What should have been a rather boring and uneventful Tuesday morning turned out to be rather eventful with my town’s emergency PA system blaring out a warning around 6am.

I’ve done plenty of language learning posts in the past. This time around I want to just give a quick shout out to a small company based out of Taiwan, called Glossika, that I’ve started using to try to get my Japanese pronunciation and speaking skills up to scratch.

One of my pet peeves on about living in Japan is just how hard it can be sometimes to get things done when you have a middle name.

Five years on the JET programme has now officially passed with my final JET contract coming to an end at the end of July this year. Whenever you come to the end of five years in any sort of job it is a big adjustment to move on to the next thing in your life.

April is a time of year in Japanese schools that I’ve written about before, but despite that it still hasn’t gotten any easier every year to see teachers I’ve come to know well move on to other schools.

Sometimes living in Japan does have it’s perks, as in this case when students at Tama Art University in Japan decided that the best way for them to make their graduation ceremony memorable was to dress up as Immortan Joe and his War Boys.

For all the times I’ve mentioned that I was studying for and planning to take the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT), I’ve never actually gone through with my plans and written the test! On two previous occasions I just felt that my studies, or lack thereof, meant that it was pretty pointless to sit it as I was pretty much guaranteed to fail it.

It’s been a long time since I’ve updated my blog much to my shame. There are many, many reasons why I haven’t had a chance to set aside some time to sit down and knock out a short post or two.

Coming from South Africa meant that I grew up sorely lacking in the field of donuts and coffee. We’ve got very few coffee chain stores on the scale of Starbucks (heck, last I heard we only had a grand total of 3 Starbucks in all of South Africa). Donuts too, eluded me with Krispy Kreme, Dunkin’ Donuts and countless other donuts stores opting to evade the South African market for greener pastures.

April is here (or half way done already by the time I’m writing this) and with that Japan has burst out into cherry blossom mania. The blooming of cherry blossoms in Japan is taken pretty seriously with weather reports even having a special forecast focusing on when each part of Japan can expect to see their local cherry trees in bloom. Stores are filled with sakura flavoured snacks and drinks, and most towns will hang paper lanterns along the streets and at parks to herald the end of winter and the start of spring.