Atatakai Suupu Ikaga desu kaaaaaaa?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...