This past week, Tuesday to Saturday, I have been in Naha for the Mid Year Conference. As with all JET conferences it was as much a lesson in drinking and sleep deprivation as anything else. Certainly is you are a crazy islander that is. This said the seminars were in the main super useful and fun. Each night was completely different but equally crazy and fun, although I must say Friday night was pretty much the best. It all came to a climax when I had to get back to my island to give a speech on saturday afternoon. This meant catching the 10.30 ferry from Unten port which in turn meant leaving naha at about 7.30. I think I got about 45 minutes sleep on Friday night. But mostly due to David being a freaking Hero I made it back in time. The speech I was to give was on my impressions of Izena to a group of high school kids from all over the world plus some mainland Japanese kids too. I think it went pretty well and I got lots of good questions from them. Afterwards we also did a taiko workshop which was interesting too. They chose some random piece to teach the students which I hadn’t seem before and after a few failed attempts they decided I should be demonstrating the piece. EEEEEEGGGGGHHH (if you don’t know what sound that is then you’re not an islander from Okinawa)! But I used my ninja powers to do the piece (they come in so useful) and the kids then 'got it' enough so that we could all have a jolly good time banging our drums. There was a festival at 6pm that evening and I did plan to go but I passed out and slept soundly until 10am the following day. I needed it. Sunday was a rainy cold day, just like home! I had planned to quietly study Japanese and get my lesson plans down for my Monday English conversation class but I got a call from Kamiyama-san. And that only means fun stuff (and drinking) so off I went. We set out crab traps in the wind and the rain and then had warm sake afterwards which felt wonderful. The day was finished off with some sushi from my favourite izekaiya ‘Fukasushi’ and naturally orion beer. One interesting titbit thrown up in my discussions with Shunichi (a shoen tiako member from naha) was that the Japanese don’t really use the word commitment (in personal relationships). Or more specifically they don’t use it in spoken Japanese. There was some confusion as to the point so I looked the word up and he thought about it for a while and then told me people would not say this but it might be used it written Japanese. Seemed a little odd to me. I would have asked Natsu sensei about it today (my Japanese English teacher) but she is away. I took both my classes by myself today but that was no problem I am a pro at that now, maybe. Maybe I just get them to play games and don’t really teach them anything. Just before lunch today we had a presentation by the foreign students and their Japanese counterparts, a lot of trot about how pretty izena was etc. however they did bring up the issue of litter in a little presentation called ‘Keep Izena Beautiful’. I think I have harped on about the litter problem here before and it is definitely a problem. The British girl was one of the students who gave that presentation I am proud to say. She’s going to study chemistry at Edinburgh university and wants to do JET after, just what I did more or less! Unfortunately I will not be able to go to the beach barbeque with the internationals tonight because my English conversation class is on at the same time. Not sure how I can get around that one. Oh! a couple of students said ‘cut cut!’ to me today while miming hacking motions at their faces. Also during lunch some of the teachers were asking me if I was going to cut my beard and telling me I looked like father Christmas. Oh they are a fickle lot! Last week they were giving me compliments left right and centre about my beard. Humph. I’m not sure what I am going to do with it. I suppose it is getting a little bit straggly now. Apparently it was pretty lucky of me to have come back on the first ferry on Saturday as on Sunday the ferry was cancelled and all the teachers had to pay 15 thousand yen to take the plane back (that’s about 75 pounds) except my English teacher who didn’t. Actually I kind of hope she doesn’t make it tomorrow either so I can do the classes again by myself and this time I will have more than 25 minutes time to prepare before the class.