today was my first birthday spent in japan. and it went by just like any other day here. i woke up at 6am and fought the spiders and mosquitoes all the way to my outdoor shower. after sort-of waking up and cleaning up, i drank some coffee and prepared for today's lessons. i taught four classes at two elementary schools today. first graders are pretty rad; sixth graders are lame.

but heres where the story gets good. after work i threw a huge party at my house and invited all of the english-speakers in my town to come celebrate. any boy, today must have been my lucky day; every single english-speaker in my entire town showed up to party with me! oh, what a fun time we all had hanging out with me. to remember the awesome time we had together, we all squished together and took this group photo:

my 29th birthday spent with all the english-speakers in my town. note: all attendants are pictured here.

being the gracious host that i am, i even promised all my guests a piece of chocolate cake. fortunately for my pocket book, that meant i only had to buy one piece of cake. hooray! we struggled a bit trying to fit all twenty-nine candles on that tiny sliver of a cake. im pretty sure we came close to burning down the house when we lit the candles. we had just enough time to snap one picture of the cake before it melted in a blaze of lonely-old-man-confused-as-to-what-the-hell-he's-doing-with-his-life glory:

twenty-nine candles ablaze on top of a cake that was definitely enough to feed the entire party

but sarcasm aside, times like these remind me all the amazing friends of made in all of my previous lives. rest assured that if you are one of the people actually reading this blog then you are in fact one of the peeps that is sorely missed.

today i learned the difference between the words "penis" and "population" in japanese. and as luck would have it, i learned this lesson the hard way. you see, in english these two words are quite discernible - in fact its difficult for me to imagine a scenario where i could honestly mistake "penis" for "population" in english. at least while sober. japanese, however, is a completely different story. and by "completely different story" i mean that it is way too freaking easy to accidentally say one when you clearly meant to say the other.

so there i was, in the teachers room of one of my junior high schools. this was between classes, so all the teachers were in said room preparing for their next lessons. i was practicing a new japanese grammatical rule i had just learned with one of the english teachers, when i suddenly noticed that everyone around me became uncomfortably quiet for some strange reason. the english teacher quickly came over to me and corrected my mistake. the rest of the teachers around me pretended to ignore whatever mistake i had just made and continued going about their business. since i am still quite dumb when it comes to japanese, i didnt even realize what i actually said until a few minutes later when we were already in class. and by then i had to literally bite my tongue to keep from laughing out loud in front of all the junior high kids at my hilariously terrible faux pas.

the sentence i meant to say was "人口が増えてきました" ("jinkou ga fuete kimashita") which in english means "the population has begun to increase." but i, in my subconscious quest for making terribly awkward yet ridiculously funny mistakes, started off that sentence with a ち ("chi") instead of a じ ("ji"). unfortunately for me, this made an innocent sentence about a changing population size turn into a very dirty sentence about an expanding male organ.

i, nick whalen, while in front of many teachers today, said out loud "ちんこが増えてきました" ("chinko ga fuete kimashita") which literally means "the penis has begun to increase."

ahh, the joys of learning a new language. i almost think that the designers of the japanese language did this on purpose, knowing full well that someday a foreigner like me would accidentally say this exact sentence.

this weekend has been a nice breath of fresh air - but i suppose that metaphor only works if we assume my normal days are filled with the stuffy stale air of loneliness, and that this weekend was filled with the cool refreshing air of actually being able to have real conversations with real people. ahhh, and how refreshing it was - even if it was for just a brief instant..

friday night i was fortunate enough to experience my first enkai (宴会), or after-work party. these are infamous events here in japan. they usually involve all the coworkers going out for food and drinks after work, getting very very drunk together, bonding with each other, and then pretending it never happened when they see each other at work the next day.

my particular experience was pretty tame compared to the stories ive heard from other JETs. since my town is apparently too small to have a decent public place to throw a 20-person party, we all had to pile into multiple cars and drive to owase (尾鷲), which is the closest "big" city to us (please note: in this particular case, owase is considered a "big" city when compared to my small town of kihoku (紀北町) because it has about 20,000 people. trust me - after living in my town for almost two months, owase feels like a freaking metropolis!). for two hours we sat on tatami (畳), ate appetizers, drank beer (ビール), plum wine (梅酒), and japanese sake (日本酒), and attempted to talk to each other in english and/or japanese with very mixed results of understanding. please see also: confusion. please see also: frustration. anyways, after exactly two hours, everyone got up, piled into their respective designated drivers' cars, and went home.

saturday night was awesome because i actually got to hang out with people my own age and partake in full-on enlgish conversations. oh, how i do miss those things dearly. a bunch of mie JETs went down to kumano (熊野) to celebrate a friend's birthday. we rented out a karaoke room / house for the night and drank, sang, talked, shared funny stories, played games, etc.. not only was it nice to feel like a social person again - even if it was just for a night - but it was also great to hang out with so many really cool and interesting people.

a few of us brave/awesome/crazy souls decided not to go to sleep at all that night. instead, we continued to party until about 4:30am and caught the first train back up north to our respective lonely towns.