I talked to my mom recently (2 times in 2 weeks!) and she said that I should be blogging more consistently because it sounded to her like my understanding of Japan is changing a lot right now, and I should document it. This is probably true, and only one of the many reasons I should be updating this thing with greater frequency.

It is also true that I have reached that point in this new experience where the mundane has again become the mundane. I am no longer thrilled by my morning cup of tea at work, (although I do look forward to it every morning, even after my cup of coffee) and while I love what I do, and still have tons of great memories from each day, nothing seems extraordinary about that anymore. This is the blessing and the curse of adjusting to a new and exciting lifestyle. I lose perspective by gaining understanding of my new surroundings. Don't your co-workers talk to each other in a language you only begin to understand? Kids don't all start jumping up and down excitedly when you say hello to them in the morning at your school?

In all of this, the two coolest things that happened to me today were the following:
First I got invited to table tennis club again, for the second day in a row. This is awesome because I love table tennis, and the (5) girl members, and the table tennis teacher. This is dangerous because I don't want to get suckered in to going to table tennis everyday. Why might I be afraid of this? Well, two of the kids today asked me if I wanted to be the third teacher adviser to the table tennis club. (after asking me if I "liku liku Shitama Sensei kiss kissu?!") But this was not the exceptional part, (kids frequently ask me whether I like "so-and-so" Sensei, or "so-and-so" chan) the exceptional part was the 117 consecutive rallys I had with the captain at the very end of the day! 117! And it was a for real 117, where 1 rally was both of us hitting the ball with "no miss!" Awesome!

Second, as the kids were leaving, Kyoto Sensei turned to me and said (in English, because he was an english teacher before becoming the vice principal, and his english is really good) that today was a busy day. I said "hontou?" in surprise, to which he replied "hontou dayo." This was aweome for two reasons. The first being that I understood what he said in response to my Japanese, which I also understood. The second was that the casual manner he threw it out meant that not only did I use the language properly, but he thinks my Japanese is good enough to use casual expressions in Japanese that he could just as easily say in English. It was awsome. (The Japanese was, me, "Really?" to which he replied, "It really was!" or "yeah, really!")

Awesome.