I cracked open an envelope I received from HIS/No. 1 Travel regarding my upcoming Seoul trip, and I just had a brief period of panic, because inside was a credit card application, and the agent hadn’t said anything about it being optional. I immediately sent Julie an e-mail and then called her, and it turns out it’s just part of a campaign–if you apply for a JCB card (I’d misread it as JTB, Japan Travel Bureau, which was why I hadn’t thought anything of it, though I should have wondered why an agency would send me an application for a competing company) you can get a ¥3000 discount. I won’t be applying for that.
Julie and I have been discussing trip points daily for the last few days–it’s definitely time to start planning my trip to Okinawa (most likely solo) and Julie’s and my joint trip to Kyushu. We were thinking of either flying to Seoul and catching the train to Pusan and the ferry to Fukuoka, or just meeting Sara and her friend in Seoul, but then we realized that it actually will be cheaper for us to do the roundtrip Osaka flight and catch a shink from Shin-Osaka to Fukuoka/Hakata. That simplifies things greatly, especially since Osaka should have luggage storage and we can ship our Kyushu bags to the airport for them to hold, until we pick them up and drop off our Korea bags to ship back to Tokushima. SWEET.
Today brought the first snow of 2007 to Ikeda–and I greeted it in a long skirt and knee socks. I’ll be a bit wiser tomorrow.
Today, I also successfully booked tickets for five of us to go see Muse–one of the best bands ever, and one of my all-time favorites–live at the Zepp Osaka on March 15! (By the way, the music video for “Knights of Cydonia” is one of the greatest I’ve seen in a long time–it’s slightly NSFW, though. I don’t know if a music video has ever made me laugh like that.) I’m so indescribably excited–Kirsten’s seen them 4 times live in England and swears up and down that they’re the best live act she’s ever seen, and I’ve heard recordings from their show at Glastonbury, which sound fantastic. It’s going to be such a fantastic evening.
I called Hamza in Auburn tonight–he was suffering from insomnia, unfortunately. We talked on and off, but he watched Heroes and I caught up on my daily websites, and there were long and very comfortable silences–it was almost as if we were in the same room, just doing our own things. It was really nice, to sort of “have him nearby” for a while like that.
Yesterday, my JTE and I were walking to one of our classes when we saw some blue cloth lying in the hall. As we (and the math teacher, coming from the other direction) got closer, we all simultaneously identified it as a pair of boxer shorts. We all were completely stunned, and just burst out laughing. The first-years’ homerooms are located right next to the changing rooms (formerly homerooms, now vacant due to a decreased number of students over the years) for the students to change into and out of their gym uniforms…and apparently a second-year boy decided to go commando while on the field. (Nice.) Once in the classroom, we forgot about it, until we got back to the teachers’ room, where a female teacher was handling the boxer shorts very gingerly by the waistband as she put the pair into an envelope and handed it to a male teacher (one of the two homeroom teachers, I think, and the staffroom comedian) to give back to its owner. He turned to me then and said in his broken but enthusiastically flamboyant English, “Five years–one time. This is big happening!”