I love Japan

So far during my ten years in Japan I have tended to focus on things that annoy me about my life here. Some of them are universal, and some more specific to Japan or Sendai. I'm sure everyone has their own list.

However, recently I have found myself appreciating my life here. I really do feel at home, and enjoy almost everything I do.

Keeping that in mind makes the small annoying things much less important.

I just wanted this on the record in case people had the wrong impression from the amount of moaning I do on debito.org and other websites.


(I took this photo myself earlier this summer, by the way)

Google translate

This video explains how Google translate works. Something for all the corpus linguists out there?

Conference season

I just received the following list of conferences from a JALT newsletter:

PAC 2010 / Korea Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (KOTESOL)   

October 16-17, 2010   

Seoul, South Korea

http://www.kotesol.org/

English Teaching Association of the Republic of China (ETA-ROC)   

November 12-14, 2010   

Taipei, Taiwan

http://www.eta.org.tw/en/index.html

Thailand TESOL (ThaiTESOL)

January 21-22, 2011

Chiang Mai, Thailand

http://www.thaitesol.org/

CamTESOL Conference (Cambodia)  

February 26-27, 2011  

Phnom Penh, Cambodia

http://www.camtesol.org/

Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL)  

March 16-19, 2011  

New Orleans, Louisiana, USA

http://www.tesol.org/s_tesol/convention2011/

International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language

(IATEFL)  

April 15-19, 2011

Brighton, UK

http://www.iatefl.org/

I have never been to a conference outside of Japan, so I'm really interested in heading to KoTESOL or Thai TESOL (I can't make the others as I have other plans). IATEFL or TESOL would also be nice, but might be outside of my budget for this year ;)

Does anyone have any advice as to which of these would be most interesting?