of tired. The weariness of productivity.

On the downside, since I was too busy this weekend to clean, my apartment is a mess. A really big mess. All I've managed so far is half of the dishes. Bad Anna!

This week at school has been speech contest, speech contest, and more speech contest. We judged speeches for six and a half periods on Monday and four yesterday, managing around 150 speeches altogether, I think. I am SO SO TIRED of speeches. Twelve more to go on Friday, but otherwise we can put this stage behind us! (Alas, the specter of the contest will live on, because next is the school contest, then the area contest, then prefectural contest...assuming our students get that far, of course.) Once we've picked out two kids to represent our whole school in the area contest, apparently Kristin and I will be spending a LOT of time at lunch and after school prepping them. And I mean a LOT. Ah, well. C'est la vie!

In other news, I just noticed that the decently young music teacher that sits across from Kristin is wearing a pastel pink sweater vest today. Tee hee!

The next big thing on our plates is an event called SELHi (Super English Learning Highschool) Open Class. Since we are one of the aforementioned SELHis, we have to have an open-house school on a Saturday for teachers from other schools and representatives from the Kyoto Prefectural Board of Education to come and observe our classes. It's a little nerve-wracking, especially since in I and Kristin's cases they'll be observing our most difficult and recalcitrant students. (Figures.)