long overdue update

by mikka

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Exactly one more week of work to go, and I am getting way too sentimental at the thought of saying goodbye to my students, all of whom are amazing and who are by far the single best thing about this job. I've gotten so used to seeing most of them so often throughout the week (some of them every single day!) that I'm really dreading saying goodbye. I'm doubly lucky they're so amazing because the pre-ordained lesson plans for this last week of teaching are painfully awful, and fortunately I can at least count of students who will be sweet and funny and good-natured, and who can usually be counted on to be irreverant enough to make the worst canned lesson entertaining. Today's lesson on performing! skits! (because that's a skill I think we can agree everyone needs) included improvised tales of woe ranging from murder to being buried alive to two-timing to, my personal favorite, an inexplicably tiny man who steals women's underwear.

At any rate;  I know I've slacked off quite a bit with this blog lately; part of this is because I've been trying to set up an actual website with the fairly massive collection of photos I've been sitting on for the last three years (edited, don't worry), and part is because this schedule, as I may have whined before, is absolutely brutal in terms of having free time,  and I'm generally pretty embarrassed by just how exhausted I am all the time. I'm hoping, very very much, that this won't be a problem next year when we're back, because (hooray!) we just accepted job offers in nearby Numazu, which is about an hour and a half away from Tokyo by Shikansen. I don't know too much yet except that it's a small school (Iain and I are the only full-time English teachers) and I'm going to have to learn to drive on the wrong side of the road. So: more plans (and more updates in general; I swear, about ninjas and that bike ride that amounts to the most exercise I got the whole time I was here, and talking to ALL THE HALLS on Skype) to follow, but for now, sleeping.