Two Appointments

The first appointment was a private English lesson with one of my students MO. This was fairly late in the morning, so I was surprised that I had arrived late. I guess that being unprepared isn’t a good thing. But I wasn’t extremely unprepared otherwise I might have missed the appointment altogether. I hadn’t prepared all the paperwork that I wanted for my student to complete for me. But it didn’t take too long to get them either, but so some reason it was like I was bound to be late. Things were just slowing me down some how, I mean it felt like it didn’t take too much time, but really it did. The walk to the station was shorter than usual since I was partly running, but the time seemed to be the same. I even went the short-cut way too.

Anyways, when I met up with her at the station, I had realized that I had been feeling a tad ill. My throat was killing me and couldn’t breathe so clearly. But I figured that it would only be an hour so I could tough it through, which I did. I thought the lesson went pretty well. She did the vocabulary test within one minute so I think it might be too easy for her. But I think that over time, it will get progressively harder. I need to add more to the list and get her to do a better job at understanding the words, not just memorizing them.

We then went onto the next lesson which was the reading. I was teaching her some skills that she could use for taking tests. It wasn’t anything revolutionary to her yet. I think that she’s been through other classes where they teach these kinds of things, so she is on a higher level than the other people that I’ve taught before. I’ll have to be prepared to kick it up a few more notches before the next lesson. I just want to make sure that she’s got a foundation to build upon.

The second appointment I had today was with my friend KH. We met up in front of Sakuragicho station, and then went to a café to get some drinks. It had really gotten cold at some point from the morning to the afternoon. It dropped like 10 degrees quite suddenly. But we found a nice place to have a little chit-chat. We talked about a new organization that he wants to start up. It’s going to be based on the model of that was seen by him in San Diego for his trip. He wants to spearhead an international organization to work with other cities. But I believe that he’s a bit lost. I don’t think that he truly has the drive to lead such an organization because he lacks the vision to guide the other members. They look to him, but I’m not sure what he’s looking at. He was too focused on the structure of the organization rather than the guiding light and the purpose of the organization. I think it’s at least a start to get something going. He hasn’t been through many leadership positions before, so I wouldn’t imagine that he understands these things clearly. Especially since he has to deal with the government in a way that I wouldn’t imagine that he would have any experience. I mean we don’t deal with that kind of pressure in San Diego, but I have to commend him for the effort to get something started. He was asking me for some advice about how to get one started and just the basic stuff, like the structure and organization and what they do.

After we finished our little talk, we went around the Sakuragicho area. I went on the side that I haven’t been to before. It was good to do that since I was always curious what was over there. It is opposite from the Landmark Tower, but still around the same area. We went to the free zoo. They don’t have many animals and it isn’t world famous or anything, but it was nice to see. It’s a nice place to go on a date or bring your family. It’s one of those types of venues. I’m not sure what the name of the zoo was, but we didn’t have enough time to go through all of it since we went in 10 minutes before it closed. We also took a stop at the biggest library in Yokohama. I didn’t get a good look at it, but I will probably come back some day to check it out.

We walked around a little bit and then we got a bit hungry. We found a nice little place and the voice of someone reminded me of a place I had heard about. We then proceeded to go inside a joint called Freshness burger. It was pretty good, well one of the two hamburgers that I ordered. It wasn’t bad at all, but I’m not sure that I would make the claims that others make and say that it’s the best hamburger joint in Japan. Something weird happened today too. I mentioned that it had dropped about 10 degrees but the part I didn’t mention was that it just started to snow out of no where. It was the strangest thing I’ve seen in Japan. It was sunny, but snowing. It wasn’t a lot of snow, but enough to be annoying. I’m glad that I had checked up on it and brought some extra gear for the freezing cold. From there, we got back to Sakuragicho station and then went our separate ways. I chilled at home for the remainder of the day.