Spirited Away

Ok, so I wasn't really spirited away in the same sense, but today I had a surprise visit and outing, so close enough ^-^.    I unfortunately slept in, thanks to me 2nd alarm not going off, so now I have to wait until Wednesday to take my trash out -.-........for those of you who don't know in Japan you don't put your trash outside, you wait until designated trash days where you take your trash to a dump site where it is picked up and taken to wherever. So I can only take my trash out on Wednesdays and Saturdays.....seeing as I live alone it's really not too bad and I can go without the second day....but sadly I have a relatively full bag, and now I get to wait and hope it doesn't start to stink xppp.   Anyhoo, that aside I was just sitting in bed trying to decide what to eat when the door bell rang, so I scrambled up and tried to look as awake as possible and it was the delivery guy with my snow boots that I ordered.  Less than 2 minutes after I closed the door and took the package in the doorbell rings again and it's Sadea-san (the older lady who helps me run the adult teaching class at the community center) and she wanted to go out and eat lunch and chat and stuff.  So I quickly threw on clothes and such and was whisked away to a nice small restaurant and then to her house for some mini potato-things and coffee and tea.  The mini potato things are really cool, they are the size of a half dollar to a quarter and look like, well, mini potatoes, and you can easily peel them with just your fingers. And then you eat them and they taste kinda of sweet, not quite as sweet as a sweet potato, maybe more similar to a red potato in a way.  Anyway, it was a lot of fun hanging out and she showed me pics sent from the first ALT to her of their family and kids, and we just sat and chatted ^^. 

The day before that I was asked to join a last-minute get-together with two of Kita Elementary's teachers, Kamimura-san, Chika-san and their friend at a nearby restaurant.  It was a lot of fun, their friend teaches English in a town nearby and can speak it really well and he was talking about watching the Little Mermaid in English and having to look up the phrase "take it from me" in the song "Under the Sea" because he wasn't sure what it meant.......it's always fun to have phrases like that pointed out, because you don't really realize how many things are said but aren't easily understood by foreigners until you spend a lot of time with foreigners.....though I guess here I'm the foreigner lol, but ya know what I mean ^^.   Anyway, it was a lot of fun hanging out, I got to eat some of a 'century old egg' which wasn't as bad as I thought it'd be, definitely expecting a more fermented nasty taste, but it didn't really taste all that bad.  And the oyster sauce (kakisa-su) fried rice at that restaurant is really really good ^-^.  Anyway, this is a short post, but more are on their way shortly, figured it's easier to separate the subjects and put them in different posts rather than one giant blob. So on to the next post ^^.