Live from Fukui!

So I clearly am terrible at updating this thing! But I come bearing tales of my Japanese adventure...in List Form!

1. I've been teaching for almost a month now, and so far it's pretty good. I'm at at "lower-academic" high school, which means the students are preparing for the workplace instead of college. Which is not a bad thing at all. My kids are always really excited to see me, and they do their best. My teachers are awesome too. The woman who sits next to me in the teacher's room has totally taken me under her wing. Her name is Sakamoto and she's working really hard to teach me Japanese and to make me feel welcome here. She's my favorite.

2. The town I live in is called Katsuyama and it's completely beautiful. It's surrounded by mountains and it has the Kuzuryu river running through it. I live right next to the Echizen Daibutsu, which is the largest cast-iron statue in the world. Check out our giant metal neighbor!



3. I took a mini-trip to Kyoto with a few friends before school started, and it was tons of fun. I got to meet up with my friend Masako, whom I hadn't seen in 4 years. It was awesome. Kyoto has about 23801492330 temples and shrines, there's still tons of stuff I didn't get to see. I'm def going back there at some point.

PICTURES!!







4. I climbed Mt. Fuji!!!! Well, mostly. I didn't make it all the way to the top, but I made it to the 8th station (which is almost 11,000 feet high) and was able to watch the sun rise. Oh yeah, we climbed it at night. Which, at the time seemed terrifying and awful, but had we climbed in the day time it probably would have been even scarier. It was almost better that it was dark, because I probably would have freaked out if I had been able to see exactly how high we were. It was really really cold, and a pretty hard climb for someone who's never climbed a mountain before, but it was totally worth it. And I'm totally stoked that I never have to climb it again.





That's all I can think of to write right now, but I'll try to update more often. I still don't have internet in my house which makes it a little difficult to stay on top of this. I'm writing this at school, which I have to be covert about. Later!