Over the last couple of weeks I've been really busy, but give the highlights.

A week ago Friday I walked to Omiya, the neighboring town. I thought it would take about an hour but turned out to be a little over an hour and a half walk. I found a ton of great shops and restaurants there and have been back a couple of times. One of the shops is a international shop which made me a little homesick for some of the foods that you just don't see here (ie: good soft moist cookies, candies, chips, eventhough I don't ever eat them save for cookies... it's weird). The store had a ton of stuff that I wanted to buy, but as you can imagine, it was expensive, so I settled for a Milka bar and went on my way. That night I decided to try an Italian restaurant and have some pasta and wine to cure the bit of homesickness that I had gotten. It's just not the same. the pasta was cooked wonderfully, but the sauce was all wrong, but at least there was wine, and a lot of it (thus leading to the album entitled 'Urawa and Omiya at Night')!

That Sunday I went to Yokohama with a couple of the other teachers and students for an International Food Festival and, not far away, Oktoberfest! At the food festival there was a ton of little stands with food from different countries, all with their flag in front of the booth. some of the countries were: Japan, China, Korea, Tailand, Napal, America, France, Mexico, Germany, Spain, and so many more. After spending a ton of money on food we walked over to Oktoberfest to 'relax'. I was a bit surprized when we got there because it was so much more expensive than the food festival. The entrance fee was 200 yen (100 yen ~ $1) but then each beer was 1,000 yen! it was all German beer so that was probably most of it. The beer garden was packed full and all of the Japanese people were so very drunk dancing and 'singing' to a German band. Overall it was a great time, and more than one of our group passed out on the train ride home (Japanese people just can't hold their beer, sake is fine, but beer).

Over the last week I've been either working on the ever elusive job hunt or making myy way back to Omiya and surrounding areas to see the sights and just to familiarize myself with this place. This week will be pretty crazy because I have two job interviews (one of which is near Nagano) and I have a lot of little things to do (We're having a Halloween party at the english school and I was asked to make some food, so I have to find the ingrediants... if I can).