November 16th: A day for the host family

Before I had made all my preparations and whatnot to come to Japan this time, I contacted my old host family from back when I studied abroad four years ago. We have been keeping in touch all these years, and I really wanted to see them. My host sister had gone from 9 years old to 13…..a big jump for a young girl. Especially in Japan, when you enter your “chuugaku” (middle school) years, and your preparation for college starts. A big responsibility at a physically challenging time... I won’t get into the details of the cultural context and all that stuff, but needless to say: Japanese kids have it rough during this time in their lives. I was particularly interested to see how Kayoko was handling it and how grown up she had gotten since I was last here. As her “brother”, I was impressed and pleased. Much like my blood sister, she has matured a lot and shows a great deal of promise :-) Here's a picture of her to the right of their new host daughter, holding a gift that I won in a claw machine, hah:


So I dedicated a whole day to them. I got up and going from Ian’s and met my host family at the station I used to go to everyday for school, Korien-eki:


They came with their new host student, whom I was very pleased to see. You see, I was their first host student, and I was always curious really what kind of impression I left on them (the Japanese are often not very forthright about how they think of you….in fact, they never are). I guess the fact that this is their 7th host student since me is a testament to me not being a terrible “son”. Here are some pictures of my family:




This is the skateboard I left behind when I came back to the US. They made me sign it. They're going to keep it. Wow....I feel like I'm famous :-)


“Boku no koto wo wasuranaide kudasai” I said to my host mother before I left from Japan. By the time I got back to the US, she had written my mother an email that said “I cannot forget Andrew, he was my first son”. I almost cried.

Nov 15th: Outback to Izakayas

On Saturday, I decided it was about time to get the hell out of the house, so after sleeping in, me, Mike, and Kozue (who stayed over with us) decided to go out for breakfast/lunch (at 1pm, hah) at…


Yes, Outback Steakhouse. I know, strange to go to an Asian country for an authentic experience and whatnot, and then drop a bunch of money on a western franchise, but what the hell, Outback has some tasty food, I’m not gonna lie about that…

On the way to Outback we saw this (take a look at these tights...this lady was like 60):


And this cool sculpture:



After this tasty treat, we took a trip down to Nagoya station, where they dropped me off so I could head to Osaka via my good old friend the Shinkansen (I’ve really gotten my money’s worth out of my unlimited train pass dealy):




Nice sunset out the window of the train:



Upon arrival, I settled at Ians place and then met up with a friend to go dancing! It was a lot of fun, and it was good to see my old dance friends from 4 years ago. I took this really cool picture of a wall of advertisements near shinsaibashi(a popular area for bars and shopping in Osaka):



Me and Ian killed some time and called up another friend of ours, Matthias Kreiger, who previously joined us for Karaoke in a previous post. Due to a negative experience after the last time we stayed out late in Osaka, Kreiger decided to bring some friends to accompany him on tonights ichibanjuunomi (All night long drinking…..yeah, doesn’t translate well). After some brief debate, we all decided we’d go out drinking - Japanese style! By that, I mean we decided to go to an Izakaya. Izakayas are essentially the traditional version of bars in Japan. They serve interesting small snack-y foods and lots of tasty, tasty booze.

On the way to the Izakaya:


This is what is being said:


So, we removed our shoes, climbed up behind a more or less non effective curtain, and congregated around our table and so began the fun. After introductions, and some general chit-chat about relationships and whatnot, I brought up the idea of drinking games, and we decided to try out a few. We started with a game that some of my Japanese friends in the US taught me called “Gyuu-tan geimu”, which literally translates to the “beef tongue game” (don’t ask…I don’t know). Apparently it’s a really popular game, because everybody at the table knew it right away. If you’re interested, I can teach you….it’s really easy. After many rounds, and many beers, we decided to switch games, we played another game that I don’t know the name of, but in similar style, people around the table call off certain words in a pre-determined order. Add to that, random pointing to reset the order of the yelling, and you get one big, fun, drunken mess. It was a blast, to say the least. After that, Ian TRIED to explain a very complicated coin flicking, beer chugging, game, like quarters…mixed with Hockey… mixed with pinball, mixed with….well you get the idea. After two other drinking games, and the ensuing difficulty in learning and explaining it, needless to say, we eventually just sort of gave up in drunken disinterest.

Unfortuately, I don’t have any good pictures from the Izakaya. (I know….I’m a slacker. Sorry, I was distracted by delicious booze and fun games, can you blame me?). These pictures are of us putting our shoes back on the way out from there:





After this, Ian and I went home, and Kreiger and posse headed to the next destination in their ichibanjuunomi. Needless to say, after the brief bike ride home (in the light rain, no less). We passed out VERY quickly.

The 13th and 14th: Gorogoro

Thursday, I took most of the day to relax from the traveling all over the place, and get some work done, get some stuff prepared for the blog, chat with Teni (who I was beginning to miss a lot!), and just generally get re-organized. So, unfortunately, there’s not a ton to report about today. However, I do have some pictures of what sitting at home all day does to me:




In the evening, Mike and I went out on the town. We went downtown, and just generally hung out. Nagoya is a cool city. According to Wikipedia, “it is the capital of Aichi Prefecture and is one of Japan's major ports along with those of Tokyo, Osaka, Kobe, Yokohama, Chiba, and Hakata. It is also the center of Japan's third largest metropolitan region, known as the Chūkyō Metropolitan Area. As of 2000, Chūkyō Metropolitan Area has 8.74 million people, of which 2.17 million live in the city of Nagoya.”

Quotes aside, my impression of Nagoya is that it’s very open and western-looking for a city in Japan. Mike told me that the reason for this is that Nagoya was used for military weapons stockpiles at one time, and that the American presence during the rebuilding of Japan after the war, heavily influenced the building styles and layouts. But enough of the history lesson. Mike decided to take me to a cool shopping area called Osu Shotengai (Shotengai is the word for a covered walkway. There are Shotengais in many cities in Japan).




We also came upon a random shrine at one part of the shotengai....it really surprised me.



Friday was another day dedicated to “gorogoro”, the onomatopoeic expression in Japanese for lazing around relaxing. I did venture out a little bit in the form of a walk around the immediate area around Mike’s place, but I didn’t take any pictures, so I’ll just leave the narrative there. Later, after Mike got back from work, we decided to go out to dinner with his friend Kozue. We went for Kaiten-Zushi. It was delicious and inexpensive at the place we went. Here are some shots from that night:











Got bored in the back of the car on the way home...haha:

November 12th: Working from Dan’s and trip to Nagoya

Not too much happened this day. Early day was dedicated to work and catching up on the blog, and whatnot. And Dan had some studying to do:

Plus, since there are only a few express trains from Takayama to Nagoya, we needed to make our way down to the station pretty early. And that’s what we did. But not before taking a few pretty pictures:

Dan and Takaho:

Dan and I:

Once in Nagoya, Mike met me at the station, and we made our way to his place to drop the bags…oye, I packed too much…anyway, we then went out to some gaijin (slightly derogatory term for foreigners) bars near his house. Apparently there is a relatively large Brazilian population here in Nagoya, and they are enterprising, for sure.

By the way, while walking around we came across some interesting bar names. I am actually going to putting up a separate post for interesting English stuff that I see here. I've already got a good collection going :-) Apparantly, Teni will be doing the same with MORE stuff that she has.

November 11th: School and Soba

Today we woke up on the later side, chilled for a bit, I did laundry, and we headed off for school!!

The beauty seen from the school.

We were to teach the 3rd year students and the 6th year students at the nearby elementary school. We took the b-e-a-utiful walk from Dan’s place to the nearby elementary school that he works at. We were stars! As we got closer, we started eyeing kids from the road...and then they saw us! It was on.

As we walked up to the school, the few kids that were outside ran up to us and started with the inquisition. “Who’s this?”, “is he a friend?”, “Which of you is taller?”, “Oh wow! You speak Japanese? Amazing!”. As we walked through the halls on the way into school (after taking off my shoes, and putting VERY small school slippers on), kids ran toward and away from us, and every word out of their mouth that I could hear was about Dan and his foreign friend.

Made our way to the teachers’ lounge, got introduced to Dan’s fellow teachers, and killed some time before class. 3rd year kids are very similar to their counterparts in the US. Hyper, emotional, curious, and awesome. The 6th graders were much the same, and both classes were a blast…lotsa fun.

After school, we made our way home for a brief period, and then went to eat dinner with the lady who had previously planned our social schedules. It was a feast befitting a king (or like 5 or 6 kings). It consisted of nabe with all kinds of veggies, mushrooms, and more; Apple turnovers; persimmon; chicken; cabbage; and plenty of beverages. We overate, to say the least.

Then off to soba club. Soba is an entire culture and would take up its own post, needless to say, it was a lot of fun :-).

After we made the soba, we sat, ate soba, chatted, and drank lots of sake…it was a good day.

Nov. 10th: Adventures in the Mountains

Hola!

Spent the day driving around the Hida Takayama, Hirayu, and other beautiful areas in the mountains here in Central Japan. Took some really good pictures and video. Hard to sum up today in any other word than beautiful. The area up here is stunning, even though the weather was overcast all day. I tried to take a picture of the cool thing that the clouds do here where they hug the mountain so closely, but I don’t know if it’s easy to see…you tell me. It’s really beautiful how they seem to swallow the mountain.

After rolling out pretty leisurely at about 11 or so, we drove around for a while, then went to a cool little village area where we got some lunch. Here, we ran into a person that Dan knows. A nice old lady with a perma-smile and a warm personality. She told us – yes TOLD US – that we were going to come to her house for dinner at 5 tomorrow before we go to the soba club meeting. Apparently, this happens to Dan all the time. The people in this quaint little country town “take care of” Dan by organizing his social calendar ahead of time, and letting him know later…interesting. That’s Japanese hospitality for you.

After that, we drove around a little more, stopped at a few places, and drove around some more. Walked around, found this:

Another Picture:

I like the idea of Café Mustache…tasty.

As we were exploring, I took an alternate route up a hill, and ended up on the wrong side of this sign…oops, hehe.


This is a cool picture of me I think….the clouds are doing that cool thing in the background…Thank Dan for this one.

Later, we walked up to a really cool waterfall called Hirayu O-taki (Hirayu large waterfall):

This is more of that cool cloud effect again :-)



This is a sign that says “Ashi-Yu place”, which means “foot hot water place”.

I meant to take a picture of the actual thing, but forgot because of the Taiwanese people that were asking me to take pictures of them….oops. Right after the waterfall walk, we soaked our feet for a while and drank some interesting juices from berries grown in the region. Really relaxing and good feeling in the cold, cold weather.

More pretty pics from Monday: