Don't quit your day job

The chequered flag fell on Friday and I roared over the line in about 7th place, ready to shrug in disinterest and start the best bit of work - not going there. This time it's going to be done in style - we've picked up our Fuji climbing tickets, our rental boots and wet weather gear are on their way and in about 1 week, we'll be wondering what the hell we were thinking. Until then though it's as much of nothing as possible; the only hiking we're going to be doing is between beer joints and roller coasters.

I spent Monday and Tuesday tying up the last of my loose ends, then I was up before the sun on Wednesday morning in order to get to the orientation seminar before the orienteers. We ended up arriving at about 8:30 and it was already sweltering hot - by the time we'd got ourselves all organised there was a river named after my back. I had a huge spider in the corner of my room which was probably a very good thing - I killed 5 mosquitos within the first few minutes of getting there then decided to leave the rest to him. The delegates started arriving once we'd set everything up so after we'd shuttled everyone to their rooms, we started moving them over to the main lecture hall to start the conference proper. I didn't have much of a role on the first day - I mostly sat at the back of all the seminars giggling whenever anyone said "big" or "hard". After 5 o'clock the beer machines opened and everyone was left to their own devices until bedtime, so we bought a couple of cans and sat around after dinner. I was absolutely knackered by this stage so I divebombed into bed, entrusting my life to the spider and leaving the other helpers on sentry duty.

I was the main presenter for the second day and people either enjoyed the lectures or were very good at pretending. By the evening I seemed to be seen as some kind of guru and found people would believe just about anything I came out of my mouth; I had convinced one new JET that one of my coworkers was a professional wrestler ("he wears a tiger mask") and almost made dropbears a reality for a couple of Americans ("koalas to dropbears is like dogs to werewolves") before I decided to use my powers for good again. The (in)famous 1 litre cans of beer in all the vending machines seemed to be getting a good workout, there were endless gales of laughter (mostly from me) and the "kitchen band" was doing some live karaoke but unlike our orientation year, nothing was ignited or strangled in the process. The rest of the conference passed without incident (there wasn't even a mutiny when I told people to make lesson plans) and the next day everyone said their goodbyes and headed back to their new digs. When I got home, Lis had laid out beer and snacks which was an awfully nice way to start the holidays.

Saturday night we went out to the welcome beer garden in Kobe, which was initially cancelled and then not due to the dicey weather. Adam and I weren't totally convinced and almost almost went to get dinner on our own instead, but decided to be social. We weren't 5 minutes into the place before all the rainclouds in the world opened up, soaking everything in misery. "Should have gone to the other fucking restaurant", I shouted over the rain, imagining lovely warm grills and plates not full of water. I think Adam only heard "fucking", but that was probably enough to get the message across. The weather turned out to be entirely localised; Lisa and Mel were at a festival almost in the same postcode and got away with barely a sprinkle. Fortunately, the deluge eventually stopped and we got enough dryness to almost rescue the evening. The girls showed up to meet their drowned rat boyfriends at this point, looking just as glamourous as when they left.  "Should have gone to the other fucking restaurant", Adam said on the way home.

More dampness than man

And that's about that. We're now printing out countless hotel vouchers, buying tickets for theme parks and trying to make sure we're not forgetting anything important. We head off on Friday night, stay in Tokyo over the weekend for Disney Sea and who knows what else, then we're down Fuji way early in the week. Before judgement day, we're planning a trip to "Fuji-Q Highland", another theme park where just about every roller coaster is the "whateverest in the world". I think for the most part Lisa will be content to stand to the side and take photos of my pulled-back face, but she seems to be up for the "haunted hospital", by all accounts scary enough to make a grown man scream like a girl. God knows what it'll do to me.

The timetable gets particularly brutal from that point - we're climbing the mountain through the night in the interests of getting to the summit by sunrise, then we head straight back down and hop on a bus home. I will be in no condition to write about any of this when we get back, so I'm taking next week off and will have all the gory details in a fortnight. Gonna need a holiday after all this I think!