chiba city sights

This week was mostly work as usual, until yesterday, when I got to take an unexpected sightseeing trip! One of my coworkers was taking our Chinese guest to see a few places around Chiba City, Hirata-san suggested that I go with them. Since I only had one translation to work on at the time, my supervisor said it was okay, and I got to tag along! You can read it about it on my travel blog, here. It was the same people that I went to LaLaport with a few weeks ago, and like I said all three of us are very quiet, but again, I had a good time! I also managed to get my coworker to put his face in one of those cardboard cutouts you take pictures of, shaped like a samurai, which was pretty awesome. :P

Then later that night we had a farewell party for our guest, as it was the end of her training and she was going back to Wujiang the next day. It was at a pretty nice restaurant, that had little ponds full of koi that you had to cross over, but which was also a little alarming because if you stood by the water the koi would rush over and open their mouths and thrash around hoping for food. O_o Anyway, it was a  yaki-shabu place, which just meant that it was a combination of yakiniku (Japanese barbecue) and shabu-shabu (Japanese hot pot) on the same table, which was pretty cool. We also had chosen to do tabehoudai, or all-you-can-eat (but sadly not nomihoudai, all-you-can-drink, this time) for two hours. It was pretty fun because everything cooked really quickly, so there was a constant scramble to eat things before they burned and to put on new things to cook, and of course it was delicious! We were all full before our time even ran out, which I think is unusual, haha.

Today I had no plans for the first Saturday in weeks, so it was a pretty low-key day (not a bad thing). I'd stayed up a lot later than I expected to, so I slept in a little bit and then did laundry/some cleaning before heading out to frisbee practice. Saturday practices are nice because it's usually a small group and pretty chill - it's the first once I've been to since my first ever practice with them (feels like such a long time ago but I guess it was only a month!), and I really enjoyed it. I'm hoping Monday's practice doesn't get cancelled (which seems likely at this point due to imminent typhoon), because Cory and another WI-ALT are planning to come, which is super exciting!

Tomorrow I'm planning to take a trip to Otaki for a festival (even though it's Sunday), so look forward to a post about that soon!