Should be studying for tomorrow’s test right now so no time to proof read so beware of typos and enjoy!

Day 1 (Friday February 3, 2006)

As I’m typing this, its 4:17pm and I’m sitting on JAL Flight 2507, 37,500 ft. above sea level on way to Sapporo. We’re scheduled to land at 5pm. The weather there is –9 C with light snow!! So far I think this has probably been the best flight I’ve ever been on. But, lets start from the beginning…

Got up around 7:15am so that I could get in a little more studying before this morning’s test. I had two homework assignments that are due on Monday that I was going to attempt to get done before we left, but because one of them was a 3 paragraph composition in which I had to analyze bar and pie graphs based on the study habits of Japanese college students, I knew there was no chance they’d get done before I left. Finished packing up all my stuff and 20 minutes early walked over to the large conference room, where I’d be taking my test. Brian was there early because of his home stay, so we chatted a bit and eventually the tests got passed out. I feel pretty confident about how I did on this test, but I also felt confident on the last test as well, and it turned out that I did just as horrible as the first test. I’ll find out on Tuesday…..

After the test was over I practically ran back to my room and quickly cleaned up all the dirty dishes that I had sitting in the sink. My one carton of milk decided to sprout a leak so I also had to clean our my fridge, and took our my garbage so that I wouldn’t return to a stinky room. I had just enough time to toss the bags outside of my door before I had to run back to the large conference room for the Friday project, which this week was Kyogen (kind of like a comedic version of Noh). The Friday project was scheduled to be over at 11:15am, so that morning I had called a cab to have to come at 11:30am. I snuck in some of my Monday homework, and while we were watching a video and later given a demonstration on Kyogen, I was able to finish it up a little. Luckily, it ended at exactly 11:15am, which gave me enough time to run back to my room, rum my garbage out to the dumpsters, finish packing up my stuff, grab a snack, and go down to the lobby. On the way there I snagged Tim, and when we got down to the lobby we found the taxi driver wandering around looking for me (since I had given them my name). He even seemed a little pissed that he had to come in….we were all of 2 minutes later than 11:30am. Oh well. We jumped in the cab and were glad to be heading away from JCMU for a long weekend of snow, skiing, and fun. When we got to Hikone station a few minutes later, we went across the street to Al Plaza to grab some McDonalds for our 2+ hour journey to Osaka-Kansai Airport. We were able to make it on the 12pm rapid with no problems, and even met up with a student from JCMU who is in 4th year and lives in Kyoto.

The next 2 hours and 40 minutes were pretty uneventful, and we arrived at Kansai Airport with plenty of time to spare. Checking in was basically the same as the US, except that they didn’t even check our ID’s and they asked me what kind of seat I wanted, and I told them window. J Tim and I each checked a bag, and we were told (in English) what gate we needed to go to and that we just had to be there 15 minutes early. So, then we had 30 minutes to kill. We ended up just going to the gate and waiting. It surprised me that even though we were in the domestic departure area, all announcements were made in both Japanese and English (despite the fact that I think we were the only gaijins on the flight). 15 minutes before departure, we boarded the flight, and to my utter surprise, not only did I have a window seat, but it was an emergency exit row seat!!! I’ve never even been able to get one of these if I *ask*, so I guess maybe they just kinda looked us up and down at check-in and figured we were tall gaijins and needed some extra leg room. Well, thank you unnamed JAL employee. J Once settled into our seats, we were able to watch, on the television screens in the plane, a view from a camera on the front of the plane. We got to watch it as we were pushed onto the runway, taxied out to the end, and while take-off. Once in the air, the view switched to a camera on the underside of the plane, and then we got to watch the ground going by underneath us. Of all the US flights I’ve ever been on, they’ve never done anything like this. It was soooooooooo cool. They left it on the sky view for quite a while, and then after a while changed it to a segment of today’s news. When they allowed us to get our electronic devices out again, I played some games and started writing this blog entry.

(Several hours later…)

Well, now I’m finishing this day’s entry while sitting in our hotel room. The rest of the flight was incredibly smooth, probably one of the nicest flights I’ve ever been on. (One interesting contrast in service on Japanese airlines is there was a man sitting ahead of me who was asleep when the stewardess went by with drinks. Instead of waking him up or skipping him altogether, she put a little sticky note on the chair in front of him, so that he’d know when he woke up that he could still get a drink.) We were able to watch our plane landing from the nose cone camera, which was also very cool. We landed at New Chitose airport outside of Sapporo around 5pm. We could see a lot of snow on the ground, but when we got out of the plane it wasn’t really that cold. We picked up our bags and then immediately went down to the train station, where we got on a rapid train for Sapporo. 36 minutes later we were in Sapporo station, where we wandered into the tourist information center in order to ask about some discount tickets for skiing and the train ride to the ski resort. We ended up buying tickets for Kiroro Snow Park, since it was the largest ski resort close to Sapporo. We then got a few maps and some information about the snow festival, and then headed to the subway to get to our hotel. There were SO MANY people in the train station. More than I had seen at one point in all of my week in Tokyo. We got on our train and three stops later we were out and wandering around the snow covered streets trying to find our hotel. We eventually found it and then I had to tell them that actually we had a 2-bed room instead of a 1-bed room, which I felt pretty guilty about but eventually they brought out our room keys and our meal tickets for the free breakfasts that we get each day, and so we went up to find our room. As far as hotel rooms go, it was pretty normal, which made me happy since all I really wanted was a room with heat, a bed, and hopefully a TV. We dropped off our bags and then headed back out in the cold to find something to eat for dinner. We wandered around for way too long and kind of ended up in the adult entertainment part of town. Turning around and heading back into the now driving snow, we ducked into an interesting looking restaurant, which when we actually got inside we were a little worried because it looked like a pretty nice and expensive place. The first thing the waiter did when he walked over to us was set down this little appetizer plate with some pieces of raw salmon and a snail (or something like it) still in its shell. We attempted to order from a menu with no pictures and kanji we didn’t know, and after the waiter left I took a good, hard look at my snail for a good 5 minutes then decided I’d just eat it. Surprisingly it was actually quite tasty. When the food finally came out, it was luckily also good (despite the fact that I didn’t know what it was). Walking back through the snow, we got back to our hotel and settled in to watch some TV before deciding when to get up the next morning for skiing.

Day 2 (Saturday February 4, 2006):

Woke up at the crack of dawn (6:30am) to get ready to go to Kiroro Snow World. We had to get out of our room by 7am, to go down and check out the buffet breakfast, which turned out to be awwwwwesome. Scrambled eggs, bacon, potatoes, fresh fruit, miso soup, rice….and it was all very tasty. We got out of our hotel by 7:30am, and made it with plenty of time to spare to get on the 8:10am bus. It took us a while and a little effort to find where we had to board the bus, and at 8:10am it came and picked us up. We were supposed to get to Kiroro at 9:35am, but it turned out to be more like 10am. When we got there it was snowing pretty steadily, and there was at least 6 or 7 feet of snow on the ground outside of the ‘Mountain Center’. (We had read before getting here that there was some 390cm of snow on the ground at Kiroro.) Going into the main ski center, we exchanged our tickets for ski boots, skis and poles (of which I got a double take when I showed them my form with my shoe size on it). After getting our lift tickets, I just kind of followed Tim to one of the lifts, figuring that at the top there had to be a moderately easy run. Well, turned out there wasn’t. The only one to go down was a ‘red’, which in the Japanese system means intermediate. Well, I was completely not ready for something like that and it was hell trying to get back down to the bottom. This is the first time that I’ve skied in years, and I probably wiped out 3 times. It was really very unfun. When I finally got down to the bottom, I looked on the big map myself this time, and found that the big gondola had the longest beginner course of the whole resort. The ride up was a good 20 minutes, and as we climbed higher and higher it was starting to get windier and started snowing harder. Reading the top, the wind was blowing so hard that at points along the course on the way down, the wind actually stopped us from moving. While this second course was very easy and flat, at some points it was so flat that we had to almost practice our cross country skiing technique. It was actually *too* boring. So, 0 for 2 on the courses, when we finally got down to the bottom (it probably took us a good 40 minutes), we took a break to have some lunch (negi (green onion) ramen because we couldn’t read the kanji on any of the other kinds of ramen), and then we split up since I knew that I was only going to be able to handle the beginner courses and Tim is a way better skier than I. We made plans to meet up at 4pm, around the time that the park would close, and I decided to go back up on the large gondola and try one of the other easy courses. Immediately off the gondola, I had to take the same course as I had the time before, but then a little ways down it splits off into several over courses. There was a new course called the “Grand Line”, and while it was an intermediate course, I thought that maybe I’d be able to do it. Turns out I was COMPLETELY WRONG. The next 45 minutes were incredibly frustrating. I’d go about 10 feet and fall onto my ass. Then I’d go another 10 feet and I’d be flipping end over end. It was so steep that eventually I decided to just give up and slowly make my way down the steep parts of the route by walking. When I finally got down to the bottom I was about on the verge of just returning my skis and sitting the rest of the day out. The day so far had not been very enjoyable. I decided to go into the lodge, find some hot cocoa, and take a break before attempting to go back out again. Well, turns out they didn’t even serve hot cocoa!! L So instead I had a pop and a cream puff, and analyzed the courses at the resort to find something that make me feel like I was glad I had come all the way out here to ski. Eventually I found something with a max pitch of some 16 degrees (the ‘red’ courses had a max of 25). I took a 10 minute lift ride up, and took the plunge yet again. Luckily, this time, I did quite well and was actually starting to have a certain amount of fun. By the time I got back down to the bottom of the hill, it was 3:40pm and 5 minutes before the lifts would close. So I quick went back up the same lift, and then came down the same route again, and met up with Tim at the bottom of the hill at 4pm. It got darker a lot faster in Hokkaido than it does in the Kansai area, so we got all of about 5.5 hours of ski time in. I wish that I had been able to go down the same route a couple more times before Kiroro had closed. They offer night-time skiing, however the only routes open are the intermediate to hard routes, so I wasn’t really interested in doing that.

We went inside the lodge and returned our skis and boots. And then, we inquired about the public bath. Yes, the discount tickets that we bought included a ticket for a public bath. Up to this point, I’ve never used an onsen (hot springs) or ofuro (bath) in Japan based on the fact that I don’t really enjoy baths, and the fact that I would be completely naked amidst a bunch of people I didn’t know. Despite the fact that my day wasn’t going all that well up to this point, I figured that, what the hell, I was here and I could do it for free, I might as well try it once, and if I hated it I’d never do it again. Well, going in I put all my bags inside of a locker and then I searched around for a towel. Well, they failed to tell me that there are NO towels. So after standing around waiting to see what other people did, I went back to the front desk and asked where the towels were. I explained (in Japanese) that this was my first time going to an ofuro and I wasn’t sure what to do. I was told that there were “nai” (none) towels. So I kinda stood there and said “….ok”. At this point I’m on the verge of just walking right out and not coming back, but then the desk attendant comes in, and I guess since she took pity on the stupid gaijin, she gave me a towel. I thanked her and then reluctantly decided that I’d just…..get naked! Once I kinda passed that hurdle it really wasn’t too bad. Everyone else there, kids and adults, were just normal people. I didn’t really know what to do so I just kinda followed everyone else’s lead. Sat down on a little stool and took a ‘shower’ before getting into the bath part of it. I hadn’t used my towel at this point and I didn’t know what to do with it, so I sat it on my head. Well…that was fine until it fell off my head and into the water. L Sat around in the bath part for a couple of minutes then decided that I’d had my fill, so I took another shower and then tried to dry off as well as I could with a completely soaked towel. Hid in the bathroom to get dressed again before escaping the ofuro. All in all it wasn’t horrible or even terribly embarrassing, and if I had been better prepared (had my own towel and brought a change of clothes) it would have been a lot more enjoyable. I don’t know if I’ll go back to an ofuro or an onsen, but I wouldn’t be opposed to it like I was before.

We had about a 15 minute wait before our bus came to take us back to Sapporo. Once on the bus we both just kinda dozed during the 2-hour trip back. We were starved when we got back to the station so we stopped at a restaurant in the underground area for some donburi and cheap udon. Took the subway back to our hotel room, where we were met with a note stuck in the door. Apparently the hotel staff had investigated and found out that only I had paid for the hotel room. So now Tim will have to pay about 20,000yen for his 3 nights here. It sucks but I was feeling pretty guilty about telling the hotel staff that I had a 2-bed room reserved. Oh well. We plan on getting up tomorrow morning around 8 for more good breakfast and giant ice sculptures!! This is guaranteed to be fun, and is the main reason that I came to Sapporo in the first place. I’m really looking forward to it.

Day 3 (Sunday February 5, 2006)

Waking up around 8am (the alarm went off at 7:45 but it was painful attempting to get out of bed), we quickly took our showers and went to get our buffet breakfast. The main goal of today was to see everything for the snow festival. Our first stop was Odori Koen (Odori Park), which was the main drag of Sapporo. It was 2 stops by subway from where our hotel was (and for this day we were able to buy a special ‘Eco Kippu’ (Eco ticket) which was only 700yen that could be used on the subways, buses, and streetcars for the whole day), and once we got there we were right in the midst of all the snow sculptures. The park is set up so that it was about 15 blocks long, and on one end was the Sapporo TV Tower, which marked the ‘start’ of the festival. From there, on each end of the block, there could be a large or medium snow sculpture, ice sculpture, or snow sculpture contest taking place. At points on either side of the ‘route’ there were also many smaller snow sculptures. Leaving the subway station, the first snow sculpture that we saw was for The Chronicles of Narnia. It was one of the ‘large’ snow sculptures and it was probably 3-stories tall and 50 feet across. Because the snow festival didn’t actually start until Monday, and because it had snowed quite a bit the night before, there were still about a half dozen people working on the sculpture, with brooms and hair dryers tied onto long poles. There were also billboard sized advertisements all around the sculpture for the movie, which comes out in Japan on March 4th. The next snow sculpture we saw was called Dream Ai-land Okinawa, and depicted the current JAL (Japan Airlines) spokesperson sitting among a scene of a temple and some Chinese looking dog statues in Okinawa. This was also a large snow sculpture, and the level of detail was amazing, even surpassing the Narnia sculpture. This one was also completely finished. The next thing that we saw was a giant ice sculpture, a replica of the Royal Exhibition Hall in Australia. (2006 is a year of exchange between Japan and Australia, so at the snow festival there were two large sculptures of Australian buildings, as well as many other smaller sculptures.) While walking down along each block of the festival, some of them would have small snow sculptures at the end or along the walkway. Unfortunately most of them weren’t brushed off yet, so it was hard to make out what some of them were. However, there were *2* Totoro’s and one sculpture of Kiccoro and Morizo (the mascots from the World Expo)! Continuing on, we passed the second large sculpture for Australia, the ‘Flinders Street Station’.

The next snow sculpture, taking up an entire block, was a replica of Horyuji temple in Nara. It was still being worked on so the entire block was roped off and there were a ton of Self Defense guys (read: army) wandering around working on it. Continuing on we saw a bunch more of the smaller snow sculptures, that were made out of probably 10’x10’x10’ blocks of snow. Two of them were very nice sculptures of a temple and city/castle gate, and there was even a snow version of The Thinker. The next large snow sculpture was, I think, my favorite one of the entire festival. It was called Happy Taiwan, and was a 3- or 4-story tall scene with a giant Buddha with mountains in the background, and a temple. Very very cool. I almost want to say it rivals the size of the Daibutsu at Todaiji, but I don’t think its quite that big. The detail level on it was amazing, and its incredibly to think that all of the sculptures here have actually been constructed by different regiments of the Self Defense forces. (I wonder though how they kept all the little things on the Buddha’s head attached……) The next block over was the ‘Citizens Square’, where they were having a snow sculpture contest that started the day before the snow festival officially started. Different cities (especially sister cities to Sapporo) and countries (as well as US states like Hawaii….which, I don’t know how well they’d so in a snow sculpture contest, but…) all had about 4 days to turn their 10’x10’x10’ block of snow into a sculpture, and then it would be judged in the end. At the point that we saw them, the teams were just getting starting to carve into them so they didn’t really look like anything quite yet.

Since we had made it to the end of the park, we then turned around and started walking back in the other direction, on the opposite side that we had come. As we did this the snow suddenly started to come down really hard and the wind picked up. We walked through the blizzard-like conditions, passing by a block worth of ice carvings of animals, and finally reached the Sapporo TV Tower. Since the snow sculptures weren’t finished yet, we had planned on coming back later in the day when it was dark to see them lit up, and then probably would return on Monday to see them at the start of the actual festival. At this point it was right around 11am, and because it was Tim’s girlfriends’ birthday back in the states, he had to find an internet café somewhere to call her. So while I waited at a Starbucks across the street for him, I looked for something to do next. When we had visited an information booth the day before in Sapporo station, and were told about the Eco Ticket, we were also told that it would get us ½ off a ticket up the ropeway for Mt. Moiwa, which wasn’t too far from downtown Sapporo. So after Tim finally came to meet me at Starbucks, we headed into the nearest subway station because I had to figure out how to get to the street car from where we were located. With our Eco Ticket we didn’t have to pay any extra to use the streetcar, and once we found the station we were on our way to Mt. Moiwa. Getting off at the nearest stop, we had to walk a little bit through the snow and then up a hill to get to the ropeway, where we then got 550yen off of our tickets thanks to the Eco Ticket (this thing saved us like $15 throughout the day I think). After our little trip in the cable car, we thought we had gotten to the top of the mountain, however waiting for us outside of the station was a Snow Cat! We got to ride in a little sled behind it as we slowly made our way up to the top of the mountain. When we got to the top we had a great view of snowy Sapporo. (In fact the observatory that we were standing on, there was so much snow on it that only about 6” of the railing could be seen coming out of the snow.) It was pretty cold and windy out so we quickly went inside of the ubiquitous gift shop, and without buying anything, returned to the Snow Cat, where this time I decided to ride on the inside back down to the ropeway station. After another cable car ride, we got back to street level and walked back to the streetcar station, where we spent the next few minutes and the subsequent streetcar ride back to the subway station talking to an American family that was visiting Sapporo from a US army/navy/air force/something base near Tokyo. They didn’t speak a word of Japanese (though their 5 year old son was in an all Japanese school), but the Mom knew about Ann Arbor and U of M. J

When we got back to Odori Station, we planned on making our next stop the Sapporo Beer Brewery. I had to ask several people exactly how we could get there, and after a little bit of confusion we finally located the bus stop outside of an exit to a department store connected to the station. 20-minute bus ride later, and we had arrived to the Sapporo Beer Garden. Before arriving I really didn’t have a clue what a “Beer Garden” was exactly……but it turned out to be just a restaurant (I had visions of people sitting around in some outdoor courtyard, drinking bottles of beer while sitting on benches….). Since we hadn’t had lunch and it was now around 2pm, we were starved and went to eat in a restaurant called Genghis Khan. When we walked in they came over to us with plastic bags and instructed us to put our coats and purses in them, after which they hung them from hooks under the table. Also included among the plates and silver wear was a bib……these two things made me a little worried. Basically the restaurant was such that you ordered a plate of raw meat, and you cooked it on the island-of-Hokkaido shaped convex grill placed in front of you. You could also cook veggies, if you so desired. Because I was cheap and didn’t think I’d be all that hungry, I opted for a plate of lamb that was only about 850yen. Well I think I should have gone for the 2000yen all-you-can-eat-in-an-hour plate of lamb because it was some of the most delicious meat I’ve ever had. Unfortunately the Caesar salad that I also ordered turned out to be somewhat disgusting…..an entire raw egg just plopped into my cup of dressing? Eww. When we were finished eating we wandered around the Beer Museum for a bit (which was somewhat humorous in its miniatures portraying how beer is made; they had little snowman-like people pushing around barrels and such…), but skipped the beer tasting (Tim doesn’t drink and I just didn’t care). We then went to go and catch the bus again, which we missed and had to wait 15 minutes for the next one. When we finally left, we made a stop at the ‘Factory’, a mall occupying the old Sapporo Brewery building. They had a floor all of just traditional Hokkaido crafts, which were pretty cool and pretty expensive, and then another section of your run of the mill mall. That got boring pretty quick so we decided to head back down to Odori Park to see the snow sculptures all lit up.

First stop was the Sapporo TV Tower, which was crowded with all the people that wanted to go up and see the entire length of the snow festival, lit up, from several hundred feet up. It was very cool and I took a lot of pictures. (I was also randomly offered a piece of beer flavored taffy from someone, and it tasted like…..beer.) When we got back down to street level we made our way down the 15 blocks of snow sculptures again, taking pictures of everything because now most things have been brushed off and all of the ice sculptures were all lit up, some with different light shows going on. The Narnia snow sculpture was the most impressive, with music (from the film, I’m assuming) and a laser light show going on it at varying times as we passed by it. The only thing not lit up was the sculpture of Horyuji, which was somewhat of a disappointment to me. After we had walked all the way down to the end and came back, we got on the subway and headed to Susukino, where they had another 2 blocks of ice sculptures. Most of them weren’t brushed off, and we couldn’t get close to them because the road hadn’t been blocked off yet (the snow festival still hadn’t started). Some of them were incredibly detailed, like peacocks and a mermaid. There was also a Hina Matsuri (Girl’s Day) ice sculpture (Hina Matsuri is typified by families displaying these very intricate and expensive displays of a male and female doll, dressed in a style from the Heian period). The neatest thing from it all was two buildings with real fish frozen in it. After seeing the rest of the ice sculptures, it had already gotten to be about 9pm and our feets and backs were killing us, so we went the one stop needed on the subway and returned to our hotel room.

Day 4 (Monday February 6, 2006)

Got out of bed at 8am, and after taking a shower, I turned on the TV in hopes of seeing the Super Bowl. I figured that it had to be on TV somewhere, and luckily it was! I turned it on just as some guy with a tattoo on his check started singing the national anthem. I watched with anticipation as they did the coin toss, and the kickoff, and then they went to commercial break…….except they didn’t. They went to a Japanese language commentary instead. L The only reason I watch the Super Bowl is because of the commercials, and it being in Detroit this year, I was looking forward to it. Oh well, guess I’ll just have to download the commercials from the internet instead. After that letdown, we went to get our final free breakfast (it was the same as the previous two mornings, except this time the eggs were cold), and then came back to the room to pack our bags. Every time I go on a trip, even if I don’t buy anything, I’m never able to pack everything back in the way it was when I got there. Going down to the front desk to checkout, Tim had to pay about $200 for his stay, and luckily they were able to hold our bags until we came back to get them.

Leaving the hotel, we took the subway to the end of the line, to Asabu station, where we would catch a bus to Sato-land, another area in Sapporo where events for the snow festival were being held. It was about a 30 minute ride out to the site, and once we got there we walked around and saw a whole area where teams were getting to work on making snow sculptures out of 10’x10’x10’ blocks of snow. There was also a huge snow slide, and a snow labyrinth. The first thing that we did was explore the snow labyrinth. I had hoped that it would be a snow maze, with dead ends and all that, but it turned out to just have a never-ending path where there were no wrong turns. At the end of the path were some steps that allowed you to go to a platform made from snow that was taller than the maze, so you could look down and see everyone inside of it. After leaving that, I wanted to go on the snow slide. It was then that the day became not so fun. There was a sign saying that it was only a 30 minute wait for the slide, so we got in line. As the line slowly starting to move towards the entrance of the line, we were waiting for longer…and longer…….and longer. As we stood in like we were getting colder and colder. Eventually we got close enough and had spent enough time standing in line that we just didn’t want to leave. So about 1.5 hours later we FINALLY got to go on the snow slide, and immediately afterwards we practically ran back to the dining hall to warm up. After that we pretty much were done at the Sato-Land site, so we got back on the bus and headed back to the main Odori Park site where we walked through the snow sculptures one last time, to see them completely finished. Everything that we couldn’t get close to earlier was now open, and on a few of the stages different kinds of performances were going on. (Best moment of the day: we’re walking down the length of the park, and since no matter where I go in Japan I try to wear something with Michigan written on it, I got a ‘Go Blue!’ yell from a passerby. J ) After finally buying some souvenirs, we returned to the hotel and picked up our luggage and then headed off via train and subway back to New Chitose. We got there a bit earlier than when our flights would leave, and since we each had a separate flight back (I was going to Osaka International and Tim was going to Nagoya), so I went to wait inside of the gate. About an hour later and I was back in the air again. Wasn’t really all that exciting of a trip this time because it was spent entirely doing homework. I didn’t get an emergency exit row seat again but the two people who were supposed to be sitting next to me moved before takeoff, so I had an entire row to myself. When I got back to Osaka International (called Itachi) I had to take a 45 minute bus ride to get to Kyoto station, and then 2 trains back to Hikone. Taxi ride later and I was finally back to JCMU!

The one course at Kiroro that I didn’t wipe out on:

The day before the snow festival starts, they are still working on the Narnia sculpture, and a cool advertisement for the real thing:

A building in Austrailia, and ‘Happy Taiwan’:

A snow sculpture for Okinawa, and a very cool mini snow temple:

Does it look cold enough?? And…a snowy Horyuji temple:

Close-ups of parts of Horyuji:

The Thinker, and Morizo and Kiccoro:

Totoro!! (I love the sign…it says ‘YES! Totoro!’) and the kanji for snow, made out of….snow:

Odori Park at night:

Another part of Sapporo, called Susukino, with cool neon signs and fish frozen in ice!:

On top of Mt. Moiwa:

Attractions at another site for the snow festival, called Sato-Land:

A snow slide and snow maze!:

I’m leaving for Hokkaido in (as of now) 19 hours!! As such, I won’t be online for the next couple of days (unless our hotel has wireless, which I highly doubt). The official website for the Sapporo snow festival is here, and you can see what all of the large snow sculptures are going to look like, as well as find out that there is a snow labyrinth and 100m snow slide!! Woo!

And no, I’m not going to get injured while skiing! Don’t worry!!!

I’ve been pretty busy lately with no time to be blogging, emailing, or other social activities to let people outside of JCMU know that I’m still alive. So, since I should be studying right now for tomorrow’s test, and packing for my trip to Hokkaido, here’s a quick rundown:

-After getting my test back on Monday (which I did horrible on), I went to talk to Melville-sensei to make sure she knew why I did so horrible and that it wasn’t just because I had slacked off on studying. To my surprise, she told me that she already knew about it, and that the teachers (and I guess, everyone else on the staff) had been talking about it, and that if roommate #3 ever said anything to me again, that I should tell her about it, so that then she’d have a little ‘talk’ with her and become “scared of her” (which she emphasized with making a fist)! Maybe Melville is a lot cooler than I first though……

-Sent two packages home, one by boat and one SAL (surface air lift, which basically means it sits and waits until there’s a plane that has some extra space). The one sent by boat was all of 5.5kg, and cost me 4500yen. The one sent by plane was even worse, 4.57kg and 7300yen. Ugh. When I came to Japan I sent a 59lb box (27kg) by boat for $86. So when I come back, I can see that I’ll probably just pay the $130 or whatever it is to send an extra piece of luggage, since it can be up to 50lbs, otherwise I’ll be completely broke just trying to get back to the US…

-On Friday I helped out with a group of elementary kids, and on Monday someone from the office handed me a copied article from a local newspaper of which my picture with the kids appeared in! Yippie!

-Tim and I sat down the other day to figure out where we were going to ski in Hokkaido. Right now its going to be either Kiroro Snow World, which boasts 21 courses and 9 lifts, or Teine Highlands, with 13 courses and 14 lifts. The biggest difference is Kiroro is 46 minutes away and Teine is 16 minutes away from where we’ll be staying. When we get to Hokkaido, we’re going to inquire about discount tickets and then make our decision based on which one is cheaper.

After the events of Friday night, I wanted to get out of JCMU for at least a day trip. Luckily the night before I had chatted with Scott and Michael, who had planned on meeting Brian in Omihachiman (the closest stop to his homestay), for a day in Kyoto. I told them all I’d tag along and maybe act as their tour guide a bit. So around 11:30am on Saturday morning, we set off for the station, to catch the noon rapid train to Kyoto. When we got to Omi, we found Brian standing on the platform and yelled at him to get him to come to our car, which he did, so we didn’t have to get out of the rapid train and wait around in the station for 20 minutes for the local. For all three of them it was their first ‘big’ excursion out from JCMU and it was neat to see all of their reactions on things like the train ride, where as my attitude to it now is that I just want to get a seat so I can half-doze my way to wherever it is that I’m traveling to. That’s not to say I find train travel boring, I love it, its just now its not so much of a novelty anymore. When we got to Kyoto station exactly 46 minutes later, I pointed out the waffle store directly next to the exit for the Biwako line, and then we walked out to the main area of the station, the area under the large open-air canopy. We spent a little bit exploring around while they took some pictures. The next stop on our trip was the revolving sushi bar in Kyoto station (in the Asty Road section of it that is an underground walkway away from the main station area). I’ve been to this place probably a half dozen times now since first going to it when I was in Kyoto 2 years ago with my mom. Its really cheap and easy and they have these cool hot water dispensers right in front of you for tea. None of the guys had been to a revolving sushi bar yet so I thought it would be the best place to go for lunch. Lunch was tasty again, and leaving the restaurant we went underground again, and found our way to Porta, where I first headed to the foreign foods store, with the intent of buying Swiss Miss hot cocoa (yum!) and in the process I found REFRIED BEANS!!!!!!!!! Yeah, you might call me crazy, but I’ve gone without refried beans for 5 months and had searched for them previously with no luck and so had assumed they didn’t exist in Japan, however I was proven wrong. Go, I bought myself a can along with my box of hot cocoa, and finally used a prepaid credit card that I got for Christmas. Stop #2 in Porta was, of course, Mother Garden. The Sirotan tissue box was on my “must buy” list, and luckily they had it in stock. I wasn’t able to convince any of the guys to buy anything Sirotan though….but I’ll work on that. I was also able to use my prepaid credit card on this, so you can’t tell me to stop buying silly stuff.

Leaving the station, we made a quick stop at the post office and then starting wandering around a bit. We stopped into a pachinko parlor for a second, just to demonstrate why I’ve never been able to say inside of one for more than 2 minutes: the noise level is enough to make your ears bleed. Leaving, we couldn’t figure out what to do for the rest of the day, so I suggested Shijo and Sanjo, two streets which between them encompass the entertainment district of Kyoto. We then spent the next several hours wandered the covered streets, going through the different market districts (Nishiki) and shopping districts (Tawaramachi). I had hoped to find an arcade that I had been to once before while we were wandering around, and was also on the lookout for a place called the Wonder Tower, which I knew was on Kawaramachi-dori but that was all. Along the way we found a couple different arcades, which we stopped in from time to time for some games of Guitar Freaks and Taiko Drum Master.

After a couple hours of walking, we happened upon a building called Round 1 Amusement, and saw a big sign for bowling. We all kinda looked at each other and said “lets go bowling!!”, and so…we did. It was a 7-story building, with the bowling alleys on floors 5-7, and the reception desk on the 4th floor. Floor 1-3 had a mix of UFO catchers, video games, and slot machines. We went to the 4th floor and thought at first that maybe they wouldn’t have bowling shoes in sizes that would fit us. Shoes were dispensed to people on this wall of what looked like lockers, one each with the size of the shoe written on it, a button to dispense the shoes, and a little opening at the bottom where the shoes would come out. Luckily when we talked to someone at the front desk (who actually asked us, in Japanese, if English was ok…heh), they had shoes to fit us. They gave us a little slip with a number on it and told us to come back in an hour. So, we left the building and went in search of a place to get a quick dinner. The first place we found turned out to be a KFC, where I had a strange meal of a chicken breast and ‘gratin’, which was basically a baked pasta dish.

After eating we returned to the Round 1 building to see if a lane was open for us yet. They were all ready for us so I got shoes for everyone and they gave us our lane assignment with a free token for the jukebox. It was a pretty high-tech bowling alley, with projection screens above each lane, and a camera that would show you exactly how the pins were being hit, in real time, on the television screen near your lane’s seats. At one point they even turned off all the lights to try and do a strike contest (which, we didn’t know at the time). Brian tried to win it for our team but ended up with….a gutter ball. Oh well. (Apparently they were giving out clocks or something to the people that got strikes.) My first game ended up over 100, and my second game was under 100. But I had a lot of fun even if I suck at bowling. When our games were finished, we had to go back to the 4th floor to pay. When we paid, we got some cards that would let us get 20 free ‘tokens’ for the slot machines and a 1 free try at a UFO catcher. Well, I didn’t win anything in the UFO catcher (also known as the ‘claw’ game in the US), but my 20 coins in the slot machines lasted for a good half an hour before I ran out. Gambling is actually illegal in Japan, so you don’t actually win ‘money’ at slot machines or pachinko, you win prizes. However those prizes can then be converted to money at some little window down the nearest back alley. These little doorways exist at every single location with slot machines. It cracks me up how blatantly people are working around the law and yet no one cares at all.

Leaving the Round 1 building, we walked a block or so down to the Wonder Tower (which, really isn’t a tower, its just a normal looking 6-story building). We decided to start at the top and work our way down. On the top floor, we found this whole section with very spiffy looking computer stations, with a bunch of people playing some kind of game on them. On closer inspection, they turned out to be playing Counter Strike! It was a mini Counter Strike LAN inside of a Japanese arcade! How cool is that? What was even better was, it was 100yen (~$.90) for 30 minutes of playing time! (If you wanted to play longer, you had to buy this card which would keep track of your stats and allow you to come back to play more CS or other games that might be featured at another time. The computer stations all had these very cool card readers on the desk parts of them…) So after a moment’s deliberation, we decided to sit down and play. Someone working there came over to help us get set up, and lucky he spoke very good English, so that even those of us who suck at CS (um…me) could figure out what to do. The next 30 minutes flew by pretty quick, and by the end of it I was finally getting the hang of everything. After it was over were wandered the Wonder Tower a little more, and ended up one floor with some games and Brian and I played from Time Crisis while Michael reprised his role on Taiko Drum Master. No matter what I do on that game, it always ends up giving me blisters. That and I can’t do drum rolls.

When we were all arcaded-out, around 9:30pm, we decided to head back to Kyoto station by bus (since it was closer to where we were and I *thought* it would be cheaper). On the way back we dropped off Brian at his stop in Omihachiman, and the three of us continued back to Hikone, wondering when we got back how hard it would be to get our bikes out of a locked parking area. (I only parked there because someone told me last semester that even when the lot is closed, there is still an open doorway that allows people to walk in and out and is large enough to get a bike out. Well, when we got back to Hikone that turned out to NOT be the case. We had to squeeze ourselves into the lot through a crack in the fence, and then toss our bikes over the same fence to get them out. All the while I was wondering what we would say incase the cops came up and asked us what the heck we were doing, since it looked like we were stealing the bikes. (Though I thought, if they cops did come, they wouldn’t give us much trouble since how many would-be thieves would be wearing their dorky bike helmets while stealing someone else’s bikes.) We ended up getting back to JCMU around 10:30pm where I finally had a chance to clean up my room and do laundry for the first time since my roommate went crazy.

The interesting ways to get bowling shoes in Japan (notice the kid with the Michigan hat!), and Scott looking like Elvis:

Counter Strike!

For those of you that don’t have the password for Part 1 of this saga, this post is for you. Everything had been going great with Kayoko, my Japanese roommate who has been here all of about three weeks, until I suddenly heard from a classmate Thursday morning that she wanted to switch rooms. I was shocked since things had been going so well (or so I thought), and I couldn’t understand why she’d want to change rooms. So after class was over I waited in my room for her to come back, figuring that there must be some sort of misunderstanding and that we would work it out together. Well, to my great disappointment and shock, she came in and told me some incredibly hurtful things which left me very upset and confused. She had no interest in compromising on anything and was adamant about moving out. I talked to Karen the next morning about it all, and she set up a mediation session for us, with her and two people from the office, and I went, even though I really didn’t want to, hoping that we could work some things out and she could explain to me why her attitude had changed so suddenly. However despite many hours of talking she refused to try to work anything out and wasn’t concerned with how what she had said to me had made me feel. In the end she was told to move out of my room before midnight on Friday night, to which she complied and switched with another Japanese student here, Mariko.

I’m really shocked that it has turned out this way. I thought I was getting along with Kayoko so well, I had a lot of fun talking to her in English and Japanese, and it was nice having someone who could teach me how to make some Japanese food. But now what she said to me has really hurt me I feel like I’m now judging other Japanese people (especially females) based on what she did and said. When I went to Kyoto the following day I was seeing her face everywhere, mostly because I now dread ever coming into contact with her again and I don’t think I’ll ever be able to speak to her again.

Life with roommate #4 (yes…..after 5 months I’ve now had 4 roommates), however, is going GREAT. Friday night she came in and dropped off her stuff (while I hid in my room as #3 moved out), and since that time (its now 1am on Monday morning) I’ve seen her once. She hasn’t even been sleeping here. She informed me at that one time we met that because she is so busy (she works at Caines) and has a boyfriend here, that it would “be like you don’t have a roommate”. Well, I assured her that that would be totally fine. I’m looking forward to getting back to U of M where I will *never again* have a roommate.

And I also want to say thanks to Karen, who really helped me out a lot, especially during the mediation session and that morning where she gave me a shoulder to cry on for a bit. So if you’re reading this, thank you!!

So the past few days have been pretty much some of the worst days I’ve had during my stay at JCMU. Everything had been all hunky dory until Thursday morning, where I woke up at exactly 8:45am thanks to someone calling my room. My alarm clock hadn’t gone off, and so I had exactly 5 minutes to get dressed and run to class. I very briefly pondered just skipping the first hour but I had a quiz and a reading check so I went anyway. Well, I probably should have skipped after all since I hadn’t been able to study at all that morning for either the quiz or reading check, and so I basically failed both. After having that wonderful experience, I was then told by a classmate that he had heard Kayoko and his girlfriend discussing the fact that Kayoko wanted to switch rooms. He told me that they planned to talk to the office about it before bothering to tell me, and he told they that they should talk to me first. So for the rest of the class period I sat there worrying about what exactly would be the problem. I figured it had to be some simple misunderstanding and that we would be able to work it out if we could just talk about it a bit. Well by the time class got over I went back to my room and waited. As the knot in the pit of my stomach got bigger, I sent Kayoko an email on her cell phone asking her to come back to the room, just incase she had planned on going somewhere else.

Around 12:15pm she shows up with Youko, uses the bathroom and then comes out. At this point her normal facial expression had completely changed, and she was staring at me with these incredibly cold eyes. She told me “mou, yadda” and “I can’t take it anymore, I’m tired”. She told me she wanted to move out. I was completely shocked and so I asked her why she wanted to move out. She continued to look at me with a very cold expression, and kept saying that she was too tired and that she had so much “stress piling up” from living with me and that it was causing her to miss sleep and not do well in class. I couldn’t see how this was possible so I asked her if she didn’t like me. She gave me some ambiguous answer, so I asked back in Japanese if she hated me. She replied back, in English, “Yes, I hate you”. I couldn’t believe it. I became very upset and started to cry, and Kayoko continued to rattle off her reasons for why she hated me and why she wanted to move out. She said I didn’t give her a gift when she moved in (which, I wasn’t aware she would buy anything for me, and I did give her something a week later when I went to Himeji), that I was selfish because I only “talked about my own things”, that I talked too fast in English several days prior which upset her (which she hadn’t told me), even that she just didn’t like Sirotan. The one that got me the most was the fact that I asked her not to wash dishes while I was still asleep, after a morning where she was cleaning the kitchen at 6am and woke me up. She told me that it was “her way of life” and that she didn’t want to change it. All the while I was asking her why she suddenly decided this and why she never told me that anything was bothering her since we would have been able to compromise on some things, but all the while she just looked at me and shook her head. While it was all going down Youko was sitting on the floor, occasionally nodding when I would say things to Kayoko, and was also crying. It really upset me when Kayoko asked Youko why she was crying, despite the fact that I’m sitting there very upset, and she completely ignored me. Eventually I could see that nothing I could say would change her mind or stop her from saying such hurtful things to me, so I went into my room and closed the door. During the remaining time that Kayoko and Youko were in the room, I could hear Kayoko talk about me, in Japanese, to Youko. At one point I yelled out through my door at her, but she ignored me and continued to talk about me, like I had no clue what they were saying.

After they both finally left to go to their afternoon class, I called my mom over Skype and told her everything that had just occurred. We talked for about an hour and I tried to calm down a bit although the fact that someone I thought had become my friend had so suddenly told me that they hated me and I still didn’t know why made it pretty difficult. I’m pretty sure that I’ve never had anyone ever tell me that they’ve hated me before. My mom told me that I should talk to Karen about it, so after getting off of Skype I walked through the buildings to look for her but I guess she had already left, so I went back to my room and tried to deal with the day’s events. Add that to the fact that tomorrow was test day, and because I didn’t do very well on the last test, I had planned on really getting down to my studying before my roommate had completely turned on me. Well the rest of the evening was spent by watching a bunch of Law & Order: SVU episodes to escape reality, and eventually studying for the test.

Friday morning I got up early to study for my test and tried to escape from my room without having to see or speak to my roommate. I was completely puzzled when she basically told me the equivalent to “have a safe trip!” in Japanese on my way to school. I said nothing at all back to her. Sitting in class during my test was absolute torture, since I basically felt like I was going to throw up due to the anxiety I had over my planned visit to Karen’s office after the test. (Luckily I think I did better on this test than the previous one, but we’ll see once I get my grade back…) Once the test was over I went in to Karen’s office, and since I had sent her an email about the whole situation the night before, she was expecting me. She had already visited the office and told me that Kayoko hadn’t talked to anyone about switching rooms and that it was as much of a shock to her as it was to me. I told her everything that Kayoko had told me, and despite wanting to do it calmly, it didn’t happen. It was nice to be able to talk to someone about this in person, since Cassidy was really the only girl friend I had from JCMU who I could tell such things to, and it just wasn’t the same since I could only talk to my Mom on Skype or type out the issue with other friends on AIM. She gave me a shoulder to cry on, and for a while we discussed what could have led to this, and she even showed me a few examples she had had to prepare for something for her Masters, about Japanese people who have acted very nice and happy until sometime in the future they become upset at you for something you did weeks ago and thought had been fine.

After talking, I had to go to the Friday Project, which was the tea ceremony again. I know I looked horrendous, with my face all red and puffy, throughout the whole thing so I did my best to just kind of hide in the corner and not get noticed. After that was over I escaped to Coco’s with some new students that I’ve been hanging around with, and after lunch volunteered at the last minute to help show a group of elementary school kids around JCMU. This consisted of everyone breaking off into groups of 1 or two, and then pairing up with about 5 or 6 12-year olds at a time, where we basically were asked the same questions in each group, like “What is your favorite color?”, “What kind of animals do you like?”, “How old are you?” etc. This went on for a while until they broke out the spinning tops and tried to get us all to play with them as well. We all got a little bit of practice, then they had all the gaijins come up and one by one, show if we had mastered making the top spin. Luckily I was able to do it quite well! Afterwards we gave them a tour of the building, and then came back to the conference room where they gave us a gift. By the time it was all over, it was about 3:30pm.

While this was all going on, Karen had come up to me to tell me that at 4pm there would be a mediation session between Kayoko and I, along with Karen and some people from the office. I wasn’t particularly looking forward to it at all, but I figured that I would give it a shot anyway, incase there was anything that I could work out. Karen also told me that it would make me feel better afterward if I was able to tell her how everything she said to me had made me feel. As 4pm was rapidly approaching, I was getting increasingly nervous, and when I went over to the academic building and knocked on the door to the small conference room, I was told that they needed a little bit more time with Kayoko (who had been in there since 3:45pm). So, I waited outside the doorway. And waited. And waited some more. Since my watch is still dead and there were no clocks anywhere I didn’t know how long I had waited until Isaki-san from the office emerged from the room and asked me how long I had been waiting there. I told him since 4, and he was surprised and said to me that I could go back to my room to wait because they still weren’t ready for me. So, I went back to my room. I couldn’t really imagine what they could have been talking about in there for almost 2.5 hours. Around 6pm the phone in my room finally rang, and I nervously hurried down to the small conference room once again. This time they let me in and I sat at the end of the table, with Karen to my right and Kayoko to my left, and Isaki-san and someone else from the office at the other end of the table. I asked what had taken place while I wasn’t there and Karen gave me the rundown. Then she told me how the rest was going to go: Kayoko would tell me her grievances, and then I would summarize and repeat them back, and then she would do the same thing. So Kayoko starts out by flipping open her notebook and reading off a list of things that she has against me. Basically, I hadn’t heard any of these until this very moment. Things like, my face didn’t “show enough happiness” when she prepared some bizarre food that I tried to eat (and did, and liked it), she didn’t like it that I didn’t need her help on my homework, she was offended when I didn’t go play ping pong with her at some time, staying in my room with my door shut made her feel ‘lonely’, and on and on and on. The one legitimate thing was that she sent me an email when she didn’t come back from Tokyo on the day she planned and I never sent her one back. Ok, so sometimes I’m bad when it comes to replying to emails in a timely manner. However, everything else that she listed off was just completely petty stuff to which I had no idea she had an issue with. That and being someone’s roommate doesn’t mean I’m there to hold her hand all the time and make sure she’s always entertained and isn’t feeling lonely. Peacefully coexisting with a roommate should be the ultimate goal, anything more is a plus but not necessary. So after she finished rattling off her list, I had to summarize it and repeat it back. Note that during this Kayoko is speaking in Japanese, and had to continue to be corrected when she would refer to me as ’she’ instead of by my name, and never bothered to look at me while speaking. Karen was translating for her and then when I responded in English, Isaki-san would translate for Kayoko.

When it came to my turn to tell her my side of the story, I basically said how I thought everything was going great until Thursday, and then I basically listed everything that she had said to me during her ‘emotional assassination attempt’ (so says my mom), talking about how she told me she hated me and how I asked that back to her, twice in Japanese, to make sure I was hearing her correct. All the while that I’m saying all these things, Kayoko is sitting there, doing the heavy sighs, and making these ugly faces every time I would repeat something she had said to me the day before. Karen had to ask her at one point to stop it, she was acting so immature. After I was done, she had to repeat everything back, and while she tried doing that she kept going off track and saying a lot of other unnecessary things, causing Karen and the office people to tell her to stay on the topic at hand. After she had finished she hadn’t bothered to address the main issues, how she had told me she hated me and how she had been spreading rumors about me and generally just talking bad about me to other people (usually while I was within earshot). Karen then told her to repeat both of those things back, which she finally did after much sighing. Then it was time where we could talk to each other, and since Kayoko didn’t seem eager to start, I asked her things like why she told me she hated me, why she didn’t bother to bring up any of these issues she had with me earlier so that we could have attempted to work things out, among other things. She first attempted to change her story to say that I had told her that I hated her first, which I most certainly did NOT, and then later tried to say that the word ‘hate’ really doesn’t mean the same thing in English and Japanese…to which I countered with the fact that the Japanese word for hate is something you learn very early on in 1st year Japanese, and since she had been taking English for a much longer period than I had taken Japanese, she knew exactly what she had said (not to mention the two times I repeated it back to her in Japanese). When talking about why she hadn’t bothered to bring up any of the issues with me beforehand, she turned to me and told me (in English, with a very cold expression on her face) that she was “too tired”. I told her that it was her responsibility alone to bring up issues she had with me, since I had no way of knowing and I certainly cannot read her mind. Since the only issues she had with me were very pretty, and completely irrelevant things, during the last stage of the mediation she basically had nothing to say, and so spent most of the time not bothering to look at me and not saying much. At one point, where she told me in English that she was too tired, she tried to do some kind of stare down, and while I may have been incredibly upset at that point, I didn’t back down and so I ended up winning that little match. The entire time during the mediation session, she sat there with a cold, uncaring look on her face, showing no emotion whatsoever. At one point, the people from the office asked her a few questions as to what her definition of a roommate was, and also if she thought there was a problem in a room, if it was always the roommate’s problem. She couldn’t even answer this one. This prompted both the people from the office to kind of sit in their chairs to the side and look at Kayoko with a sideways glance that basically communicated “what are you thinking??”. As the mediation session came to a close (it was around 7:30pm at this point), Karen asked me what I wanted to do, and I told her that there was no way I could be roommates with Kayoko any longer, since it was very uncomfortable for me to be in my room just knowing that she was also in there. I told Kayoko there was no way I could ever trust her again, based on what she had said to me, for which she was confused since she thought that even if we couldn’t be roommates we could still be friends. I told her that was not possible since I will never be able to forget what she said to me. The session ended with Karen telling Kayoko that she was to move out of my room by midnight that night. She told her “I want you to know that, I’m not doing this for you, I’m doing this only for Nikki.” And with that I left, after thanking Karen and the people from the office.

I returned to my room as fast as I could and basically shut myself in my room, grabbed my laptop and my headphones, and watched some Law & Order: SVU with the volume up high so that I wouldn’t have to hear what Kayoko was doing in the next room. Luckily she began to pack up her stuff right as she got back to the room. I chatting with some friends online about the outcome of the mediation session and basically just sat in bed….waiting. Eventually some other students came in to help Kayoko move her CRAP LOAD of luggage (she had at least 20 boxes), and Megan (Adams) knocked on my door to see how I was doing, which was very nice of her. I was embarrassed by my messy room but she tried to cheer me up a bit anyway. Soon after that I heard the door close and it became quiet once again in my room. I called my mom and told her what had gone down, and then checked to see if Kayoko had stolen anything on her way out. I think I’m missing 1 chopstick rest but that’s not really something I used in the first place…. The new roommate (Mariko, another Japanese student who has been here since last semester), had already moved her stuff in, but I hadn’t seen her yet and she was no longer in the room. While sitting around I got an IM from Scott, inviting me for some rounds of Texas Hold’em, to which I gladly accepted. Tried to compose myself a bit (I knew I looked horrible and there wasn’t anything I could do about it), grabbed some snacks and some pop, and headed over to his room, where we were joined by 3 other students (Tim, whom I’m going to Hokkaido with soon, Nathan, whose in 4th year, and Michael, whose in 2nd year with Scott). I told them all the condensed version of what was going on, and Michael kindly shared some of his Lawson’s bought vodka which I mixed into my pop, since I figured if there was a good night to get wasted, that would be tonight. So we played poker, ate peanuts, and drank for a couple hours, and I still was the first one who lost all their chips……ah well. I ended up having a lot of fun, which was nice, and I learned some other interesting things about Kayoko, like apparently she had come to JCMU because of someone here who had worked at the Expo whom she may or may not have been stalking. I also heard that she may be in (or close to) a sexual relationship with another student here…despite the fact that that student has a girlfriend back in the states. Tim and Nathan told me they would describe her as being sort of “strange”, so I guess maybe her attack against me wasn’t really personal….its just that she is a psychopath. She certainly has that no remorse thing going on, anyway.

So as it is now, life with roommate #4 has been going great. I’ve seen her a total of *2* times since she moved in, and she hasn’t even been sleeping here. She’s fairly nice as far as I can tell, but then I also thought Kayoko was very nice. I feel a little conflicted now, almost like after 5 months I’m finally experiencing culture shock, and I don’t want to make blanket statements like “all Japanese women are incredibly passive aggressive”, however my experiences now force me to think about that every time I interact with a Japanese student here. If everyone is like Kayoko, even asking that person if they have a beef with me will yield nothing, so then how do I deal with that? There’s no way I can coexist with another stranger without sometimes doing something that they don’t like, but if I don’t know what they don’t like, what do I do?? I’m going to have to do a lot of thinking on these questions within the near future. One positive that came out of all of this though, would be that I got a lot of support from people at JCMU (students and staff alike) who I wasn’t very close to in the first place. For a while I was starting to feel very isolated and alone, but once I started talking to some people about what had happened and trying to get some guidance/assistance, people really seemed to care about me and I really appreciate it a lot. I know that I do still have friends here and that they didn’t all leave last semester. I am still counting down the days until I get back to the US though. Until that happens, I’m going to try and just make it through the end of this semester without making it to roommate #5….

So I haven’t written anything in my blog lately because….nothing has happened. I haven’t gone anywhere, or done anything. Here’s the basic rundown of how my days are going lately:

7:30am: Alarm goes off. I reset it to go off in another 10 minutes.
7:40am: Alarm goes off again. I lay in bed for 5 minutes, telling myself I must get out of bed.
8:05am: Finally get into the shower because my roommate (who’s can early bird) has gone back into her room, and she can’t see me run to the bathroom in my pajamas……
8:50am: Japanese class starts.
~
~(Trying not to fall asleep because the heaters are on SO HIGH.)
~
11:40: Japanese class ends, and I return to my room where I generally get under my bed covers and just lay for a bit until…
12:15pm: My roommate gets back from her class, and I get up so as not to seem rude. At this point I try to scrounge up some food, and despite the fact that my fridge and cupboards are completely stocked, there’s never anything to eat.
1:00pm: My roommate leaves for her class, and I sit in bed usually watching Law & Order: SVU or something else, still munching my lunch.
2:00pm: Some days, this is my nap time. Other days, its my “sit around and don’t do anything productive” time.
~
~(On Wednesdays I have class until 4pm. On Thursdays I’m cramming for my test all day long.)
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5:00pm: I start pondering what to make for dinner.
6:30pm: I get around to making dinner.
7:30pm: Homework begins….
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~(While chatting with people on my computer, surfing the web, watching more SVU, etc…)
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10:00pm: Homework is done! But wait, there’s more….there’s still that essay I have to read and 4723 new kanji I need to memorize for the quiz tomorrow. And don’t forget that reading check! Or maybe the dialogue on page 74 that has to be memorized. And oh yeah! The 14 new grammar patterns! And don’t forget that new vocab from the dialogue….or the kanji from the kanji book….
1:30am: I’m finally done with (most) of the things I describe, so I go to sleep, promising to get up promptly at 7:30am and not to hit my snooze button.

Cycle repeats.

Ok, so with the exception of the amount of studying I’m supposed to be doing every night, the rest is exaggerated. I procrastinate as much (ok maybe a little more) than the next guy, but I make sure and always get my homework done.

And in my last post I talked about how they are painting the roof red. Well, I might be wrong after all, because after painting it completely red, now they are painting it….gray. So maybe it is just primer for another coat of green? Stay tuned….

So for the past month, I’ve had to put up with a lot of noise coming from the other side of my window. During Christmas break a bunch of trucks and guys one day just showed up at JCMU and started putting up scaffolding all around the dorm building. Seeing as there was no one in the dorm building at the time to clue us in as to why, we were left scratching our heads about what exactly was going to be done. Two week ago, when all the new students started coming to JCMU, they put out a notice saying that there was going to be roof work done on the dorm and academic buildings up until March. It stated that the roof was going to be “repaired”. Oh joy, two more months of crashing and hammering right outside my window at times that I want to study or sleep. So, a couple days ago, a notice showed up on the white board downstairs telling people to be careful, because they were going to be “cleaning” the roof and water might come down off of it. Cleaning, ok, I can’t really understand why you’d clean a roof that gets rained/snowed on, but, I don’t really care.

So, today I’m taking nap. Finally resolving to wake up and study for tomorrow’s test I look out my window. What do I see? A drop cloth hanging down from the roof with red paint on it. Now, unless red is the new color for priming a green roof, it looks like the roof “repair” is nothing more than painting over the rust spots that are starting to come through. I’m not sure why I’m even writing about it or even care, but it seems like JCMU had a thing going here with its green roof, green trees, green brick drive, and even the green academic building. It looked, well……nice. Any time you’d go somewhere far away you’d just tell someone to “look for the big green roof next to the lake” and you could find JCMU’s building. (Then again….the wavelength of red is longer than green which means we’ll be able to see it even better…..).

Lets see how long it takes JCMU to update its website with a new picture. I’m thinking…2010?

Sunday I went to the Hard Rock Cafe in Osaka once again. My main reason for going was to obtain pin #6 of 7 in the Guitar Case series, and luckily it was not sold out. Unluckily though, the Fashion Statement pin for Osaka was already sold out. So instead, I settled for a guitar with a dog on it, since 2006 is the year of the dog. Since I’ve met my goal of visiting all 7 Hard Rock Cafe’s in the country, and managed to visit 3 of them twice, lets recap.

September 17, 2005: Visited the Nagoya HRC on the way back from a fun day at the World Expo in Aichi.

October 30, 2005: After a spontaneous trip to Osaka following a morning in Nara, Cassidy and I stopped at the Osaka HRC to have our food served to us by waiters and waitresses dressed up for Halloween.

November 19. 2005: After a 2 hour long search for a hotel room in Fukuoka, Cassidy and I drop off our bags and head out to the Fukuoka HRC (my sole reason for travelling all the way to Kyushu). Getting to the HRC just as a concert was getting out at the nearby Yahoo! Dome, we had to wait a bit for a table, but eventually had a nice meal in a somewhat louder than usual HRC, where they played only Japanese music.

December 19, 2005: After a loooooong series of train rides to pick up Nick at Narita airport in Tokyo, we stopped at Ueno station on our way to the guest house for a bite to eat at the Ueno Eki HRC. This HRC is the only one in Japan to have a completely different menu. Things were cheaper too! Picked up #1 in the Guitar Case series.

December 20, 2005: On the way to Roppongi Hills, we got slightly lost before finding the Tokyo HRC. Since I had eaten here on my previous visit to Japan, I went in and bought #2 in the Guitar Case series along with some other goodies, and skipped dinner.

December 23, 2005: The Emperor’s birthday! Took a break after visiting the Imperial Palace, and went to Yokohama at night to visit the Yokohama HRC. Picked up #3 in the Guitar Case series as well as had yet another tasty cheeseburger.

December 26, 2005: Universal Studios! The Universal Citywalk Osaka HRC isn’t actually inside of Universal Studios (or USJ as they call it here), but it gave us a good enough excuse to go into it. On the way back out we stopped for dessert only (and I convinced Nick to actually order a beer), and I picked up #4 in the Guitar Case series.

January 2, 2006: Visited the Nagoya HRC for the second time, this time on the way back from Ise Shrine. Picked up #5 in the Guitar Case pin series and my only in the Fashion Statement series.

January 15, 2006: Spent the last of my two Seishun 18 tickets on a trip to Himeji Castle with a new classmate, Katie. On the way back I dragged her along with me to the Osaka HRC where we had some food and I picked up the 6th and last pin I’ll be getting for the Guitar Case series.

I thought about adding a picture of each of the 7 HRC’s with my standing in front of them, but I thought that might be a bit too obnoxious. So instead, I’ll post pictures of all the pins I have accumulated thus far:

The guitar case pins (maybe I’ll watch Yahoo! Japan auctions to see if someone is selling their pin from Fukuoka…):

All of the other pins from all 7 Hard Rock Cafe’s:

All together!:

My one regret about going to all the HRC’s in Japan is not making it to the Nagoya HRC in time to buy an Expo pin. They sold out in ONE DAY!!! I was so mad…I was going to be visitng it in all of 3 days but nooooooooo….well, there’s always Yahoo! Japan auctions.

For the past month, I’ve been enjoying using the special Seishun 18 tickets, which allow you to go as far as you can go on JR trains in a 1-day period. I could try to add up all the money I’ve saved, going to Tokyo, Ise, and Osaka, but that would take brain power….we’ll just say that its a lot. So, with the deadline of the current period of Seishun 18 tickets rapidly approaching (they are valid from December 10-January 20), and with two uses left, I had to devise an interesting day trip. Himeji castle, which is about a 2.5 hour or 3200yen trip from JCMU seemed like a good choice. I’ve been in and seen quite a few castles around Japan so far, but Himeji castle is *the* castle in Japan. Going by myself though seemed rather dull, so I wrote up a little advertisement of my trip on the white board, and during the potluck a new student here at JCMU, Katie (also in 3rd year with me), told me she wanted to come along. So, Sunday morning, we met at the doors to JCMU at 8:30am, hopped on our bikes and rode to Hikone station. Got there in time for the 9am rapid, which goes from Hikone directly to Himeji, without having to change trains. Arriving at Himeji at precisely 11:13am (which was somewhat of a suprise to me since 20 minute prior my watch battery decided to die ), we left the station and we’re able to see the castle directly down the main road about 1km away.

And now, the obligatory history segment: The original version of the castle was first built in 1333 by Norimura Akamatsu. In 1581, Hideyoshi Toyotomi, a member of Nobunaga Oda’s military staff, the first ruler of Japan in the age of civil wars, entered this castle and worked out a basic layout for construction of a castle, building a modern castle with a three-storied tower. After the battle of Sekigahara in 1601 (which actually took place very near to Hikone), Toyotomi was replaced by the Tokugawas, and an eight-year expansion project began that would bring the castle to a state roughly like what it looks like today. The last major addition, the Western Circle, was completed in 1618. In 1879, he War Ministry took over control of the castle, which had previously held a regiment of infantry troops. The main tower was renovated in 1910 using approximately $900 in public funds. In 1945, Himeji was bombed during WWII, and although nearby buildings were completely destroyed, Himeji castle survived almost unscathed. A few interesting tidbits about Himeji castle include:

-Large parts of Akira Hurosawa’s 1985 film Ran were shot at Himeji castle
-The Last Samurai also used Himeji castle as a location, along with some fake snow
-There is a zoo on the castle grounds
-Himeji castle is a UNESCO World Heritage site
-It is the oldest surviving original castle in Japan

One feature of the castle is its winding, maze-like stairways and pathways, which in a battle would have helped to confuse would-be invaders and also given archers and riflemen inside of the castle easy targets. However, Himeji castle was never invaded, so its untested as to whether this strategy would have worked. Paying our 600yen and going into the castle, we made our way through the maze and eventually got inside of the castle. We had to take off our shoes and put on ridiculously small slippers, which let me tell you are oh-so-fun when climbing nearly vertical stairs. I ended up walking around most of the castle in my socks. The interior of Himeji castle wasn’t much different from some of the other castles I’ve been in, except this one had actual weapons hanging in some locations along the tour route. Reaching the top of the castle after about a half an hour of slowly circling each floor, we got to see some great views of Himeji on a perfectly clear day. On the top floor, (which was much smaller than the floor below) there was a small shrine erected with offerings for the new year (including some really yummy looking pineapples….), and we were also able to get a stamp on our brochures. Walking back down all the flights of ’stairs’, we left the main castle building and walked around the grounds a bit. We were able to go into another building, which we found out later had been the women’s quarters. I was slightly disturbed by the fact that the women’s quarters were inside of a long building which basically wrapped around the perimeter of the main castle building, thereby being the first defense line from invaders. One part of the women’s quarters was a very extravagent (in its day) building, which was built by money from the dowry of Princess Sen, who married (at the age of 7!!) Toyotomi Hideyori and lived in Himeji castle for 10 years from 1603. (When we went to enter this building, we came to where we were supposed to take off our shoes, and I guess I stood somewhere I shouldn’t have as some older woman came over and literally pushed me off of this platform….not sure if she thought I didn’t speak Japanese or just didn’t want to bother attempting to communicate with me AT ALL.)

After spending several hours wandering around the castle and its grounds, we left and searched for a place to eat. Right outside the castle was a restaurant serving unagi-don, so we both went in and had a bowl. After eating we started walking back to Himeji station to plan where we would go next (since it was only about 2pm at this point). Then, all of a sudden, a parade literally appeared right in front of us. I really have no idea why there was a parade, but I think it probably had something to do with the new year. The parade consisted of a few ‘floats’, as well as groups of people carrying women dressed up as Shinto priestesses in these wooden palanquins, and at certain intervals they would start to roll and toss up the palanquin, causing the woman inside to hang on for dear life. As we caught up to the parade, we found that as they walked along the sidewalk on this main street in Himeji, they would stop at random businesses, where someone would come out (very nicely dressed in a suit or kimono), and a bunch of women dressed as Shinto priestess (I don’t think they were real priestesses) would begin to bless the business (at least, that’s what I THINK they were doing), and gave whoever was representing the place some flowers and an arrow ema. This process was repeated several times, as the procession slowly made its way closer to Himeji station. At one point, on a ‘treasure boat’ that approached us, I noticed there was a baseball player sitting on it, with people coming up and asking for his autograph. I haven’t a clue who he was, but…maybe someone famous (baseball is huge in Japan). We spotted another baseball player, in one of the tumbling palanquins, who actually waved specifically at us and said “Hello!”. Eventually, the parade changed directions and crossed the street, heading for a covered mall, and at this point we parted ways and headed for the station.

Getting to the station, we found a Baskin Robbins and decided to go in and see if they had any interesting ice cream flavors. My last visit to a Baskin Robbins (which is now called Baskin 31 in my family, that’s thanks to you Khoi ) in Fukuoka was great, and I had this Apple Caramel Fondue ice cream (I’m not sure which part was the fondue…). This time around, I opted for a Matcha ‘Blast’ which is basically a smoothie. I was hoping for something close to what I had at the Starbucks in Shibuya, and it was pretty close. Katie got an Apple Caramel Fondue (on my advice) and Strawberry Cheesecake ice cream cone. At this point we pondered for a bit what we wanted to do next, and instead of wandering around Himeji some more, we headed back to Osaka to go to a bookstore (that sold English books!) as well as make another stop at the Osaka Hard Rock Cafe.

Getting back to Osaka at…..some time that I don’t know (my poor watch ), we had to make it to JR Namba station to get to a bookstore called Maruzen, which is supposedly the largest bookstore chain in Japan, and each store has a section of foreign books. Not having read a book in the past almost 5 months, I was feeling somewhat deprived. Jumping on the Osaka Loop Line, we decided to take the long way around since the train we really wanted wouldn’t come for another 10 minutes. This was probably a mistake though since we had to get off it and get on another train on the loop line just to go two more stops. Then, we had to get on another train to go another two stops until we got to Namba. Luckily, Maruzen is right in Namba station, so we just had to take an elevator up to the 5th floor to find it. Being the ‘largest bookstore chain in Japan’, I had high hopes for this place. Sadly, it turned out to be a fairly small (think smaller than Waldenbooks or any other mall bookstore), and the English book section was all of 2 racks, which held mostly movie adaptations (yes, I’d really like to read the novelization of Constantine…..not), and English translations of works by famous Japanese authors. They also had imported Japanese manga translated into English….which I think is the silliest thing I’ve ever seen (the fact that it was imported….not the manga itself). So, I ended up with a 1100yen softcover copy of The Davinci Code (yes, I’m the only person left who hasn’t read it), and a copy of Newsweek. Got to use a giftcard for 1000yen off so I ended up only paying about 800yen for the magazine and book. I also got a bookcover, which basically every Japanese person has on their books. I’m not sure if they use them to actually protect their books, or to make sure no one knows what they are reading so intently on the train. After leaving the book part of the store, we wandered to the stationary + other part, where they had some really awesome stickers (perfect for scrapbooking), crazy greeting cards and a bajillion of those ‘gel gem’ things which seem to have become very popular lately. After buying even more stuff, we left with our stuff to get back on the train and head to the Osaka HRC.

Riding back to Osaka station, we had to walk to Umeda station, which is basically right next to and under JR Osaka station. 2 stops later, we were at Honmachi, where we had to walk through a mini-maze of stores underground to get to the right exit to find the Osaka HRC. We sat down and enjoyed another good meal at a Hard Rock Cafe, surrounded by familiar music and lots of foreigners (there was a guy in a cowboy hat, cowboy boots, cowboy shirt, the works….I want to know where the heck he came from). I keep saying I’ll eat something other than a cheeseburger but they’re just so darn good and I can’t get a burger as good (or with a bun) anywhere else. After eating we made the obligatory stop at the giftshop, where they still have the Guitar Case pin in stock (score!) but were out of the Fashion Statement pin (sadness…). So instead I picked up a pin with a dog on it, since 2006 is the year of the dog. I was a good doobie and didn’t buy any more shirts…… (I almost regret now not getting one from the Tokyo Ueno Eki HRC…I mean, I have one from every other one…oh well). Traveling back to Osaka station once more, we wandered for a bit where I found a bakery and picked up a few items since I was short on breakfasty food back at the dorm, and then we caught our train. The next 1.5 hours or so was spent first standing, doing my usual hawk routine for scouting out seats (I take no prisoners when it comes to grabbing a seat on a train….if you can move faster than me then I’ll be impressed), and once we had secured a set of seats, half reading some things in the textbook that I had dragged with me all day. Getting back to Hikone around 9:15pm, we were happy to find our bikes still parked in front of Al Plaza (the free bike parking lot wasn’t open at 9am…so we took a risk and parked somewhere else), and got back to JCMU around 9:30pm, where I spent the rest of the night chatting and studying for class.

Himeji castle:

Views of Himeji from the top floor of the castle:

The random parade that suddenly appeared out of nowhere…:

A women’s only car that we encountered on our journies through Osaka:

And, here is a picture of my roommate, Kayoko!: