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.