Saturday, December 16th, part one... Still in Oyama-cho...

(welcome to any cruisecritic.com members who may have come over here :) )

Well I'm packed and basically ready to go, we leave in about an hour and a half, and Peter is still frantically packing - I'm glad I got as good as start as I did last night, even though I wasn't exactly efficient between 4 and 5 am!

I ended up going to bed at 5, not so much because I was tired, but because I knew I'd feel really bad if I was completely useless at teaching this morning, so I decided to grab two hours of sleep... got back up at seven, had a shower, and left at about 8:30 to go to Roppongi Hills early for a Starbucks. I had a caramel frappacino (yay for sugar and caffeine!) and a croissant, and then at ten walked over to teach for an hour and half.

Unfortunately, I hadn't brought much to work on, since I'd had to take the books back to the library yesterday, and it would have been fine, except the kids got out on winter vacation yesterday, so they had no homework! We spent about 20 minutes on grammar (her), and reading (him). Then, I decided we could write a story together, one line at a time. It ended up being more like a paragraph at a time, which is was fine - they got totally into it (luckily!) and we ended up spending an hour writing a four page story which went something along these lines:

Today John is happy and excited because of the magic tree. He climbed up the tree to the top of the clouds and found a castle. In it there was a big monster. He was fat and short and he looked like a sumo wrestler. John turned around, but the door was magically locked. The monster put him in a jar, he had a note about how to cook people. He got put on the shelf with lots of other monsters, then a bat came to try and help, but he didn't understand the bat. He was tired, so he lay down in the jar and it rolled off the shelf and broke. The monster heard him and came running, John hid under the bed. Then he found a mouse house, but he got stuck in a mousetrap. The mouse came to find him and ate the cheese, but the monster found John and swallowed him whole. John crawled into his nose, but the monster was cleaning his nose and sneezed. John got wrapped up into a tissue and then managed to escape and go home. His mother didn't believe his story and since he was late for lunch, he got sent to bed with no food. The end.

I was so impressed with how creative they were, and thank god we were able to pretty easily keep it going for so long - they were really into it, and I think for the boy, its the most interested he's been in any of our sessions, so this is definitely something we'll be doing in the future!

I went to Aoyama Book Centre on my way to the eki to pick up a Metropolis and a Weekender for the plane, and then also got the textbook and workbook that go with the website I found when I was trying to learn katakana - the Genki books. They seem pretty good, and I'm bringing them on the plane with me, so if my Buckley's Nighttime Remedy+rescue remedy+2 hours of sleep in the last 24 technique of sleeping doesn't work, I can add some studying into the mix and hope that does the trick! I managed to ask for them in Japanese, small progress! Hopefully in the new year, there will be some more situations like last night, which would be good practice times, though I can see how drinking would be very helpful to aid the whole situation a little bit!

That's about it - just packing, trying not to forget anything too crucial, not having enough room for enough shoes for Mom and me for two weeks, etc. I won't bore you with the details, but I did keep it to one checked bag (my big backpack), with potential one bag expansion for the way home, which is handy so I can bring cereal and peanut butter back with me!

Not sure when I'll be able to post next, but probably on HNL's Saturday night I should be able to get online at the hotel and post from there...

Peter's just thrown a rope into my room, which I take to mean I have to go adjust Santa on the roof before we can go... If I fall off the roof and break my leg two hours before the flight, I won't be impressed!!

Aloha!
D