Long Blog is Long

Spring break part one! I went to Tokyo for the first part.

Before I left for Tokyo on another accursed night bus, two things happened: one, my iphone broke on a bus, when I tripped and dropped it with remarkable force and accuracy, and two, I forgot my camera heading out the door. So, no photos for this next part, a pretty big part.

Anyway... I arrived in Tokyo after very little sleep at 5:30 AM. I went to Ueno first, which is kind of a park-ey area, though the “central park” of Tokyo is the Imperial Palace, which is off limits to the public for the most part - which strikes me, as an American I suppose, as completely insane. Anyway, Ueno has a big park. It’s famous for its cherry blossoms, which were just starting when I was there, and a the National Museum, which is where I planned to spend as much of my day as possible. Anyway, Ueno Park is terrifying at 5:30AM. Lots of hobos. Though not everyone sleeping on the ground was a hobo! Some people were there to snag a spot for sakura viewing later, by sleeping there. Also: freezing out. Also: a huge group of people was doing synchronized Tai-chi or something. Kind of freaked me out.

Because the museum was closed I decided to ride on a train, where it was warm and I could sit down. I went around the Yamanote line twice or so. The Yamanote line is a super famous train line that goes through a lot of famous districts, and is notoriously crowded, though on a saturday morning it wasn’t hard to find a seat. So, I watched people for two hours - the national past time of Japan is not, as you may have heard, video games and anime, it is looking fabulous in public. People get really dressed up, and ride around in trains, pretty much. Great people watching.

Eventually the museum opened and I made my way back, and spend four-ish hours wandering around. Lots of amazing Japanese art, with a room devoted to each kind of traditional Japanese craft - the katana, laquerware, kimono, dolls... lots of great stuff. A little light on the ukiyo-e, though, which I love, but there was a great Hokusai instantly recognizable as a Hokusai, of a particularly crafty looking eagle. Maybe there’s more of that usually - there was a big building undergoing renovations. There was also a big archaeology part, and a building devoted to statues taken from a particular temple, which was perhaps the most amazing part. Also a garden with some tea houses. Japan has a system of “national treasures” and the less important “valuable cultural property.” Every item in the museum is tagged with its appropriate rank. Quite a lot of Valuable cultural property, and a few “national treasures,” which they make a huge deal out of. Japan also has “living cultural treasures,” which are people who are masters at a specific Japanese craft or art. None of those in the museum, though they did have some pottery by these living masters.

Outside the museum again there was, bizarrely, in the park, a Japan / Pakistan friendship festival. I had seen the booths when I was there early in the morning but didn’t know what the hell was going on. So, unexpectedly, I had a really great pakistani-food lunch. Naan is great. I don’t get enough Middle eastern food. Also that day: weird bodily pains. Right after I ate lunch the inside of my right ear started hurting really badly, and hurt for pretty much the rest of the day. Before that, my eyes were really sore and producing a huge amount of sticky white eye goo. Maybe the air, maybe my body punishing me for not giving it any sleep.

I had gone to Tokyo to meet up with my brother, who was coming to Japan for spring break along with his Japanese teacher and some other students as a class trip. But he wasn’t coming till the evening so I rode around the loop one more time, went to Akihabara, the electronics-ey district, wandered around a used bookstore, went back to Ueno to try the western art museum, which I lingered in till it closed looking at its rather nice collection of impressionist paintings, including some nice Monet water lillies. Then I went to the nearest train stop to My/My brother’s Japanese teacher’s house, where I was going to meet them, and ate a hamburger and read until they were supposed to be there, then got picked up by my teacher’s cousin at the subway stop. They had just gotten there ten minutes earlier. That was the first day.

The next two full days, when I was with my teacher and tagged along with their trip, were quite fun. However I have kind of forgotten the exact order everything happened in. This is my best guess of how it all went down.

The first morning I’m pretty sure we went to Meiji Shine, first... which is a shrine. Famous, I guess. Caught a very traditional Shinto (in Japan, shrines are Shinto and temples are Buddhist) wedding procession in progress, and threw some coins in the collection box and did the traditional clapping/bowing thing. My favorite part was reading the emas, which are wooden boards people write wishes on in shrines. They’re always in Japanese, but Meiji Shine is a pretty famous tourist attraction so there were some english ones, including one with “I wish I could become a pony and ride a rainbow” written in a kid’s handwriting. In general... I prefer temples to shrines, for some reason. Temples are more interesting to me.

Then we walked around Harajiku, which is right next to the shrine, and is famous for being kind of hipster/fashion oriented. There was a pretty great store of clothing for dogs. Other than that, though, full enjoyment of Harajuku was probably blocked my my Y chromosome. All the stores were A) expensive and B) for women, pretty much. After that... everybody made Kinpaku, gold leaf, which is a Traditional Japanese Thing. You put tape where you didn’t want gold to be and then used glue and a thin leaf of gold, peeled back the tape and then did a clear glaze for permanence. I did a little box. The lady at the store who guided us through the process - which was mostly devoted to really nice gold leaf things professionals had done - looked exactly like a Japanese version of my cousin. Exactly. Then we ate take out! And my brother and I watched the Big Lebowski, which is a great movie.

The next day we woke up at 4:30 or so to go to Tsukiji fish market, which is a really big fish market. We are talking about a very large fish market, containing a staggeringly large number of staggeringly large fish. Kind of sad, to me, in an environmentally destructive sense. Lots and lots of fish - big tuna, live squid in tanks, shellfish... you name it. One of the students on the trip’s father works for an associated company out of Seattle, so we got a behind the scenes tour, which was cool. They drive the fish around on these crazy carts! Also, you know how auctioneers are completely incomprehensible in English? They are also incomprehensible in Japanese. Then the fish company people treated us to lunch (fish) and took us to their headquarters for some reason. We asked some polite questions about their business, but the cool part of their headquarters is that it was right next to the Imperial Palace, and we got a cool view of it from above. They are a very, very large fish company, I guess.

That afternoon, we hung out briefly at the teacher’s house, then the girls in the group (which was only four students, by the way) went off to do a cooking lesson, and my brother and I and the other boy went off to go to a famous soba restaurant, which has been around for like 400 years, or something. It was delicious, though one of the servers was standing right next to our table the whole time - not because of us, but because we were near the door and he was a greeter type.

The next morning Erich and I split off from the group and took the Shinkansen south to Osaka, which is where I am. I think I’ll end this post here because it’s already quite long, but unfortunately we still have two more camera-less days before we get to anything remotely readable, a.k.a. something with pictures.

Cosplay Weekend

Ok, Ok, Ok. I know it's been a month. There's a big apology post coming. For now, here are some funny pictures! I took them the weekend before spring break. I went to a cosplay (dressing up as Anime and Video game characters) parade in Den-den Town, the part of Osaka known for computerey, geeky culture. I'm not sure who's being referenced in these pictures at all, except for the last one, which is basically a power-rangers type kid's show character. My host brother is super into that show.
This is my favorite picture I took. All the creepy looking older guys taking pictures is priceless. Of course, I was taking a picture too, I suppose.


Not a huge fan of these costumes, but the collapsing inflatable castle was key to making the parade seem as surreal as it was. That, and the brass band, which I took pictures of but didn't include here.
Maids in every color!

Hiroshima

Last weekend I went to Hiroshima. The trip had two halves. The first half might be called the awful half, and the second the fun half.

The awful half started on the way there - I had decided to save some money and go to Hiroshima via night bus, which is what it sounds like. I left my host family's house at 9PM, boarded at 11:50 after wandering around looking for the terminal, and arrived at 6AM, having slept very little. I then spent six hours wandering around the city - I had bought a two-day pass that gave me unlimited cable car rides. I rode to the port, where I dropped my cellphone, wandered to a Book-Off (a big used book store chain) and bought two volumes of Doraemon just for fun before realizing I had dropped my cellphone, then backtracked to the port-ish area where it was happily located. I went to a starbucks I had seen from a cable car, and bought a drink hoping I'd be able to use the internet, but alas! no internet. Somehow six delirious hours had passed, and it was time for me to go to the A-Bomb museum.

I had gone to Hiroshima because one of the classes at Gansai Kaidai was having a field trip, and everyone was invited even if you weren't in he class, and there was to be a speech my an a-bomb survivor. You were supposed to see the museum before the speech, so I took the streetcar to the a-bomb dome and walked around the dome, the building that was left standing even though it was right near the epicenter of the blast (the blast came from directly above so the walls up, people think). I was circling it and thinking some rather depressing thoughts about war, when two Japanese men walked up and said they wanted to practice their English, and it turned out they were Jehova's witnesses, so that was weird and awkward. Then I walked through the museum. If you've ever been to the holocaust museum, it's a little like that. Hard to describe, certainly. Lots of very, very saddening stuff. Then, we heard a speech from a bomb survivor, which was also... hard. It seemed so... well, surreal I guess, something like that - hard to believe that things like that really happened. Descriptions and photos of Hiroshima after the bomb fell are like descriptions of... hell, or something. Too awful to describe.

That was the bad part. Weirdly, the day made a complete turnaround, and my afternoon after the horror of the a-bomb museum and speech was really enjoyable. I went to Miyajima, which is about an hour streetcar ride plus a fifteen minute ferry ride away from downtown Hiroshima. Which is, it should be mentioned, a really pretty city. Lots of canals, very clean-seeming, and the streetcars are really fun. You get to see the city as you ride, unlike, say, a subway.

Anyway, Miyajima is an island, a rather small one with some very fun landmarks. One of the iconic images of Japan is the big red Torii gate out in the water. Perhaps you've seen it. Anyway, that's Miyajima. It was low tide when I went, so I didn't get to see the picture-postcard kind of scene, but I could walk out to the gate and see it up close, out on the tide flats. So that was cool. It's really large. I hadn't realized how large it was. It's quite old so there were some splits in the wood, and people stick coins in there, and I am certainly not a believer in Shinto but I thought I should be polite to the gods and stick a coin in there anyway, and I thought it would be nice if I could find a coin from the year I was born, and the first coin I pulled out was indeed a coin from the year I was born, and I was tall enough to reach a place where I'm pretty sure it'll stay. I don't know, maybe people clean it out every once in a while. Maybe. But it's probably still there.

There's more to Miyajima than the gate, though! There's lots of old temples, especially near the top of the highest mountain on the island, and there was a gondola to the top, which my two-day metro pass covered, interestingly, so I took that to the top and walked down. Thanks to China's ridiculous pollution, which has been blowing in recently and been on the news, I couldn't see very far, at all, which is a shame because the view is supposed to be lovely. It was nice anyway, though. I wandered around for a while near the top, which was quite fun! It was kind of zelda-esque, which is a very good thing. I need to find more things to do that are zelda-esque. It was getting dark and I was incredibly tired so I went to my hostel.

The next day I went home, by train, regular train, commuter-kind-of-train, which took... all day. We caught a train at ten in the morning and I got home about... 8, I think. Anyway. We took some stops - I was doing this part with some friends - including one to Okayama, which is Momotaro's hometown. Momotaro... is a folk story, so that's a little like saying it was the gingerbread man's hometown. Riding in the train for hours and hours without sitting down was kind of hard. Anyway, that was my weekend. More or less. A post about the weekend after this one - where I went to a "Maid Parade," among other things - coming soon. Sorry for the lack of updates recently.

Sorry for no pictures; Blogger is being angry. I'll put them in the post tomorrow.

Tales from the Past: Nara

Today's tale is a tale from long ago. More than a month, anyway. My speaking partner invited me to go to Nara, which was the capitol of Japan from 710 to 784. It's a smaller city, but one with a good deal of history (and a good many UNESCO sites). We bought a one-day kind of card, which worked on all the trains and buses. It's still floating around my room somewhere. The train took about an hour. We ate at an Italian chain once we got there. It's been a while, so I'm a little sketchy on some of the details. Here are some pictures! No captions because I'm uploading them straight from the web. You see, the reason I never wrote this post is because I had forgotten my camera, and didn't have any pictures to put up with it. But recently my speaking partner sent me the ones she took.

Here's me feeding some deer! They're kind of scruffy looking but I think it's just the time of year. They run wild in Nara park, which is near Todaiji, the big temple we were visiting. They know exactly how many there are - I've forgotten the number but it's very specific. Anyway, you can feed them little wafers you can buy from vendors. Once you have them, they know you have them, and they swarm you. They nibbled some of my clothes and ripped my friend's (the floridian, for those who have been reading) jacket. It's a little scary, but also very fun. They just take it right from your hand. Sometimes they jump up and hoof you, though. I'm wearing my headphones in the picture, and one of them snagged them with its hoof, and I had to untangle it. When you don't have any food they're unintersted in you, and you can just go up and pet them. They're not really into it, though, as you can tell in the second picture.

Here's me looking dorky outside Todaiji. Seriously dorky. But Todaiji was cool. It's the world's largest wooden building, and it used to be bigger. It also houses an alarmingly large Buddha. There's a pillar in the back of the temple with a hole in it, large enough to fit through if you're relatively thin (I didn't try, they were kids in it at the time) and if you can fit supposedly you will find enlightenment in the next life. But, this hole, which is large enough to fit through, is the size of one of the nostrils on the Buddha in Todaiji. So: a large Buddha. Pictures of the nostril pillar, and the Buddha, at the Wikipedia.

We also went to another temple, notable for having the world's oldest standing wooden building. Also, it was incredibly cold, and the floridian took us on a quest to find ninja shoes he could purchase, which have the big toe in a separate little shoe of its own. I want to go to Nara again when it gets a little warmer.

Koko

I had a good day today. I had forgotten there was a quiz this morning and arrived having done zero studying. (Two sentences which do not usually belong together, right there) but after 120 seconds of glancing over the vocab list (and, well, having studied a lot of it before) I'm pretty sure I got 8 or 9 out of ten. Then, this afternoon, I walked to Hirakata (the nearest city, where I always set out from on my various adventures) and picked up my foreign resident registration card - which they have to me without uttering a word of complaint about the fact that yesterday was the last day I was supposed to be able to pick it up. Then, I went to the local starbucks (so exactly the same all over the world) and got a hot coffee and access to pure, unfiltered grade A internet. I'm currently violating copyright at more than 300kb/second. Which is far from a record, but feels so, so good. Each byte is a drop of water on my dry, withered hard drive. No real water on my hard drive, though, please.

Anyway, here are some pictures of the family dog, Koko, who is a Chihuahua. He (she? actually I don't know) is half the size of a cat and convulses and shivers constantly. If you put him between your hands... he shakes. Constantly. It kind of seems like there's something seriously wrong with him... especially when he compulsively licks my clothes, putting wet patches on them. He seems to like me a lot, but maybe that's just because I don't torment him like my four and six year old host siblings do. He crawls up onto me and lays on my chest whenever I lie down. Pretty cute, but... not really all there. I've been missing my home dogs, which are... large dogs. Very large. And, though I suppose who really knows, and anyway we're talking about dogs, I feel like are much smarter. Captions from the Band's "We Can Talk," form Music from Big Pink.

Two Weekends!

Lots of time has gone by! And my title image changed. I think it might be broken. Well, we’ll see if I can fix that. But lots of other things have happened!

Last friday, I went to Kyoto and wandered around in the shopping district. Nothing really super exciting happened. Fun looking in windows though! And I had some doughnuts, which were not real doughnuts because this is japan. They were sweetish bread rings. Didn’t really take any pictures. I wandered to a museum, but didn’t really go in. For some reason I was really out of it.

That sunday, though, was a ton of fun! I left early and went to Toji, which is a pretty standard temple by Kyoto standards, standards which, it should be noted, are incredibly high. I went into the temple and looked at the statues and architecture, and got to go into the pagoda, which are very rarely open in temples, and took a look at all the paintings on the inside, which were many centuries old and in very good condition! I wish I had been able to climb it, but they only let you see the first floor. It would have been really fun to go up in, too, because it’s the highest in Kyoto! Or maybe Japan, or something. It has some kind of height record. It’s five stories high, but I’m not sure if a pagoda-story is the same as a regular story. It could be bigger.

But I wasn’t there just for the temple! I was there for the market. It was about half antiquey kind of stalls, but there was also food and clothing and other miscellaneous ephemera. Some of it was a tad pricey. I was looking at a little brass lion-ey creature an inch or so tall, but pleasingly hefty. I asked the price and there was one zero whose presence surprised me. Same thing when I asked about an old map. I did buy a little bell, though, which jingles pleasingly amongst my change. Then I saw a cooler bell at another stand, and felt kind of like an idiot. But whatever. Still enjoying it. I also had a fabulous lunch! Fair food is always fun. Picture attached. Takoyaki, little octopus dumplings which are a local specialty, and roasted corn. And a soda. That afternoon I wandered around Nijo castle, which is not really a castle because the castle burned down, but there’s still a pretty cool palace. It featured the famous nightingale floors, which squeak when you walk on them. Sounded more like mice than nightingales, but whatever! Lots of very delicate metalwork around the beams and doorways.

Then during the week, on tuesday, I took a field trip to a grade school! I went around from class to class with some other exchange students and did a different activity in each room. The kids were super cute and practiced their english on me. I wowed them with my kendama skill. Those japanese tops are pretty tricky though. I’ll have to pick one up and master it.


This weekend followed a somewhat similar pattern in that friday was a little aimless. I wandered around Osaka with my speaking partner, in the shopping district. Picture: the Glico man, famous Osaka landmark. Hadn’t really seen Osaka at all. Kind of fun... but shopping isn’t that fun for me. You know, Y chromosome and what have you. Well, that and not a lot of money to spend on anything. There have been a couple of times when I’ve thought, man, I could blow some serious spending money here. Didn’t happen when I was in the shopping district, actually, but it did later when I went to pokemon center, which is a shop that only sells pokemon-related things. It also happens at temples sometimes - they usually sell some really lovely wooden Buddhist rosaries which are rather pricey. I might have to pick one up before I leave. Anyway, pokemon center was full of pokemon things. It was... really really fun to wander around in, actually.

The next day I was by myself, and went to Kyoto to see the plum blossoms. Kitano Tengu, the shrine I went to, is famous for them. Lots of different varieties in a ton of different pinks. I caught them at their peak, and had a really lovely time wandering around the grounds. Took a ton of pictures. I walked to the outskirts of kyoto after that and went to Ryoanji, which is famous for (and synonymous with, though there’s a lot else there) a zen rock garden, which is notable for being very very old and for the fact that it is impossible to see all the rocks in the garden at once. Supposedly, only by enlightenment can you see all fifteen at once. I was a little bit disappointed at first, because the garden is actually very small, but looking at it became... rather hypnotic. It seemed a little like one of those cross-your-eyes at it pictures. The temple was nestled in the hills, in a very cute japanese way. I’m a little bit sick of it being winter - all the photographs in the pamphlets you get at the temples show these beautiful summer trees and sakura, but now they’re much more drab. One of the reasons I went to the rock garden was because it’s a rock garden and winter shouldn’t matter. It did, though, somehow. Anyway, thanks for reading.

My room!

Here are some pictures of my room! And here is an explanation of what's going on in them, I guess. So. My house kind of has a double life. One half of it is new, western style, hard floors and carpets. This side has a kitchen, a living area (known to me as the warm area) and two bedrooms, one for my host brother and sister and the other for my parents. The other half is where my room is, and it's the old style part. Sliding doors (the paper on mine is pretty torn up, but I imagine that's just because the kids thought is was fun to poke their fingers though at some point), tatami, open ceilings, and the only bathroom: eastern style. If you know what that is, you just heard a dun dun DUN plot twist noise. No one ever really hangs out on the old side, because it's winter and it's very cold. Maybe they will when it gets hot. There's a very complicated/expensive looking Buddhist altar in the room diagonal to mine. I think it's to my host mothers' parents. Or my host father's, but somehow I get the feeling it's for hers, though I have no idea why. The entryway to the house is in the old part too. Anyway, here's my room. Pretty spare. It's only half of a somewhat bigger room, divided by some roll-up wall looking thing. The other side is storage.

Coming soon: my crazy kyoto weekend! Not that crazy. But fun! And with some good pictures.