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.

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.

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.

Shashinjutsu 13

batch trois: sunset after sportsfest, sea of japan, some of the buddha carvings, beware of tsunamis, and some used whatnot store

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 gorge

Ni 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.