These last few weeks have been hectic to say the least! I’ve just spent the last few days in Ehime getting everything ready for the CD5 launch. The new worksheets look really good, we’ve just changed printers and they’ve done a cool job. And over the weekend it was packing up all the CD5 orders. It is actually quite exciting seeing all that activity going on, and they have a great system which they won’t let me go anywhere near in case I mess something up!!

It was good being back in Ehime, I miss my old JET job! But it is certainly different from Fukuoka, and in the space of two days a I got all the cliche comments, kids running past shouting “gaijin da”, the women in the post office asking me where in America I wanted to send money to and being offered a spoon instead of chopsticks in the Okonomiyaki shop! I’m glad this wasn’t the part of town I used to teach in!

I also had to renew my drivers license, which was an ordeal in itself. They have to be renewed every three years, and as this was the first time to renew mine I had to talk a half day lecture course! That was the most boring thing ever…. I tell it’s not just English education that needs updating! But it was cool to re-learn all the things not to do in a lesson!

Now that CD5 is done and out of the way, it was time to plan out the rest of the year. To be honest I have spent far too much time on CD5, to the neglect of the other activities! But a few phonecalls to let people know I’ll be ready to do stuff from June and things are filling up nicely. And hopefully I should be able to keep a nice balance between promotional tours for the CDs and volunteer work in schools.

We’ve also extended the free post and packing offer on the CDs, basically because we had to do for the internal orders so it was easier to keep it on for the Japan orders as well! So the new finish date is May 6th.

Otherwise it was good to see Prime Minister Koizumi apologise in Jakarta, hopefully that should go some way to ease the tensions with China. But this sort of thing really makes your work more important, if the kids are actively chatting with kids in other countries then it doesn’t matter what’s in their textbooks as they can ask for themselves! So let’s get them good enough to be able to do that!

And it was crazy to hear about the rail crash in Kobe the other day, just a day after I passed through there myself. But I’d still trust the Japanese trains more than any others in the World.

So now I’m in Milan for a couple of weeks. I’m going to take this week to have a look around and see what other projects need putting in place, and what else needs working on the site. And hopefully over golden week I’ll be able to take a few days off – yeah!

It is nice being here, it just feels like Europe! I just wished we could keep in cleaner, there’s so much good stuff here but it’s all full of graffiti! But Milan is cool, I had a walk around yesterday and the Duomo and everything is great. So after putting some new games up on the site I’m off out for the my lunch now, to find some nice pasta and coffee and a couple of hours learning Italian – I wish I had done more before I came! Still it’s nice to be here, and it’s a lot cheaper than living in Japan!

Ciao!