Sorry everyone, this bit has to be short since I'm on a public computer and time's a tickin'. So far, Japan is the land of cleanliness and convenience. In every bathroom stall you will find a toilet brush and in every shanty town there is a 24 hour conbini for your late night beer and food run needs. I've been able to settle in pretty easily so far and made some new friends - a group of Americans in my building who will be moving to the next town over. There is also a nice British dude who lives down the block with his family - he's super helpful with just about everything. Work so far is great! My teachers are really nice and I've been able to help some of the kids with their English ... read more

As first nights in Tokyo go, this one could have been a lot worse were it not for the superior organization skills of the JET team. They made arrival/getting settled an easy brease. Honestly, the only hard part of this entire process so far was getting out of Toronto. Due to various technical errors, our flight wound up being delayed by 4 hours. We spent that entire time just sitting on the plane, waiting. It was ridiculous. And after all of that the pilot announces that they had to call in new pilots for our flight because we'd been sitting there for too long and their contract hours were up. Ugh. I slept most of the bus ride over from the airport to the hotel but what I did see was very tall, very neon and ... read more

Well it seems I'm due for an update. Sorry for the delay, have been rather tired these past few days. So to recap - yesterday the family, Andrew and I headed up to Arthur's Seat for a nice hike. It took us about 3 hours and we went first along the escarpment side and then up to the very top peak. My ass is not impressed with me today, nor are my legs, but what can you do? It was a shame the weather wasn't more cooperative for our climb. There was a good degree of Haar coming in off the Firth of Forth (this is what the Scots call sea fog) which made it difficult for us to see much of anything at the peak beyond white, white and more white. We took a bunch ... read more

Scotland Day Two was just awesome. This morning Dad, Sara and Kev decided to head on out with Andrew and Chris sight seeing. I stayed in to work on my presentation and get it all together so I could relax the rest of the week and not have to worry about it. Before getting down to work, I headed up the road to Starbucks to get my daily caffeine injection. As I'm walking along, lo and behold I see a bit of a commotion at the church across the street. I stopped on my way back to check it out while sipping my coffee and lo and behold, it was the Queen coming out of Sunday mass! Took a few obligatory pictures and laughed to myself at the Japanese tourists next to me cheering "Sugoi! Sugoi!" ... read more

While being in Scotland for the past couple of weeks I've noticed a few things... First, you are always on CCTV (close caption television). Ever read 1984 with the whole Big Brother scenario? Well it's very real here. It's actually kind of creepy to see signs literally everywhere that say "Smile you're on CCTV!" This next observation I noticed more out of inconvenience than anything else. For every ten signs around that say "Gents Toilets This Way" there is probably ONE Ladies Toilet sign (sometimes there's none at all...). If you happen to be in a shopping mall, the toilet will inevitably be on the upper most floor and in some random far corner of the mall. It's not like back at home where there's at least three major washrooms in every mall. Granted - the ... read more