About once a month, when my other schools are busy, I get sent to go teach at the local kindergarten. Actually, it's not really teaching. It's more like I get sent to go play at the local kindergarten. I really enjoy these visits, although they are often very tiring and I'm pretty sure that whenever I get sick it's because I caught something from one of those snot nosed little kids. Yesterday was a typical kindergarten visit. I showed up, did about 30 minutes of English time with the older kids (introducing new words, practicing phrases like "My name is...", reading books), then about 30 minutes of play time (we played some board games and card games), a break for afternoon tea (yogurt and fruit), then I spent some time playing with the other younger classes.

These visits are always a good opportunity to practice speaking Japanese. Kids at this age have enough trouble speaking their own language so they're often hard to understand, but we have some great conversations. This is an example of a typical conversation ("J" is me and "S" is one or more students).

S: What's your favourite food?
J: Uh, I like steak.
S: Ohh. Ok. What's your favourite colour?
J: Blue, like my eyes.
(kids look at my eyes - some are amused, some are a little scared)
S: Why are your eyes grey?
J: Grey? My eyes are blue.
S: Ohh.... so why are they grey?
J: What are you talking about? I just told you. They're blue!
S: Ummm. Ok, why are they blue?
J: I don't know. Why are your eyes brown?
S: Hmmm.
(long pause while they think of an answer)
S: Are you married?
J: Yes. I have three wives.
S: Oh, really? What's your favourite food?
J: Uh, steak.
S: What's your last name?
J: Um, Gorilla. My name is Jonathan Gorilla.
S: Hah hah hah! The teacher's name is Gorilla!
(runs off to tell the other kids - spend five minutes rolling around on the floor laughing)
S: Which masked rider do you liker better, Masked Rider Yellow or Masked Rider Blue?
J: Um. Blue?
S: Oh, me too! What's your favourite food?
J: Have you been listening to me?
S: What?
J: Never mind. I like steak.
S: Oh. By the way, I like your grey eyes.
J: Thanks.
S: So, do you have any children?
J: Yeah. That kid over there. (point to a random child) He's my son.
S: Really? Kenta is your son?
J: Yes.
S: He doesn't look like you.
J: Yeah, he looks like his mum.
S: Really, who's that?
J: Oh, his mum is (insert random famous celebrity name).
S: Ahh, I see.
(pause while the student picks his/her nose, scratches his/her butt or starts a fight with some other kid for no particular reason)
J: I've gotta go now.
S: Ok. Bye...... Oh, by the way, what's your -
J: Steak!

Yes, this is a typical kindergarten conversation. Crazy kids...

Back to work.

I had a nice long winter holiday. I was very busy and did lots of interesting things. But I'm not going to write about what I did. Why? Because I've already spent a few hours writing about what I did, only to have my computer finally kick the bucket. I have a feeling that my holiday blog is still safely stored on the hard disk of my dead laptop, so once I get around to removing the disk and getting the data off it then you'll hear about my winter vacation. For now, I'll write about something else.

I guess the most appropriate thing to write about is my lovely new computer. I'd been putting aside a little money over the last few months to by myself a nice Christmas present. When Christmas came, I couldn't decide what I wanted, so the money went unspent. Lucky for me that I didn't spend it, as life here would be a hell of a lot harder without a computer. So, last weekend I took my hard earned cash down to Sapporo and bought a brand spanking new Apple Macbook. Until now I'd always used a PC, so getting a Mac was a pretty big step. Over the last two years (sine my laptop started showing signs that it was getting sick), I've spent quite a while weighing up the pros and cons of various machines, and for various reasons I decided that the time was right to switch to Mac. Among the biggest reasons for my change were:

- Basically, Mac doesn't have viruses and other nasties like that
- An Intel CPU means that performance wise its on par with PC laptops
- With programs like Boot Camp and Parallels you can run windows on it if you want to
- It looks sexy
- No installing millions of drivers and having a hard disk cluttered with crapola
- I just wanted to try something different

I've been using it for a few days now and it's been great. In fact, the only problem I have with it is that it's not compatible with my Sony MP3 player (that's Sony's fault, not Apple's, with their stupid proprietary software). Everything is very user friendly, programs are nicely integrated into the OS, everything looks magnificent, and (best of all) it's all so simple. Take the mouse issue, for example. The laptop doesn't come packaged with a mouse and it's not much fun using the trackpad all day. So, I took my Microsoft Optical mouse from my dead laptop, plugged it into the USB port, and half a second later I was using the mouse (with all of its functions working perfectly). No slow loading, no download of drivers, no blue screen of death, just simple functionality. The same went for my printer. I just plugged it in and was away.
Sweet. Overall, I have no complaints yet, though I've still barely probed the surface of what the machine can do.

To finish, here are a few photos I took over winter. This is my town, as taken from the top of the ski hill. Hopefully they will give you a good idea of the kind of place I'm living (small town in the mountains, isolated, but always fun!). Click to enlarge!