whoaa.... wha...?

Yeah yeah, this is a billion years late, and everyone stopped reading about 6 months ago, i know. I had no internet, bite me!

Anyway... most of you probably know i was back in the states in August. I had a good time, went to Ryan Griswold's wedding, that was a pretty good time. My first wedding actually... heh. I didnt make it to Vegas, unfortunately, so if any of my family/friends living there are reading this, dont think cruised through town and didnt call anyone. Eric and i went to Nagano here when we got back. We stayed in a hotspring for a night, and hiked around the pristine forested mountainous terrain there for 2 days, very pretty area. The pictures im gonna put online dont do it justice. On the way back we decided to take local trains (instead of the express quasi bullet trainish train we took on the way there). It turned out taking a million years, but we got to see alot of the pretty rural areas in central Japan. After doing that, Eric and I came up with a plan to hop on a train the next 3 day weekend we get, and ride as far in one direction as we can. We're hoping we can get to Kyushu (the SW island of Japan).

So, work started after that and it was back to normal. My schools all had their school festivals a few weeks ago. A Japanese High School festival is pretty cool. All the different classes and grades take on random tasks, such as selling food, ice cream, drinks, etc. Other classes provide entertainment by turning their classrooms into haunted houses, or mazes and the such. All of the clubs perform the various routines they've been working on all weekend. The hip-hop dance club was pretty impressive, and so was the marching band at one of the schools. One of my schools had a sorta.... beauty/popularity contest type thing for the festival, sorta like the prom queen or whatever. All of them kept coming up and telling me to vote for them, haha.

Tuesday was a national holiday this week, so monday night Eric, Jon and I went out, since Jon has mon/tues off. We decided to walk the Yamanote line and drink as we walked all night(a train that basically does a circle around Tokyo). We got about... a third of the way around i figure. We started at around 8:30 pm and called it a night(day?) at about 6:00 am. When we were waiting for the train in the morning, all of us fell asleep, haha. I wish I had a picture of the 3 of us passed out on the most uncomfortable bench ever.

We were on track for about.... 4 hours id say. After that we got into unfamiliar territory and i was thrust into the leadership position, with my uncanny tracking and city navigation skills. Some... errors were made.... and well, we ended up in a place we were at 2 hours earlier.... at that point a mutiny was staged, and eric attaked me, BUT... BUT we soldiered on, afterall, to quote Eric (its about the journey, not the destination) *cough* haha.... It probably woulda been fine, but I made the decision to go left instead of right, despite being outvoted 2 to 1 by my crew.

Anway.... the night got crazier the later it got. There were a few things that would best be described as stupid. Fun, but..... a bit stupid, yar. I wont say everything, but perhaps one of the dumber ones was scaling a 10 foot rock wall in the darkness and stumbling through the spider infested forest/shrubbery of someones gigantic private estate.

Anway, i'll update again soon!
We're going to Hokkaido in November, and Thailand in December! rock.