I apologize for spamming you all but I wanted to get those all done while I was still in Japan.
Still in Japan, you say? Why would I be leaving now, you say, after all that 'Keep Calm and Carry On' bluster in the last post? Well, after the Embassy suggested its non-essential personnel leave the country last week, my school pretty much flipped its shit. It's canceled the Study Abroad program and all SA students have to return home immediately, so I'm flying out tomorrow. To say I'm less than pleased about this would be an understatement, but there's nothing that can be done about it at this point. (Also, both of my best friends here had finally decided to leave, so despite the fact that I was intending to stick out the semester, it would be unbearably lonely here without them for a whole month. Places are nice but they're pretty useless without friends to enjoy them with.)
I've been assured that I'll get credit for all my classes as TUJ hopes to do online classes or something to finish off the semester. (Studying abroad via online classes from my living room at home seems kind of dumb, but like I said, can't be helped at this point.
I spent the last two days having all sorts of fun to make up for being basically kicked out of the country - we went to Akihabara, Ikebukuro, Hibiya, Ebisu, Hamamatsucho, and Ginza; I ate whale bacon, took pictures with Godzilla, did a semester's worth of souvenir shopping in a day, definitely saw Izaya-kun from Durarara!!!, played in a playground, went to all-night karaoke for the second time this week, and were treated to desert on TUJ's dime; that is, we generally had the time of our lives to make up for everything being cut short. (here are some pictures from that :D voila!)
My plane leaves here tomorrow at 5pm JST and after 18 hours of traveling and a 6-hour layover in San Francisco I land in Pittsburgh a measly 7 hours later at 11:45pm EST. So my next post will probably not be from Japanland. But the news ain't all bad. It's not sayounara, just ja mata - since my mom already has tickets to come see me at the end of the semester, she and I will, barring nuclear apocalypse or other extenuating circumstances, probably still be coming back for a vacation filled with fun times. :D
Saturday, March 19, 2011
post from post-earthquake Monday [3/14]
Hi everyone. I just figured I'd pop in and post another "I'm still okay" note. I've been doing fine these last few days. None of the quakes since the first one have been nearly as bad (although a nearly-minute long aftershock did wake me up in the middle of the night). We spent most of Saturday lurking around our apartment (we were warned to stay inside after the news of the first explosion at the Fukushima reactor broke and no one was quite sure what kind of explosion it was.) Since then we've been trying to keep up a level of normalcy, which is not that hard despite the constant flow of more bad news. My area has been blessedly unaffected so far, and the only sign that something's wrong is that all the instant-food shelves in the grocery stores are completely empty, and the stores are all packed with people.
Yesterday we went to Yoyogi Park near Harajuku with the intent to walk around and kick a soccer ball for a while. We ended up engaged in the dirtiest, most fun game of soccer I've ever played. It was a trilingual game with me and my two friends teamed up with/versus a Spanish guy and his kids and and a bunch of bratty Japanese kids who kicked, grabbed, pulled, and did just about anything to win (and also complained about being put on the girls' team).
It was really reassuring to see everyone out having a normal day in the park, although the trains and stations were far emptier than usual.
They have scheduled blackouts to start soon to conserve power so it can be directed to areas that need it more. They were supposed to start today but they postponed them a day because people were mostly home and conserving energy anyway. We didn't have school today because of the blackouts and various train stoppages/reschedulings. (We don't have it tomorrow either.)
Today the weather was really nice, so I went out and sat in the parking lot of our apartment building (we don't have a yard) for the afternoon and caught up on some school and for-fun reading.
A lot of people in my building are trying to get the hell out of dodge. One girl with dual Austrian-American citizenship got the Austrian Embassy to help her get a flight out (or so I've heard). Another girl was forced to leave by her parents; some other people are going home too. A few guys from my dorm are going to Osaka to stay with friends for the week since it's much farther from both the Fukushima plant and the current earthquake warning area.
Right now I have no plans to go anywhere. It seems silly to me to fearmonger about things that may or may not happen, and over the happening of which I have absolutely zero control. I'm not saying that earthquakes and the threat of nuclear meltdown don't scare me, or that they absolutely can't happen. But all the news I've seen leads me to be cautiously optimistic rather than over-cautious. If I'm being a cock-eyed optimist then sue me. From what I know of radiation I'd be in more danger from a CT scan than the current emission levels in Fukushima. But I'm determined to stay until it's clear that not staying would be a very bad idea. I'm not so proud that I'll go down with the ship as it were, but right now in the face of such unclear news I'm not ready to go anywhere yet.
In fact, in lieu of skipping the country, I'm going to karaoke instead. >.>' No sense sitting around angsting when there's fun to be had. >.<
Yesterday we went to Yoyogi Park near Harajuku with the intent to walk around and kick a soccer ball for a while. We ended up engaged in the dirtiest, most fun game of soccer I've ever played. It was a trilingual game with me and my two friends teamed up with/versus a Spanish guy and his kids and and a bunch of bratty Japanese kids who kicked, grabbed, pulled, and did just about anything to win (and also complained about being put on the girls' team).
It was really reassuring to see everyone out having a normal day in the park, although the trains and stations were far emptier than usual.
They have scheduled blackouts to start soon to conserve power so it can be directed to areas that need it more. They were supposed to start today but they postponed them a day because people were mostly home and conserving energy anyway. We didn't have school today because of the blackouts and various train stoppages/reschedulings. (We don't have it tomorrow either.)
Today the weather was really nice, so I went out and sat in the parking lot of our apartment building (we don't have a yard) for the afternoon and caught up on some school and for-fun reading.
A lot of people in my building are trying to get the hell out of dodge. One girl with dual Austrian-American citizenship got the Austrian Embassy to help her get a flight out (or so I've heard). Another girl was forced to leave by her parents; some other people are going home too. A few guys from my dorm are going to Osaka to stay with friends for the week since it's much farther from both the Fukushima plant and the current earthquake warning area.
Right now I have no plans to go anywhere. It seems silly to me to fearmonger about things that may or may not happen, and over the happening of which I have absolutely zero control. I'm not saying that earthquakes and the threat of nuclear meltdown don't scare me, or that they absolutely can't happen. But all the news I've seen leads me to be cautiously optimistic rather than over-cautious. If I'm being a cock-eyed optimist then sue me. From what I know of radiation I'd be in more danger from a CT scan than the current emission levels in Fukushima. But I'm determined to stay until it's clear that not staying would be a very bad idea. I'm not so proud that I'll go down with the ship as it were, but right now in the face of such unclear news I'm not ready to go anywhere yet.
In fact, in lieu of skipping the country, I'm going to karaoke instead. >.>' No sense sitting around angsting when there's fun to be had. >.<
post-earthquake update
Hi all. Despite being in Tokyo during the quakes, I am alive and well although aftershocks are continuing to come through and scare the pants off of me. It was pretty terrifying today; we had to evacuate the building twice in a row (after which they canceled classes). They stopped all the trains in the area until (I'm pretty sure) Sunday. Thankfully, I live only about five miles/eight km from the school so I was able to walk back to my apartment with some friends.
Also, the gas and water in my apartment are fine. The gas is set to automatically turn off in the case of an earthquake, which is reassuring.
My thoughts and prayers go out to all the dead or injured as well as all those stranded without shelter because of the train stoppages.
[written 3/11 - I hadn't posted it here but I figured I would copy it over for historical purposes.]
Also, the gas and water in my apartment are fine. The gas is set to automatically turn off in the case of an earthquake, which is reassuring.
My thoughts and prayers go out to all the dead or injured as well as all those stranded without shelter because of the train stoppages.
[written 3/11 - I hadn't posted it here but I figured I would copy it over for historical purposes.]
Journey to the West: Osaka
Pics from Osaka are here.
Osaka was also awesome, although we ended up not seeing everything we would have liked to. On arriving we wandered around a bit before finding our hotel but eventually were able to check in and drop off our bags and stuff. We took a break then, splitting up to nap/otherwise recharge, as we'd left the capsule hotel in Kyoto at around 7:45 that morning and had done a LOT since then. When I woke up my roommate was nowhere to be found, so Michael and I went off on our own to explore and eat dinner. On top of a building near our hotel was a giant ferris wheel called the Hep-5, so we went off to that to go around once and see the city from way up high at night (it was only around 6pm or so, but it was very dark out already). It was really cool despite the fact that I'm slightly terrified of heights. (I don't have any pictures from up there, unfortunately, because I wasn't sure how well my phone's camera would work in the dark...)
After that we had dinner in a little chain restaurant and headed back to the hotel; my phone had died and we were still pretty tired, so we spent the rest of the night relaxing and catching up on internet business and sleep. (We also charted a course for the following day.)
The next morning we ate breakfast at the hotel's buffet and checked our bags into the hotel's back room so we didn't have to drag them around all day. We had been given passes by the group leaders that were good for entry into some museums/whatnot as well as fora limeted number of subway lines. The first place we went was Osaka Castle, which is huge and giant and other adjectives that imply largeness as well as many adjectives that mean beautiful. :D The grounds of the castle are simply enormous, as is the moat. We walked through the grounds for a while before going into the castle itself, which is now a museum dedicated to the castle's history, especially to Hideyoshi, the Tokugawa-era shogun who built the castle. (The castle that currently stands there is a replica; however, Hideyoshi's original castle was burnt to the ground centuries ago.)
The museum has you start on the eighth floor, which is basically an observation deck. We could see the ferris wheel by our hotel from it! The rest of the floors had various displays and replicas and artifacts and videos and infographics, etc., that talked about different historical events and people tied to the castle's history. After buying a bunch of souvenirs in the gift shop there, we had some takoyaki from a stand for lunch and headed off to our next destination.
From here we had a series of failures - the next place we intended to go was a Buddhist temple that apparently had a shrine built of human bones. However, the temple was really far from the stop we had to get off at, and after walking for a ways we decided to move on to bigger and better things. (We later learned that it was one altar made of cremated ashes, which is nowhere NEAR as cool. Never trust hearsay, kids.) Unfortunately this put us behind schedule, so we had to rush the rest of our adventures.
The next place we went was Namba, where there is an underground shopping center. We split up and wandered for a set amount of time before returning and getting back on the train to try and get in one more thing before we had to meet up with the group again. (I bought an awesome hat there! :D)
The final place we wanted to go was a place called the Floating Gardens, which is a giant garden that forms the top bar of a skyscraper built to look like a doorframe-type shape. Unfortunately, time was too short and it was too far away, so we only saw it from a distance...
After that, we went back to the hotel and picked up our suitcases and met up with the rest of the group. (I also popped into a Family Mart and bought some FMA folders, random but whatever. :D) We headed to the main Osaka station where we boarded the shinkansen and headed back to Tokyo. A few hours later we arrived at Shinagawa station and hopped off to go our separate ways. All in all the trip was a great experience despite a few swings-and-misses as far as sightseeing was concerned, and because of the shinkansen I actually got my homework done too! Crazy, I know right.
The Journey to the West ends here - that's all folks. Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.
Osaka was also awesome, although we ended up not seeing everything we would have liked to. On arriving we wandered around a bit before finding our hotel but eventually were able to check in and drop off our bags and stuff. We took a break then, splitting up to nap/otherwise recharge, as we'd left the capsule hotel in Kyoto at around 7:45 that morning and had done a LOT since then. When I woke up my roommate was nowhere to be found, so Michael and I went off on our own to explore and eat dinner. On top of a building near our hotel was a giant ferris wheel called the Hep-5, so we went off to that to go around once and see the city from way up high at night (it was only around 6pm or so, but it was very dark out already). It was really cool despite the fact that I'm slightly terrified of heights. (I don't have any pictures from up there, unfortunately, because I wasn't sure how well my phone's camera would work in the dark...)
After that we had dinner in a little chain restaurant and headed back to the hotel; my phone had died and we were still pretty tired, so we spent the rest of the night relaxing and catching up on internet business and sleep. (We also charted a course for the following day.)
The next morning we ate breakfast at the hotel's buffet and checked our bags into the hotel's back room so we didn't have to drag them around all day. We had been given passes by the group leaders that were good for entry into some museums/whatnot as well as fora limeted number of subway lines. The first place we went was Osaka Castle, which is huge and giant and other adjectives that imply largeness as well as many adjectives that mean beautiful. :D The grounds of the castle are simply enormous, as is the moat. We walked through the grounds for a while before going into the castle itself, which is now a museum dedicated to the castle's history, especially to Hideyoshi, the Tokugawa-era shogun who built the castle. (The castle that currently stands there is a replica; however, Hideyoshi's original castle was burnt to the ground centuries ago.)
The museum has you start on the eighth floor, which is basically an observation deck. We could see the ferris wheel by our hotel from it! The rest of the floors had various displays and replicas and artifacts and videos and infographics, etc., that talked about different historical events and people tied to the castle's history. After buying a bunch of souvenirs in the gift shop there, we had some takoyaki from a stand for lunch and headed off to our next destination.
From here we had a series of failures - the next place we intended to go was a Buddhist temple that apparently had a shrine built of human bones. However, the temple was really far from the stop we had to get off at, and after walking for a ways we decided to move on to bigger and better things. (We later learned that it was one altar made of cremated ashes, which is nowhere NEAR as cool. Never trust hearsay, kids.) Unfortunately this put us behind schedule, so we had to rush the rest of our adventures.
The next place we went was Namba, where there is an underground shopping center. We split up and wandered for a set amount of time before returning and getting back on the train to try and get in one more thing before we had to meet up with the group again. (I bought an awesome hat there! :D)
The final place we wanted to go was a place called the Floating Gardens, which is a giant garden that forms the top bar of a skyscraper built to look like a doorframe-type shape. Unfortunately, time was too short and it was too far away, so we only saw it from a distance...
After that, we went back to the hotel and picked up our suitcases and met up with the rest of the group. (I also popped into a Family Mart and bought some FMA folders, random but whatever. :D) We headed to the main Osaka station where we boarded the shinkansen and headed back to Tokyo. A few hours later we arrived at Shinagawa station and hopped off to go our separate ways. All in all the trip was a great experience despite a few swings-and-misses as far as sightseeing was concerned, and because of the shinkansen I actually got my homework done too! Crazy, I know right.
The Journey to the West ends here - that's all folks. Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.
Journey to the West: Nara
Pics of Nara are here. There are fewer and they're all portrait-oriented because my actual camera crapped out as we were leaving Kyoto and I took all of these with my cell phone.
Nara was a very rural area, especially compared to the rest of the places we went during the course of the weekend. (Miyajima was by no means urban, but it had a different feel that I wouldn't use 'rural' to describe, idk.) It was pretty cold there, and you could still see the snow on the mountains around it.
So the thing Nara's famous for is deer. There are freaking deer everywhere. So the first thing we did was walk to the deer park to see all the deer. We wandered around there for a while, feeding the deer and watching the fear in the eyes of people who had also bought crackers for the deer and were being mobbed by them. My roommate thought the deer were literally the cutest thing on God's earth; I heard "Ooooh, over here Shika-chan!" more times that day than I could count (shika means deer). They were cute - I just wasn't as enthralled with them as she was.
After hanging with the deer for a while we checked out the Kasuga Taisha shrine, which is a Shinto shrine that's a ridiculous amount of centuries old. It was really impressive but it was a relatively long walk to get to the shrine from the road, and it had started to rain a little. We stopped in a souvenir shop and had lunch before heading on. The shrine had immense grounds and was really cool, but at this point I was starting to think that if you've seen a few Shinto shrines, you've seen them all - there isn't much variety in architecture and stuff, which is why places like Fushimi-Inari that I mentioned in my last entry are so exciting.
At that point I wanted to see the Buddhist temple as well, (we were on a bit of a timeline, as we were supposed to meet in Osaka to check into the hotel there at a certain time) so we headed back to the road and towards Todaiji where the giant Vairocana Buddha statue is. It's the largest in the world (15m/50ft tall) and was really incredibly impressive. Pictures really don't do it justice-it was really quite breathtaking in real life. There was also a slightly smaller statue of the Goddess of Mercy aka the Bodhisattva Kannon/Guanyin/Kanzeon Botatsu/Avalokitesavara (she has a lot of different names). Of all the figures I know of in the traditions of other religions, Guanyin is my favorite ever, so I was pretty excited.
At this point it was still raining, and I had made the terrible choice of wearing pants that dragged on the ground a little. This wouldn't have been a problem except for the deer - where there are hundreds of deer there is a a metric fuckton of deer poop, unfortunately, and it mixed with the water on the ground to form a nasty poop-mud that made my pants wet to about mid-shin. We headed back to the station after seeing the Buddha so I could change into my other pair of jeans (stopping briefly so I could buy a shinsengumi headband) and then bought tickets and hopped on the train to Osaka.
Nara was a very rural area, especially compared to the rest of the places we went during the course of the weekend. (Miyajima was by no means urban, but it had a different feel that I wouldn't use 'rural' to describe, idk.) It was pretty cold there, and you could still see the snow on the mountains around it.
So the thing Nara's famous for is deer. There are freaking deer everywhere. So the first thing we did was walk to the deer park to see all the deer. We wandered around there for a while, feeding the deer and watching the fear in the eyes of people who had also bought crackers for the deer and were being mobbed by them. My roommate thought the deer were literally the cutest thing on God's earth; I heard "Ooooh, over here Shika-chan!" more times that day than I could count (shika means deer). They were cute - I just wasn't as enthralled with them as she was.
After hanging with the deer for a while we checked out the Kasuga Taisha shrine, which is a Shinto shrine that's a ridiculous amount of centuries old. It was really impressive but it was a relatively long walk to get to the shrine from the road, and it had started to rain a little. We stopped in a souvenir shop and had lunch before heading on. The shrine had immense grounds and was really cool, but at this point I was starting to think that if you've seen a few Shinto shrines, you've seen them all - there isn't much variety in architecture and stuff, which is why places like Fushimi-Inari that I mentioned in my last entry are so exciting.
At that point I wanted to see the Buddhist temple as well, (we were on a bit of a timeline, as we were supposed to meet in Osaka to check into the hotel there at a certain time) so we headed back to the road and towards Todaiji where the giant Vairocana Buddha statue is. It's the largest in the world (15m/50ft tall) and was really incredibly impressive. Pictures really don't do it justice-it was really quite breathtaking in real life. There was also a slightly smaller statue of the Goddess of Mercy aka the Bodhisattva Kannon/Guanyin/Kanzeon Botatsu/Avalokitesavara (she has a lot of different names). Of all the figures I know of in the traditions of other religions, Guanyin is my favorite ever, so I was pretty excited.
At this point it was still raining, and I had made the terrible choice of wearing pants that dragged on the ground a little. This wouldn't have been a problem except for the deer - where there are hundreds of deer there is a a metric fuckton of deer poop, unfortunately, and it mixed with the water on the ground to form a nasty poop-mud that made my pants wet to about mid-shin. We headed back to the station after seeing the Buddha so I could change into my other pair of jeans (stopping briefly so I could buy a shinsengumi headband) and then bought tickets and hopped on the train to Osaka.
Journey to the West: Kyoto
Pics from Kyoto are here. (Avoiding hater flickr, because it wouldn't let me upload more pics. >.>)
We left Miyajima and rode a train to the station in Hiroshima where we could board the shinkansen (the bullet train). We had some free time to wander around the station and buy souvenirs and whatnot before we boarded the train, so I got some stuff for my family as well as a snack for the train ride: delicious citrus-flavored kit-kats! They are a regional specialty (only sold in the Chugoku region of Japan) and they were totally dericious! They tasted like creamsicles. :D
Boarding the shinkansen was an adventure in and of itself - say your train is scheduled to leave at 10:56? The train pulls in at 10:56, you get the hell on, and then it leaves at 10:56. Needless to say with a group of almost 30 with luggage trying to board the same car, it was interesting. >.> The ride itself was pretty uneventful aside from the fact that it was SO COOL. I mean, you hear about how fast the bullet trains are but you don't really realize it until you're on one and you're really just tearing through the countryside. I took some pictures from the window but I'd be surprised if any of them are not blurry.
The first thing we did when arriving in Kyoto was to get on a different (local) train, which took us to our lodging for the night, a capsule hotel! We were able to drop off our luggage in the lobby of the hotel, leaving us free to wander about for the day.
Our hotel was blessedly close to a bunch of exciting things, and one of our group leaders (from the school office) had a recommended path through them to see as many cool things as possible in the least amount of time. The first thing we did was to go to stroll through the Gion district, which is the famous geisha entertainment district. (Most of the buildings were unfortunately closed since it was the middle of the day, though, so we didn't see any geisha. :/) The street was really cool though because all of the buildings were very traditional and most had gated gardens separating them from the public roadway.
Next we went to see a Shinto shrine. Kyoto is famous for its shrines and temples - there are hundreds of them in the city and surrounding area/mountains. Yasaka Shrine was really cool - there were loads of little side shrines and statues as well as some big pavilions. We saw a wedding party in traditional garb and sniped some pics of them. We wandered around inside the shrine for a while and then headed out again on our way to the next stop, Kiyomizu Temple.
Along the way we popped in and out of a bunch of cute little shops. In one I bought a good-luck cat for a souvenir, and couldn't remember what the word for them was in Japanese. I thought it was ma-neko or something similar, and then a friend was like 'bake-neko'? Which means monster-cat, which gave the lady checking me out a good laugh. It's 'maneki-neko', by the way. We stopped in a little cafe for lunch/a snack (as in I got dessert and Jenny and Mike got food and dessert). I had green-tea ice cream with red bean jelly and shirotama (rice paste/mochi balls) on top. It was quite tasty. :D
After eating we continued on towards the temple. That was when we saw one of the most exciting things about out Kyoto trip: a geisha house with its garden doors open and four maiko inside in full geisha makeup and attire having a professional photoshoot done. We creeped on it hella hard and took a bunch of pics - they were so graceful and beautiful and very doll-like.
After that and a lot of wandering, we finally ended up at Kiyomizu Temple on top of a big hill on the edge of Kyoto. It was vary pretty, and we could see a panoramic view of the city from up there, which was amazing. It was just starting to get a little dark, and we had other plans yet, so although there was a path you could take to go see a waterfall up on the mountain, we opted to keep going. We meandered back down the hill slowly, stopping to buy ice cream at a little stand (I had sakura flavor! It was strange and delicious!) We walked back to the giant Kyoto station to hop on a train out to a shrine a ways away from the rest of our scripted plan. On the way we got to see Kyoto Tower, which is built on top of a Yodobashi electronics store, starting to light up for the night.
The shrine we went to was Fushimi-Inari Shrine, which is quite possibly one of the coolest places ever. It was already dark when we got there, so we were concerned that our pictures wouldn't come out well, but using flash actually made them AWESOME. The draw of Fushimi-Inari shrine is the torii. (Torii are Shinto shrine gates, usually laquered red.) There are pathways all over the area there that are literally walled in with the torii, making basically a tunnel. There were very few people there, and we wandered around spinning mysterious and scary stories about all the spirits that might be lingering there until we literally terrified ourselves, jumping at a sound we couldn't find the source of and finally skedaddling because we couldn't deal haha. ^^;
From there we got on the train back into downtown Kyoto and met back up with the big group to go to dinner. They had arranged an all-you-can-eat meal at a buffet near the station. We ate ourselves silly. After eating, it was pretty late and most of the shops had closed. We opted to walk back to the hotel to work off some of the enormous amount of Japanese food we had just ingested.
When we arrived back at the hotel it was to a scene of discord - the hotel had accidentally booked the girls on boys' floors and vice versa. As the girls outnumbered the boys by a lot it was a problem. They eventually just blocked off a whole floor for TUJ students and we were fine, although our group leaders argued a refund out of the place for the girls who had to sleep on the guys' floor. And I got to confuse the hell out of the Japanese men when I got on the mens' elevator.
(Quick explanation of capsule hotels if you've never heard of them: They're really inexpensive places to literally do nothing but crash for a night - they eschew an actual hotel room for stacked rows of single-bed-sized capsules. You climb into the pod and pull down a screen for privacy in order to sleep. The hotels are set up with men's and women's floors to ensure that no one's sexins interfere with other peoples' sleep. The women's elevators only access women's floors and vice versa for the men. One floor of each section has showers and bathroom facilities, so in order to shower I had to go all the way down to the lobby and back up again. The hotel also provides you with pajamas, slippers, toothpaste/toothbrush, and showering materials, which was handy.)
So that was pretty frustrating, and we had to be on the road pretty early the next day, but we finally got ourselves set up and hit the sack in our little pods, which was really cool, actually, and rather comfortable as well.
The next morning we got up early (the pods use a ambient light alarm to wake you up so alarms don't bother the other customers - the lights get gradually brighter and then turn on completely at the time you set, so you wake up gradually and silently. I didn't trust it to actually wake me up, as I'd slept through an earthquake in the past, but it worked perfectly!) and headed out to the station. We had basically a free day that day - we could wander around Kyoto again, or take a train to Nara, or go straight to Osaka, as long as we ended up in Osaka at the end of the day. We wanted to go to Nara, since we had seen most of the things we wanted to see in Kyoto (I'd have liked to see the Manga Museum and Kinkakuji/Temple of the Golden Pavilion, but they would have been a significant time drain...) and we had most of Sunday to see Osaka. It's only like Y600 (about $6 USD) to get between all three cities since they're so close, so we bought our tickets and hopped on the train. :D
We left Miyajima and rode a train to the station in Hiroshima where we could board the shinkansen (the bullet train). We had some free time to wander around the station and buy souvenirs and whatnot before we boarded the train, so I got some stuff for my family as well as a snack for the train ride: delicious citrus-flavored kit-kats! They are a regional specialty (only sold in the Chugoku region of Japan) and they were totally dericious! They tasted like creamsicles. :D
Boarding the shinkansen was an adventure in and of itself - say your train is scheduled to leave at 10:56? The train pulls in at 10:56, you get the hell on, and then it leaves at 10:56. Needless to say with a group of almost 30 with luggage trying to board the same car, it was interesting. >.> The ride itself was pretty uneventful aside from the fact that it was SO COOL. I mean, you hear about how fast the bullet trains are but you don't really realize it until you're on one and you're really just tearing through the countryside. I took some pictures from the window but I'd be surprised if any of them are not blurry.
The first thing we did when arriving in Kyoto was to get on a different (local) train, which took us to our lodging for the night, a capsule hotel! We were able to drop off our luggage in the lobby of the hotel, leaving us free to wander about for the day.
Our hotel was blessedly close to a bunch of exciting things, and one of our group leaders (from the school office) had a recommended path through them to see as many cool things as possible in the least amount of time. The first thing we did was to go to stroll through the Gion district, which is the famous geisha entertainment district. (Most of the buildings were unfortunately closed since it was the middle of the day, though, so we didn't see any geisha. :/) The street was really cool though because all of the buildings were very traditional and most had gated gardens separating them from the public roadway.
Next we went to see a Shinto shrine. Kyoto is famous for its shrines and temples - there are hundreds of them in the city and surrounding area/mountains. Yasaka Shrine was really cool - there were loads of little side shrines and statues as well as some big pavilions. We saw a wedding party in traditional garb and sniped some pics of them. We wandered around inside the shrine for a while and then headed out again on our way to the next stop, Kiyomizu Temple.
Along the way we popped in and out of a bunch of cute little shops. In one I bought a good-luck cat for a souvenir, and couldn't remember what the word for them was in Japanese. I thought it was ma-neko or something similar, and then a friend was like 'bake-neko'? Which means monster-cat, which gave the lady checking me out a good laugh. It's 'maneki-neko', by the way. We stopped in a little cafe for lunch/a snack (as in I got dessert and Jenny and Mike got food and dessert). I had green-tea ice cream with red bean jelly and shirotama (rice paste/mochi balls) on top. It was quite tasty. :D
After eating we continued on towards the temple. That was when we saw one of the most exciting things about out Kyoto trip: a geisha house with its garden doors open and four maiko inside in full geisha makeup and attire having a professional photoshoot done. We creeped on it hella hard and took a bunch of pics - they were so graceful and beautiful and very doll-like.
After that and a lot of wandering, we finally ended up at Kiyomizu Temple on top of a big hill on the edge of Kyoto. It was vary pretty, and we could see a panoramic view of the city from up there, which was amazing. It was just starting to get a little dark, and we had other plans yet, so although there was a path you could take to go see a waterfall up on the mountain, we opted to keep going. We meandered back down the hill slowly, stopping to buy ice cream at a little stand (I had sakura flavor! It was strange and delicious!) We walked back to the giant Kyoto station to hop on a train out to a shrine a ways away from the rest of our scripted plan. On the way we got to see Kyoto Tower, which is built on top of a Yodobashi electronics store, starting to light up for the night.
The shrine we went to was Fushimi-Inari Shrine, which is quite possibly one of the coolest places ever. It was already dark when we got there, so we were concerned that our pictures wouldn't come out well, but using flash actually made them AWESOME. The draw of Fushimi-Inari shrine is the torii. (Torii are Shinto shrine gates, usually laquered red.) There are pathways all over the area there that are literally walled in with the torii, making basically a tunnel. There were very few people there, and we wandered around spinning mysterious and scary stories about all the spirits that might be lingering there until we literally terrified ourselves, jumping at a sound we couldn't find the source of and finally skedaddling because we couldn't deal haha. ^^;
From there we got on the train back into downtown Kyoto and met back up with the big group to go to dinner. They had arranged an all-you-can-eat meal at a buffet near the station. We ate ourselves silly. After eating, it was pretty late and most of the shops had closed. We opted to walk back to the hotel to work off some of the enormous amount of Japanese food we had just ingested.
When we arrived back at the hotel it was to a scene of discord - the hotel had accidentally booked the girls on boys' floors and vice versa. As the girls outnumbered the boys by a lot it was a problem. They eventually just blocked off a whole floor for TUJ students and we were fine, although our group leaders argued a refund out of the place for the girls who had to sleep on the guys' floor. And I got to confuse the hell out of the Japanese men when I got on the mens' elevator.
(Quick explanation of capsule hotels if you've never heard of them: They're really inexpensive places to literally do nothing but crash for a night - they eschew an actual hotel room for stacked rows of single-bed-sized capsules. You climb into the pod and pull down a screen for privacy in order to sleep. The hotels are set up with men's and women's floors to ensure that no one's sexins interfere with other peoples' sleep. The women's elevators only access women's floors and vice versa for the men. One floor of each section has showers and bathroom facilities, so in order to shower I had to go all the way down to the lobby and back up again. The hotel also provides you with pajamas, slippers, toothpaste/toothbrush, and showering materials, which was handy.)
So that was pretty frustrating, and we had to be on the road pretty early the next day, but we finally got ourselves set up and hit the sack in our little pods, which was really cool, actually, and rather comfortable as well.
The next morning we got up early (the pods use a ambient light alarm to wake you up so alarms don't bother the other customers - the lights get gradually brighter and then turn on completely at the time you set, so you wake up gradually and silently. I didn't trust it to actually wake me up, as I'd slept through an earthquake in the past, but it worked perfectly!) and headed out to the station. We had basically a free day that day - we could wander around Kyoto again, or take a train to Nara, or go straight to Osaka, as long as we ended up in Osaka at the end of the day. We wanted to go to Nara, since we had seen most of the things we wanted to see in Kyoto (I'd have liked to see the Manga Museum and Kinkakuji/Temple of the Golden Pavilion, but they would have been a significant time drain...) and we had most of Sunday to see Osaka. It's only like Y600 (about $6 USD) to get between all three cities since they're so close, so we bought our tickets and hopped on the train. :D
Thursday, March 3, 2011
Journey to the West: Miyajima
The next stop on our trip across Japan was a little island just 30 minutes East-ish of Hiroshima, ostensibly in the Inland Sea. (pics are here)
We took the ferry straight from the Peace Park to the island, about a half an hour or so's ride during which I fought sleep desperately, the miserable bus-nap I had taken the night before not quite sufficing. >.> However, when we arrived at the island, we had to race to our lodging to drop off our stuff, which was less than fun... (that's why all the pics at the beginning were sort of blurry - they were taken mid speed-walk). Apparently Miyajima is full of tame deer; (on a scale of one to Nara it barely rated, but you know whatevs). The deer were totally chill around people and would jump you for food. (We realized this danger quickly.)
We walked past a bunch of temples including a great big one set into the bay, as well as various pagodas and shrines. Then we snaked through a residential area, and finally pulled up to our ryokan, a traditional Japanese inn. IT WAS SO COOL. Very old-school, like tatami-mat floors and rice paper screens in the rooms. Awesomeness.
After splitting up into our rooms, we headed out to see the island before the temples closed and the sun went down. We first went to Itsukushima Shrine, which was the big shrine in the bay that we passed. It's built on the beach on stilts, so that when the tide comes in it looks like the building is floating :O (We unfortunately didn't see it then, though... :/) We went in and took a bunch of pictures of the Ootorii (the giant red shrine gate that is out on the water) from the pier inside the shrine) and then wandered around the beach for a while checking out the sights and trying to get a little closer to the torii - the tide wasn't out far enough to get out there. but I went out as far as I could (probably gaijin-photobombing a million Japanese pictures, but whatevs >.> haha)
After that we split off from the main group for a little while and explored the backroads of the island a bit - it was an island after all, so we were pretty sure we wouldn't get lost. We found a big tree that looked like a definite totoro habitat :D and also got some really cool pictures of the bay from high up. After wandering a little more (and doing some souvenir-shopping) we headed back to the lodge for dinner.
Dinner was a literally enormous feast with like eight or nine tiny dishes per person. I don't eat a lot of fish or vegetables, but that was pretty much all they gave us and I wasn't gonna waste it, haha. We had a leisurely dinner, and then I donned my yukata (a casual sort of kimono provided by the inn) and went downstairs to live it up in the public bath. The set-up is like this: there are girls' and boys' sides, and you basically get undressed, wash up, and then luxuriously soak in a giant hot tub for as long as you can stand it. *__* it was wonderful. :D
After that we lounged about the room for some time just surfing the web, doing some homework, and getting to know each other (we were grouped up pretty randomly for rooms, so I didn't really know two of the girls at all). Finally we set up our futons on the floor and settled in for the night pretty early.
We had to get up early the next morning, as we had to get the first ferry off the island in order to get the train to the Hiroshima shinkansen (bullet train) station in order to get on the right shinkansen to Kyoto. Before we left, though, I had another delicious traditional-style meal for breakfast, and got to try Japanese maple candy! :D And that's the tale of our trip to Miyajima. :D
Sorry this took a while to post... real life is, how you say, fuben.
We took the ferry straight from the Peace Park to the island, about a half an hour or so's ride during which I fought sleep desperately, the miserable bus-nap I had taken the night before not quite sufficing. >.> However, when we arrived at the island, we had to race to our lodging to drop off our stuff, which was less than fun... (that's why all the pics at the beginning were sort of blurry - they were taken mid speed-walk). Apparently Miyajima is full of tame deer; (on a scale of one to Nara it barely rated, but you know whatevs). The deer were totally chill around people and would jump you for food. (We realized this danger quickly.)
We walked past a bunch of temples including a great big one set into the bay, as well as various pagodas and shrines. Then we snaked through a residential area, and finally pulled up to our ryokan, a traditional Japanese inn. IT WAS SO COOL. Very old-school, like tatami-mat floors and rice paper screens in the rooms. Awesomeness.
After splitting up into our rooms, we headed out to see the island before the temples closed and the sun went down. We first went to Itsukushima Shrine, which was the big shrine in the bay that we passed. It's built on the beach on stilts, so that when the tide comes in it looks like the building is floating :O (We unfortunately didn't see it then, though... :/) We went in and took a bunch of pictures of the Ootorii (the giant red shrine gate that is out on the water) from the pier inside the shrine) and then wandered around the beach for a while checking out the sights and trying to get a little closer to the torii - the tide wasn't out far enough to get out there. but I went out as far as I could (probably gaijin-photobombing a million Japanese pictures, but whatevs >.> haha)
After that we split off from the main group for a little while and explored the backroads of the island a bit - it was an island after all, so we were pretty sure we wouldn't get lost. We found a big tree that looked like a definite totoro habitat :D and also got some really cool pictures of the bay from high up. After wandering a little more (and doing some souvenir-shopping) we headed back to the lodge for dinner.
Dinner was a literally enormous feast with like eight or nine tiny dishes per person. I don't eat a lot of fish or vegetables, but that was pretty much all they gave us and I wasn't gonna waste it, haha. We had a leisurely dinner, and then I donned my yukata (a casual sort of kimono provided by the inn) and went downstairs to live it up in the public bath. The set-up is like this: there are girls' and boys' sides, and you basically get undressed, wash up, and then luxuriously soak in a giant hot tub for as long as you can stand it. *__* it was wonderful. :D
After that we lounged about the room for some time just surfing the web, doing some homework, and getting to know each other (we were grouped up pretty randomly for rooms, so I didn't really know two of the girls at all). Finally we set up our futons on the floor and settled in for the night pretty early.
We had to get up early the next morning, as we had to get the first ferry off the island in order to get the train to the Hiroshima shinkansen (bullet train) station in order to get on the right shinkansen to Kyoto. Before we left, though, I had another delicious traditional-style meal for breakfast, and got to try Japanese maple candy! :D And that's the tale of our trip to Miyajima. :D
Sorry this took a while to post... real life is, how you say, fuben.
Journey to the West: Hiroshima
Pics for this entry are here at photobucket because flickr seems to think that 700+ pictures is too much. Rude.
Please be warned before looking that the Hiroshima Peace Museum is filled with displays and artifacts that unflinchingly show the results of an atomic blast on human beings, and that many are upsetting and/or graphic and/or triggery.
So our Watern Japan trip. It was epic, and fun, and exhausting, and a little ridiculous. We started out running five minutes late, getting separated from the group, and thinking we were going to be left behind in Tokyo forever. >.>
Once we met up with our group, I immediately made friends with some new folks I'd not met before because of my Doctor Who shirt. :) After waiting around for a while and dicussing our personal favorite Doctors and episodes, we boarded a really snazzy coach bus and began the 10-or-so hour drive from Shinjuku Station to Hiroshima.
I slept most of the trip, amazingly, despite the frequent stops we made for bathroom breaks and snacks. When we got to Hiroshima, we piled off the bus and onto a train, which took us right to the Hiroshima Atomic Bomb Dome (where the Memorial Peace Park is located). We headed to the museum first, checking our luggage in lockers and freshening up in the bathrooms there before getting our audio guides and heading into the museum proper.
Let it be said at this point that the exhibits in the musuem are not something I want to relive, ever. There were clinically-described dioramas of red spheres hanging over the city to denote where the bomb was dropped, and there were also life-size dioramas of children suffering from horrific radiation burns. The purpose of this museum is to convince people that they should never use atomic bombs for any reason ever again, and let me tell you I was convinced. It was eye-opening and horrible.
(Interesting clinical-sounding historical side note: American children are taught that the bomb was used to force Japan to surrender as an actual invasion of the archipelago would have cost up to 1 million American lives; Japanese children are taught that America dropped the bomb to intimidate Russia.)
After making it out of the museum, and feeling like I was never going to smile again, we split into small groups to tour the actual Peace Park with a bilingual tour guide. We saw a memorial for Korean forced-laborers who were victims of the bomb, as well as the Children's memorial with thousands of origami cranes symbolizing a wish for peace, and the Students' memorial which had a list of all the local schools from whom students had been taken for war-effort work. The huge skeletal building that you can see in the pictures is the former Hiroshima Prefectural Hall. Finally we went to the plaque they've erected at the hypocenter of the blast; it's a little tiny 3'x3' or so stand that just says 'the bomb went off here at this time', wedged between a parking garage and a hospital. I think it was sort of cool in a way, like "Once a terrible thing happened here, and now we've moved on and become better people for it."
We went out for lunch (I had okonomiyaki! :D) and after that we met up with the group again to take the ferry out to Miyajima, where we'd be spending the night.
~to be continued~
Please be warned before looking that the Hiroshima Peace Museum is filled with displays and artifacts that unflinchingly show the results of an atomic blast on human beings, and that many are upsetting and/or graphic and/or triggery.
So our Watern Japan trip. It was epic, and fun, and exhausting, and a little ridiculous. We started out running five minutes late, getting separated from the group, and thinking we were going to be left behind in Tokyo forever. >.>
Once we met up with our group, I immediately made friends with some new folks I'd not met before because of my Doctor Who shirt. :) After waiting around for a while and dicussing our personal favorite Doctors and episodes, we boarded a really snazzy coach bus and began the 10-or-so hour drive from Shinjuku Station to Hiroshima.
I slept most of the trip, amazingly, despite the frequent stops we made for bathroom breaks and snacks. When we got to Hiroshima, we piled off the bus and onto a train, which took us right to the Hiroshima Atomic Bomb Dome (where the Memorial Peace Park is located). We headed to the museum first, checking our luggage in lockers and freshening up in the bathrooms there before getting our audio guides and heading into the museum proper.
Let it be said at this point that the exhibits in the musuem are not something I want to relive, ever. There were clinically-described dioramas of red spheres hanging over the city to denote where the bomb was dropped, and there were also life-size dioramas of children suffering from horrific radiation burns. The purpose of this museum is to convince people that they should never use atomic bombs for any reason ever again, and let me tell you I was convinced. It was eye-opening and horrible.
(Interesting clinical-sounding historical side note: American children are taught that the bomb was used to force Japan to surrender as an actual invasion of the archipelago would have cost up to 1 million American lives; Japanese children are taught that America dropped the bomb to intimidate Russia.)
After making it out of the museum, and feeling like I was never going to smile again, we split into small groups to tour the actual Peace Park with a bilingual tour guide. We saw a memorial for Korean forced-laborers who were victims of the bomb, as well as the Children's memorial with thousands of origami cranes symbolizing a wish for peace, and the Students' memorial which had a list of all the local schools from whom students had been taken for war-effort work. The huge skeletal building that you can see in the pictures is the former Hiroshima Prefectural Hall. Finally we went to the plaque they've erected at the hypocenter of the blast; it's a little tiny 3'x3' or so stand that just says 'the bomb went off here at this time', wedged between a parking garage and a hospital. I think it was sort of cool in a way, like "Once a terrible thing happened here, and now we've moved on and become better people for it."
We went out for lunch (I had okonomiyaki! :D) and after that we met up with the group again to take the ferry out to Miyajima, where we'd be spending the night.
~to be continued~
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
yokohama and tsukiji fish market adventure!
So last weekend me and my roommate left school and (not passing go, not collecting $200) went straight to Chinatown. The proper name of it is Chuukagai (pretty much 'Chinatown') and it's in Yokohama, which is a prefecture away but only about 35 minutes by local train.
It was really exciting to go when we did, because as it was last Friday, it was still around the time of the lunar new year, and everyone was celebrating hardcore. :D (Another of my friends had been there the night before and had seen fireworks and dragon-people parades, but we unfortunately missed that.) We wandered around all the different streets for several hours, gonig in the little souvenir shops, ogling the dim sum, etc., etc. It was pretty fun. I bought a little phone chain that has little glass chili peppers on it (they're supposed to be good luck). My roommate bought the most adorable panda hat ever.
There were people selling water chestnuts on every street corner, and handing out free samples. I probably ate an entire Y1000 bag's worth of nuts in free samples. They were delicious and tasted mealy and sort of meaty almost, which was really strange but good.
Finally we succumbed to hunger and allowed ourselves to be ushered into an all-you-can-eat dim sum restaurant by a hawker who spoke Chinese with my roommate (who's fluent). It was pretty cool because she was able to ask all the questions that neither of us could in Japanese and she knew what all the different types of food were and could make reccommendations. We ate soooooooo much , it was a little ridiculous. We had shrimp and soupy dumplings and pork and chicken and duck and rice porridge with those sketch-looking hundred-year eggs in it and a million other things, and then we had pastries and fried red-bean buns, and pudding and green tea soft-serve ice cream, and it was delicious and amazing. :D (We also had a heated discussion about pairings in Boys Over Flowers and other dramas, but that's a bit of a tangent)...Afterward we waddled out of the store and went on our merry way again, popping into various stores and searching out New Years mooncakes and other stuff. (We found one store on the main drag that was totally dedicated to K-pop merchandise, it was a little ridic.)
After that, things seemed to be winding down (most of the stores were closing, and people were moving toward the train station en masse...) so we hopped the train back to Jiyugaoka, and headed home for the night.
However, we were not done with our plans for the weekend yet.
We got home from Chuukagai around 11 pm. However, we'd already made plans to go to see the Tsukiji fish market when it opened Saturday morning (and it opens at like 5 am) so I opted to just stay up and stick out the five hours sitting in the dark while my roommate napped. We met with a big group of people from our dorm outside at 4:40 (it takes about 20 minutes to get to the station, and the first trains don't start running here till 5 am. We hopped on the first train toward the market, and upon arriving, followed our noses (seriously, you could smell it from like a block away) to the market, which was already a bustling nightmare at 5:30. There are these trolley cart/forklift things racing about everywhere and they stop for no man, it's like Frogger. :X We finally made our way into the market itself, which was truly enormous. We wandered through several aisles of (living and dead) crabs, squid, eels, flounder, salmon, and myriad other oceanic critters. Tsukiji has a terrifyingly expensive tuna auction each morning (like, millions of yen per fish) and we had hoped to see that but got there late; when the more bullheaded of us headed toward the pricey-tuna area anyway we were summarily kicked out of the market.
We skirted around the edge of the building (getting to see an impressively huge mountain of styrofoam boxes as we went around the side) and waited a few more minutes before heading back inside. (The place is the size of the UPitt campus, no one was gonna find us twice. We also ditched the folk who had got us kicked out in the first place. ;D)
There we wandered around looking for things that stuck out from the crowd of regular fish. We saw live octopi in tanks, fugu pufferfish, chimeras, stargazers, and even found one stand that was selling actual whale :O. (There are pictures of all of this, never fear.) And we were constantly dodging the ubiquitous trolley truck things, which were usually loaded down with tuna roughly the size of my little brother. (We got to see a guy cutting one up with a freaking huge sword, it was epic.)
After that, we headed back out of the frightening hustle and bustle of the market and, after buying some breakfast from a stand, hopped a train and headed back to home. It was about 9am when we arrived, and I immediately hopped right back in bed. :X
And that is the tale of my trip to Tsukiji. Pics to follow.
It was really exciting to go when we did, because as it was last Friday, it was still around the time of the lunar new year, and everyone was celebrating hardcore. :D (Another of my friends had been there the night before and had seen fireworks and dragon-people parades, but we unfortunately missed that.) We wandered around all the different streets for several hours, gonig in the little souvenir shops, ogling the dim sum, etc., etc. It was pretty fun. I bought a little phone chain that has little glass chili peppers on it (they're supposed to be good luck). My roommate bought the most adorable panda hat ever.
There were people selling water chestnuts on every street corner, and handing out free samples. I probably ate an entire Y1000 bag's worth of nuts in free samples. They were delicious and tasted mealy and sort of meaty almost, which was really strange but good.
Finally we succumbed to hunger and allowed ourselves to be ushered into an all-you-can-eat dim sum restaurant by a hawker who spoke Chinese with my roommate (who's fluent). It was pretty cool because she was able to ask all the questions that neither of us could in Japanese and she knew what all the different types of food were and could make reccommendations. We ate soooooooo much , it was a little ridiculous. We had shrimp and soupy dumplings and pork and chicken and duck and rice porridge with those sketch-looking hundred-year eggs in it and a million other things, and then we had pastries and fried red-bean buns, and pudding and green tea soft-serve ice cream, and it was delicious and amazing. :D (We also had a heated discussion about pairings in Boys Over Flowers and other dramas, but that's a bit of a tangent)...Afterward we waddled out of the store and went on our merry way again, popping into various stores and searching out New Years mooncakes and other stuff. (We found one store on the main drag that was totally dedicated to K-pop merchandise, it was a little ridic.)
After that, things seemed to be winding down (most of the stores were closing, and people were moving toward the train station en masse...) so we hopped the train back to Jiyugaoka, and headed home for the night.
However, we were not done with our plans for the weekend yet.
We got home from Chuukagai around 11 pm. However, we'd already made plans to go to see the Tsukiji fish market when it opened Saturday morning (and it opens at like 5 am) so I opted to just stay up and stick out the five hours sitting in the dark while my roommate napped. We met with a big group of people from our dorm outside at 4:40 (it takes about 20 minutes to get to the station, and the first trains don't start running here till 5 am. We hopped on the first train toward the market, and upon arriving, followed our noses (seriously, you could smell it from like a block away) to the market, which was already a bustling nightmare at 5:30. There are these trolley cart/forklift things racing about everywhere and they stop for no man, it's like Frogger. :X We finally made our way into the market itself, which was truly enormous. We wandered through several aisles of (living and dead) crabs, squid, eels, flounder, salmon, and myriad other oceanic critters. Tsukiji has a terrifyingly expensive tuna auction each morning (like, millions of yen per fish) and we had hoped to see that but got there late; when the more bullheaded of us headed toward the pricey-tuna area anyway we were summarily kicked out of the market.
We skirted around the edge of the building (getting to see an impressively huge mountain of styrofoam boxes as we went around the side) and waited a few more minutes before heading back inside. (The place is the size of the UPitt campus, no one was gonna find us twice. We also ditched the folk who had got us kicked out in the first place. ;D)
There we wandered around looking for things that stuck out from the crowd of regular fish. We saw live octopi in tanks, fugu pufferfish, chimeras, stargazers, and even found one stand that was selling actual whale :O. (There are pictures of all of this, never fear.) And we were constantly dodging the ubiquitous trolley truck things, which were usually loaded down with tuna roughly the size of my little brother. (We got to see a guy cutting one up with a freaking huge sword, it was epic.)
After that, we headed back out of the frightening hustle and bustle of the market and, after buying some breakfast from a stand, hopped a train and headed back to home. It was about 9am when we arrived, and I immediately hopped right back in bed. :X
And that is the tale of my trip to Tsukiji. Pics to follow.
Friday, January 28, 2011
part two of epic adventures (read the previous post first! :P)
The next day began in a complicated way. (And yes, we did end up being late, but let's ignore that, shall we?)
Here's the backstory to the day: back in Pittsburgh, Jenny (my roommate here) took some Japanese conversation classes at the public library. Her teacher there insisted that she get in touch with a friend of hers who lives in Saitama, which is about an hour north of downtown Tokyo. Either Jenny or the friend did get in touch, and it all ended in Izumi-san offering to show us around the entire city for the day. (Apparently this is regular bsns as usual for the Japanese...)
So our day began in Ueno, where we met Izumi and her husband, Tetsuya. We drove around Ueno and saw the various museums and parks that are there. We also stopped in/at Ameyoko, which is a big shopping street with all kinds of cool things that you can buy and bargain for. :D AND AN ARCADE THERE HAD STUFFED LLAMAS, DO WANT.
From Ueno we went to see the Tokyo Sky Tree. It's still under construction, but it's possibly one of the biggest freaking things I've ever seen. So Tokyo Tower is just an aesthetically pleasing antenna, right? Well everything around it is taller than it now, so they're building an even more gigantor tower to bounce various waves and signals off of. And that is the Tokyo Sky Tree. It's awesome.
Then we went to Asakusa. There we were 1) interviewed by Fuji TV about our own thoughts on Maid Cafes. (Jenny'd never heard of them, the innocent.) I was like, "They're weird, but to earch their own I guess." You know, being a poster girl for normal and all. I suppose if I hadn't been taken off guard I would have had something clever to say about feminism and otaku culture, but I'd been all over the place and hadn't even had breakfast yet sooo. Apparently Japanese are very interested in what foreigners think about different bits of Japanese culture, and the show I was interviewed for is a very popular show that quizzes gaijin on their opinions. (Also, why do I attract news reporters/interviewers regardless of country or current activity?) and 2) we investigated the temple at Asakusa (different from Meiji-jingu, which is a shrine, not a temple).
There we did all sorts of neat stuff. Between the main Kaminarimon gate and the actual temple there are about a million little shops selling traditional candy and food and clothes and gifts and shinsengumi happi coats and all sorts of ridiculous stuff. We walked all the way down to the temple first, where we did a fortune-telling thing that involves pulling numbered sticks at random from a container, then taking a fortune from that number's drawer. I got a 'BAD FORTUNE' the first time, so Izumi-san bought me another fortune so I could try again (I got a 'MEDIUM FORTUNE' >.>) They had a stand that you could tie your BAD FORTUNEs onto so that the bad luck wouldn't follow you, so I left it there (after taking its picture). Then we went into the shrine and threw in a coin for a wish. On our way out we stopped at a stand selling agemanju (I'm not sure what they were besides delicious and deep-fried) and were treated to green-tea flavored agemanju by Izumi-san.
Then we met up with Tetsuya-san again (his position for the day seemed to be glorified chauffeur - his meishi said he was the president of his own company but I think Izumi-san's the brains behind the throne, haha). Next was lunch, and after some discussion we asked if we could try nabe (like hotpot/soup with everything just thrown in and cooked together). We headed over to Ginza to have delicious delicious lunch. (To top off its awesomeness, the restaurant we ate at was playing Gee by SNSD when I came in. K-pop ftw.) Besides the soundtrack, however, the restaurant was really traditional Japanese where you sat on the floor and took your shoes off and everything. :O And I was adventurous and ate pretty much everything that was put in front of me, including many many green things :O (I am not big on green things, like at all.)
Oh, and did I mention that even though Izumi-san spoke English very well, we spent most of the day talking in Japanese? LIKE A BOSS? Haha we're by no means fluent, like at all, but it was really great practice to be able to talk freely with real and patient Japanese people about any number of topics. Izumi-san said we were very skilled, at least. (I begged to differ, but she pointed out that all Japanese kids have to take six years of English and can barely introduce themselves, and I've only been studying Japanese for three years... well, at this point it just gets into a complicated back and forth about the politeness of accepting compliments regardless of implicit truth and depending on variable societal norms so I'mma get back to the story.)
After lunch we were pretty much stuffed. From Ginza we headed across the Rainbow Bridge to Odaiba (which, according to my sources aka Jenny, is where Digimon is set, fyi). The view from the Bridge was awesome, and then when we got to Odaiba we got to go down to the beach and see the Tokyo Bay up close. :D Then we went up in the super-crazy-looking Fuji TV building (yep, the same station that wants to make my opinions on Maid Cafes a national broadcast). It has a giant metal ball at the top called the Hachi-tama which you can get tickets to go up into. We went up to check out the view and took a crapton of pictures from the awesome vantage point looking across at downtown Tokyo (we could see Tokyo Tower and the Sky Tree among several other things). We also were introduced to Fuji TV's adorable mascot, the coolest dog ever, Ruff-kun. He's blue, and rocks the Lennon shades.
From Odaiba we headed back across the Bay to Harajuku. This was exciting for me because we were going to learn where exactly that tricksy Takeshita-dori actually was. Turns out about a block away from where we'd been the day before, go figure. >.> Takeshita was bustling, like super-crowded, but we went in a few stores (one was wallpapered with Johnny's boys and K-pop bands along with some straight-up J-rock folks (they had Gazette phone charms); I also fondled some really nice boots along the way. :X I am having a problem with boots in this country.) They sell crepes all up and down the tiny-crowded-alleyway-cum-street, and when we finally emerged on the other side of the block, Izumi-san treated us to delicious crepes as well. (I got one with strawberries and whipped cream, both deliciously fresh.)
After nomming down our crepes, we hopped in the car for one last stop: the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building in Shinjuku. You can go in for free and ride up to the 45th floor for a legit spectacular view of the city from above. (Unfortunately, it's difficult to take impressive nighttime pictures from behind glass with a point-and-shoot camera, but I did my best.) They had a bunch of little tourist-trap gift shops in the middle of the observation-deck floor, and Izumi-san bought us both a set of adorable erasers. (Mine look like desserts! :D)
From there, we went back to the car, and by the magic of GPSes Tetsuya-san managed to make it all the way back to Meguro to drop us in front of our house (despite our protests that dropping us at any train station would be equally fine). We went through a flurry of otsukaresama deshitas and hontou ni arigatou gozaimashitas for a few minutes, and then went our merry ways, utterly exhausted at least on our part.
And thus was an epic day had by us, following the incredibly wise decision to get into a car with two people I'd never met before and to let them drive me wherever they felt like. :D And God bless you if you actually read this whole giant thing. >.> (And God bless Tetsuya-san for driving in Tokyo, it's terrifying.)
Here's the backstory to the day: back in Pittsburgh, Jenny (my roommate here) took some Japanese conversation classes at the public library. Her teacher there insisted that she get in touch with a friend of hers who lives in Saitama, which is about an hour north of downtown Tokyo. Either Jenny or the friend did get in touch, and it all ended in Izumi-san offering to show us around the entire city for the day. (Apparently this is regular bsns as usual for the Japanese...)
So our day began in Ueno, where we met Izumi and her husband, Tetsuya. We drove around Ueno and saw the various museums and parks that are there. We also stopped in/at Ameyoko, which is a big shopping street with all kinds of cool things that you can buy and bargain for. :D AND AN ARCADE THERE HAD STUFFED LLAMAS, DO WANT.
From Ueno we went to see the Tokyo Sky Tree. It's still under construction, but it's possibly one of the biggest freaking things I've ever seen. So Tokyo Tower is just an aesthetically pleasing antenna, right? Well everything around it is taller than it now, so they're building an even more gigantor tower to bounce various waves and signals off of. And that is the Tokyo Sky Tree. It's awesome.
Then we went to Asakusa. There we were 1) interviewed by Fuji TV about our own thoughts on Maid Cafes. (Jenny'd never heard of them, the innocent.) I was like, "They're weird, but to earch their own I guess." You know, being a poster girl for normal and all. I suppose if I hadn't been taken off guard I would have had something clever to say about feminism and otaku culture, but I'd been all over the place and hadn't even had breakfast yet sooo. Apparently Japanese are very interested in what foreigners think about different bits of Japanese culture, and the show I was interviewed for is a very popular show that quizzes gaijin on their opinions. (Also, why do I attract news reporters/interviewers regardless of country or current activity?) and 2) we investigated the temple at Asakusa (different from Meiji-jingu, which is a shrine, not a temple).
There we did all sorts of neat stuff. Between the main Kaminarimon gate and the actual temple there are about a million little shops selling traditional candy and food and clothes and gifts and shinsengumi happi coats and all sorts of ridiculous stuff. We walked all the way down to the temple first, where we did a fortune-telling thing that involves pulling numbered sticks at random from a container, then taking a fortune from that number's drawer. I got a 'BAD FORTUNE' the first time, so Izumi-san bought me another fortune so I could try again (I got a 'MEDIUM FORTUNE' >.>) They had a stand that you could tie your BAD FORTUNEs onto so that the bad luck wouldn't follow you, so I left it there (after taking its picture). Then we went into the shrine and threw in a coin for a wish. On our way out we stopped at a stand selling agemanju (I'm not sure what they were besides delicious and deep-fried) and were treated to green-tea flavored agemanju by Izumi-san.
Then we met up with Tetsuya-san again (his position for the day seemed to be glorified chauffeur - his meishi said he was the president of his own company but I think Izumi-san's the brains behind the throne, haha). Next was lunch, and after some discussion we asked if we could try nabe (like hotpot/soup with everything just thrown in and cooked together). We headed over to Ginza to have delicious delicious lunch. (To top off its awesomeness, the restaurant we ate at was playing Gee by SNSD when I came in. K-pop ftw.) Besides the soundtrack, however, the restaurant was really traditional Japanese where you sat on the floor and took your shoes off and everything. :O And I was adventurous and ate pretty much everything that was put in front of me, including many many green things :O (I am not big on green things, like at all.)
Oh, and did I mention that even though Izumi-san spoke English very well, we spent most of the day talking in Japanese? LIKE A BOSS? Haha we're by no means fluent, like at all, but it was really great practice to be able to talk freely with real and patient Japanese people about any number of topics. Izumi-san said we were very skilled, at least. (I begged to differ, but she pointed out that all Japanese kids have to take six years of English and can barely introduce themselves, and I've only been studying Japanese for three years... well, at this point it just gets into a complicated back and forth about the politeness of accepting compliments regardless of implicit truth and depending on variable societal norms so I'mma get back to the story.)
After lunch we were pretty much stuffed. From Ginza we headed across the Rainbow Bridge to Odaiba (which, according to my sources aka Jenny, is where Digimon is set, fyi). The view from the Bridge was awesome, and then when we got to Odaiba we got to go down to the beach and see the Tokyo Bay up close. :D Then we went up in the super-crazy-looking Fuji TV building (yep, the same station that wants to make my opinions on Maid Cafes a national broadcast). It has a giant metal ball at the top called the Hachi-tama which you can get tickets to go up into. We went up to check out the view and took a crapton of pictures from the awesome vantage point looking across at downtown Tokyo (we could see Tokyo Tower and the Sky Tree among several other things). We also were introduced to Fuji TV's adorable mascot, the coolest dog ever, Ruff-kun. He's blue, and rocks the Lennon shades.
From Odaiba we headed back across the Bay to Harajuku. This was exciting for me because we were going to learn where exactly that tricksy Takeshita-dori actually was. Turns out about a block away from where we'd been the day before, go figure. >.> Takeshita was bustling, like super-crowded, but we went in a few stores (one was wallpapered with Johnny's boys and K-pop bands along with some straight-up J-rock folks (they had Gazette phone charms); I also fondled some really nice boots along the way. :X I am having a problem with boots in this country.) They sell crepes all up and down the tiny-crowded-alleyway-cum-street, and when we finally emerged on the other side of the block, Izumi-san treated us to delicious crepes as well. (I got one with strawberries and whipped cream, both deliciously fresh.)
After nomming down our crepes, we hopped in the car for one last stop: the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building in Shinjuku. You can go in for free and ride up to the 45th floor for a legit spectacular view of the city from above. (Unfortunately, it's difficult to take impressive nighttime pictures from behind glass with a point-and-shoot camera, but I did my best.) They had a bunch of little tourist-trap gift shops in the middle of the observation-deck floor, and Izumi-san bought us both a set of adorable erasers. (Mine look like desserts! :D)
From there, we went back to the car, and by the magic of GPSes Tetsuya-san managed to make it all the way back to Meguro to drop us in front of our house (despite our protests that dropping us at any train station would be equally fine). We went through a flurry of otsukaresama deshitas and hontou ni arigatou gozaimashitas for a few minutes, and then went our merry ways, utterly exhausted at least on our part.
And thus was an epic day had by us, following the incredibly wise decision to get into a car with two people I'd never met before and to let them drive me wherever they felt like. :D And God bless you if you actually read this whole giant thing. >.> (And God bless Tetsuya-san for driving in Tokyo, it's terrifying.)
part one of epic adventures
Last weekend was pretty epic. I posted a link to the pics a few entries back, but http://www.flickr.com/photos/miss-bookw
Firstly, Saturday:
Saturday Jenny and I decided to explore the expanses of Shibuya and Harajuku once more. First we went to Harajuku to see the Meiji-jingu shrine. It's freaking awesome, to be quite honest. It's in the middle of a huge park that's basically a forest in the middle of Tokyo - and as much as I love being a city-dweller, I won't deny that it was nice to be surrounded by some tranquil nature for a while. To enter the shrine, we walked down an enormous gravel driveway that led into the woods. There are little pathways and shrines that trail off the side of the walkway, but most of them seemed closed for winter so we didn't really check them out. There are also three (I think three) gigantic torii that we passed under (and took a few pictures by), as well as some huge casks of French wine (I took a picture of the sign that had the whole story behind them on it) and some huge drums of some sort (whose purpose I could not divine, but which were lovely and many).
When we got to the actual shrine we wandered around a bit rather than going into the main building, since people were praying pretty seriously inside and I didn't want to interrupt or insult anything/one by bumbling about. There was a big courtyard, however, with my favorite thing: a tree covered in peoples' wishes. Every day the priests there pray for the intentions that people submit on little wooden board that are hung on the fence around the tree. The wishes I saw ranged from things as simple as "I want to go to an Arashi tour every year!" to meaningful wishes for family and friends. Jenny and I saw things in Japanese, Spanish, French, English, German, and I'm sure many more. It was really cool. We weren't sure where to buy the plaques, but we did write down paper wishes that we put in a collection box near the tree.
We wandered around there a bit more, and then went back out of the shrine. We wandered through the gift shop (everywhere must needs have a little shop ;D) for a while before heading back into Harajuku main. At this point we still hadn't been to Takeshita-dori yet, but had not yet figured out where exactly to find it, and as it was getting dark, we abandoned that quest to jump on a train back to Shibuya.
In Shibuya we mostly shopped and sight-saw. We wandered all over into a million little shops. We found a fabric store (the prices were so cheap >___<) and a bunch of exciting-looking clothes stores and restaurants. I bought a pretty ring for Y300 in a little shop that smelled so strongly of incense it made my head hurt. Jenny was also on the lookout at the time for a bar in which we could watch the Asia Cup finals with camaraderie rather than quietly in our room (the final is tonight, unfortunately, and Jenny is curled up in bed sick and asleep, so that plan failed a bit...)
By this point in the night we were starving and exhausted, so we wandered a bit more before heading to a small restaurant in the bottom of a department store where Jenny had katsu-curry and I ate my body weight in hamburger (it comes without a bun; mine came with pasta and mashed potatoes on the side) and an enormous omurice that was super-delicious. :D
After that we pretty much waddled back to the train station and back to home. We had plans for the morrow, (and we were sooooo full) that we opted to turn in early so as not to be late in the morning.
Firstly, Saturday:
Saturday Jenny and I decided to explore the expanses of Shibuya and Harajuku once more. First we went to Harajuku to see the Meiji-jingu shrine. It's freaking awesome, to be quite honest. It's in the middle of a huge park that's basically a forest in the middle of Tokyo - and as much as I love being a city-dweller, I won't deny that it was nice to be surrounded by some tranquil nature for a while. To enter the shrine, we walked down an enormous gravel driveway that led into the woods. There are little pathways and shrines that trail off the side of the walkway, but most of them seemed closed for winter so we didn't really check them out. There are also three (I think three) gigantic torii that we passed under (and took a few pictures by), as well as some huge casks of French wine (I took a picture of the sign that had the whole story behind them on it) and some huge drums of some sort (whose purpose I could not divine, but which were lovely and many).
When we got to the actual shrine we wandered around a bit rather than going into the main building, since people were praying pretty seriously inside and I didn't want to interrupt or insult anything/one by bumbling about. There was a big courtyard, however, with my favorite thing: a tree covered in peoples' wishes. Every day the priests there pray for the intentions that people submit on little wooden board that are hung on the fence around the tree. The wishes I saw ranged from things as simple as "I want to go to an Arashi tour every year!" to meaningful wishes for family and friends. Jenny and I saw things in Japanese, Spanish, French, English, German, and I'm sure many more. It was really cool. We weren't sure where to buy the plaques, but we did write down paper wishes that we put in a collection box near the tree.
We wandered around there a bit more, and then went back out of the shrine. We wandered through the gift shop (everywhere must needs have a little shop ;D) for a while before heading back into Harajuku main. At this point we still hadn't been to Takeshita-dori yet, but had not yet figured out where exactly to find it, and as it was getting dark, we abandoned that quest to jump on a train back to Shibuya.
In Shibuya we mostly shopped and sight-saw. We wandered all over into a million little shops. We found a fabric store (the prices were so cheap >___<) and a bunch of exciting-looking clothes stores and restaurants. I bought a pretty ring for Y300 in a little shop that smelled so strongly of incense it made my head hurt. Jenny was also on the lookout at the time for a bar in which we could watch the Asia Cup finals with camaraderie rather than quietly in our room (the final is tonight, unfortunately, and Jenny is curled up in bed sick and asleep, so that plan failed a bit...)
By this point in the night we were starving and exhausted, so we wandered a bit more before heading to a small restaurant in the bottom of a department store where Jenny had katsu-curry and I ate my body weight in hamburger (it comes without a bun; mine came with pasta and mashed potatoes on the side) and an enormous omurice that was super-delicious. :D
After that we pretty much waddled back to the train station and back to home. We had plans for the morrow, (and we were sooooo full) that we opted to turn in early so as not to be late in the morning.
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
normal life and some more pics :D
Herro! Normal blog post here, and then blog post filled with tales of adventure later on. :D I shall separate them to avoid extreme longness.
So here is the dealio, in the life of me:
I have class Monday, Wednesday, and Fridays. I'm taking four classes so I'm just barely a full-time student. I walk twenty minutes to the train station in the morning, take the train for twenty minutes from Meguro-ku into Minato-ku, and then walk another ten minutes to class. My calves are going to be even more monstrous than they already were by the end of the semester. I usually get lunch from one of the convenience stores near the school building, and my lovely roommate cooks our meals at home (if we don't go out). (I do the dishes in return... I'm not good at cooking things that a) don't come out of a box or b) don't involve butter in some way... She is excellent at making Japanese-ish food. Recipe suggestions are love, btw.) We usually go to bed freakishly early on MWF days because we stay up freakishly late doing homework on Tuesdays and Thursdays and Sundays.
The first class is Art History, which is interesting but unfortunately has a really-annoying-question-asking guy AND a legit hipster guy who are rather annoying. So far we've covered Miyazaki Hayao and Noguchi Isamu.
The next one is Religions of the World, which is interesting and far less terrifying than its CMU equivalent. (We've only had one reference to performance studies so far, and I made it through without ptsd-tears.) We're doing Hinduism right now, which is a really fantastically interesting religion. :D I sit next to a fun gay boy and a really hot Japanese guy who's totally hopeless at the class.
Then I have my lunch break. Sometimes I eat with people, sometimes I eat alone; my friends' breaks start an hour and a half before mine so I usually don't make them wait.
Next up is Japanese - Advanced II. It's actually nowhere near as bad as they made it seem at first, although it is pretty tough. I actually like it a lot better than CMU's program, if only because it's something new and different. We spend enough time on one topic that I actually remember most of the vocab, for one thing... *glares at giant vocab worksheets of yesteryear*
Finally I have my Japanese History class. It's both interesting and annoying and probably worthwhile. For one thing, we are tested on geography weekly so I can now tell you where pretty much any major city in Japan is as well as naming all 47 prefectures and some various and sundry landmasses and bodies of water. The class itself hasn't progressed too far into history yet (still talking about hunter-gatherers and wet-rice farming) but the teacher's more than a little nuts and all of my friends are in the same class so it's quite fun. :D
On my off days I mostly sleep an indecent amount (I'm beginning to suspect my body is making up for all the sleep I've ever missed, ever) and sit around putting off doing homework until very late; recently this procrastination has involved a lot of k-pop music videos. I spend a lot of time hitting up the various Seven Elevens and Lawsons and whatnot for chocolate-themed desserts also, it is a failing that I have no strong intentions of casting aside. >.>
One nice thing about one of the peeps I hang out with (specifically Wyatt, who reminds me a lot of Collin in a lot of ways) is that he's pretty much on the same level of Japanese as Jenny and I, so when it's just the three of us (or when it's not, to mess with the rest of the group, always fun) we talk in at least half-Japanese and text each other entirely in Japanese for practice. It's quite handy. :D
And tomorrow is a long day of catching up in reading for my art history class; I am unfortunately over a hundred pages behind from not reading for two class periods. >.> therefore, I shall bid you a fond farewell and goodnight, and shall post about last weekend's adventures in great detail on the morrow. Adieu!
(for pics of the adventures, they are here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/miss-bookw
Oyasumi nasai!
So here is the dealio, in the life of me:
I have class Monday, Wednesday, and Fridays. I'm taking four classes so I'm just barely a full-time student. I walk twenty minutes to the train station in the morning, take the train for twenty minutes from Meguro-ku into Minato-ku, and then walk another ten minutes to class. My calves are going to be even more monstrous than they already were by the end of the semester. I usually get lunch from one of the convenience stores near the school building, and my lovely roommate cooks our meals at home (if we don't go out). (I do the dishes in return... I'm not good at cooking things that a) don't come out of a box or b) don't involve butter in some way... She is excellent at making Japanese-ish food. Recipe suggestions are love, btw.) We usually go to bed freakishly early on MWF days because we stay up freakishly late doing homework on Tuesdays and Thursdays and Sundays.
The first class is Art History, which is interesting but unfortunately has a really-annoying-question-asking guy AND a legit hipster guy who are rather annoying. So far we've covered Miyazaki Hayao and Noguchi Isamu.
The next one is Religions of the World, which is interesting and far less terrifying than its CMU equivalent. (We've only had one reference to performance studies so far, and I made it through without ptsd-tears.) We're doing Hinduism right now, which is a really fantastically interesting religion. :D I sit next to a fun gay boy and a really hot Japanese guy who's totally hopeless at the class.
Then I have my lunch break. Sometimes I eat with people, sometimes I eat alone; my friends' breaks start an hour and a half before mine so I usually don't make them wait.
Next up is Japanese - Advanced II. It's actually nowhere near as bad as they made it seem at first, although it is pretty tough. I actually like it a lot better than CMU's program, if only because it's something new and different. We spend enough time on one topic that I actually remember most of the vocab, for one thing... *glares at giant vocab worksheets of yesteryear*
Finally I have my Japanese History class. It's both interesting and annoying and probably worthwhile. For one thing, we are tested on geography weekly so I can now tell you where pretty much any major city in Japan is as well as naming all 47 prefectures and some various and sundry landmasses and bodies of water. The class itself hasn't progressed too far into history yet (still talking about hunter-gatherers and wet-rice farming) but the teacher's more than a little nuts and all of my friends are in the same class so it's quite fun. :D
On my off days I mostly sleep an indecent amount (I'm beginning to suspect my body is making up for all the sleep I've ever missed, ever) and sit around putting off doing homework until very late; recently this procrastination has involved a lot of k-pop music videos. I spend a lot of time hitting up the various Seven Elevens and Lawsons and whatnot for chocolate-themed desserts also, it is a failing that I have no strong intentions of casting aside. >.>
One nice thing about one of the peeps I hang out with (specifically Wyatt, who reminds me a lot of Collin in a lot of ways) is that he's pretty much on the same level of Japanese as Jenny and I, so when it's just the three of us (or when it's not, to mess with the rest of the group, always fun) we talk in at least half-Japanese and text each other entirely in Japanese for practice. It's quite handy. :D
And tomorrow is a long day of catching up in reading for my art history class; I am unfortunately over a hundred pages behind from not reading for two class periods. >.> therefore, I shall bid you a fond farewell and goodnight, and shall post about last weekend's adventures in great detail on the morrow. Adieu!
(for pics of the adventures, they are here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/miss-bookw
Oyasumi nasai!
Sunday, January 9, 2011
pics!
It was recommended to me that I make a flickr for photo-sharing purposes. It is here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/miss-bookworm/sets/72157625782844670/ . From now on I'll try to post the pics with my posts.
In other news, today we missed the official tour we were going to go on, so we took the initiative on ourselves to visit Shibuya, Harajuku, and Shinjuku ourselves.
We went to Shibuya first and wandered around for a while. We finally found our way around the station to the side with Hachiko and the Times-Square-mitai-famous street crossing, which there are pics of in the above bunch. :D Then after much scanning of a map, we walked for what was apparently (according to google maps) about a mile, down to the entrance of the Meiji Shrine. (We may go back there tomorrow - there's a big coming of age festival, a national holiday in fact, for 20-year-old girls tomorrow, so everyone will be there in their kirei kimono best. (Too bad I left both my furisodes at home... :/) We window-shopped and actually-shopped along the way, and I almost impulse-bought the most beautiful grey pirate-y/steampunk-y/loligoth high-heeled leather boots. Everything was marked half off, and their tag said like 15,000Y, and they even closed over my monster calves, but when the lady went to ring me up she said that 15,000 was the already-discounted price, and holy frickin crap, I am not actually paying ~$200 for even the most beautiful shoes ever. (I was still sad about leaving them, though... :X)
We finally made our way down to Harajuku (at least to Harajuku station). There we had totally delicious takoyaki! I have been waiting to try takoyaki since I got here, but I wanted to get it from a street stand fresh and proper-like, not have the reheatable bento konbini takoyaki that they sell in all the Lawsons and 7-11s. We shopped around a bit more there (I was irrashaimase'd approximately one million times...) and then we headed into the metro station to go back to Shibuya for dinner.
Didn't see very many people in awesome garb, but that's probably because it was late and dark. (I did see two lonely lolis getting on the train when we left from Harajuku station.) Also, not having that much of a head for fashion, I wasn't sure whether there was a particularly famous street I should be seeking out or not. (I do want to eventually seek out Takeshita Dori and have oishii parfaits while creeping for kanon, though, haha).
We had cyborg soup for dinner - you order via vending machine thing, and it gives you a ticket, and you give the ticket to the cook, so it's definitely cyborg-y, being part machine and all. It was sooooo delicious haha, giant shrimp and all. Then we stopped in the big departo where we'd shopped before because they had a bunch of really cheap food places in the basement - we bought some super cheap croquets and yakitori for tomorrow (we're not sure how much will be open around home) and finally jumped the train home. All in all it was an awesome day of adventuring!
Things we want to do eventually:
try a Japanese Mcdonalds >.>
go to Akihabara, which is far away which is why we didn't go today
continue finding 50-yen croquets underneath overpriced department stores
In other news, today we missed the official tour we were going to go on, so we took the initiative on ourselves to visit Shibuya, Harajuku, and Shinjuku ourselves.
We went to Shibuya first and wandered around for a while. We finally found our way around the station to the side with Hachiko and the Times-Square-mitai-famous street crossing, which there are pics of in the above bunch. :D Then after much scanning of a map, we walked for what was apparently (according to google maps) about a mile, down to the entrance of the Meiji Shrine. (We may go back there tomorrow - there's a big coming of age festival, a national holiday in fact, for 20-year-old girls tomorrow, so everyone will be there in their kirei kimono best. (Too bad I left both my furisodes at home... :/) We window-shopped and actually-shopped along the way, and I almost impulse-bought the most beautiful grey pirate-y/steampunk-y/loligoth high-heeled leather boots. Everything was marked half off, and their tag said like 15,000Y, and they even closed over my monster calves, but when the lady went to ring me up she said that 15,000 was the already-discounted price, and holy frickin crap, I am not actually paying ~$200 for even the most beautiful shoes ever. (I was still sad about leaving them, though... :X)
We finally made our way down to Harajuku (at least to Harajuku station). There we had totally delicious takoyaki! I have been waiting to try takoyaki since I got here, but I wanted to get it from a street stand fresh and proper-like, not have the reheatable bento konbini takoyaki that they sell in all the Lawsons and 7-11s. We shopped around a bit more there (I was irrashaimase'd approximately one million times...) and then we headed into the metro station to go back to Shibuya for dinner.
Didn't see very many people in awesome garb, but that's probably because it was late and dark. (I did see two lonely lolis getting on the train when we left from Harajuku station.) Also, not having that much of a head for fashion, I wasn't sure whether there was a particularly famous street I should be seeking out or not. (I do want to eventually seek out Takeshita Dori and have oishii parfaits while creeping for kanon, though, haha).
We had cyborg soup for dinner - you order via vending machine thing, and it gives you a ticket, and you give the ticket to the cook, so it's definitely cyborg-y, being part machine and all. It was sooooo delicious haha, giant shrimp and all. Then we stopped in the big departo where we'd shopped before because they had a bunch of really cheap food places in the basement - we bought some super cheap croquets and yakitori for tomorrow (we're not sure how much will be open around home) and finally jumped the train home. All in all it was an awesome day of adventuring!
Things we want to do eventually:
try a Japanese Mcdonalds >.>
go to Akihabara, which is far away which is why we didn't go today
continue finding 50-yen croquets underneath overpriced department stores
Friday, January 7, 2011
first post from jolly old nippon! :D
Hello, everyone! :D
I'm currently sitting in my dorm room in Tokyo!! I live in a pretty nice suburban area called Meguro-ku (Meguro Ward) about a 30-min train ride from the school building (plus about ten minutes walking...) The dorm is pretty nice, although we had a bit of a time figuring out some stuff, like how to work the heater (the remote was, go figure, in Japanese) and how to take a shower (you have to turn on the water heater manually on a panel outside the bathroom, rawr).
We have a stove and a little fridge and a toaster oven in the kitchen, so we've been creatively heating up the food we've been buying in the toaster oven. (We're not yet comfortable with cooking from scratch, so we've been buying ready-made bento-type things from convenience stores and munching on those instead. Mal made me promise to be an adventurous eater, so I'm proud to say my very first Japanese food I ate was a kabocha tempura, aka pumpkin tempura. (It was good, but veryyy pumpkin-y, so idk how often I'll be trying it.)
The toilet is in a different room from the shower and vanity, but it has a sink built into the top of it. (I'd prefer having a self-warming seat and having to walk to the other room to wash my hands, but whatever.) It's the first in what I'm sure will be a long line of cray-cray Japanese potties.
The bedroom is pretty much our center of operations - the heater's in here, so we usually keep the kitchen door closed and interweb away at our little table. Our beds are bunked and actually quite comfortable. The tv is also in here, but it gets about 10 channels (and half of them fuzzy) so we haven't really bothered with it.
Jenny and I have pretty much settled in, and we're getting along swimmingly. We had our first proper adventure the very first full day here, aka yesterday. After giving us a lecture about how Japanese people WILL leave you behind if you're running late, we made the mistake of being late to meet the group that was supposed to take us to the school for orientation in the morning. (7:45 after over 20 hours of traveling the previous day? rude.) Not one to allow myself to succumb to panic (at least as far as getting to places I need to be is involved) I grabbed a map we had been given before leaving (it was to give our cabbies directions to our dorm) and, crossing my fingers, we headed off to the station. we circled around it a bit before finding the entrance, but the paper we had also had directions to the school, so we hopped on the trains it told us to hop onto and voila! We arrived. So first morning here we got to experience the crazayness that is a train during Japanese rush hour - that is, smashed up against everyone else in the train, and deathly silent.
Orientation was relatively interesting but dragged on as orientations are wont to do. The basic things I learned from it are these: Go to Roppongi and I will be drugged and robbed and no one will care, and I am going to fail my Japanese class. As to the former, apparently the ubiquitous Japanese police force is fond of making sure foreigners are here legally, but not so fond of prosecuting foreigner-on-foreigner crime (apparently there is a lot of Russian crime syndicate activity in Roppongi?); as to the latter, this tiny hardassed Japanese lady came up to the front of the room to talk about the Japanese program, which was basically to inform us all that the language program here is harder than anything we could have possibly taken anywhere else, and that we should probably round down one or two classes at best if we wanted to not fail. "You can stay in the harder classes if you want to," she said, "but that's your choice, and when you fail, you won't be able to drop out, you'll get an F, and I will laugh at you." Like a tiny drill sergeant of the Japanese language. Terrifying. I am going to fail. (I'm taking a placement test today, but I'm not sure how well that will go. I can stay in AJII regardless of the results, but depending what the results say I may want to curl up in a corner and cry instead. :X
On a brighter note, tomorrow we're going on a tour of Shibuya, Ueno, and one other place that is either Shinjuku or Harajuku, and is probably Shinjuku. I am very excited :D And then Monday is a national holiday, so we don't start class till Tuesday, which means I don't start class till Wednesday :D Jenny and I are probably going to lay around like lumps on Monday (we've already planned it out) because we haven't really had a day to properly relax yet. Yesterday I went to bed ostensibly for a nap at 7 and slept through till this morning when my alarm went off at 9:30. :X
Things I'm still trying to get used to:
what time it is at home, for calling and skyping purposes
exactly how much a yen is worth in dollars and trying not to cry every time I spend them
Pictures will follow later, btw. I haven't taken that many yet because yesterday was so hectic that I didn't want to worry about photographing everything on top of all the stuff we were doing. :X
I'm currently sitting in my dorm room in Tokyo!! I live in a pretty nice suburban area called Meguro-ku (Meguro Ward) about a 30-min train ride from the school building (plus about ten minutes walking...) The dorm is pretty nice, although we had a bit of a time figuring out some stuff, like how to work the heater (the remote was, go figure, in Japanese) and how to take a shower (you have to turn on the water heater manually on a panel outside the bathroom, rawr).
We have a stove and a little fridge and a toaster oven in the kitchen, so we've been creatively heating up the food we've been buying in the toaster oven. (We're not yet comfortable with cooking from scratch, so we've been buying ready-made bento-type things from convenience stores and munching on those instead. Mal made me promise to be an adventurous eater, so I'm proud to say my very first Japanese food I ate was a kabocha tempura, aka pumpkin tempura. (It was good, but veryyy pumpkin-y, so idk how often I'll be trying it.)
The toilet is in a different room from the shower and vanity, but it has a sink built into the top of it. (I'd prefer having a self-warming seat and having to walk to the other room to wash my hands, but whatever.) It's the first in what I'm sure will be a long line of cray-cray Japanese potties.
The bedroom is pretty much our center of operations - the heater's in here, so we usually keep the kitchen door closed and interweb away at our little table. Our beds are bunked and actually quite comfortable. The tv is also in here, but it gets about 10 channels (and half of them fuzzy) so we haven't really bothered with it.
Jenny and I have pretty much settled in, and we're getting along swimmingly. We had our first proper adventure the very first full day here, aka yesterday. After giving us a lecture about how Japanese people WILL leave you behind if you're running late, we made the mistake of being late to meet the group that was supposed to take us to the school for orientation in the morning. (7:45 after over 20 hours of traveling the previous day? rude.) Not one to allow myself to succumb to panic (at least as far as getting to places I need to be is involved) I grabbed a map we had been given before leaving (it was to give our cabbies directions to our dorm) and, crossing my fingers, we headed off to the station. we circled around it a bit before finding the entrance, but the paper we had also had directions to the school, so we hopped on the trains it told us to hop onto and voila! We arrived. So first morning here we got to experience the crazayness that is a train during Japanese rush hour - that is, smashed up against everyone else in the train, and deathly silent.
Orientation was relatively interesting but dragged on as orientations are wont to do. The basic things I learned from it are these: Go to Roppongi and I will be drugged and robbed and no one will care, and I am going to fail my Japanese class. As to the former, apparently the ubiquitous Japanese police force is fond of making sure foreigners are here legally, but not so fond of prosecuting foreigner-on-foreigner crime (apparently there is a lot of Russian crime syndicate activity in Roppongi?); as to the latter, this tiny hardassed Japanese lady came up to the front of the room to talk about the Japanese program, which was basically to inform us all that the language program here is harder than anything we could have possibly taken anywhere else, and that we should probably round down one or two classes at best if we wanted to not fail. "You can stay in the harder classes if you want to," she said, "but that's your choice, and when you fail, you won't be able to drop out, you'll get an F, and I will laugh at you." Like a tiny drill sergeant of the Japanese language. Terrifying. I am going to fail. (I'm taking a placement test today, but I'm not sure how well that will go. I can stay in AJII regardless of the results, but depending what the results say I may want to curl up in a corner and cry instead. :X
On a brighter note, tomorrow we're going on a tour of Shibuya, Ueno, and one other place that is either Shinjuku or Harajuku, and is probably Shinjuku. I am very excited :D And then Monday is a national holiday, so we don't start class till Tuesday, which means I don't start class till Wednesday :D Jenny and I are probably going to lay around like lumps on Monday (we've already planned it out) because we haven't really had a day to properly relax yet. Yesterday I went to bed ostensibly for a nap at 7 and slept through till this morning when my alarm went off at 9:30. :X
Things I'm still trying to get used to:
what time it is at home, for calling and skyping purposes
exactly how much a yen is worth in dollars and trying not to cry every time I spend them
Pictures will follow later, btw. I haven't taken that many yet because yesterday was so hectic that I didn't want to worry about photographing everything on top of all the stuff we were doing. :X
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