Current mood:	happy
Current music:	Elane - Come to the Sea

Parties
Just a quick update before I go to bed.

The Teikyo Welcome Party yesterday was really, really good. Loads of people (over 100) turned up, and they all seemed to have a great time. And the Teikyo students were all incredibly friendly and eager to interact with everyone, which was wonderful to see. Some of them have incredibly good English too, which suprised me as it's the first time most of them have been to England before. They all got into the spirit of English drinking culture, and were buying drinks all night!

So, well done to Richard and Andy for their organisation of the event! Richard's got some photos of the event here.

There's over 50 Teikyo students in all, and I still struggle to remember all their names, let alone match names to faces. To help me learn, I made a deal with some of them that if I forgot their name, I would have to buy them a drink. Well, this has turned out to be a rather expensive deal so far rather than helping me learn - doh! What's particularly challenging is that many of them, particularly the girls, have quite rare, unusual names, which reflects the changing tastes of different generations in Japanese society. Japanese girls' names typically end with -ko or -mi or -e, which makes remembering them much easier, but most of the Teikyo girls' names don't follow this pattern at all.

And then tonight, our friend Hiro (also Japanese, but an exchange student at Durham) celebrated his birthday in our favourite watering hole, Bar 24. But I was astonished to see that most of the people who went were in fact the Teikyo students! They were drinking more than their fair share, which is particularly impressive as many of them are under 20 (the age at which one can drink alcohol legally in Japan) and they'd never had alcohol before (yes, they actually follow this law in Japan!).

It's so good to see how friendly and willing to interact the Teikyo students are - I'm really looking forward to getting to know them even better :)

Unfortunately, the upshot of all this is I've got virtually no revision done over the past two days (I've had to do lots of other AJS related things too, like the website)...but since I'm speaking Japanese to the Teikyo students a lot of the time, I'm counting it as sort of revision.

So yes, AJS is keeping me very busy, but I really didn't realise just how much satisfaction a little bit of responsibility can give you - it's so rewarding to see something that you've contributed towards work out so well!

And now, I SERIOUSLY need to revise.  But sleep first.