I came here for the culture and the food

I AM A ROBOT. Whenever any of my students ask me why I came to Japan, I fall back on the textbook answer. Food and culture. 'Oh, Japanese culture is very popular in America, Dragonball-Z, Sushi, etc;' blah blah blah. It seems to make them happy that America knows who they are. In addition to my regular classes I'll do something called 'Voice' soon. Its where I get a bunch of Japanese people and we all just pick a topic and chat. The regular classes are very rigidly structured, so to just chat with Japanese people is exciting for me. I've been warned however about hot-button topics. No religion or politics (although politics isn't always off limits - its more for our benefit than theirs [or so I'm told]), and definitely avoid everything that happened between say, 1932 and 1945. But seriously, nothing over here is older than the 1950s. There are tons of old temples and great sites and shit, but they all say 'rebuilt in 1953' or whatever. This country got housed.

Bruce, I was actually offended that you hadn't been posting random comments earlier. Rock on my naked and peanut-butter covered friend.

So, I wrote some postcards today, but I don't have mailing addresses for most of you. Where do I send the cards for Kevin, Jon, Mark, Luke, Santosh, Jarod, Dave, Jeff, Ari, Jeremy, Conor, Bruce and everyone else? If you send me your mailing address I'll get right on sending something to you.　

Let's see... So I've gotten positive feedback about the blog, but I don'ｔ know what you all like reading about. Any questions?

I'm going to pick up my UFJ ATM card in Obu today. It was sent to me but I wasn't home in the middle of the afternoon on a weekday, so now I need to take a train to the post office to get it. Weird that it would have missed me on a fucking Monday at 3pm. Idiots.

I don't think I'm going to let anyone in Japan know about this blog so I can use it to badmouth some of them and be honest with all of you back home. I made plans last Thursday to meet this socially-awkward Canadian girl at a bar tonight. Ｉ think I'm gonna blow her off though. I don't have a cell phone to call her but I don't think I care anyway. I got stuck riding a train with her for over half an hour and the conversation went something like this:

Weirdo: (blah blah blah)
Captain Awesome: (blah blah blah)...yeah, so I eat the shit out of bananas because you need to get on a waiting list for a melon.
Weirdo: haha, yeah, me too.
(silence while she takes in how cool I am)
Weirdo: I ate an apple the other day too.
Captain Awesome: Sure.
Weirdo: Yeah, there's this place right by me that sells them.
Captain Awesome: ...ok.
Weirdo: It was red, but I don't know what kind it was.
Captain Awesome: (oh no, is she actually talking about a fucking apple?)
Weirdo: I like Granny Smith ones.
Captain Awesome: (well, I just freed up some time on Tuesday)

ROAR!