Fire on the Mountain

Late July and the End is Nigh

2007-07-23T11:39:00.000+09:00

Slowly, ever so slowly, my suitcases and backpacks are filling with things to bring home. On my list of things to do this week, I've got close the bank account, send things home, and clean my house. In a week I will almost be out of Japan. I leave next Tuesday, July 31st, and it's about time. I've said a lot of my goodbyes now, to people and places in my life here. There aren't too many more to go.

But, I'll tell you a little about the past few weeks. Supposedly, there was a typhoon headed towards Japan around July 13th or 14th, and everyone was scared. That week it rained a lot and I even began to think there might be a large tropical storm coming for us. I was in Osaka and it was supposed to hit there on Sunday, but when the day dawned on Sunday, the 15th, the skies were clear and the sun was out. So, no typhoon. Audrey and I went to Osaka Liberty Museum, a museum about discrimination and human rights in Japan, which I thought would be really interesting, but it wasn't really. I mean, there wasn't much in English, so I didn't really understand a lot of it. It wasn't a bad museum, necessarily, it just wasn't as good as I expected it to be. Here's an Ainu dwelling from Hokkaido. It reminds me of the Pacific Northwest Indians.The next day, Monday, the 16th, Audrey and I went over to Koya-san, outside Osaka. That place was pretty cool, and we walked around some old tombs in a shadowy forest with towering trees and rainy mists between the rocks and leaves. It was really beautiful, but I had to leave in a hurry to get back to meet some people at Pizza King. I didn't make it back in time to eat at Pizza King, and for a while I was worried I wouldn't make it back to Wake at all, because all the trains were really really late. But, I finally got on a train bound for Wake and it worked out okay. I found out later that the lateness of the trains was due to earthquakes in the north or a suicide on the tracks near Nara, or both. Here's some photos of Koya-san.I taught for the last time at Saeki Junior High on Tuesday and said goodbye to all the students and teachers. They all filed out of the staff room to watch me change into my outdoor shoes and waved goodbye as I left. On Thursday there was a closing ceremony at Wake Junior High and it was a kind of goodbye for me too. The principal made a speech and then I made a speech and some students gave me a card and told me how much they enjoyed learning English from me. They also gave me a huge bouquet of flowers, and as I sat there on the stage and the students sang their school song, I surveyed the faces of the bright and eager students who always made a point to talk to me and really really tried hard to learn English (Eri, Kana, Nozomi, Kaede, Miho, Yugo, Mochi...), and I was a little bit sad. I'll miss some of those kids, and I can only hope that the next ALT who comes to Wake will find them as fun to teach as I did.Then, I had a goodbye party amongst all the teachers of Wake. I met them in OKC for a large dinner and lots of drinks and it was a lot more fun than I expected. They gave me some Bizen pottery (some really expensive pottery that comes from this region) and lots of handshakes and made me make lots of speeches. We went to a tiny tiny karaoke bar after that and I sang some songs and talked to the youngest teacher, Yuki, a lot.

On Saturday, I'd tried to arrange a big party for Okayama JETs so we could all say goodbye. I met Marisa and Tiff and Dennis in OKC and we walked around a bit, shopping at Loft for the last time, running into people we'd see later that night.

We all met at the station at our appointed time and lots and lots of people came. By the time we got to the restaurant Moby Dick's, there were about 20 people or so, and more kept arriving. It was really great to see so many there. I tend to think goodbyes are important. Other people don't so much, maybe, but I like saying goodbye to people who have meant something to me. I have no idea when I'll see most of the people in Okayama again, so I wanted one last time out, to talk about big and small things, and get really drunk and sing karaoke. I did.

And here are some of the best pictures from the night.

Saying Goodbye is Hard

2007-07-11T20:58:00.002+09:00

It's getting to be that time, when we all brace ourselves for leaving someplace we've come to know, and leaving people we've come to know. I've done it plenty before, but it never really gets any easier. I have a lot of people and places to say goodbye to. There are all the JETs I've met from various places. Some of them are staying in Japan, many of them are going home. There are my students at school who will probably quickly forget me and move on to torment the next ALT who will come to take my place here. There are teachers and co-workers who keep saying that one year is such a short time to stay in Japan. And there are my English conversation class students in Saeki and Wake. I complained about those classes a lot, but those people have been kinder to me than I ever would've expected. In the course of a week, I've had to say quite a few goodbyes.

First of all, there was a big beach party up in Tottori, north of Okayama, last weekend. Almost everyone who is a JET in Okayama was there, and for a lot of them, it was probably the last time I'd see them. I went up on Saturday morning and had to walk all the way to the beach from the tiny train station. Because of the goodbye party for me on Friday night, I couldn't go up there on Friday, so when I arrived on Saturday everyone was still rather hung over from the night before. I layed on the beach and did some swimming. I took a few pictures and tried to avoid getting sunburned (I failed at that).
At night, there was a big dance party and some famous DJ came to spin and everyone danced in the sand. There were lot of food stands and drinks and I had Thai red curry and lots of Chu-hi's. And I took a lot of pictures with some of my favourite people in Okayama.
The next morning I didn't feel so sick, but I was tired and hot. I fell asleep on the beach on Sunday and eventually woke up, got a ride to the station, and boarded the train in Tottori to get back down to Okayama. Bernie and I made plans for a final Pizza King outing soon and I limped off the train in Wake, exhausted after only one night of partying and a couple days of swimming in the ocean.

I had school on Monday and taught the last classes of my 9th graders. They were really never my favourite, but they all wrote me very nice notes that they gave me as presents at the end of each class. We had fun playing description pictionary too.

Then, on Tuesday, I had my last class with Saeki conversation class students. We met in the kitchen of the very modern and expensive looking Saeki community center and they taught me how to cook okonomiyaki and tacoyaki. They even gave me a tacoyaki grill! Now I can make dough balls filled with octopus parts any time I want! Plus, I now know how to make one of my favourite Japanese dishes, okonomiyaki, so at least I can claim I learned something in Japan. We took some pictures too.
Today, I had my last classes with the 8th graders at Wake. Apparently many of them have already reached the turning point and decided to become apathetic and unresponsive. It was a struggle to get through some of those classes, but I got to take some pictures with some of my favourite students and we played a clapping number game that some of them may've liked.
Just tonight I had my last class with the students of my Wake evening class. They all wrote farewell speeches for me and read them during class. They were all very nice (the speeches that is). They wished me luck and recounted their favourite memories of their year with me as their English teacher. I talked about my plans for the future and told them they could all come to Minneapolis next summer sometime.

I said goodbye at the end of class and thanked them all for being such dedicated students (after I'd taught them the word dedicated).

There are yet more goodbyes to be said, but I'll write about those when they come.

Some of my last classes

2007-07-06T22:21:00.000+09:00

Today was my last day teaching the 7th graders at Wake Junior High. Although they've only been my students since April, and I really rarely taught them (thanks to their classes being on Fridays, which are the best days for me to take off), they were still a lot of fun. Their enthusiam and excitement carried over from elementary school, and they hadn't yet become synical and twisted junior high school students.

So, all the students first sang me "Saturday Night," which I didn't recognise from the title. It's by the Bay City Rollers and starts out spelling out the word Saturday. I'd forgotten that song existed. Then we played pictionary and I gave a short speech and we took pictures at the end of each class.

Here are some pictures. Although I really made an effort to get to know some of their names, it was pretty hard. I mean, I barely know any of my students names, which I still kinda feel bad about. Anyway, here is a group of 7th grade girls (the girls are, on a whole, much better students than the boys, a fact I suspect teachers everywhere have known for a long time).
Class 1A at Wake.Kids playing pictionary.Class 1A and ME!One of my favourite students, Toese. I remember her as a particularly bright student from my elementary lessons.Most of class 1B with me. The girl in the exact center speaks English without any accent (or with an American accent I guess).Some students' renditions of me.
And proof that the students have fun in my classes, usually.And then I finished up and all the students bowed to me and said 'sank you very muchey' and I said goodbye.

Tonight I had a goodbye party in OKC with people from the Wake Board of Education. I never see them, so I don't really know any of them, but they are the ones who pay my salary, so I figured I should go to the party they were having for me. It was a bit odd actually. It was in a large hotel near OKC train station, and it featured a lot of people in a large banquet room with a buffet dinner, free refills on any kind of drink, and a bingo game with prizes. It was a lot of fun, and I spoke in Japanese pretty much the whole night. It wasn't very good Japanese, but most of them didn't speak English, so I had to understand and make myself understand in this crazy foreign language. If I'd only been speaking Japanese my entire time here, I'd be fluent by now. I didn't take any pictures, but it was a lot more fun than I expected it to be. That's probably because I wasn't expecting it to be any fun at all.

A Lake, more Kyoto, and a party with my family

2007-07-03T21:43:00.000+09:00

My family left Japan today. They're probably on a flight right now, heading towards Hawaii and then back to Minneapolis somehow. During their last few days, they were in Kyoto.

They left for Kyoto without me on Tuesday, and I joined them there on Saturday morning. We met at Kyoto station and they showed me their new hotel (not where I'd made their reservations). But, who can blame them for not really liking a hot and humid ryokan so much?

I wanted to go up to Hikone, on the shores of Lake Biwa (I'm not sure why I wanted to go, I just got it in my head that Lake Biwa would be pretty), so we took the train up to Hikone, about an hour north of Kyoto. It's a rather small, dull town with only a few people in the streets. As we neared the castle though, more people appeared and the scenery seemed a bit more lively. We skirted around the castle moats and past its garden on our way to the shore of the biggest lake in Japan. I was trying to find a beach with things such as sand and waves, but I only found a small shoreline littered with trash and weeds. The sky was a little overcast and the wind was coming in strong from the immense lake. So, we stood on the tiny dirty beach and looked out over the water.We found a shopping mall and I bought a lot of gifts for people back home. We spent a really long time there, and by the time we left the castle was almost closed. Mom and I went up the large hill to look inside the relatively small castle. Hikone Castle is another original, not a reconstruction. It's rather pretty, and there are impressive views over the town, surrounding mountains, and the expansive of lake to the west.
We walked back down the hill and across the moat into a garden. The sky was still cloudy but the bridge over the pond still looked rather pretty.After some difficulty, we found Dad and Katie and made our way back to the station in Hikone and got on a train bound for Kyoto.

Once back in Kyoto we looked around Kyoto Station. Even though I’d been to Kyoto twice before, I never spent much time in the station. It’s a huge modern structure that sweeps up escalators and wide staircases to a sky garden 16 storeys up. We went all the way up to the top and the Kyoto Tower, just across the street, loomed in the night sky. The moon was bright and the air was warm, and it was a long way back down to the ground floor of the station.
We ate dinner and retired to our room, despite the fact that Katie really wanted to find something to do. I tried to explain that there really wasn’t much to do, as Lindsey and I had found out earlier that much by trying to check out bars but not finding too many to our liking. So, after walking around for a while, Katie and I returned to the hotel and eventually everyone went to sleep.

On Sunday, I suggested we go to the Higashiyama area, where there were still some sites Mom, Dad, and Katie hadn’t seen yet, and some nice shops where we could buy things. We stopped in the Yasaka Pagoda which is not near Yasaka Shrine and actually went inside. I hadn’t been in a pagoda before, so it was a little interesting for me.
We took the Higashiyama strolling path up towards Maruyama Park and Gion and there were lots of girls walking around in full geisha attire. They all had semi-professional photographers following them around to take their picture between the rain showers that kept coming every half hour or so. We went through Maruyama Park and up to Chion-in Temple, which is free and has some nice grounds.
We looked around at Chion-in and then walked through Gion to find something to eat. After lunch at Müchen restaurant, we went to Nishi-Hoganji Temple, which I wanted to see because it’s huge and I hadn’t seen it yet. Parts of it were closed, so we didn’t get to see much. The best I could do was take a picture of this nicely decorated gate while the rain came down.It was then time to get on a train and go back to Wake, where we arrived Sunday evening.

On Monday, I taught at elementary school and came home early. We looked at a shrine near my house where I’d never been before and prepared to go out to dinner with my English conversation class from Wake. They wanted to have a party for my family and a sort of goodbye party for me. We met at a new restaurant where we didn’t have to sit on the floor and didn’t have to eat a bunch of sashimi and it was very nice. My family had a good time talking with my students, Jack made a nice speech about how he hopes I have fond memories of Japan, and they gave me a beautiful painting on a heavy scroll of paper. It was amazing and looked very expensive. A few members of the class who haven’t come for months were even there. It was a fun night.Afterwards we walked home in the rain and everyone packed stuff up. I sent home a package and gave Mom and Dad a whole bunch of my things to take back, but it still seems like I’ve got so much stuff. I’ll have to find some way to get it back, I guess.

The visit from my family was very fun. It was great to have them here in Japan with me, to show them my house and my life here. They didn’t get to see where I work, but of course Mom and Katie came to Wake JH when they were here before. And it was a very nice party with my conversation class and I was really touched by the gifts they gave me. I already miss my family now that they’re gone, but I’m happy that there’s only a little bit more time left before I get to go home. And I feel lucky to have had such nice people in my evening classes who have tried their best to take care of me. It's all part of the long goodbye.

To the Japan Alps

2007-06-24T21:41:00.001+09:00

Last week, after I got back from Tokyo with the whole family, I had to go to work for a few days. It wasn't really so bad, but it was terribly hot out. Biking to Saeki JH was like bathing in sweat. And then of course I just sit at my desk and bathe in more sweat.

My family went to places like Himeji and Hiroshima while I was at work, and then we all ate dinner together at my place in the evenings. It was fun to have people at my house when I got home, and to not have to eat dinner alone.

I took the day off of work on Friday and we left, heading towards the Japan Alps, on Thursday after I got home from work. We made it to Nagoya by Thursday evening at 9 and it turns out it's a huge city. There's nothing really to see there, but there are a lot of people and it's convenient to get to Nagano from there (our final destination). So, we found our business hotel and then looked around the central area of Nagoya, called Sakae.

We saw a ferris wheel and an arcade with masks out front, inside of which Katie and I took purikura. For some reason, Mom and Dad refused to participate.
There were so many people out, we were rather relunctant to just go back to the hotel and sleep. Plus, it was the first day of summer, June 21st, although for being the longest day of the year it really wasn't so long. So, Katie and I went to an Irish pub we saw, which turned out to be really small and not very lively. But, we each had a beer and it was nice.
In the morning we tried to find a design museum nearby, but it was closed. It was raining pretty hard out, and we didn't have much else to do. I went out in front of the design complex shopping place, called Nadya Park, and took pictures of statues in the rain.
We boarded a train and went on our way towards Nagano. On the way we stopped in Matsumoto to see its castle. There are four original castle in Japan, or something like that, and Matsumoto is one of them (another in Himeji). So, it was still raining a lot when we got off the train in Matsumoto, but we decided to walk up to the castle with our umbrellas out.
The castle was very pretty, surrounded by a moat and with a beautiful red wooden bridge in front of it.We went inside and looked around. Matsumoto Castle has a pretty nice museum and it was fun to look out the windows into the garden, even if it was raining constantly.
After a lunch that included a premium drink bar (awesome!) in Matsumoto, we went back through the rain to the station and went the rest of the way, an hour, to Nagano. It was dusk and raining (the sun sets really early here, by the way, a fact I didn't really notice until my family pointed it out) by 7 o'clock when we got into Nagano and started looking for our fancy and expensive hotel.

We found it eventually, checked into our nice rooms, and went out looking for some action. We found a mostly dark shopping arcade and possibly a couple middle-aged prostitutes, but didn't find much else. I think the happening parts of Nagano are elsewhere.

On Saturday, the 23rd, we explored Nagano. We had a bunch of pastries for breakfast and then went up to Zenko-ji, the big deal temple in Nagano. It has the oldest image of Buddha or something in Japan and everyone loves it and goes there to waft insence smoke over themselves.So, we walked around and took pictures of Buddha statues and it was a hot, clear, lovely day.
Inside the temple, Mom, Katie, and I took off our shoes and went into a dark passage underneath the temple's altar. It was totally and completely black, with no light. Instead of quietly reflecting and trying to find enlightenment, Mom insisted on bending over like an invalid and holding onto my shirt and wondering aloud when the darkness was going to end and we'd emerge into the light again. Then we found the key to enlightenment, a metallic object on the right side of the wall worn smooth by people's hands as they groped their way through the darkness.

We found some cows.
And looked around the temple some more.
Then we walked around some more and wound our way down the main street towards the train station. We had to stop at a one-hundred yen store to buy some things, which set us back quite a bit. As a result, we had to walk back from monkey park. I'll explain.

We caught a train out to Yudanaka to get see the snow monkeys bathing in the hot springs nearby. It took about an hour to get out there, which is north of Nagano. It's near a national park and a famous monkey park where there are about 200 monkeys who run around and take onsen baths and it's fun to watch them. So, we had to take a train to Yudanaka and then a bus up a hill. From the bus stop we had to walk a little ways to get to a trail where we could walk through the wood for 1.6km. Before going on that trail, I noticed that the last bus of the day going back to the station was at 15.50, in about an hour. Why they would make the last bus of the day at 15.50 in the afternoon, I have no idea. It's the flawed stupid logic of the people who make bus schedules in Japan.

So, we set out with the knowledge that we might miss the last bus. It was a nice walk through the woods, with water rushing somewhere down below us.Eventually we reached the monkey park and there were monkeys! They were running around and chasing each other and there were a whole lots of baby monkeys. They reminded me of a certain baby monkey that I know. They were taking dips in the hot springs and sitting by the river. I do love those monkeys.
Then Mom insisted that we try to make the last bus back and I insisted that we couldn't walk 1.6 km and then the extra 5 minutes down to the bus stop in less than 20 minutes. I was right, as usual, and we rushed along half of the forest path before it became entirely clear to everyone that we would not get on the bus. So, we walked back to the train station. It took 45 minutes and I was wearing flip flops. We got the train we wanted though and made it back to Nagano. We were just happy to be sitting down.

It turns out there are plenty of dining options in Nagano, we just hadn't looked hard enough. For dinner, we had our choice between a Japanese soba restaurant, Indian food, Okinawan food, and a Hawaiian Café. We ate soba, since it seems like the thing to get in Nagano and then had elaborate drinks and dessert at the Hawaiian Café, which was a really cool popular place on the warm Saturday evening.

On Sunday it was raining again. We didn't really have anything to do in Nagano anymore, so we had breakfast, checked out, and left. We stopped in Nagoya again and found a wonderful Indian restaurant connected to the station in a department store and I was full for the rest of the day.

Oh, and before we left the hotel in Nagano, I took a picture of this sign on the room phone. I don't know what it means.

Tokyo: This Time with More Disney!

2007-06-18T23:14:00.000+09:00

My family, all of them, arrived in Tokyo on Thursday, the 14th of June, and I left Wake immediately after teaching a rather mundane lesson at elementary school to catch a shinkansen up there.

I arrived on the rainy Thursday evening and found the big fancy hotel my mom had booked and met both my parents in the lobby. I hadn't seen my dad since last July, so I almost didn't recognise him when I saw him sitting next to my mom in the hotel. My sister was up in the room and all four of us were together in Tokyo. We ate nearby and didn't stay out in the rain too long, going to sleep early.

On Friday, the 15th, we got up and vacillated and deliberated about what to do, given that I'd read it would rain. It didn't rain at all that day, so in the end we made the right choice. We went to Tokyo Disneyland. I felt it best to avoid the crowds, so Friday seemed like a good day to check out Disneyland and DisneySea, which is only about a half hour or so outside Tokyo. Since Disneyland is about the same as the one in California, we decided to go to DisneySea and check out what they've got there. I took a lot of pictures. Here's one of Mom and Dad at the entrance to the resort park.Once we got in, a giant globe fountain greeted us and music played and we instantly felt that we had entered the magical and fantastical world that is Disney.
The first land is modeled after Italy and has lots of Venetian decorations and gondolas gliding around the water.
Across the expanse of water (DisneySea is themed around the Sea) that is Mediterranean Harbour is a Spanish galleon and a fort. Behind that is Mount Prometheus that is constantly spewing smoke.As we moved in a circle around the park, we reached the American Waterfront, which looks like New York City in 1910 or something like that. It contains a large steam ship and the Hightower Hotel where the Tower of Terror ride is.The hotel façade is really big and intricately decorated and of course the inside is amazing in its attention to detail. We took the elevator ride and dropped from the top stories and had fun.
Around the corner is a Cape Cod fishing village where we had lunch.
After lunch, it was time to watch a big show they have in the Mediterranean Harbour that involves a bunch of boats with mythical creatures on them and they shoot fire and water and Mickey is in the middle of it all and it's all very entertaining and elaborate, involving hundreds of dancers and jet skiers and costumed characters and flames. I didn't get very good pictures.
Then we explored the galleon.
We could pretend to fire these cannons, but they were hardly as loud as the real thing.
Then we explored the fort. It was filled with rooms called Navigators' Lounge and Astromers' Obvervatory and Alchemy Laboratory and such. It was pretty damn cool.
The Lost River Delta was really cool, I thought, because I haven't actually been to the part of the world it's supposed to look like (Mayan ruins in the Yucatan).
We went on the Indiana Jones ride, which was fun and we almost got crushed by a giant boulder. Indiana Jones spoke Japanese, which was a bit odd.

I also really liked the Arabian Coast area, because it might be the closest to the Middle East I ever get, unless I join the army. The bright minarets and clay forts and markets made me feel like I was in Agrabah.We even saw Aladdin and Jasmine, who were speaking English to all the kids in an American accent. Jasmine kind of looks like someone I know.We went on another ride and took more pictures pretending we were in a Moroccan market.

Then we went to King Triton's Mermaid Lagoon thing.
It's a whole land under ground and everything is filled with colourful fish and coral and Under the Sea is constantly playing in the background.
It was getting later in the day when we went to Mysterious Island to check out the 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea ride.Almost everywhere we went in DisneySea, we were the only non-Japanese people we saw. There were a few other white people, but not too many. The sun set as we walked back across Mediterranean Harbour with the lights twinkling on in the Italianate buildings and the Spanish galleon.We ate and then watched a water and fire show they do at night. Before leaving we all bought some souvenirs at McDuck's Department Store and sleepily took the train back to our hotel.

With still all of Tokyo to see, we left on Saturday to go into the west side of Tokyo, Shibuya, Harajuku, and Shinjuku. Having already been to those places, I didn't feel the need to take as many pictures as I did at DisneySea. That didn't stop me from taking a few though.

The dog at Shibuya Station.Mom and Dad on the streets of Shibuya.
A mosaic of dog tiles on Shibuya Station.
Mom and Dad going through Yoyogi Park to Meiji Shrine.
A torii fronting the beautiful, cloudless, blue sky.
Mom, Dad, and Katie on Takashita Dori in Harajuku.
We passed through Shinjuku Gyoen Park, which actually cost money to get in to. And then they closed the park at like 5.30. What the hell is that about? A city park with train style gates at the front and a closing time long before dusk? Seriously. So, we walked around there and saw ponds and bridges and things.
We layed on the grass and they blared loudspeakers to tell us the park was closing and I refused to leave but Mom insisted we follow the rules. Shinjuku Park is a western style park with grass on which to sit, but apparently they also erect gates around western style parks and charge people admission.

With plenty of time before the sun set, I took us all up to the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building's observation deck on the 45th floor to look out over Tokyo. This time, I have pictures in the sunlight.I wanted to go have a drink at the New York Bar at the top of the Park Hyatt Tokyo, where they filmed Lost in Translation. So, I went looking all over the place for it and led the rest of the family around with me. We finally found it and went up to the top and we were stopped immediately after getting off the elevator and told there was a dress code and I couldn't go in with sandals. So, it was all for nothing. But, we had a drink instead in a bar in the lobby area, which still had excellent views (the hotel starts on the 40th floor) and still was insanely expensive.That was about it for the day, as we dragged out feet over to the night view of Shinjuku and then onto a train to get back to our hotel, worn and hot with the day's activity.

On Sunday we still had plenty to do. I took everyone up to Ueno and we walked around Ueno Koen. We were thinking about going to some museums but got sidetracked by a possibly homeless Japanese man who started talking to us in English outside the zoo. We was carrying some sticks with him and was very inquisitive. He told us the problem with the Japanese is that they don't communicate with each other or anyone else very well. He may have been right. We told him we had to stop communicating with him and leave, and left Ueno Koen.

We took a train all the way to The Edo-Tokyo Museum, which is a huge ultra modern museum complex outside of the main loop of Tokyo. It has exhibits all about the Edo era (when Tokyo was called Edo before the Meiji restoration) and then about Tokyo up to the modern era. I'd heard it was really interesting, and it was. There were cool dioramas about life in the old days and full scale models of buildings and moving displays of Ginza brick town in the Meiji Days.
After the museum we went to Asakusa so Mom, Dad, and Katie could see Senso-ji and Nakamise Dori, the big shopping street. They had the gate just in front of Senso-ji uncovered and apparently restored, so I was excited because I hadn't seen that before.
And we weren't done yet. Dad wanted to see Tokyo Tower, so we did. We looked at Tokyo Tower from afar, and then closer. We didn't go up inside.
On our way back to our hotel from the train station, I led us a different way and found a giant mechanical clock that delighted everyone, and then a presentation about Wicked outside the theatre in Shiodome where it was opening that delighted Katie.
Finally, after all that, we got back to our hotel. If I'd been with anyone else, I probably would've gone out and partied in Shibuya all night long, but I was with my family, I was tired, and I didn't feel like going out there alone. So, we just watched TV, ate grocery store food, and fell asleep.

On Monday we walked around Ginza. Actually, first we went to Tsukiji Fish Market and I was disappointed for the second time. If you remember, Nessa and I tried to go there at 6 a.m. only to find it mostly deserted. When I went there on Monday with my family at 10 a.m., it was less deserted but no more exciting. We left in a hurry and made our way through Ginza to the Sony Building, which wasn't really that cool, and then finally had had enough of diappointment and got on a train bound for Okayama. Finally, at home, I gave Dad a tour of my house, we set up places to sleep, and went to bed.

A Week Full of Lindsey

2007-06-04T23:25:00.000+09:00

My friend Lindsey landed at Kansai Airport last Tuesday, May 29th and took a bus all the way to OKC. I saw her near the fountain in front of the station, which wasn’t difficult because she was the only white person around wearing a pink scarf (not that there were many white people around not wearing pink scarves). I shall never again underestimate the value of a familiar face (not that I have underestimated the value in the past, to my knowledge).

Anyway, Lins was kind enough to bring me dry socks on Wednesday after I got completely soaked in a tempestuous downpour when I had nearly arrived at school that morning. By the time she arrived I was mostly dry, but I still wasn’t wearing socks. She looked around Wake in the sunny afternoon after the skies had cleared and took peeks at the couple shrines we’ve got in town. She came to the evening conversation class with me and tried to make my students understand that her mother creates expensive teddy bears for a job. She went grocery shopping with me and learned, firsthand, why I tend to buy the same things over and over again, because I have no idea what about three-fourths of the things in the grocery store actually are. Later on, she observed that “Japanese food is weird,” and I informed her that the sky was sometimes blue and water is wet, just in case she wasn’t aware.

On Thursday, May 31st, Lins came to elementary school with me. It went well, I think, although Lindsey was not nearly as excited as Shannon and Nessa had been to play with elementary school children. We played fruit basket and other basket games and Lindsey got to see first-hand how insane Japanese first-graders are, which I think was a valuable lesson. She asked a few students their names and I, at least, was happy she got to see part of what I do here.
Later, we answered questions from the 5th and 6th graders and then played some clapping game I’d created.
We ate lunch with them too.
Lins and I packed up and were ready to go to our Hanshin Tigers baseball game by the afternoon, and we arrived at Koshien Stadium with plenty of time to wander around and look at cakes in windows.
And we could pose in front of the ivy covered stadium as diehard Tigers fans wafted into the stands.
My first baseball game in Japan! I was excited. I don’t particularly like baseball, but I think going to baseball games is fun, and I thought it was a cultural event (although one they stole from Americans) that I should see while I was in Japan. We got some okonomiyaki and had plenty of beer.
They were playing the Seibu Lions and were beating them by a few runs by the time we left (The Tigers won 6-3).The game was fun, and people often broke into a common song to which they all knew the words, and they beat little sticks together to create some rhythmic, mesmerising, chant. Then, without warning, everyone took out balloons and began inflating them. Lindsey and I looked around in wonderment and commented on what the shape of the balloons most resembled. As would only happen in Japan, a couple behind us offered us some extra balloons, so then we had our own to blow up, in preparation for the imminent release.
During the 7th inning, no one sang “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” but instead hummed “Auld Lang Syne” and later on released the balloons, to fly and hiss and whistle skyward. It was pretty.Pretty soon thereafter we had to leave the game, although it wasn’t over yet, to get our train to Kyoto. Luckily, we didn’t have far to go. We arrived in Kyoto just after our hostel’s reception closed, but we checked in with no problem and made our beds for the night. Lins was sleepy and I wanted to walk around town and go have some drinks. We walked to the Kamo River, very near our hostel, and looked out over the placid, shallow water interspersed with grassy tufts. Lins won in the end, and instead of going out drinking all night, we returned to the hostel to sleep, vowing to wake up early the next day.On Friday, we woke up late. Or anyway, we didn’t leave the hostel until late. We rented bikes and rode over to the Higashiyama area, which holds quite a few of the big sites in Kyoto. We tried some mochi along the way, and Lins fell in love with them, but thereafter each mochi we tried just wasn’t good enough for her.

Since we were riding past Sanjusangendo (the Hall of 1,001 Buddhas), I suggested we stop in to take a look. I still think it’s amazing, and it was sunnier inside the hall than in December, which made the statues glow even more.

After seeing so many Buddha statues, we rode over to see more temples. We walked our bikes up the long hill that led to Kiyomizu Dera temple, certainly a must-see for any Kyoto trip. Lins stopped to look at every shop along the way, of which there were many, and I was stopped by junior high schoolers on a class trip who asked me questions in English and took my picture as part of a class assignment. After all these obstacles, we finally reached the front gates.
Once inside, we were stopped by still more junior high schoolers, from the same school, who asked us the same questions. We all posed for a picture.
And we spent a very long time in Kiyomizu. There were about a thousand students on class trips clogging up every available space.We also drank from the three streams, which are supposed to bestow luck in some area of your life; I’m just not sure which one.After finally leaving Kiyomizu, we abandoned our bikes and strolled on the Higashiyama Strolling Path, looking for things to buy and maiko (geisha apprentices). Once again, maybe they were real, maybe there were fake, but these didn’t have digital cameras with them.Up at Maruyama Park, we sat by ponds and enjoyed a cool late afternoon breeze.
Lins wanted to see Gion, so we went through Yasaka Shrine and I tried to find the entrance to Chionin Temple.It was closed when we got there, so we made our way through Gion and turned on picturesque streets when we had the impulse.After more shopping and looking, we found our bikes, somehow, and went towards downtown looking for something to eat. We found a Thai restaurant before we got downtown, biking down a quiet street next to a canal, and had a great meal.

On the way to the restaurant, we came across this very fun looking restaurant. Are you my white lover?Oddly enough, I actually kinda enjoy riding bikes now, so I wanted to use every minute I had with our rented uncomfortable bikes. We took sexy pictures on them in the night.
It was a Friday night at 10 when we had to return our bikes to the hostel, but Lins only wanted to sleep. I wanted to go out, drink in bars, sing karaoke, go to dance clubs, wander around and terrorize combinis, anything! But, Lindsey only wanted to sleep. I was disappointed and made a point of telling her so, but she only promised we’d go out the next night and fell asleep in our hostel room with two Chinese guys.

On Saturday, the 2nd of June, we made a plan over tea to go to Northeast Kyoto and check out Ginkakuji, the Silver Pavilion. We got bus passes, and boarded a bus bound for Ginkakuji. We got off along the way to see the Heian Shrine, and once again were accosted by people who wanted to speak English to us. A couple students from Kyoto University of Foreign Studies stopped to see if they could give us a free tour of the shrine so practice their English. I really can’t refuse, so we acquiesced to the tour and walked around with them while they didn’t quite know what to say. It was funny though, and we learned some information that we couldn’t have received anywhere else, and then took our picture with them.
As the day grew hotter and hotter, we hopped on a bus to the Northeast, getting off at Eikan-do Temple to look around. The grounds there were as beautiful in June as in December. Taking pictures was easier than in December, because we weren’t challenged by a dusky rain (although the dusky rain made our surroundings lovely and misty).
We climbed up steps to peer out over Kyoto, basking in June heat below us. There, we paused to eat some snacks and empty our collective water bottle.The Path of Philosophy lay between us and Ginkakuji, and we walked along the stones besides the deep canal ditch rather listlessly and hungrily, anxious for food but relieved to be in the shade. We found the approach to Ginkakuji full of people, shops, and plastic food restaurants, and stopped to eat.

Ginkakuji is a place that was prettier on a wet December day than a humid June day. All the same scenery lay before us, but without the golden leaves or mist of late autumn, there was something missing. Lindsey was also disappointed to learn that the Silver Pavilion wasn’t actually silver, although I’d apprised her of that fact before we arrived.I ardently believed we could reach Kinkakuji, the Golden Pavilion, before it closed, so we got on a bus and reached Kinkakuji about a half hour later. By late in the afternoon, the sun was obscured by clouds, so the gold on Kinkakuji lost some of its shine. Still, it’s a stunning site, I think, and it was on Lindsey’s list of things she really wanted to see.
We walked around it and out the front gate, just as they were closing for the evening. The bus ride back was long and took us through seemingly every street in Kyoto, with an endless parade of old people and families and tourists and students. Lins wasn’t taking any chances with falling asleep early, so we rested as soon as we arrived at our hostel room in preparation for our night out.

Before dinner we took some purikura and Lindsey loved it. She said something like “that’s one of the best experiences of my life,” and she may’ve been right. After purikura, Lindsey chose a kaiten-zushi (revolving sushi) restaurant that was the exact same one I’d eaten at with Amy about 6 months ago. It was good, even the second time around.

We met Tiffany and her English teacher who were in Kyoto just for the night and had a drink at a bar. They left after a little while and Lindsey and I were left to our own engrossing conversation. That bar was a lot of fun, the company and the music were good, and we probably could’ve stayed there all night. But, the smoke was filling the air and it was getting hard to breathe.

We stopped into a happy mushroom bar by chance and it was a tiny little place with a big happy bartender with hair like a friar and it was difficult to tell which decade we were in. Lins looks sufficiently happy for the mushroom bar but I look a little worried.
We wandered around after that, trying to avoid bars with covers and expensive drinks and any bar Lindsey didn’t like the look of. That didn’t leave us many choices, so we ended up sharing a combini-bought beer and walking back to our hostel.

Sunday, the 3rd, was the last day in Kyoto, and I really wanted to see the monkey park. I’d heard there was a monkey park in Arashiyama, which Amy and I had somehow missed when we wasted hours in the visitors’ center in Arashiyama. This time, I wanted to be sure to see the monkeys, after so many failed opportunities. We took the bus out to Arashiyama and found the monkey park with ease. We passed through torii on our way up the mountain with the monkeys.At the top, there were a bunch of monkeys hanging out. We had great views over Kyoto, for we were pretty high, and I just couldn’t stop taking pictures of monkeys.Then, we went inside a house and fed monkeys some apples. They could reach inside a chain link fence and pluck the food from our outstretched hands. For reasons beyond my comprehension, I was delighted.
I liked watching this monkey interact with some large koi in the pond and splash water at them. This monkey was resting. This may be the best picture I took all weekend.We spent some more time exploring Monkey Park or Monkey Mountain or whatever you’d like to call it, and then descended the mountain towards the river and bamboo forests and souvenir and ice cream shops of Arashiyama. We explored the bamboo forests, which were not illuminated at night, and then got on a bus in sleepy, stifling heat, and reached Kyoto Station with time to get our bags and board a train. With ¥120 tickets we finally reached Wake and ate dinner at 10. I was just happy we’d gotten to see monkeys.

I’d missed Sports Day at Wake JH on Sunday, which was fine with me because I’d rather feed mostly wild monkeys than watch junior high school kids jump rope and run relays and stuff. So, there was no school on Monday at Wake JH, which meant I was supposed to go to the Board of Education at which I was supposed to do absolutely nothing all day but read a book probably, all while Lindsey wandered around Japan by herself. So, I did the only logical thing there was to do and called in sick. Then, Lindsey and I went to Hiroshima.

Lindsey was worried I’d be found out and they’d know I wasn’t actually sick and I was actually in Hiroshima with my friend. I knew I probably would be found out but I didn’t really care. We took the Shinkansen to Hiroshima and arrived by noon. The day was another oppressively hot day and our water supplies were drained shortly. We ate a huge lunch and then, stuffed, waddled our way to the A-Bomb Dome. It’s still there and still looks the same as the last time I saw it. And, so here I am in front of it.Lindsey, like Amy, also didn't feel right about smiling in front of things destroyed by atomic bombs.We crossed the bridge (the T-shaped bridge that was the target for the atomic bombers) and went into the Peace Park. School children were singing on the banks of the river and old ladies were ringing the peace bell. We looked at the ever-changing exhibit of colourful Japanese cranes and watched some school children bring their own cranes to the foot of the Children’s Peace Memorial.We stopped into the Victims’ Memorial Hall, a place I hadn’t seen before, and looked at their solemn memorial surrounded by 140,000 mosaic tiles, to represent the 140,000 people who died because of the bomb in Hiroshima between August and December, 1945.
Then we looked through victims names and pictures, which was all very high tech and saddening.Afterwards, I went through the exhibits in the A-Bomb Museum, or Peace Memorial Museum, for a second time and re-read a lot of things. This is a before and after picture of Hiroshima from the dioramas they had set up. The A-Bomb Dome is in the lower left corner.
Lins stopped to read everything, which is fine with me, but I had to tell her that the museum might close before we reached the end. So, the second half was a bit more rushed, but we still got to see burned school uniforms, displays of mannequins with their skins melting off, and picture of horribly mangled burn victims and accounts of how radiation affects the body.

We made it out of the museum just before it closed and sat in the Peace Park for a while longer. With plenty of daylight left, however, we walked up to Hiroshima Castle, a reconstruction of the castle was that destroyed by the bomb. With no Himeji for Lindsey, it was her only castle, and it was adequate.
We strolled down Peace Blvd. and argued about where to eat. As night fell on Hiroshima and I suggested okonomiyaki place after okonomiyaki place, we finally decided to eat at home. A shinkansen ride to OKC and a train to Wake brought us back to my place, for a last meal of Lindsey’s week with me in Japan. She would leave for Tokyo to meet her mom and sister on Tuesday, and I would be alone again. And that’s it.

Ultimate Frisbee is Dangerous

2007-05-28T20:45:00.000+09:00

Another busy weekend has now passed me by, on the way to my countdown of days still left in Japan. I should think it's about 60-something days left, and most of those will be spent sitting at my desk at work trying to count the number of days I've got left.

It was Bernie's birthday on Saturday. I didn't really get her a gift, but I showed up to her barbecue, which was maybe enough. The Bernie Backyard Birthday Barbecue was a very popular affair, which many JET friends showing up to grill meat and bring pasta salad. Bernie's parents were even there to help celebrate.

There's the birthday girl herself, with a big plate full of food.
Many people enjoying the sunny sun and plentiful food.
Suzette and Brian.
Melanie and Vasco.
A beautiful picture of Sarah.
And Bernie and me, looking super hot in our black tops.
After all the eating, someone took our a frisbee and we went across the road to the yard in front of Bernie's school and played some frisbee. But, not just any frisbee, but ultimate frisbee. I would've been content to just throw the frisbee back and forth and fun stuff like that, but some people (the damn Canadians) wanted to make it competitive, so we formed teams and played ultimate frisbee, which is a bit like American football, trying to advance the frisbee down the field until you can catch it in the end zone.

We played for a while and nothing really went wrong, except that my team was losing. Then, and it's still hard for me to say exactly what happened or how it happened, I was running for the frisbee, trying to intercept it or knock it down or something. And another guy was also running for it and suddenly I hit the other guy and then hit the ground hard. I landed first on my stomach and then my chest, knocking all my breath out of me. Then my face hit the gravel and sand on the ground, cutting my chin and finally bruising my right eye. My sunglasses and hat flew off and everyone stopped and ran over to me. I sat up and struggled to breathe as everyone asked if I was okay. I stood up and brushed myself off and spit dirt and small rocks out of my mouth. My chin hurt so I put my hand up to it, and when I took my hand away it was smeared with blood. Everyone thought my hand was bleeding, but it was actually coming from a large cut on the bottom of my chin, just under my beard. My right eye felt swollen and I asked if I was bleeding anywhere else. The others gave me water to wash off the blood and picked up my strewn articles and I walked back to Bernie's, where people looked at me and asked, "what happened?!?"

Once I was cleaned up, I was okay. I held a cold can of Chu-Hi up to my right eye to help the swelling and sat out the rest of the game. It looked like I may eventually have a black eye, so we all developed a story that I could tell my students about how I got the black eye. I was fighting the yakuza (Japanese gangsters), you see, and there were ten of them and only one of me, and they all had golf clubs and baseball bats, but I beat each of them while only receiving a small cut and a little black eye. That's believable, right?Well, soon enough it was time to say goodbye to Bernie and my friends who were still eating or playing or chatting, and run to the train station to get the train to Aioi. Michelle was having a party at her place because of the large festival in Aioi, her hometown which is badly in need of some consonants (can you spare an L or an R or maybe just a couple S's for Aioi's sake?)

Michelle and her friends were already on their way to watching the fireworks once I got there, so I met them along the food stall-lined street and we found a good spot from which to see the show. Annie was there and her friend Dao, whom I'd met at Annie's party a few months ago. I didn’t know many other people.

So, we sat and watched the fireworks for quite a while. They were pretty.
Annie, Dao, and I had our picture taken.And Dao and I enjoyed some wine together.
Oh, and here’s one of Annie, who apparently didn’t want her picture taken after all.
Later that night, we went to Michelle’s apartment and had a party. I brought fruit and wine and we mixed it all together, and someone may have put orange juice and vodka in there, and suddenly we had a wop. We set off fireworks and I got a little drunk. I don’t remember much else.

The next morning my body hurt much more than it had the day before. My knee, hip, and one of my ribs all were in pain from my fall the previous day. My black eye was also getting darker. It was a hot, sticky day that made me feel even sicker, but once we were out on the streets and I had some okonomiyaki, I felt better. We got a place to watch the boat races in Aioi Harbour and sat there and got sunburned.

These are the only good pictures I took that day.
Moon and Dao watching the races.
Some very strong people paddling their canoes as fast as they could go.
Eventually, I got on a train bound for Wake, and fell asleep in the heavy heat of the cars. I woke up just after the train stopped at Wake and had to wait for a train back, but it was okay. I promptly fell asleep upon arriving home and didn’t wake up until I absolutely had to.

Heads on Sticks

2007-05-24T20:46:00.000+09:00

With a lack of a better thing to do on this Thursday night, I've cleaned various parts of the house that were very dirty, mopped the floor, and went grocery shopping. As I biked past the patch of earth surrounded by heads on sticks, I was reminded of the pictures I took of the strange sight.I think they're meant to be scarecrow type things, but it's only a bunch of heads on poles. It's really weird and creepy. Actually, when people came over last Saturday to park at my house and then go to Osaka, we walked past the heads and everyone was slightly bemused and a little shocked.Anyway, it's just another oddity of Wake. It's not as much of an affront to my senses as the loudspeakers, but it's just eerie as I ride past on the bike in the quickening dusk.

Osaka again (and still not enough)

2007-05-21T22:05:00.000+09:00

Despite my best efforts, I didn't see a baseball game in Osaka last weekend. I'd mentioned seeing a game to quite a few of my friends, and some of them expressed interest, but, in the end, we were all left disappointed. "Sold out!?!" my English conversation class students asked when I told them I couldn't go to the game. They couldn't believe a Hanshin Tigers game versus the Yokohama Bay Stars would be sold out a week ahead of time. I couldn't believe it either. I wasn't aware that baseball games ever sold out, but...well, there's no good explanation; the game was just sold out.

Nonetheless, I wanted to go to Osaka to eat and drink and check out some clubs. Apparently, there are places to eat and drink and dance in OKC, but I've never really seen any of them, so I can't be sure that they exist. On Saturday morning, Britt drove over to my place with her boyfriend Lash, crazy Amy (Britt's label, not mine), and a guy I'd never met before named John. The five of us took the local trains from Wake, paying as little as we could, and got to Osaka in time for lunch. We met Boone and Sarah at a great Mexican restaurant in Shinsaibashi, Osaka, and had lots and lots of happy hour margaritas. The food was great and the drinks were even better, so I was happily full and a bit wobbly when we left to go shopping. Michelle, a Hyogo-ken JET I met through Annie, then met us in Osaka and we looked around Amerika-mura for a little while. We shopped separately or together for a while and then met back up at the giant scary clown head in Amerika-mura. I took pictures of the strange personages who pass through the streets, including Amy with clown heads.
I starting taking pictures of random people on the street and even the street lights that kind of looked like people.After too much wandering around, we settled on getting drinks from the combini and sitting in the concrete park - full of skateboarders and girls putting on stockings - to drink.
This is John, Amy, Lash, and Britt.
I think Lash actually kept this Stitch bag that we found on the street. Alas, there was no money in it.It was soon time to meet Boone, Sarah, and Michelle (who'd gone shopping on her own) at Café Absinthe, our favourite bar in Osaka. It was close enough to walk, but I thought we'd get lost, so we took the subway one short stop and wasted ¥200.

But, we made it to Café Absinthe! And I had very good food and, of course, some absinthe.
I actually had two absinthe drinks, because Michelle refused to drink the excellent absinthe margarita she'd holding in this picture.As always, taking pictures in candlelight was fun when I'm drinking absinthe.
Lash, Britt, and Michelle.
Me.Boone and Sarah enjoying drinks and food and company.
After leaving Café Absinthe, the evening became very confused. I wasn't confused, the evening was. Some people went to watch a football match at a pub and I went with Michelle and a friend she'd met at Café Absinthe (she seems to know someone everywhere) to find her Hyogo JET friends who were having a birthday party for someone she hardly knew.

We wandered around a really long time and no one quite knew what was going on, and we thought we were going to one bar and then it turned out we weren't, and Michelle found some Japanese friends she knew and we continued wandering around and thinking we knew where we were going and then we didn't and finally we ended up at a club.

It was called Sam and Dave's Club (or something like that) and it wasn't too crowded at 11 p.m., or whenever we got there. At first, it was just me with Michelle and her friends, and eventually, a couple vodka tonics later, my friends showed up. I'd put my camera in the locker with my stuff, so I didn't take any pictures. I kinda wish I had. But, the club was fun for the most part, although it started getting pretty crowded around 1 a.m. or so and then it was hard to move around.

At 5 a.m. I somehow found myself in a karaoke room with Michelle, a couple Hyogo JETs, and some Japanese guys. I didn't really know where my friends were, but we all had mobile phones, so it was no big deal. After an hour of karaoke, we took the subway to the station. It's actually pretty crowded at 5.30 a.m. on a Sunday. Weird.
I met Britt and Lash, who'd lost everyone else, and we slept in various uncomfortable positions on the way back to Wake. I wanted to get some breakfast in Osaka or see the Umeda Sky Building that I still have not ascended, but no one else wanted to stay. This whole staying up all night in a club idea: it sounds good before you do it, and then it just turns out to be horrible the next day. I doubt I will try it again.

A Constant Rush

2007-05-14T14:00:00.001+09:00

It was a busy weekend. First, I was really tired from the previous week of traveling, and I did a lot of sleeping, but probably not enough, as usual. Then, I was trying to figure out what to do for the weekend, and finally accepted a couple invitations to attend some festive gatherings. Britt invited me to karaoke in the city and getting drunk, which I can rarely turn down, Rachel talked me into going to the AJET party on Saturday at Takebe with more promises of drinking, and I even planned to attend some festival in Kobe with Michelle on Sunday, but I wasn't sure how I was going to accomplish all of it. In the end, however, I did it all.

I went into OKC on Friday to talk to a travel agent about my return flights. I want to go through Hong Kong and Honolulu on my way back to Minneapolis, and apparently getting me involves lots of trips through Seoul. That's okay with me, but the travel agent also had me routed back through Japan after I leave Hong Kong, and leaving Seoul only to fly back there later that same day. It doesn't make any sense. But, I could go on complaining about that for a long time, so I won't.

Afterwards, I sat around by the fountain and made the mistake of eating a bread product in the presence of pigeons. It wasn't a good idea. Eventually, I met people and we walked to our favourite Indian restaurant in OKC. Afterwards, it was time for karaoke. I brought a bottle of wine, others had their combini bought drinks or ordered beers, and we sang lots of songs. Lots and lots of songs. It was fun and I was, per Britt's goal, more than halfway drunk by the end of our session.

The following day was a lazy one, during which I mostly lay around, ate pancakes, and...well, that was about it. Sometime in the afternoon, I drove with Rachel to the Takebe villa to attend the AJET handover party thing. I was kind of a member of AJET (the local governing committee for JETs), but I only helped plan some social events. So, those of us who were leaving were giving the power to next year's people, of whom there are very few. Only 7 of us attended the party, but dinner was good, the onsen bath was nice, and we talked about business and drank before going to sleep.

Immensely tired the next day, I nonetheless took a sleepy train into OKC and made my way to Kobe in the fastest way possible. It was there that I finally took some pictures. While waiting to meet Michelle, a couple Japanese guys started talking to me, first about the Minnesota Twins and then about a lot of other things I could sort of understand but mostly pretended not to. Finally I found Michelle and we had some Korean food (one of the first times I've eaten Korean food), afterwards which we walked down to Merikan Park, where there was some kind of break dancing competition and hip hop dancing exhibition and it was pretty interesting. So, we first looked at Columbus's ship, which is in Kobe for some reason (it's the Santa Maria).
Then we watched the dancing.
We eventually got a little bored watching people dance (although the break dance battles were really cool and highly entertaining) and went to play with some dogs. On a patch of grass just across from the stage, there seemed to be a gathering place for people and their dogs. There was a large variety of dogs, and of course, the omnipresent dauchsunds. So, we hung out with the dogs for a while and took some pictures.After some more exploring of Merikan Park on a beautiful spring day, we went through Chinatown and got some kind of dessert thing that was like ice cream but a little different. It was definitely very good. Then, according to Michelle, it was time to shop. I withstood buying anything until we went into Uniqlo, and then of course, there's always something to buy at Uniqlo. I walked away with a new zip up sweatshirt and some more shirts.

On my way back to Wake, I had to stop for a half hour in Aioi to wait for the next train. Aioi happens to be where Michelle lives, so we ate a very late dinner at a ramen restaurant near the station with Michelle's friend Nate, whom she had by chance seen on the train ride home. We ate 20 minute ramen and walked quickly back to the station, where I was in time to catch my last train back to Wake.

When I got home it was nearly 11 at night, and it had been a very long weekend. Or, at least, it felt like that.

Wednesday night at the park

2007-05-10T21:55:00.000+09:00

Every Wednesday night, I teach a couple evening classes for the citizens of Wake. Anyone can come, and I've had a pretty wide range of ages in my classes, but most of my students have stopped coming. Between two classes of an hour each, I've got about four people who I can depend on to come every week and about two or three who will probably show up occasionally. Everyone else has just disappeared. My classes once had 10 or 15 people in them, but now there are only two or three.

So, last night, very few of us met at the Wake community center building thing and we went to Fuji Park in Wake, where there are a huge amount of wisteria blossoms out. They're hanging from trellises and you can walk underneath them with purple and pink flowers swaying directly in front of your face. We had a picnic and I forgot to bring my camera. No one, actually, brought a camera, so I don't have any pictures of us on our picnic. There were seven of us in all, myself, four students, and Setsuko brought two of her children. They're both in elementary school in Wake and I've taught them in class before (but of course I don't actually remember them from my elementary school teaching).

We had a lot of food and they told me about how great the wisteria blossoms used to look and how they're much less impressive now. They still looked quite beautiful to me, hanging from their branches in limp shapes in various shades of pink. We sat on some blankets and tarps, ate sushi and strawberries, and I was the only one who drank a beer. It was fun, despite some long conversations in Japanese that I couldn't follow at all, but it was still fun. It got dark and cold while we were there and I got a little weary of sitting outside looking at back-lit flowers. I do wish I had brought my camera though, because the park was very pretty and I probably won't see it again, considering how far away from my house it is.

Anyway, that was my Wedneday night conversation class. It sure beats sitting in the Wake Community Center trying to get my four students to do communicative activities.

Chicago

2007-05-07T14:00:00.001+09:00

Last week was the so-called “Golden Week,” which, in actuality, isn’t a golden week at all. It’s a few holidays in a row that almost form an entire week off, but not quite. There are days right in the middle of the week that aren’t holidays, and people still have to go to work or school. I could go on and on about the stupidity of that, but I won’t. I took the two days off and decided to go somewhere. Somewhere far away. Somewhere like Chicago, Illinois.

It was a long way there. I left on Friday night and arrived in Honolulu on Friday morning. I spent my second Friday wandering around Honolulu airport, going to Seattle, and then finally got to Chicago on Saturday morning just after 5 a.m. Amy picked me up from the airport and we went to her place in Chicago. I got to see her apartment and her kitty cat and actually got to get some sleep because I was exhausted from the time traveling.

We had lunch in an area of town near where she lives. We walked there in the sunny spring weather and had fun being together. It wasn’t as strange as I thought it would be to be back in the United States. Maybe it’s because it wasn’t my home, or maybe it was because I only would be there for a week, but I didn’t feel strange being in my own country for the first time in 9 months.That evening we walked to an improv theatre near Wrigley Field. Oddly enough, I’d been to that particular theatre before. I walked there with Kate Dantoft and her friend last February when I was in Chicago for the JET interview. And then, more than a year later, I was there with Amy. We were in a different part of the theatre though, so it was still all new to me. We had fun watching the improv team perform mostly homourous skits and took a bus back to Amy’s place to sleep.

On Sunday, the 29th, we planned to see a play about the Armenian genocide. I know, a great follow-up to a comedy improv show. First had pizza for lunch at a great restaurant and I really enjoyed “real” pizza.We found the Irish American Center, where the play was being performed, and looked through the small exhibit about the Armenian genocide. I am a person we call Armenian.
We took our picture with St. Patrick too.
The play was good; it was more about the memory of the Armenian genocide than the actual event, but it was still well-acted and a good story. Afterwards, as afternoon turned to evening, we went to the beach on Lake Michigan. We walked around on the sand and I even went in to the water, but it was very cold.We took some pictures of ourselves at the beach and then went out to look at the Chicago skyline on a “cee-ment” structure, where we took some more pictures.
The wind was coming in and it was turning cold when we left to go grocery shopping for dinner supplies for that evening.

On Monday, I slept late while Amy went to teach a few classes in the morning. When she got home at around noon, we went off to the Chicago Botanic Gardens. I’d been there on my last evening in the U.S. before I went to Japan last July, and I knew that it would be nice to be there with Amy. The blooming tulips were beautiful and we took lots of pictures of us and flowers.
We spent about 2 hours walking around the gardens, looking at plants and trees and flowers and enjoying the beautiful sunny afternoon (even though it was a little chilly). When we left the Botanic Gardens, the roads were crowded with rush hour traffic, so we stopped off in Evanston, drove through the Northwestern campus, and ended up at some large Bahai’i temple (and what the hell Bahai’i is I have no idea), but it was huge. The evening sun’s glow made the white marble on the outside looked warm.
There was only solitary worshipper in the interiour, so we looked around and disobeyed the rules about photography to take some pictures of the beautiful detailed and ornate dome.
That evening, for dinner, we ate Mexican food. I really miss Mexican food (among most other types of food) in Japan, so it was high on my list to visit some Mexican restaurants while in Chicago. It was great.The following day was May Day and Amy had the day off of work because everyone knows how much she sympathises with the workers’ revolution. We spent a long time trying to figure out how I could exchange my yen for dollars, but we kept failing. If I found a place that was willing to exchange the money, they had a horrible exchange rate that would mean losing $200 in the exchange. It was afternoon before we made it to Millennium Park in downtown Chicago. There’s a reflective sculpture there (it’s called the bean or something weird like that) where people marvel at their own reflections. Actually, it’s pretty cool. So, we took a lot of pictures of our own reflections too.Millennium Park is a nice place to be on a hot summer day. It wasn’t a hot summer day when we were there, but I can imagine that it’d be nice. There’s a fountain in which to tromp around and big images of faces that spit out water.Our ultimate goal that day was to get to the Art Institute of Chicago, and we finally accomplished that in the mid-afternoon. They had a great exhibit on impressionist painters that included all the big ones: Monet, Van Gogh, Cézanne, Dégas, Gaughin, Manet…., but we were also anxious to see the permanent collection.

We saw American Gothic, just sitting there on the wall for anyone to steal.
Not having had enough impressionism (who can ever get enough impressionism?) we looked at Monet’s Water Lillies and bridges.When Amy was taking my picture with Van Gogh, passersby commented on the resemblance.
A very famous piece in the collection is Sunday on La Grande Jatte, by Georges Seurat, It’s pointillism at its finest.After looking at miniature rooms,
we left the museum in time to get to dinner with Amy’s friends. We ate at a restaurant just down the block from Amy’s place, and nearly everyone Amy had invited came to see us. The food was Mediterranean inspired and the sangria was very good. There were seven of us in all and we had a lot of good food and good drinks.
Although we went out for a drink after dinner with Amy’s friend Ray, we couldn’t stay out too late because we had to wake up early for class on Wednesday. Amy wasn’t teaching though, someone else was giving a talk about archives to her history classes. So, I didn’t see her give any lectures or anything, but we got to sit together as one of the archivists gave a talk to her students.

We decided to go back to the downtown museums after class was through, and arrived near the Field Museum of Natural History that afternoon. Before we went into the museum, we enjoyed the sun on the lake front, taking pictures of the blooming trees and the cold Lake Michigan water.We both climbed around on the steps leading to the immense building with the immensely tall buildings of Chicago behind us.Inside the Field Museum, we saw mummies in Egyptian tombs and lots of animals that used to be alive but are now in glass cases.
We went through an exhibit on the ancient Americas really quickly and wished we had more time with the indians of the pacific northwest. But, the museum was closing and we had to get out fast, so there was no time to stop and dawdle.Amy and I went out for more Mexican food with her friend Ray and his boyfriend Patrick. The food was great and the margaritas were even better. I was a little drunk by the time we got home that night, but considering how little I drink in Wake, that’s not surprising.

On Thursday, we wasted some time in the morning and eventually took a bus towards downtown. We got as far as Lincoln Park before we got off, and since we were already there, we stopped to look around the Lincoln Park Zoo. The large gorillas and chimpanzees were a lot of fun to watch, and it’s pretty striking how much they look like us.
We had decided we would try for rush seats to that evening’s performance of Wicked. I’ve had some luck with rush seats before, so we thought we could at least put our names in and see if we could get the tickets. We filled out our slips and went to get something to eat before the drawing at 5:30. There weren’t many people who were waiting for seats by the time they drew the winning names and I was sure, 100% sure, that we would get seats. My confidence was fortuitous, as my name was the second one drawn from the witch’s hat. With front row center tickets at $25 a piece in our possession, we went to eat Italian food at Italian Village restaurant. The food was great but we were far too full by the middle of the meal to finish it.
The show was great. We were right behind the orchestra pit and as close to the stage as it was possible to be without actually being in the show. The music wasn’t that memorable, but it was good and the story and acting were great. As far as musicals go, it was good.
After the show, we wandered around trying to figure out how to get home. We ended up taking the El (which I keep wanting the call the T) train to somewhere near Amy’s apartment.

Friday, May 4th, was my last full day in Chicago. We had been so busy all week we couldn’t think of much else we should do. We had breakfast at a really good place in a neighbourhood called Andersonville and then went back to Amy’s. We watched a movie and talked about where we could eat for my last meal out in Chicago. We’d had Italian, Thai, Mexican, Mediterranean, Franco-American, and more Italian. I finally decided on Greek food, so Amy and I drove to Greektown to find a suitable restaurant. There were plenty, but we settled on Greek Islands and had some really good food with names that were too long to pronounce correctly. It was a great night for my last night there.
On Saturday, the 5th, I had to leave. Amy drove me to the airport and we said goodbye before I went to the security line. It was like saying goodbye all the other times we’ve had to do it: sad. Goodbyes at airports seems to be an experience common to many people, but I didn't think it would play such a large role in my life. It has.

With only uneventful flights, transfers, and train rides between Chicago and Wake, there's not much more to say about the way home. I'm happy I went to Chicago and I realise, having been there, that I do miss home. I'm glad I'm going back soon.

A weekend with no monkeys is hardly a weekend at all

2007-04-24T19:45:00.000+09:00

Shodoshima: Olives and Monkeys. I don't think that was too much to ask. We got one but utterly failed at getting the other. I'll explain.

This weekend I went to Shodoshima Island with Kim, Nicole, and Rebecca. Nicole and I had been talking about where we should visit for the weekend, and out of all our ideas I picked Shodoshima as my preference. It had olive groves and a monkey park, and that was enough to convince me that we should check it out. Nicole persuaded Kim and Rebecca to come with us, so I met the three of them in OKC on Saturday morning and we took a bus to the new port. From there, we boarded a ferry bound for Tonosho Port on the fabled island of Shodoshima. On the ferry ride there, we watched birds fly incredibly close to our faces as they raced each other to the upper deck, where some people were throwing out food for them. At times, I thought their wing tips would brush my nose.
We entertained ourselves in this way for a while, and I believed it portended our close encounters with wild animals to come, namely the monkeys that we were all so excited to see. We played categories eventually, an activity that was to occupy us for the entire weekend. By the end, we'd exhausted all the categories we could, including cartoons from the 80s and 90s, famous people who were gay, famous people with a disability, art movements and styles, famous pirates, sports teams named after animals, Johnny Depp movies, national capitals of the world, musicals, musical composers before the 20th century, etc. This was how we occupied ourselves for the majority of the time.

We arrived at Shodoshima and found a place from which to rent bikes. We had to bike to our hostel, which didn't look too far away on the map. We stopped to eat sushi that was revolving in boats and then mounted our bikes to ride to the hostel. We peddled and peddled, up hills and down hills, walking at times and then going really fast down steep hills. After an hour or perhaps more, we found the hostel at which we had reservations. As usual, the price was higher than what the lady had told me on the phone (Japanese people at hotels usually tell you one price before you arrive and then say another when you get there).

Anyway, our hostel room was nice. We had a large room to ourselves, a kotatsu, and plenty of futon to lay out on the floor. Here are Rebecca and Nicole in the hostel room, just before going out to explore.Back on our bikes, we rode back to Olive Park. It's a park full of olive groves, for which the island is famous. It hardly looks like Japan at the park; it's meant to, and it has, a very Mediterranean feel. We bought some olive products (like olive chocolate that actually just tasted like chocolate) and look at Greek statues.
Outside, we wandered olive groves and stole oranges from trees.
It was a really pretty evening, with hardly a breeze to turn the windmill.
Inside a building that looked like a Greek church, a solitary Venus de Milo stood under a domed ceiling and we took pictures with her.We took an onsen bath at Sun Olive Onsen and the facilities were very nice. There was even a hot spring tub outside, from whence we had a beautiful view over the olive groves, island's shoreline, and the shapes of far away mountains rising from the sea.

Later, as we drank some beer on a small beach, we named Greek gods (only full gods though) as a category. The beach, however, wasn't filled with soft white sand, and the dark water looked murky and slimy, so we quit the beach to return to our comfortable hostel room, playing cards and drinking until late into the night.

On Sunday morning we got on our trusty (old and with terribly squeaky breaks) bikes to find some breakfast. We rode in the direction of the nearest combini, but found a supermarket first, where we bought plenty of food. It started to rain as we biked to a park to eat our breakfast under a gazebo type roof.
The school children of the island played baseball and soccer below us and we climbed on some oddly shaped stone sculptures.After our bellies were full, it was time to go back to the onsen for another hot spring bath (we liked it so much). We had a limited time though, because we were supposed to meet Lauren at the monkey park. She'd come over from her home in Tamano on a ferry that morning, so, since we all wanted to see monkeys, we decided to meet her there.

Getting there, however, proved to be immensely and unnecessarily difficult. We parked our bikes and boarded the wrong bus. The bus driver started laughing at Kim when he told her we wanted to go to the top of the mountain. We got off in a very deserted park of town (so empty it was really creepy) and tried to figure out what to do while standing in the light spring rain. Eventually Kim and I found a guy who called a taxi for us, and we tried to get him to bring us to the monkey park. For some reason that we couldn't quite understand, he wouldn't do it. So, we settled for a ride to the top of a mountain where there was a cable car. We thought we could reach the monkey park from there.

We were wrong. After a really expensive cab ride up the mountain we arrived at another eerily empty cable car station and asked the workers about a bus to the monkey park. The next one, and last one, didn't leave until 2 hours later, and our bikes were still at the bus stop, and we weren't even sure where that was anymore. The cable car across the gorge was expensive and there was a bus going back down the mountain in 15 minutes. I wandered around and took some pictures.It was beautiful in the rain, with no one there but us and the bird chirping in the trees. It was like we had a tropical rainforest all to ourselves.
I wanted to wait for the next bus, but I was overruled by the others, who just wanted to get back down the mountain and make the long bike ride back to the port.
It was raining steadily when we got to our bikes and started the ride. We all made the long, wet ride back to Tonosho Port, with Nicole falling along the way and bruising her leg extensively. Our clothes were soaked when we returned the bikes, and Kim and Nicole "acted" miserable.
We ate, finally got to see Lauren, who had been stuck at Monkey Park by herself, and she showed us pictures of the cute little primates. Then, quickly, we all had to part ways and board our separate ferries back home. The mist of rain hanging over the shadowy mountains looked beautiful in the dusk.

The Bike Ride

2007-04-19T15:24:00.000+09:00

My legs almost didn't stop moving for an hour and a half (except during the down hill parts). This is a bike ride on the bike path all the way to Saeki JH. I pass the Wake Dome and the sun shines brightly above. School children with yellow hats walking single file down a road in the distance with a mountain backdrop. Birds chirping loudly over head and in the trees, joyously telling everyone that spring had finally arrived. A sunny afternoon with puffs of white cloud dotting the sky. Clouds casting shadows on the tree covered mountains, filled with various shades of green and rocky faces sticking out from amongst the light and dark emerald foliage. Riding past old women with sun bonnets on, tending their vegetable gardens with hoes and spades. Flowering trees on the side of the road and fallen cherry blossoms covering parts of the path. Old men on bicycles, plain baseball caps, few teeth, and an ambling pace, apparently with nowhere to go and not much to do, much like me. My grey bicycle, basket stuffed with a jacket and my satchel, creaking and groaning underneath me. Houses with laundry hanging outside, drying in the warm sunlight. I pass a small building that says Amase Station. It's completely open, small, and covered in chipped light grey paint. Looks more like a child's playhouse than a station. Ride through two tunnels cut into the mountain, circular and cold in the shade. Soon I'm riding next to the river, the sun glittering in the small ripples beside me, and the water moving silently and almost imperceptibly towards its destination. The shadow speckled mountains descend towards the water, some by gradual declines and some in steep falls into the wide river. Small forgotten wooden benches underneath red wood shelters, the kind of place you'd have to already know before you could find it. The sun is bright and hot when it's not behind clouds, and the pink flowers on trees gleam and radiate. When the sun hides momentarily behind a cloud, the landscape turns grey and a little cold, making the birds stop their chirping, for the moment just a bit doubtful that spring has come to Wake. I reach Saeki JH in 40 minutes and turn around. My students are practicing tennis on the court behind the school. They don't notice as I ride past; for the time just an anonymous rider. On my way back I stop at Amase Station, the old abandoned rail station left over from when the bike path was a rail line, and go inside. There's a bench and a vase of fake, dusty flowers on a counter, in front of which is a book held down with rocks. Looking through the book, I find messages, drawings, and "someone" hearts "someone else" on the pages. I write "This is a very nice cycling path. Jon. April 19, 2007," and put the rocks back on the book. Somehow, if by nothing else, that will prove that I was once here, in this small Japanese town: that book in an abandoned rail station next to fake dusty flowers. That image, maybe, is the best representation of my time here.

I think I'll bike along the path more often.

The Sakura are come

2007-04-09T16:37:00.000+09:00

It's April in Japan, which means one thing: sakura! Well, April means a lot of things actually, like the start of a new school year, lots of work parties for new teachers, and lots of boring times for ALTs who sit at their desks and have nothing to do. But, mostly, it's about the blooming of the cherry blossoms (sakura in Japanese).
There are cherry blossoms trees in every town in Japan; I think it must be some kind of law. These trees, however, do not yield cherries, they only bloom white blossoms for a couple weeks in April every year and everyone goes crazy. Perhaps because there is only a short time in which to see the sakura or because the weather is finally nice and people can go outside, the Japanese people have "hanami" parties, or flower viewing parties which resemble pic-nics with lots of beer, barbecues, and shoes all lined up along the edge of the tarp.

The sakura were blooming outside Wake Junior High by late last week, and I brought my camera on Friday to take some pictures. The snow white flowers fully bloomed were very beautiful.And of course they made everything somehow look so much more Japanese.
That Friday evening I decided to get on a train and go to Himeji. By the time I arrived, it was dark in the city. I hadn't been there since I went last August, back when Japan was still new to me and I thought I had all the time in the world. I walked through the dark streets and passed a great many people carrying tripods and expensive looking cameras. I arrived at the end of the long street from the station to the castle and saw the White Egret, Himeji-jo, lit up and shining brightly in the April night air.I walked through the large gate across the moat and there was a large number of people sitting around on the ground, drinking, eating, laughing, and yelling. It was quite a spectacle: all the blue tarps spread out, men in suits and ties getting drunk, the lanterns lining the walkway illuminating everything in a kind of half dim light, and the castle in the background lit by floodlights, framed by white cherry blossoms made stark by the bright lights upon them.

I walked through the ticket gate of the castle, as they were letting people part way in for free, and saw the sight of the bright cherry blossom tree in front of the pond and the castle.
I went back down and walked around the hanami parties, listening to people yell and sing and trying to hold my hands steady enough to take good pictures. It was difficult, but I got a few.
The last train from Himeji bound for Wake is at 9.30 and I wandered back through town with too much time to spare. I walked around empty shopping arcades and finally went to wait for my train. I got home a little more than an hour later and set my alarm for Saturday.

I didn't bring a tarp or a portable barbecue with me to Tsuyama on Saturday, but I went up to the city in northern Okayama prefecture because it's supposed to be great for cherry blossom viewing. It took a long time by local trains, but I finally arrived in Tsuyama towards 1 o'clock. I went in the direction I thought Kakuzan Park must be in based on the way the crowds were walking, and soon after crossing a river saw thousands of cherry blossom trees surrounding old castle walls on a hill. It was pretty.Really pretty.
Past the food stalls and along crowded sidewalks, through the gates and up stairs I walked with my headphones playing Sigur Rós or The Shins. Japanese people had their tarps spread out, shoes lined up, and ties loosened all around me. And everywhere, all around, were the blossoms, gleaming white from fully bloomed trees, against a backdrop of stones walls and uneven staircases.I took an inordinate amount of pictures, just as everyone else did too.
I kept going up, it seemed. There were always more stairs to climb and higher vistas to see. I took off my headphones and listened to the sounds for a while, including a taiko drum show on a stage atop the castle ruins.I walked in circles, strolling past parties and young couples and old women with canes and little children chasing each other over a few fallen petals on the pathway. I came upon a fully-bloomed tree and did the same thing everyone who passed it did: stopped to marvel at it and then took out my camera.
I felt some sort of connection with the people around me. I felt a sense that these Japanese, they aren't that different from we Americans. Of course, in countless ways they are the complete opposite and I oft cannot understand why they do the things they do. But, having a pic-nic, barbecuing food, drinking with friends, and enjoying the nature of a nice weekend were things to which I could relate.I sat on an ancient wall for a while, watching people pass below. They seemed normal. They seemed like they were having fun. "New Slang" played in my earphones and I just watched people.Eventually I made my way back to the Tsuyama train station, where I ate ice cream on a bench and an old man who was missing fingers (he was probably a Japanese mafia member) started talking to me. He asked if I was drunk and I said no. He said he was and sat down next to me. He wanted to buy me a beverage, but I declined the offer. We talked about the cherry blossoms and he told me his wife was scary, and then I decided to go to my train.

I had trivia that night in OKC, and I played on a team with Rachel and her parents, who were visiting from the U.S. There were a lot of difficult questions, at least a couple with dubious answers, and quite a few I should've gotten right but didn't. We came in third place out of five teams. Mostly though, it was a fun night with lots of drinks and lots of food. As I ran for the last train out of OKC, I realised I was a little bit drunk. Not too much, just nicely so.

On Sunday, I went back into OKC. It was a day for playing with orphans. Yes, that's right: I went to an ophanage on Easter Sunday to play with poor, unfortunate kids. Very out of character for me, isn't it?

Anyway, I brought blown eggshells for the kids to paint, and even painted one myself. This little boy was pretty cute. He wanted to dye an egg in each colour.
We also filled plastic easter eggs with jellybeans and chocolate and hid them around the yard for the little kids to go and find. They found all 150 in about 5 minutes.
But, it was a very fun day and I even got to eat revolving sushi and then meet Marisa's boyfriend and friends who are all visiting her from the U.S. She wins the prize for most number of people visiting her in Japan; I don't think I even know that many people.

So, another weekend went by, and another week came. It was a fun one though, even if I did have to go to Tsuyama and see cherry blossoms by myself.

Farewells in Osaka

2007-03-26T10:21:00.000+09:00

Once Shannon, Nessa, and I returned home from Tokyo, we barely had time to breathe before it was time to leave for Osaka. I went back to work for a couple days and Shannon and Ness packed up their stuff and tried to cram all they'd bought into their bags. They went to Hiroshima on Friday, the 23rd, and had all their things packed up by Friday night.

On Saturday, the 24th, we got up and took the local trains to Osaka. It didn't take too long and we were there by noon, walking around in the rain and trying to find the hostel we had booked. Although at first we liked our hostel and its familial atmosphere, they later moved us into a different room in a different building and it turned out to be a poor choice. Luckily for me, however, I would only be spending a short time sleeping at the hostel.

Osaka doesn't have too many sights to see, except for maybe the castle and aquarium, which I've already seen. So, we went out into the rain and went shopping. The fun of Osaka is just to be a large city, look at bright lights, and watch people go by. We came across this street crowded with stuff,
before we walked down a shopping arcade in Shinsaibashi for a long time. We ate lunch at a very good restaurant and had some lively discussions.
Eventually we met Ludo and continued browsing in the shops. Shannon and Nessa found some type of vibrating exercise machine that they seemed to enjoy very much.
It was raining lightly when we made our way over to Amerika-mura, and on the way stopped at a shrine with fox statues.
Amerika-mura is a few blocks of town with many stores, restaurants, and bars trying to sell American things (like basketball shoes, hip hop fashion, and McDonald's, apparently). Ludo got into the spirit, although he looks more like Elton John than an American.
We went past Cutie Love Smile, which I believe I'll adopt as a term of endearment for you,
and then saw a really scary clown head.
It was really raining hard when we went back through the Shinsaibashi Arcade towards Ebisu- bashi and observed the mass of humanity with umbrellas making their way through the wet night air.After getting ready for the night at our hostel, it was party time. We started out at Café Absinthe, a bar that came highly recommended by a number of people, and with good reason. We met Britt, Amy, and Roo (Amy and Roo of Hiroshima-ken and from the Tottori Sand dunes trip), who were already drinking their absinthe, and Ludo and his Japanese friend Yusuke. First, Shannon and I had some absinthe of our own.
Then we all were eating and drinking and yelling at each other, and I took a bunch of pictures.
Yusuke, Amy, Britt, and Ludo (what the hell does Amy have in her mouth?)
After a little while, four more people showed up, which somewhat annoyed the wait staff I think. Andy, his girlfriend Kanae, her friend who happens to be from Minneapolis Lorna, and Rachel had been watching sumo wrestling in Osaka and stopped by Café Absinthe to join in on the fun times.
After I had my absinthe margarita, everything I saw had a greenish tint. This is how Shannon and Roo actually looked to me.And the bar. It was a cool place.
After we'd had enough of Café Absinthe, most of us continued on to a club in Dontonburi, an area in Shinsaibashi full of clubs and restaurants and bars. We went to Pure, a famous club in Osaka or something. It had a high cover, but it was all-you-can-drink, so it was worth it.

Shannon and Nessa, I believe, had some fun.
And so did Rachel and I.Kanae and Andy stayed till the end,and I even got to act a little crazy with Kanae.
We stayed until 5 a.m. when they turned on the lights and told everyone to go home. Overall, it was a pretty crazy night, but we were able to walk back through the rain soaked streets to our mostly uncomfortable hostel room and get a little bit of sleep.

On Sunday, the 25th, Ludo tried to get sumo tickets for us, but they were sold out. I was a little disappointed, but happy that I could sleep a little bit more. It was dry out when Shannon, Nessa, and I got up to look for some breakfast. They were going to Nara that day and I was going back to Wake. So, as we sat on a bench on the street, eating our combini pastries, we reflected on our travels in Japan. I told Nessa and Shannon they were lucky, because they would soon be in a place where people speak English, mostly. And they could get any kind of food they want, not only fish and rice. And there would be movies to watch and places to go and getting around wouldn't cost ¥10,000. And they'd be able to read menus and ask for something in a store without referring to a phrasebook or hand gestures. But, there are only four more months of that for me, so I can't be too envious of Nessa and Shannon for getting to go back to a place where people look different and houses are heated and no one needs to bow.

We said goodbye as I got on the subway and they went towards the train to Nara. And I came back to Wake, to my empty house, with a few more clothes in my possession than when the month began.

Tokyo: The Neverending City

2007-03-25T18:22:00.000+09:00

A little time has passed since I got home from Tokyo, but I still mostly remember what happened in that huge, seething metropolis that is the city of Tokyo. I spent about five days there with my friends Shannon and Nessa, who were visiting me from the U.S., and Nessa's earlier concerns that five days was too much time were soon quieted by the limitless number of things to do and see in the capital of Japan.

We left for Tokyo on Friday, March 16th. The three of us took the train into OKC to catch the bus to the airport. We arrived just in time and checked in for our flight without problems. I got the cheap birthday deal for all the tickets, so the flight price was actually a little cheaper than taking the shinkansen there. In Okayama Airport, Shannon and Nessa tested out some massage chairs while we waited to board our plane.Once on the ground at Haneda Airport, we had to find our way to central Tokyo and to our hostel in Asakusa. It was really easy and relatively cheap, so we arrived in Asakusa about an hour after our plane landed. Still, it was quiet at night and as we passed Senso-ji, the huge famous temple in Asakusa, it was very still in the night air.Our hostel, Sakura Hostel, was very nice, very clean, and very affordable. We had a private room with six beds, so we spread our stuff out, each claimed a set of bunk beds for our own, and went to sleep.

Saturday, March 17th - St. Patrick's Day - We all tried to find something green to wear in the morning before we left the hostel for a full day of wandering around. I'd forgotten the shamrock tie Tiffany had given me, so I settled for my drab green sweater and we were off to get breakfast at Lawson's. You can always count on a combini breakfast, I say, and we found a few good pastries and drinks for cheap at the Lawson's around the corner from our hostel. We passed through Senso-ji again, but now it was day time and the temple and temple grounds were crowded with tourists and locals. It was very pretty, and came complete with a tall pagoda.Where there had been no one the night before, now the square in front of Senso-ji was full of people.We passed down the market street leading from Senso-ji to Kaminari-mon Gate and it was clogged with people. Hundreds of small shops selling cheap souvenirs and clothes and food lined each side of the narrow street, and it was almost impossible to do anything but amble along with the crowd. Immediately we noticed how many foreigners (basically white people) there were in Tokyo. Shannon pointed it out and I agreed in mutual marvel. Nessa probably sees lots of white people in Boston all the time, but it was the most I've seen in one place for about eight months.

We passed Kaminari-mon on our way to the station.
Our first stop of the day was Shibuya, in the southwestern part of Tokyo, which is a kind of combination of Picadilly Circus, Times Square, Knightsbridge, and Fifth Avenue. It's the place with the huge pedestrian crossing ringed by gigantic screened TVs and even bigger billboards and it has some of the biggest department stores in Tokyo. It is the place to buy, buy, and buy. We came out of Shibuya Station and watched the lights change and the sea of people come and go like high tide.Everything there was huge and meant to be impressive.
There are Shannon and Nessa waiting to cross the street.
After passing through Shibuya Crossing, we found a place to do purikura and Nessa fell in love with it. Shannon and I had already done some purikura (the little photos that you can draw on) in Kobe with the group we'd been with there. So, it was Nessa's first time and she liked it so much I think we would've done it everyday if we'd had the time.

After our photo session we looked around in some of the large department stores. The girls browsed in Seibu, but noticed immediately that the average price was about ¥20,000 and I suggested we go over to The Loft, where things were a bit more reasonable. We tried on hats and the girls each bought a bag with funny English on it. We went back out to the streets of Shibuya.After The Loft, we thought we'd eat at Parco Department store, but it was just too expensive.
We finally ate somewhere, where we had Dragon Ramen, and it was really spicy. It was even on fire when they brought it to us.
We passed back through Shibuya Crossing and took pictures of the crowds waiting to cross.
And me, of course.Then, I really wanted to see the statue of the dog who apparently waited by Shibuya Station for his master years after the master died. So, the Japanese put up a statue of the doggie.
The afternoon was turning into evening by the time we made it up to Shinjuku, our next stop in the tour of "crazy neon lit crowded massive loud" Tokyo we'd planned for the day. We went over to Kabuki-cho, a red-light section of Shinjuku, but night had not yet fallen, and I didn't see much of the debauchery that Lonely Planet described. There's Shannon and Nessa in the middle of it all.Then they took pictures in every direction.
Night was falling and the neon was starting to light up.
Nessa wanted to go into someplace to warm up and, for some reason, she was slightly interested in trying pachinko, the Japanese pinball gambling game. So, we stopped into a pachinko parlour.
There was no way to figure out how those machines worked though, and I think the machines only took ¥1,000 at the least, so we left.

The sun was setting in the west and it lent a beautiful colour to the background of the endless lights and flashing signs on the main street in Shinjuku.
Me and Nessa.And the lights.The night air was chill and the wind was sweeping in amongst the buildings as we marched towards the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Offices so that we could ascend to the top floors and see the view of glittering and resplendent Tokyo. It was a long walk with the freezing wind pushing hard against us, and we passed the Keio Plaza Hotel, where I'd begun my sojourn in Japan seemingly so long ago. We walked right on the elevators at the government offices and went up the 45th floor. The views over night time Tokyo were pretty damn good.
It was too cold to do anything else outside that night, so we got on the subway to get back to our hostel. At Sakura Hostel, we went to sleep for a couple hours and then woke up to prepare for our night out in Roppongi. We planned to stay out, clubbing and bar hopping, until the first trains at 5 or 6 a.m. We sat in the hostel lobby for a while, talking to a few people, drinking, and watching some scenes from a movie called Borat that Shannon and Nessa had to explain to me. We arrived in Roppongi at about midnight on one of the last trains out of Asakusa, and the station was crowded with people going out for the night.

We began the evening at a couple bars with expensive drinks and a little bit of dancing. There were more foreigners in each bar than there were Japanese people. I thought that I was in any college bar in the U.S. when I saw the places, except we paid yen for the drinks. We left those bars in a favour of some club with a high cover at a little after 2 a.m. There was almost no one at Club Garden when we came in, so the three of us sat at a table and chatted instead of dancing on the empty dance floor.
Our final bar of the evening was a lot of fun, but still overly full of foreigners. The three of us left The First Bar (although it was our last of the evening) at about 6 a.m. Dawn had come to Roppongi and Nessa and Shannon watched tired and drunken partiers slowly filter out of the bars and clubs.
Nessa wanted to continue partying, but I talked her out of it. Although she was the one who wanted to keeping going, she quickly fell asleep on the subway on our way back to our beds.
Sunday, March 18th - We didn't get to sleep until almost 7, and Nessa and Shannon even later because they went to McDonald's. Close to noon we awoke, feeling pretty good considering we'd danced and drank until 6 a.m.

We passed by Senso-ji and saw some men performing a dragon dance. We had no idea what was going on, so we only watched for a short while and moved along.
Sunday afternoon seemed to me to be a perfect time to check out Harajuku, an area of Tokyo between Shibuya (to its south) and Shinjuku (to its north). Harajuku is also where the goth kids of Tokyo hang out on the weekends, dressed up in elaborate costumes and make-up and posing for pictures. We got to Harajuku and immediately came across this long and crowded shopping street. There were so many people on its narrow pavement that it looked like something we had to check out.
That would come later though. While it was still light, we passed by Jingu-bashi where all the goth people were sitting around.
I must say, I was not as impressed with them as I was expecting to be. There weren't that many of them and they weren't posing for any pictures. These girls were, but they aren't goth, they're just dressed like dolls.Some of the costumes were odd, or cool, but I didn't see anything extraordinary.
So, we passed the goth people and their admirers and went into Yoyogi Park, a large wooded park that spans an area between Harajuku and Shinjuku. At the entrance, we passed under a huge wooden torii.We stopped on the path and looked at wine barrels and lanterns. The afternoon sun threw speckled shadows across the front of the lanterns in a serene kind of way.
Shannon looked up interesting phrases in Nessa's Lonely Planet Japanese phrasebook,
and then we continued on to Meiji Jingu Shrine, a huge shrine in the center of Yoyogi Park.
It's really pretty inside, which perhaps made it a good spot in which to get married.
The three of us posed while the wedding procession passed behind us.
We examined the messages people had written in a variety of languages on wooden cards,
and then made our way back through the gravel paths under the chill shades of the trees.
On the way back through Jingu-bashi, we tried to get some more interesting pictures of the goth teenagers, but it was pretty difficult.
We saw some more people offering free hugs however, and Shannon took advantage of one.
This guy, apparently, didn't know how to compete in the hug giving market.
Night was falling and we started our way down Harajuku shopping street. It was still filled with people and every store seemed to hold something funny or intriguing.
It reminded me a little of Khao San Rd. in Bangkok, except it was a lot colder and everything was more expensive. It had the same sort of festive atmosphere though.
All of us (yes, even me) bought shirts with funny, totally non-sensical English on them, and voiced our opinion that we really liked Harajuku. It was getting later though, and colder, and Shannon wanted to check out a giant camera store up in Shinjuku. So, we got on the train and went over to Yodobashi Camera, just west of Shinjuku Station. It was indeed huge.
While Shannon shopped, Nessa and I had fun drawing on this computer screen with our own take on non-sensical English. I could imagine this appearing on a T-shirt someday. Couldn't you?
We each found something we liked at Yodobashi Camera and probably could've kept looking around forever, noticing every stupid English sentence we came across and playing with gadgets and the like. It was about time for us to go home though, so towards 9:30 that night we got back on the trains. Shannon and Nessa look ready to end our Sunday evening.
Shannon, Nessa, and Jon on the Tokyo subway.
On our way back to the hostel, I stopped to take a photo of the Buddha bathed in moonlight, with the pagoda of Senso-ji as a backdrop.Monday, March 19th - We woke up very early to catch the train to Nikko, our day trip out of Tokyo. Fortunately, we could catch a train from Asakusa Station that went all the way to Nikko, a small town in the mountains north of Tokyo full of elaborately painted and decorated shrines and temples. So, we boarded the train at around 8 and arrived at Nikko about 10 a.m. The snow-capped mountains were a beautiful backdrop.
We made the long walk up hill, through the quiet town towards the big grouping of shrines and temples to the northwest. We first came upon Rinno-ji, a large red temple with some statues of Buddha and the gods inside.
Not quite as large as Buddhas elsewhere, but very shiny, don't you think?
We also looked around a peaceful Japanese garden and discussed how much extra time we'd have during the day if we didn't stop to take any pictures.
From Rinno-ji, it was only a short walk to the Tosho-gu Shrine complex. We first noticed how brightly and delicately each part of the shrine buildings were painted. Nessa and I posed by the tall pagoda.
Next we walked up the steps to Omote-mon Gate.
Once inside, there are many storehouses and sacred stables and such, all beautiful painted and adorned with intricate designs.
We went through another big stone torii,
and got to Yomei-mon Gate, another archway filled with finely carved statues and designs.
And here are some close-ups.After the whole Tosho-gu thing, we walked a short stone path through pine trees to Taiyuin-Byo, a shrine for some famous Japanese military leader in the 1600s. We passed another large torii and Shannon seemed to dance amongst the stone lanterns, even though she was feeling rather sick this day.And we climbed more steps up to the peaceful and secluded shrine, surrounded by tall evergreens and shaded from the cool breeze. It's quite pretty.After our morning of looking around shrines and temples, taking off our shoes and putting them back on, and taking lots of pictures, we went back to the sacred bridge, Shin-kyo, and went over the river.We had a great lunch before ambling back through town with plenty of time before our four o'clock train. The way home took a long time, and I think we all used the opportunity to sleep a little. We got back to Asakusa after 6 that evening and night had come to the streets as we made our way back to Sakura Hostel. We rested, had some dinner somewhere, and then planned to go back out in Roppongi. None of us wanted to stay out all night though, and we planned to catch the last train home at about midnight.

So, by 9 p.m., we were back in Roppongi, ready to party a little bit more.
We went to a bar called Gas Panic and had some happy hour drinks. Shannon's health, although she doesn't look it here, was in an ever-increasingly worse condition.
Nessa and I danced after I requested Hey Ya, but, as you can tell, we were the only ones on the dance floor.After Gas Panic, the three of us went to a Salsa Club for a little while and then quit it to go back to one of our bars of Saturday night, Mo Town House. As the evening progressed, we had more fun.
It was getting crowded at about midnight, but we had a train to catch, so we ran towards Roppongi station and just missed a train at 12:06.
The next train wasn't for a while, and then, to our dismay, didn't bring us all the way we wanted to go. The last stop was quite a distance from where we needed to be, so we had to take a cab, and in Tokyo, that's an expensive thing to do. It was affordable when we split the price three-ways though, and we were back at our hostel by a little after 1 in the morning.

Tuesday, March 20th - We all woke up at a reasonable hour, but Shannon was very ill. Nessa and I arranged to meet Shannon later in the morning, so she could get more sleep. I suggested we meet over in Ueno, an area of town just west of Asakusa with a large park and many museums. So, Nessa and I took the train over to Ueno with a meeting time and place for Shannon.

Nessa and I first went to Ueno Park on the sunny spring morning. Nessa and I and an old Japanese man fed the ducks in the willow pond at Ueno koen,
and then found some swan boats.
Nessa got pretty excited about the boats, so we definitely had to take a ride. We took the paddle boat shaped like a yellow swan out for a ride around the pond for a half hour, and actually had a lot of fun.We made it back to the dock eventually though and walked around the rest of Ueno Park.We sat by a fountain for a while and talked before I finally called Shannon to figure out the deal. We arranged to meet at Ueno Station an hour later, so Nessa and I left the park to look at the rest of Ueno. Shannon was waiting for us at the station and we told her about the nice park. She wanted to see it, Nessa wanted to shop, and I felt that I'd rather go to a nice park on a beautiful day than look at stores, so I went with Shannon. Shannon and I walked down the bright paths and observed all the people who didn't seem to be working on Tuesday morning.
We sat on swings by the pond until we had to meet Nessa by the park entrance.
With the three of us finally together again, we took the subway to Ginza, the central part of Tokyo with expensive stores and the imperial palace grounds. Ginza looks much like the rest of Tokyo, with tall, glittering buildings, fancy stores, and beautiful people littering the streets. So, we walked up to the Imperial Palace grounds and saw the famous view of the Niju-bashi bridge and palace.
This is pretty much all anyone is allowed to see of the palace, and it's not much. All around it is a moat and fences and guards.
Shannon and Nessa thought about what could be behind those walls.
We walked over to the Imperial Palace East Gardens after seeing the Niju-bashi bridge and palace ramparts. The East Gardens are as controlled and restricted as the palace itself, with every leaf and blade of grass carefully laid out to exact specifications. Here are some shots of the water and trees doing exactly what they are told.
And, since we went to great lengths to get this shot of the three of us, I have to include it here.
Nessa, Jon, and Shannon in the Imperial Palace East Gardens, with the buildings of Ginza, central Tokyo, behind us.We ate Vietnamese food before we decided it would be best to go back to Asakusa. It was late afternoon and Shannon was fatigued from her sickness, Nessa wanted to shop somewhere, and I was open to taking a nap. We were planning to go out all night again, this time in Shibuya clubs, but as the day wore on, Shannon decided against it. She was just too sick. So, we all took the subway back to Asakusa and took a nap.

When we woke up it was evening and time for dinner. What did we eat? Indian food, naturally. We all really like Indian food, the restaurants are plentiful in Tokyo, and they always speak English, so it seems a good choice. After our great meal, we had strawberry wine we'd purchased in Nikko, and I ended up drinking most of it. Nessa and I bade goodbye to Shannon for the evening and got on the Ginza line all the way to Shibuya station. We found the clubs Annie had recommended without much difficulty and learned they weren't even open until midnight. While Nessa and I had a drink at a nearby bar, I called Annie to tell her we were going to her favourite clubs in Tokyo and she asked if I was drunk. Yes, I was already a little drunk, and we hadn't even entered the clubs yet. It would be a long night.

Our first stop was Club Vuenos, a hip hop club that wasn't very crowded when we arrived. We'd paid a ¥4,000 cover to get in, so we were hoping it would be better. Still, Nessa and I had some fun.
Then we noticed that the wrist band for which we'd paid 4,000 was good for a variety of other clubs, so we went across the street to Club Asia. Club Asia was pretty cool and here's the red lounge at almost 3 a.m.In the main room at Club Asia, there was a rap show going on by the name of Spicy Chocolate. We watched some Japanese rap artists do their thing while the crowd threw their hands in the air. Nessa and I were the only non-Japanese people there as far as I could tell. Everyone around us was having a lot of fun and they were pretty much completely oblivious to our presense, even though we didn't have black hair or Asian features. There wasn't a lot of dancing going on amongst the crowd, but the show was really unique, the floor was crowded, and everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves. Between acts, women dancers came out to do flips, jumps, and dances with silver jump suits and chairs. I took more videos than pictures, but here are some photos.After a long time at Club Asia, going between the dance floor and the bar area upstairs, Nessa and I decided to go back to Club Vuenos, where our jackets were still in lockers. The dance floor there was so crowded by 4 a.m. that we could hardly get out there to dance. We stayed for about an hour amid loud, thumping hip hop music and the crowd of Japanese gangsta-dressed guys and girls and I snapped this picture from above before we left.
It was 5 a.m. and still mostly dark when Nessa and I exited Club Vuenos. We found a great udon restaurant open and serving sleepy revelers like ourselves and the sun was coming up in the east above the mostly empty Shibuya Crossing intersection.

Wednesday, March 21st - Early morning - Nessa and I, having eaten good udon and feeling more tired than hung-over or drunk, tried to make our way to Tsukiji Fish Market, near Ginza. It's supposed to be an exciting place, filled with activity as the fish comes in from the sea in the morning and people are buying and selling and yelling. After falling asleep on the subway, missing our transfer stop, back tracking, walking through empty Tokyo streets at 6.30 a.m. and wishing we were asleep and warm, we finally reached Tsukiji Market. It was empty. This is what it looked like in all directions along the stalls of fish markets.
There was no one there. No one there at all. It was 7.15 a.m. and the place was entirely empty. Nessa and I walked around a little bit and realised we'd wasted a bunch of time getting here, time we could've spent sleeping. It was a big disappointment, and all the worse because we were so tired. We dejectedly walked back to the subway and went up to Asakusa. We got back to our hostel by 8 a.m., slept until 10.45 and had to get up for check-out at 11 a.m.

When we woke up, we all felt surprisingly well (certainly Shannon 'cause she actually slept a full night) and we went down to Palette Town, another of Annie's great recommendations. Out by Tokyo Bay there's a huge shopping complex with a giant ferris wheel called Palette Town. It's pretty cool and has lots of expensive stores and restaurants. We took the subway and then a monorail all the way out onto reclaimed land in Tokyo Bay.The centrepiece of Palette Town is something called Venus Fort, and it's like Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas, with renaissance architecture inside and a ceiling that changes colours to look like the sky. Shannon and Nessa shopped while I wandered around the immense shopping mall and watched fashionably dressed young couples parade by. We took lots of pictures by the fountain after we had lunch there and did some purikura.It was a great Wednesday and an easy way to spend our last few hours in Tokyo.
Then we had to take the trains back to our hostel, pick up our bags, and ride the train all the way to the airport (luckily no transfers). We had plenty of time to check in, get a little something to eat, and rest before we got on our plane. On the ground in OKC, we rushed to get the last bus from the airport to the station, and had no trouble making our way back to OKC and then getting to Wake by just after 10.15pm.

Dry Thine Eyes

2007-03-16T14:31:00.001+09:00

March 16th: The day after my birthday. And graduation day at Wake and Saeki Junior Highs. Although I would've preferred to go to Saeki's graduation ceremony, I had to attend Wake's, because unfortunately I can't be in two places at the same time.

Anyway, the ceremony was in the freezing cold gym, but at least I'd prepared by wearing plenty of clothes. The 9th graders filed in past the parents and assembled 7th and 8th grade classes. Everyone clapped the entire time, but no one said anything and the 9th grade students wore an expression bereft of any emotion. They wore their regular school uniforms: no caps or gowns.

The first hour or so some people gave speeches. The principal, student body president or something, some representative from the 8th graders, some other important looking men wearing suits and sashes, they all gave some sort of mostly incomprehensible speech. I had a very difficult time staying awake. We had to bow a lot, and whenever I bowed I felt that I could just keep going and put my head down on the table in front of me and fall fast asleep.

Yet, I stayed awake, and witnessed a really strange ceremony. People made speeches and they played weird music box music at the same time and everyone started crying. And the students stood up and said thank you to their teachers and they were sobbing. And a 9th grade boy got up to (what looked like) conduct his fellow students in some song and he was sobbing too. And the biggest punk in the 9th grade who always acted like a cool kid in class was crying his eyes out when he tried to say thanks to his homeroom teacher. It was so strange.

I didn't take any pictures because I didn't bring my camera, but no one was really taking pictures. All the students, boys and girls, and some of the teachers, were crying like their dog had just died. No one said anything to me during the whole ceremony and eventually the students left the gym amid more clapping and I got the hell out of that frigid space and back into the relative warmth of the teachers' room.

I felt as if I'd just been to a funeral service rather than a graduation ceremony. No one was happy to be leaving the hell known as junior high. I wanted to call out to them, "Dry thine eyes little ones! Today is a not a day for tears!" But, what good would that have done?

This is what I wore to the ceremony. The tie Shannon bought me in Vietnam looks good with my black suit, doesn't it?Well, now it's off to Tokyo. Watch out for the long entry about that one!

12 x 2, 3 x 8, 6 x 4...It all equals 24!

2007-03-15T16:18:00.000+09:00

I'm 24 years old today. I'm going to have to get used to telling people that when they ask my age, which happens a lot here in Japan.

My birthday celebrations started last weekend in Kobe and they've been going ever since. Today, March 15th, was the real day, but we've already had some fun this week. Here's the story:

On Monday, 12 March, Shannon, Annie, and I all went out for conveyor belt sushi (or revolving sushi, or kaiten zushi, whatever you want to call it) in Wake. We all had a pretty good time.
On Tuesday, 13 March, my friend Nessa arrived from Boston and Shannon and I met her at Okayama Station. Before Nessa showed up in Okayama, Kuniyo and Yo took Shannon and me to OKC for a birthday dinner. They also stopped at a bakery in the station and had me pick out a cake, so I picked one with lots of fruit all over it and they bought me 24 candles to put in the cake. It was very kind. We ate pasta for dinner.
Afterwards, Shannon and I waited for Nessa at the shinkansen exit, and found her at about 10 o'clock, getting off the train from Shin-Osaka.On Wednesday, Shannon and Nessa went to Kurashiki with Annie while I went to work, and they got back just in time to come to my evening conversation class in Wake. I think my students were amazed that another person had come to visit me. Class was fun, and I was excited that it was the last one I'd have for three weeks. Wednesday nights, as least for the time being, are my own again.

After class on Wednesday, the three of us had the fruit covered, cream filled, sugary cake that Kuniyo and Yo had bought me. We lit all 24 candles and had a little private party. It was fun.
Here's the cake.And here I am blowing out all my 24 candles.
I'd previously obtained permission to bring Shannon and Nessa with me to my elementary school visit today, my birthday. So, we made the long walk to Honjo Elementary and entered the teachers' room, where everyone was a little surprised to see two girls accompanying me. There was a note on my desk that told me the plan for the day and at the top said "Jon sensei, Happy Birthday. Today is your special day." It was very nice.

In our first class of the day, we taught a large class of 1st graders, and they began by singing me Happy Birthday while the teacher played the piano. They weren't quite sure if they should call me Jon, Jon sensei, or anything at all, so most of them just mumbled something when they got to the "Happy birthday dear...." part. Still, it was very cute and a very nice birthday present. I had the kids tell me their names,and Shannon and Nessa went around the room to introduce themselves too. Nessa had some very cool American money with which the kids were pretty fascinated.
Then we taught them the names of some fruits in preparation for fruit basket.
So, the kids got in a circle and we assigned them a few fruits. Someone in the middle would say the name of a fruit and everyone who was that fruit would get up and find a different chair. But, there was always one more student than there were chairs. It was complete mayhem.
Here I am, waiting for someone to say the name of my fruit.
Every time the kids got up to run around, some of them would start fighting, one kid (who may've been a bit off) insisted on crawling around on the floor on his stomach, and most of the boys would spontaneously fall on the ground for no reason. Shannon, Nessa, and I looked on with hilarity at the uncontrolled madness.
It was the same thing in our second class of 1st graders.
After that we had two classes of 5th graders to teach. Here's an action shot of me teaching. Pretty cool, eh?And another action shot (I'm obviously deep in explanation. But even Nessa looks bored).
We played a telephone game with them and afterwards Shannon and Nessa observed that there wasn't much English language ability difference between the 1st graders and the 5th graders. I told them that there wasn't much difference between the 1st graders and the 9th graders.

We had lunch with the 1st graders in their classroom and the kids looked rather confused.
But, Nessa took these portraits and I think they turned out rather well.
We left just after 1 o'clock and it was raining. We had a long walk ahead of us, so one of the teachers offered to drive us back to my house. There, we prepared to go out in OKC for the evening, where I'd planned an evening of dinner and karaoke. I took them to the 100¥ store first, and then we met others, waiting in the rain at the station, to go to dinner.

Our dinner destination was a place called Moby Dick's, with Americana decorations and a pretty good menu of small appetizers and sangria.
Tiffany, Shannon, and Nessa before the meal.Lauren came to wish me happy birthday too.Shannon, Nessa, and I shared some great sangria.And Tiffany gave me a beautifully framed photo of us in Thailand.
To complete the picture, the restaurant staff came out with an ice cream dessert and sang happy birthday to me (in English of course).And then I somehow found room to eat an awesome dessert that Annie gave me.
We were rather late for karaoke, and Sarah, Boone, and Boone's visiting parents were waiting for us at Joypolis. For the next hour, we all drank some beer and sang as many songs as we could. Brian dressed up very fancily for the occasion.
Nessa seemed to think she was the tamborine master for the evening.
Annie, Bob, and Shannon all had to share one mic.And Sarah and Boone stuck it out with me till the end, even though Boone's parents were rather tired.Before we were kicked out, Annie and I sang a Weezer Song and I really got into it.
We all made it to the station before the last train and the rain had stopped. It was a good birthday.

Kobe: Our friendly neighbour

2007-03-11T22:21:00.000+09:00

The week of March 5-9 went by quickly, I going to work every day and finishing up the school year, having some last lessons with the 9th graders, and Shannon and I watching a movie, shopping, or just fixing some good dinner in the evenings. On Friday, we went out to dinner with Bernie, Amy, and Richard at a restaurant in Bizen. It was quite good, and I was glad that Shannon finally got to meet some of my friends (she was beginning to think I didn't have any). Bernie and Amy finishing their meal.The next day, Saturday, March 10, the Kobe weekend went ahead as planned, despite some setbacks the previous week. Shannon and I left on Saturday morning, taking the local trains and paying as little as possible. Shannon has reminded me of the necessity of taking pictures of "normal" things, like riding the train. So, here are the local JR trains, heading to Kobe.
We met Annie at Sannomiya station in central Kobe, and she even brought her friends who live in Hyogo-ken. We met Jana, then Michelle showed up, and eventually another of their friends named James. The six of us ate some okonomiyaki and then Shannon and I went to find our capsule hotel. On the way we found some Japanese people offering free hugs.
And who can turn down a free hug?For the second weekend in a row, the hotel we booked didn't work out, because the capsule hotel was only for men (although I'd established over the phone that the two people consisted of one woman and one man). Shannon went to the tourist office and they booked us a hotel room at a very nice hotel for really cheap. So, we got lucky again with accomodation.

Once we knew we had a place to sleep that night, we all went down to Kobe HarborLand, a big entertainment and shopping complex near, that's right, the harbour. Annie on the left, then Shannon, James, Michelle, and Jana.Those familiar with Kobe told us of a magical place called Sweets Harbor, so we felt we had to go. On our way, we walked through a mall with lights glittering above us.
Sweets Harbor was a kind of a theme park for desserts, with everything decorated like an old-fashioned port town. So, Shannon and I posed by the steam ship.
Then we all got something to eat, like ice cream or cream puffs or cake.
Afterwards, we walked through the cold Saturday night air towards the large ferris wheel and the pier with great night views of Kobe port.Here are the girls (Shannon, Jana, Michelle, Annie) with the Kobe Port Tower and the city behind them.We had had dessert before we had dinner, but that didn't stop us from having a large Indian meal at a great restaurant. It was a very nice early birthday celebration.
After dinner the group split up, as some had to go to Himeji for some event and some had to go home, so Shannon, Annie, and I found our way back to Sannomiya Station and to the guide book-acclaimed bar, the Lock Up. It's a bar with a jail, haunted house, mad scientist laboratory theme, and it was amazing. We went in and some motion sensor triggered a fake vampire thing to pop up and scare us, and then the hostess handcuffed me and led us to our table.
We sat behind some bars and had drinks out of beakers and vials. Mine was called The Shock.
We only had one drink each and it was a bit expensive, but Annie and I posed by the fireplace that looked direct from a Halloween party, and I thought it seemed like a place my family would like.By the time we left it was raining hard, but we didn't get too wet on the way to Ryan's Pub, an Irish pub apparently popular with foreigners in Kobe. There were a lot of foreign old guys there when we arrived, but with a live band and big pints of beer, it was fun. We took lots of pictures and stayed until the place was almost empty.For the next hour or so after we left Ryan's, Shannon, Annie, and I wandered around in the rain looking for a bar that didn't exist. There was some place listed in Shannon's guide book which was not where it ought to be according to the guide book's map. The phone number worked, and Annie asked for directions at least twice. They led us around in circles through the darkened and wet streets of Kobe, searching in vain for a late night dance club. We ended up at a quiet bar named Ugly Ducks, at which we each had a drink and spoke to the bartender, a cool mix-master DJ who sold Shannon one of his rocking CDs. He took this picture of us.
And then Shannon went behind the bar to pose with a martini shaker.
The bartender recommended a dance club called Gemini that was open late, and even drew us a map for how to get there. It was a smoky, black-lit, techno rave club with an expensive cover, but we had a lot of fun. We danced for at least a couple hours, and by 5 a.m. I found myself quite drunk. We took a cab back to the hotel and got a few hours of sleep.

On Sunday morning, Annie made her way sleepily back to Wake and Shannon and I got up and got lost in the underground passages beneath Sannomiya Station. We were hungry, tired, and just a little hung-over, so when we finally found some pastries we were very relieved.

We walked, or rather shuffled on tired feet, towards Kobe Port, passing innumerable shoe stores on the way, feeding Shannon's desire to find tall boots that would fit her. We passed through Kobe's Chinatown, a busy few streets full of Chinese restaurants and gates.
It seemed to be a popular place.Down at the waterfront, the wind came in cold and strong and I wished I had warmer clothes. We found a ship that had something to do with Christopher Columbus and I pretended that Columbus rocked.Although we wanted to see the Kobe Earthquake Museum, we learned it was actually quite far away, so we settled for the memorial they had preserved at one of the piers.
They've fenced off this portion of the concrete pier that is broken and twisted from the power of the earthquake that struck Kobe in 1995.We took these pictures and then had to get inside because the wind was so cold. I think we went to eat something, but I'm not entirely sure. What I do know is that we stopped at pratically every shoe store on the way back to the train station so Shannon could look at boots. But, they don't really make shoes large enough for her feet here in Japan, so our search ended fruitless. We took the train back in time for dinner in Wake and an early (but certainly not early enough) bedtime.

Kyushu revisted

2007-03-06T22:22:00.000+09:00

My friend Shannon arrived in Japan last Wednesday, Feb. 28th. I was at work as she made her way from KIX to Wake, but my detailed directions of train transfers and Japanese phrases guided her to my house, where she was waiting for me when I got home.

I finished up the work week as Shannon learned how cold it was in my house. On her first night in Japan, we put a DVD she'd bought in Vietnam into my computer and it wouldn't come out. We had to scrap our plans for Kurashiki on Thursday and go find a computer shop that could get the DVD out of my computer. That was indeed an adventure in miscommunication and Shannon was amazed at how inept a great number of Japanese people are at communicating in anything but really complicated and fast Japanese. We finally had a cab drive us to the shop and they took my computer, cutting us off from the outside world for the weekend. As such, we decided we should go somewhere far away, where it wouldn't matter if we had a computer or not. I mentioned Beppu, and the more we read about it, the more it seemed an attractive choice.

So, on Friday, March 2nd, we departed for the island of Kyushu. We took the shinkansen to Hakata (otherwise known as Fukuoka). Here's Shannon, riding the train at super fast speeds.
It was almost dark when we arrived and we had a rather difficult time finding the ryokan that Shannon had booked. We knew we didn't want a curfew deciding when we had to come back, so when we learned that the lady wanted to shut her door at 10.30 that night, we said no thanks and slipped away. The next couple hours involved lots of walking and calling and a woman lying to me on the phone about the price of a room. After I complained a few times in minimal Japanese, the hotel manager told us he would book another hotel for us, which was cheaper, and paid for our cab ride there. So, by 8 o'clock, we were checked in to the last room at the cheaper hotel and were ready to go out into Fukuoka for a night of partying (the very kind of night I'd missed about five months earlier). We didn't, however, have the foresight to look up cool bars in our guidebooks before we left the hotel, and this led to some confusion later on.

We made our way to the rivers and it felt good to be in a giant, lively city. Shannon posed on the streets of central Fukuoka.Shannon and I found the food stands that line the quays along the river and decided to try some famous Hakata ramen.
We sat down and had an excellent meal and even spoke to a couple of Japanese people next to us at the tiny counter.Afterwards, we walked through Canal City and got some ice cream, despite the fact that it was cold. We walked in a large circle from the central Nakasu island in Fukuoka towards Tenjin, but failed to see any cool bars or clubs. We ended up back on Nakasu island, where everything is overpriced, and had a few such drinks (overpriced) in a very nice wood paneled bar.
Afterwards we tried to enter numerous clubs, only to be told that we couldn't go in, they were for Japanese people only, and that they were only for men who were alone, or something like that. Our failure on Nakasu island was probably due to the fact that it was a huge red-light district and every club was a hostess bar or strip club instead of being a dance club. We finally gave up and went to look at puppies and kittens before having some pastries by the river at 1 a.m. and walking back to our hotel.

Our hotel had a great free breakfast, of which we took full advantage, and then we went out in search of transportation to Beppu. My weekend excursion to Shikoku taught me that the bus is always cheaper and usually takes the same amount of time as a train, so we bought bus tickets to Beppu and were there by about 2 p.m. on Saturday. Beppu is rather famous in Japan for its numerous hot spring onsens and some hydrothermal vents, or geysers, that they've translated into English as "hells." These hells litter the area around Beppu. So, the thing to do in Beppu is take a few onsen baths, party and eat in the tourist-oriented town, and go look at steam and boiling water rise from holes in the ground. That is more or less exactly what we did.

After finding out hotel, we found Takegawara Onsen, a very old onsen in a very old looking building. Shannon wanted to take a sand bath and there wasn't one for another hour, but instead of being allowed to pay and come back, we had to wait near the entrance to the onsen. There was absolutely no reason why we couldn't just come back, except that those were the rules and Japanese people do not know how to change the rules. After much arguing with the woman who spoke no English, Shannon was convinced that Japan is a country where rules needn't be explained but only followed without exception. I observed that the only two countries I've ever visited where people wait for the green signal to cross the street (even when there are no cars) are Germany and Japan. Curious, isn't it? When Americans start unanimously waiting for walk signals to cross the street, we'll know that totalitarianism is on its way.

Anyway, Shannon had her sand bath and then the regular onsen, and I sat around in my onsen space, rather small and somewhat grimy, until I couldn't stand it in the hot steam and boiling water any longer. Here's a picture Shannon took in her onsen, which looked exactly the same as my side.But, the entrance to the building was cool and Shannon clearly enjoyed the onsen she just took.
Feeling clean and warm:Then we walked down a shopping arcade for a long time.I thought these bugs on the ground with flashing lights in them were interesting.
And both Shannon and I thought this sticker on a motorcycle was very intriguing.
For dinner, we settled on a Jamaican restaurant we'd seen. I reminded Shannon that whenever I get the chance NOT to eat Japanese food, I take it. And Jamaican food is not very common anywhere in this country.
Our picture in the mirror at the restaurant.The food was great. It was probably the best meal I've had in a very long time. The festival bread was especially wonderful, and I convinced Shannon that we ought to have a side order of festival bread (fried sweet bread) with chocolate sauce. Shannon complained that it was too much and too unhealthy, and I loved it all.

The two of us walked through Beppu Park to a large observation tower, Global Tower, that is part of a huge convention center/entertainment complex. The views over the night-shrouded city of Beppu, lit up and sprawling, but quiet, were very pretty.
It was just before closing and we were the only ones up at 1,500 metres.
We walked back through the park on the way to the hotel and stopped to take some pictures of this walkway, covered with stone arches and flanked by blooming rose bushes. It was night time, but I could capture some foggy images of the night sky behind the archways.
Shannon, however, set up her camera with a long exposure, and made the scene look like noon instead of night.
After our failure to find cool bars in Fukuoka, I badly wanted to go out in Beppu. We read about a few cool places to check out in Shannon's guide book and knew exactly where we should go. It had been a long day, however, and Shannon suggested we take a little nap. I've taken enough naps, intending to get up and go out somewhere, only ending up sleeping through the whole thing, to know that there was a good chance it might not work. So, I acquiesced, but resigned myself to the possibility that we may wake up suddenly at 1 a.m. and realise that we'd missed the whole evening. We woke up at a little after midnight and realised we'd missed most of the evening. Then Shannon felt sick and I went out into the darkened and not-as-lively-as-I'd-expected city to find her some medicine. After my outing in the emptying streets I felt a little better about our not going out that night in Beppu. Shannon assured me that we would have plenty of drinking nights ahead of us in Kobe and Tokyo.

So, on Sunday, March 4th, we had a big day of seeing "hells" planned. We got a bus pass, some fruit for breakfast, and waited for a bus to bring us to the Kannawa area where most of the hells are located. A British guy asked if we spoke English as we deboarded the bus and we spent most of the afternoon with him. His name was Neale and he was traveling around Japan on his own, apparently, and very likely wanted someone with whom to speak English. Our first stop was Ocean Hell. We bought the package ticket and went in to see lots of steam rising from the ground.
The water there is a kind of pale blue, with steam constantly rising from it and water spraying out from various holes.
Then there's another one just up the hill with water that's a kind of rust-coloured brown.
After the three of us, Shannon, Neale, and I, had eggs that were boiled in the water issuing from the ground, we went to see Monk's Hell, which is a bunch of bubbling pools of mud. It was pretty cool.Even though we had been aptly warned by Lonely Planet to skip the next hell, we went to Mountain Hell because it was right there and we'd already paid for it. The primary reason, I think, for Lonely Planet's advice was the sad state of the animals in cages near the geysers. Shannon took some pictures of the unfortunate monkeys who looked like prisoners in barren cells.
I asked them what crime they had committed to deserve to be locked up, but they only looked back at me with sad and bored eyes. The elephant had gone crazy from captivity and the hippopatamus was begging for old potatoes. The contrast of the animals with this sign was actually rather pathetic.We left as soon as we glanced at the steam rising from the rocks, and found our next desired goal: the Sex Museum. The Hihokan Sex Museum sits right in the middle of the steaming pools of coloured boiling water, which shoot and spray liquid through the air. I don't understand why there is a sex museum there in Beppu; it's not connected to a fertility shrine the way the museum in Shikoku is; but it's there nonetheless, beckoning people inside with its Sculpture of India out front.
This particular sex museum was not quite as poorly organized as that in Shikoku, and, although smaller, it was much funnier. The museum in Shikoku was just confusing, somewhat interesting, and not as humourous as one would've liked. The Hihokan Museum combined shocking wax figures with old Japanese wood block prints with explicit statues with a softcore porn playing in a small movie theatre (and who could forget the whale penis and vagina!) to create a hilarious and surprising effect that left me in slight disbelief and yet with a smile on my face. The greatest difference, however, between the sex museum in Shikoku and that in Beppu was that photography was very much allowed at Beppu. Here, are some of my favourites (and after my description you shouldn't need to be warned that these pictures are... well, avert your virgin eyes if you wish).

Cool Indian statues (but once again we just don't know what time period).
Shannon and Neale watching the porn (sort of).
Another giant penis (there can't be just one).
A whale's vagina (or model thereof).Japanese prints.Shannon and her really giant breasts (the effect is quite convincing, don't you think?)
Some wax figures of a naked woman on a kotatsu and her friend (she really should be underneath the kotatsu if she wants to keep warm. And why is the man fully clothed?)
And, finally, the crown jewel of the sex museum, Snow White receiving cunnilingus from one of the dwarves (which one? You tell me).Overall, it was an excellent museum in my opinion. The gift shop was manned by two middle-aged Japanese women and filled with pornography, vibrators, and some very expensive blow-up dolls (but, then again, blow-up dolls are always expensive, aren't they?)

Our next stop was White Pond Hell, where Shannon gazed out at the beautiful turquoise water.
We met Neale, who had gotten something to eat, at White Pond Hell. Here are Shannon and Neale enjoying the bright and sunny day in Beppu.As we continued to make our way south, we parted with Neale and Shannon and I went to our onsen destination for the day, Hyotan Onsen. After we changed into our yukata for the sand bath, we had our picture taken in the courtyard.
Then we went in for our sand bath, which wasn't as great as I expected. We just laid in the steamy sand and tried to cover ourselves with it. It was a lot like a sauna, but that was it. The onsen itself, however, was beautiful. There were a lot of baths, waterfalls, a pool outside, and there were barely any people there. Shannon and I each enjoyed our respective baths and then ate something in the central courtyard before continuing on.A bus brought us to the final two hells, Blood Pool Hell, which is red, a little like blood, and always sparsely steaming. It was pretty cool.Our last one was Waterspout Hell, which is a regular geyser like Old Faithful in Yellowstone. We waited for the requisite amount of time, 25 minutes, and then the water started shooting up in a straight stream from the ground. The Japanese people went crazy and started snapping pictures, and I took a few before we left, but Shannon and I were not as impressed as everyone else seemed to be.We made our way back to the hotel, picked up our bags, and had a nice pasta dinner before catching the train to Kokura, where we would pick up the shinkansen back to Okayama. Shannon has learned very quickly, and very well, how to cheat JR out of some ticket money, and we used it with great effect on our way from Beppu to Kokura. We got back at a reasonable time on Sunday night and reflected that our weekend had been a very good one.

Hell

2007-02-24T13:59:00.000+09:00

At various points in my life I have tried to imagine what hell must be like, if such a place as hell actually existed. Once I thought that hell must be working at a strenuous or tedious job for an eternity, never quite reaching the time when you could stop and go home for the day. Later I came to the conclusion that hell must be a very dark, cold, and lonely place, and this is the view that I still hold (my view of the hypothetical hell anyway). At any rate, I always knew that the bullshit about burning fires and dancing demons was just silly.
And yet, these past few days, I have come close to finding a new vision of hell, albeit somewhat subtler and milder than cold, dark, loneliness. Loudspeakers making announcements have been a problem in Wake since I first arrived, and, if you remember, were the forces that finally drove me to decide to leave after one year here.
However, for about the past week, there have been innumerable cars driving around town, loudspeakers mounted on top, telling the poor, unfortunate people of Wake to vote for a particular candidate for town council, or some such pointless and useless governing body. They can do this, I learned, from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. until the election on Sunday (tomorrow). And so, whether I am in my house or on the street, biking to school or trying to teach a lesson, I can hear the announcements, blaring all over town in some unintelligible language, repeating some candidate's name over and over again. They form a complete bombardment on the auditory senses from which there is no escape. Sometimes the annoying, mostly female, voices are yelling excitedly, driving down my street, so that no amount of ear plugs or pillows over my face can keep them out.
Of course, normally this would be simply an angering annoyance, which indeed it has been since my arrival in this poorly and sadly named town of Wake, which means peaceful atmosphere. But, add to this the fact that I am sick and it all becomes infuriating to the point of madness (or despair). I am so sick, in fact, that I went to the doctor yesterday, something which I am loathe to do, especially in a country where I can barely communicate, and the doctor said I had a touch of the flu (what the Japanese like to call 'infruenza'). So, while I am trying to rest and sleep in my own house, in my own bed, the cars drive by with their loudspeakers blasting. They started this morning at 8 a.m. and no doubt they will squeeze in every possible moment until 7:59 tonight. There is something wrong with a people who will, by collective consent, allow others to wake them up at 8 a.m. on a Saturday morning. Or, at least there is something wrong with people who can't realise that others may want to sleep past 8 a.m. on a Saturday morning.
I cannot adequately describe to you the feelings these political advertisements arouse in me without you thinking I ought to be committed to the authorities for the sake of the safety of the people in the loudspeaker cars (although if you heard them for 12 hours a day you would not want them to be protected from harm, I am sure).
There is much you can complain about the nature of political advertising in the United States, but, next election season, simply be thankful that you can turn off the TV, you can turn off the radio, you can ignore the billboards on the roads, and you can be safe in your own house, in your own bed, without hearing some idiot with a car and a loudspeaker driving up and down your street. That, at least, is one thing we've got going for us.

The Naked Man Festival and Rain

2007-02-19T21:20:00.000+09:00

On Saturday, February 17th, the most anticipated event of the year in all of Okayama Prefecture took place. It was...The Naked Man Festival. Officially called the Hadaka Matsuri in Saidaiji, we prefer to call it the Naked Man Festival, because it involves hundreds of men, dressed in a small piece of cloth wrapped around their groin, running around, shoving each other, and fighting for a couple sacred sticks. It doesn't make any sense to me, but it's been going on for 500 years or so, and the Japanese really like their traditions.

So, as this is such a big event for Okayamans, Okayama AJET, of which I am the Special Assistant and Aide to the Social Chairwoman, organised a way for JETs from all over Japan to come to the festival. Unfortunately, it rained all day on Saturday. It didn't stop raining from about 10a.m. on Saturday morning until sometime on Sunday. It was terrible.

Anyway, Saturday was one of those days, like New Year's or your birthday, when you spend the whole day waiting for evening to come so the party can start. I didn't really do anything during the day, and I couldn't go out because it was pouring rain. So, I made last minute preparations for the lists I'd compiled of people riding our buses and packed up for the night. I got into OKC early and met up with Rachel and Nicole, the people who would be helping get people on the buses and collecting money where necessary. The runners (people who were participating in the festival instead of just watching, as in getting almost naked and running around in the cold and rain) started arriving soon thereafter and we had to begin the arduous task of finding out who'd paid and who still needed to and why so-and-so wasn't on the list and how many spaces we had on the bus and other confusions. And all the while, it was raining hard and soaking our paper lists and making us awkwardly hold the umbrella, attempting to keep something dry.

The runners' bus finally left and the spectators (naturally, the people who would be simply watching, presumably fully clothed) arrived. I felt important whenever I stepped forward when someone asked "who's in charge here?" We got everyone on the buses and handed out drinks and Barbie made announcements. I offered to, but she wanted to use the mic on the bus, and I'm glad she did. She told everyone that umbrellas weren't allowed in the festival grounds, and then, as it turned out, everyone else brought them in anyway, so that once inside, everyone was complaining that we hadn't brought our umbrellas. And they hated Barbie for it. But, that's what happens when you're AJET president (or the president of anything).

We made the long walk from the buses to the entrance to the temple. The actual festival was taking place inside a temple and the guys had to run around in the grounds, through some water, and then try to find a place on a platform where someone would throw out the sticks.

Before we went in, Marshall, Marisa, and Tiffany posed in the dark, cold rain.
And there's the three of us, making faces (sorta).
Here's a nice little mural of people grabbing for that all important sacred stick.
Eventually, we got closer to the temple and there were a bunch of food stands, serving typical Japanese festival food. And, of course, runners in their loin cloths running around.
Ludo must've been terribly drunk by this time. In fact, probably most of the participants were. He gave us a variety of poses.
And then there's Rachel, my assistant. Wait, I'm her assistant.
And here are some mostly naked men running by.
Once inside, I lost people quickly and easily, but there was always someone else I knew nearby.
We stood there, with the soaking cold rain drenching our jackets, gloves, and hats - so that it was almost useless to wear them - watching, or trying to watch, more and more men gather in the main temple for about two hours. Lauren got on my shoulders and took some pictures. They are, of course, blurry, but they give you some idea of what we could see (I mean, our vision was blurry too).Here is that seething mass of men, arms flailing and rocking back and forth. The most entertaining part was when people fell down the steps, because someone at the top would lose their balance, and, just like dominoes, 20 or 30 guys would tip over and fall down the staircase.
At midnight, they turned off the lights and threw out the sticks. For about three minutes, there was only the noise of men yelling and the sight of hundreds of them pushing each other. Then, it was all over. Bernie looked on in horror.
Everyone watching was glad it was over, because it meant we could all go home. The Naked Man Festival, like I said, is a little like New Year's Eve: it just wasn't quite as good as you hope it'll be. Watching it was mainly boring, wet, and cold, and all of us found ourselves wishing that time would go by much more quickly.

After all that, we got on our buses, which would bring us all back to OKC. Many people went out to the bars, which stayed open late. I followed the crowd to Aussie Bar, but I didn't stay very long. It was crowded, I was wet, and I wanted to change. I went back to Champ Clair and watched people dance in an apartment there until about 6 a.m. But, at least I was warm and dry, which I much preferred to being out in a bar, still cold and wet.

Tour de Shikoku

2007-02-12T20:36:00.000+09:00

Shikoku makes three out of four for me. Japan is made up for four main islands (Hokkaido, Honshu, Shikoku, and Kyushu) plus probably thousands of little islands scattered around the seas. Now, I've just got the one up north to go.

So, after consulting, Marisa and I decided to plan a trip to Shikoku, the island directly to the south of Okayama prefecture. We sent an invitation out to some people and heard some answers. Then suddenly more people wanted to come, and others canceled. It went this way for a couple weeks, the numbers in the group constantly changing as people decided to go or dropped out. In fact, about four hours before we were supposed to depart, Britt decided she couldn't go, then I talked her back into it, Ludo bought too many bus tickets, and another group of people, Brian, Jenn, and Chris, wanted to come along too, but would meet us later. If it sounds confusing, it's because it was.

But, all seemed well when six of us met in OKC on Friday as night fell, bus tickets bought and paid for, and got something to eat before running in the rain to the bus that would take us to Matsuyama. Britt, Kim, Lauren, Ludo, Marisa, and I slept, talked, and stared out the window as our bus drove over the Seto Inland Sea towards Shikoku's largest city. Once in Matsuyama, we found our hostel surprisingly easily and were also pleasantly surprised by the price. We didn't like hearing that the curfew was midnight, but we found a nearby udon restaurant and had a nice meal. The proprietress spoke to us for a long time after our meal, so we took a picture with her. L to R: Jon, Kim, Lauren (in front), Japanese lady, Marisa, and Ludo. Britt took the photo. With only 45 minutes until curfew, we bought a few bottles of wine at the combini and played card games in our hostel room. It was a lot cheaper than going to a bar, and maybe even a lot more fun. We drank enough wine to make us laugh a lot and eventually it was time for Lauren, Britt, and Marisa to go up to their room and sleep.

On Saturday morning, Kim, Ludo, and I sleepily awoke in our warm hostel room and tried out massage chairs until it was time to go. Before breakfast, we checked out a shrine at the top of a hill, Isaniwa-jinja, and Lauren, Marisa, and I posed by our zodiac sign, The Boar.We looked at the outside of the shrine,saw a wedding couple arrive,then climbed down the long stairs to level ground.We all had some simple breakfast from Lawson's (the ubiquitous convenience store (called combinis)) and found the famous Dogo Onsen, the oldest public hot spring bath in Japan (or so they say). The building itself was nice but not as impressive as I expected: I thought it would be bigger. Naturally, however, we couldn't miss a bath in the onsen, so we went in and warmed up in the hot pools for a while. Inside, it was also rather small, but it was filled with nicely decorated fountains pouring the hot water out of the ground.

Although we were supposed to meet Brian, Jenn, and Chris at Dogo Onsen, we never found them, and learned later that they had gone to another onsen. We found them after our respective baths and formed our large and slightly cumbersome group of nine people. I say cumbersome because trying to find a place to eat that could accommodate all of us was difficult, and so we had to split up for lunch.

After that it was time to find Matsuyama Castle, high up on a hill in the middle of a park in the centre of the city. It's possible to climb to it, but we thought it might be more fun to take a chair lift. Yes, we took a chair lift up and down the mountain.
And here I am, on my way to the top.Once on the summit of the hill, the views of the castle were very beautiful. Lauren and I posed in front of the main tower.Then Kim, Brian, Jenn, Lauren, and Ludo did some strange dance on their way to the castle.Some plum blossoms (or blossoms of some kind) were also blooming, and gave us a slight glimpse of what the cherry blossoms may look like when they come in March or April. The blossoms and the castle looked gorgeous as the sun was beginning to sink in the sky on the top of Matsuyama.A few of us didn't go inside, so we just walked around the grounds and imagined what it must look like on the interior.After the chair lift ride down, we found one of the guys dressed up in an imperial navy costume who seemed to be all around town and decided we needed our picture with him. Luckily, he had a couple fake moustaches for Ludo and Britt. There were also a couple other characters who we had in our photos too. I have no idea why they were there.From there, we made the long walk to the train station and bade Matsuyama goodbye. We boarded an Uwajima-bound train and arrived in the small town towards 8 o'clock. Ludo ascertained where our hotel was and we had a comical check-in with multiple reservations and seemingly too many keys. We exchanged and traded rooms until all was well and went into the town to find something to eat. After a great dinner with cheap beers (alas! we couldn't stay there to keep drinking because they were closing), most of us wanted to find some bar in town. Uwajima, however, like most Japanese towns, has nothing going on after about 10 o'clock at night, and our only option seemed to be buying drinks at a combini and having a party in our hotel room. It proved to be not a bad decision, and almost all of us (save for those who went to sleep) gathered in one of the rooms and played cards, drinking into the night. We also tried on our hotel-provided yukata, and Lauren, Marisa, and Brian modeled them for my camera.
We hardly awoke at the appointed hour the following morning, but we were out of the hotel at a good time nonetheless. We wandered around the quiet, chilly town on a Sunday morning, looking for the sex shrine. Our entire point in going to a small town like Uwajima was to see a fertility shrine that included a sex museum. There are a few other things in Uwajima, but the sex shrine was our goal. Once we found it, it seemed smaller and less thrilling than I'd imagined from the description in Lonely Planet. In fact, it mostly looked like a normal shrine, except for a large penis carved from a tree trunk. Here are the brave examining it: Brian, Marisa, Britt, and Kim.And the full view of the very large penis.Kim and Marisa threw some coins in the box for good luck in ___ (insert whatever you think appropriate here).Kim, Marisa, and I are here with one of the lions.And Brian and Chris made friends with the upright statues littering the grounds.Ludo, Britt, Kim, Marisa, and I went into the museum while the others, claiming to be saving money but I suspect in reality because of squeamishness, waited outside. The museum was an amazing collection of prints, drawings, and statues of people having sex with people, with animals, African fertility statues, Greek vases, stone carvings of penises and vaginas and all sort of things, and leather stuff and Victorian photographs and too many other things for me to name or even remember. Here's a good example of the organization of the museum: a collection of haphazardly placed statues from some time and somewhere (things were labeled to indicate what date and what place they'd come from, but not in any language I could read or understand).And Britt, Kim, and Marisa examining the vast collection of erotica.The museum was very interesting, but I wish that there had been labels in English so I could learn from whence and when the artifacts and prints had come.
We left Uwajima as soon as we could after that, but we had to wait for a slow train to take us part of the way to Kochi. We went through deep valleys ringed by pine covered mountains and near dark icy rivers for about two hours. Most people fell asleep with their iPods.On the second half of the journey, just when it seemed we'd been on the train for ages, we suddenly stopped when we had almost reached Kochi. Clearly, there was something going on right outside our carriage, and everyone got up to peer out the windows at a van with someone crying inside, a quickly gathering crowd of on-lookers, and, if one could get the right angle, a man lying very still near the tracks, bleeding copiously.
For about 20 minutes we watched as the police came, took down reports, then an ambulance arrived to gather the man up and put him inside, rushing him off to the hospital (presumably he was still alive). We didn't know if we had hit him with the train, or if something else had happened. No one in our group who spoke Japanese could hear any explanation about what had happened, only apologies for the delay.
We were trying to get to Kochi in time for their Sunday Market and it closed at 5 p.m. We arrived into town at about 3:30 and headed for the road leading to Kochi Castle, where the market was set up. We wandered among the stalls searching for something worth buying, but it was mostly fresh fruit.We got overly excited about finding gyros kebabs, but upon buying them and eating them, we remembered that foreign food in Japan (anything that is not Japanese food) is usually not quite as good as at home.
As evening approached, the nine of us, slightly less hungry but becoming weary, shuffled to Kochi Castle. It was a very impressive looking castle high up on a hill (as most castles are).I'm not sure who this is a statue of, but I was awfully impressed. I only wish I had a horse to make the imitation complete.Up at the top of a long climb of stairs, the setting sun was shining brilliantly on one of the castle walls. It was too late to go inside, but we enjoyed walking around the grounds outside. Brian, Jenn, Kim, and me:The castle in the sun light.We had someone take our picture and she did a pretty good job, I think.The garden below was full of blooming trees, and it made for more pretty sights.Back down in the city, we walked along streets lined with life and lights looking for a bar or some place to hang out. We settled on an Irish pub, which had very expensive drinks (as all Irish pubs do in Japan). We didn't stay very long.From there, our large group found a good restaurant with a large section just for us. We ordered lots of little dishes of food and drank what we could afford.Ludo behaved strangely, of course.We had to leave a little early, however, because unfortunately our hostel was two train stops away from Kochi station. I felt bad about not being able to stay in the city, but it all turned out okay. We checked into our very nice hostel amid more confusion about reservations, but once having appointed ourselves in our comfortable, wood paneled rooms, we straggled to a bar down the street. The place was just barely large enough to fit us all in, but we managed to snuggle up to a couple tables and have a few drinks.
Britt and I had no idea Marisa was squeezing her way into the photo.I don't know what Jenn was doing with these coasters.Chris looks rather surprised here.Marisa and I got drinks with gin in them, but there wasn't very much gin.And then I took a picture of Ludo showing a picture of me on his camera, and in the picture I'm showing a picture of Ludo (and into infinity).We spent quite some time at the bar, then, back at the hostel, Kim and I tried to start a party in our room, but no one came, so we had no choice but to go to sleep.

On Monday, we all met in our hostel lobby, checked out, and had some breakfast before getting the small, local train into Kochi. We planned to rent bikes, but Ludo soon learned that there were only four available, hardly enough for the nine of us.
Chris and I discussed our options and presented them to the group: we could go to a garden and temple or go a bit farther away to the beach. We all voted for the beach, except Chris, who went to the garden.
A bus took us to the rocky beach just outside Kochi and we were lucky to have a beautiful, even hot, day in mid February. The view from just above was already beautiful, so Lauren and I stopped to take a picture.Next we walked towards the water and gazed out into the Pacific Ocean.The waves managed to reach my shoes and get my socks inside wet, so I just took them off and waded into the water.Ludo, however, went all the way into the water. Here's the portrait of the boys.And the girls.Before I left, I climbed out on a rock pier and was amazed at the clarity of the water. The shrine at the top of the hill was also pretty.After that, we got our bus back to Kochi, where we had some lunch and boarded our very comfortable bus back to OKC. Bus travel, I'm learning, is often the way to go. Although it's a bit more difficult to book than train travel, it's much cheaper, usually more comfortable, and sometimes takes the same amount of time.
We got back into OKC earlier this evening and stepped back into the windy cold of Okayama.
The weekend in Shikoku went better than I could've expected. Doing things in groups of nine is hardly ever easy, and reaching consensus is often a lengthy process. However, we all behaved well, made decisions as swiftly as possible, and were generally convivial in what we did. I, for one, was impressed and can say I wouldn't mind traveling with these people again. Well, most of them, anyway.

The week as it was

2007-02-08T20:47:00.000+09:00

As I am about to embark on another weekend adventure beginning tomorrow, I thought I would take the time to write a little about my week. My weeks hardly get any attention in this blog because they are routine, often boring, and I rarely take any pictures. Of course, this week was not particularly out of the ordinary, and of course, I didn't take any pictures which I can post on this entry, but I don't want to give the impression that all I do here in Japan is go on weekend trips and eat at pizza restaurants we discover.

On Sunday, I was lounging around when Ludo texted my phone, asking if I'd like to go for a drink. After telling him that there was nothing to do in Wake, I met him in Higashi Okayama, his home town. He took me to a karaoke place inhabited solely by 5 or 6 old people who were singing the worst karaoke song I've ever heard. Almost immediately, a large old lady came and put her arms around Ludo and started singing to him. He'd been to this bar by himself before, certainly a very Ludo thing to do, and everyone was excited to talk to us. The Japanese grandmother took a seat next to me and spoke to me for most of the evening. I'm at a point in Japanese where I can understand some words and often can figure out the topic of a conversation if it's about eating, the weather, or my Japanese language (or lack of) abilities. I couldn't understand a single word she said to me, but I nodded and Ludo translated from Japanese into French when he could. It was a little tiring because I was the only one who didn't get to speak in my native language.

Ludo and I sang some songs and Ludo danced with the regular customers like something from Lost in Translation. In fact, the whole evening could be labeled Lost in Translation, because I was speaking some kind of foreign language the whole night. It was hilarious and more than a little weird. Ludo and I agreed afterwards that the strangest thing about it was that the Japanese people there were very touchy, as in we actual had physical contact with them. We went to another bar later on in which we were the only customers, but I guess I can't expect much from Higashi Okayama on a Sunday night. In the end, I had to run and very nearly missed the last train back to Wake.

On Mondays, in general, I go to Wake Junior High and teach three classes of 8th graders. The 8th graders are the most difficult to teach, because the majority of them don't give a damn about anything but sleeping and possibly hitting each other, and ironically, these are often the classes for which I prepare the least. There's some part of me that's stopped trying, at least with the 8th graders at Wake, because I know that they likely won't like whatever I try to do with them. This Monday, however, I taught four classes, and three of them were 7th graders, whom I like. I hope they don't instantly turn into little, apathetic bastards when they graduate to the 8th grade in two months. We played a version of the card game Bullshit, except there was no drinking and it was called Doubt.

Also, generally on Mondays, I have Japanese lessons in the evening from a Japanese man whose nickname is Jack. The lessons are going quite well, but I often tire of knowing that my Monday evening are not completely free. And so, I canceled the lessons so I could take a nap.

On Tuesdays, I go to Saeki Junior High. I take a bus there and get annoyed at having to find ¥380 in exact change each way. Before the JTE at Saeki tells me, I have no idea which grades or how many classes I'll be teaching. Sometime I teach the 9th graders, sometimes I go months without having much contact with them. Unfortunately, the 9th graders at Saeki will be graduating in a month and I'll probably never see them again. And I'm just now starting to get to know most of them. As I've said before, I like the students at Saeki much better than those at Wake. Saeki students seem to be smarter and most of them try harder. Even the ones who aren't intelligent at least aren't a complete nuisance. I'm not sure of any explanation for this, but I think it may have something to do with a smaller student body, thus ensuring that each students gets more personal attention. At four I walk to a community center in Saeki to teach a conversation class for adults. It's very ill-attended and I often only have two or three students. They are all women, most of them are middle-aged, and they are all tolerably good at English. I don't terribly mind teaching my Saeki adult class because it's directly after work and I'd have to wait until 6 to catch the bus anyway.

On Wednesday, I go once again to Wake Junior High. Biking in the cold morning air has been somewhat dreadful, but it's getting better now, so that it's not so terribly cold as it was about a month ago. I usually teach three classes of 9th graders on Wednesdays, and I often have the entire class time to do whatever I want. Sometimes this is harder than having a plan to follow because I have to come up with my own games and fill 50 minutes worth of class time. This Wednesday we played a Valentine game and then the students made their own Valentines. Most were creative and clever, some were unintelligible, and at least one was obscene.

Wednesdays are horrible because I have to work all day and then I am able to come home for but a few hours. I've always hated the feeling of getting home from some kind of work with the knowledge that after only a short respite I'll have to go out again for some other kind of work. That is how my Wednesdays are and I hate them. I don't necessarily hate my adult conversation classes in Wake on Wednesday nights, but I hate having to go to them. There are more students than at Saeki, but it often fluctuates. Some nights, I have 10 or 15 students per class, other nights, like last night, I only have four or five. I never blame them for not coming, nor do I feel bad about it myself. If I were them, I probably wouldn't come either; I only wish that I had the option not to show up for class without any prior notice.

On Thursdays, I either go to Saeki Junior High or visit an elementary school. Both are fine with me, although for days on which I go to elementary schools, I come home by 1.30, and my lessons are all planned for me and I get to act like a celebrity. Today, unfortunately, I was at Saeki Junior High and I had nothing to do at all. The students were taking some tests or something and I had no classes to each. As such, I sat at my desk in my uncomfortable office chair and read a book most of the day. I also have to wait until 6, two hours past my normal ending time, for the bus to bring me back to Wake. Today, I got a ride from Urakami-sensei, Saeki's JTE.

Then, on Fridays, I go to Wake Junior High once again, and I teach four classes of 7th graders. Fridays are never so bad, both because I like the 7th graders and it's only a half day, so I leave school at one and have the rest of the day off. It's a bit difficult teaching four classes in a row, and I feel very tired by the end of it all, but I usually have the option to go home and take a nap after work, so that's nice.

And that's my week. This weekend, like usual, I'm traveling somewhere. I'm going with a group of people down to Shikoku, the island directly to the south of Okayama Prefecture, and the smallest of the four main islands that compose Japan. It should be an interesting weekend, at the least, and a lot of fun, I hope.

Ako and the rest

2007-02-04T13:22:00.000+09:00

It was a relatively easy week at school because I didn't teach too many classes. In the ones I did teach, I didn't have to do very much. On Thursday, I went to a large elementary school in Wake, Honjo Elementary. The class sizes were more like what I'm used to with American elementary schools: at least a couple classes in each grade and about 30 kids in each class. In a country where the population is continually decreasing, most elementary schools only have a few students in each grade. I went to one which only had about 6 students in 1st and 2nd grades.

But, Honjo was fun, the kids, as always, treated me like a celebrity, and the teachers were nice and well-prepared. The highlight of my day there, however, came after lunch. I ate with a class of 6th graders and they asked me the usual questions during lunch time: favourite food, colour, place in Japan, etc. After lunch, a few students crowded around me and asked me questions about sports or something. Then one students, obviously the class clown, asked me: "Do you like sex?" and then immediately went and hid somewhere, laughing his head off. The other students giggled and laughed and knew that he'd said something he wasn't supposed to. I laughed too and asked him where he'd learned that word, and then congratulated him for being the first student, thus far, to ask me that. I mean, I would've almost expected it from my 9th graders, but from a 6th grader? He's been watching too many American sitcoms.

On Thursday night, I went into OKC to eat dinner with Marisa, Tiffany, and Tiffany's friend visiting from the U.S., Susan. We ate at our usual ramen place, and it was quite good. Here we are in front of the restaurant. Tiffany thought it was so cold, but luckily, she finally got a hat.

On Friday I taught my usual four classes of 7th graders. They wrote letters to students at William Byrne Elementary in Burnsville. I told them that they might get a letter back. Most of the students copied word for word what I'd written on the board as an example, filling in the various blanks with their own details. A few creative and intelligent students came up with their own sentences and ideas, but those students are few.

On Friday evening, Annie and I met at Sunmall Video Rental and tried to find some Miyazaki movies. Miyazaki is a famous anime film director and I felt that I should probably see some of his famous movies to get more in touch with Japanese culture. I've seen one, Princess Mononoke, but no others. Unfortunately, they didn't have many of his movies on DVD. Annie and I said, "who uses VHS anymore?" We rented Howl's Moving Castle on DVD and watched it at Annie's place. It was very strange. I'm still not sure if I liked it or not; it was just really weird. On Saturday Bernie and I had planned to do something, but we didn't know what. She came over around noon and we had some tea, discussing our day's plan. We decided on Ako, a city about 15 minutes east of here, just over the border in Hyogo prefecture. Someone had told me it was a sizable city with some things to do; that wasn't entirely accurate. It's actually more deserted than one would think.

We found some castle ruins and walked around the walls. Bernie posed in the windy cold with the kanji in the mountain that many cities in Japan seem to have.Bernie and I climbed along the edge of the wall, with the castle moat covered in moss just below us and tried to imagine how anyone could ever prefer freezing cold to oppressive heat.
Ako is also famous for its 47 Loyal Samurai, some samurai who tried to avenge someone and then had to commit ritual suicide. If someone is forced to commit suicide, isn't it more like murder? Apparently not for the Japanese. Check out this somewhat poorly translated page for the story: http://japan.chez-alice.fr/Culture/Japan/47Ronin.htm
So, we looked at their scary statues, all 47 of them.We also checked out a shrine, Oishi Shrine, and threw some beans at a big picture of the devil for Setsubun, a Japanese festival when they throw beans at the devil to rid themselves of evil (apparently the devil really dislikes beans!). We took turns throwing some beans.
I also posed by my sign, the boar. That's right, it's my year now, The Year of the Boar, so what out!We then met Sarah and Boone and attempted to eat something at a small café. The waiter was incompetent and I ordered the last remaining French toast set and stupidly expected some syrup. Sarah never got her order and it was all very expensive. Completely useless.

Apparently after meeting Sarah and Boone I stopped taking pictures, because there are no more. We went grocery shopping however, and then wandered around until we could get a seat at a small pizza restaurant with their menu all in Italian. Italian is a hell of a lot easier to understand than Japanese, so it was a joy to read the menu. The pizza was also very very good, and rivaled the Pizza King, although it's different enough to warrant a separate category. We finished our Saturday with some tea at Sarah and Boone's and Bernie dropped me off at home.