Today we had a new instructor (to me, anyway), Taniyama-sensei. She helped work us through the rest of the current chapter and practice some more grammar in the morning before letting us go with a mere 3 pages of homework for the weekend. Of course, I still have about 8 pages to catch up on from the first few days of the class.

My conversation partner Ryohei didn’t show up at lunchtime, but that was OK since I needed to study for the test. This I did while sitting on a bench outside on what turned out to be a beautiful day weather-wise. I later found out that he was at a hospital and they kept him longer than he thought—he’s fine and I couldn’t exactly determine the reason for his visit, but oh well.

Then the written exam. It wasn’t as scary as I remembered from last time and in fact I think I did pretty well. Of course, afterwards you start thinking about it and I realized that I blew a couple of things including getting one of the Kanji wrong that I’m supposed to know (for “Sora” 空). That of course makes you feel like an idiot.

After the test we first had a meeting to plan out what we would be dong for the Kindergarten visit and Ikushima-sensei had me lead the discussion and take notes in English—it was like herding cats, but we finally decided on what to do and who would be doing it. The group working with the 89 3-year old kids will be doing “Eentsy-weentsy Spider”, the 99 4-year olds will get both English and Japanese renditions of “Old McDonald Had A Farm”, and the 99 5-year olds will get the tried and true “Simon Says”. It should be a good time, though I’d be happy to take a pass.

It turns out that last night was—inexplicably—one of my monthly sleepless nights, so I did this all on about 3 hours’ sleep. I’m pretty dead to the world tonight, so after having Curry for dinner and writing this journal entry, I’m probably going to call it a night. Tomorrow is our day trip to Nara, and I have to decide if Sunday I want to do some Kyoto sightseeing or if I want to go to Osaka.

That is, if I have enough energy…