I took many photos during my final week in the Noto, and while I would love to talk about them, it became quite clear to me that it was not possible time-wise to blog about them individually. So here is a selection of the shots taken at school, at various sobetsukai and around my little town of Ukawa - including the ones taken at the obscene time ( Read more... )

My routine on most Saturday afternoons in the Noto involve meeting a group of lovely ladies to have a casual English conversation class. Not too long ago, they held a farewell dinner for Rob when he left the Noto in May for Tokyo. Last Sunday, they organised my sobetsukai at Ryusen in Suzu, a 45minutes drive north from my apartment ( Read more... )

Tsukareta (tired)! Cleaning, some packing (still have more to do), writing farewell/thank-you notes and baking lots of treats for my collegues. And I had my final sobetsukai (farewell dinner party) last night with my collegues from school (and I saw one of my favourite teachers, Kitano-sensei, who was transferred to another school in far away ( Read more... )

Been absolutely busy with cleaning and packing. The inspectors are coming around tomorrow afternoon, so I'm hoping everything will be done by then.. I still have yet to change the shoji paper for one of the windows. And there are lots of little things that need to be put away.. I get so scattered-brained when I have so much to do so I have made a ( Read more... )

Cleaning is so much fun and I should do it more often! Not. Well, actually maybe I should do it more often so that it's not such a huge job like it is now. Just taking a lil break atm..

This last weekend was a long weekend in Japan, with Umi no Hi (Marine Day) holiday on Monday. I spent the time with Rob in Tokyo, but the typhoon headed for Japan ( Read more... )

I just delivered my farewell speech to the school at the closing ceremony. It was completely in Japanese, and there were a couple of parts that evoked chuckles from the students. I was sure it was due to grammatical error since it wasn't humourous (not intentionally anyway), so I later asked Kami sensei and she told me I had a couple of small ( Read more... )

The same weekend of the Abare Matsuri, I drove my visiting friends around the Noto - to the Wajima asaichi (morning market), Senmaida and all the other places worth visiting in the Noto. It was a long drive, but the summer scene is gorgeous - both of the sea and of the mountains ( Read more... )

The second night on Saturday is the "violent" part of festival. We arrived in town around 8pm, and it seemed to us that the streets were less noisy than the evening before. Perhaps the residents were preparing the long exhausting night ahead. Rob made an interesting observation: it seems like the streets (at least in the Noto) were built to ( Read more... )

[edited to add: Rob's server is having issues, so the photos may not work on this livejournal from time to time. Hopefully the problems will be solved soon.]

This last weekend, Rob flew back to the Noto from Tokyo for the much-anticipated Abare Matsuri, dubbed as the "Fire & Violence Festival" - he has waited for one year for this event! My friend ( Read more... )

Restaurant Yonemura is perhaps the finest we've been to. I booked this place (or rather, asked my supervisor to help book it for me) after I'd recently read a raving review about it. It's located in glitzy Ginza, on the fourth floor of one of the nicest department stores I've ever set foot inside. Indeed, I felt quite intimidated as I stepped ( Read more... )