Climing up a mountain

All over Japan near shrines you can find what are called torii gates, which are usually either red and made of wood, or stone.  He's an example of one.  Oh yeah, I saw that one up close when I was there too, but it's a pretty extreme example as usually they aren't that gigantic.  Usually you only see one gate by itself, but that wasn't the case on my last day to Kyoto.  The last place I saw at Kyoto is a pretty famous place.  Perhaps people have seen pictures of it before? Fushimi Inari is a shrine built up a mountain, and the distinguishing feature is just how many of those gates it has.

Now I didn't get to climb up any other mountain during my time in Japan.  Originally I wanted to go climb Fuji but I realized that I didn't have the hiking gear or a nice coat that would make it safe.  Fushimi Inari on the other hand doesn't need any special gear, just a couple hours of your time and a camera to take great pictures of the spot.

I wanted to climb this mountain early on during our visits to Kyoto, but we weren't really in good shape for that most of the time.  All of the walking that kyoto required left david in a state where climbing wasn't an option.  But I didn't fare any better, as I ended up with blood-filled blisters on my feet from walking, which would make the climb painful and slow.  But I think there was one day where we really didn't see very much so that we could rest instead.  After that, we took off for the mountain.

The main thing to see there, I think, is the thousands of gates.  Because of that, instead of reading my description of the place its probably best to take a look at the pictures and videos I took.  I took a video of almost all the climb up to show the sheer amount of gates on this mountain, and it definitely is in contrast to a normal shrine.  With as many gates as there were, parts of the trail seem less like a collection of gates and more like a tunnel.  As for the reason there are so many gates - people are able to pay to get a gate put up in their name, and you can see the owners names written on each.  I think the gates are pretty expensive though, up in the thousands of dollars.  However apparently for those who can't afford that, there are mini gates that are about the size of someone's hand or head.  At the very top of the mountain I saw hundreds of these mini gates.

There wasn't only one path up the mountain however.  There were paths going out from the main one we took, and on these paths there were spots that looked significant, but I really had no idea what they were.  Some locations made me think they were graves or mini shrines to minor gods.  Other locations looked to be donation boxes and prayer areas.  I took a picture of most of the interesting looking spots on the mountain but I can't really say much about what they were.

The mountain wasn't a very steep climb most of the time, but it varied and I was pretty tired on the way up so it was slow going.  I remember that halfway up the mountain there was an area with a few buildings.  Shops and surprisingly even homes.  I'd hate to be someone that had to supply the shops, as it would mean taking an hour or so walk up a mountain as far as I know.

On my way back down, because I was slow climbing, it was getting dark.  I ended up getting separated from david but I didn't think it was a problem because all I had to do was go down to get to the bottom of the mountain, or so I thought.  Turns out there were forks in some of the paths, and I took the one that went downward partially because it seemed like the best way to get down, and also because I saw a cat and followed it to take pictures.  I ended up at a dead end 10 minutes later with nobody in sight, so that was bad but I figured I could just call david up on the cell phone to tell him I would take a while to catch up.  While backtracking to the fork I previously saw, I came across a lady outside of what must have been her home (imagine living on this mountain!) and she told me to go on the path that went upward, as it did eventually go down, and that's the path I wanted.  Oh well.  I think the cat that I saw was hers, too.  She had a few cats around her house.

At the halfway point with a resting area and shops, I got to take some pictures of the city from above.  A nice night view, but I don't think the pictures came out as good as what I saw in person.  At any rate, it's better to see the mountain than to explain it in words, so go take a look at the videos I took!

Even more pictures!

If you just love viewing thousands and thousands  of pictures, you'll love the fact that I just added a link on the side of my page to my friend David's images.  Between the two of us, I'm sure there's enough pictures to last a lifetime so enjoy!

My visit to Kyoto!

So, last time I wrote about how much time I spent getting to kyoto and going from place to place around it.  Despite the difficulties, I still did get to see a lot of the things I wanted to.  I had to cut some cool things out of my list to see because they required reservations, but otherwise we got to see a great deal of what we wanted to.

The first day was nearly pointless.  We got to our first destination so late that it was closing time for that, so we had to move on.  It's unfortunate since we never did go to that place despite it being a big attraction.  Another day we tried to go back but it was closed that day and it was just our bad luck.  Anyway, we moved on to go near the imperial palace, however we couldn't really go inside it.  We just walked around the park that surrounded it.  Since we got a bit lost during our trip from the first destination to the imperial palace, we arrived a bit too late and most people were leaving or gone.  There wasn't too much to see but at least we did go near the palace.

After that day, we learned how to use the train system better and woke up earlier so that we could see more things in a day.  However we never did get to see a few things ( for example,
http://www.japan-guide.com/e/e3941.html http://www.japan-guide.com/e/e3929.html http://www.japan-guide.com/e/e3907.html for example  ) because of their location.  Kyoto was similar to Nara in that it had a lot of old shrines and temples to see, but it was different in that everything was spaced farther apart and trains did not always have stops near the things that we wanted to see.  So, of the things we missed, there not only were a few that had reservations we never made, but there were a few that had no train stop near them so it would have taken a long time just to walk from one to the next.

There's two good examples of how I wasn't able to see something due to its location.  The first is the day where we wanted to see three locations that were, relative to everything else, nearby each other.  On that day the closest train station to the first location resulted in a 40 minute walk from the station to the gold pavilion, and then from there we walked another 20 minutes or so to the rock garden, after which we were going to walk to the last place but didn't have the time and had to turn back.  And boy, all that walking was not very fun.  Especially not in that high humidity, high temperature weather.  I'm reminded of how I thought I wasn't going to spend a lot of money on food every day and that while I didn't, a lot of the money that I did spend each day was on things to drink to stay hydrated.

Anyway, there were about two other places that I wanted to go to, but instead of one long walk from place to place to place, there was simply no train anywhere nearby an isolated place and it would have taken a large part of the day just to travel to the one place and back.  One of such places was the silver pavilion.  Just look at this map, and see how much of a distance a train station was from the silver pavilion (ginkakuji) , compared to the gold pavilion (kinkakuji) which took over a half hour to walk to!  Of course, it wasn't really that travel would take up a whole day, but that most famous locations would close at 5PM so our "days" were shorter than I'd have liked.

We did still get to see some pretty nice places.  Heian Shrine was a nice, free trip.. although we must have made a common traveler's mistake since we tried to get there by walking down the main street from the station closest to it, and stopped at the first fancy, old looking building we came across only to find a sign that said this isn't the heian shrine.. we ended up at a martial arts school if I remember correctly.  Oops.

We also saw, but did not go near or in Kyoto tower.  It wasn't nearly as tall as the sky tree or as cool looking as the tokyo tower so we skipped it to save time for other things.  By the way, the gold pavilion and rock garden I mentioned earlier were very beautiful.  The gold pavilion was quite the sight to see, from the nice pond constructed around it to the gold-covered building itself.  Both it and the rock garden were very peaceful places to be.  Another beautiful place I saw was Byodoin temple.  Yet another temple, like the golden pavilion, that was surrounded by a sort of pond.  Very iconic perhaps, as it's the only building on the coins they have, being on the reverse side of the 10  yen coin.

Oh yes, and among other places there was also the world's longest wooden structure, Sanjusangendo.  I have no pictures of the inside since there were 1001 sacred statues that nobody could take photos of, but it was interesting to read about the significance of them, and it was quiet and peaceful despite the many people there.  I did manage to get a few pictures of the outside of it however, showing how long the building was.  Apparently it used to be used by archers to practice by shooting arrows from one end of the long building to a target on the other end.  Judging by how long the building was when I saw it, I thought that was pretty impressive.

I might still be leaving a few locations out, for example a famous temple I went to with my friends during a school trip, rather than on my own.  I'll be sure to add more if I did forget anything, but in the meanwhile I'll write about my trips up a mountain, and to an island, next post.

Kyoto : unfortunate transportation

After getting to Osaka and realizing there wasn't really much to do in the area that was worth the time, we took most of the remaining time to visit Kyoto.

Kyoto had a huge amount of famous places to visit, but I quickly found out that unfortunately I wasn't going to be able to visit everywhere that looked nice.  There just wasn't enough time to do everything.  The first problem was where we were staying in Osaka.  We were located in a place that wasn't convenient for people who want to travel to kyoto.  Even though kyoto is located nearby if you were to look at a map, there were many trains required to get from our hostel in osaka to the kyoto station, and that took a bit of time every day.

In order to get to kyoto we would have to take a train from one end of osaka to the other.  We were nowhere near the osaka station, which is the best way to get to kyoto.  The first set of trains we took to get to osaka station would take between a half hour to an hour since one connection came pretty infrequently.  Then, we would need to take another train for a half hour to get to kyoto station.  However, before we did that every day we would stop for lunch in the underground mall of osaka or somewhere nearby.

Once we did get to kyoto station, depending on where we wanted to go we sometimes had to take a local train to the station nearest to our destination.  However, the two problems with kyoto was that most things we wanted to see were between 10 minutes to 1 hour away from the nearest train station, and that most things were not located close to each other.  There was a bit of back and forth walking to get from a station to the destination and back before heading to the next place.

So, due to our location in osaka, trains, and walking time, it was hard to see as many things in kyoto as I would have liked.  It wasn't absurd so much as that I had an unusually quick and easy time getting from one place to another in the other cities that it was slow going in comparison. If I knew this ahead of time, I could have picked a different hostel to save some time.  But even then that wouldn't change how kyoto was laid out, and the only way I could have seen everything was if I had stayed in Japan longer.

On Osaka - not much

After Nara I made my way over to Osaka, which is the place that I planned to stay the longest after Tokyo.  The original plan was to stay in Osaka because of its close location to Nara and Kyoto, so that we could just take a train between the 3 places and only need one hostel.  However, the hostel in Nara looked so nice that I changed that plan and reduced the time that would be spent between Osaka and Kyoto so that we could stay in the Nara guesthouse.  That worked out really well, since I had exactly as much time as I needed to see Nara, had a great time there, and really enjoyed the place that I stayed at.  I can't say much of the same about the Osaka hostel however.

I was misinformed when I picked the hostel for Osaka so I ended up picking one with less than perfect ratings even though the reviews of the place didn't really say what was wrong with it.  When I got there I found out that there were a few things that made it inconvenient.  Unlike the old house in Nara I stayed at, this building was no antique and so I thought it might be more comfortable.  However, the stairs in this building were very steep and narrow which made it very hard to get luggage up.  David tried to get two suitcases up at once and was about to fall down the stairs because it just wasn't possible, but I was below so that didn't happen.  We got our suitcases up to our 3rd story room and checked out the place.

The whole time we had poor internet and owners who really never talked to us - they seemed unfriendly.  Unlike the other places we had been to before, we were the only white people in this hostel but it seemed that almost everyone else was korean, which is odd.  The first few nights there were difficult because the air conditioner in the room was turned on so low on purpose that I couldn't even feel it.  Someone must have said something since after that we had proper air conditioning for the rest of the stay and I could sleep without trouble.  There wasn't much else to say about the place.  Nothing special happened there.  Nobody talked to us and there was nothing interesting about the hostel.

About Osaka, we didn't spend much time around the area.  When I got there I came to the conclusion that going to Osaka was a lot less important than I thought.  It's the second biggest city in the country, but we had already been to Tokyo so it had nothing that we hadn't already seen.  Beyond that, we had been to one of the more populated parts of Osaka before since it wasn't that far from where we went to school for 6 weeks.  However that also meant that we knew where to shop and get food.

On shopping and food, we knew of a 10-floor electronics chain building that generally had one or three floors of the top dedicated to clothes and food.  But in this particular building, the basement floors connected to an underground shopping mall that seemed to go on forever.  One mall would connect to another underground and you could get lost in there.  With all of the multi floor super stores, sidestreets of strip malls that go on for a great distance, and huge underground malls in various places I had the thought that if I knew how many places to shop there really were in any area, I might find that the whole country is just a very large mall.

Anyway, we spent the first day or two in Osaka.  Finding out where we were staying and where there was to eat, as well as finding a movie theater so we could see batman, which we saw in english with japanese subtitles that we ignored.  And that was fun.  Speaking about movie theaters, I had seen two movies in total there but both times nobody left until after the credits.  I think that's just how it is done there.  Very patient anyway.

Instead of spending half of the time in Osaka and half in Kyoto like the plan was, we decided to spend most of the time in Kyoto since the list of things to see was long and it took a while to get there with all the connecting trains.  Next post is on Kyoto!

Back home!

I'm back in america now, safe and at home.  It was a long boring series of flights which involved a lot of sleeping, followed by a lot of staying awake since I was stuck at an airport overnight.  At least I found a place to use a power plug so I could use my computer all night while at atlanta.

Going though customs on the US side was as easy as it was on the Japan side.  Airport security is still more obnoxious here but at least customs was not trouble.

Brought back my whole new suitcase of things I bought, and even the old suitcase made it without falling apart!

I'm now going to have some work with adjusting my sleep schedule 11 hours.  But now I finally get to relax after 2 months of heavy studying and schoolwork followed by every day being busy with traveling.  New York is also pretty hot right now, but relative to japan it is cool so I am glad for that.

I still have more to write about my trip, as well as thoughts and interesting things I saw in japan!  My blog isn't done yet, but I wanted to let everyone know that I am home!


PS : I heard it's sort of hard to view my pictures online because there are so many and internet might be slow to get them one by one.  So, when I have all of them online I will package them into one single file that people can download.  It will still take a while but at least everyone will be able to do it at once overnight and then view each at your leisure.

Communication in japan part 2

                In the Tokyo hostel, we were one of the few who spoke Japanese although there were others so we were not that special.  Yet still, the people at the front desk were very friendly and one of the most cheerful girls had conversations with us in Japanese once or twice, like when she had recommended us a place to eat.

                At the nara guesthouse, when I arrived I spoke in Japanese to the best of my ability just as I have done everywhere else – even in situations where a Japanese person says something in English, perhaps assuming we don’t know Japanese, I will respond in Japanese unless the situation doesn’t call for it, just to be nice.  So in the guesthouse, I spoke in Japanese as we were taking care of the check-in procedure and the girl staff member was surprised and happy to find out that we knew Japanese and wanted to let all of the other staff know as well.  They were very happy, and wanted to hear about our backstory about how we were traveling after being international students.  From then on the staff tried to speak in Japanese to us but checked to make sure if we understood some of the more difficult words they used.  They kept saying how good we were at Japanese, even to some of the other people but I tried to be humble and say that I’m not quite good yet, still a beginner and still studying.

                An amazing thing happened the day after that, again in nara.  That day we were off to see the first of the shrines and temples I had planned to see in nara.  Plans changed that day after meeting a man in the local park.  We were walking buy when he said to himself “it’s hot out today isn’t it” in Japanese, and I had responded something like that yes, it was hot out today, but thankfully not as hot as it was in Tokyo where we just came from.  This basically shocked the man as he was like wait, you know Japanese?  He was extremely happy to meet visitors who knew Japanese and got up off the bench and wanted to talk with us while we walked.

  

He eventually decided to give us a tour of the area as we shared stories about our travels and heard about his stories.  He was a retired man, but took it upon himself to study English in his spare time.  He told us that he would watch tv and read in English for practice, and he was pretty good!  He said that he would take walks in the park once a week so we just happened to be in the right place at the right time.  And just like that we made friends with a stranger in japan, and had conversations in Japanese for a few hours.  He eventually walked us to the local shopping mall and gave us free lunch!  Afterwards he had to go since it had been a few hours, but before he went I made sure that we all got a group photo!  I never did learn his name, but we talked about a whole bunch of stuff – even if some of the more in depth explanations of some content in the shrines and temples was impossible for us to understand.  It really made our day, and has been one of the highlights of our trip.  Just to meet and talk to random locals.  Befriend Japanese people, and exchange stories.  It was a really great thing to do and it made us feel really awesome for the day.

We had another awesome experience the next day when we traveled to the location of the original imperial palace.  There weren’t many people there for like I said I thought nara was a lot less populated than it should have been.  Only like 5 visitors in the building at a time, with maybe 5 or 10 volunteers or staffs and guards.  One of the volunteers/staff had come up to us and given us a pamphlet with information about the place in English.  I thanked him in Japanese and said that while I can understand a little Japanese, in a place like a museum it’s very useful for me to have an English explanation.  He must have been surprised that I knew Japanese at all since when he went back to his table he must have talked with the people nearby to tell them about how they had white visitors that spoke Japanese.

 I say that because then later we had a guard come up and start asking us questions in Japanese – the place was interested about us.  So we told him that we were previously students at konan university which he knew of, and then we told him about where we have been and where we are traveling to.  He thanked us for talking to him and then as we looked at some of the rest of the stuff in the palace we could hear him on the other end of the room telling the others about how we were students at konan university, and so on.  They all sounded very excited.  On our way out as we were about to walk off the grounds we saw the guard come out of some building with more papers and pamphlets in Japanese about the place.  He gave us these gifts and said maybe we could use them for studying Japanese.  So basically, we left a great impression on the people there that day for us to have been given gifts and be talked about just for talking Japanese.  And once again that made our day and made us feel awesome.

After these events we started thinking that we had too high expectations on how much Japanese visitors would know.  It was a very disappointing thing but also a very cool thing.  It seems that because almost no tourists know Japanese and all expect the Japanese to know English, that by comparison we had become the coolest people around just by having studied Japanese for only a year or two.  I told david that we have super powers now.  That we can brighten up the day of a Japanese person just by talking, since we are like the only white people around here that know any Japanese.  We often get complimented, and received gifts, a free tour and a free lunch.  Just by knowing a little bit of Japanese I think we are really getting more out of our vacation than a normal tourist would, just by the simple but powerful pleasure of being able to be friendly and talk to locals.

Unfortunately the people in Osaka didn’t seem to be as friendly.  Nothing bad has happened but the people of Osaka don’t seem to care as much or don’t want to talk as much as the people of nara.  But then again, Osaka is a big city and either we aren’t as unique there, or the people aren’t as friendly to tourists.  So, Osaka had little talking involved.

In my next set of posts I’ll talk about Osaka and Kyoto!  Although, I’m posting this from America already.  My trip ended!  But there’s still more to write.

Communication in japan part 1

                A while back I wanted to write a blog post about my interaction with Japanese people after the study program had ended, but before I got around to post it online my thoughts on the matter changed after events at nara.

                Prior to nara, I didn’t really get many opportunities to practice my Japanese, and didn’t need to use it at all if I didn’t want to.  In Tokyo, our roommates were from Canada and Australia, and knew no Japanese and got by just fine.  So I could have been like them, and used only English and survived.  But I feel like they didn’t leave the best impression on people they met by doing that – it might be rude to go to a country and expect them to communicate in your language instead of theirs.  It’s not like the country and everyone in it is just there to serve the tourists. 

So, I used Japanese as much as possible in an effort to fit in and be polite while traveling.  But there wasn’t much that required me to speak at all.  During my time in Tokyo I had used Japanese to talk to policemen/guards twice.  Once was when trying to find that damn movie theater, where we had asked for directions.  And the other time was when I was at a shrine and wanted to know the characters to properly write one of my teacher’s names rather than writing it in a less proper way.  I was able to ask a passing guard to write the character on a paper for me after explaining what we were trying to write.

Beyond that, there was ordering food.  Sit down restaurants and fast food places alike were pretty easy where I would just say the name of the item and ‘please’ in Japanese, or if I didn’t know how to say the name of the item I would just point and say ‘this please’ in Japanese.  There wasn’t much to getting food.

                Also, when walking back from skytree and to Tokyo tower we must have went some back street and stood out because some Japanese person walked up to us and just wanted to start talking. It was as if we were special since on the main street you could find many white people if you wanted to talk to one.  But perhaps it was our apparent age that shocked him, as if we looked like we might know a bit of Japanese to be able to be out here by ourselves?  So we talked to him about how we were international students studying Japanese, and he talked to us about how that was really awesome and that he was glad to hear it, and how we was trying to study Spanish now – he could already speak English, but we spoke mainly in Japanese.  It really made our day to get to talk to just some local guy on the street in Japanese and have it go over well.  He was a very nice guy.  We just talked for a few minutes and then went our separate ways.

                I’ve had more than one encounter like that, especially back in my host family’s city.  But for the most part I hadn’t used Japanese a lot, as there really wasn’t much of a chance to use it.  But my thoughts on the matter changed when going to nara.

Nara: destinations and deer

               Nara was very convenient for a traveler like me.  There were a few major landmarks to see and about half of them were in walking distance of where I stayed, while the others were lined up in a way so as to make a train ride quick and easy.  Me and david saw temples, temples, shrines, temples, temples, a park, and the old imperial palace.  Everything in the region was built between the late 600s to the late 700s to my knowledge, so it was interesting to get to see all of the very old buildings.  The shrines and temples were extremely cool to see, with one of the temples being perhaps the oldest in the country, and another having a pagoda that was the second tallest in the country.

                Also, deer!  Unlike deer everywhere else I have seen, nara is known for its deer which while wild are not afraid of people and can often be seen walking or resting around the city and hording around people with deer snacks in the park.  That was really amazing and I think I got a few pictures of me petting some deer and also a video of some guy running away from deer because he didn't expect they would want the deer food he bought as much as he thought.

                There was something slightly disappointing about nara however, and I started to notice following my visit to the old imperial palace.  The palace was surrounded by pretty much nothing, and the building itself is not necessarily a recreation of the original palace, as too little was known about the original which was lost, other than the length and width as measured by information gathered from the grounds.  So the imperial palace building that we had seen was an educated guess at what it may have looked like, using data from the grounds as well as knowledge of architecture style of the time.

                According to some reading that I have done, the historical significance of nara was neglected until the later 1900s in japan, and nara hadn’t been as popular since the capital was moved to kyoto.  I felt there were too little people visiting the temples and shrines in nara, and  I thought that was unfortunate since it was a very interesting and beautiful place to visit.  It just seemed too quiet for such a historically significant city. 

                But because nara was a bit quiet, perhaps me and david stood out a bit more.  And the fact that we stuck out turned out to be one of the coolest parts of visiting nara.  Next post is on my interaction with people in japan!

Easier way to find my photos

I should have done this sooner, but I noticed that my post with my photos link had been viewed a lot, so I put the link to my photos on the side of the main page now.  I hope that helps!

A first look at nara - the hostel

After the train ride from Tokyo I took earlier, I ended up in Kyoto, the nation’s capital city.  But the final destination was nara, the nation’s first 'permanent' capital.  Of course permanent is a bad word to use, but that’s what I saw something else describe nara as.  Nara was used as the nation’s capital around the 700s, but not for very long before the capital ended up being relocated to Kyoto.  Nara isn’t as easy to get to by train as the other destinations I had been to before.  It’s on the end of a line, and the train used to get there seemed a bit older than some of the others we had used in the past – it made me think that nara isn’t a common destination.

                We ended up in nara a lot later in the day than expected, and I dragged my suitcase quite a way to the guest house – it seems that its wheels are about done for and I might need to get another. We missed the guesthouse  at first but some locals must have thought we looked a bit out of place so an old woman and a kid came up to us and told us basically that we were one street away from where we should be.  Oh well.

                The guest hose that we stayed in was one of the coolest places in nara for me.  Unlike all of the other hostels/guest houses that we will be staying in, the house was about 100 years old and built in traditional Japanese style instead of the modern Japanese houses which are just like any other house.  This house was all wood floors, some stone walls with a sort of sand finish, had bedrooms with mats of straw.  The bedrooms had sliding doors that went from ceiling to floor, wall to wall.  The doors themselves were made of a wooden structure and a sort of paper cover so that the doors would let light in even when closed.  These sort of sliding doors were also used in place of some of the walls of our private room, with the purpose being to help cool or warm the room by basically opening the room up to the outside.  But since these sliding doors are delicate they aren’t suited for bad weather or good for security so our private room also had a secondary wooden door that could slide in to place and lock so that the set of sliding doors that formed one of our walls could be reinforced against weather or people outside. 

It’s difficult to explain the house in text so I took a video of it all.  Unfortunately the internet connection in this new hostel is very slow and is preventing me from uploading that video just yet.  But I do have this.

 Also two things – we didn’t have a normal bed, but one which we used during the night and then folded up and put in the corner/away to save room, as is more traditional.  Also, no air conditioning in that place.  It was hot all the time and we had to make the best of the ability to open the room up and use a fan.

               We ended up having a couples room I think, but it wasn’t a big deal.  It’s not like hostels are supposed to be private.  There was also a very old looking bathroom and living room.  It was a very cool place and  I thought whoever decided to give the old house new life did a good thing.

                Speaking of old houses. There were a lot in nara.  Either old or made to look old, some of the houses looked worn out but they still looked very nice just because of that old style of architecture.  I’d also assume even an old worn out house would still be expensive.

                Moving on to what we saw in the area!

Internet

In a new city now, Osaka, but Internet is an issue so I'm not sure when I will get the opportunity to write more. Nara was fun but short. Saw many traditional buildings and met a few Japanese people. I will write about it more when I can! Also yes, posting from a Krispy Kreme

Meanwhile in America

     I got news today that my pet cat squeeker is at a vet right now due to not eating anything in a while.  Tests are being done and she is being looked after by the vet.  I don't think we know if anything is wrong with squeeker yet, but it's horrible that I can't be in america to help out or at least be around for my pet.

      I have more that I will write about my trip in the coming days, but right now I am also worried for my cat.
   
     Let's all hope that squeeker is all right and can come back home soon!

Finishing up tokyo, heading to nara

Me and david wanted to see a few more things before we left.  First up was a life-sized gundam (giant, like, 6 story human piloted robot from a show of the same name).  This gundam was constructed years ago and to our knowledge had been torn down when whatever reason that it was put up was over.  Only I had just found out by chance that day that it had been re-assembled at some new classy shopping area on a man-made island in Tokyo.  So, david said we absolutely needed to go and I really saw no reason to go somewhere else for that day.  It was located at a fancy shopping mall that specialized in basically American shops.  Like American eagle and banana republic and so on.  Expensive American clothes mall.  That and the gundam café with life sized robot stationed on one side of the mall.  Kind of doesn’t fit in.  Anyway we got tons of pictures of that, and coincidentally happened to come only a minute before it started to move, which it does only 3 times a day for a few minutes each time.  So we were very lucky over all.  After, we bought stuff in the souvineer shop “gundam café” and sat down on the mall steps and took a break since it was raining.  David took that opportunity to say how awesome it was that we took over a year to study Japanese, work our asses off, travel halfway around the world and take another hard program all in Japanese all leading up to the moment where we get to see a giant robot in real life.  So, I guess it was pretty awesome after all.  I certainly had fun, and bought lots of stuff, and took lots of pictures.  At the very least, my friends sure will be jealous.

                The next day we wanted to go to the ghibli museum.  Ghibli is basically the only anime company that americans know.  It’s the studio that makes every anime film that makes it to theaters in America.  It’s more internationally recognized than other anime studios due to the style and plot just being more to the tastes of an international audience.  Oh, and it only does movies, not shows, to my knowledge.  So, because of that success it’s sort of like the Disney of anime or something along those lines, and it has a little museum somewhat outside of Tokyo.  Apparently it’s really hard to get to since it’s normally sold out on weekends.  I thought we might be able to go to a gift shop or something without needing a ticket, so I took that chance and walked over to it to find out that was impossible after all. There are little shops for this company all around the country so I will just have to look in more local locations for those sorts of souvenirs.  So, we took a long walk back to the train station and wasted like 3 hours overall.  But the walk was nice because I passed many kinds of houses and took a bunch of pictures of these houses so you all could get an idea of what a Japanese house looks like.  They are pretty uniform in dimension, being tall rather than wide, and all having not fences so much as solid stone walls.  You might also see how little parking space there is.  Japanese must be ridiculously good at parking cars.  I don’t think I could manage to park in the spaces that they have to.

                I forgot to say earlier but on the same day we went to go see the large robot we did go to see sky tree – the tallest building in the country, and Tokyo tower – a previously super tall structure.  They were right around the area and we did that our hostel was at, so we basically just followed the large structure in the sky until we were there.

                Finally, on the last day of our Tokyo trip, we headed out to a shrine – the meiji shrine, made in honor of the emperor and era of the same name that was a restoration period of japan in the early 1900s.  So, pretty important shrine.  It had a park surrounding it which was cool since it was completely shaded, and the shrine itself was quite large.  When we were there we of course took tons of pictures again, but I also came up with the idea to leave proof that we were there and to thank our teachers who helped us get to where we are.  There are small pieces of wood that you can write on and hang up with many others for the purpose of praying or thanking others.  I have pictures of all of this.  I bought one and wrote on it something like “We hope for the health, time, and strength needed to continue studying Japanese, and hope to return to japan again some day. [in Japanese] thank you very much sakamoto sensei and nakagawa sensei (our Japanese teachers in America who wrote letters that allowed us to be accepted into the program)”  and then signed our names in Japanese, dated it, and hung it up.  So now it is there for everyone to see, for proof that we have been there and to give proper thanks to our teachers for helping us to get here.  We took pictures so that we can show our teachers when we get back.  It was the highlight of that day I think.

                We got back early after that, and packed everything up, and now here I am, the day after, on a train to head to the next region – Japan’s previous, ancient capital called Nara.  There will be lots of old and beautiful areas to see most likely.  And I will take pictures of it all.

What else was there to tokyo?

We had planned to go to an aquarium, the national history museum of Tokyo, shibuya which is the fashion district of Tokyo… and that’s about it.

                The aquarium was as expected for the most part, since I already went to an aquarium with my host family only a few weeks ago.  The only thing that was really cool about it over the other aquarium were the squid that I saw.  They kind of danced in formation for the guests.  It was really nice to watch and I thought the squid were interesting creatures.  Oh, there were also a lot of tuna on display.  I knew tuna were big fish, but I never really thought about how thick or.. fat they were.  Other than that though, yeah another aquarium.  Not too much to say.

                As for the national history museum, we knew that we needed to walk through a park to get there and so we did.  Except it turned out that the park was better than the museum, because starting with the park and ending somewhere in the city of the district we were in were cultural items that people could visit.  We went against the plan of going to the museum until later in the day, and instead traveled along the trail finding temples and shrines which we took many pictures of.  It was very beautiful and a good example of why having a plan could be bad, and exploring might be better.

                The history museum itself was for me a bit boring.  It just went on too long for my attention span.  I didn’t start taking pictures until the later half of the museum, but basically it was a bunch of artifacts like bowls or documents or weapons and armor.  Some of it was interesting, but things like bowls put me to sleep.  Regardless, it was the national history museum so I am glad I got to see it as it had a nice large collection that I wouldn’t see in other areas of the country I imagine.  I also got some souvenirs at the place.

                Oh yeah, and we went to shibuya, the fashion district.  And basically left right away.  After seeing akibahara, shibuya was sure boring.  It was like a clean version of new York city if everything was just clothes and shoes shopping.  Much less interesting that akihabara, as anime and technology are much preferred to clothes.

                And you know, after going to the technology and anime district I was thinking where are all the movie theaters around here?  There were posters all over the place for a movie adaptation of an anime series I watched back in 2008 in my florida tech dorm.  I thought, hey since I saw this before and I really enjoyed it, I can watch this movie even without subtitles because I already know the story.  So I invited david to come watch it with me, even though he had never seen it.  He looked up a review and explanation of the movie online so that he didn’t need to know what was being said either.  And then we tried to find a damn movie theater.  And boy that was hard.  Not only are there, to my knowledge, 0 movie theaters in the technology district of Tokyo (is this crazy?), this movie was only playing at basically 5 theaters in the Tokyo region, despite being advertised all over the anime district.  And most of these theaters had some kind of restriction or odd way to get in to one or was too far out of the way.  We were lucky to find just one that we could go to, only an hour before it started and I had to buy the tickets online, using my Japanese cell phone for confirmation, and then rush off by train to a place we had never been before.. and then find it from the train station without a map.  We ended up asking a police man for directions in the local ‘police box’, or very small police station mainly for asking directions or getting help.

                The movie theater was in a mall just as it would have been in America.  And that movie sure was good, and unusually long for a cartoon movie at 2.5 hours.  It was definitely worth it, we enjoyed it a lot, but it sure was ridiculously hard to get to a movie theater!  Or at least for the movie we wanted.

                Next up is the last few days of Tokyo leading up to today.

Akihabara, or my favorite place to waste money

    Our Tokyo adventure started with shopping.  It didn’t end with shopping, but there was a lot of shopping all throughout the week.  Basically only in akihabara.  Our roommates at first did not go to akihabara because they didn’t know what it was, and later when they did go they never wanted to again, because it was too overwhelming and strange for them apparently.

 Akihabara is a district of Tokyo that is unique to the world in what you can find there as far as I know. Lots of Tokyo is like a clean version of new York city.  Big buildings and lights everywhere especially at night time.  Except Akihabara is even more exciting.  It was originally the electronics district of Tokyo and grew over time as electronics did.  But Anime and technology must go well together, because as anime became more popular it took over the area.  It’s a dual purpose area of Tokyo.  It’s the only place in the world I know of where certain anime goods can be bought, and its also a place with a hell of a lot of computer stores.  It’s great.

                But it’s also a bit like a flea market or bazaar.  The anime stores are all over the place, sometimes with different stores inside of one tall building, but other times with a large store crammed inside of a small, but again tall building.  Some stores were a bit like catacombs in how you had to navigate them.  And many of the stores I only went up so many levels because top floors tended to be adult material.  Just right out in the open like that. 

                There were also many girls in costumes on the streets trying to get customers for themed cafes or I think even brothels.  The place is really extreme and like my roommate said, overwhelming.  I had trouble navigating the place the first time I went, where there were certain stores I was worried about entering.  But the more times I went back the more I learned that none of the stores are anything that I needed to worry about, but just mind my own business and ignore certain content / stay on the lower levels.  Bought lots of anime goods and video game goods in the non-tech stores.

                As for the technology stores.. it went a bit like this – I pointed out the first technology store saying we needed to go there / go back to there, and then did that with the second and third.. and gave up after that.  Because unlike a normal large city where you might have to keep track of what kind of store you wanted to go back to, there were just technology stores at every corner so there was no need to keep track of them.  And that’s great.  I bought a few tech items when I was there – ones that I could make use of on the trip and that wouldn’t waste a lot of luggage space.  Speaking of luggage space, I did get a new suitcase which the cost was split between me and my friend since we are sharing it for extra room on the trip.  It seems to me that Japan doesn’t have a lot of cloth suitcases, only the more expensive hard shell kind.  But we got a good deal, so it is nice to have one of those.

                Shopping was likely half of the trip to Tokyo, and lots of money was spent.  But I bought lots of great stuff.  Though, I also saw some nice areas of Tokyo which I will talk about next.

A first taste of tokyo

Sunday, only 2 days after graduation it was time for all students to leave.  Everyone was going back to their home countries except for me and david and maybe one or two other people.  Me and david instead took the local train out to a large train station to get on the bullet train and leave for Tokyo.  My host family saw me off and I carried my very heavy baggage on board the train and wrote my blog entries for the wedding and Disney sea on the trip.  It wasn’t goodbye for my host family since I gave them all my relevant contact information so I can talk to them any time.

                I didn’t really have a plan for Tokyo, or anywhere else.  I had taken care of transportation and housing plans far ahead of time and knew how much I could spend on food, but I never planned on what I would do when I got to a place.  On board the train however I read some guides that my host family had given me about Tokyo.  The English guide recommended a few places like museums that I thought I would go and see, but really most of my trip at Tokyo was just going to places I had known about ahead of time, as well as looking up highly recommended areas from the internet.

                Our  first hostel that me and david had stayed at was excellent.  For 30 dollars each night we got memory foam mattresses, a bathroom and shower shared with only 2 other people, air conditioning and a few power outlets.  There was also free internet.  The owners spoke both English and Japanese, and many of the guests spoke only English including our roommates.  It seemed to me like some of the people there should have learned more of the local language before coming.  It would help them and the people they try to talk with in the long run.  But so, since it seemed to be common that travelers did not speak Japanese, there were several occasions where I got to speak Japanese with people around town and they would complement me on my language skills.  The hostel owners also wanted to speak to me in Japanese, and would recommend to me good places to eat.

                Speaking of food, that was a challenge.  I am tired of Japanese food at the moment since I had enough of it while at school.  So, I didn’t really know what to do for food while at Tokyo.  I ended up eating at : denny’s, a curry chain restaurant, mcdonalds, a convenience store, kfc, and a donut chain.  Denny’s in japan really has very little to do with American Denny’s.  American Denny’s menu I believe is just a random assortment of food that is convenient for family dining.  Well, that’s the same in japan.  Except that convenient family dining options are different in japan.  So while it had a lot of good food, the food was not like American Denny’s at all.  The only similarity was the look of the building.

                KFC and McDonalds were the same as in America.  Except that towards the end of the week McDonalds all around the region started doing this international food thing, where they are going to temporarily sell food from McDonalds in different countries.  So this week they had a French McDonalds burger.  And I had that and it was pretty good.  Later in the summer they are supposed to have Indian and Australian options.

                The donut chain was a lot like dunkin’ donuts.  They have crispy crème around here, but it wasn’t that.  It was just a place called mr donut.  And it was good and cheap.   Oh right, there was also a chain called Miami garden which served Italian food.  Of course Italian food is pretty normal in America so I went there a lot and it sure was tasty.  As was the curry chain.  In fact the curry chain is so good, convenient, and cheap, that I really wish they had some in America. 

                Anyway, enough about food.  Where did I go?  Next post is akihabara, the anime and technology district of Tokyo.

Last days of class

So school ended on Friday after a hard test, and we had a graduation ceremony.  The test was about 2 hours long and I studied far too much for it and probably did just fine.  After that we had a speaking test or ‘interview’ in which I didn’t study for at all and just walked in because I really didn’t care anymore – I’m done with school.  I was confident in my speaking ability since I talked in Japanese with my host family every day that I was there.  And as I thought, I did just fine and the teacher complimented me on how good I have become.  Only, after that I had to immediately rush home as fast as possible as I had not a minute to waste before the graduation ceremony.  I didn’t have any of my fancy clothes with me which I needed for this.

                So I had to take a train home, change, and get back all within like 40 minutes.  Luckily since my mother drove me back to school, I made it exactly on time to the minute.  After that we had the graduation ceremony which my host mother recorded so I have that.  It wasn’t anything unusual, just a normal ceremony.  If it is normal to go to a ceremony on the other side of the world for graduation from a foreign language program.

                I received my graduation certificate and headed to an after graduation party witjavascript:void(0);h my family.  Only, I couldn’t really do much at the party because I was feeling really nauseous.  When we got home later I told my host family that I probably just had too much coffee and mistook the can of regular coffee for espresso.  Only later on it turned out that it wasn’t just coffee, but that I had a very high temperature.  I was getting sick right before I had to leave.  I had a fever of about 103 for the day of graduation and the day after, but my very nice host family went out to the store and got some medicine for me to take.  I did end up taking the medicine which was unfortunate because before we even decided to get any I was telling them about how in America people take medicine for just about everything, too often.  And that I like sicknesses to just go away naturally.  But the fever did get too high for that.  Although from our talks it seems to me that japan takes medicine less often than America, which doesn’t surprise me since there are a lot of prescriptions that would be illegal to bring in to japan.  I had looked up such legality information before entering the country.

                So, the day of the graduation ceremony I didn’t do much because I wasn’t feeling very energetic.  The day after I was feeling well enough to do the suggested plan which was to go up to the top of a local mountain and see the night view.  Unfortunately the mountain was so foggy we could not see more than a few feet in front of the car on the drive up.  It was extremely dangerous.  So, since we couldn’t see anything when we got to the top we just left instead.  We ended up playing with fireworks for the night as a backup plan and that was fun.

A wedding

The next day after Disney sea was a wedding for my mother’s brother.  I was initially worried because I’d have to meet so many new people in Japanese, and also I thought it would be boring.  But in reality the wedding was awesome and I had an equally good time at the wedding as I did at Disney sea.

                When I came to japan I brought with me some dress pants and shirt, but it wasn’t at all fitting for a wedding.  Luckily my host father was roughly the same size as me and so with the family I was able to pick out some proper wedding clothes that fit me.

                At the wedding building, in the lounge, I went through a few different introductions and idle chat which went well despite being in Japanese.  I got to meet my host mother’s mother, father, and sister among other people which I remember less of.  Both my mother’s mother, and the mother from the other family were the only ones wearing traditional black Japanese yukatas for the wedding.  No other girls wore those.  They are more formal than regular dresses.  Guys can wear something similar too but all the guys wore suits.  I’m not sure if it was a cultural thing that only the two mothers could wear those for a wedding or if it was just decided to be that way.  But I did end up getting a picture with my mother’s mother in that outfit, so you can see that online.

                The wedding shocked me because it was not only a Christian wedding, but that the priest was a white guy who spoke English half of the ceremony.  The whole process I assume was just as it would have been in an American wedding, but I wouldn’t know since I have never been to a wedding before.  I got pictures of most of it anyway.

                After the ceremony which didn’t take very long, we got to go into a larger room to have an after-wedding dinner.  Various kinds of food, most of it I liked and some of it I traded for other stuff.  I got to sit between my host father and my mother’s mother.  So I got to talk to my mother’s mother who was a very nice woman and I have to say that my host mother’s family is super nice.  I had a lot more fun than I expected to in getting along with the family as well as viewing the wedding process.  It was a very modern wedding in my opinion.

                So modern that there were some surprises.  Throughout the whole process there were various people with large cameras and video cameras crouching and moving around taking various shots.  At the end of the dinner, which maybe the whole day was only a few hours, the wedding place had made more or less a music video of the whole thing with photos taken from that same day.  I am pictured like 3 times in that video which was nice.  Also, they gave everyone at the wedding  a paper that had a user name and password to pick up all the photos and videos from their website after they have been properly edited.  I liked those modern touches to the wedding.

                Also, the mother’s brother who was getting married works in the computer industry.  Something to do with windows servers and android.  I don’t remember whether it was administration and security or programming.  But his best man who is also in the industry talked with me for a little bit and gave me his business card for his company of which he is the president, and told me to look them up on facebook.  So, that was really cool, and I already added him.  It’s like I’m already making connections through attending weddings.

                I had a lot more fun at the wedding than I thought I would, and I’m glad that I went as that was one of the highlights of the trip and I would have really missed out if I didn’t go.  I made sure to congratulate the newlyweds as well, and thanked everyone for letting me come, as I was the only one who didn’t have much to do with the whole thing.

                Everyone should really get a look at the images I uploaded.  It was a really nice looking wedding.  Also a cool thing to see in the pictures and videos is this sort of staircase of glasses.  The husband and wife poured some sort of blue glowing liquid in and everyone got to watch it travel down the glasses, and then they poured in another thing of liquid which as it traveled down created different colors I guess based on amount of whatever was in a certain glass at the time.  It ended up as a glowing rainbow of cool.

                I could write a lot more but I think I will let the pictures do the rest.  When the wedding company pictures are put online I will see if I can get some of those too.

Disney sea!

Last time I posted I had said that I would be going to Tokyo for the weekend.  I had been very busy with the last week of school, since I had to study for a final exam.  That wasn’t very fun, but first let me talk a bit about my awesome weekend.

                Friday, immediately after class was over I headed to my host families house and made sure that I had everything packed to go on an airplane from kobe to Tokyo.  The travel time by plane was only about 1 hour.  However, they planned to leave the house like 1 hour before the plane leaves.  I was a little worried that we wouldn’t make it in time.  It seemed crazy.  We got to the airport 30 minutes before the plane was supposed to leave.  But according to my family that’s an ok thing to do, that you can make it to the plane in time like that.

                Getting on a plane in japan is better than in America.  Security is very reasonable and reminds me of American airports in the 90’s, to the point where you can keep your shoes and belt on as you go through the metal detector archway, and that step felt much quicker to me.  After that, there’s a place that prints out a sort of receipt for you – not a boarding pass.  But on the back of this receipt there are coupons for various stores like in my case mcdonalds.  Getting on the plan required scanning your printed boarding pass except that as opposed to America, you do it yourself.

                Onboard the plane, even though we were only going from one place in japan to the next, we took a plane newer and about the same size as the one I took from America to japan.  Also onboard, the music stations offered were interesting because as far as I know, American airlines unlike this Japanese airline do not have kids music stations. 

                Other than that there wasn’t much more remarkable about the plane flight.  Except that my host family paid for it entirely which was extremely nice of them.   It was in the evening when we arrived so we just checked in at the hotel and spent the night there.

                I thought that the next day was for the wedding and that the day after at Disney sea would be to make up for me having to go to a wedding, but it turned out that Saturday, the first day, was the Disney sea day.

                Disney sea was an amazing place.  It wasn’t overly Disney themed like Tokyo Disney probably would have been, but it was more of an epcot or universal studios sort of place where they had amazing scenery and attractions that may or may not have been Disney films, but weren’t all from cartoons.  Although they did have some Aladdin content and were adding a toy story area only a few days after we left.

                We didn’t do the tower of terror since everyone except for the father hate that sort of thing, but we did do a 3d Aladdin movie theatre, 20,000 leagues under the sea ride, and an Indiana jones ride.  There was also some people mover ride focusing on the adventures of some character named Sindbad.  It was like a mix between pirates of the carribean and it’s a small world.  We went to a proper broadway style theatre and saw 30-40’s style jazz band music by perhaps the only non-asian, English speaking people in the park.  We also took a gondola ride which was fun, in the European area of the park.

                In the park there was some fun food to try as well.  Every area had a different flavor of popcorn.  What I saw was pepper popcorn, strawberry popcorn, and curry popcorn.  Unfortunately I did not get to try the curry popcorn.

                We saw basically every attraction in the park that wasn’t scary and also not the water attraction since it was a cold day out already.  I bought some souvenirs there and had a great time.  I took a lot of pictures that you can view online now.

Sunday's food and fancy buildings

Last post I mentioned about what I did just a few days ago on saturday.  Sunday was an exciting day too, just like most weekends have been around here.

My family mentioned going to a steakhouse on sunday in the past week, so when my family asked me what I thought was for brunch that's what I answered with.  Only instead they had prepared waffles since I pointed out at a shop that the waffles looked good.  The mother had gotten some thick fluffy cream to put on the waffles, which isn't something that I usually had with waffles so I thought it was a fancy touch to that.

But afterwards a few hours later we did go to the steakhouse as planned.  And it was quite the restaurant.  We sat down in front of a flat top grill where the chefs performed tricks and had conversations with us while they made our food.  Notable things on the menu were jellyfish, squid, and the somewhat famous kobe beef.  Jellyfish is interesting.  It's a bit hard to chew but it doesnt taste like much and there isnt much to see.  Squid is even harder to chew.  Kobe beef on the other hand is the opposite of a normal steak.  It is very easy to eat, but tastes as good or better than a normal steak.  Very expensive but very tasty.  Combining the nice looking building, chefs juggling and flipping things around while cooking and other treats, and the awesome food itself, it was quite the steakhouse.  Maybe the best that I have been to.  Also, when we were done with the dinner, the chefs brought out funny hats for us to pick out to have a group photo with.  I have the picture in physical form so I guess I will upload it when I get to a scanner.  So, the steakhouse was awesome and I didn't even pay for it.  My host family is very nice.

After that we went up a very tall and steep hill by foot to a special part of town that's an old western-styled housing area.  Apparently over decades really rich japanese who wanted to live in a lavish fashion or visiting rich foreigners had built up an area of the town that had all sorts of western houses, from american white fenced houses to old Victorian housing.  We went inside a victorian house converted into a museum, which was designated as one of the top 100 houses in this area of japan.  It was apparently home to various important foreigners, like barons and ambassadors.  There was lots of china inside, along with various antiques including a one man sleigh.  which was really unique and cool.

Apparently people still live in that area of town, although some houses are left for historical purposes or converted into a store.  Oh also, inside the victorian house, the other half of it was an art museum.  So, I got pictures of all of the paintings.  I wasn't sure of if they were there for a reason other than just being an art museum.

Speaking of art, I believe my online collection of pictures right now includes a statue we saw in this city.  Which was.. a statue of butts and groins stacked on top of each other.  What even is that.  Why


Anyway,  that's about it for that sunday.  A very good day, lots of fun stuff was seen and many pictures were taken.  Now, I'd like to write about what happened the week after, which would be yesterday and today.  But I'd also like to go to sleep.  So, next time I do write, I will write about my trip to tokyo.  What did I see?  I saw tokyo disney sea, and attended a wedding.  Both were really fun and I have lots of pictures.  I'll write again soon!

Last Saturday at Kyoto

So I uploaded a bunch of pictures to my dropbox that I linked earlier.  Hopefully everyone can see those just fine.  Some of those pictures were from what I did on saturday, the others from sunday.

Last saturday was the last of the 2 school trips I was going on.  This one was to the capital city Kyoto.  Except, we didn't go to the center of kyoto but to the outskirts instead for whatever reason.  I don't get why they would do that.

Anyway, what we did get to see was cool.  We took a train as usual, but very far out all the way to another province which was about an hour ride.  The school group was going to then take a scenic train up the mountains, and get a boat ride back.

To get to the scenic train we needed to cross through a forest.  Except it wasn't a normal forest but instead a bamboo forest.  I didn't take pictures of it but instead took one very long video of the whole walk through the forest.  Very tall trees with no branches except at the very top.  Gives a really cool appearance.  And of course a forest was welcome since it was a very hot day.  Japanese fanta grape soda was also welcome once I reached the train station.

So, next was the scenic train in which I took a lot of pictures which you will notice as the ones with bars through them, since trains arent the best place for pictures.  But I did get some views from above the river that I later took a boat ride down.  And it was pretty nice looking.

The boat ride itself was interesting.  It was a 1 paddle boat but rowing like 20 people.  The rower sat toward us students and had to row crew-style.  Then, someone way at the front of the boat was designated as the big pole guy.  That is, his job was to take a long bamboo pole and stick it in to the bottom of the river or against rocks in order to steer the boat.  And then there was one last guy in the back who controlled a rudder to steer the boat even more.  So, it was some sort of traditional boat.

The river itself was really nice, and so were the mountains above as you can probably see from the pictures I took.  The boat people spoke entirely in japanese but that was okay, since we could understand them for the most part.  They were really nice and did some tricks on the water when they weren't busy - like the long-pole-guy threw the pole down into the water a few times and then caught it as it jumped back out of the water a few feet away while the boat was moving.

The most shocking thing of the day though was the boat merchant.  I don't think I got a video or picture of it which is really sad, but basically there was a boat about the size of the one that we were on, except with 3 people on board manning registers and portable stoves.  It was a little mobile food stop.  They cooked and served everything standing up on not much more than a row boat.  It was really cool.

Oh, also, me and my classmates are all polite as we should be to everyone we see in the country, and so we had thanked the people on the boat for the ride, only to find out that in the region we were in, the normal standard japanese word for thank you isn't used in that region.  That's one thing that's different from america - japan has dialects that vary by region in the way that UK and US english do.  Certain words have different meanings or aren't used.  It's probably not a big deal to adjust to it, but there are these regional differences in language.  Apparently textbook japanese isn't any specific dialect but an average of them all to find what's most normal.  Luckily my host mother says she speaks textbook japanese as a result of having been relocated so much as a kid since her father was a businessperson.

After all of that, the class trip was over but I went farther into the city with my friends and visited an extra large temple as well as some souvenir shops.  You can see pictures of the temple as well.  I went to go home at 5:30pm which is just before dinner time but unfortunately I didn't get back until 7pm, but I had bought a prepaid cellphone so I was able to call my host family and tell them the situation!  What a relief.  And then with my family we went out to dinner and I had something that you would describe as breaded chicken, over an omelet, over rice.  Japanese food can be both awesome and terrible, but fried food and eggs are things they do well.  Luckily I had both.


Well, that's it for saturday.  I did some more stuff sunday which I will write about hopefully tomorrow.  But right now I think I'll sleep instead, since it is after midnight here.

Moved my images to dropbox

I've got over 600 images now, and it's like above the limit that picasa gave me, so I moved everything to my dropbox.
No comment system on my dropbox, though.  But you can also see my videos I think.
Here's the link, tell me if it doesn't work for any reason


Also, I went to kyoto (japan's capital city) and went to a fancy restaurant and saw a western style fancy old region of the city I live in, all over the weekend.  Tomorrow I will try to write about it all, but you should be able to see the images by following the link above!

Last weekend

Every weekend has been busy since I have been here. Last weekend was the same way. Just like I was invited to visit a castle the week before, last week my boat family took me to a local aquarium. It's not the biggest aquarium around but there was still a lot to see. I don't remember the last time I was at an aquarium, so there was a lot to see.

There wasn't anything particularly Japanese about it except that in couldn't read anything, but otherwise it was what you would think of when you think of an aquarium. Lots of exotic sea animals. It was hard to get good pictures so I took videos instead, and I'm not sure how well I can upload them so I will see what I can do. Also interesting things I found out at the aquarium about Japanese are

Corn dogs are called American dogs
There are different names for various eels. In other words English groups together different things and calls them all eels when they aren't the same
But Japanese groups together turtles and tortoises. They are apparently all turtles.
Also when the park was closing one of the seals we saw earlier in the day was floating in the tank vertically near the people on the other side of the tanks glass to pose for pictures for the guests, or so it seemed. Damn, that was cool. A "smart" seal for sure. My host mother got a picture.

After that, Sunday, I went over to my host brothers friends apartment, which was surprisingly just one building over. They had a slightly larger apartment than I had as a kid. My own host family has about the same size as I had. The father had lived in England for a few years as well as America so he knew English but I try to talk without English around English speaking Japanese people anyway just to not be lazy.
Funny though that my host mother basically has two friends that speak English. The other was an English teacher. And yet my family speaks none. Except I did find out my host mother went to many countries as a kid because of her businessman father, and lived in Singapore at 3 and so knows some English words, but not grammar. It's helpful that she knows some words so that I don't need a dictionary all the time.

We'll that's all for now. Going on a field trip to the capital this weekend. Should have something to say about that later.

Ps picture is me watching spiderman 3 lipsyned in Japanese with my family. It's like a reverse Jackie chan movie!