I'm going home, I'm going home, yay! Finished all my classes for today . Booked the Limo-bus to take us to the airport. Booked the taxi to take us down the hill! Packed all my presents! Do have to sort through my clothes again though... I feel like I may have packed too many... Got my big thick book to read on the plane. It's called 'Shantaram', recommended to me by a Dutch girl we met in the Philippines. It has great reviews on Amazon.com, and looks really interesting. Anyway, more about that when I've actually read it eh?!

I'm looking forward to; shopping with my mum and sister, playing mah-jong with my family, and shopping/movies/cafes/beach with my friends! ahhh no work! Michael and I have a few 'wedding things' to organize when we are in NZ, but I'm trying to take it easy and not stress about that. I also have to get my 'Full' driver's licence, and learn how to drive a manual van - eek! Because we want to take a campervan around Europe next year. Ah well, I will truely feel like I've accomplished something when I say I've driven a (manual!) campervan around the south of Europe.

Not sure if I will blog much/at all when I'm in NZ, so "Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, and I'll be back in 3 weeks!" if you don't hear from me before then.

Look who we found curled up together on the couch, escaping the cold winter's day! ...Fatty-Lumpkin, Fatty-Bulger, and Buttons! These clever kittens can slide open our screen door now!

He was really surprised to get a birthday cake! Here's Snoopy at the end of the night, his 'makeup' is a little smeared...haha...I suppose he had a good night.

oh..I tried to put a couple more photos, but they're not working for some weird reason... never mind.

I have an (old) student who is manic-depressive (apparently), her English is really good, and occasionally, she comes back to school to visit me and have a chat (she's 20 now). When I met her for the very first time, a teacher told me "she's sick" and that's all he would say, actually, at first, I couldn't tell there was anything wrong with her at all. Anyway, they drugged her up to her eyeballs with a million different things meant to 'cure' her, but all I've seen is her getting worse and worse, with strangely spaced out look and garbled speech. Well, I hadn't seen her for about a year, and today... who comes to the teacher's office, but this girl, and she's not so spaced-out as before, (but ok, still a little spacey... I blame it on all the medication). Here she was, buying Chanel, and wearing a tonne of makeup, I was a bit surprised. Hey, how'd you get enough money to spend $800 on Chanel?! Maybe her parents are rich...wow, I nearly passed out from the amount of Chanel perfume she'd spritzed on herself! Always interesting to see what your students are up to after they've graduated from school!

Anyway, that story doesn't really have a storyline or an ending, or a moral, but that's just what happened to me today.

Today has gone nice and fast. I borrowed a 'Morning Yoga' video from Ashley, and did some yoga in the LL room in the morning. (hehehe, don't know what excuse I'd make for doing yoga at school if someone walked into the room!) Anyway, pretty unlikely someone's going to walk in, yet I was still not as relaxed as I'd like to be when doing yoga. My ears were perked up ready to hear someone walking through the door.

My class described people today. I have lots of magazine pictures of people, and got some funny pictures of people from the internet, and each person has to write a description of the person in their picture. Then, they have to describe it to their partner, and their partner listens and draws. Then they compare the drawing with the magazine picture. Quite amusing. They did really well.

Bye-bye, going home from school now. Looking forward to curling up on the couch and eating Italian-pasta and watching a good movie (dvd) tonight.

What a busy weekend I've had! All preparing for Michael's birthday party! On Saturday, we made a special trip to the foreign food store to buy yummy cheeses and wine. And I did a whole lot of groceries and lugged them up the hill by myself!

I couldn't sleep well on Sat night because I was too excited about the cool present I bought Michael, and about the 'surprises' he would have with his friends coming over. Early in the morning, I gave him his presents. I'd knitted a 100% wool scarf for him, and bought him a Leatherman! (I knew he'd been eyeing them...)

He loved his new 'man toy' and showed it off to all his friends who came round that night. And he was really surprised that everyone knew it was his birthday (I told them of course!!) He thought they were only coming round to do their geek-gaming thing.

We cleaned the house on Sunday morning. Nothing like having visitors over to give you incentive to clean the house!!
I made a home-style vege soup for dinner (2 vegetarians among us). And we ate the cheeses, and drank wine... I ran around playing 'hostess'. Around 5pm, I went to Ashley's house in secret, and made an Apple Crumble (another taste of home...). It was my first time to make Apple Crumble, but it turned out very tastily (Thanks to the trusty Edmonds Cookbook). Aaaand, Irena had bought a Birthday Cake (ice-cream cake!) and hid it at Ashley's house, so we brought it over, and at my signal (the door slamming), the lights were turned out and we came in with the birthday cake all lit up with candles, and sang Happy Birthday. It was fun The ice-cream cake had an edible Snoopy and Woodstock..and a rainbow

It was a good night, but today I'm tired...I don't feel like being at school!
Will post some photos tomorrow.

(ONLY 3 DAYS TO GO!!!)
hmm, maybe I should start packing tonight? Coz I can't do it tomorrow night, too busy. And if I do it the night before... how if I forget something...? I might pull out my suitcase tonight. Ooh, how exciting.

 I'm really excited about this weekend, because it's Michael's birthday! And we're having a party! and I've got him a really cool present! Not going to write what it is till after his b'day though. Some times he's reads my blog...

Aaaand, another thing about this weekend, is that it's the last weekend before I go back to NZ!! (only for a holiday though..) 6 days to go!! Bring it on!

Ok, going to look for some lunch that is not rice now. Kinda sick of eating rice and salmon for lunch. For the past couple of weeks, we have been trying to save money and so Michael has been making my 'bento' (lunchbox) most days. They have been reaaally reaaally yummy, but there is a limit to how much rice and salmon goodness I can handle. And usually if I make lunch, I make sandwiches, but now I'm sick of sandwiches too!! Ungrateful brat, I know. Oh well, off to buy some lunch!

My 3rd year students are writing their memories of their past 3 years at high school. This is what one of my boys wrote about this year... I thought it was amusing... because that is really what he did during all my classes, if I was doing anything 'fun' he would study instead of participate.

Title: Studying gave me hell
August. One: I studied English. Two: I studied English.... I studied English... I studied Math... I studied Math. I studied.... I never gave up! I fought myself. And I win!!! HAHAHA!

Poor thing, studying so hard. Glad you won the fight with yourself.

The Kyoto International Manga Museum
On Saturday, Michael and I went to the new Manga Museum. In case you are not familiar with "manga", it means comic books. I was expecting a lot of popular manga character paraphanalia, but it was more of a Manga Museum/Library, except you can't borrow books to take home, you are only allowed to read them there. They have a large collection... if you can read Japanese! Ok, some of the Japanese manga was translated into English..but seems like they plugged it into a computerised translator and it turns out to be the most random sentences... they really should get it checked by fluent English-Japanese speakers. They also had some 'foreign mangas' and old comic books, like superman and spiderman... The German Manga we looked at was really 'dark' and morbid stuff! The Thai and Chinese and Korean manga were practically copies of Japanese manga, with slightly different ways of drawing the people.

Anyway, if you're really into Manga, and you're in Kyoto, and you want to read a whole lot for free, you should go and spend a day in the Kyoto International Manga Museum.

After the museum, we went into Sanjo and had a coffee at Starbucks. Michael has a problem with supporting huge empires like Starbucks and McDs, but in Japan, where we often get burned or expensive instant coffees, Starbucks is the place to go for a reliable and good short black! Well, not for me, I'm not so much of a coffee conniseur to drink short blacks, but I do love the hot Chai Tea Latte! Sooo good after a cold walk from the station!

Oh, I lost an earring that night, I think it was so windy, my earring blew off! But I was sitting in Starbucks, and realised that I had only one earring. boo hoo. They were really cool ones too.

Then, because we still weren't hungry enough for dinner, we took a walk down the shopping arcade and spontaneously decided to watch the new James Bond movie, Casino Royale. I thought it was great. But I guess people (esp die-hard Bond fans...) have their differing opinions on the new style of Bond in the movie. haha, as Michael mentioned to me, there were more gratuitous body shots of Bond than there were of the women, which is a nice change for the ladies!

Actually, what was really trippy was that, before the movie, we bumped into 2 people we knew from University in Christchurch! We haven't seen them for 3 and a half years! How weird is that, when you're living in biiig Kyoto city, to bump into people from your hometown. And they were going to the same movie! Anyway, we knew that they'd come to live in Japan before we did, but we didn't have any contact with them till bumping into them now, and all of us were surprised that the other had stayed in Japan so long! Hopefully now, we'll keep in touch!