Hazy Days: Trying to make out the end of the sports field from the staffroom through the June fog. 

View over Okazaki bay on Sunday evening (sorry, my camera couldn't work out whether it was the fence or the horizon that was wonky... so they both are!)  

Piles of students making towers for sports day 

Yukiaizaki beach first thing on a cloudy morning after the Daikon Party 

You Look Like Horse.

So, it's officially summer! On Tuesday it was 29 degrees in the staffroom, the sun is shining, the haze is here and just standing in front of a blackboard causes me to break into nice little sweat. All of a sudden summer just appeared overnight and well - I guess there's no going back now!

So, to answer the question of what the hell have I been doing recently: for about three weeks I was celebrating my birthday :) in a number of ways ranging from cake and candles in the staffroom to daikon-camping to eikaiwa pig-out, all-you-can-eat salad and a particularly stunning (if slightly sweaty) night out in Hirosaki courtesy of Magnet, Papa Soul (and Dee)! Ironically I spent the night itself at home with a video , but I guess having a birthday season almost the size of lent makes up for it. I don't think I'm going to be able to squeeze any more parties out of it this year though, sadly.

Then I went into full-power study mode for Kanji Kentei (17th) and J-Test (19th). Actually that's a lie, I was blatantly not studying for J-Test. J-Test is a proficiency test that gives you a score out of 1000 depending on your level - so studying for it is kind of not the point, unless you want to get yourself over the next barrier. There's a hilariously tortuous listening test and then grammar, reading, and (unlike the more famous JLPT) a writing test, so it was pretty interesting really - and it's the first time I've ever been tested on actually writing a whole sentence. Kanji Kentei is a national test aimed school kids that tests your reading, writing and comprehension of Kanji up to a certain level (depending on the grade). I was taking Grade 4 this time - a 316 character leap from Grade 5 and my first encounter with four-way combinations (四字熟語） that had my head spinning for most of last month! I'm not feeling too good about the result, there were just too many words! And I guess maybe expecting to have taken on that much vocabulary in three years was asking for trouble. It was fun though, practicing writing, and the last-minute cramming reminded me of uni. And at the end of the day, I can read a lot more now than I could three weeks ago, which has helped with the whole translating-my-successor's-contract thing.

Anyway, those were my last tests ever in Japan (this time around) and now I have a lot more free time and can concentrate on dealing with other things - namely school, packing, and my CV (ugh moan groan). I can't believe I'm leaving (or maybe just don't want to?) and I figure I'm just going to wake up one day and realise I'm in a different place, but I've booked my flight now so I guess it's really going to happen. Maybe it's time to get excited about seeing everyone at home again, and baked beans, and decent curry, and leaving my shoes on for more than five minutes...