I should have posted this a month ago

The blog keeps going unblogged. Life is taking up a lot of my time nowadays. Planning lessons still seems to take up a lot of my time and focus. The teaching has been going fairly well, but there have been some bumps in the road too. I'll have a really good class and then the next class will go just awfully, or vice versa. Today I had a class that I got into a pretty bad funk over. They used to be a really good bunch of kids, but I suppose its my own fault for not being really strict with them from the start. I let a few things slide in the beginning and now they are spiraling out of control. Rowdiness, whining, constant Japanese speaking, inattentiveness, general boundary testing. Its just one of those things that happens, but it doesn't feel particularly good. to get some order back to the class I will have to be incredibly strict to make up for my prior laxness. I will have to wear my German Uber-disciplinarian hat. We'll see how that goes.
On a more optimistic note, fun stuff happened to me too. Three weekends ago (gee, I really haven't been keeping up with stuff, have I) one of Trey's students took us to the Japanese pub. The student, Kio, is a 50 year old BMX bike racer. He took Trey and I out after class on a friday night. He ordered us these huge platters of sushi and sashimi, plus salad, sausage, fries, bright blue eggplant, pickled cucumbers, and of course many gigantic mugfuls of beer. I thought I was going to explode. One thing I really love about Japan is that your friends order for you, and if they are Japanese, they usually pay too. In exchange we just have to speak ridiculously slowly and engage in very basic small talk that just-learning-english-japanese-friend can understand. After all the eating and drinking at the Japanese pub, Kio suggested that we all amble down the street tot he darts bar. He had the bartender make me a drink that is apparently very famous in Japan because it is mentioned by Hemingway in the Old Man and the Sea. it was awful, but it was a small sacrifice to be made for literary trivia. I also discovered that I am freakishly good at darts. If the teaching thing doesn't work out, maybe I will become a professional dart shark in Japan.