hi dudes. gotta squeeze out one more before i head off to effing tokyo tomorrow. i'm going to tokyo. tokyo. tomorrow i will be in tokyo. ashita, tokyo ni imas. this has been the craziest week and a half since arriving here. every day has seemed frantic and crammed with as much stuff as could be crammed into the day. what those things were, i can't quite recall, so i'll have to browse the photos for a bit here...
there was a wacky party last monday night in the baitshop-like place next to the convenience store. one of the japanese students decided he wanted to have a party there for all the international students, so he sent out an all school email about ten hours beforehand, and the place ended up filling out pretty nicely. there were beverages and de-pantsings and i rode an old crusty treadmill that was sitting in the corner. talking, whatnot, party things.
said goodbye to some americans i had gotten to know pretty well. when talking with the japanese students seemed tough, or i was going through a "too squeamish about somehow offending someone" phase, there was always this group that was having the same hard time, and i could relax a little talking to them. so they got on a bus for the station with charles hubert and the two other quebecers, and now they're back in the u.s. charles is spozedta come back in the spring, though.
went bowling with the remaining americans and two japanese girls, drank some chu-hi, this fizzy fruit flavored shochu based thing, threw the ball a little too hard, ate the new japanese mcdonalds thing called the mega tamago, three patties with an egg brick and some pepper sauce on top, brilliant. what the hell else? back to the photos...
hina came by and tried on my santa suit the day before she left. we talked for a while here, and the next day i helped her pack up her and her roommate ai's stuff, then hauled it over to the shipping spot in a big wooden rickshaw. right after that there was a big school party for the students studying abroad and the foreign students here who returned home. tables layed out with all maner of tabemono, some musical performances and speeches, talking with as many people as possible, getting a little frantic making sure i could get around and then discovering i didn't have a whole hell of a lot to say. it was too crazy to stay organized and whatnot in muh brains.
at some point last week, there was also a little show by the guitar club. we played some songs individually that we had picked out, mine were two neutral milk hotel songs that i managed to hack and warble through. pretty embarrassing, though.
i also dressed up like goddamn santa four days in a row. once for a preschool in the area, where i danced, handed out presents and took about forty hunnerd pictures. turned out to be fun, even tough i was kind of dreading it all week. the next time was for the bet i made with m'ladies. i told them that if they found a santa suit, i would wear it, thinking they'd have a hard time tracking one down. they went out the next morning and picked one up at the mall right away, so i had to fulfill my end of the bargain and wear it during a super appetizer extravaganza the ladies were having. so i sat around in the ratty thing eating little pieces of bread with ham fashioned into a flower perched on top. times three and four in the santa suit were for an event in akita city called "hot hot christmas", a bunch of booths selling food, and a little trailer bed stage for performances. most of the booths were run by aiu students or akita university in the city. i was on the damn stage in front of everybody for a performance having something to do with a masked super hero called "santa man" battling a dude in a cape called "black santa", and then i pop out at the end and ask them to help me deliver presents. i dunno. the whole thing was in japanese. while i wasn't in the santa suit, or struggling to get the hell out of it in a port-o-potty, i was selling soup and a japanese rice puff snack called dongashi, or meeting folks, or dancing, or trying some food and whatnot.
so, i think that was my week. i'm tired, dangit. i spent today, christmas damn day, doing laundry and finishing a final report. i gotta get up in six hours for the bus to the station, so i'm cutting this off and going to friggin sleep. i'll take my journal to tokyo and then put it up here when i gets back.
Tuesday, December 25, 2007
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Saru-chan
this is hina. she leaves in two days, i think. it's four in the damn morning and i'm sitting around thinking about all the people who are leaving, and the people i wish i had a chance to get to know better. hina always effortlessly made me feel comfortable on the days when i couldn't seem to figure anything out and i felt like i was just bumping along. she never seems at odds with herself or her surroundings, and i can always drop whatever stupid struggle i'm stuck on for the time i'm around her. i know i'll see her again, and that there will be a lot of people left here to talk more with, and even more new people coming here soon, it's just going to be strange and quiet without her around.
everyones been kind of flopping around the last few days taking half assed lame little stabs at jokes about how we can see eachother again (maybe it's basically just been me). i just wish i had more time with the people like hina and ruriko, who is leaving for singapore, who i know could grow into even more integral lifelong friends if the chance was there. had some last parties and conversations this week, and the rest of the time seems anticlimactic and weird.
Monday, December 17, 2007
Shashinjutsu eleventy hunnert
some of these might be a little of a stretch for worthwhile content, but that's never stopped me before, so: the crowd at kyu, that damn delicious grilled fish you eat whole (the crispy head is the best part), an ugly ass namahage, a random scene from campus, and me taking suck.
Shashinjutsu buhzillion
what do we have... a view overlooking the school on a grey snowy day, the kids preparing to mob me, kids in mid mob, an island in the sea of japan with a few tori on it, and the sea of japan doin what it do.
Sunday, December 16, 2007
Mainichi Takusan Tabemono ga Tabetai
dangit. it's been a spell, has it not? i can't even recall what exactly i've been doing, had to go back to the photos to piece it all together. hokay... near as i can tell... two weekends ago, went on another trip to teach english to first and second graders somewhere in the southern corner of the prefecture. round trip alone took five hours, so it was an all day trip. the kids were bonkers, trying to climb me simultaneously while i tried to shuffle away in the ridiculously undersized slippers provided by the school. we worked on animal names and sounds, and then body parts and things around the classroom. after the kids, we drove along the coastline for a while, and for some reason stopped at a community center to make something out of sticks, nuts, hot glue and googly eyes. yeah. we also went to a little roadside restaurant that specialized in ikayaki, grilled squid, and chomped on it for a while. got back on the bus, everyone fell asleep, bus driver got lost for a while, finally made it home 3 hours later.
the pictures tell me that the next thing of note that i did was head out to the restaunt kyu in wada again last friday for more beer, hot sake, sashimi, and grilled fish et whole. that place is friggin incredible. it was an american fellas birthday party, and there were eventually twelve or thirteen people there in the corner of a room that maybe seats 25 at capacity. half the folks wanted to go into akita city for karaoke and beverages, but i elected to stay behind with the other half, who wanted more sashimi, hot sake, and yakitori. caught the last bus back to campus and watched a little of another performance night with 19 school bands. i think i was one of only two international students watching people perform. later, headed over to an intl student apartment for some top notch not so tasteful revelry, which is all i can come up with for that part of the night, adjective-wise. ended up in the residence hall lobby doing who knows what till 4 am or so, tottered off to bed.
the next morning, got up and rode out to the dang mall to get quesadilla ingredients for the "japanese conversation friends" party. this was a group that met every week to speak japanese or play some japanese games or try calligraphy, whatnot. so later that night, in the res hall kitchen, there were about thirty students in 5 or six groups making whatever food their group decided to make, there were kimchee pancakes, a japanese style pancake called okonomiake or something damn close to that, a massive heaping noodle dish, gyouza, and the quesadillas from our group. we hauled the food over to a tatami mat room down the road, where apparently tons of fun was had last semester, but this was my first time being there. we set up some low japanese tables, some floor mats, layed the fat trays of food out, gobbled it up, played some telephone type game in japanese, and generally had a fine time. a little short though, we only had the room for two hours.
last night, went out with m'ladies and the quebecers to an italian restaurant called ya-ya for some tasty pizza and a fine night out. had my japanese final today, pretty brutal, but i might have done decently. the class moved so fast, and the winter term will move even faster. i've been pretty dilligently neglecting my other final for japanese society class, due in 4 days, a paper on "how modern japanese women are changing their society" based on a book i relly want to read, but now that i have to read it, sleeping or lounging about always seem to be the favorable options. yaga. well. i will post pictures, eat dinner, and then dammit, i will read that book.
i have a hostel in the setagaya neighborhood of tokyo booked for december 26th through jan 1st. bunch of folks from school will be around, and i'll be swooping in just in time for a birthday party, i think.
yeh. this sumbitch is a long'un. i should update more often so's i don't have to type so much, and nobody has to take up all that time reading this bastard.
the pictures tell me that the next thing of note that i did was head out to the restaunt kyu in wada again last friday for more beer, hot sake, sashimi, and grilled fish et whole. that place is friggin incredible. it was an american fellas birthday party, and there were eventually twelve or thirteen people there in the corner of a room that maybe seats 25 at capacity. half the folks wanted to go into akita city for karaoke and beverages, but i elected to stay behind with the other half, who wanted more sashimi, hot sake, and yakitori. caught the last bus back to campus and watched a little of another performance night with 19 school bands. i think i was one of only two international students watching people perform. later, headed over to an intl student apartment for some top notch not so tasteful revelry, which is all i can come up with for that part of the night, adjective-wise. ended up in the residence hall lobby doing who knows what till 4 am or so, tottered off to bed.
the next morning, got up and rode out to the dang mall to get quesadilla ingredients for the "japanese conversation friends" party. this was a group that met every week to speak japanese or play some japanese games or try calligraphy, whatnot. so later that night, in the res hall kitchen, there were about thirty students in 5 or six groups making whatever food their group decided to make, there were kimchee pancakes, a japanese style pancake called okonomiake or something damn close to that, a massive heaping noodle dish, gyouza, and the quesadillas from our group. we hauled the food over to a tatami mat room down the road, where apparently tons of fun was had last semester, but this was my first time being there. we set up some low japanese tables, some floor mats, layed the fat trays of food out, gobbled it up, played some telephone type game in japanese, and generally had a fine time. a little short though, we only had the room for two hours.
last night, went out with m'ladies and the quebecers to an italian restaurant called ya-ya for some tasty pizza and a fine night out. had my japanese final today, pretty brutal, but i might have done decently. the class moved so fast, and the winter term will move even faster. i've been pretty dilligently neglecting my other final for japanese society class, due in 4 days, a paper on "how modern japanese women are changing their society" based on a book i relly want to read, but now that i have to read it, sleeping or lounging about always seem to be the favorable options. yaga. well. i will post pictures, eat dinner, and then dammit, i will read that book.
i have a hostel in the setagaya neighborhood of tokyo booked for december 26th through jan 1st. bunch of folks from school will be around, and i'll be swooping in just in time for a birthday party, i think.
yeh. this sumbitch is a long'un. i should update more often so's i don't have to type so much, and nobody has to take up all that time reading this bastard.
Tuesday, December 4, 2007
Yoru wa Shizuka de Kirei Desu
i just peeled off my wet socks and threw them on the clothes pile. i've got two giant mud cakes on m'pantses. just got back from a few hours of snowball tossing and sledding with various folks from various continents after watching a few of the americans play some card game called asshole where the loser has to wear a popcorn bucket with a steaming turd and the word "asshole" drawn on it. we played your standard tactical run n' shoot snowball fight for a while, and then some tiny sleds appeared out of nowhere, and we headed over to the park where there's a halfway decent incline and dove down it 6 or 7 score times. i rolled backwards over my damn neck and that may or may not have been when one of the sleds was demolished. we got a pretty good, slick path going down the hill, between two trees, over a curb and into an invisible puddle in the parking lot. came back to school, dumped some snow on some people, stowed the sleds under the stairs in the dorm, and tottered back to our rooms. i'm tuckered. got at least six parties in the next three weeks: taiko party, two cooking parties, a birthday, a going away, and the christmas celebration in akita city, for which i idiotically agreed to dress like friggin santa claus. i also made a bet with m'ladies that if they found all the necessary parts for a santa suit, i would wear it and do a stupid santa dance.
Sunday, December 2, 2007
Minasan wa Hirugohan wo Matteimasu
my bones is hurt. went ice skating all day yesterday with some cannucks and two japanese girls somewhere out in akita city. we were out there all day wobbling over the chopped up rink (well, i wobbled and everyone else mostly had it down). i talked in japanese with a group of kids about japanese bugs vs american bugs and got lapped by some four year olds a few times. japanese kids are usually really fascinated with foreigners. i must've talked to 6 or 7 kids who had all sorts of questions about america, and they all wanted to skate with us and tell us about their families. fun, but my feets got straight jacked by ill-fitting skates. included in the happenings were some bus and train rides fore and aft, to and from, japanese fast food takoyaki (breaded and fried octopus balls), and pink hockey helmet wearing. we flipped eachother around, knocked eachother over, raced, and sometimes us boys was very gentlemanly, offering a hand and whatnot.
the night before, went to a traditional style restaurant near the local train station with some mongolians, an australian, and an american. it was called "kyuu" which either means 'ball' or 'nine' or neither, maybe. we drank beer and hot sake, ate sashimi, a few different types of yakitori, snails, and a local specialty called "hatahata", a small fish grilled to a crisp that you just clamp onto with your chopsticks and eat whole. afterward, went to the local family mart for more beer and miscellanea, ran into some students who had a car with just enough room to transport the ladies of our party, leaving the dudes, me and max, to walk the 2 or 3 miles back to school, on account a cause it was the middle of the night and weren't no buses going there.
working again in reverse chronology, as i am wont, from time to time, to do, the night before that, a small group went out to hunt down a cheap karaoke place and belt out some junk for a few hours. shook maraccas, stood on couches, gave it our all. i'm starting to piece together a little idea of the layout of akita city, maybe. i've mainly seen the city at night, and it looks totally different then, so it's still disorienting, but i think i have a general picture. es-siting.
today, classes are done for me. only had my two hours of japanese, which knocked the wind outta me, but i recovered with som ramen, and now i'm ready for all the walking and lounging i have on tap for the day. got some more sloppy snow to trounce about in, maybe i'll do that...
the night before, went to a traditional style restaurant near the local train station with some mongolians, an australian, and an american. it was called "kyuu" which either means 'ball' or 'nine' or neither, maybe. we drank beer and hot sake, ate sashimi, a few different types of yakitori, snails, and a local specialty called "hatahata", a small fish grilled to a crisp that you just clamp onto with your chopsticks and eat whole. afterward, went to the local family mart for more beer and miscellanea, ran into some students who had a car with just enough room to transport the ladies of our party, leaving the dudes, me and max, to walk the 2 or 3 miles back to school, on account a cause it was the middle of the night and weren't no buses going there.
working again in reverse chronology, as i am wont, from time to time, to do, the night before that, a small group went out to hunt down a cheap karaoke place and belt out some junk for a few hours. shook maraccas, stood on couches, gave it our all. i'm starting to piece together a little idea of the layout of akita city, maybe. i've mainly seen the city at night, and it looks totally different then, so it's still disorienting, but i think i have a general picture. es-siting.
today, classes are done for me. only had my two hours of japanese, which knocked the wind outta me, but i recovered with som ramen, and now i'm ready for all the walking and lounging i have on tap for the day. got some more sloppy snow to trounce about in, maybe i'll do that...
Monday, November 26, 2007
Ofuro ni Haite mo Ii Desu Ka?
konbanwa. i took about seven naps today and now i can't sleep. big test tomorrow in japanese. i will do decently, i believe... i spent all the live long day with hina and her friend maki on friday. we bummed around the mall for a while, then ate dinner at a restaurant called "pikuri donki", which means "the excited donkey". they serve big fat hamburger patties on rice with bunches of types of whatnot to put on top. decent stuff. hung out there, talked for a long time, wandered around in a strip mall for a while, then we came back to school and had a litttle mini-party in hinas room, ate some dried squid, drank chu-hi, ran out and threw some snowballs at eachother, sat around some more, wonderful. i don't get to see hina nearly as much as i'd like to, and she'll be gone in a month. kind of whiled away the rest of the weekend, whittling away at my bank account by buying more shena ringo cd's, and a few others by my most favoritest japanese bands that rarely release things in the u.s.
tonight, went to a place on the outskirts of akita city called "manga circle", but the manga was only one of the things stuffed in there. there were narrow pathways, random half steps and cul-de-sacs crammed with cds, dvds, stuffed animals, guitars and used music equipment, a unicycle, baseball cards, porn, shoes and clothing, pachinko machines, video games, candy, fishing poles, air rifles and random crap like lighters and key chains. endless mounds of every concievable item of any possible use or worth, and equally massive mounds of crap with little or no use. the most mind boggling pop culture aneurism i've ever seen.
after the test tomorrow, i've got no classes for two days. i need to find me a project, maybe get some multivitamins or something, cause i feel a little lacking in some essential juice or other. yayaya yayaya yayaya ya. ya.
tonight, went to a place on the outskirts of akita city called "manga circle", but the manga was only one of the things stuffed in there. there were narrow pathways, random half steps and cul-de-sacs crammed with cds, dvds, stuffed animals, guitars and used music equipment, a unicycle, baseball cards, porn, shoes and clothing, pachinko machines, video games, candy, fishing poles, air rifles and random crap like lighters and key chains. endless mounds of every concievable item of any possible use or worth, and equally massive mounds of crap with little or no use. the most mind boggling pop culture aneurism i've ever seen.
after the test tomorrow, i've got no classes for two days. i need to find me a project, maybe get some multivitamins or something, cause i feel a little lacking in some essential juice or other. yayaya yayaya yayaya ya. ya.
Thursday, November 22, 2007
Onigiri, Onigiri, Aishiteru, Yo!
hi dudes. i best get this thing uppidy dated before too much happens to cram into one post. last weekend, what...? i can't quite remember the order here... i think it was friday night, went out on the town with rikako and a few americans. we stopped first at another tiny ramen place, where i had the biggest, best bowl of ramen i've ever had in my damn life, and then we went to a type of restaurant called a "nomihoudai" (nomi=drink, houdai=without restriction). you pay the all night rate of about 2300 yen (around 20 bucks) and the drinks keep coming. i think they must be extremely watered down, because i was fully functional when we left for the last train. any dang how, at the nomihoudai, we met some folks from akita city and talked with them sort of through rikako, along with whatever we could manage to spit out, played some made up drinking games and took pictures with them. a grand time. after the train home to the station nearest the school, we decided to walk the 3 or so miles home and stop off at a grocery store for some of japan's brilliant convenience food. theres a popular thing here in most convenience stores which is a hot dog bun crammed with whatever seems to be laying around at the time. i've seen yakisoba with mayo and a hard boiled egg, chicken balls and spaghetti, and a bunch of other variations thereof. the walk home was cold, envigorating, and grand, through rice paddies and over rivers in the dark.
saturday i got up really damned early to head off to a field trip/program called "ego de asobu" or "playing in english". about 15 folks went off to a community center in a town about an hour south of here called daisen-shi, where 7, 8, and 9 year olds come every weekend to learn english. we played games with them focusing on colors and numbers, like a fishing game where we would say to a kid in our group "o.k., go find aaaaaa... BLUE FISH!" and then they would run off to the 'pond' and try to snag a blue fish with a magnetic fishing pole. the kids had some questions prepared in english, and we were able to talk about where we came from using a little bit of japanese. it was pretty fun, great to have a chance to practice the old profession a little, over really fast though, only lasted about an hour and a half. as for what happened with the rest of that day, i haven't a clue.
this week: we got us some snooooow. snow. pretty fine. started falling pretty heavily maybe monday or tuesday night, and immediately there were about 20 people running out of doors and climbing out windows to go jump around in it and throw it at eachother and bodyslam eachother into it. i made myself a snowperson, a muddy sumbitch named takeshi-san, threw, and was thrown upon. the next day everything melted and takeshi-san dissapeared, then it snowed again and we built an even bigger, uglier snowperson with a bunch of people, and gave it a fez fashioned from a bucket. havent been sledding yet, maybe i can make it a project for the weekend.
last night, thanksgibbinz night. my thanksgiving dinner here at school was comprised of pork bits with sundry items in a brown sauce over rice, and some kind of egg drop soup. after dinner, a few folks, mostly americans, with a norwegian, a chilean, and some japanese folks thrown in, went to another nomihoudai/karaoke bar called "waddawadda". three floors of restaurant and bar. we got a private room with a karaoke setup, and ordered their nomihoudai meal deal, where the drinks flow freely and the appetizer dishes keep showing up on the table. we drank and sang and ate and had some general revelry, and then most of the group went back to school. i stayed in town with one american, one norwegian, and one japanese fella, and went to a dinky little rockabilly themed bar for a guinness and tried to talk to shou, the japanese guy about movies and music and america, which was hit and miss. good times, though. i can ask what kind of beer they have in japanese now, which thrills me to no end. after the rockabilly bar, we went back over to waddawadda for a few more hours of drinks and appetizers and karaoke, and took a taxi back here at about 3:30 in the morning. walking around in akita city is pretty treacherous right now, everything is slathered thickly with ice. everybody fall down go boom a few times last night, before and after the drinks.
tonight, in 15 minutes, i will head off to the big bastard mall for dinner with hina, a dude from hong kong named tomo, and hina's friend maki, who is the unnamed person featured in that first picture of hina way back when. dunno what we'll do, dinner i think, and maybe some other junk. no plans for the rest of the weekend yet, except maybe trying to go sledding somewhere... gotsta go.
saturday i got up really damned early to head off to a field trip/program called "ego de asobu" or "playing in english". about 15 folks went off to a community center in a town about an hour south of here called daisen-shi, where 7, 8, and 9 year olds come every weekend to learn english. we played games with them focusing on colors and numbers, like a fishing game where we would say to a kid in our group "o.k., go find aaaaaa... BLUE FISH!" and then they would run off to the 'pond' and try to snag a blue fish with a magnetic fishing pole. the kids had some questions prepared in english, and we were able to talk about where we came from using a little bit of japanese. it was pretty fun, great to have a chance to practice the old profession a little, over really fast though, only lasted about an hour and a half. as for what happened with the rest of that day, i haven't a clue.
this week: we got us some snooooow. snow. pretty fine. started falling pretty heavily maybe monday or tuesday night, and immediately there were about 20 people running out of doors and climbing out windows to go jump around in it and throw it at eachother and bodyslam eachother into it. i made myself a snowperson, a muddy sumbitch named takeshi-san, threw, and was thrown upon. the next day everything melted and takeshi-san dissapeared, then it snowed again and we built an even bigger, uglier snowperson with a bunch of people, and gave it a fez fashioned from a bucket. havent been sledding yet, maybe i can make it a project for the weekend.
last night, thanksgibbinz night. my thanksgiving dinner here at school was comprised of pork bits with sundry items in a brown sauce over rice, and some kind of egg drop soup. after dinner, a few folks, mostly americans, with a norwegian, a chilean, and some japanese folks thrown in, went to another nomihoudai/karaoke bar called "waddawadda". three floors of restaurant and bar. we got a private room with a karaoke setup, and ordered their nomihoudai meal deal, where the drinks flow freely and the appetizer dishes keep showing up on the table. we drank and sang and ate and had some general revelry, and then most of the group went back to school. i stayed in town with one american, one norwegian, and one japanese fella, and went to a dinky little rockabilly themed bar for a guinness and tried to talk to shou, the japanese guy about movies and music and america, which was hit and miss. good times, though. i can ask what kind of beer they have in japanese now, which thrills me to no end. after the rockabilly bar, we went back over to waddawadda for a few more hours of drinks and appetizers and karaoke, and took a taxi back here at about 3:30 in the morning. walking around in akita city is pretty treacherous right now, everything is slathered thickly with ice. everybody fall down go boom a few times last night, before and after the drinks.
tonight, in 15 minutes, i will head off to the big bastard mall for dinner with hina, a dude from hong kong named tomo, and hina's friend maki, who is the unnamed person featured in that first picture of hina way back when. dunno what we'll do, dinner i think, and maybe some other junk. no plans for the rest of the weekend yet, except maybe trying to go sledding somewhere... gotsta go.
Thursday, November 15, 2007
Tegami o Kaite Kudasai
a little nugget of an evening to document before i forget... last night, in the lobby, on our already well rested laurels, not particularly hungry, but peckish enough to use it as an excuse to get the hell away from the campus for a while, a norwegian and a few americans hopped in rikako's car and headed off to find a little ramen shop that rikako had heard about on tv a few times. supposed to be one of the best in the area, i guess. so we wound around in the rain for a half hour or so through neighborhoods that looked unsettlingly suburban-american until most of the buildings dropped away and the only ones remaining were rusting into infinity, and rikako spotted the little ramen sign out of the corner of her eye. it's one of the apparently numerous noodle joints that have a little machine in the entrance where you pick what you want from a nearby menu, put your money in the machine, push the button for your selection, and out pops a ticket with your order written on it, which you give to a waiter, who passes it to a cook. so... we browsed for a while, and i picked a few things based solely on my inability to discern exactly what in the hell thet were. i ended up with a plate of plain noodles accompanied by a bowl of savory sauce with green onions, bamboo, and chunks of maybe pork or something floating in it, into which the plain noodles are supposed to be dipped. dangit. i dunno. maybe the best meal i've had since i've been here, plus the atmosphere of the dinky little shack in the middle of nowhere stroked a little section of my fantasy ideal of japan, so that probably had something to do with it, too. that's not all, though. the other thing i picked was like every japanese standard thrown into a bamboo steamer and slathered with mayonaise. there was a whole soft boiled egg in there, some fish, some kind of shredded meat, maybe some seaweedy stuff, a bunch of rice, another saucy sauce of some unknown derivation...god dammit. most of the gaijin weren't into it. honestly the combo was a little surprising at first, and i remember waking up at least once last night and berating myself for eating the stuff, but now i think i've got a little craving for it building up somewhere between the gut and the loins, this japanese version of that kfc everything bowl, whatever the hell that thing is called. after the ramen stop, we drove over to the mall for some reason or other and puttered around. i bought a cd by a japanese singer named shena ringo which is pretty bloody gaw damn awesome and completely unavailable in the u.s. it's a bunch of orchestrated torchy sounding stuff with weird electronics thrown in behind shena's raspy voice, and the lyrics are in english, french, and japanese. we also went down to the jusco market, bought some ice cream and looked at marinated animal parts in bags.
Monday, November 12, 2007
Shashinjutsu 13
batch trois: sunset after sportsfest, sea of japan, some of the buddha carvings, beware of tsunamis, and some used whatnot store
Sunday, November 11, 2007
Shashinjutsu 12 for reals
batch two: another shot of the gorge, fella jumping in the wonder castle, sports fest people, tug of war, and some dudes motoring back to school after the fest. i'll have to put another chunk up since it's been so long...
Shashinjutsu 12 or something
batch one: the folks i went to the gallery with, from left to right: ruriko, yuna, and mako, and a few shots from the gorgeNi Ji Kara Jugyo ga Arimasu
yeh. still here, in japan, doin' stuff n' things. i'll have to recount bunches of stuff as best i can and slap on some pictures afterward. so... what have i been doing? last weekend (two weekends ago, now, i suppose) i went out on the town with some folks to check out some galleries in akita city. one of the people i went with, yuna, was an intern for a while at a gallery we visited called the cocoa laboratory, or "kokorabu" in katakana characters. the cocoa lab was having a bazaar type thing, selling art and baubles and such, and it was in the first floor of an old 4 or 5 storey building that also housed a tiny cafe, a bookstore, and a fabric shop. there was a woman in the cocoa lab making some of her paper mosaic art, pasting little strips of paper onto a canvas with tweezers and glue. it has some specific name in japanese, but i can't remember what. yuna led us to another gallery in a hotel lobby that was showcasing a type of art called "ranga" maybe? or maybe that was just the name of the show... anywho there were mostly some scroll paintings by an american artist using a lot of japanese symbolism like peaches and cranes, kind of an exaggerated cartoonish representation of traditional japanese art. after just those two galleries, we had to get back to the station, so we wandered back and stopped in for a minute at another fabric shop, gallery, book/clothing store where everyone seemed to know yuna, and then ran for the train back to wada station where the bus took us to school.
sunday of that week, there was a school field trip to a gorge/valley and an amusement park type place. the gorge was 60 meters deep, i think they said, and toward the bottom, sulphur smelling jets of steam were shooting out across the river that cut out the gorge. there were a bunch of lots of stairs heading down to the river and a trail leading along the bottom of the gorge for a quarter mile or so. the leaves along the river and on top of the gorge were at their autumn peak. we walked along the trail, through a jet of stinky steam, and had to turn around and come back because of some construction or what have you. came back up, went to a bridge overlooking the gorge, bought some wasabi peas in a souvenir shop nearby, and got on the bus for the amusement park place. the park was a really odd combination of a childrens "wonder castle", a planetarium, a museum and a botanical garden, all connected by an electric choo-choo train on a track. we wandered around looking at flowers, eating stuff on a stick, and winding through the wonder castle's optical illusion maze, and then watched a show in the planetarium. hopped back on the bus and were deposited at the dorm for sundry whatnot.
ok. this is the second time i'm doing this part on account a cause the computer crapped out before i headed off to my tohoku culture class, so i'll shoot for a halfway decent rewrite here, if i can remember it all correctly...so. this weekend. saturday was the aiu sports festival, really just a bunch of goofball games that required minimal athletic ability, which i sure as hell qualify for. there were 5 teams of about 20-25 people each competing for free ice cream, i think it was, in games like the one where we tried to break balloons tied to the other teams ankles, a game where our team tried to toss balls into a box hanging off of someone's back while they ran around in circles, an obstacle course designed to make people throw up, with spinning and cola drinking being combined, a tug of war for which i was the anchor on the losing team, getting dragged down the track by the gut, an all team jump rope competition (25 of us trying to simultaneously jump under one giant rope), and a relay race. our team came in 4th out of five, i think. the sports fest lasted all dang day, and my old ass muscles hurt, so i'm pretty sure i wandered around for a while and then went to bed.
sunday was an all day field trip with my japanese society class to a temple, a shrine/museum, a sake museum, the sea of japan, and a river, all in the next prefecture to the south, 2 and a half hours away. the first temple was the same one we went to on the school field trip in september, but this time there was a whole bunch more historical context thrown in about the poet basho visiting the place and writing a haiku about it, and that it used to be on the ocean until a volcano erupted and filled in the bay, and now it's in the middle of farm land. the shrine/museum housed two mummified buddhist monks belonging to a sect that practiced a 5-10 year process of self mummification by severe diet and excercise regimentation including drinking laquer and arsenic. we also went to a spot on the sea of japan where there are 16 buddhas carved into the rocks along the coast, and clibed around for a while before heading off to the sake museum where we sampled 10 or so types of sake and got a little gift of a sake glass. we jumped in the bus, sang loudly for some reason, and made an impromptu stop at a wide section of a river where migrating ducks stop to rest, eat, rumble, and make little baby ducks, then settled in for the 2 and a half hour trip back to school, after which i ate me some balls of meat and passed out until morning.
there. two weekends of stuffs recounted twice. now what? laundry, dinner, homework, sleep, dunno. been slammed around a lot by various crap and i'm really not feeling myself lately. feel like i'm kind of just drifting and bumping into people and events, whereas a few weeks ago i was feeling good and grounded for once. yeh. i'll try to be more on top of this thing than i've been so far this month.
sunday of that week, there was a school field trip to a gorge/valley and an amusement park type place. the gorge was 60 meters deep, i think they said, and toward the bottom, sulphur smelling jets of steam were shooting out across the river that cut out the gorge. there were a bunch of lots of stairs heading down to the river and a trail leading along the bottom of the gorge for a quarter mile or so. the leaves along the river and on top of the gorge were at their autumn peak. we walked along the trail, through a jet of stinky steam, and had to turn around and come back because of some construction or what have you. came back up, went to a bridge overlooking the gorge, bought some wasabi peas in a souvenir shop nearby, and got on the bus for the amusement park place. the park was a really odd combination of a childrens "wonder castle", a planetarium, a museum and a botanical garden, all connected by an electric choo-choo train on a track. we wandered around looking at flowers, eating stuff on a stick, and winding through the wonder castle's optical illusion maze, and then watched a show in the planetarium. hopped back on the bus and were deposited at the dorm for sundry whatnot.
ok. this is the second time i'm doing this part on account a cause the computer crapped out before i headed off to my tohoku culture class, so i'll shoot for a halfway decent rewrite here, if i can remember it all correctly...so. this weekend. saturday was the aiu sports festival, really just a bunch of goofball games that required minimal athletic ability, which i sure as hell qualify for. there were 5 teams of about 20-25 people each competing for free ice cream, i think it was, in games like the one where we tried to break balloons tied to the other teams ankles, a game where our team tried to toss balls into a box hanging off of someone's back while they ran around in circles, an obstacle course designed to make people throw up, with spinning and cola drinking being combined, a tug of war for which i was the anchor on the losing team, getting dragged down the track by the gut, an all team jump rope competition (25 of us trying to simultaneously jump under one giant rope), and a relay race. our team came in 4th out of five, i think. the sports fest lasted all dang day, and my old ass muscles hurt, so i'm pretty sure i wandered around for a while and then went to bed.
sunday was an all day field trip with my japanese society class to a temple, a shrine/museum, a sake museum, the sea of japan, and a river, all in the next prefecture to the south, 2 and a half hours away. the first temple was the same one we went to on the school field trip in september, but this time there was a whole bunch more historical context thrown in about the poet basho visiting the place and writing a haiku about it, and that it used to be on the ocean until a volcano erupted and filled in the bay, and now it's in the middle of farm land. the shrine/museum housed two mummified buddhist monks belonging to a sect that practiced a 5-10 year process of self mummification by severe diet and excercise regimentation including drinking laquer and arsenic. we also went to a spot on the sea of japan where there are 16 buddhas carved into the rocks along the coast, and clibed around for a while before heading off to the sake museum where we sampled 10 or so types of sake and got a little gift of a sake glass. we jumped in the bus, sang loudly for some reason, and made an impromptu stop at a wide section of a river where migrating ducks stop to rest, eat, rumble, and make little baby ducks, then settled in for the 2 and a half hour trip back to school, after which i ate me some balls of meat and passed out until morning.
there. two weekends of stuffs recounted twice. now what? laundry, dinner, homework, sleep, dunno. been slammed around a lot by various crap and i'm really not feeling myself lately. feel like i'm kind of just drifting and bumping into people and events, whereas a few weeks ago i was feeling good and grounded for once. yeh. i'll try to be more on top of this thing than i've been so far this month.
Monday, October 29, 2007
Shashinjutsu 10
a few more shots from friday: some rocking out, the trophy as presented by the enigmatically pulchritudinous yoshimi, the champion sharing his take, and the best shot i could find of some of m'ladies from friday night - from left - nyonyo, lisa, and serena.Shumatsu Wa Nani O Shimashita Ka?
hullo. i'm avoiding work, and i thought a good way to do so would be to put a little thing up here about the fine goings on of last friday night. so. yes. friday night, the first annual aiu air guitar competition was held in a small hot room crammed with about 15 contestants and spectators. the lights were turned off and the people holding the competition used some little clip lamp for atmosphere while they videotaped the happenings and hosted it like one of the crazy japanese karaoke shows that always seem to be on. the competitors were introduced and then waited for the song to be queued up on somebody's laptop, posing and strapping on the nonexistant guitar and checking monitor levels and such, and then some japanese metal shitstorm would come out of the speakers and they would flail around for a while until the music was cut off, and then they would introduce the next person. the winner got a giant chocolate chip cookie with frosting on it that said aiu air guitar champion 2007, which he shared with everyone and then did an encore. it might have been the sunglasses that did it for him, or maybe because he did the most drastic back bends. anyway, it was spectacular.
after the air guitar, i went to a birthday party for a taiwanese fella. of course all m'ladies were there, and just about every other taiwanese and chinese student in the school, along with a smattering of white folks. i had some melon soda, some sweet taiwanese jerky stuff, played wii tennis, and got my ass handed to me in some cut throat taiwanese rules uno. a fine night to clear the head like a snort of vick's vapo rub, just what i needed.
Saturday, October 27, 2007
Shashinjutsu what, 8,9? no, 8
so, aiu fest round one: taro-kun rocking the karaoke competition, the minnesota booth, the mummiez, and some wacky whatnot happening on stage. now round two...Ashita Tabun Ame ga Furimasen
hey, dudes. a post is long overdue. i have not been in a decent 'blogging mood' of late, but i'm not gonna let this thing go stale. so: aiu festival, then... the first day was a rainy bastard. what the blazes did i do? wandered up and down the row of student run food booths eating everything in sight. "minnesota" soup made by some japanese students who spent a year at st. cloud state, gyoza from m'ladies, taco salad, some japanese crunchy sandwich type thing called takose, a s'more, and a pita sandwich from hina's friends. derrrr... went up in the school to see some friends in their room, which they called the "art pu cafe", i guess they just liked the sound of the word "pu" and didn't know it meant a steaming dumpski. turns out i did'nt make it past mr. aiu round one to the part where i would have anything to actually participate in. not mr. aiu material, i guess. helped sell some frankfurters for a while, and when i was doing that, a big gust of wind knocked over part of the stage and all the outdoor stuff had to be cancelled for the first day. stinky.
second day, woke up early to catch some rescheduled bands in the auditorium, namely taro's band the mummiez. taro's pretty damn amazing, if somewhat lacking in polish, which is better anyway. crazy bastard. watched the first year students perform in their homeroom type groups. there was a competition for best performance, one group did some kind of super mario sketch, another did the thriller dance and dressed like zombies, suchlike. hmm... played some john fucking denver with the guitar club, sold some more frankfurtersssss... no one really bought any, we still had 100 left over afterward. the closing ceremony was really long, but pretty great. the japanese love their ceremonies. there were more performers, dances mostly, some acrobatic stuff with human pyramids, fireworks, and some student videos. pretty damn fine. it rained all weekend, so the field out front turned into a mud pit, and there were clumps of the stuff all over the school all week long. i think some students must have stayed up for the entire thing, and they were up all night after the closing ceremony tearing things down and cleaning. they were wearing the same clothes and staggering around the next morning. so that was the fest. i'll post some pics and then maybe do another post about last night's goings on, which were pretty coo.
second day, woke up early to catch some rescheduled bands in the auditorium, namely taro's band the mummiez. taro's pretty damn amazing, if somewhat lacking in polish, which is better anyway. crazy bastard. watched the first year students perform in their homeroom type groups. there was a competition for best performance, one group did some kind of super mario sketch, another did the thriller dance and dressed like zombies, suchlike. hmm... played some john fucking denver with the guitar club, sold some more frankfurtersssss... no one really bought any, we still had 100 left over afterward. the closing ceremony was really long, but pretty great. the japanese love their ceremonies. there were more performers, dances mostly, some acrobatic stuff with human pyramids, fireworks, and some student videos. pretty damn fine. it rained all weekend, so the field out front turned into a mud pit, and there were clumps of the stuff all over the school all week long. i think some students must have stayed up for the entire thing, and they were up all night after the closing ceremony tearing things down and cleaning. they were wearing the same clothes and staggering around the next morning. so that was the fest. i'll post some pics and then maybe do another post about last night's goings on, which were pretty coo.
Thursday, October 18, 2007
She Got A T.V. Eye on Me, She Got A T.V. Eye
the atmosphere around here tonight is really great. everybody's working their dang hearts out getting ready for the fetival this weekend. i can see about five groups of dancers flailing around in the second floor windows as i wander around the quadrangle, (or i guess yard in a dinky little school like this'un) ten other groups crouching on the floor and meticulously carving little shapes out of cardboard with boxcutters or pasting photos together or painting something or playing some instrument or other, and in the cafeteria, they're making an ten foot tall three dimensional clown out of cardboard boxes, shredded pink plastic, sparkly shit and sheer determination. through it all i've been wandering around in my poofy hat and feeling like a lout because they're all working so frigging hard and seem to be having a pretty decent time even though they're half crazed with exhaustion, and all i do is stand there and say "derf! clown! fnur!" and snap a photo. feels like i'm kind of a guest here, more than a student. i'm fine with that, i guess, i just feel really oafish when i see the japanese students putting so much into stuff like this. feels good, though, too, to be around all that positive energy and action.
Monday, October 15, 2007
Tokidoki Eiga wo Mimasu
lets us see can i get this down right. sunday, was it? woke up around 11:30, got preened and prepped, went out to the cafeteria, loaded up on semi palatable gruel, and immediately after plopping down in my chair, max, the australian fellow who used to have a mohawk and still has a car axed me did i want to drive off and try to find some gorge somewhere. so, slipped the food down my gullet, (now i'm remembering it was actually pretty good: gyoza and eggrolls) got my hat and my camera and set off with max and 3 other gaijin to track down this gorge place. we were doing pretty good until the veins on the map started getting more and more atrophied, and eventually dissapeared altogether. we rolled into a dead end at the base of a dam with a large terraced park where the local community was having a little festival. we parked in the grass next to the 50 or 60 other cars, popped out into the alcove park area and got gawked at by an entire town. there was a really beautiful stream next to the park, widened because of the dam, where a bunch of folks were casting lines in their rubber pants. walked back up the bank of the stream, bought some vendor stuff, got oggled some more, and decided to go find the gorge. we tried a few directions until we ended up on a gravelly road with big ass rocks bouncing up and hitting the undercarriage of max's crappy little car, but we kept going, i think because we figured it had to pop out onto a regular road somewhere. it just kept winding around on a narrow precipice, though, and getting rockier and tinier. we finally found a slightly wider patch of the road where two of us had to get out and negotiate the about face of the car so we could bounce back over the road and get back onto a paved street, and when we got out to the street, no one cared much if we saw the gorge, so we just headed back to school.
back at school, i caught a cab out to the mall and met up with m'ladies (the taiwanese crew, remember?) for one of their birthdays. we went to a japanized itallian restaurant and had some decent pasta, but the real attraction at this place is apparently their dessert bread cubes (no idea what the hell they're called). big bricks of really soft warm bread heavily draped in honey, chocolate or caramel and topped with a scoop of icecream. if you want more topping, the waiter comes out, sings a song about your topping, and drizzles it on until you tell him to stop. damn fine. the japanese version of pizza is pretty good. this place's toppings included corn, big strips of bacon, and a complete fried egg smack in the middle. after the food and the whatnot at the restaurant, we went to the arcade to take pictures in a type of photo booth called a "puricura", a squashing of the words "print" and "club". in a puricura, people crowd into a photo booth with a green screen background that can be changed from a big list of choices, snap the pics, and then walk around to the outside of the booth where they can take 27th century electro-laser pens and write all over the photos. when they're printed out, they have sticky backs so you can paste a tender memory somewhere on your stuff. so, after the mall antics, came back and, as far as i can remember, shuffled around a bit, finally got around to doing homework, and went to bed.
aiu festival this weekend, should be super magic time. the japanese students have been working their dang asses off getting ready for this thing for the past month while us int'l students bobble around and whack eachother in the junk and whatnot. there's a promotional poster for the festival that a bunch of students including m'damn self posed for which is hanging up all over the city, in the train station and mall. apparently the whole community gets pumped and comes out to watch the students perform and make food and speeches and stuff. gonna be good, i think.
back at school, i caught a cab out to the mall and met up with m'ladies (the taiwanese crew, remember?) for one of their birthdays. we went to a japanized itallian restaurant and had some decent pasta, but the real attraction at this place is apparently their dessert bread cubes (no idea what the hell they're called). big bricks of really soft warm bread heavily draped in honey, chocolate or caramel and topped with a scoop of icecream. if you want more topping, the waiter comes out, sings a song about your topping, and drizzles it on until you tell him to stop. damn fine. the japanese version of pizza is pretty good. this place's toppings included corn, big strips of bacon, and a complete fried egg smack in the middle. after the food and the whatnot at the restaurant, we went to the arcade to take pictures in a type of photo booth called a "puricura", a squashing of the words "print" and "club". in a puricura, people crowd into a photo booth with a green screen background that can be changed from a big list of choices, snap the pics, and then walk around to the outside of the booth where they can take 27th century electro-laser pens and write all over the photos. when they're printed out, they have sticky backs so you can paste a tender memory somewhere on your stuff. so, after the mall antics, came back and, as far as i can remember, shuffled around a bit, finally got around to doing homework, and went to bed.
aiu festival this weekend, should be super magic time. the japanese students have been working their dang asses off getting ready for this thing for the past month while us int'l students bobble around and whack eachother in the junk and whatnot. there's a promotional poster for the festival that a bunch of students including m'damn self posed for which is hanging up all over the city, in the train station and mall. apparently the whole community gets pumped and comes out to watch the students perform and make food and speeches and stuff. gonna be good, i think.
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Shashinjutsu 7
more stuff: the princess and the lake, closer in on the princess, lantern (maybe?) and the lake, and the shrine from further away. n'stuff. ok, lunchtime. more as it happens...
Shashinjutsu 6
here are a few views from the trip. from top to bottom: lake, lake, lake with flag, and the little shrine next to the statue. now some more
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