Entries this day: Departure Lunch

Departure

2:24pm JST Thursday 2 November 2006 (day 13371)

Went to PB departure ceremony today, but super tired last night being up until 2am so I fell asleep on the train, missed the stop and ended up at the next (主点) station on the line, which wasted about 8 minutes. Running up to the port, I passed 背が高い Levi, and thought it was him, but didn't think he would be late. He caught up to me, "I couldn't stand to see Rob running past me..."

"Hey, it was you!!

We arrived about 3 minutes before 11am, but the ship left a couple minutes late (as in 2), so we still got to see a few peeps on the ship. I didn't spot Kazzah nor Pat, but I saw Sabrina (up on the crew deck), Rei (front and center on stage for the ceremony), and Phil (after they were about 100 meters away).

On the land-side, Carla, Roberto, Ai (who is now pregnant!!! "does this change your plans to be on the upcoming voyage?" (yes)), Maiko, Erika, Levi, Chris, Tomoyo, Maria, Jen, and probably others.

Lunch

2:32pm JST Thursday 2 November 2006 (day 13371)

Ended up catching Chris and Levi leading a posse of PB peeps to a nomihodai food fest, and told Chris how I promote PB to basically all of my students, and some of them seem quite interested. He said PB is seeing the need for word of mouth advertising, so they may be developing ways to facilitate that. I'm thinking just some old advertising flyers would be hella great, and he pointed out I could use those in lessons for tons of different grammars, vocabulary, etc.

I left them to it, feeling a bit poor and late for work (having to start at 2pm) and then remembered I had told Reiko specifically to block my lessons until 3pm! Whoohooooo!! I hesitated before heading back, but then decided I could just say that I called work and found I had no lessons, so I closed them out.

Great fun at lunch; got to meet Mary a bit more (CC and staff), Yoko (whose name I had forgotten again until Levi told me). (I always think her name is Maya, and he agreed she would be a good Maya, very earth energy...), Shuichi, Shian, and Wataru. Wataru was hyper-genki, along with a guy named Pete ("pe-te") they held their own circus amidst the tables and innocents.

"Chief" Shizuo was there; I sent regards from Petra in England (I could only think of London, but I'm pretty sure that's not right, yet).

Food included individually baked (?) spaghetti noodles with salt, so they were sorta like french fries, but brittle. And hella long and skinny.

I drank mostly nothing, then orange juice, tea, orange juice, kalua milk, and something that looked like strawberry milk, but was alcoholized in some manner.

Rocked outta there a bit after 2pm, and good thing too... even on the supa-express train (I love love love love Tokyu Toyoko line) I'm barely making it to Shibuya on time. It's 2:51pm and we are stopping in 中目黒 now.

Zoom!