A Clean Slate...

Purikura with: (L-R) Saki, Matt, Erling, Me, Yumi (front right), Satomi (back right). Random picture to make the blog seem a bit less like a block of text. EDIT: That picture really brings out my receding hairline, doesn't it?

Well, this weekend has been a fresh start, for sure. I got a haircut yesterday, which I was terrified about, and it was really necessary - I was putting it off due to the fact that should I visit a hairdresser they probably won't speak any English and I was pretty scared about what the outcome might be. It didnt go badly, if anything it was quite fun. The guys in the hairdresser are really friendly and although they spoke barely any English (to the extent that one of them didnt know how to say 15 minutes) but they tried to get everything across as hard as they could, and it allowed me to try out some of my new japanese vocab that Ive been learning.

Today was a very different sunday to normal though. This morning, me and Erling went to Hokutopia (the place where we gave the speech to the students in an earlier post) to watch some Japanese traditional dancing. Watanabe-san from our tuesday lunchtime class invited us because her daughter was performing and it was a really good performance. We watched 4 dances and each one was really well done, really professional (and considering afew of the dancers were about 8 years old it was insanely good). After this we went, with a member of our monday night class and a friend of hers, down into the basement of Hokutopia to see a Japanese flower arrangement exhibition. Although I wasnt particularly thrilled about flower arrangement, it wasnt too bad and it meant today was a real cultural experience with a hefty slap of two really traditional things. And then they paid for dinner for us, which was a god send because I have no money (payday tomorrow) and was going to live on instant noodles for the day.

This is a poster I found in a train station, again a random pic.

The real reason behind the title of the post was our flat. This morning this place was a hellhole. To put it nicely. The living room was littered with beer cans (anyone from Project Trust reading this, we dont drink... the cans were... someone elses...) which wouldve made us look like binge-drinking alcoholics if anyone from Junten came to see. The kitchen was a state, and my room was pretty bad too. I told my parents I was going to live out of my bag when I got here, and I pretty much have (to an extent, my clothes were always put in the wardrobe but pretty much all of my books and anything else were in my bag/all over my floor). However this sad state of affairs has been dramatically changed and although my awesome Mountain Dew can-tower still stands, theres nothing on the floors, the desks been cleared and the only mess to be seen is a laundry pile in the corner. Which is neatly stacked, I'll add. The entire flat is now habitable and will stay this way, and luckily now I'm not ashamed to take pictures of the place to let you all see what my flat is really like (the 11 year old wallpaper/stained carpets still remain I'm afraid). The next blog post, along with a cracking set of pictures, will be about the flat. That will either be later tonight, or sometime this week - depending on how busy I am.

Laters.