Alright, so here are some updates:

First, let me apologize for being MIA for sooo long. And HUGE thanks to my fabulous sister, Rebecca, for updating my blog while she was visiting. Where did I last leave off? It seems to me that I had just finished follow up training… Oh my, so much has happened since then!

Well, let's begin: So after follow up training I visited my friend, Kurstin who lives in the prefecture next door. Her school is actually in a rather small city, Tokuyama, and she repeatedly warned me that there was nothing to do. I was curious and decided to go anyway.

The train ride was about two hours. The first half hour we passed through the outskirts of Hiroshima which becomes quite industrial. Then we cruised alongside the ocean which I was so happy to see. But instead of nice sandy beaches there were rocks. Lots and lots of rocks. And oyster farms which were interesting but there went my hopes of actually taking a dip in the ocean. Ah well, probably sharks anyway ;).

Next the train began to curve inland and we went around mountains and through mountains. The hills were absolutely green. I have never seen so much green except for maybe one month in spring in California. But the hills were so green and it just spread into the valleys only to be broken up by rice paddies. And there were a lot of rice paddies. I saw a crane/heron (?) walking in them. Never saw any people though. Just the heron. It was an overcast, cloudy day (although this was the start of all the humidity so it was decidedly NOT cool) so maybe everyone was taking it easy indoors.

Then came the smokestacks once more and I knew we were getting close to Tokuyama. Kurstin had warned me that Tokuyama is a very industrial town and so I was expecting blackened skies, bricks buildings, a city dump, and no more green. However, it is actually a really pretty town. Granted, everything she said about it being small and uneventful was true. There was really nothing to do there. And we walked around the majority of the town in an hour or so but I liked the quaintness (at least for one day).

We decided to go to this yakitori izakaya (family restaurant) and while we were debating over whether or not we should actually go in, I swear I saw the waitress at the door slowly shake her head in terror. As we walked in, she turned to the rest of the guests and I believe asked them whether or not there was anyone who knew English because they answered, "English, OK. OK!" But they were drunk so it didn't count. I should probably mention at this point that I have never been stared at more in Japan than when I was in Tokuyama. Everyone had gotten used to Kurstin but now that she was walking around with someone else instead of alone, shocked and awed everyone. They all stared unashamedly and I don't think it was me being paranoid when I say that people literally stopped their cars to gawk. Maybe they were at stoplights but they certainly didn't hit the gas the second the light turned green as long as we were still in view.

So there we were at this restaurant where clearly no one spoke English and the staff was more freaked out than we were. The waitress looked around at her fellow staff members but they avoided her gaze. They totally just threw her to the foreigners. Of course the menu was all in Japanese and without pictures but we were feeling adventurous so I asked her what her recommendation was. (I had just learned how to in my Japanese class so I was pretty proud). The waittress looked terrified and mumbled something about sashimi and cabbage rolls so we got one of each. And free beer. They were having a nice little promotion. It was not a lot of food and we scarfed it down but our waitress pretty much disappeared after that. You're supposed to yell, "Sumimasen!" to get them to come back over to you but we felt so bad for her that we just drank our beer. More and more people kept coming in and I think they wanted to ask us to move over so they could make room but NO one would approach us. But we weren't finished with our free glasses so we pretended to have no clue about what was going on.

Eventually we finished and the second we left you could practically hear the tension leave the entire place. It sounded much livelier as we walked out the door. We were still hungry so… we went to McDonald's, lol.

And since there wasn't much to do that night we ended up watching a movie at her apartment and then I left early the next day to go shopping with Fumie, one of my coworkers.

Did I also mention that I went hiking? Well, I'll have to expand on that in another post :)