Graduated Like a Cylinder

Woooo. Class is done, finally. I'm a bona fide certified TEFL instructor now. Or I will be tomorrow, technically, but it's already been settled by tonight. We went out to celebrate at a nearby restaurant afterward. It almost made up for the fact that it's been friggin' freezing and raining like a mrhrhrmgmgph all day long.

What's been happening in the meantime? I dunno, I've been pretty busy finishing up lesson plans and stuff. Let's see, this actually happened a while ago, but I went to a nice little "British Indian" cafe close to where I live. I'm not 100% what makes it British Indian as opposed to just Indian, except that they served a green salad and fruit with the lunch special curry, and they had some kind of special European tea set you could order. I had a green curry that was really pretty decent, with nan (also pretty decent).

The price wasn't so terrible either, though I'm not sure I'd want to deal with how much it would be if it wasn't lunch.

Wandering around in that same general area, I found this weird, um, thing. It looks like it could be a doorbell, but the doorbell is right beside it, so who knows. In any case, it reminds me of a cartoonified Cthulhu head, particularly like one that a Walla Walla friend of mine has painted on her car.

Last night, I finally realized that a shop I'd been so far dismissing as simply for knick-knacks and toys is really the 100-yen shop people kept mentioning in Harajuku. It's pretty big, and multileveled, and it's a little bit heavenly to be able to buy things for 105 yen ($1.21, includes tax) that I've seen elsewhere selling for three times as much. Seriously. Well, maybe two and a half times as much, but still ridiculous. They sell FOOOOOD there too (albeit not a lot of it), so this may be my new favorite "grocery" outlet, now.

This is the interior on the top floor; I happened to catch some guy rounding the corner by accident as I took this shot. I wonder what he thought.

Here's a view from the stairs into the bottom floor, where most of the food and kitchen supplies are:

Next, jump forward to the restaurant for the TEFL graduation celebration.

Some of the food we ordered. (Unfortunately, as usual, most of it was meat-ed. But I had some seafood-y things and a few other items. They weren't half bad, though hardly gourmet dining by any stretch.)

Annnnnddd I'm pretty tired, I don't have it in me to write a lot more right now. (What I've written so far in this post feels a little "stale" and overly wordy to me already. Best to quit while you're ahead. Or... not behind.)