Odds and Ends
Just a few odds and ends in case anyone is interested.
1) I missed the deadline for the Japanese Proficiency Test
They're pretty strict on this deadline. Every year a lot of people miss it. It happened to me this year.
I obviously enjoy living in Japan as you can probably guess by how long I've stayed here. But it is not without it's frustrations. Some of us ex-pats have a saying that "Nothing is ever easy in Japan," and this monkey business with the application for the Proficiency Test is a perfect example.
The application needs to be sent by certified mail according to the rules of the test. So I can't just drop it off in the mail box, I have to take it to the post office. And the post office in Japan is open very inconvenient hours if you have a job.
At my old job I would have just asked if it was okay if I could go the post office during work hours, but I'm new here, so I just waited for the weekend. I need a photo for the application, so I had to search for a photo shop place to get my picture taken. By the time I sorted it all out, it was too late to send it in the mail on Saturday, but I wasn't worried because the deadline for postmarking the application wasn't until Sunday.
Except (as I found out Sunday morning), they don't do certified mail on Sundays. Which begs the question of why the post mark deadline was written for Sunday, September 12th. But I won't moan about it too much.
Since I passed level 3 last year, I was set to take level 2 this year. Which I probably wouldn't have passed anyway, so I console myself with that.
My Weekend
Still don't know that many people around here yet, but a teacher I work with and her husband were nice enough to take me out for the day on Saturday. We went to Nagoya to eat at a French Restaurant, which seemed like a long way to drive just for a restaurant, but I was just happy that somebody was taking me out. Afterwards we went to the shopping mall and the movies.

Sunday I went back to the Church I had gone to the previous week. Since I had joined the choir last week, I ended up standing up and singing in with the choir during the service, even though the songs they were singing were ones I had never practiced before. Or heard before. And it was in Japanese. Really I probably shouldn't have been up there, but they were really eager to have me sing with them. This particular church has white choir robes just like you see in the movies, which we all wore. This probably falls under the category of "It's only funny because it's in Japan" but imagine me standing with an all Japanese choir in white robes up at the front of the Church trying to sing a song I don't even know.