workin’ in a winter wonderland

Konnichi wa, minna-san.

Long time no write.

I feel I owe you a couple of updates to avoid creating one long mega-post on life, so look for a lot of activity here this weekend and the upcoming week. I owe you guys a lot of pictures etc. For now you can take sneak-peek of my Thailand adventure (yeah you heard me, I went to THAILAND for Christmas!!!) on Facebook, or check out Picasa for the wonders of the past.

Currently all of my energy is consumed by living in a winter wonderland. I vastly underestimated both the beauty and the torture of winter in Alpine Japan, which is fairy-like and bestial all at the same time.

To give you an idea, here is a photo of what I saw on my walk to my enkai (staff pub party) last night:

Snow on Kokobunji-dori (5-min. walk from my apartment)

Indeed.

It has been snowing non-stop for consecutive days, a fluffy, sticky snow that clings to your boots no matter how tenaciously you kick them. It packs into white ice the instant you touch it, but here in Takayama we drive on that ice. Yessiree, the show must go on. This is the second blizzard I’ve experienced and the most amazing part is that it isn’t amazing; life continues as usual, stores say open, and people drive around on their errands. School closings? HA! I’m fairly certain Godzilla and Mothra combined would have a hard time cancelling school.

As far as how we drive on that ice, well… we just do. Somebody clever figured out that bulldozer grooves provide excellent traction, so they drive down the roads with construction-like equipment to make lateral grooves that help our tires hold on. When the snow and ice is shallow this tactic generates a terrible, are-my-tires-about-to-pop-off? washboard vibration, but hey. That’s probably just because the snow tires on a K-car are smaller than the tires on bikes.

It’s really nice, anyway, to be able to keep about life as we know it, with the possible acception of the more distant errands we face. Alas. Furukawa and even Big Arena are a notable struggle right now.

Around the neighborhood, the snow has begun curving into interesting patterns, as though the temperature secretly warmed up for 5′s minute and the top layer began to melt off. But then it froze into snow mid-sliding, and this process somehow repeated all night.

Here is a picture of snow ‘mushroom ledges’ growing out of the stone wall near the cemetery:

Snow 'mushrooms' create imaginary contours in a ledge-less wall.

And here are some crazily tilted icicles, perhaps pushed down at that angle due to heavier snow piling on top of the already several-inch-thick layer of snow that was on the ground before this blizzard began.

Menacing icicles.

Threatening, aren’t they? Like Fenrir’s teeth.

My colleagues joyfully tease me whenever I take photos of the snow outside my window, but you know, I have never seen THIS MUCH SNOW piling on top of itself where I live. Plus, the pictures I took the day before are no longer cool enough because there’s now MORE. So harumph. Here is the view out my office window at Kogyo one day ago (I bet it’s sweeter now):

Snow clinging to every possible surface.

Beautiful but freakin’ chilly. Did I mention that I live in the middle of this without central heating or insulated walls?

That’s what I meant when I said that all of my energy was devoted to living this; I have been scrambling almost non-stop to try to warm my living quarters without a kerosene heater (they give me headaches and make everything smell. ) I spend my spare time shopping for simple oscillating electric fan heaters (they don’t exist), bathrobes (they also don’t exist), and any other clever warm-up solutions.

I just bought leopard slippers and a cheap fleece ‘granny jacket’ that I now tie shut with a scrap of clashing lace from my craft box in an attempt to mimic a miniature bathrobe. (It rocks.) When I get home, I usually put it on over a jacket and keep my scarf on for a while. I then pile on blankets, sit next to a heater, or swear at the disgustingly low voltage capacity of my apartment. (2 heaters on high in a 5-room apartment? POWER LOSS!)

Zannen desu nee. I think I have finally decided to be content with the heaters I have and focus on trying to somehow further insulate my kitchen, which gets up to 14C when I leave the heater on long enough and the divider-curtains closed. That’s solid. If I could only get up past the 15 mark… ahh. I am thinking I will buy another cheap but fluffy rug to cover the remaining bare floor space, cut some more cardboard and cover more of the wall-window area, and then call it a year.

In better news, yesterday the Kogyo teachers fixed my kotatsu, so now I can sit with my legs and feet tucked under a heated table and get warm!!! And, Angel Saito is coming over after lunch (we had to take a half-day because of a big test held at our school) to teach me how to make nabe (a hot stew) and use my new rice-cooker to make porridge, etc. YES!!!

CULTURE SHOCK!!!!!! Dunannanaaa…

Whoahhhh long time no update. So… here goes.

I woke up this morning in an unbelievably negative mood, but I managed to shake it by shoveling snow. I figured, plowing is not only great exercise but also a service to the community, plus I like to play in the snow.

For about a half an hour I sweated and kicked and lifted and hurled snow out of my path, all under the refreshingly blinding December sun. It was very impressive, all in all. I felt like I was some sort of arctic lumberjack… I wound up in a hoodie and pony-tail at the end instead of my down coat and warm winter hat.

I then hopped into my itteh bitteh car and skated down the icey mountain with it. I drove to Mory hoping to find some travel stuff (I’m going to Thailand!) in the 100-yen section to brighten my mood, then thought of the conversation that had kept me up so late last night. I stopped in the middle of an aisle when it hit me. Have I been culture shocking all this time? Is that what this impossible funk is all about?

All in a rush I saw the connection between my noticeable weight gain, my feelings of helplessness toward it, my tendency to blame Japan for not having the right healthy foods or gym opportunities to help me, my loneliness, my occasionally frustrated (and unreal) feelings of isolation from my pals here, my inability to tolerate my unhelpful supervisor, and my newfound tendency to sleep and stay in.

Culture shock. Duh!! I thought it would hit me in a dramatic “OMG I AM SO SICK OF JAPAN IT IS STUPID WHY DO THEY PUT MAYONNAISE ON SPAGGHETTI” moment, but actually I never stopped liking Japan, Takayama, or the Japanese people. It was a slow, insidious thing. I started to open my eyes to it, I think, when my Mom commented that I seemed to be eating extra at meals because I was uncertain when I would eat next… that phrase tickled something in memory, but it took a rough night’s sleep to let it percolate into a big mug of “Wake Up” joe.

My brain produced that wake-up mug in Mory, actually, which is why a few locals probably saw me get Deer-in-Headlights eyes in the middle of the 100-yen cleaning supplies. “Seriously?!” I had to ask myself. There in my mind’s eye was a huge, obnoxious purple PowerPoint — a presentation on Culture Shock delivered to me and five hundred other ALT’s.

“Symptoms often include overeating, hoarding food, and an exaggerated preoccupation with when you will eat next (regression into survival mode).”

Sound like anyone we know? Holy crap! I wanted to be upset and laugh all at the same time, as REALIZING you have Culture Shock means you are already half-way over it. I felt both liberated (YES! So Japan does NOT really make people fat!) and ashamed (Wait, that means *I* have been making myself fat, not Japan! AHHHH what have I done!!) I bought my travel toiletry doodads in a daze and obediently turned the mysterious spinny wheel to receive a cute pack of wet tissues for some promotion beyond my comprehension.

I then began to prowl through the grocery store in search of the items I’d written into a food wish-list to my parents. I didn’t take a basket because I figured I wouldn’t find or buy much now, but I wanted to know what sort of options I would have to look forward to in the new year. I wondered(with a mixture of hope and shame) if the items I was furiously pining for were actually right under my nose.

As I’m sure you guessed by now, many of them were. For instance, salad dressing. Within moments of entering the grocery section I found myself staring at a big display featuring a selection of new salad dressings with partially English labels. I turned the corner and then found at least 20 more varieties of dressing, many of which had English on their labels. Unbelievable! I haven’t had a salad since SUMMER because I got sick of the ubiquitous thick sesame dressing or soy-saucey drizzles… thinking about them kind of turned my stomach, but I’d somehow begun believing that they were the only kinds that they had. How redonkulous! That’s textbook culture shock for you… you start assuming there is adversity where there is not and unfairly categorizing.

And so I left the store not only with two new dressings (one cheap 5-kcal one with yuzu in it and one dark “Greek black pepper” marinade type thing I could hopefully use to cook meat as well) but ALSO with spicy mustard, nutmeg, yogurt-covered raisins, and a bag of dried garbanzo beans. ALL of these I firmly believed to be unobtainable until today. I also found a surprise selection of dried fruits and nuts amid all the dried squids and prawns… I hardly ever ventured down that aisle because it was predominantly “drunk food”, but today I had resolved to use newly opened eyes and was rewarded with snacks that were still quite expensive, but at least more varied than I had feared.

Finally, I also found some wheat pasta (!!!) and tabasco sauce to cleverly use as a substitute for salsa when making eggs. By the time I was done scouring I left feeling very hopeful and excited; I KNOW I can get back to healthy Western cooking, but I’ve got to approach it with the same optimism and curiosity I approached Eastern-style cooking. Let’s vary it up! It’s time to fight homesickness with HEALTHY Western comfort foods — tuna salad with chickpeas and lemon, for example, or pumpkin toasted with nutmeg instead of stewed in mirin and soy sauce.

The best part is that there are still 2 other grocery stores to scour, one of which (the seedy Bigg Lots of T-town whose “VALUE” logo has almost faded..) I learned today is actually supposed to have a lot of random ‘foreign’ food. Who knows what I will fine! Today I still couldn’t find any fresh herbs besides mint, canned vegetables besides corn and tomatoes (random?), canned beans, wheat crackers, quinoa, lentils, or wheat bread, but there are still two more stores to happily explore with newly opened eyes.

Ah. I feel so much better today.

Spent the rest of the day making a GIANT SNOWMAN and SNOW TIGER (for the New Year — the Year of the Tiger, of course!!) with my friend Krystel from California and Martin from Quebec… I had an utterly amazing time and am now more exhausted and sore all over than I have been in months. YESSS fun and exercise and playing in the snow. We made it in the public park so everyone can marvel at the “Western” snowmen (Japanese ones have only 2 balls and wear a bucket as a hat…)

Hee!

Sorry such a long post, but I hope it explains why I haven’t been posting in a long time. Culture shock. It’s the darnedest thing.

Christmas in Asia

ACK!!! I am so sorry, I forgot about this! I worked hard to get a lot of pics organized and uploaded, but then no big trips occurred and I totally dropped the ball.

I’m sorry! I’ve not forgotten about you. Christmas is hysterical and busy in Asia, full of consumering and fun just like fun, albeit strangely Victorian-English.

Will share much about that soon, and about my 3-day trip to Kyoto. Other big news (The Rooftop Girls are coming!! My brother arrives tonight!!), but give me some time to focus on my brother’s visit before posting more.

Gomen ne!

Concluding Road-trip Day 6… destination HELL (seriously)!

…And realizing I have not concluded whether the correct writing is “road trip” or “road-trip”. Hm. Wonders never cease.

Anyway, Day 6 just keeps on going. It was the most adventurous day of my life! If you’ve lost track, it began at 1am or 2am with an animal screaming in the dark, resumed at 7am or so with a sudden rainstorm and an angry official, and then took us to the fog-shrouded lakes of the spider-infested Mordor. After that there was a random statue park, a volcano memorial that was actually a destroyed mental hospital, a red smoking volcano, a bit of road-side exploration, and the haunting ruins of a demolished hotel. And what time was it when we finished this, you ask? Somewhere around — I kid you not — 2pm.

Our next destination was Hell’s Valley.

Now, at first we weren’t exactly sure what we were looking for. Carl had been to Noboribetsu, the onsen/samurai town that encompasses Hell’s Valley, but only on a brief side-trip during a snowy weekend in Sapporo. He hadn’t seen Hell’s Valley. We figured we’d surely know it when we saw it, and yet a sign saying we’d entered it yielded nothing demonic. “Hmmm, is THAT Hell’s Valley?” we started asking, suspiciously thrusting our fingers at the odd copses of dead trees or fire-burned undergrowth we saw down below us. We were still on our high mountain road, which rewarded us with the occasional sweeping vista, but the day was still partially swallowed by fog.

Finally, ten minutes later, the road descended and we found our clue.

“AHA! A devil! A devil!” we all started yelling excited. We pulled over to take pictures of the wonderfully hokey oni statues (an oni is a traditional Japanese demon depicted with horns, red or blue-green skin, and cave-man-like tiger-skin clothes) posted to welcome tourists. Then we drove on and saw a few more, and finally a glimpse of something suspicious:

Hmm! We soon arrived at a National Park-esque pull-off, paid a few bucks to park, followed some signs and stairs, and were floored by the REAL, UNQUESTIONABLE, OBVIOUSLY HELLISH VALLEY! WHOOP!

Words can’t accurately describe the place, so I will attack you with pictures.

Amazing. The place reeked of sulphur; the ground was literally burbling and steaming and belching out yellow and grey clouds of smoke. Lurid yellow-grey streams scored the ash, ancient-looking stone cairns bore unreadable kanji, and at the end… at the end was a gypsum-ringed monstrosity.

Wicked. Needless to say the Mordor jokes from earlier came back to life hard-core, such that by the time we reached this geyser I yelled to Carl, “It is time! We must now throw it back into the fiery chasms from whence it came!”… he pretended he’d forgotten the ring, we all posed looking panicked and accusatory for a photo, and Japanese tourists stared at us.

It was fun. Here’s the LOTR photo as well as a special one I PhotoShopped…

Hehe. It was an incredible place.

After seeing it we went to the adjacent onsen — it’s literally fed by HELL, bwahaha — but I did not find nearly as inviting as I expected the most famous onsen in Asia to be. There was a huge, somewhat awkward mural of a naked woman on a swan attempting to impart a sense of classical grace, but… the bath area was huge with neon lights and white concrete walls and tile everywhere. I felt like I was in a YMCA, not an intimate earth-fed hotspring. The other ones i’d been to all had rough, natural stone or dark-colored tiles and bamboo faucets, complete with pretty Japanese trees planted to change with the seasons. This place… hmmm… not so much.

On the bright side, the Noboribetsu onsen isn’t supposed to be famous for its looks. It’s famous for the water, which reeks of sulphur and has interesting hues, but is supposed to be enormously healing and good for the skin. It’s like the liquid form of those awesome BareMinerals Mom gave me before I left. Also, while it lacked style, it did have 2 stand-out novelties. The shallow wading maze that took your feet from warm to roasting hot to ICE COLD to warm again was invigorating (nevermind that you’re just plodding around naked; everybody else is nonchalantly doing it too!), and the bamboo pipes letting a narrow waterfall of water cascade from so high up that it hammered into your shoulders like a massage was priceless. However, the sick, dizzy, dehydrated feeling I got immediately after the onsen was NOT so good… the boys and I all had to sit and pant and drink lots of Aquarius before we could move again. We were then promptly ripped off by the crappiest restaurant I have ever been to in Japan, which wasn’t our fault because it was the only restaurant open.

Still, the verdict? Noboribetsu town is lame. Fortunately the Hell’s Valley part of it kept our day of adventure on track.

Kanji reading “Hell.”

Us being devils. >:D

That night we finally arrived in Sapporo (doesn’t it seem like this day is eternity?) and decided to explore. We went into a few entertaining stores, did purikura, and met an amusing, extremely outgoing street kid who was making hemp and bead bracelets. He invited us to sit down with him; we did for a long time, enjoying the weirdness of urban youth in Japan. We saw dolled-up Lolitas, J-rocker goth kids, a group of girls dressed up like bloody school girls who abruptly put down a boom-box and did an energetic but admittedly unimpressive dance, a kid on a unicycle… you name it. Good times. The funniest part was that WE were the biggest spectacle there. The street kid — I shouldn’t really call him a kid because he was probably the same age as me — had a lot of shy friends who would come up and stand in a sort of ring around us but never dare to calm talk to us. All in all, it was cute and fun.

Took a few more goofy pictures around town and then at last went to bed in the miraculous $24 a night hotel in freakin’ downtown Sapporo that Bergman found us. What a champ! I hadn’t slept in a bed in a 2 months…

Can you see the cute face?!

The street kid, Akira, with his grey jumpsuit and almost-mohawk.

A good end to an epic day.

Mysterious ruins

This part of the road-trip was so exciting, unnerving, and moving to me that I wanted it to be its own post. It got too long when attached to the previous post, so just note that this part of the sixth day of road-trip Hokkaido.

Anyway, to cut to the chase, we were driving along when we saw this:

We had to stop. We had to know immediately what had happened, what this was. The volcanic ruins from earlier already had us thinking about impermanence, the dominance of Nature, and the mystery of abandoned human structures, which is why this sudden unguarded building seemed like a plum in the tree of adventure. We parked immediately! It was hard to believe that it wasn’t gated or remotely blocked off. In the US and Canada, these places are forbidden, strictly zoned off with “No Trespassing” zones… The health and safety department seals them, demolishes them, or regularly sends cops to scare out the hooligans who try to get inside. Not so here. There was nothing but a sudden, Apocalyptic scene spread open before us like a strange buffet. A tiny road led down to sleepy houses and a very old man walking slowly around, but immediately around us there was nothing but hazy sunlight shining on rain-damp ruins.

First there were the faded letters telling us that this place was a hotel. Then there were the remains of an onsen — shallow tiled pools cracked and broken with suggestions of drains or privacy walls. All that was left of this courtyard was a series of broken square foundations choked with wildflowers and weeds, the rusted wire reinforcements writhing out of the concrete like courting snakes.

I took many more photos than I have today. I do not know if they’re still out their or lost, so sorry. But here are the ones I have left.

Next there was a large outbuilding missing its entire eastern wall. The stone stairways were totally sound, but intriguingly, the floor was missing. This floor was covered with dusty wreckage: blackened chunks of wood, shattered stone tiles, broken chunks of foundation, and uprooted squat toilets. “What happened here?” we asked over and over. Out in the grass we saw glittering glass. It had to have been an earthquake, we said. But could an earthquake really wreak that much havoc to a building? An earthquake could crack walls and floors, surely, but if it had, why was the entire huge hotel still perfectly in tact while the buildings around it were completely demolished? How were there HEAVY squat toilets rooms away from where they should be? And the steel reinforcements snaking out of everything, and the fact that the tops of the onsen structures were missing…

What had happened here? We still don’t know. We took many photos and then moved on to the hotel itself. The boys, foolishly, went in… I wanted to, but A) the thought of splinters and rusty cuts in flip-flops and B) a keen awareness of the dangers of black mold and asbestos kept me out. Common sense won. I also didn’t trust the integrity of the building. I elected to stay outside and examine the grounds with a photographer’s eye, once again contemplating the fascination we humans feel when we see our own ruins. Who were they? we wonder. Maybe we should really ask Who were we? When we encounter ruins, we encounter reminders of our own impermanence, symbols of our forced humility before the over-arching power of Nature. We feel connected to and yet impossibly distant from the people who occupied these ruins. And the sight of everyday objects transformed into alien things by fire, mold, and water forever changes the way we perceive them…

Or it does for me, anyway. I guess some would say it is terribly morbid. To me, however, this kind of devastation is fascinating…

(A Blair Witch moment)

Paint torn away by… fire? Mold? Water? The mystery haunts me!

Unfathomably severe devastation.

The main hotel, slowly and beautifully being consumed by Nature.

Carl poses with inappropriate cheerfulness.

I am captivated by this door.

Eventually I encounter this utterly inhospitable, dangerous out-building, a garage/onsen of sorts completely decayed into filth. Pale foam insulation oozes from the tiles of the blackened ceiling, frozen mid-drip as though in some sort of hideous fire. The floor is missing, replaced by a filthy mess of shattered toilets and broken slate. I gaze at it in horror for a moment, then slowly back away; even the boys are too smart to get within four feet of this place.

Strange. I got very impatient and nervous while the boys were in the hotel. A car pulled off the highway to stop by ours for a while, and then there was that old man walking ever so slowly up the road. What if we were to get in trouble? I would have to face it alone because I was the only one in sight. There was also the fear they would somehow get hurt or stuck and I wouldn’t know until too late. I paced, and took photographs, and shouted angrily at them to at least answer my calls, but for a good half an hour nobody did. Then another 15 minutes passed. Then finally, finally, I heard them coming down.

Apparently they had seen incredible things there, like a large terrifying taxidermied deer, a vintage beer can left untouched for decades, and a box of creepy masks. I accidentally got a picture of lester when I pointed my camera in the door and the flash illuminated him. I don’t know where their pictures are (they say they have a lot) but for now, I will end with this foolish one of Lester and one more of the mysterious hotel.

What happened here?

Road-trip Day 6: Mordor Continued!

Yo everybody! I am on a roll! I finally, finally downloaded Picasa, then sucked it up and resized every photo I didn’t think I would someday want to print. This made the process of uploading them to Picasa a billion times faster, which in turn allowed me to hot-link them here instead of spending ages directly loading them all. Thank goodness for getting my act together. My ambitious goal now is to finish posting about the road-trip here, organize and upload all the previous days’ photos (many of which were not posted here) onto Picasa albums, and then start on something new. I also want to post the pics with people on Facebook because I said I would share them with my friends. Phew, but once this is done, getting caught up on other things (the Takayama Matsuri, the Maze fireworks, T-town in fall and summer, Kamikochi, etc) will seem so much more manageable.

So, here we go!

Continuing with Road-trip Hokkaido: Mordor…

After we saw the volcano memorial, we went on a hunt for the actual volcano. Getting there was a little bit tricky, but we were rewarded with a bizarre and interesting park. The volcano loomed over a small, brave forest and an expanse of touristy grass, opposite which stood a miniature village of souvenir shops and cafes. There was some sort of cable car leading up to another volcano, but the clouds and the fog were so thick we could not see where it was! We decided to explore the village instead.

Here are some rare, non-completely-clouded photos of the volcano:

Weird looking, eh? We didn’t expect it to look like that. Apparently it’s a super rare kind of volcano because it is red and shaped like that.

Here is what I like to think of as “Little Switzerland”:

And photos of various things we encountered.

(Yes, this is an actual POLAR bear. I think it cost around $30,000…?)

Tasty, tasty whelks.

Lester is for some reason invited to grill corn with the corn man. Oh cheerful awkward gaijin moments!

An accidentally terrifying photo of a giant Ainu wood carving of a salmon.

Endless furs!

Mega geodes.

A pretty buttercup outside.

Good times. We couldn’t get over the fact that we were actually beside a smoking volcano… it was surreal to try to imagine it errupting.

—

After our time at the volcano, we realized in amazement it was still quite early in the day. Such is the magic of rising at 7… you can squeeze a hell of a lot into a day. The result is really long blog posts like this!

Along our drive to Noboribetsu we stopped a few times to take pictures of strange buildings, investigate look-outs, or wander around attractive creeks. At one point we even ran into fellow young J-road-trippers and took pictures for each other at a pull-off.

What happened next gets its own post.

Road-trip Day 6: MORDOR (part 1)

Hey, everyone! Long time no blog!  I lied about my schedule getting easier before, but only because I was lied to first. Alas. I actually got slaughtered schedule-wise the last two weeks. More on that later, though; for now here’s a photo I tragically forgot to include last post of our devilish shadows on Mount Hakodate!

Muahaha. Hope you had a Happy Halloween.

Speaking of which, Day 6 of our road-trip took us through all sorts of unimaginable strangeness, leading us to nickname this portion of the road-trip “Mordor”. It was so epic that it will take several posts and many photos to explain. I hope that you will enjoy.

Let us journey through the fog-shrouded wilderness of a seemingly endless stretch of national park…

Road-trip Hokkaido Day 6: Mordor

Day 6 had an ominous beginning. We woke up to the simultaneous knocking of a policeman on our car door and Carl swearing at the sudden rain inside his tent. Floundering and flustered, we hastily attempted to break camp and re-pack without soaking everything, all under the watchful eyes of a bemused toll booth officer. Clearly he did not know what to make of us. We’d assumed the other parked cars were there for sleepers, but actually they were left there for a morning park and ride, making the brazenness of our tent and sleeping bags that much more unexpected and ridiculousness. It was hard not to giggle as we solemnly relocated. The fact that it was barely 7am seemed to help.

Once free of the toll both parking lot, we followed a scenic high-way through a long, long stretch of national park. We were headed for Sapporo that night, but we wanted to stop at Asia’s most famous onsen in Noboribetsu along the way.

We did not expect to encounter Mordor, but the rain, fog, and wanderlust led us to pull off at a sign for a lake. That lake turned out to be this:

Stunning, isn’t it? We waded through soaking wet knee-high grasses and brambles to get to the shore, which turned out to be made entirely of smooth, volcanic rocks. The air was chill and utterly silent. We were near a campground, actually, and an international hostel with a cafe, but it felt like we were in another world. I took photo after photo as the morning darkness slightly let up:

I particularly liked the plant-life all around. There was something so pure and alpine about the way everything was drenched with rain and dew, small and slightly ragged around the edges yet vibrantly colored against the dark undergrowth. I don’t know if vibrant is even the word I want, as that word makes me think of bright red and yellow tropical flowers… no, it was more subtle than that, more intense and unexpected. I was reminded of Butternut and Michigan. Of far northern places I never thought I’d see.

It was this reverie that nearly caused me to walk directly into Shelob:

BLAARRRGH AHHH what an @$&#ing big spider. I like spiders at a distance — they are fascinating and spooky and challenging to photograph — but RIGHT IN YOUR FACE in an entirely different story. What would that thing do, bite you another nostril? Brrrrr. Any spider that uses hand-sized leaves as part of its web is not a good one to have on your face.

Ahem. But back to the perilous beauty of Mordor…

So magical.

Eventually we left the lake and explored the much less cool but still entertaining park around it. There were a lot of inexplicable statues, which we posed on for your viewing pleasure.

Apparently it was called Lake Toyako.

The day did not get any clearer when we left it, and so Carl took us into the wild…

Next we spontaneously followed signs for an “Earthquake memorial”. We figured it would be more ridiculous statues, but we shocked by what we found. The memorial was not a statue but ruins. The remains of a volcano-ravaged mental hospital stood crumbling back into Nature before us, rain dripping off blackened eves and bugs scuttling through decimated windows.

It was incredible. The boys snuck around the fence to pose beside it, but mostly we just read the story (no one died there; it was a memorial to the compassion of the local citizens (oh, was there a town somewhere we missed? o.o) who led all of the hospital patients to safety using proper evacuation techniques. That made it easier to enjoy the power of the post-Apocalyptic landscape, as otherwise it would have felt like a crass horror movie exploitation scene. Then again, the abandoned building I describe in the next post may have been a scene with many casualties… or not.

Hokkaido is a mysterious place.

Stay tuned for the rest of Mordor: the volcano, the unbelievable ruins of the hotel, Hell’s Valley, and more.

Road-trip Day 5: Aomori, Hakodate, and Almost Getting Eaten

“Hello hello! I don’t know why you say goodbye, I say hello…” *singing*

Today is the first day of a beautiful week. No more 23 classes a week! No Interact after school this week! It’s annual school field-trip time, so the second years and their teachers are flying down to Okinawa for a week. They have absolutely zero scholastic requirements; they simply go, shop with their friends, and lie out in the sun.

My jealousy knows no limits.

Ah well. At least I get to join the trip to Kanazawa on Wednesday. I hope the weather is beautiful like today, as if it is my heart will absolutely burst with happiness at the chance to be out in it. I am giddy as it is knowing I get to leave with an hour of sunlight left today. Don’t have to go to club because the kids are going on a trip… *sings*

Anyway. Let’s end this slacker festival with another road-trip update! This day is mercifully short (for me, it takes forever to upload those pictures ) but ends in a scary adventure.

Day 5: Aomori, Hakodate, and Almost Getting Eaten By a ???

Day 5 began… slowly. We had to get up early to catch a ferry to Hakodate, but we were stiff from car-sleeping, tired from Day 4, and generally struggling to get there quickly without stopping for too long to get breakfast, wash our faces in the conbini sink, etc.

We made it to Aomori with an hour to spare. We didn’t have time to explore the city (it’s got little historic stuff because it was leveled once…) but we did visit the big, exciting-looking mall just across from the port. I once again failed to find anything that fits my giant Western body, but Carl found a handful of cute Rilakkuma t-shirts and (wtf?) a bow-shaped Hello Kitty bath rug for his manly toilet room.

Rilakkuma, if you didn’t know, is one of the most popular characters in Japan right now. There are several that are heavily merchandised / available as prizes in game machines; I ought to make a post about them because they are fun! For now here is a sneak preview of the ubiquitous Rilakkuma:

His name means “Relax Bear”. Basically that’s what he does. He is a Sanrio character occasionally accompanied by a smaller white bear and a duck, all doing relaxing things like wearing pajamas, watching movies, having cocoa, etc. Here they are relaxing together:

Yep. Good times.

Anyway, we also found and did purikura, but we had a ridiculous broken machine that wouldn’t let us undo our mistakes! We were deeply unsatisfied with our pictures, even though we’d LOVE the fact that it had monkey bars for us to clamber on and pose with.

The ferry ride to Hakodate, Hokkaido took four hours. It was uneventful. I played Kirby on my DS, napped (we were all so tired), and took a few pictures. At one point Carl busted out the melon he’d bought from his school (he teaches at an agricultural high school) and we faced the challenge of eating it without a knife… in the end we MacGyvered it with a torn-in-half coffee can from the vending machine. We all got caffiene AND we had melon. It was a win-win situation.

Here’s some photos:

The ferry to Hokkaido.

Land ho?

It was a pretty day.

As soon as we arrived in Hakodate, Hokkaido we went to the huge toward that Hakodate is famous for. To one side you see the modern city; to the other you see Hakodate Castle’s amazing star-shaped grounds. There is a star-shaped moat, even, and a lot of information in the tower you can read. We learned about Hakodate’s European history, enjoyed the bizzarre photo op boards (who DOESN’T want to be the squid grabbing the tower? Only the person who wants to be the tower!), and ate, delightfully, some famous Hakodate ice-cream.

It felt WEIRD to be somewhere where people love milk it.  Hokkaido’s lush nature and cool climate also make it famous for its corn (!!), cheese (!!), strawberries (!!), blueberries (!!), chocolate (!!), and beer. Can we say… most delicious place ever? Alas that Takayama has not discovered how to make any of these things. -_-

After going up in the tower we bought nice omiyage in the gift shops for our schools.  I bought myself some wonderfully flavorful corn “flakes” that you mix with milk to make corn soup and white chocolates for my office. I was sorely tempted by the wonderful sachets and ornaments made from fresh lavender, the funny “the most dangerous bear in the world” paraphenalia (which is even funnier now after what happened that night…), and the chocolate-covered strawberries.

I didn’t end up buying anything else, but it was hard not to overspend on this trip. You get this feeling of “When will I ever be here again?!” and everything is a new taste, a new experience, a new delight. I definitely did not save money. But I’d like to think I enjoyed the best of everything without going crazy on the souvenirs…

*laughs* Anyway. Here are some photos.

Part of the incredible fortifications.

Hakodate tower at sunset.

Hm! It seems the squid and tower photos have been lost! The castle (it was hidden under construction anyway…) and park photos have also gone missing. Probably they are still on my card; at this point in the trip my memory card was full and I had to transfer bunches of my favorite photos to Carl’s computer. Lesser ones may have been left on my card in the mix-up and may or may not have been deleted. I will look later.

Anyway, as just mentioned, afterwards we walked that star-shaped park. It had pleasant running trails and abundant trees and flowers. It must be nice to live around that…

Once darkness fell we took the cable car up the mountain, where we beheld — I kid you not — one of the 3 Most Famous Night Views in the World.

I give to you the peninsula of Hakodate:

A freezing cold but breath-taking view.

We stayed up there a long time even though we were shivering our butts off.  Hokkaido is notably colder than Honshu already, but it was a particularly cold and windy night.

After our trip back down the mountain, we pulled out the guidebook and looked for places to eat. We ended up in a really neat, startlingly European district right by the wharf. Most of the buildings were already closed, but they were made of BRICK and WOOD with CHRISTMAS LIGHTS and GAS STREET LAMPS and SHINGLED ROOFS and OUTWARDLY OPENING DOORS… I tell you, all sorts of foreign devilry was afoot! I can see why people love to visit it when it’s a snowy winterland in the winter. It already felt a little like Christmas…

We ate dinner late that night at a super hip ramen place. It was playing action movies on big-screen tv’s, had stainless steel Chipotle-esque tables, played hip hop music, and made its own in-house chili sauce.  We agonized a long time over what to order because everything looked SO GOOD and in the end I tried a regional speciality, jajamen. Jajamen is sort of like Japanese pad thai; you have a generous pile of cold ramen noodles (thought I think you can get it hot) tossed with cucumber slices, green onion, corn, red lettuce shreds, etc, etc, all with a wonderful combination of lime juice, spicy red chili sauce, and a sort of chilled, spicy mustard. AWESOME. I am craving it now. ;___;

We took (and photoshopped) a picture of their funny sign:

Oh yeah!

Right outside the restaurant we found a wooden Viking-ship-shaped foot bath, pulled off our shoes, and soaked ‘em with strangers. Then we drove for an hour or two into nowhere, where we found the perfect camping spot.

This pull-off was totally in the middle of nowhere, black as night but for the beautiful stars, and it backed right up against a lovely, grassy area. We sighed in relief (it was so late!) and began setting up the tent.

Then, suddenly, we heard the most terrifying sound I have ever heard: an all-out animal scream RIGHT NEXT TO US, a pause in which we all froze with terror, and then the rustling noises of something big moving toward us.

“WE’RE LEAVING,” Carl announced.

We threw all of our stuff in the car so fast that we ended up piled on top of it in the back, with only Josh left to rampage toward the passenger seat. As he was bolting toward us he suddenly skid violently  like a baseball player sliding toward home. He whacked his leg on the car with a cry and in our terror we all thought the mystery animal had grabbed his leg! “JOSH!” we started yelling, grabbing his shirt and pulling him into the car. We slammed the door behind him and Carl screeched out of there, all of us shouting and laughing and breathlessly asking what kind of creature had almost eaten us.

15 minutes later we found a toll-booth / high-way entrance with a park-and-ride. It was lit more brightly than a football field and exceedingly public… perfect. We parked as far away from the tall wild thickets as possible and cast mistrustful gazes into the dark.

What was that noise in the dark? To that day we still don’t know. Nobody thought to try to take a flash picture — we only thought to get the hell out.

Our best theories to this date are a) that it was a bear/wolf/wildcat killing something (the first noise was an almost bird-like scream; it was unfamiliar but sounded like a death cry) right next to us; or B) that it was some sort of screaming wild boar.

Josh says foxes scream like murdered women, but the rustling sound it made was WAY to big. Unless maybe it was something else killing a fox.

Insanity. I am glad we survived.

A Day in the Life

Yo all!  The sun did indeed come out. It’s not so chillingly cold as it’s been, but the forecast this weekend predicts a low of 2* celcius. 2 degrees?? That’s like 35* Fahrenheit. NOT AWESOME.  Unless, of course, I done some cute cowgirl boots and a snuggly scarf and feel warmed by the company of friends…

Today I feel like writing a post about a day in my life here. You know, what I do with my time.  Obviously’s it’s different everyday, but there is enough of a schedule that I can give you an idea of what I’m up to these days.

A day in the life.

7:50 a.m.:

On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays my super cheerful phone alarm announces that it’s time to stretch cat-style and clamber out of my futon. I wake up earlier on Tuesdays and Thursdays, around 7:10 a.m., but either way I do not have to get up ridiculously early. It’s nice.

Breakfast:

For breakfast I always eat a mixture of some of the 5 (they’re getting extravagant now…) kinds of cereal my grocery store stocks. One is a bag of brown rice puffs with a slight mocha-ish flavor; one is a super delicious granola ($$$); one is Kellog’s Bran Flakes ($$$!); one is Frosted Flakes; and one is Cocoa Crispies ($$$).

These are not my cereals of choice, but they work. Add in a banana, yogurt, coffee, mikon, or toast with the Vegemite I inherited and you have a decent Western breakfast. I sorely miss healthy, organic cereals. I also miss oatmeal, berries, trail-mix, other cheap fruit, whole wheat English muffins, affordable cream-cheese, apple-cinnamon anything, and cheap wheat bagels. Ah well. Life goes on just fine!

I am thinking I should start eating miso for breakfast now and then; it’s warm, nutritious, and protein-packed. Gotta get on that.

Transportation:

I drive to school.  I could easily bike to my base school, Hida, but I quickly learned that biking home after a long, exhausting day is terrible. Really I should be doing it, as I’ve been complaining about the lack of exercise, but man. Does it even count as exercise if you fail and have to walk your bike before you even reach the mountain?

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My schools:

I teach at two senior high schools. One, Hida, is my “base” school. They are in charge of me. I see them MWF. This school is one of the best in Takayama and is famous for its rigorous academics. I call it the “pressure cooker.” The environment is tense, busy, and political, and I work WAY beyond the hours of my contract. I also work mostly alone; sometimes my assistant Japanese teacher simply leaves or sits in the back.

The students are brilliantly intelligent but shy. They have warm, friendly smiles but they will hardly ever speak. Teaching them is often like pulling teeth, although they come alive whenever we get to play a game. I wish I could just do nothing but games with them. Unfortunately they have mandatory quizzes, listening exercises, and mountains of weekly vocabulary.

I am ridiculously busy at Hida. I coach 3 speech kids, teach 5 classes a day, help students with homework and teachers with grading at lunch, lesson plan, write tests, and lead Interact Club from 4-5 two days a week. It sucks, quite frankly. My friends are free at 3:45 or 4 and I am not home til 6 or 6:30.  Fortunately the class load is lightening soon, so maybe I can get more stuff done during school hours. Also fortunate is that the teachers, P, and VP are wonderful, thoughtful people.

My “visiting” school, pleasantly enough, is the polar opposite of Hida. I got there on Tuesday and Thursday. It is a  Kogyo, or technical high school.  The students there are very low level; few of them will continue on to college. Their English is quite poor but they are exuberant and rambunctious. They are also overwhelmingly (98%) male. This makes for a lot of jokes and silliness. They love games, love vocab, and basically love anything that lets them make noise. They try (unsuccessfully) to flirt with me.

Unlike Hida, where I have to teach almost entirely on my own, at Kogyo I have a whole crew of JTE’s. Sometimes there are as many as 4 of us English teachers handing out papers, managing students, and translating into Japanese. We play a LOT of fun, simple games and do frequent understanding checks. I have all 50 minutes to plan for, also, and don’t have to cut time out for a quiz. The most classes I have is usually 4 a day, and sometimes I only have to do 3!  I also leave beautifully early, even if I have my speech kid to coach. The JTE’s are very conscientious of my contract. They apologize, set reasonable time limits right off the bat (“Can you coach until 4:30?”), and always provide snacks and tea in their office. They are very generous.

The teachers at Hida are generous, too, and the super-nice teacher gives me more little gifts (coffees, cookies, rice crackers, etc.) than I deserve. However, they still ask way too much, and I feel I have no choice but to give it. :/ Hopefully things settle down.

I’ll make another more amusing post at the amusing details of what its’ like to teach at these schools. So much culture shock!

After school:

After school there are extracurricular activities (speech-coaching, Interact MW 4-5, etc.). After those, I often come home and crash into a nap. I then have what’s left of my evenings free every night except Tuesday. (Tuesday nights I have taiko practice from 7:30-10.)  I generally run errands if I need to, spend too much time on the computer, cook, prepare my bento for the next day, lesson plan some if needed, and walk across the hall to Carl’s to hang out with him. Sometimes I do (drawing, painting, etc) or read a lot of poetry (I am such a Bohemian. )

When it was light out after school I would meet up with Bergie to play soccer at a school field, but now that it is dark I have no exercise. Gotta get on that soon. I would LOVE to regularly play volleyball or badminton or whatever my friends’ Japanese friends seem to play, but I gotta get into the gym first.

Bergie and I occasionally cook dinner and then watch a movie together (not romantically, haha); so far we’ve seen Taken, Fight Club, and Shawshank Redemption. I approve of all of them. Taken could have been better, I feel, but the other 2 were great. I’m not sure what we will watch next. Mooaaarr action movies?! It’s the best genre foh sho.

I have occasionally met up with other pals for movies (saw the weird Catch Me If You Can with Kacey just the other day) and cooking, but mostly I think we were all exhausted and just wanted to vegetate alone after school.  I want to get a new anime from Josh…

Night-time: Nothing to tell here. Sometimes some of you are up early online and we get to talk. I try to update my blog, get ready for the next day, and then listen to my iPod. Sometimes I really wish I’d spent another $100 for an iPod with twice as much memory instead of my 8gig. It’s great and compact, but I can never have enough music on it at once to fit my spontaneous, eclectic tastes. Ah well. At least I have a nice laptop, a nice camera, and an iPod shuffle…. all I need is an electronic Japanese dictionary and my life is complete!

The final thing to share is Weekends, which are always awesome. There’s nothing more I can say about them. I pack them to the gills with adventure and fun. The ALT’s all manage to get together in various numbers and I go to festivals, go to karaoke, eat out, hike, take miniature road-trips to nearby places, shop, watch movies, take naps, make art, etc. I love for weekends here. The weekdays are just filler in between.

More later… sorry if that was super boring, but I wanted to at least clue my family in to my daily life.

Ups and Downs

Hallo all. It’s another cold morning in Takayama, Gifu.  The sun looks like it may want to come out, and it is Friday here, but I feel rather depressed right now.  Thank goodness I have COFFEE and COCOA CRISPIES (haha) and a BANANA right now. Delightful thing, breakfast. I can’t understand why people choose to miss out.

Anyway, that aside, I am missing people very much for several reasons:

1.)  Have you heard? My mom broke her leg. This makes life very hard for her, and hard for Dad, who worries about her tons.  I wish I could make her feel better. Will have to send another care package once I get paid… miss you guys so much. Want to talk to Dad about finance and the economy, Mom about the fashions I am desperately behind on.

2.) It’s RenFaire season right now. And, I know it’s silly, but that’s the season I always want to be in Ohio. RenFaire is an old tradition. It’s the drive through the gorgeous autumn-kissed forests and cornfields of southern Ohio, the sunscreen and costume adjustments in the parking lot, the cheerful noise of peasant actors and startled tourists and shows. It’s imagining my ancestors a long time ago and wondering if life was actually anything remotely like this. It’s Brit and Kat and John and Brian, Jesse and Adam and the flower-seller who relentlessly tries to sell me roses every single time. Brit and I should be dressed up and made-up in all-out faerie regalia this year, carrying business cards for Sidhe Designs and dispensing them whenever we are asked about our costumes. It’s the best promotion to the perfect audience. We could take in so much business! But, supposedly it just keeps raining there, and I am a Pacific Ocean away.

3.) Got an email from Weifei this morning telling me she doesn’t think she’ll meet me in Asia. I admire her sensibility and my immediate response was “O rly? Oh ok”…  but now I am starting to realize that that means a year without Weifei and no familiar faces at Christmas. Thank goodness ROB is coming in December!! I am so pumped. I hope I can find someone pleasant to travel SE Asia with.

4.) Going back to Brit, she is having a really hard time right now.  I wish I could be there for her. We could throw ourselves into sewing 50′s-inspired Halloween costumes again. I miss listening to “girl music” (Spice Girls, Peaches, CS, etc…), eating a dinner cooked by Mama Everitt, and sewing, painting, and beading the night away.

5.) I also, of course, really miss the girls. They’ve been rather busy lately, so few emails or blog posts have occurred.  I think about Barwick in particular right now because she is my nature adventure friend, but if we could be together ALL of the girls would gung-ho head for an apple orchard or hay ride or PUMPKIN FESTIVAL (need I say more?) together right now. Aw.

6.)  John and Brian just moved! I am dying with curiousity to see their new place, and to share stories and snacks with them. I want to try those gingerbread cookies from IKEA, in fact walk around IKEA together again, and so much more.

7.) The colder it gets, the more I miss the presence of cozy coffee shops and an insulated house.

8.) I also miss “gaijin” food and my gym; I feel once that once I feel more in control of my health again I will be much more cheerful.

9.) The cold also makes me miss California and the time I spent with Rob, Judy, and HP and the boys.

So those are my grumpy dumpy downs… fortunately there are also many ups and I feel better now having written about them.