A busy/sickly week...

Wow, let's start off by saying that I have the worst cold in the history of mankind. It's awesome.

Other than that, I'm gonna run down last weekend:
Saturday morning was one of those lucky mornings (not being sarcastic) that I have once a month where I get to go to the nursery school to teach English. Since this is technically out of my contract I get paid 1.5man (~$150) to go play with 3-5 year olds for like 2 hours. It's amazing. This month, I taught them animal names and made a fishing game out of dowels, string, magnets and paper clips. They ate it up!




How cute are they?!


After that we went to a festival in Yahiko, a neighboring town that has an annual Chrysanthemum Festival (Kiku Matsuri) during the entire month of November. I missed it last year cause I didn't have my car and I was generally clueless here up until like, two months ago. So we had our first Saturday of nice weather in the longest time, so Aaron and I headed over to check it out.
Yahiko is this tiny town up in Yahiko Mountian and it has this lovely old shrine and a ropeway to the top of the mountain. I've yet to take the ropeway up since I've climbed Kakuda (the mountain next to Yahiko, in Maki) so many times and seen the view that way... Anyway, here's what Yahiko looks like:
These are the prayers that people write and leave up around the shrine.

Here's the shrine itself

And this is a lovely little little bridge in the forest near the shrine.

Basically, for the festival there's just lots of flowers inside these booth type things. They were actually quite stunning.



Aaron and I took advantage of the typical yakuza-run matsuri food stalls - including the ChocoBananas. YUM! And spent time enjoying the fall colors. I really missed the changing seasons when I was in Florida.


After that we went back to my place to get ready to go out. We were going into Niigata to have dinner and drinks with some people. We made reservations at an Izakaya we can never seem to get into and we posed with more Zima bottles (cause it never gets old) and ate and ate.


It turned out that the night was kind of a, um, couples theme, so Aaron (my gay boyfriend) and I decided to leave. We bought more chu-his for the train back to Maki and got totally and senselessly wasted by ourselves in my apartment where we proceeded to drunk dial unsuspecting people (raise your hand if we drunk dialed you on Saturday morning!). Oh, and Aaron tested out the scarf SJ made for me (here's your picture, sj)
(he looks sober ne?)

Sunday was a school festival day at one of my elementary schools, so even though I didn't need to, I dragged my (and Aaron's) hungover ass out of bed to go say hello. I saw some parents making mochee, which was cool cause I'd never seen that before. Mochee is a Japanese sweet made from rice. It's really sweet and has a strange texture, so I don't actually like it that much - this shocks and appals Japanese people everytime I tell them.



And I was pleasantly surprised to see ME on the 1 nen sei posters. See, they really DO love me!


Phew, that was hard work. Now I'm gonna chill out till my new English student comes along for his lesson - that's another $30 a week my friends. It's gonna suck when I go home and no one pays me for simply speaking my own language anymore...