Yesterday (Wednesday)

Yesterday I was not having a good day. I was going through the ‘what sort of idiot moves to a country where she doesn’t speak the language, where the culture is the complete opposite of her own, and she is still a short-arse?!?’ stage. I’m sure you are all familiar with it.

I guess it didn’t help that I have a cold, my ankle is stuffed and I had a really bad headache yesterday. So after moping around my house for a while, I got bored of feeling sorry for myself (it only took a couple of hours), and decided I should head out for a walk. This was just after 6pm, so the sun was setting and the weather was really nice.

Anyway, I wandered in a direction I hadn’t explored yet, and came across another historic part of Hagi (did I mention Hagi is a castle town which still has a samurai quarter and heaps of old buildings and areas?) with temples and a foundry and stuff. As I walked around the outside of the quarter, I noticed all these little birds flitting around. Then I decided they couldn’t be birds because the wings weren’t right, so they had to be moths or something, but they were too big for that, and after a while I realized they were bats! How cool is that! They were out chasing insects in the twilight.

After an hour, I wandered home, bad mood (almost) completely forgotten.

Today Dan, Rosie, Jo and I are stuck at the Board of Education because school has finished. That wouldn’t be so bad, except we have nothing to do, so are reduced to reading, playing sudoku, playing spider solitaire and making constant trips to the kitchen for coffee. The boredom is killing us!!!

By the way, this is Paul with an empty bottle of Hennessey. I don’t know if you can do this in NZ, but in Japan you can buy bottles of alcohol at bars, and they write your name on it and keep it for you, so whenever you go in, you just grab the bottle and drink away. It isn’t a bad system, but it can be expensive (this bottle cost 8000 円, roughly $120.