lucky day!

i almost had a heart attack today, really.  they told me that i was getting a new "pas con" today and my heart nearly jumped out of my chest.  oh, for those of you who arent hip to the katakana english yet, a pas con is what they call a laptop computer around here.  (personal computer is where their word comes from.  a bit of a stretch, but once you get used to kata english its a snap!)  so i am more than elated to report that i am now writing to you all from my very new and very lovely pas con!!!!  it loads internet pages in an instant and has a version of microsoft word that was made in this decade...i have died and gone to heaven.  in case i have failed to mention it, i have been pissed at my old computer pert near every day for the last, um, i'd say eight months.  it crashed on a daily basis and took MINUTES to load web pages and you could not even think of multi-tasking on it (read: open more than one window at a time).  my supervisor told me just last week that he thought it would be a long while before i was getting a new one, so really i had just started to use it less and less and have been getting by on a lot of hand made lessons. 

soooo...it arrived today and they installed it for me and even transferred all of my files for me and now i have no excuses for not using a computer as it should be used, well, unless anyone still considers the fact that all of the programs are still in japanese (kata, hiragana and kanji) and thinks that is a hurdle.  whatever, small potatoes to what i was dealing with.  and now, off to the races!!!!!

okay, so catching up.  last weekend i met up with a bunch of othergoto  island english teachers and we all headed out to our friend brett's island of ojika.  it is north and has this sweet little abandoned island that is about a 30 minute ferry ride away called nozaki.  no body lives there anymore because the population just slowly died out (as it is doing on ALL of the gotos, but that is another story for another time) and no one could really sustain life there anymore.  the last people moved off the island about 8 years ago and left tons of evidence of their exsitence.  everything from toothbrushes to pots and pans remain in houses dotted along the coastline of nozaki and you can wonder in and around all of the houses and feel the ghosts now residing there.  now the island belongs to the deer who are everywhere and the brave people who come over to visit and lodge at the hostel that remains in the center of the island.  the hostel is the old school building and has been transformed into comfortable quarters for at least a few dozen people, complete with a beer vending machine and everything.  all 11 of us stayed one night on the island and explored a good bit.

the hostel is just a few minutes walk from a really fantastic beach and there is an excellent hike that we took to the highest point on the island and one of the oldest shrines in japan. supposedly constructed in the year 700 AD it towers on the hillside looking over the east china sea below.   its location is superb and has vistas that the gods themselves must have brainstormed awhile on.  being able to soak all of this up on just another weekend adventure is such an amazing feeling.  not too far from home, but so far from where i began. 

im leaving you all with a few pics of my nozaki island adventure and oh, a few snaps of the family of cats who have taken up on my back porch.  fingers crossed that they will be grown up enough to leave soon, but for now they are a sweet sight to sneek a peek at every now and again.  there are five of them and four of them are black and one is white.  their mom is all black.  strange goto cat genes i guess...

matta ne!

(okay, my bad, i just realized that i didnt save the pictures on my new computer, so i will get them up at home in a jiff.  sorry im a little flustered still from the shock of having a computer that works!)