Monday, August 30, 2010

First Day of School

Well, not exactly the first day teaching, but the first day with all the kids back.

So I come into school at 8:00, someone hands me a cup of hot tea (nice!) and then we go into the gym for the opening speeches. The students file in silent as mice, all in their uniforms of navy blue pants/skirts and white blouses/shirts, with navy blue ties. They file up and sit down on the gym floor in orderly rows that American kids couldn't do if they tried (or maybe after much prodding they could). The principal says some opening remarks that I don't understand, he passes out some awards certificates, which the students accept with a bow to the principal and a bow to the student body, who responds with subdued applause. Then the principal motions to me to come onto the stage. I pick up a few things that he says: "This is the new ALT. She's from North Carolina. This is her first time in Japan" and some other things that I don't understand. Then it's my turn to speak.

I look at my prepared romaji speech in front of me. I smile. I say, "Ohayo gozaimasu!" in my cheerful American voice. The students respond with a less boisterous "Ohayo gozaimasu." I start my speech, first in Japanese, which I read slowly, painstakenly, and with a few errors I'm sure, and then in English:

Good morning, my name is Jaimie Foster.
I am from North Carolina in America.
I am an ALT.
I speak English and Spanish and will work hard to learn Japanese.
This is my first time in Japan.
I am very happy to be working with all of you and I hope we have a happy relationship.
Thank you very much.

You can go ahead and laugh now at my beautiful, broken nihongo.

Then I go back, the principal speaks for maybe 10 more minutes about working hard and being dedicated to the school, then the students file out as quietly as they came.

I am shocked at how quiet they are during assemblies. Assemblies in my middle school were ridiculously loud.

Now I am working on my 1-page newspaper to put up around the school, and preparing for tomorrow's lesson (today the kids have tests all day so no teaching).

I'll let you know how things go!

Oh, the other day the kids at club activities had shaved ice raspados and they were delicious!!!

.....

Lunch.

Japanese school lunch is about 30,000 times better than American lunch, but it's a much different presentation.

At 12:15, a crew of kitchen folk came into the staff room loaded down with trays and bowls and plates of steaming things that smelled good. About 5 or 6 teachers, me included, went to help them put the food onto plates and carry them to the other staff. There were about 20 plates to fill: a bowl of white rice, a bowl of shrimp and vegetable soup, a salad with lettuce, corn, peanuts (?) and a delicious sauce, and half of a frozen apple. We also had a box of milk (100%, which I haven't had in a while and that tasted like straight cream) and a cup of hot green tea (ocha). However, once we sat the trays in front of the respective teachers, no one ate.

Indeed, no one ate until 12:45, when the bell rang signaling the end of 4th period. That's when the other teachers showed up from their 4th period class, and everyone was able to eat together. Luckily my milk was still cold and my food was still mostly hot, even after a 20 minute rest.

Afterwards, we tore our milk cartons apart, rinsed them out and placed them in a basket to be recycled, dumped the rest of our food in one big container (either for tomorrow's soup or the pigs, hahaha), and washed our personal tea mugs and chopsticks/forks. There isn't a towel to dry your dishes off on, though; you have to bring your own. Which I didn't have today. But I will tomorrow. (There actually aren't hand drying towels in this whole country, I've noticed, except at nicer stores or restaurants. Otherwise, it's just water, but no soap or hand towels.)

Oishii!!!!

Sunday, August 29, 2010

Daily Life

In Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, Augustus McRae tells a disconsolate Lorena, sobbing because she wants to escape from an empty Texas town for California, that “life in San Francisco is still just life.” And life in Japan, even though it’s 7,000 miles away from everything I’ve ever known, is still, when I think about it, just life. I do here what I would do anywhere. Of course there are millions of little differences, from driving on the other side of the road to not finding Dial hand soap in the grocery store, but my life in Asia is still mine, and I don’t change myself, regardless of location.

When I first moved to Winston-Salem from Tennessee in 2002, I would cry when washing the dishes or cleaning the bathroom, because they were routines I had associated with my life in Littleton. When I moved back to Greensboro from Kernersville in 2009, the same thing happened to me; and now that I’ve moved once more, I find myself missing my house on Kensington Road with an ache every time I open the refrigerator or turn on the gas stove (How I miss that stove! Six quick-burning flames and Rachel’s expensive cookware!). Every change I experience makes me miss the one before it, until I get so used to it that it becomes the routine I miss when I go somewhere else. Surely when I leave next summer, I will find myself flailing in whatever other place I end up in, longing for my futon on the floor and the breeze rolling in through open windows . . .

This feeling of “I-could-be-anywhere” first hit me on the trip to Mt. Fuji, listening to M.I.A. sing “Paper Planes” like I was back in North Carolina with Jon and Jonathan on the way to Roxboro, when we listened to that song 10 times in a row. Since then, I feel almost surprised when I step outside and see that I am not just anywhere, but here. Two nights ago, on the drive back from Shibukawa, a town 11 kilometers from my house where I had gone to eat ramen with a group of friends, I was surprised at the sense of familiarity that I felt. Me, my car, my iPod playing my music, the 2-lane road that reminds me of 158-E going to the beach—it all seemed the same, even though it isn’t.

Yesterday was Saturday, my first Saturday alone in my apartment, and I spent it just like I would if I were living on Brown Stone Court, Mayflower Avenue, or Kensington Road: cleaning. Usually I play movies while I clean, so I can have something to listen to; yesterday, I chose Lonesome Dove (hence the reference earlier) out of the five movies I brought with me to Japan, and I got through almost half of the six-hour epic before giving up for the day. (I can’t wait until I have internet in my house and can stream YouTube videos! Or maybe I need to bite the bullet and get a Japanese television and DVD player so I can watch movies here. . . unfortunately Hulu and nbc.com don’t work in Japan.)

I did laundry (referring to my Japanese-English cheat sheet on the wall to remind me of what all the buttons mean), hung up my clothes outside on the balcony to dry (no dryer), and straightened up. I cleaned out all the cabinets and rearranged the kitchen, throwing out my predecessors’ scratched-up Teflon pots and pans and making a list of replaceables. I organized the tiny kitchen the way I want it to be: food, glasses and plates on the shelf, cleaning supplies under the sink, utensils in the drawer. I swept—albeit with a plastic-bristled broom—the kitchen floor, vacuumed the rug covering the hardwood floor in the living room, and cleaned the tatami mat in the bedroom. Everywhere I live, I’m never finished cleaning.

Tomorrow, Monday, starts the real routine. Classes start after summer break, and I will be at work from 8:00-4:30 every day. On September 6th, I start weekly Japanese classes at the local community center, and I’m also going to start doing yoga once a week either at Brain Yoga or NSM Yoga, the only two yoga studios I’ve found so far. My three girlfriends and I are continuing our weekly dinners as well.

I’m also excited because I bought a couch—a real couch!—that will be delivered on September 9. I stay on the floor almost all the time here, and I am ready to be more than a couple inches off of it. The couch is cozy and comfortable, soft, beige, and three-cushioned, which will go under my window in the living room, where I can prop up and read all night long by the light of the moon if I want to.

I’ve been reading more than usual recently: I finished the last 100 pages of The House of the Spirits (in Spanish, of course!) in a day, and I devoured three Ray Bradbury books in two. Now I’m halfway through A Little Princess, a book I’ve been meaning to read for years, and A Beautiful Mind, even though I never saw the movie. Great Expectations and Kent Haruf’s Plainsong also await me. There is a small library at the international center at City Hall, where I can check out free books for up to three months! I’ve also been watching True Blood like a fiend, and wonder how I’m going to get Season Three after I finish Season Two . . .

It’s been about a month since I’ve been living in Japan, and things are starting to settle down some. In a way, this experience is just like moving to any new city for the first time: trying to meet people (I even got the girl’s number who sold me the couch because she speaks English!), learning my way around the city (so far I know Hwy. 25 and Hwy. 17 in a confusing sprawl of streets with no names), and finding out what there is to do besides go home at 8:30 every night. Even though living here is vaguely reminiscent of living anywhere else, what with the garbage removal and the grocery shopping and the figuring out how to say “Fill ‘er up” in Japanese to the gas station attendant, I have high hopes for this next year. I wonder what I will write at the end of September, at the end of October, at the end of May.

I hope to write more soon.

Mt. Fuji Part Two

Starting Part Two….picking up from where I stopped last time…

The rest of the ALTs came back to the cars around 11:00 a.m., and we drove to the hostel we were going to stay at. Instead of sleeping, though, some of us (a Canadian girl, an American guy, and two British guys) drove to McDonald’s for lunch—I know, embarrassing. When we got back, more people were getting ready to go to the onsen, a Japanese public bath. So I decided to go.

I wasn’t sure what to expect: naked public bathing isn’t really in American culture so I had no reference for it. However, it was much cooler and much less uncomfortable than I had thought. There were five of us English-speakers to begin with, and as we were leaving, a couple more JETs came in.

This is how it worked: we walked into the building, took off our outside shoes and barefooted or in sock feet walked to the counter, where we told the man that we wanted a bath. He rented towels for 200 yen, and after we paid for everything, we went into the women’s section. It was kind of like a locker room, but fancier and more Japanese, with pretty woven baskets to put your belongings in, or, if you don’t trust your co-bathers, rented lockers with locks on them. My friends and I stripped naked, gathered our towels (which maybe we weren’t supposed to do, since I didn’t see anyone else with towels…) and walked into the actual bathing area, separated from the changing room by two sets of double glass doors.

The bathing area was huge. A row of sit-down showers were against two walls; each cubicle had a plastic stool to sit on, a mirror, big containers of shampoo, conditioner, and body soap, a faucet and a removable showerhead. Besides the shower sections was a gigantic pool of hot water about two and a half or three feet deep, and another hot-tub-esque pool of bubbling water. There were women at almost all of the showers, but I found an empty one, sat down on the stool and lathered up. (One must be clean before entering the bath!) After rinsing off –you NEVER get into the tub soapy or dirty!—I padded along to the first tub and sunk down into the richest (in the Spanish sense of rico) bath I’ve ever taken. The water was the perfect temperature of hot, and even though I had a slight sunburn, it felt delicious on my sore muscles.

After resting there for about 10 minutes, I went outside to the open-air tubs, and joined my friends at one. It was part of an enclosed patio surrounded by trees and plants. I felt like royalty soaking in a warm bathtub under a clear blue sky, soaking up the water and the sun. After another 10 minutes, I went to explore another outside tub, shaped like a gigantic stone soup bowl filled to the brim and overflowing with the water that constantly poured in from an open spigot. How to describe: the blue sky, the slight breeze, the not-as-hot-as-Gunma sun, the sound of the water flowing into the tub. . . ? One would think being naked in front of your new friends and a couple of perfect strangers would be strange, but the fact that everyone is naked makes it a little easier.

After soaking in the various pools, we got up to go. I got dressed and went to wait for my friends in the waiting room, where I tried out a “jacket massager”: a little coat that beats out a rhythm onto your back and shoulders with a little hammer. I still hadn’t slept by this time (it was 3:30 p.m. and I had been awake for almost 32 hours) but the water and the heat made me even sleepier. Straight upon returning to the hostel I fell sound asleep for two hours on my hot top bunk in the 8-bed room.

Dinner consisted of conveyor belt sushi, much like what I had had with my host family a few weeks ago, except this time it wasn’t 100 yen sushi (~$1) but 100-800 yen, depending on what color plate you chose. (Interesting side note: waitresses in restaurants like these have a cool apparatus that scans your stack of used plates and automatically totals the cost.)

We got back to the hostel around 8:30 p.m. and I was sound asleep by 8:45.

The next day, well-rested, we were awoken at 7:00 a.m. by charming classical music that started playing softly, but gradually increased in volume until the proprietor was certain every person in the sleeping quarters was awake. We left the hostel for Fuji-Q (or Fuji-Kyu, depending on where you see it written) Highland, an amusement park like Kings Dominion/Carowinds but with less rides. Everyone made a beeline for the tallest, scariest, twistiest, up-side-down-iest one, but three of my friends and I declined politely and went to another one—still wickedly high and made my heart go into my throat. I ended up riding three roller coasters, and I wonder if my roller coastering days are over . . . .

Lunch was pizza and fries from Pizza-La, which had weird combinations like a meal of 2 slices of pizza, fries, and chicken nuggets, but no drink. There were also pizzas with corn on them and pizzas with cut up hot dogs on them, which I didn’t try.

It was a fun day, but we had to leave early so the boys in my car could catch their train back. There was terrible, bumper-to-bumper traffic most of the way back, and to pass the time we played a Japanese word game where you have to make a word out of the last letter of the word the previous person said, without using a word that ends with n (i.e. “ramen” or “gohan” is off-limits). So the game goes like this: one person says, “Go-mi” (trash), the next person says “Migi” (right, not left), the third person says a word that starts with “gi” that I can’t think of now. We also played some game that involves everyone putting their hands into fists with the fingers together so the thumbs can come up easily. You say some special word in Japanese that I’ve forgotten now as I’m typing this, and end with a number that isn’t higher than the number of thumbs possible (so the three people playing have six thumbs in total). At the same time that you say whatever that magical last word is, everyone raises one or two thumbs, and the person whose turn it is guesses what the number of thumbs raised will be. For example, if the person whose turn it is says, “Magical word – san! (three)” and there are three thumbs up, he wins that round. If there are not three thumbs up, it’s the next person’s turn. When you lose a round you take away a hand. Somehow I ended up winning, and I can barely count to ten in Japanese—impressive!

Unfortunately, we were so late getting back that I missed the last bus and the boys missed their last train. I took a $30 taxi home, but couldn’t tell the driver how to get to my apartment, so I just said, “Koko, onegaishimasu” (Here, please) and walked the rest of the ten minutes home, using my Fuji walking stick and ignoring my screaming legs.

And that was my Mt. Fuji weekend.

Monday, August 23, 2010

Climbing Mt. Fuji Part One

(This is Part One of maybe four parts. I'll talk about the why later on--I need to find a good excuse besides, "Oh, I didn't have anything else to do over the weekend....")

Sometimes we don’t know what our bodies will do until we try it: then we discover that they can do a lot more than we think. I like to sleep at good eight or ten hours every night, and I usually get pretty irritated if I don’t sleep enough (most of you know that already). And yet I found myself walking, climbing, and clambering over rocky terrain on a dark mountain at my prime sleeping time. The group of 23 ALT JETs got a late start and we didn’t begin walking up Mt. Fuji until 11:00 p.m. That didn’t stop almost all of them from reaching the top before 4:00 a.m., though! (I only made it 3250 out of 3776 meters, but I gave it the old college try at least.)

To get to Mt. Fuji, I walked for 10 minutes to Aeon Mall in my hiking clothes—leggings, shorts, a t-shirt, and a cowboy hat bequeathed by my predecessor (an outfit I’m sure the well-dressed Japanese citizens loved), and took the 3:08 bus from the mall to Shibukawa. After the 45-minute bus ride, which was only around $8.00, I was dropped off at Shibukawa station, where I discovered that I was the first one there. I was actually afraid I had misunderstood the directions, so I called a friend from the pay phone to see if I was right. According to her, everything was okay, and two minutes after hanging up with her, three other JETs drove up. I felt indescribable relief at not being the only other gaijin around—it’s so much easier to bear when you’re one out of twenty something being stared at, instead of the one that everyone maybe feels sorry for and thinks is lost.

It took a while for all 23 ALTs to show up, but we were able to divvy up the cars and drivers, form a caravan, and leave the station by 5:30. I was in a car with three boys, two first year JETs from California and one second year from Idaho. It was reminiscent of the road trip from Mexico City to Acapulco, where I discovered that if you’re in the car with friends (or soon-to-be friends) listening to good music with the windows down, you could be anywhere. The mix of hip-hop, rap, and Japanese pop music kept us awake, and the Rage Against the Machine songs made me laugh because they reminded me of driving down 158 with my brother and his friends in high school. Only the passing signs in Japanese reminded me that I was in a foreign country, because otherwise, we would just be four Americans back in the U.S. driving anywhere. The four times we stopped at rest areas on the four-hour trek down to the other prefecture (o-namae?) were also fun: 23 gaijin from English-speaking countries around the world are hard to hide in Japan. The prevailing vibe from all of us was excitement; we were anxious to get on the mountain and excited about getting out of Gunma for a little bit.

By the time we drove through the entrance gates to Fuji-san, it was almost 10:00. The guy from L.A., who had maybe never had much outdoor experience, kept marveling at the cedar trees, the hazy fog that was rolling in the higher we went up, and the nature of it all. We parked at 1300-ish meters up, and started getting ready for the climb. After the heat and humidity of Gunma, the brisk cool air of the mountain was a welcome relief. I looked up at the sky and was in awe at the number of stars I could see. As the night wore on, I kept staring at the sky and drinking in the sight of the innumerable stars above. I don’t remember the last time I saw so many beautiful stars, if I’ve ever seen so many—not in Littleton, not in Greensboro, not in Takasaki.

The beginning was easy: a half a mile walk from the car to the zocalo/square/center (I’m not sure what to call the block or two of stores selling souvenirs, restaurants, and shops). Almost all of us bought a walking stick—mine has a map of Mt. Fuji on it, although there were more with the Japanese flag or some Japanese art on it. Then the real fun began!

At first it wasn’t so bad. We had started at the 5th station; Station 10 is at the top of the mountain. The numbers are misleading, though, since there are maybe three Station Sevens and maybe more Station Eights. It was pitch dark, but almost everyone had head lamps, and I had a flashlight. Plus, we were not the only people climbing Mt. Fuji that night. The weekend we went was the last weekend in the 8-week hiking season, and it seemed that the entire population of Japan decided to hike the mountain at the same time. The mountain was swarming with people, chattering in Japanese, English, Chinese, and other languages. At the same time, though, it was easy to feel alone, because as the hours rolled on, I was only aware of my legs moving step by step and the cold that began to seep in. I kept having thoughts of Stephen King’s The Long Walk (read it if you haven’t already), scenes from Lonesome Dove, and whatever other references that reminded me of endless, endless walking. I should have found peace on the mountain, but I mostly found aches.

Before it got too hard, though, I was enjoying myself. I was pumping myself up for reaching the top. “Six hours to reach the top,” I said to myself, “That’s not too bad at all. That’s easy. We can do that easy!” I was part of a small group of three other girls, one who had climbed a mountain taller than Fuji a few years back, and one who hadn’t. But by the sixth station—a little hut where you can buy drinks and have your stick stamped for 200 yen—I was out of breath. “Slowly, slowly,” I told myself. “You can do this.” We kept walking up, slowly, breathing evenly so the altitude wouldn’t hurt us.

The terrain was not pretty. Mt. Fuji is an inactive volcano, and as such, it is not lush or beautiful. There are trees for the first few hundred meters, but they were quickly replaced with craggy rock, volcanic rock, dust, and more rock. At first, there were some stairs steps carved into the mountain, but they disappeared after a while, only reappearing when we grew closer to the top. The first time I saw a pile of rocks without a path going through it and only a chain to mark the way, I thought: “This is impossible. I can’t do this for five hours.” But it wasn’t. We kept going.

As time went on, Angela and I kept falling farther and farther behind Anna, and we finally decided to split up so Anna could make it to the top before sunrise. Angela, who has asthma that started acting up the higher we got, had to go very slowly and stop often to catch her breath.

Even though neither of us speaks much Japanese beyond the basics, we met some nice people on the way up. We had just seen the most disheartening sign at 3:00 a.m. that said, “Three hours to the top.” We were going to try it, but it seemed so far. . . at one break, we started a conversation (“Ima nan-ji desuka?” What time is it?) with a Japanese man named Kenji, who was walking up with someone who was maybe his father. We started talking about the climb, the weather, and the sunrise, and his father gave us advice about how to make it to the top. “Yukkuri, yukkuri,” he kept telling us: slowly, slowly. (Later, coming down, we saw the effects of not going slowly: an American Navy boy and his family were hiking up quickly, and his little brother threw up from altitude sickness.) After Angela said she was feeling sick, too, and asked if there was oxygen at the next station, Kenji and his dad said they could go back to Station Eight and get her some: her, a perfect stranger! But we said it would be okay and that we would find some at the next station up.

It was 3:40 a.m. when we said goodbye to our new Japanese friends, who I suppose arrived at the top two hours later. Angela and I rested every 15-20 minutes to drink water and eat the peanut butter sandwiches, Snickers bars, and almonds we had brought to keep up our energy, which actually worked very well.

However, the stars began to the fade and the east began to lighten far before we were anywhere close to the top. There is actually a special word in Japanese for the sunrise as seen from the top of Mt. Fuji (which I forget now, having only heard it twice), but I believe the sunrise I saw from 3,250 meters was just as beautiful as it was there. We were far above the clouds beneath us, and the sun’s ascent coming out from under them was breathtaking. At first it was just a little lighter than nighttime, then gradually the yellow line in the east glowed brighter and brighter until the sun itself came up from under the clouds and shone on the rocks around us. Everywhere the people who were still climbing stopped to take pictures and gaze speechless at the beauty around them.

Soon after the sun came up, Angela and I started the hike down, quickly realizing that going down was 10 times worse than going up. The loose rocks slipped under our feet, making us unsteady, and clambering down the stair-less rocks was difficult. After a quick station break to get Angela some oxygen and me a 5-minute cat nap, we renewed our descent, this time on the actual descent itself, a switchback cut into the mountain at a 35 or 40 degree angle. This way was no easier; if anything, the rocks and dirt were looser and more slippery. For a while we walked backwards to relieve the pressure on our knees, but even that didn’t help after a while.

At one break, we started talking with an English airline stewardess who decided to climb Mt. Fuji while on a 3-day stop in Japan. She accompanied us the rest of the way down, which consisted of intermittent “Oh-this-is-so-beautiful!”s with “Oh-my-God-my-feet-and-legs-are-killing-me!”s. She had made it to the top, though, through the huge crowds of people, and said it was beautiful but that there were too many people there. It wasn’t as peaceful as she had wanted it to be.

There at the bottom, finally, at 8:45 a.m. (I’d been awake for 25 hours!) I ate a filling breakfast of sweet corn on the cob and a hot dog at a little stand, and walked back to lay down beside the car. I couldn’t sleep because flies kept landing on me and the sun was deathly hot—what a change from the cold temperatures of a few hours ago. During my time in the sun, I developed an awkward sunburn on half of my face and half of my neck, that everyone laughed at for the next few days.

Part Two will come soon…..!

Friday, August 20, 2010

School

I've written a nice little paragraph of two about my kindly neighbors and about the weird banking system in Japan, but I can't post it just yet. So I will talk about school for a bit.

Right now it's summer vacation, so there's not too much going on. I come to school every morning at 8:15 and stay until about 12:15. During the school year I will be here until 4:15, and I will eat a healthy and delicious school lunch.

I've met almost all of the teachers at my school. We share one huge teachers' room (one of the only air-conditioned places in the school) and all our desks are put together. I will be co-teaching with three teachers until at least October, when I will start teaching with four--at least, that's how I've understood it. Some days I teach 2 classes a day, some days I teach 5 (out of 6 periods). In my free time I'll be doing lesson planning or studying Japanese. So far I get along with everyone. I think it's because I brought them candy; a little bribery never hurt anyone.

The school is bigger than Warren County Middle School (the only one I can compare it to) and they have a ton of clubs: tennis, judo, brass band, art, basketball, soccer.....almost every student is involved in at least one club, and there are some teachers who work 7 days a week between regular classroom work and club activities. There are three floors to the school, and the teachers are the ones who change classes, not the students. However, there isn't as much technology as you would think--there is only one computer in each classroom, although there is a big computer lab on the 2nd floor.

Classes are divided into rooms and years. They call them First Year, Second Year, and Third Year students, what would roughly be 7th, 8th, and 9th grade in the U.S. So classes are called 1-1, which means they first year students in classroom one, 1-2, in classroom two, etc. etc. My schedule looks like 1-3, 1-4, 2-5, 2-6, etc.

We also can't wear outside shoes inside, so I take off my shoes when I walk into the building, put on my inside shoes that are waiting for me in my locker, and go from there. When I leave the building I put my inside shoes in my locker and put my outside shoes back on. Of course, the floor is still a little scuffed up...

On another note, I'm planning to go to Mt. Fuji this weekend and climb it, but I have no aspirations higher than just to see how far I get. If I pass out in the middle of it, at least I can say I tried. I'll be going with a group of ALTs and whoever else is there at the time. I'll let you know of my success or failure when I get back!

Sorry this was kind of disjointed; I'll try to write more eloquently next time!

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

My Long Post

Pedaling home from the grocery store in the 7:30 dark, torrents of rain cooling me off but soaking my recent purchases nestled in my front and back baskets, I thought to myself: This is my life now. I live in Munadaka-machi, a small suburb north of Takasaki. I sleep on a pile of futons every night stacked up on a tatami mat floor. I buy my groceries at Saty and at the international market because I need bagels, tortillas, and olive oil. This is what I do now!

I bike 10 minutes downhill to school every morning and 20 minutes up, and I’ll do that until I get a car in a couple of weeks (I can rent one for about $150/month if I don’t mind learning how to drive on the left side of the road). Bus fare is ungodly expensive (400 yen ~ $4.50 one way to the train station, so any time I have to go downtown, which is often, it costs about $10.00). The trains are much cheaper (about $1.50 or $2.00 for the same trip that on the bus is twice that) but inconvenient for me, since I live a long way from the train station! My life now is so different from the past year at 107 Kensington, where I had a huge house to spread out in, transportation, a cell phone, and free wireless hotspots all over the city (not to mention all my friends!).

I never thought I’d be so reliant on external communication, but it’s all I want right now! Without a car, reliable, consistent internet service, or a cell phone, I am suddenly 13 again, relying on everyone else to take me places and contact me. I have managed to navigate the bus system fairly well (Aeon Mall Takasaki or Maebashi Station, Stations Aeon Mall) except that one time when I took the wrong bus and ended up on the other side of the town with no way of explaining myself to the driver. (It ended up okay, but only after I shed a few tears of impotence. How do you say, “What should I do?” in Japanese, anyway?) I can get around my neighborhood on a bike, as long as I don’t mind getting wet if it rains, which I actually don’t, since it’s so hot here! But I can’t go buy a microwave or a sofa without help, and I hate the feeling of not being able to move freely, or to call someone and see if they want to hang out.

If I want to use the internet, I have to take my laptop to Starbucks, where they charge me by the minute, or use the computer at school, which has limited access (for some reason, Yahoo Mail is blocked but I can check Facebook). I guess that’s one of the misconceptions I had about Japan: I thought everywhere would have free wireless and that I could connect any time I wanted. Shows what I know. Maybe I’m in the Warren County of Japan, just with a higher population. This disconnection will not last forever, though: as soon as I have my sweet iPhone4 in my hands and am streaming episodes of Lost from Hulu on my high-speed fiber-optic cable internet, I will feel a lot better.

I am happy to be meeting a lot of cool people, though. I have plans to have dinner in Maebashi tomorrow night with my three new girlfriends, which is exciting.

I’ve also gotten a lot of help from my predecessor, who hung around a little more to get all of his stuff shipped off and to make sure that I knew what was going on. I spent today with him, his mom, and his host mom from years back. We had a fantastic Japanese lunch in a special restaurant where there were both inside shoes and bathroom shoes. Then we drove up to the hill that the famous goddess lives. She is imposingly tall as she stares at you through closed eyes, but Adam and I ran up the stairs anyway and viewed Takasaki from hundreds of meters up. According to legend, girls should never bring their boyfriends to this park, because the goddess gets jealous and makes them break up (watch out, ladies….).

I also went to the Maebashi fireworks festival last Saturday with three other JETs (or ALTs, however you want to call us). We took the right bus, but missed our stop completely, so we had to backtrack a while before the found the right festival. Luckily, though, the city bus drivers communicate, and when we got on the bus going in the other direction, the driver immediately asked us if we were going to the festival. He didn’t even charge us for the extra lift! I wonder what the other driver told him. . . . watch out for the group of loud gaijin trying to get to the fireworks? It’s not as scary getting lost with a group of people, especially when two of them speak fairly decent Japanese; the problem is getting lost alone and being helpless!

The fireworks were beautiful, but very long—maybe two hours of explosions. There were cool fireworks that exploded into smiley faces, cat faces, and flowers, just like in Takasaki. There were so many people there I couldn’t count them all and it was really fun! Afterwards, my friends and I were talking and some Japanese people overheard us. They were all pretty drunk but one more so than the others. He kept speaking in English to us loudly, and trying to get us to say what I think was a bad word in Japanese (we refused). It took about 45 minutes to walk back to Alice’s apartment, but we made it! The next day we had breakfast at Joyfull’s (yes, with 2 l’s) which consisted of a hamburger patty and rice for me, and miso soup and vegetables for the other girls. Where is Waffle House when you need it?! Or Jan’s House!

Living here is exciting, frightening, adventurous, scary, and wonderful, and I feel thrilled, sad, homesick, elated, competent, and incapable—all at once! Some days I feel happier than others. Some days I want to scream, “Quit staring at me! Or at least talk to me!” I’ve been sleeping great at night and I think it has something to do with the waking up at 6:45 and the 30 minutes or an hour of biking every day. (I am going to have some sexy legs soon!) I am falling into a groove, and I think as soon as I establish a real schedule—school, home, friends, etc.—then I’ll feel much better.

Thanks for being interested in my life; I hope it’s as scintillating as you’d hoped. I’ll try to put up more pictures on Facebook soon.

P.S. I missed my bus from Maebashi to Takasaki, so I'm spending the night with my friend Amy in Maebashi. I'm going to be late to work on my 4th day. That is not cool. At least it's the summer and there aren't a lot of people around...

La Vida Hasta Ahora

(I stole this picture from the internet; I didn't take it. I did see it, though, and climb inside up to her shoulder. Of course that was the day I left my camera at home.)

I have a really long blog post that I wrote at home and wanted to put on here, but I can't figure out how to cut and paste in Japanese.

So y'all wait a little bit longer and I'll let you know how exciting my life is.

Saturday, August 14, 2010

Out of the Loop

I hate being cell phone-less and internet-less. It makes me feel like it's the 1990s again, but worse because I don't even have a house phone. I might be sporadic in the next little bit, but I'm also kind of a technology addict and will probably find a way to sneak a signal in somehow.

I start school on Monday, 8:00 a.m. bright and early if I can find it on time, so wish me good luck!

See you soon......

Friday, August 13, 2010

From Starbucks

Yesterday, Thursday, August 12, I moved into my apartment that will be my home for the next year. Since it has housed JETs for at least the four previous years, it was already pretty furnished, but since it was full of boys, there were some things to change. I bought new curtains, hung up my decorations (a Mexican flag, my Oaxaca hanging, a poster a client gave me for my birthday…is there a pattern here?), and put up all my things. There is something comforting about opening the wardrobe and seeing my own clothes hanging there, seeing my own books on the bookshelf. I still need to buy new pots and pans and a window fan, though.

I have a new futon that I put over some of the older ones, and it is really comfortable. The only annoying part is having to hang it outside in the sun about once a week to make sure that it’s still nice and fresh.

My predecessor came over yesterday and showed me around the area. I’m only a 30- or 45-minute bike ride from both downtown Takasaki and downtown Maebashi; it takes just about as long to take the bus or drive! Near my house is a bakery, a laundromat, a convenience store, and a 3-story mall with a huge supermarket downstairs and an international food store full of tortillas, salsa, peanut butter, granola, and cheeses. The mall is about a 5-minute bike ride away: very convenient! There’s also a bus that runs from the mall to Takasaki and to Maebashi, for about $4.00 each way.

We also went to my school so I could learn the route there. (I need to do it again before I start school on Monday!) It is a nice, easy bike ride there; you cross through a park, down a tree-lined street, past a couple of rice paddy fields (they are all over the place, even right beside the mall!), and through a little neighborhood, until you get to the school. I just hope I don’t get lost on my first day!

Japan is crazy about trash here, and it makes trash removal a little difficult. Recycling is mandatory, and separated into plastic PET bottles, aluminum cans, glass bottles, and cardboard. The lids off the plastic bottles are taken off and put in another container. The other trash is separated into “burnables” and “non-burnables,” and apparently if you throw away the wrong thing, they will go through your trash to find your address and put it back on your porch! Also, there is no public trash pick-up; I have to take my burnable trash about 2 blocks down the road and put it in a big yellow metal structure, where it gets picked up later. The recycling center is about 5 blocks away, but there are recycling places at convenience stores and at the mall nearby just in case.

I’ve had interesting experiences trying to cook, too. I had picked up a bottle of what I thought was olive oil, just to later discover that it was something like rice vinegar! (Note: vinegar does not do to potatoes what olive oil does.) Last night I settled down to drink a cup of hot tea as I finished up Season One of True Blood, but realized that what I had flavored my tea with was actually salt!

In better news, I ran into the nice lady from down the street who had showed me how to get to my house the other day, and she said she wants me to help her learn more English in exchange for her teaching me Japanese. I’m going to go over there sometime this afternoon to start, and I’m excited about that.

Unfortunately, I don’t have internet at my apartment. Adam (my predecessor) said that until about two weeks ago, there was a free wireless signal floating in the air, but it disappeared. So my only chance to check email and everything is if I go to the Starbucks at the mall, and even then I can only stay for about half an hour or so until the proprietor starts shooting me dirty looks. (I wrote this blog at home and just uploaded it at Starbucks.) To be the most technologically advanced country in the world, Japan surprises me by not having free wireless all over the place. Apparently (so sayeth former JETs), even the places that advertise wireless require a password that no one at the place knows. It looks like I’ll be setting up Japan’s equivalent of Time Warner Cable sometime soon…

I think that’s all in interesting news for the day. I miss everyone back at home and hope to see you over here soon!

Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Hambuger Friend

So I spent 2 days in Maebashi City at Gunma Orientation, where I was sufficiently oriented in matters such as how to buy/rent a car and not get a wreck while driving on the left side of the road, how to put out a candle flame with my bare hand during a karate lesson, and how to properly file U.S. taxes, among other things. I also had my first Japanese karaoke experience with about 30 or 40 other JETs: it was a lot of singing Disney, 80s, and Broadway songs (with a little Lady Gaga thrown in, because no karaoke session is complete without a little "Poker Face").
When I got back to Takasaki, my host sister (the daughter of my host mom) was wearing the cutest shirt I've ever seen, that says, "Hamburger friend: It is not stopped if I have begun to eat it. The thing which is cuts it, and do not runout" on the front, and "I feel happiness when I eat a potato" on the back. I would die for that shirt in my size. She was also super cute because since it's my last night staying with this family, she said to me in Japanese, "I want to give you some Croc decorations!" and proceeded to give me a handful of plastic Croc designs to put in my empty shoes. So many people in Japan wear Crocs and have them super decorated. She even showed me her own little shoes and pointed at them to have me pick which ones I wanted for mine! She wanted to give me some of her own to take with me.
In all my goodbyes recently, this one seems like one of the saddest. Having a host family to take me places, show me how to do things, explain food labels, call companies, and everything else for me, was so nice. Now I'm about to do it on my own!
Tomorrow morning I move into my apartment in Munadaka, Gunma-machi, about 7 kilometers from downtown and maybe 10 or 15 from my host mom. But she'll still come visit (and apparently she can give me the hook-up with a great massage therapist in town!) and I'll still be able to call on her when I need her. It's so nice to have someone to hold your hand when you don't know what's going on. I'm hoping all the good karma I saved up working at the CNNC will come back to help me out, and I'll find a Thriving at Three for American girls in Japan, who will take me places and interpret and invite me to weekly group meetings to meet other American girls in the area. That would be helpful. :)

Monday, August 9, 2010

Quick

1) I moved all the rest of my stuff into my apartment but won't sleep there till Thursday night.
2) I'll be in Maebashi at the Gunma Prefecture orientation Tuesday & Wednesday and come back Wednesday night.
3) I bought a bike and rode from the store to my house and only got hopelessly lost about five times before a nice old woman showed me where I live. :)
4) I think I'm learning a little more Japanese every day...and learning my way around this city a little more.

Sorry, I'm exhausted tonight but just wanted to give you a quick update. I'll write more soon!

Saturday, August 7, 2010

A Good Day & Fireworks

It was crazy hot again today, and the air conditioning only runs at night. They had all the windows and the doors open, letting the hot breeze roll through the house all day. Around 12:30, my host mom and I left the house and went shopping--first to Nitori (something similar to Bed Bath & Beyond but with less bath) where I bought a futon set (futon/mattress, blanket, and pillow) plus sheets and covers for everything. I got a pillow filled with soba as well, that they say is good to sleep on. After Nitori, we went to Aeon, which is a huge mall like any other mall anywhere else in the world. I got my inside shoes for school; apparently it doesn't matter how nicely you dress at school, you always take off your outside shoes and put on inside shoes once you're in the school. So I have a year of wearing nice fancy clothes and some cute ballerina slipper crocs that can never touch the ground outside of the school halls. :)

I had an awkward experience at the McDonald's at the mall (I know, I know, I'm embarrassed even admitting it; leave me alone). I didn't know any of the words for anything, so I said and pointed at a picture of a cheeseburger, fries, and a Coke (ko-ku, I think...). The fries were in a picture with another sandwich, though, so when I got my tray, it had a cheeseburger, a Coke, and a chicken sandwich on it. I had to get my host mom to help me sort out the mistake. I thought my miming eating French fries was really good, but apparently it wasn't good enough....:) The cashier was embarrassed and so was I, and a lot of "sumimasen"s (excuse me) and "gommenasai"s (I'm sorry) were thrown around. Well, you live and you learn: they say "po-ta-to-fri" for French fries. Now I know.

This evening was an experience as well. It was the first day of the Takasaki Festival (which we skipped out on, but we'll go tomorrow, dressed up in yukata) and they had fireworks at the rugby field near the house I'm staying at. It felt festive, like the 4th of July but without the American flags and obnoxious people (there're always a few...). People brought blankets and we all picnicked outside. It felt fun to be drinking a beer and eating rice balls while watching the sky light up with hanabi (fireworks: hana = flower and bi = fire). The fireworks lasted almost an hour, with fireworks that light up like smiley faces, flowers, and, of course, cat heads. I met some of my host family's friends, and we exchanged smiling bows and names. I'm at the point where can I have a 2 or 3 word conversation with someone, and that's pretty nice.

I keep wanting to go to bed early; it's barely 9:30 p.m. but I feel exhausted. Maybe it's because I wake up at 5:30 with the sun! Goodnight!

Friday, August 6, 2010

Getting There...

Living in Japan, I think, is going to be drastically different than just visiting! I am thrilled about my apartment and having a space of my own. Right now a lot of my predecessor's things are in it, but I think it will soon become mine. Sooner than later, because I move in in a few days!
My apartment is called K-Haitsu (pronounced K-Heights) about 15 minutes north of downtown Takasaki. We got lost getting there because none of the roads have names, just numbers, and this area is very densely lined with houses and apartment buildings.
When you walk in the house, there is a bathroom on your right, with a sink, a washing machine (no dryer), and a separate room with a shower and bathtub. Next there is a separate room with the toilet, then the kitchen at the end of the hall. There are two big rooms on the other side of the kitchen, which you see in the picture. The first room has a window and a little table; the second room (the tatami mat room) is where I will sleep at night, after I buy myself a futon and some covers. There is one air conditioner in the tatami mat room, and if I close the doors I should be okay. In the winter I hear that I only heat the tatami room as well, so cooking and showering should be fun!
This city reminds me of any other city, except that I can't read any of the signs and the traffic is the opposite of what I'm used to (they drive on the left side of the road, like in England). Since I live so far out in the suburbs, I might have to get a car myself, but thinking about driving in Japan is scary!
I need to take more pictures of the streets so you can see how similar the layout is to a lot of U.S. cities. Of course it has a very different feel, but there are stores that are similar to U.S. stores (I went to a sorta/kinda Bed Bath and Beyond today) and the streets are lined with restaurants and stores much like Wendover Avenue in Greensboro.

Wednesday, August 4, 2010

Takasaki-Shi

Greetings from Takasaki City! It's been a long ride and I'm still not "home" but I'm getting there! I'm staying with a family here in Takasaki, and although I'm almost falling down from exhaustion from the long day, I feel very happy. I taught their 9-year old daughter how to play "Speed" (the card game) and got beat at Old Maid, so I think I'm doing okay. Tomorrow we're back to the Board of Education (where I left several very important documents, including my alien registration card...) to finish up the business of moving to another country. This weekend looks like fun: the Takasaki Festival and maybe some good Mexican food (although not at the same time). Oyasuminasai!

Tuesday, August 3, 2010

Full Day #2

(I forgot to mention that this blogger website suddenly jumped to Japanese as soon as I opened it in Tokyo.)

So. The thing with not speaking Japanese in Japan is that...you don't speak Japanese in Japan. Everything, everything, becomes harder. The JET folk talk to us about joining community classes, and I think, "Is there a 2-1-1 number we can call like in Greensboro? Is there help for the immigrant community? Will I have a sponsoring agency? How will I find out?" (JET does take care of us, FYI, and amazingly so, but it's still nerve-wracking to be so illiterate.)

I went to a quick-stop restaurant with two friends. It's a really small place tucked in with a lot of other really small places on a crowded street. We walked in and barely had enough room to stand at the machine that takes your order, the room was so full. It is only one big room with a long counter running through it, with a waiter on the inside bringing the food and the customers sitting around the bar in a horseshoe shape. There is maybe a foot of space between the barstools and the walls.

We stand there, we three gaijin (foreigners), at the selection on the menu. There are pictures, which is good, but we can't read the descriptions. (Well, one of us speaks pretty good Japanese, but I was lost). I picked one that looked good, put my money in the bill accepter, pressed the button for the food I wanted, and out popped a ticket and my change. I took the ticket to the counter, sat down on a stool by myself because there wasn't enough room for the three of us to sit together, and put the ticket on the counter for the waiter to see.

Not long afterward, out comes a few bowls for me: one bowl of rice and beef, another of soup, and another of a cabbage salad with corn. The waiter says something at great length, I smile and nod and murmur, "Arigatou," which I later learn should have been "Doozo." (Oooops.) Sitting there at the counter, watching the men (all men!!! Where are the women in this restaurant?!) slurping their soup and noodles and politely avoiding eye contact with everyone else, I suddenly got it: this is how I'm going to feel for a while. I didn't feel out of place in a "I need to get out of here" way, which I get sometimes, but I felt like I stuck out and there wasn't anything I could do about it. There was no conversation in the restaurant besides Tony & me whispering back and forth, "This is a lot of food. I don't know what to say. I feel weird. Am I blushing? I can't eat any more." When we finally left, I felt stressed, like I had just taken a test and didn't know how I did. But I felt proud, too, and happy, because that was my first time eating in a ticket-counter restaurant, and now that I've done it, I can do it again! The first time is over, and the second time I will feel just a little more comfortable as I navigate my chopsticks into my rice. And by the time a few weeks is over, I will feel even better.

Later, I went to the Seven Eleven--yes, the Seven Eleven--to buy pantyhose, because here, no outfit is complete without some. I pick up a package and stare as it for a while, wondering what size it is (it says "L" but what does that mean in this country?). Then I pick up another package that I think is more my size. I stand there for a few minutes staring at the two packages, trying to decide. They both list hip sizes (at least, the katakana said, "Hi-pu", which must mean something...) but it's in centimeters. What's my hip size in centimeters? No idea. I finally decide on one pair and go to the counter to pay. The cashier tells me something and I smile and nod. She rings up my purchase and tells me how much it is. I fumble around for a 1,000 yen bill because I know it'll be enough, but when she points at the screen to tell me that it's only 380 I think maybe I have enough change to pay for it with coins. So I fumble around some more in my purse, but can't find the handful of coins I know is in there. I mutter, "Gomennasai" (I'm sorry) and hand her the original 1,000 bill. She smiles and says something that hopefully means, "It's okay; I know you have no idea what you're doing. But you'll get it." I smiled, took my change, and went back to the hotel.

Monday, August 2, 2010

Full Day #1

It still doesn't really seem like I'm in Tokyo, considering I spend all day long with 1,000 (or 2,000?) other English-speaking people. But tonight I got my first glimpse of what it's going to be like. Two other JETs and I ventured out into the city near the hotel and I spent an hour and a half gawking in amazement and taking pictures of literally almost everything I saw. (These pictures will be on Facebook soon, and I'll probably open a Flikr account, too.) It isn't like Mexico City, or New York, or Madrid, or Chicago, or any other big city I've been to....but in a way it's exactly the same. Everything is new to me, and thrilling and exciting, but terrifying because I have no way to really communicate with anyone. But it's fascinating to be here where everything is new (and strangely familiar?). It will be exciting to see how my feelings change as the months progress...

Here!

I could write a beautiful, poetic account of everything that's happened in the past 24 hours, but this will be maybe a little brief and maybe not very well-written (my apologies). It's currently 8:30 a.m. on Monday, August 2 (I'm 28!) and I've slept for the past 12 hours.

Yesterday, or rather, the day before yesterday, I left Portland, OR for a 10-hour flight to Japan. The flight was fun, I watched a fantastic movie called Serendipity (hahaha), and met a lot of cool people who will be here with me. We arrived in Tokyo at 4:00 p.m. Tokyo time (something like 1:00 a.m. Portland time) and were herded from the airplane, through customs, through immigration, to a line of buses awaiting us. We sent two of our bags on to our prefectures (that's Gunma, for me) and and kept two with us to carry onto the bus. I was absolutely exhausted, but couldn't sleep too much on the bus. It was about a 2-hour ride from the airport to the hotel. I tried to keep my eyes open to see the scenery, but I was too tired to see much. I remember the guy with us telling us to see Disneyland and some other sites, but I kept my eyes closed...I do remember that the trees look vaguely North Carolina-esque...lots of pines and maybe oaks? And, weirdly enough, what looks like kudzu all over the place!

This hotel is absolutely beautiful, extraordinarily fancy, and really nice! I'm sharing a room with two other Portland JETs. I crashed last night about 7:30 p.m. Tokyo time and slept off and on till 6:30 this morning. (For some reason, I had a hard time going to sleep, but I ended up sleeping really deeply as the night wore on.)

This morning we woke up and went to a fancy breakfast, which included super floppy bacon, eggs, various cut-up fruits, toast, coffee, stir-fried vegetables, and shoe-string French fries! I sat with some people from the U.S., the U.K., and New Zealand, and marveled at the accents. :)

We have meetings all day long and a semi-formal tonight, but I'll try to keep you updated on everything else that we do. It seems so weird that I'm so many miles from home, but it's definitely going to be an adventure!

Sorry for the train of thought post, but I wanted to let you know that I've arrived safe and soundly and that things are good. I'm still a little sleepy but I think I'll accustom myself sooner or later. I hope everyone is well! I'll post pictures soon, too.

Till next time......!