Toire ni Itta Koto ga Arimasen

last thursday, i think, was chinese new year's day, so on wednesday night, most of the foreign students from chinese speaking countries (plus the koreans, a few nihonjin, and i) got together in the kitchen and cooked a whole damn bunch of food. there were kimchee pancakes and some other korean pancake thing from the koreans, and gyouza and an extremely spicy hot pot made by m'ladies. we sat around the hot pot digging out the stuff we wanted (cabbage, mochi, kiritanpo, beef, chicken, sausage, noodles, some long stringy mushrooms) and dumping more ingredients in when the pot got low. there was so much food that we got together the next night to eat the leftovers: big fat delicious gyouza and an even spicier hot pot that was making people cough just by standing next to it, which is the perfect ammount of spiciness.

friday night, got invited by the school to attend some sort of international dinner night set up in an area called omagari, a local hub where a lot of trains transfer. a couple international students gave speeches in japanese, and then there was a dinner afterward where the aiu students (9 or 10 of us) sat with local people and talked about our homes, future plans, etc... i talked to, or maybe more accurately was talked at, by a pretty drunk tailor who told me in japanese about some of the trips he's made to america. something about going behind niagra falls and taking an elevator somewhere. i also met a retired english teacher who was, of course, a little easier to communicate with, a middle aged woman who just started studying english four years ago, and several employees of a fireworks manufacturing company in omagari. there's a huge fireworks competition there every august. i had a glass of beer in front of me which was never allowed to be less than full all night, and i didn't want to reject all the salarymen who kept walking up to me and proffering bottles, so i would drink whenever it was filled, whereupon it would immediately be refilled. i also didn't want to be shoveling food in my mouth while people were trying to talk to me, so i was a little zonked by the end of the night.

saturday, we took a trip a few hours north to an area called the oga peninsula for their namahage matsuri. the namahage is a legend centered around the oga peninsula. every new year's eve night, this demon called the namahage comes down from the mountain where he lives and bangs on the doors of all the houses with children in them, demanding to be let in and threatening the family and suchlike. the family lets him in, and the namahage hunts down the children, who have gone to hide somewhere, asks them if they've been good children, and tells them he'll take them away if they don't study and help their parents. then he demands a bucket full of sake from the parents and stomps away to the next house. every year on the peninsula, the story is re-enacted, people dress up and roar around the peninsula, genuinely scaring the shit out of kids and pretending to take them away. at the festival, in a clearing between several shrines partway up a large, steep hill, there were namahage dances and taiko performances, and then a whole string of them came down from a shrine at the top of the hill, holding torches and growling, wandering through the big crowd and terrifying everyone.

since then, i've been nipple deep in homework. some photos, then?