And I'm spent!

Finally finished up a very loooong work week. I changed my schedule around so that one of the people that I work with could get consecuetive days off. I'd hate to have a split weekend and he's had one for the past 6 months so I felt it was the least I could do. Besides, when your weekend is a Monday and Tuesday does it really matter if it switches to Tuesday/Wednesday? Anyways because of the way the month ended I had to work a 6 day week. Today hardly counted though. I spent the day at the Hoya branch and when I got in I found out that I only had 3 classes scheduled-3 classes out of 8! I was all by myself too. Needless to say it was extremely boring-fortunately the staff girl who was working today was fairly cute!

I don't think I've mentioned it yet but I actually work in the same place that I live. That is, I live in Hibarigaoka and I work at the Hibarigaoka branch. Now most of you are probably saying to yourselves that that only makes sense and you would think so wouldn't you? But that isn't the case at all. At least not according to my fellow teachers. Most of them express gasps of disbelief when they hear that I get to live in the same place as I work and I guess that makes me pretty lucky. I'm also working one day a week at the Hoya branch now as I said before but it's only the next train stop away and it's a new branch so things are super slow. I've yet to have more than one person in any class and I usually have about 3 frees a day.

I finally joined the gym today. It's kind of a complicated proccess when you are english and they are japanese. Fortunately the girl that helped me was actually half decently fluent. You had to pay for 2 months up front so that cost me about $150 which pretty much cleaned me out of all the money I had just stood in line to get at the bank and therefore I had to return to Lineup from Hell. Banking is sort of an oddity here in Japan. I can't understand how a country that has 24 hour 99 Yen stores can't have 24 hour ATM machines. They close after a certain time of day and they're closed on holidays. This week happens to be Golden Week which is a celebration of the end of hayfever season. 125 million Japanese collectively yell 'Woohoo' and throw their face masks into the trash. All I know is that everyone gets the week off except for us. It also means that for 3 days during the middle of the week you CANNOT get money out of the bank. This starts tomorrow so of course when I got to the bank this morning I was met by "The Longest ATM Lineup in the History of Mankind." They have about 8 ATM machines and even then the line went forever. Fortunately it moves pretty quickly and I was able to get through without too much delay. That is a good thing because for some reason there is no air conditioning in the bank and the official temperature inside was something approximate to the core of the Sun.