満開 (Full Bloom)

This week in full bloom (満開 mankai) for the cherry blossoms in Tokyo I have heard. I keep on trying to get good pictures of them, but it's so hard. I think it's a Japanese conspriracy. Getting good pictures is really hard here because there are power lines everywhere. All those brochures you see are probably airbrushed. America airbrushes its wrinkles and fat away and Japan airbrushes their powerlines away.

So last Friday was my sort of last day at work. All the kids I were teaching quit the school so I didn't have any students left. My first experience getting laid off. How corporate America. I took a picture of one of my classes on the last day. From right to left is Kiho, Nonomi and Sumire. They are all 10 years old and about to be in the 5th grade. This was my older class.



I met a new student from the MySensei.com website last night. I don't know how to quite describe her... I think she is like 25-30. She is a secretary for an American company in Japan. She wanted to learn some english conversation, I think for work. We ended up going to this really posh cafe in Shibuya because all the other cafes were full. Really posh as in 800 yen coffee posh. Luckily in this job, I'm pretty much a high class prostitute and people pay for me. But I was in jeans and tennis shoes and felt like a billy bob at the Ritz. She doesn't know a whole lot of English and is really curious about American life so most of the time I talk in Japanese about me. Which really doesn't help the escort-esque feeling you get when unknown people buy you expensive coffee. Only in Japan.