Setsubun in Tokyo!

Good evening friends and frienemies, it’s time for another of my increasingly infrequent updates from Japan!  I enjoyed a lovely Christmas in frozen Minnesota shortly following my last post and have been back basically in Ogaki since then.  Winter has finally started in earnest and we have a few melting piles of snow around the parking lot.  The big news is that I’m in the middle of another one week break!  Why another break already you ask?  Well the Japanese teachers are doing parent teacher conferences, so we have no classes to teach, yay!  But actually all of branches I teach at finished their conferences long ago, so there is really no reason that I have off other than my loud and frequent complaining!  Now for the rest of the year my breaks are the same as the other Americans, which makes no sense from a class schedule perspective, but is a huge improvement over texting my boss every day of the break to ask if I have to work or not.  But enough about my corporate overlords, I’m on vacation!  Yesterday I played Dungeons and Dragons for the first time with six other Americans.  It took five hours and I only got to kill one person (and steal a guy’s clothes).  I am not so sad now that my brothers excluded me from their games when I was six.  I also went on one long hike from the town of Motosu to Gifu.  I took a back road through a mountain valley and discovered the prefectural prison, complete with watch towers and barbed wire.  When things aren’t going my way I always imagine the many things I could be thrown into Japanese prison for, and then I feel more grateful for my life!

Later tonight two of my coworkers and I are taking a night bus to Tokyo!  It only cost $40 one way.  We are going to hang out there and do some sightseeing Friday and Saturday and then come back probably on the train Saturday night.  So far on the agenda are: the Tokyo Skytree, the Tsukigi Fish Market, and hopefully one of those weird animal cafes.  (At first there were only cat cafes, but now there are rumored to be owl and hedgehog cafes as well.  Have to try them all before the health department shuts them down!)  Saturday is also Setsubun, the festival where people throw beans to ward of demons, and eat long sushi rolls.  Hopefully we can sneak that into our program as well.

Other than that things have been pretty quiet here.  I’ve been running, lifting weights with the old people at the gym and still trying to read my mini novel in Japanese (I’m on page 170).  I bought some folding chairs so I could now theoretically fit 3 people in my apartment.  A Japanese friend drove me to the furniture store and also gave me chocolate eggs with star wars toys inside.  I thought she liked me, but it turns out I have to give all the toys back to her after I finish the chocolate.  Okay, keep in touch and stay tuned to see how if I get kidnapped by Yakuza in Tokyo!