Another Winter Approaches...

I'm back!! Have you all given up on this site yet?

As you can see, Halloween has come and gone at Geos and Japan. We had some fun with monkey costumes and toilet paper(^_^).

I also went to a small town east of Sendai with my friends Owain and Mike to see a replica ship from 1613. It's called the San Juan Bautista. It was built by the famous feudal lord from Sendai, Masamune Date, and it sent a delegation to the Vatican to seek a trade treaty and encourage the spread of Christianity in Japan. The ship crossed the Pacific and the delegation changed ships in Mexico and made it to the Vatican in 1616. They even managed to return (it only took 7 years), but by then, Japan had expelled all Christian missionaries and the original San Juan Bautista was sold to the Phillipine Navy in the 1620s. It was nice to go to a tourist site that was NOT crowded. The day trip was followed by pasta, beer, sake and Nintendo Wii at another teacher's apartment.

This Sunday I have to go to work for a couple of hours. My company has decided to have a speech contest to encourage our students with their studies. So the first round of speeches are this weekend and I'm looking forward to it. We have 3 levels of competition. The kid's contest topic is titled, "My Hero," the Japanese teacher level students will speak about the best place they have travelled to and the Native teacher level students will speak about whether times have goten better or worse. I've checked over a few speeches this week and they look good. Everyone is writing about their topic from a very different persective. It'll be hard to choose only one winner I think. So that's aboot it. I still haven't posted the last pictures from the trip to England, haha. If anyone wants to see more pictures of York, please let me know and I'll post them. If not, then I'll move on and try to post recent photos only.

Take care!!