My, my. It's been a while since I've written anything. Why? Well, I've been pretty busy.

Back in October I played in the annual basketball competition. There are two blocks with eight teams in each block, and our team is in B block (because we're not very good). This year, in our first game we were drawn to play the weakest team in the competition. They haven't won a game in the history of the competition. So, on Saturday, I got up early and drove for two hours to the town where the competition was being held. Is still had a niggling cold, which made it pretty hard to get up early and pay basketball, but seeing as I hadn't played in a year I was looking forward to it.

As I said, the first match was against a team who had never won. Even though our team doesn't train and we only play together once a year, and even though we only have about 4 players with any basketball experience (and a few extras to make up the numbers), we managed to beat them by about 40 points. This meant we had to come back on Sunday morning for another game.

So, on Sunday, I got up early again and drove two hours to play basketball. This time our opponent was one of the best teams in our block. We had a great start and managed to get out to about a 15 point lead by quarter time, but as the game progressed they slowly chipped away at our lead. In the end we managed to win by 1 point, which was great (because we beat a team that is much better than us), but also not so good (because it meant we had to play another game and hour and a half later, our third in 24 hours).

The third game was against pretty good opposition, and although we tried hard we went down by about 15 points. Overall, it was a pretty good showing, especially considering that other teams had plenty of subs available, whereas our team had to make do with three of us playing every minute of every game (this was made even worse by the fact that the games consisted of four ten minute quarters with the clock stopping for everything - ie. the games lasted about 90 minutes). By the end of the third match I was tired and in a fair amount of pain, a feeling I haven't felt in a while.

Each time I play in this tournament I'm reminded of the differences between Japanese and Australian basketball. On the surface, it looks like the same sport, but once you really analyse what's going on there are a lot of noticeable differences. I don't think one version is better than the other (though if I was a referee I'd definitely want to be a referee in Japan), though I can say without a doubt that an average amateur team in Australia would more often than not beat an average amateur team from Japan. The teams that played this weekend are athletic, skilled and have a good knowledge of the game, but I think that if the Monday night Tigers team came and played them then the Tigers team should win without too much trouble (except that half the team would probably get ejected or fouled out by half time).

A few days after the basketball tournament, the local volleyball competition started. It's a 2 week competition and we had one or two games pretty much every night for the whole two weeks. My team finished second in the last competition, due mainly to the fact we got a few new teachers this year that can actually play ball sports, so we thought we had a good chance of winning this one. And we did. We won every game and finished top of our league. This means that in the next competition we will be in the A league. The A league has fewer teams and they take the competition very seriously, in contrast to the B league which is a much more friendly and much less skilled competition. In fact, the A league teams all have regular training and games, whereas the B league teams just come together for the twice a year competition. We watched one or two of the A league games that were playing after our B league games. Even though we won the B league quite easily, I have no doubt that we're going to get killed in the A league. But it should be fun.

As soon as volleyball was over I had to start preparing for a series of evening English conversation classes for adults. Twice a year I 'voluntarily' do a week or two of evening classes (ie. I have to do it but I don't get paid for it). This time however, I was asked to do a presentation instead of one of the classes. The topic of the presentation was 'Australia'. The presentation would be in Japanese and anyone from the town could come to watch. The main reason for doing a presentation was that most people in this town know very little about anything outside the town (and even less about things outside Japan). I remember a conversation I had with a Japanese lady who at the time was an English teacher at one of the schools in town. She asked me, "What is Australia like?", and I responded "well... I don't know... um... it's a very big country." She nodded and said, "Hmm. A big country... but obviously it's not bigger than Japan." I was shocked. "Um, yeah, it's only about 20 times the size of Japan", I replied, and it was her turn to be shocked. The most shocking thing about this whole conversation was that she was an English teacher, so it is part of her job to know things about foreign countries, particularly English speaking countries.

It was around this time that I realised that most Japanese people know comparatively little about the world. Earlier this year during a sixth grade elementary school class I decided to see how much the students knew about the world. I did an activity which had the students match country names and country flags, and then try to locate the country on a world map that had all the names erased. My God, they were terrible. Most students had no idea about flags, and although most could locate Japan on a map, they had big trouble finding other countries. Many of them found America and China, but countries like France, Canada and New Zealand had them stumped. I guess they either aren't taught or have no interest in the world outside Japan.

Anyway, back to the presentation, I spent a few days working hard on writing it and setting it up on the computer. I used the program Keynote (the Mac version of Powerpoint), which was good because it was the first time I'd had a reason to use it since I bought it. I was surprised how easy it was to make an awesome looking presentation. Just drag and drop a whole lot of pictures and movies form the internet, cut and paste info from Japanese Wikipedia, add some of my own impressions and anecdotes, press a few buttons to add some decorations and voila, you have a professional presentation.

On the night about 20 people came, which was about 10 more than I expected. Everyone seemed to enjoy the presentation, though one or two of the more elderly crowd nodded off a few times (at 8:00pm, it was way past their bedtime), and I finished the presentation with a Vegemite taste testing. I've taken Vegemite to most of my schools and unsurprisingly most of the kids hate it. However, there were a few people at the presentation who genuinely seemed to enjoy it. Of course, as always, there were a few people who smiled and said it tastes nice, then when they thought I wasn't looking they ran to the bathroom to wash the taste out of their mouth.

So, once the presentation was done I had a few weeks of evening classes. For the last class I decided to make it an English 'cooking class' instead of a regular class. The ladies were all happy about this (oh yeah, all my students are middle aged ladies). I designed a menu that would be easy but also impressive. The cooking class I did last year where we cooked pizza and pavlova was impressive, but probably a little too much work. This time we made three different pasta dishes and a dessert. The pasta dished were an easy carbonara, a marinara, and a creamy chicken and avocado pasta, and the dessert was an easy fruit crumble. Amazingly, all the dishes turned out perfectly and everyone had a great time.

What else...

Well, winter is here. Kind of. It's been very strange weather over the last month or so. There was an early cold snap in the last week of October. Over 50cm of snow fell over about 3 days. Then it suddenly became warm again and most of the snow melted. Then, it would snow for a day or two. Then back to unseasonably warm weather and rain. Basically, it's been very unpleasant weather. Cold weather, icy roads and not enough snow to snowboard. That sucks big time. Now there's about 20 or 30 cm of snow outside and it looks like winter is finally about to start properly. I'm hoping it will dump snow for the next couple of weeks so I can start snowboarding by the middle of the month.

I just looked back at my last post and realised it was about Cambodia. I haven't even finished writing about my last winter vacation and the next one is just about here. I've only got Vietnam left to write about (though that was the main part of my trip), so I'll try to do that asap.