Postcard

More from Miyajima. I was trying to make a cool shot like on a postcard, where something cool is in the pictures with the cherry tree branches and blooms surrounding it. I think these turned out pretty well.

Pagoda on Miyajima

If you're not sick of it yet, here's more pics from Miyajima. We climbed up these stairs near the gate and saw this pagoda. I'm WAY behind in my picture posting. I still owe you guys pics of the flower festival! Yeah, these were taken over a month ago, but I thought they were too pretty not to share. Toukasan is this weekend!!! I'm really pumped! My yukata and accessories are ready to go! I just wish Markian would dress up. He doesn't want to wear shorts and the men's style that isn't shorts is SO expensive (hundreds of dollars), so....no yukata for him...unless he decides to surprise me, but I doubt it. I just wanted our pictures taken together at the festival all dressed up.

Little Temple

Miyajima not only has the famous floating tori gate and lots of deer running around, there are plenty of little temples on the island. This one was near the tori gate. You can easily spend an entire day on the island and not do everything. That's what happened to us, although we mostly did everything.
On an unrelated note...pirates 3 is out here, but the movies are SO expensive. The discount late show ticket at the Warner Brothers theater (which I've heard is the nice one) is 1,300 yen and a regular ticket runs around 2,000 yen and up. So, I don't plan on seeing many movies, but I probably will break down and see Pirates at some point because Johnny Depp is in it. So, even if it is poo, I will see Johnny Depp which almost makes it worth 20 bucks.

A private museum tour

This took place April 22nd and I'm just now getting around to writing about it! Anyhow, a student at our school who is taught be another teacher gave us a private museum tour. He works at the museum and wanted to talk to people about art and try out his tour giving skills. He's an incredibly nice guy. He bought us tea and we chatted and then he showed us around the museum which mainly contains Impressionist works. It was really nice. Then he took pictures of us in front of the museum and gave us prints as a present later. I don't have a way to scan them, so that's why they're not up here. He wants us to come back after he's learned more English so he can give us another tour. We're looking forward to it!

Robots are awesome.

Saw this guy up near Yokogawa Station. Thought he was pretty awesome, so I told Markian to pose with him. Robots are awesome. I'm wondering when we'll get the transformers movie over here. I know it's not out in the US yet, but I'm just thinking ahead.

I think Pirates 3 came out today, but I'm not sure if it did here. I went to the local theater website and used one of those web translators to change it into English and it was no where to be seen on the site. It looks like they're just now showing 300 here. So, it may be a while before I get to see Pirates, which makes me sad. Movies are crazy expensive over here, so I'm only going if it's something I really, really, really wanna see...like pirates. It'll probably be disappointing like the last one, but it's pirates + Johnny Depp so I really don't care.

The reason I'm able to sit here and type this is cause one of my high schools has exams so I didn't have to go today. I plan to use the afternoon to catch up on lesson planning. I still have night classes to teach this evening. Alright, I'm going to go check on my rice. It's the first time I've had time to cook in a while. I usually am living at the Mos Burger or the cheap-o Italian place.

I want more days like these

Fun and games have been over for a while. Really busy with work, but I still have a backlog of lovely photos to share with you. I worked overtime this week, so things were crazier than normal. We went to Kure yesterday because a junior high school that I teach at was having a sports day, and I wanted to make an appearance. I have a couple pictures from that, as soon as I get the chance to upload them, like so many other pictures I want to share. We wanted to do lots of sightseeing when we were there, but our tiredness got the best of us. Kure is about an hour on the train from our home. So it wasn't a bad day, but it ended up costing us more money than I wanted to spend, and I was too tired to really enjoy it. Today we got groceries, ran erands...you know, stuff that has to be done. Sorry for the boring posts. Hopefully more exciting good things are soon to come.

Life is short

It's been a rough week for a few reasons. That is why there has been a lack of updates. It's Monday evening, and it's already time to go back to work tomorrow. A coworker and friend of ours unexpectedly passed away this week. It just came out of nowhere, so I've been pretty down most of the week. It really makes you think that you don't know how long you have. He was an incredibly nice guy, and it just really sucks. I'll really miss talking to him; he was very friendly and interesting to chat with.

The picture is of some flowers I pass by on my way to teach at a little Juku I go to.