2 months left in the rainy season.....

Well the sand festival was fun if not a little lame! The idea was to get as many points as you could by participating in fairground games and the person with the most points at the end would win 10, 000\ (500 pounds!) Unfortunately we didn’t win (we did OK until we messed up one event) but we ended up on the front of the local newspaper! If you look at a local Wakayama paper you will see 3 gaijin trying to run up a huge pile of sand with kids falling flat on their faces!

Now the tsuyu (rainy season) has arrived in Japan and it will rain pretty much everyday (when I say rain, I mean “torrential downpours”) until mid-July when the swamp-like heat commences!

I have been spending the past couple of weeks teaching (obviously) and emailing my successor. He is a 30-yr old married American and has lived in China for 3 years teaching English!　If you are reading this Colin/ Carrie then welcome to Japan! I keep telling the teachers about him and they keep remarking about how different he will be compared to me! I tell the teachers all about him but the only thing they seem to care about is whether or not he will eat kyuushoku (school lunch – mentioned in my previous update) as he is a vegetarian!

Last weekend we drove deep into the mountains to the north of Wakayama for a house party. The scenery up there is stunning….I had no idea of just how mountainous Japan was. No wonder the cities are so densely populated. With a population estimated at 124.7 million in July 1993, Japan is three times more densely populated than Europe as a whole and twelve times more densely populated than the United States! Even if my tiny town, the houses are practically built one on top of the other!

This weekend I am off to see kabuki , a traditional form of Japanese theatre.I know it will be full of screeching Japanese people and that I won’t understand a work of it but I’m telling myself that I should make the most of Japanese culture while I can! Kabuki, like other traditional forms of drama in Japan as well as in other cultures around the world, was (and sometimes still is) performed in full-day programs. Rather than attending a single play for 2–5 hours, as you usually do in a modern Western-style theater, people used to "escape" from the day-to-day world, devoting a full day to the theatre.

I am also in the process of booking tickets home via the Trans-Siberian (well, Trans-Mongolian railway). The plan is get to England without taking a plane. I will be getting the ferry from Osaka to Shanghai and spending 5 days there. Overnight train to Beijing and going back to the Great Wall…Then will hop on the train and get off a day later in Ulan Bator, capital of Mongolia. A coupe of days there (not really sure what there is to see?!) but jump on a train to Moscow. 5 days non-stop! Then train to St. Petersburg to explore. Then yet another train to Warsaw to looks around before catching a coach to Hamburg to catch up with old friends. Then I will get the coach back to London! I’m guessing that I should get home by September 3^rd! Right now it is stressful booking it all, getting visas etc. but I’m really looking fwd to doing some traveling on my own and seeing some more of Russia, China etc.

Not long now….. I’m having mixed feelings about going! However, I am very excited about the prospect of coming home and finding my pre-ordered copy of Harry Potter sitting on the table!

Here is the link to some more photos

http://bristol.facebook .com/album.php?aid =2093560&l=aea8f &id=193105082

http://bristol.facebook .com/album.php?aid =2094296&l=c2647 &id=193105082

bristol.facebook.com /album.php?aid=2096829 &l=813b0 &id=193105082

Enjoy!

Lots of love,

Sara

xxxx