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 5^th 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…..!

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!

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.

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......

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!

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. :)