I taught the taxi guy this morning, he is a pretty funny guy because he always tends to spend the first several minutes of the session telling me about clients whose reservations have been lost or changed or not honored or whatever. Of course, it's never his company's fault, which is pretty entertaining. I also think that maybe he's not the nicest person in the world, though I'm sure some of it is probably that he can't express himself accurately in English, but as an example-we were talking about the types of people who rent limos from them, and he explained that he really doesn't like it when people book for weddings because they aren't repeat clients and the priest or minister who is setting up the white wedding will shop around and wants a lower price. Add that to the fact that churches are on narrow roads, and clearly you have an unattractive client.

All that makes sense, but the slightly sketchy part was when he goes 'well, what we really want are the funerals, because when someone dies you need to take a lot of people to the burning up place, and its usually a shock, so people aren't comparison shopping and they'll pay whatever we want to charge them, so we can make it more expensive for them and they'll pay it without asking any questions.' Great, nothing like capitalising on people's grief or anything like that!

Anyway, he's never been anything but nice with me, so I can't say too much about him really, it's interesting though! I also met a new student today, or, well at least her mother - the girl is 12, but she had a cold so I'm going to start teaching her next week. We went to a cafe today and I just showed her a lot of the books and materials I use, and she seemed to like that, which was good. After we exhausted the teaching thing, we started chatting a little bit, and she gave me an impromptu Japanese lesson, I finally got the whole pun vs. fun thing sorted out which is good - it's a really random rule to do with time - if a time ends in a 3, 6, or 10 (minutes) then its pun, but any other time, its fun. So 2:03 = ni ji san pun (two hours, 3 minutes), but 2:04 = ni ji yon fun (I think!)

After that, she randomly read my palm! She was like 'can I see your palm?' so I handed it over, and seemingly, I'll be getting married at 25! She's very nice, so I'm sure everything will work out well with the family (I hope!) I guess we'll see next Sunday...

Came home and ate some leftovers for lunch (mmmm!) and then Peter and Hitomi and Venus walked to Shimo Kitazawa so that Hitomi could organize a kimono to wear to a wedding she's attending with Peter next weekend. I stayed at home and got caught up on Desperate Housewives that they'd watched while I was out teaching, and then when they got home, we tried to watch another one, but everyone flaked out for awhile, so Peter's really the only one who knows what was going on.

After we all woke up, just around 8:00, I made some cream of potato (and onion, broccoli and cheese) soup, which was pretty tasty. I was a little worried because I didn't think through my recipe modifications very well and kind of screwed up my roux, but in the end it doesn't seem to have mattered very much. We've spent the evening catching up on season three of Desperate Housewives (after the market episode we really couldn't stop watching at that point!) We're watching right now actually, so I'm going to leave it at this and get back to DH...

D.