Celebration

(Charlie bucket enjoying himself)

Last Saturday was my birthday.

Oh thank you!

I went camping on Friday night which was a lot of fun but it was so goddamn cold. When we arrived at the campsite the puddles on the road had already turned to ice and it just got colder from there. I've been discovering lately how naive I am when it comes to cold environments. Prior to this night, the coldest I have ever been was when I was in New York. I was cold because I was studying in Miami, which is hot, so I just didn't own anything warm. Here in Japan I was under the impression I had warm things and yet apparently I do not. Eight layers. Eight layers of clothing on my torso, two of which were thermals. My lower body protections consisted of 2 pairs of thermals, jeans and the hope that I wouldn't die from some cold-related illness.

Sitting around the fire was fun and talking to everyone was a lot of fun but I woke up the next day at around 5:30am shivering quite badly (Happy Birthday!)

Saturday consisted of cleaning. I cleaned most of my apartment and just before I finished I had a nap and then people arrived. To be honest I wasn't quite sure how many people were going to come. I sent out the invites on Facebook and got some responses face-to-face; some on the internet; I invited a lot of people who don't use Facebook; There was another party on the same night that conflicted with some of the friends I invited; I'm a little out of the way for people and a horde of other reasons. Sorry I just went into listing reasons and didn't really warn you about the change of structure - did you read it ok?

(shoes)

Turns out I didn't really need to worry as almost everyone I invited came which was wonderful! The other party didn't conflict too much as people either came to mine instead or came afterwards. I was also happy as everyone was talking to each other and not forming distinct/separate groups which I was a little worried about.

To set up for the party I moved a few bits of furniture around and brought up some furniture from below my apartment. I cleaned and vacuumed and I also made punch. I made punch because it's interesting and deceptively alcoholic. When I first made it before most of the people arrived, I nor my friend Christal could taste the alcohol - but a Japanese girl said that it was waaay too strong. Each to their own I guess. In any case it worked beautifully as everyone got considerable drunk and therefore had fun.

I'm sure the sober people had fun too but probably not as much.

Assortment of events;

- The music was hijacked by people with poor taste in music (read: RnB fans) so the music degenerated from the party playlist, to RnB youtube videos, to silence.

- Turning on too many things that required power = power outage at some stage. Flicked back on. Party is go.

- I got a fair few presents even though I said I didn't want any. Some really cool and interesting ones!

- Hayley made a banana cake which was nice! I shared a slice with four people and then left it unattended for a while and came back to an empty dish covered in crumbs. The small taste I had was nice though!

- No obvious throwing up which is nice.

- My friend quit his job with the company via email. Called him the next day and he maintains that he still has no regrets and is firm in his decision.

- My paper screen doors which were already rife with holes/tears (but was subsequently healed by me and a mass of paper birds [cut from a stencil] to cover the tears) has had many NEW holes added. One big enough to put your head through... which was done... by many people.

Sunday I was going to clean but boy I just did not want to. So the rubbish was categorised by a few kind party-goers and I'm cleaning it up eventually. Don't rush me!

All in all everyone had a good time I think. I'm very lucky to have such a big(gish) apartment to hold people and that I have no neighbours. It's also good that all my friends got along with each other. I'm a very lucky person. I missed all my friends back home though and I wish I could have had you all here to celebrate with me. But 22 isn't such an important age I don't think.

Next year I'll be turning 23 on the 23rd of January. That's another cause to celebrate!

P.S. I asked my students the week before how old they thought I was. The general consensus appeared to be I looked 28. Which is wrong. Obviously.... right?

Cold Shoulder

(kids on snowboards... in a game)

I went snowboarding recently! I was invited to go by a friend and the simple invitation made me ponder why it is I haven't gone before.

* The obvious reason is that it's just not convenient to go to ski mountains where I live in Australia --> but you know what? It's not that convenient to come to Japan for a year either.

* It's cold at the snow --> It's also hot in the sun but I still go to the beach.

Then I realised it may be due to the fact that everyone is better than me and I didn't want to humiliate myself and/or burden someone else with looking after me. But then it's not like I was prepared to go by myself so really it was a useless loop. Much like my thought processes on the issue.

So when I got this invitation to go I thought why not? These people are willing to help me out and the opportunity may never come again so I plucked up my courage, accepted the invitation and soon found myself in a car going up some windy roads in some obscenely snowed over environments. The level of snow over the houses, cars and trees was comical for me. I had never seen this much snow before and while I looked out at the scenery I tried to absorb as much information as possible before I got out on the ice.

I rented everything and the cost for the board, boots and the clothing (because I don't actually own anything waterproof) only ended up being 4800yen which isn't bad at all! We got on the ice and instead of practicing or anything we went straight up on the lifts and my 'tutorial' was on a stupidly steep hill at the beginning of the beginners course.

Needless to say I fell over in all matter of directions. The hardest part for me was even standing up on the board! As I mentioned before the hill was really steep so as soon as I would try to stand up the board would begin moving and I would just fall back down again. Frustrating. But I kept going because that's what people in my situation do and soon enough I was up on the board and working my way down the hill.

I won't lie. That first run took a long time. But the runs after that got progressively faster and faster until I could work my way down quite easily. I even bet one of the teachers down and fell over less!. The way I was snowboarding didn't really feel right though - it wasn't what I had seen on tv or on Snowboard Kids 2 (arguably the best snowboarding game for the Nintendo 64). So I enquired with one of the more skilled people that came to the mountain with us. He explained that what I was doing is what they teach the beginners and that I still need to learn another style and with practice I'll have a smoother rhythm and look more like the cartoonified children on ridiculously themed snowboards that I'm used to from Snowboard Kids 2.

So after a long day of boarding I got home and despite stretching and having a hot bath I woke up with some pretty nasty joint aches. But that is to be expected and they'll go away soon enough. Well worth it I think. Next I want to try skiing! Although it's such an unattractive word to type I may not blog about that.

Clear the Area

I missed the Christmas blog. Surprised? I'm not. I actually had to work on Christmas so while you were all eating good food and celebrating I was sitting at my desk doing absolutely nothing because I had no classes! After a really boring assembly some people from a local restaurant came to our school and made the teachers some soba (a kind of Japanese noodle) so I guess it was worth it. After the soba I left and ran some errands. Refusing to let Christmas pass without some kind of celebrating I went to dinner with some friends and then went to karaoke for 4 hours. I enjoyed my Christmas here! I would have preferred to be at home but this wasn't so bad.

The reason I missed the Christmas blog is because on the 27th I had planned to head off to Kansai. My friend Hayley and I were committed to going but had planned absolutely nothing except for one hotel for the first night. On hind sight maybe it wasn't such a good idea as it was around New Years which meant finding accommodation would be pretty heinous but we managed ok.

On the first day we just wanted to get out, get away, and get to a new destination. We took the bullet train and after about 4 hours of travel we finally arrived in Kobe. There's not really a whole lot to Kobe really. It's a city located between the mountains and the sea. It has an important port that for foreigners used to enter Japan before the days of airplanes so it has a little bit of a western feel to it which is... nice? We arrived in the afternoon, dumped our bags and went out to explore the town. It seemed every corner we turned we would find a new interesting place to walk towards and soon we had a pretty good idea of the culture/feel of Kobe. We visited a few bars and everyone was really nice and we could communicate fairly well with them.
So in short. We didn't really see anything in particular in Kobe - but we saw the lifestyle and what not. It's a nice place! I'd like to go back there and perhaps explore it more.

(Hugging a pillar at some pagoda [pagoda?] in Kobe)

After Kobe we had a day trip to Himeji. Himeji is famous for having a biiiig castle (and that's about it). We checked out of our hotel and went to a breakfast cafe the nice men behind the counter suggested to us and once in Himeji we put our things into a coin locker at the station. The whole layout of Himeji appears to lead people to the castle so it wasn't difficult to find (that and it's a big castle, you really can't miss it). Most of the signs were in English and we had the English guide so we could still learn about the castle and it was interesting! It's always fun to walk around those sorts of places because I like to pretend what it would be like to live in them. I do it in temples a lot too.
Next to Himeji castle there are a series of gardens which we went to... but at that stage we were really, really hungry so we had a whirlwind tour of the gardens and went out scouting for food. Hayley wanted noodles and after a long and boring search through a long and boring street we found stairs going underground. Signs like 'food!', 'gourmet food!' caught our eye and soon we were in what can only be described as an underground market place. The smells were amazing (BUTTER!) and the food all looked delicious. I was temporarily disorientated with what to eat but eventually we found a noodle bar and settled in there for some rejuvenating ramen.

(Himeji castle)
(A self-photo of Hayley and I in front of Himeji-jo)

We left Himeji that day and headed for Osaka. We had enjoyed our train trips so far, so instead of catching the rapid service we opted for the local service so we could take time to listen to music, think and what not. We hadn't thought about where we wanted to stay in Osaka so after we tried a few hostels I called my friend Kenny. Kenny used to live in the prefecture over and used to be part of the company I work for. That is until he suffered a serious of unfortunate situations (waking up on the street with a broken collarbone and a bleeding left ear, and, having a recently stabbed Brazilian man storm into his apartment and demand he help him stab someone else being some of the primary ones). Turns out Kenny was more than happy to help us so we went to his brand new apartment and we stayed there for two nights.
Osaka is a fun place. Like Kobe there isn't really so many 'sights' to see but it's the feel of the town that is the most appealing. Sure enough, a quick stroll around the town we could see that everyone in Osaka appears to ride bikes and that the sheer amount of cafes/restaurants/shopping venues would suggest a pretty laid back crowd. Osakans have a reputation for being pretty relaxed and it shows I guess. We went to 'America Town' which isn't so much 'American' as it is an area filled with cheap gaudy clothing. Or is that the same thing?
We took our time visiting a lot of different places and thanks to Kenny guiding us around I think we saw quite a large portion of Osaka. On the second night he took us to a friends place and we got to meet some new people and have a few drinks with them. It was nice to sort of see the city from the perspective of the people living there and not so much from the tourists perspective.

(Hayley and Kenny eating takoyaki [balls with bits of octopus in them])

After about two days in Osaka we moved onto Kyoto. Kyoto is generally considered to be the 'Cultural Capital' of Japan because it is bursting at the seams with temples and shrines and beautiful places. Upon arrival we met up with our pal Honda. He had a party to go to on New Years Eve but came a bit earlier to see Kyoto with us. He, like most Japanese people, went to Kyoto in junior high school which for him was 16 years ago. He took us around to many places in Kyoto including some of the famous, and not so famous temples. When he went to his party, Hayley and I went to a place called Gion to celebrate New Years Eve. We were told it's one of the most famous places to celebrate New Years Eve in Japan and there was a festival to prove it! We ate a whole lot of festival food and eventually retired for the night.


On Hayley's last day (New Years Day) we went to Nara. Nara is like Kyoto but on a smaller scale and I suppose with a different emphasis. I'd go into the history of Japan but I'm not 100% on it and I don't want to bore you. But to make it easy let's say the capital of Japan used to be Nara, then Kyoto and now it's Tokyo. Nara is famous for it's DEER! At the biggest temple in Nara there was a festival celebrating the New Year and this attracted all of the deer from the surrounding park. All the deer are tame and have for a long time existed around the city without too many problems. On this day they were just walking around amongst the stalls trying to find food. I thought they were absolutely amazing/adorable but Hayley likened them to a mix of seagulls and dogs... If you had food they would mosey on over and sort of just keep going for it despite obvious rejection reactions. I thought they just ate grass?
We wondered around a series of linking temples and and the whole time the temples and shrines seemed to fit perfectly into the natural setting around them. It didn't feel like anything was demolished to make the temples but that they were built naturally to exist with everything. It was quite a difference from Kyoto which is essentially a concrete jungle like most other cities but with the occasional flash of green (like most other cities). We were going to meet up with my friend Yuhki but he had familial obligations and couldn't meet us so after we had seen our fill we headed back for Kyoto.

(patting what is presumably Bambi)

Hayley left with Honda to go back home but I stayed around for one more night to spend a day with my friend Michael and his girlfriend Jessie. They have been traveling around Europe for a while and were stopping by Japan on their way home. We went to a nice countryside area in Kyoto and explored that general area and finally found our way to another temple in Kyoto. What we saw that day wasn't particularly exciting, beautiful, but not particularly exciting. The best part was just talking to those two because I hadn't seen them in so long!

(Jessie, Michael and I at Kyoto Station)

So after 7 days of busy traveling and sight-seeing I boarded my train home and said good bye Kansai. Hayley and I didn't see everything but that's a good thing! It means we have a reason to return! I want to see more of each of the cities I saw, so I hope I visit there again sooner rather than later.

I'm back to work again tomorrow which is both a good thing. I miss working there but it would be nice to continue slobbing around the house like I am at the moment. It's probably best for me to do something with my life though so I'll go to sleep early tonight and hope I can wake up early enough tomorrow morning.

Wish me luck!

kris.



Photo's on facebook. I almost don't need to include this link as everyone seems to be on it now!

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=370458&id=680155088&l=69847db71a