randomwisdom.com

I actually had an interesting weekend for a change.

Friday, I attended the "Miyagi October Meeting" for JETs, which was a complete and utter waste of a Friday. I did get the chance to go to my favorite sandwich shop in Sendai, so it wasn't a total writeoff. Like most teacher meetings, it consisted of "how to plan activities" and other things which would be useful if I were actually planning lessons or activities. I let out a hearty guffaw every time I heard the phrase "when you plan your lessons", though perhaps I should have made a drinking game out of it. Activities? Departure from the textbook? What planet are you guys from? Sorry guys, but if you want to change things you're barking up the wrong tree. Stop preaching to the choir and go train the people that actually run the classes, because I can only do my job if they do theirs.

So after that fantastic charade I wandered a bit with a couple of the other guys, and found my way into the Yodobashi Camera store, where I debated whether or not to buy a DS Lite. Probably many of you who read this don't know what it is, but the DS is Nintendo's latest handheld system, which has two screens and a pen. It makes for a lot of interesting possibilities, like study games or trivia; the system is really popular with kids and adults, and I've even seen grandmothers playing Brain Age while waiting for the bus. The real kicker was a kanji test game that the local Chris showed me while we were bumming around at Starbucks. It requires you to write both kanji and their readings, and is presented in a way that starts you from the most basic characters without assuming you know any kanji. I think that game by itself is probably worth the cost of the system.

The monthly Sendai "talking party" was supposed to be in the AER building next to the station, but it was moved at the last minute with a mass email. Thankfully, AER has a place where you can use the Internet for free, so I was able to find out the new location with little fuss, and met up with my buddy Ken just on the way out the door. I spent most of the time talking to the 6th grader with better English than most adults I've met, and then Ken and I picked up three girls before we left. (No, I didn't pick up the 6th grader. She had to go home.) The 5 of us met up with George back at the station, and chatted over at the same Starbucks until they closed the store, and I exchanged numbers with one who was a Chem Eng student at Tohoku.
I woke up the next morning and remembered that a girl I had met way back in February had invited me to her "international cafe" at her school's culture festival. No, my memory isn't THAT good; she reminded me at a previous talking party. So I emailed her to find out where the festival was, did some map searching on my phone, and hopped on my bike on the way to Miyagi Gakuin University.

Which, as it turns out, is a women's university. It's a Japanese college girl convention. I've died and gone to heaven.

So I stroll in there, leather jacket over my shoulder, smiling at every cute girl I see (and believe me, there's no shortage), and I could have sworn that conversations stopped mid-breath. The girls selling popcorn to raise money for their club were all smiles and giggles as I bought some popcorn from them and stopped to chat for awhile. Then I went up to the "English Cafe" where I became the most popular guy in a room full of girls. At one point I had a group of 5 chatting it up with me; two kept asking about all my travels, two just gazed into my eyes with something approximating lust, and one couldn't stop commenting about how blue my eyes were. But by far the most interesting was a girl who was part of the English Cafe staff, who had fantastic English and a disarming crooked smile. Of course, I got her number.

That evening, I got a phone call from a girl that Yassan had introduced me to; she works at a preschool. She asked me in a rather confusing fashion if she could share my email address with another one of her friends. I assumed she was talking about one of the two friends sitting with her the first time we met, but instead I got an email from a fourth girl who also works at the preschool. The next day I received another email, with a question about where I was from. When I responded, she sent another question. Each time I responded, she sent another email, and finally last night I asked her out for coffee, just to meet in person so I didn't have to struggle to write repeated emails on the phone. I guess that means she won?