It be the weekend again!

Yeah this week there is no poem - sorry. My creative juices have been sucked dry by thinking up new games for next week's classes. So this weekend again nothing on the cards. It is R's birthday on Sunday and there were tentative plans for a party of some description the last time I spoke to him - but it is likely that nothing will actually happen. I have been trying to call him all week but his phone reception is just the worst over the hill in whoop whoop where he lives. He's got more genki than me I tell you what, if I lived over there I would probably never ever see anyone cos the hour walk to the train station is just a pain, especially when the weather is awful. A taxi ride costs him 2000 yen, which is about $25 so it's not the best of locations from which to party.

I got rid of my car finally. It had been sitting in my driveway for two months just reminding me every time I came home of how slack I have been/continue to be in not doing anything about it. I called the insurance man and he came to my school last week and got the key and took it away to be scrapped. It cost me $100, which is cheap compared to the $1000+ it would have cost to re-register and try and sell. So a 4 year old car is dead. Nothing is built to last anymore because nothing is allowed to last. If I did try and sell the thing the only people who would have shown any interest would have been other foreigners. Cars over 7 years old cost an absolute fortune to register and the annual safety check is wildly expensive too so most people would trade their car in at about the 6 year mark (if that) and get a new one. This means that having a car loan to pay off is virtually a permanent feature of most household budgets which is crazy to me because there's no way I would ever borrow money to buy a car. The real shame of it is that there are so few real old cars around - you know back when a bumper bar was actually capable of bumping something without collapsing. It makes the road scenery kind of vanilla. Sometimes I see an old mini or something, but a lot of the cars are the new brightly coloured boxes - all the same but with different trimmings.

So now I am committed to a car-free lifestyle all through the cold cold winter... Hmmm, I may come to regret this decision when I am walking to my new school at 7am and it is below zero. Higashi-sho is a good 30 minute walk from mine I reckon so I will have plenty of time to lose all the feeling in my toes before I arrive. The schools aren't heated here. When I arrived at the beginning of this year the schools were so cold my toes were constantly numb and I had goosebumps all day. Bring on winter!!

Well, one of my tasks this weekend is to come up with an appropriately amusing costume for Halloween. Since there are so many Americans here there tend to be a few parties going on so I'll no doubt be going to some such event for fun and games. Last time I was here my friend and I dressed up as Snugglepot and Cuddlepie. It involved a fair amount of papier mache and cardboard action and we looked absolutely fab - but no one knew who we were meant to be of course! The best part of the evening was riding the street car into the party with big green gumnut hats and gumleaf skirts on. When we arrived everyone was like "Oh, are you elves?" and we started talking to these Japanese girls who had arrived just wearing civvies - we asked them what they were dressed as and they shyly pulled these cute sparkly cowboy hats out of their bags and put them on. Zero for effort there! And they said they were embarrassed on the way in cos of how they were dressed! They took the hats off straight after that, apparently even in the company of two gumnut babies they were embarrassed to be seen with hats on. Well, I am pretty certain that whatever happens this year it will never live up to my last Halloween party experience, but it still could be fun!