A Brief Message

Since I won't be around to wish it, Merry Christmas and Happy New Years to all of you! 2010 was a very memorable year, and a turning point in a lot of our lives, I think. I know that 2011 will be spectacular and I plan on aiding that cause. Someone drink a glass of champagne for me, when the time comes.

I'll be back in 2011 - don't do anything crazy while I'm gone.

ユキと雪ゆき (Bound for Snow with Yuki)

[Amusing language note: the title of this post is pronounced yuki to yuki yuki, Yuki being the name of my friend, the word for "snow", and the word for "destination", as used on train and bus tickets.]

I have a few minutes of rest amongst the storm of December so I figured I would make a neat little post about a specific trip I had - a first for this blog? Possibly.


Last weekend Brittany and I went to Nagano with our friend Yuki, who is super cute and friendly and invited us to stay with her family in Omachi, a town in the north-western part of Nagano prefecture.

Nagano all together was really nice. It's about time I saw some Japanese countryside. The air was crisp and fresh, and it was cold, but not piercingly cold. With sufficient layers, we were totally comfortable.

Yuki's family was soooo nice and accommodating. They made us feel totally at home, gave us huge amounts of home-made food for dinner, chatted with us, and even paid for our onsen trip. They made the trip so smooth, something you often lack if you travel alone.

We did various things:

• Went to Matsumoto castle, one of the oldest castles still in its original form. It had really neat details on its unique building structure with multiply layered floors (like, a floor 1.5) and a lot of info on the evolution of rifles. They were apparently used a lot to defend this castle.

• We ate Nagano specialties: oyaki and soba. Oyaki are like nikuman but without meat and with thicker, tougher bread. The oyaki place we went to had crazy flavours. I had anko and walnut miso. They were delicious. As for the soba, I had kamonanban, which is basically duck and leeks. It was delicious.
• We saw the first snow of this year (for us). We had a snowball fight in the bus station with the meager amount we could scrape up. 
• We went to an onsen, a first time for me. The sensation was so profound that I nearly fainted a few times and I felt like I had heat stroke, but afterwards I was the chillest dude around. I felt sooooo relaxed.
• We woke up early to see Nagano's northern Alps. Then, it was cloudy, so we hung out around the kotatsu and went a few hours later. And... wow.

• Much of Yuki's family (siblings, grandparents, other relations) all live in the same little neighbourhood, which was confined to the side of a mountain. We drove past her grandparents' rice paddies (which were situated on a hill... looked difficult) and met her grandmother who gave us apples. Then we met her goat.

• We went to an alpine museum which had stuffed animals inside and live animals outside! Only stuffed monkeys, though. I was not lucky enough to see the real thing. I did, however, see a kite, a raccoon dog, a civet, and a serow.

• We saw biscuits with bees baked into them. Just... bees. Wings and all. On the way back, we saw snack packs of whole crickets, too. They were basted in some sort of sauce. Looked crunchy. People from Nagano are weird.

On the way back, all the Meitetsu trains were down due to a power outage. Even Yuki said she'd never seen this before. Lucky us! Thankfully, we arrived in the absolutely packed Nagoya station about 2 hours after the power outage had occurred and only had to wait 15-20 minutes before things were back in order.

All in all really cool. There isn't anything super famous in Nagano (save the Olympic site which we never even visited) but the trip was really fun and we saw/did some cool things. It was a good breath of fresh air before diving headlong into the typhoon of next week and the people-infested city of Tokyo.

Wish me luck!

光（Brightness）

Recently, as some of you may have noticed, I was subjected to an internet dry spell, something I've claimed in the past would be 100% okay with me. And it was! I feared only the inability to reply to important e-mails, which could be done at school, but really, I spent more time being active and went to bed at normal hours. Funny how quick that change was!

In my absence from this place I've since moved and am enjoying my new family. Things are much different: I have two young host-siblings, a 2-year-old sister named Koharu and a 6-year-old brother named Kousei. They are both extremely active and want me to play with them, talk to them, etc. pretty much all the time. I think it's great and I like to give them attention but I've pretty much lost all privacy before 9 pm. I'm lucky the workload is minor.

Otherwise, the mother is super nice and the father is a cool, worldly guy and I get along quite well with all of them. No complaints.

Hm.

It's been so long that I've forgotten the sorts of things I say in these updates. I suppose I should mention places I've been to recently, but it's mostly been repeats or local things, so...
We went to Kyoto again and saw the bamboo forest of Arashiyama;

Absolutely stunning scenery and packed with people. Bamboo forests are just so much more serene than evergreens or otherwise, I don't know exactly what it is.

we went to the Hatcho Miso factory in Okazaki;

The tour was a bit on the slow side (as soon as you figure out how miso is made it's all a bit dry) but the restaurant was amazing. I tried miso-flavoured ice cream, miso-flavoured gyoza, miso-flavoured beer, and miso-flavoured curry udon.

I participated in a volleyball tournament at my school;

I was invited last minute as a sub, but I played for half the games and scored some devastating spikes. We didn't win but we won most of our games!

we saw a meteor shower;

It happened just yesterday, near Orion. The falling stars were huge and bright, and I saw at least 8 of them. Gorgeous.

Julian stopped by and we hung out for a day in Nagoya and Okazaki;

We discussed the differences in Asian cultures and countries, and ate kaitenzushi for lunch and tebasaki (and beer, of course) for dinner. I also taught him the basics of kendo.

and various other things I'm forgetting or choosing not to mention, like neat shrines or shops/stores we happened upon.

Coming up we have Nagano, multiple Christmas/New Years parties, a drinking date with one of our teachers (a fabled sake master), an all-you-can-eat market appointment, Kyoto and Nara again, Hiroshima, Miyajima, Tokyo, and possibly a Buddhist mountain retreat.

I've been studying Kanji a lot... I find it so interesting, its history and components and usage all combined. It seems strange to me when I can read some sentences with Kanji in them, because I'm reading it as though the Kanji themselves are letters in an alphabet ("This one is typically 'tabe' but in this situation it's read as 'shoku' so the word is 'shokudou'"). As such, my reading and writing have greatly improved, my listening is coming along nicely as well, and as usual, my speaking hasn't really improved at all. Well, a little bit.

Because of my busy next few weeks I may be unreachable after a certain point. Feel free to comment below or e-mail me and let me know what's going on for Christmas or New Years in your neck of the woods and I'll make sure to read them all and do a big update in early January, when I get back to my homestay.

Pictures:

Kyoto

 

 

Random

 

 

Old pictures of me courtesy of the Katos, my first host family

 

 

Pictures of me being a gangsta

Picture of me high-fiving a ninja

新古 (Old and New)

While waiting impatiently for my colleagues to stop procrastinating and send me some photos that I wanted to post, I realized that I couldn't call them on it if I was using them to procrastinate myself. So, here's a post.

I'm finally plateauing. With the 2 month mark being today, my consciousness has come to the realization that I'm going to be here "for a while". I can't just suck it up, I have to change - and that's something I've been waiting for this whole time. That's the idea: force change, and reap the benefits. If you're confused at my way of handling "homesickness" as some call it, bear in mind that I am an exceedingly tolerant person and thus actually changing me, my core, is a difficult task; I have to force the crowbar in and do it manually.

This sort of thinking is usually triggered by an event - you're right! In fact, I will be switching host families on the 1st of December, which is in 3 days. It's a shame that I have to leave my current family behind, as they've been more than accommodating and incredibly helpful up to this point, but I should just be happy that I was able to spend 2 months with them. This movement - involving me repacking everything, taking inventory, and reestablishing myself - put me in the mindset of changing environments. I keep feeling like I should say goodbye to everyone at school and start wrapping things up, but really nothing is changing other than my home life. It feels like the end of a chapter, but it's really only another paragraph.

December will be a somewhat wild month for me. We are planning on travelling on every weekend at this point including to Nagano, about which I'm very interested; I will encounter at least two friends from Vancouver, Alecks N. and Julian D.; we will be riding the Shinkansen for the first time (on the school's bill) as we make a 3-day trip to various places including Hiroshima (where I will meet up with another Japanese friend from Vancouver) and Miyajima; and we will be spending over a week in Tokyo over New Years eating, seeing, spending, playing, and doing as much as we can.

So yes, while part of me misses Vancouver and the lifestyle I had there, it's the weak part of me - the part of me that would love to spend my life not sleeping and playing video games. The other part of me, which I suppose should be dubbed the strong part, is who was present inside me as I spent the morning today striking the helmet of my opponent with a bamboo sword and shouting "MENNNNNNnnnn..."


Places I've been to recently:
- Korankei Gorge, Toyota

As autumn hits, all the trees in this mountainous area change colours into dramatic reds, oranges, and yellows. There are many lamps set up to amplify the effect at night. When we went, it was raining, but absolutely gorgeous.

 

  

 

- Iga, Mie prefecture

Iga is known for (and certainly proud of) having a particularly skilled faction of ninja arise back in the samurai era. The streets of the city are covered in ninja-related images and characters, and even the trains had (were?!) ninjas. I learned more than I ever wanted to know about them, saw a weapons show, and saw a real kunoichi slip into a hidden wall (see the last photo - girl in pink).

 

 - Ise-shi, Ise Grand Shrine

One of the most famous Shinto shrines in Japan, dedicated to Amaterasu, the sun goddess. We went just for the sake of visiting the shrines, but were greeted with amazing scenery with some of the most beautiful autumn leaves I've seen yet, completely exposed nature in the form of animals as well as trees, and natural yet humbling shrines flooded with people.

 

Random things that happened:
- I saw an old guy on a train with a fake hand, but then he dropped his fake hand and he actually had a normal hand under it.
- I finally went 1-on-1 with the badminton sensei for reals, and he dropped me like stone. He has such finess, it hurts. He didn't even smash a single time.
- After completely discolouring both knees due to bruises from reckless badminton/volleyball dives, I went to a restaurant where I had to kneel. ...
- We foolishly tried to finish the Unbelievable.

- I ate movie theatre food (which happened to be a churro!).
- We went bowling and I attempted to get a turkey for American Thanksgiving on the 10th round, but instead I got two strikes followed by a single pin.
- In one of the bowling rounds, I struck down nine pins with a poor shot (domino effect) and one of the pins flew into the gutter so that it couldn't be pulled away by the machine. Instead of waiting and calling over an attendant, I just threw my second ball as I was fairly certain I was going to miss (I am particularly horrendous at bowling). The ball guttered almost immediately (which actually doesn't happen often - I miss, but don't gutter), struck the pin in the gutter, leaped out of the gutter and knocked down the final pin to give me a spare. Even the staff thought it was a nice shot.

終わり