First things first: Happy Birthday Grampa!!!

This morning I taught those two kids from Saudi Arabia again, the Dad has decided he wants me to do three hours a week instead of one now, and also that he wants me to just help them with school stuff, which is good because it cuts down on prep time, and I know it's basically be at their level...

On the way home, I had my first getting off the train at the wrong station experience...what you get for reading I guess! It occurred to me that it might me my stop, so I glanced up, and saw kasumigaseki, so I lept off the train seconds before it pulled away, and realised that I'd looked at the part of the sign showing the next stop...oops! Not really a big deal but I felt stupid for leaping off the train like that, and then having done so at the wrong station!

Came home and hung out for a couple of hours and then headed to the Aquafield at Shibakoen to play Futsal with the Tokyo Gaijins. I just tried to google the location, but couldn't find a website for it. What is amazing though, is that googling 'Aquafield shibakoen' produces no results! I didn't that was possible anymore!
(interesting lighting! taken with the keitai at dusk, so amazing anything is visible! Tokyo Tower in the background, pretty cool!)

I was a little bit worried about playing, since I haven't touched a soccer ball since uvic intramurals in the summer, and I've never played futsal... It was probably, (LUCKILY!) just about the best group I could have stumbled into! It was a pretty international mix, all guys except for me, but everyone was super nice and there wasn't the anti-girl vibe like at York intramurals.... As per usual, they were all too scared to tackle me for the first five or so minutes, but I scored twice and got an assist, so they got over that pretty quickly!

Thanks to Hugh, of course, for teaching me how to play nice soccer! Since the group was predominantly British, with the rest being from soccer popular countries, we all played nice passing soccer, and everyone pretty much stayed to two or three touch which was great! Probably the size of the field (20x40 ish metres) helped as well, there just isn't time or space to mess around with the ball, you have to get it and give it pretty quick!
(you can see how narrow the field is in the this picture...we had endless kick ins, but not so much running!)

We were all about the same level, and even though everyone was trying, no one was overly competitive - both teams switched keepers ever goal, and we were switching players between the teams to keep the numbers up. It was lucky about the field size since we played for two straight hours with only one sub for two teams! It was also a gorgeous water base turf - such a nice surface! I've completely exfoliated/turf burned one leg, but that's OK, war wounds and all that!

I'm actually amazed how quickly I got my touch back and how easy it was to play fairly decently, a lot of the passing desicion making is just ingrained in there I think... (or maybe they were all just shocking so I couldn't tell how crap I've gotten!) But it was really good fun, so I'm glad I went! Will definitely be going regularly in the New Year once we get back from Hawaii...

Came back home, and Peter was at the office, but came home pretty quickly after me.... He made curry for dinner (very good!) and then we watched this weird movie called 42 up. It is part of a series of movies (7up, 14up, 21up etc) where the film makers followed these British kids starting from when they were seven and made a new documentary about them every seven years. It was pretty interesting, but I also found it incredibly depressing to see how crap so many of these people's lives ended up! And not like they were all homeless or anything, but just that all of their childhood dreams and convictions somehow got swept up and out... And most of the ones who swore up and down they'd never have kids, have like three (YIKES!) And failed marriages, and crappy council flats... It's really not an uplifting group! It's a very interesting and ambitious project/snapshot though!

Now Peter's watching Cars, which is cute, I saw it flying over here from Vancouver... I worked a little bit on some business cards for Karen's new venture, Braid Bling and now I'm just blogging, before probably reading a bit and then bed pretty early I'd guess, not so much sleep last night!

D