Happy Birthday!

Aug. 18-Aug. 20

To start this post: HAPPY BIRTHDAY to me! Thank you to everyone for the birthday wishes both on here and elsewhere. For my birthday the Himi folks all went out to dinner at a yakiniku place. Niku means meat so basically this is another one of those restaurants where you cook for yourself but here you order a lot of meat. It was delicious!!! We had a bunch of different meats but definitely the most exotic was cow tongue. It was surprisingly yummy, if a little chewy.

Cody and John cooking the meat. You can see my disappointing glass of red wine in the bottom right hand corner of the picture. I don't know why it came out chilled.

This is cow tongue before it's cooked.

Me, Katie, Cody and John

Alex and his girlfriend who was visiting and Joe and Mariko at the table right next to us.

After getting treated for dinner we went and karaoked. Karaoke in Japan is different than what we typically think of in America. Instead of standing in front of a group of strangers in a bar or restaurant you get your own room with a big TV for just you and your friends. This place even let you bring in your own food and drinks and they took a kodak photo of all of us since it was for mine and Joe's birthdays. So the day was a lot of fun and I got some nice presents including a sweet Disney puzzle from John, candy from Mariko and Katie, a bag of pastries from the BOE (my supervisor actually showed up at the yakiniku restaurant with them!), and a really nice ping pong paddle and case from Cody. Also, I got some nice cards from family and Diane and Jeannie (two of my Wake friends that are also in Japan as ALTs) mailed me a box with books in it!!!

The Disney puzzle from John. I had fun putting it together at work that morning.

The box of pastries from the BOE.

I was even able to test out the ping pong paddle Friday night as Katie and I joined Cody for another round of table tennis. I definitely like my present and I like to think it even improved my game (if you can my feeble attempts "game") at least a little bit :D

My new ping pong paddle and its very cute case from Cody! Yes, that is my unmade bed in the background.

At work I've been helping students at my two junior high schools prepare for the speech contest that is this Thursday. It's been a good opportunity to meet other people at work and see where my desk is located in the office. So far everyone has been nice to me and, in typical Japanese fashion, they are all very impressed with even my minimal Japanese speaking/writing abilities. Also, the whole group of us did an official meet-and-greet at all 20 of the JHS and ES in Himi..

So when we had a little extra time in between our school visits our supervisor took us to this large Camellia tree. It's supposed to be at least 400yrs old.

In other news, I won a free trip in a raffle. All the Toyama area JETs got to put their name in a drawing and five of us got selected for a vacation around the prefecture. I'm actually very, very excited because we will be covering many of the sights I wanted to see and we get to stay in a fancy traditional Japanese style hotel. I can't wait! The only thing is that in return for being provided the trip by the Toyama Tourism Agency (or some fancy sounding organization like that) is that we then have to promise to post something spreading the word about how awesome this prefecture is. So basically I just have to write about it in my blog...which I would be doing anyways so that all my loyal fans (aka my blood relatives) can keep track of my many exploits.

As many of you may know I hiked Mt. Fuji this past weekend, however, I believe that experience deserves a post all of its own so you will just have to remain in suspense about THE MOST EXTREME THING I HAVE EVERY DONE!!!!!!! So make sure to tune in for your next update soon!

One last note. Even though I'm not telling you about this weekend yet, I can still tell you today is my Dad's birthday. So I'm going to end with a Happy Birthday shout out to my Daddy お誕生日おめでとう!!!

Daddy this picture is also for you since we talked on Skype about how my cooking was going. These are the pancakes which were the first thing I ever attempted to cook on my stove. Using an open flame is hard...also I think I added oil when I was supposed to use milk but whatever I was still able to eat some of it.