triathlons and more

And April ended in a flash! (This feels like when it's time to publish my monthly newsletter and suddenly I realize the month is almost over so I have to rush and write it super quickly.) And once again I will resort to the bullet-point summary (which is probably all you really want to bother to read anyway). So for the past few weeks, I have:

 - gone to Ishigaki Island to volunteer for a triathlon! Read about it in detail here and here (split in two posts because a week-long trip means lots of things to write about). It was a super fun and great experience, made even better by the fact that I could use 代休 (time off taken to make up for overtime) for all six days of work I missed, woo.
- successfully been on standby to interpret for a courtesy visit to the mayor by high school exchange students, where I was only needed once, thankfully
- held another English story time at the library, where I tried to teach them the Itsy Bitsy Spider (to varying degrees of success)
- had my first trip to the dentist in Japan (not at all exciting, but parents, now you know I am properly taking care of myself)
- had dinner with my friend at a really cute cafe within biking distance from my apartment called Mother Moon! Really glad to have made this discovery
- met up with another friend I haven't seen in a while for coffee, before heading to ladies' night with some other Chiba JETs, which was super fun
- had dinner with my linguistics professor, who happened to be in Japan on business this week! It was really great to see him again and hear about everything going on at Carleton. :D
- played in a frisbee tournament and sunburned my eyelids (apparently this is possible)! We may have only scored 7 points over the course of 5 games and 2 days, but hey, it was fun. :)

And that's the end of April in a nutshell! Golden Week means that this Friday and next Monday are both holidays (as are Saturday and Sunday, not that it means much), and while I'm not traveling anywhere or anything I still think it'll be a good time. :)