KyuPugh

Half My Students Can't and Won't Speak English

2013-07-17T11:14:00.000+09:00

The Japanese pre-college English education system is not about learning how to speak or understand English, it's merely about memorizing grammar rules and vocabulary and doing translation work. Consequently, the students at this school who are not in the English department have had almost no experience speaking or listening to English, and can only read and write it. Yet they are required to take a year of English Conversation classes. Many of them communicate with me in Japanese in class (if at all), or if they realize I don't actually speak Japanese that well, they use their dictionaries to create questions or sentences, write them down, raise their hands, then point to the sentence when I get over there. I always have to tell them, "Use your mouth." The whole thing is pretty dumb. I bet most of them have no idea why they have to take English courses. As a consequence of this bullshit, it becomes extremely difficult for me to teach them any actual English, because they are so unused to using it. Most of what I teach in these classes should be review and pretty easy for them, since they've been studying English for six years or so. But they can barely master "This is a ball" or "What color do you like?" They basically have the same apparent skill level as the seven-year-olds I teach on Saturdays, even though they have a wealth of knowledge in their brains.

For my non-English majors English Conversation course, I asked them to do a show and tell about one of the projects they made this semester. I told them to use simple English, and I expect sentences like "This is my art project. I made a picture of a zebra. I used pencils and paper," etc. But doing that requires thinking in English, which they can't do. So most of them just write sentences in Japanese and plug it into Google Translate or something similar. This is an example of what they come up with:

The project which I undertook is a picture-book. The unicorn made a hero's story. It became on group by three persons, division of roles was carried out, respectively, and it made. I bacame the charge describing an illustration. When drawing an illustration, the crayon and the colored pencil were used. Colorful and lovely use of color was used using many colors. The expression of the unicorn also took care so that it might draw lovelily (not sure where they got that adverb...). It took care also about fine places. such as a bodily color and accessories attached to a tail. It was able to cooperate in three persons and was able to make the very lovely picture-book. A result is also very satisfactory. Thank you for listening!

Japanese is a very formal language, so few things get translated as informally as they would be in English. So like, whatever the Japanese expression is for "I had fun" gets translated into "I experienced a pleasant time" or something unwieldy like that. It's terrible.

Nerrrrr

2013-06-27T18:51:00.001+09:00

Today one of the teachers gave a demonstration class, which is done every semester as part of teacher training. The teacher chooses one of her classes to demo, and the other teachers can observe, so they can learn about what's going on in other people's classes, provide feedback to the teacher on the lesson, and possibly learn a teaching trick or two.

Today's class was Discussion Skills, one part of which the students took a fun health quiz as a conversation starter. After everyone added up their scores, the teacher asked a few people to read the results key out loud, for example, "0-20 points: You are in the danger zone. You should exercise more," and "31-40 points: Not bad, but could be better."

Then she asked our weakest second-year student to read the last part out loud.

Teacher: Okay, so what's 51 or more?

Student thinks about it for a moment.

Student: Sixty!

Living in the Dormitory

2013-05-25T20:35:00.000+09:00

Since I was hired as a dorm teacher at this school, I am expected to live in the dorm with the students, as I've talked about before. I'm glad, for the most part, to be able to live here for free, because I save a lot of money in housing and utilities and I get two meals a day. There are a lot of downsides, though. Like the food--I don't really like Japanese food, and although the kitchen staff often make Western food, it's still dorm food. Furthermore, they seem to think that sodium is the life source of all humans--they'll combine both soy sauce and salt in dishes, for example, when soy sauce is plenty salty to begin with. They often combine soy sauce, salt, AND miso, and about 90% of what they feed us has ludicrous, LUDICROUS amounts of sodium in it. Because of that, and the general worthlessness of the Japanese (and Korean, and Chinese) food that they serve, I often have to go right up to the little teachers' kitchen and have some more (healthy) food.

Another downside is that no guests of any sort are allowed in the dorm without permission from the Sister who is the head of the dorm--and she would never give it. The only times non-residents are allowed in are when families are helping the girls move in on the first day (ONLY!!!) of orientation, when teachers or special guest speakers are invited to lunch or dinner (and they are restricted to the lobby and dining room), or when alumnae of the school come to visit. Other than these situations, NO VISITORS FOR ANYONE. This makes it very difficult for us teachers to have a social life. Although we could always meet friends out, it's nice to sometimes be able to just hang out and watch a movie or something. But no. I had to sneak Ed in on Christmas when he came to visit and had brought me some Western food that I wanted to transfer from our hotel back to my room. That's so lame.

The last downside is just generally dealing. This is the worst. Not only do I, anti-religious, have to deal with living under the rule of a bunch of nuns, I have to watch poor 18-20 year olds endure restrictions that would cause riots at American colleges. It's not that we're dealing with the stereotypical ruler-wielding nuns; quite the contrary. The Sister who runs the dorm and the Sister who is the president of the college are both very kind and friendly women (as seem to be most of the other nuns), but they both suffer from the delusion that their students are supposed to act like nuns and they also have a serious, serious displacement of priorities. But that's all a whole different issue.

Anyway, I took some photos of the dorm a few months ago, but hadn't gotten the chance to share them yet. Here's a picture of one of the unoccupied student rooms. It's quite small and the students sometimes complain about that, but for me, I'd much rather have a tiny room to myself than have to share a big room like I did for two years in college.

Like my room, they also have plenty of storage. Unlike me, though, they tend to fill up their spaces.

Each floor has a big fridge and sink for students to share.

There are two laundry rooms per floor, with two washers. Most people in Japan don't have a dryer--the room in back is to hang clothes. It's better this way. Korea is the same.

Here is the washroom, or bathroom. In Japan, "bathroom" still means "bath room," because the toilet is separate. I often confuse students when I talk about going to the bathroom.

Anyway, in the front there are three sink stations on each side, and in the back are two bath rooms.

The shower and bath are separate because Japanese culture dictates that you must be clean before getting in the bath. The bath is for relaxation only, not for cleaning. That's a terrible waste of water that almost every Japanese person contributes to. However, I do think they share bath water. The students only get twenty minutes for their shower and bath, quite short by Japanese standards. But Sister keeps a tight control over how long the boiler is on, so they can't take their time, and sometimes end up with cold bath water at the end that they can't warm up. I swear to god this woman is going to give herself an aneurism from how much she worries about bath time and that fucking water heater.

Here is a bathroom--I mean, toilet. There are two per floor. For some strange reason, one sink is hidden behind that little wall...

"Refuge course figure"

Each floor has a couple computer rooms, with what seem like ancient computers.

The dorm was renovated right before I got here last year, but since there are now fewer students enrolling, they didn't bother to renovate all the rooms. So here's what the old rooms looked like. Pretty 70s, I think.

Here is the lounge, which they are barely allowed to use. They only have free time from 7 to 7:30 and 9:30 to 10 (which is then STRICTLY ENFORCED bedtime) from Sunday through Thursday, but they're not allowed to watch TV after 9:00. On weekends, they have most of the day free, but they tend to escape their jail and go shopping usually. We do use the lounge for tutoring four nights a week, though.

This is their one study room (they have desks in their rooms, so this would be more often used if they had to work with others on something). The crazy thing about this is that they actually have to ask permission to use this thing during STRICTLY ENFORCED study time. WTF???? ASK to use the study room during study time? Inconceivable.

This is the dining room on the first floor. Ignore all the pillows. They were just being aired out during the vacation when I took the photos.

This little alcove is off to the side of the above photos. Back when there were 80-90 students in the dorm at a time, this was a normal part of the dining room, but now the main room is plenty big enough to hold everyone, so it's closed off with a curtain.

Those colorful tags have the names of everyone in the dorm on them. Students and teachers can cancel meals on weekends, so they put all the tags of the people eating on a tray and we have to put it back when we pick up our meal. They also use them to identify special order meals, like for those who have allergies or are sick. As you can tell from the size of the board, the dorm is operating at half capacity currently. The low enrollment numbers have been a problem for a few years now--this is a problem common to all post-secondary schools, because of the low birth rate, but here it seems to be exacerbated by the intolerable restrictions forced onto the students--conditions that the nuns absolutely refuse to change. It took ten years of badgering by teachers about the 7-day-a-week 6:00 curfew for them to finally "compromise" and change the weekend curfew during summertime to 7:00. Wow. Wow.

As is tradition in Japanese schools, there are no cleaning staff. Everyone who eats must wash her own dishes, then the students take turns by hall staying late and doing all the other cleaning in the kitchen that needs doing (although I think the kitchen staff wash anything they've finished with before serving starts).

Strangely, the girls are required to bring their own cups to school, and they keep them in this storage rack. As if the school couldn't spring for some cups. Further, students have to pay for any dish they break. That seems a little extreme, especially given how many extra dishes they now have due to low student numbers.

Here's the big kitchen that we teachers would never be allowed to use.

Here's the reception area, where Sister or her assistant (not a nun, thankfully) sits. If a student wants to go anywhere (except to class or to events that everyone attends), she has to sign out at reception. They are extremely concerned about liability and such at this school, so they always have to know where the girls are, specifically whether or not they're in the dorm. I don't know how having a book where they write their date and time of exit and then something like "go to shopping" helps them keep track of the students any better than just calling them on their cell phones in an emergency. It's very fascist.

In the cupboards, the girls have to put their indoor slippers when they leave. Each year the color of the slippers changes, so the blue ones belong to a second-year student. This is just one of several special pairs of shoes they have to buy to attend this school. These slippers are for wearing around the dorm (although the teachers just wear our regular shoes, negating the reason for indoor slippers), and they have a pair of white sandals that are their outdoor shoes for wearing to school. They also have to buy (expensive) black leather pumps for special events, job interviews, etc. and indoor sneakers for the annual sports festival, and presumably PE class. In Japan they treat their floors with such reverence and delicacy that they probably last at least two hundred years. All the shoes are of course in addition to all the uniforms they have to buy--summer uniform, winter uniform, job interview uniform. The uniform thing is a whole nother can of worms, too.

Finally, here's the front entrance of the dorm.

I enlarged this photo a little bit, because if you look closely, you can see the spikes. There are some giant spikes on the drainpipe below the lowest balcony, and another couple sets of giant spikes on either side of the gate. This is to deter boys, mainly, or lecherous men. On the back side of the building, one of the balconies that is low enough to be jumping or climbing distance from the ground is also bordered all around with giant spikes. Actually, I was told those particular ones were put in after one of the dorm teachers got caught trying to sneak her boyfriend in. HA.

And even from the bottom floor, we still get a pretty decent view of the volcano, Mt. Sakurajima, from the dorm, so that's pretty cool.

Purikura

2013-05-11T20:42:00.000+09:00

Purikura is something that seems to be only available in Japan. It's very popular with young people, especially girls. I imagine boys only do it with their girlfriends. "Purikura" is what the Japanese make of "print club." They have a tendency to shorten, blend, and mispronounce foreign words. It's supposed to sound like "pri-clu," but the way the language works they end up having to add a few letters in there that English-speakers wouldn't expect.

Purikura is a really advanced photo booth. They have them in big groups in arcades and other places where young people go. The booth is much larger than our photo booths, so you can easily fit six people in there, and squeeze maybe eight people in there. It's as well lit as a professional photographer's studio inside (and consequently pretty hot). The machine shows you a mirror image of the people inside, so you can pose and such, then it takes a picture. Repeat five times.

When all the photos have been taken, you go outside to a computer station, where you can use a program to change the color/pattern of the backgrounds, write and draw on the photos, add shapes, and execute effects. You have literally thousands of choices for what to do: the entire color palette for backgrounds a writing, dozens of background patterns and auto-shapes, dozens of pen effects, and quite a few effects, some of which are particular to certain machine. For each photo, you are allowed only like thirty seconds or something to finish altering it, then it automatically goes to the next photo. I assume this is so kids don't spend hours hogging the machines making artisan purikura.

Then a machine prints up to six rows of six tiny photo stickers on one big square, which you then take to a nearby counter with a bunch of scissors tied to it and cut off individual strips. It's kind of amazing that they can do things like that--in other countries either the scissors would get stolen or they'd be used for violence and/or vandalism. But Japan is a peaceful and trustworthy place. Anyway, in addition to getting the photo stickers, if you either enter in an email address or hold your smartphone up to a panel, the purikura will email you digital copies. The whole thing costs ¥400.

A few times last year, I took a purikura set with some of my students.

Here we see the background effects, Mickey Mouse shape, and some writing.

Shapes, and couple pen effects and colors:

As you can see, their English wasn't the best.

The lipstick effect is one that you have to go to a special machine for.

This picture is kind of amusing because we had just met some creepy guy in a convenience store ("konbini") and they thought he looked like a member of the Yakuza, the Japanese mafia. Chances were pretty slim, though.

In all these photos, there are two effects that the students always choose, which are "big eye" and "white skin." I think most booths have these effects turned on automatically, or you choose them when you put your money in in the beginning, because the photos always come out like this without altering them in the personalization program. Anyway, it's especially visible in this set. In most of the photos above, the perfect white skin is of course noticeable, but you don't necessarily notice that everyone's eyes are freakishly large. In some shots, though, it's really scarily obvious. Japanese girls have wicked complexes about their skin color and the size of their eyes.

Here is a split screen option option you can choose in the booth:

Another option you have when doing all the photo nonsense is getting a close up.

I sometimes have trouble with the timing of the photos. I think the giant flashes of light go off well ahead of when the photo is actually taken, so in this case I accidentally walked out of the shot just before the right moment. So I fixed it in post.

Here you can see a little glitch in the program, where there are some third eyes going on.

I think this series was the one I sent to my sister a while back, and she was like, jeez, do Japanese girls ever get pimples? But again, this is the result of giant lights and white skin effects, so they don't look this perfect in real life.

So these are the only purikura I have so far--three trips. I don't know yet if I'll do any with this year's crop of students, but maybe.

Fukuoka Cat Cafe

2013-03-28T22:08:00.001+09:00

Sorry, I totally forgot to put this in before I moved on to my February vacation. Going to the cat cafe was easily the best thing Ed and I did in Fukuoka. We found a few websites for cat cafes, and two of the places were in the same neighborhood, so we headed over there one day. One of the places was evidently pretty obscure, and we couldn't find it, but we did find the other one, called Neko Cafe Keurig. It was pretty cool. There were something like thirty cats in there, too, which is crazy.

After going in and putting on slippers, spraying our feet with disinfectant, and putting our stuff in lockers, we could choose our "menu" and pay. I think at most cat cafes, you can pay per hour or half hour to just play with the cats, but you can also get a "set." At this place, you could get a drink set, where you get a drink and an hour of play for I think it was ¥980 per person, or for a few hundred yen more, you could get a lunch set and have a meal. We chose the drink set.

Thankfully, water was free, because this was happening when we first sat down. When we got some new waters, it happened again later. My cats used to do that to my bedside water glass.

Here's a cat who looks like my cat Barrel, and who was pushy and bossy like Barrel, too.

Here's a nice looking cat.

This cat looks like a big ol' fatass, but actually was a very small cat. I don't know if it was just a naturally small one like my mom's cat Bob, or if it was a kitten. Maybe a kitten.

The cats have ridiculous amounts of things to climb and sit on.

And lots of toys.

Ol' Blackie.

There were even shelves running all along the ceiling.

And lots of beds that had from one to many cats in them.

Ol' Fuzzy Face.

There were a few piles of cats that didn't move the whole time we were there.

Barrel Lookalike was also a seat thief.

Well, they all were. I guess they're their seats, anyway.

This was funny. This cat was standing there, guarding the sink for so long. Then he left and another huge cat sat in that spot, guarding. It reminded me of Sam and George, the sheepdogs from the Warner Bros. cartoons.

I like the sneaky one.

Here is a series of focus-defying cats at play.

This cat looks kind of lonely, despite having a friend.

Ol' Cyclops. A lot of these cats are rescued.

Here you can see the cover they give you to put on your coffee cup. Water is expendable to thirsty cats, but when you pay ten bucks for a cup of coffee, you want to it to be free of cat tongues.

Blogger got kind of dumb in that it won't let me watch videos in editing mode anymore, and I don't want to go through and find all the files in my computer, so hopefully these are all amazing and totally worth watching.

After this experience, Ed got kind of obsessed with the idea of cat cafes, like how they get started, where all the cats come from, what happens if they escape, if they ever give any away, what the cat politics are with all those territorial cats living in one small place, how they handle discipline, etc. Then he wanted to make a documentary about it. Which is a good idea. I think he had even more fun than I did.

Kurokawa Onsen

2013-03-24T15:29:00.000+09:00

As I mentioned previously, I had booked a night in a traditional Japanese inn in a little hot spring village up in the northern part of the island. Because I had been too sick to travel on the day Ed and I were supposed to go, and because they were fully booked the rest of the time he was in Japan, I had to reschedule the reservation for a later date. It was too late to get a refund. Luckily, one of my Japanese friends at school likes hot springs (onsens) a lot and said she could go with me instead.

The name of the village is Kurokawa Onsen, which means Black River Hot Spring. Although there are other resort towns in Japan and specifically Kyushu, this is one of the better ones, because there is an understanding (or maybe legislation) there that prevents things like giant concrete hotels, billboards and neon signs, and even convenience stores. Everything in the area is in the same quaint style, made of stone or wood. The purpose of the village is to enjoy the natural hot springs that the inns are built around. This area is especially good because most of them also have rotenburo, outdoor hot spring baths. The best time to enjoy rotenburo is during the winter, because you can enjoy being outside and seeing a nice view, but not be too hot, as you would be in summer. The hot springs are really, really hot, hotter than a hot tub, so it works well with freezing temperatures.

Here are some photos I took of the village.

This is a little public foot spa, where you can just take a break and stick your feet in a little hot spring river for free, but it was closed, with no water running through.

Here's the little Black River that runs through the village. Most of the inns are situated along it or near it.

The village is so small they don't get a full police station.

There are more than 20 inns in Kurokawa Onsen, maybe about 30, all of which have a few onsens, and most of which have at least one rotenburo. You get free access to any baths that your own inn has, but the big draw here is that you can get a special pass called a tegata, made out of a tree cookie, that allows you access to three different baths for 1200 yen. Alternatively, each bath costs 500 yen. The tegata is popular because people like to see a few different baths to really get the most out of staying in this area. It's really expensive. Also, the baths are so hot that you shouldn't and can't really stay in most of them for more than 10-20 minutes, and walking to the next one gives you a chance to cool off so you can go again. Even in the depth of winter, people walk outside from hotel to hotel in just their yukata (a thin kimono) and sandals, because the onsen heats you right to the core and gets you sweating.

Here is my tegata. The white strip is where three stickers used to be. With each place I went to, they removed one sticker and put their hotel stamp on the cookie.

Misaki and I arrived at our inn around 2:00, an hour before check in. However, they let us check in early because it was the slow season, and they weren't full enough to warrant making us wait. I took some photos of our room.

This table is called a kotatsu, which I learned about from my students. It's a special two-layer table with an electric blanket set between the layers. It's pretty much the only way some Japanese people keep warm. Apparently the tradition is to sit at this thing with family or friends and eat oranges. I don't know why. Underneath this particular kotatsu is a hole in the floor where you can put your legs, like sitting at a regular table. I don't imagine it's set up that way in the home, though.

Wall scroll--much more expensive in Japan than in Korea, unfortunately.

Even though it's supposed to be traditional, we still had TV. I can't imagine anyone turning on a TV when you have all this other stuff to do, not to mention the views out the window.

Here are the famous rice-paper sliding doors that Homer Simpson crashes through in that one episode.

Our armoire was filled with little goodies like towels, socks you can wear with sandals, and maybe some toiletries.

As in every Japanese housing establishment, there is an electric kettle and a box of tea and tea accessories.

Our entrance had a little kitty on the wall and maybe a little shrine??

Here's the main room as a whole. If you notice there are no beds, it's because there are no beds. In this type of place, while you are away eating dinner, gnomes move the table off to the side and put out futons on the floor.

Sink area with lots of free toiletries.

Japanese style washlet, as it's called here, with three types of bidet functions.

Possibly humorous wall hanging for toilet.

There's no shower or bath in any of the rooms, of course, because the whole purpose of the place is to use the onsens. They have shower facilities by all the indoor and most of the outdoor baths, so that's where you would go to wash.

Here's the front of our room. The rooms aren't numbered, apparently, but named. Ours was called rindou (pronounced sort of like "leendoe"), which is a type of flower--gentian in English. I never heard of that flower.

Here are some views from our window.

Here are some shots of the hotel interior. It was pretty big, multi-building.

These are all little gods, I think.

This is a little study where you can read a book or something and get some free coffee. I got us some coffee at one point, but it was terrible. I was extremely pissed off about that, since the room cost almost $200 per person per night. Surely they could afford better quality coffee.

The main building and the branch buildings were separated by the river, so we had to go across this little bridge.

This is a bit of decor by one of the reception areas. From afar it just looks like a big turd, but up close you can see it's a bunch of horses.

I imagine they do something pretty fun at this table.

Here's the lobby in the building we stayed in.

With some views.

All around the grounds, along the river precipice, were little touches of quaint stuff, like this little spring. Sometimes these kinds of springs are meant to drink from, but I think this particular one was hot. I think I saw some eggs cooking in it the morning we left. That's common.

Here was our inn's own little foot spa, but we didn't bother to use it, since we had full body baths everywhere.

The ubiquitous Japanese koi pond.

This is the reception area for the main building. It seemed like a nice little place to hang out. If I were rich I would have stayed at this place a few days and chilled out on the grounds more.

There was a little model of like a traditional kitchen in there, too.

Later, the fire was going.

I've been working my way out backwards from my room to the main entrance, so we're back outside again.

This inn was special, too, because they welcomed pets. This little building near the entrance is a special dog onsen. No joke. You can see on the sign a dog bathing in the water.

Here's the inside. It was empty, so I guess they don't fill it up unless they have guests with dogs.

Here's the main gate, Yamabiko Ryokan on the sign.

Anyway, we had the whole afternoon to enjoy the hot springs at the other ryokan, so we bought a tegata from our place, chose three places we wanted to go from the brochure, and set off.

The first place we went to was at Ryokan Yumotosou, which had a rotenburo surrounded by a bamboo grove. It was very peaceful. This is a picture from the internets. Because it was the off-season, we didn't have to share with many people. All the baths we went to, by the way, were gender segregated, so there would always be at least one bath for men and one for women. However, gender segregation while bathing was something those dirty Christians (literally, as they thought bathing too much was unhealthy) introduced into Japan a few hundred years ago. Traditionally, men and women bathed together, as it's a natural, nonsexual thing to do, and there are still some mixed gender places you can go to--such as at several inns in Kurokawa.

The second place we went to was a bath that was voted in the top 100 onsens in Japan (Japan has thousands, so it's a big deal). It was a rotenburo at Ikoi Ryokan, which is unusual because the back part of the bath is deep enough that you have to stand--it was about shoulder height on me. There are two large bamboo trunks hung parallel across the top of the water by ropes, and you can hang on to them and do like water acrobatics if you want. Or you can just throw your arms over one, rest your head on it, and relax. Here's another internetto picture.

After this one, I was pretty hungry, so we took advantage of some of the ¥50 hot spring eggs outside the ryokan.

Right in the entrance area was this little building where you can sit down for a while.

On the left side was a foot spa with a table.

We sat on the right side, where there was a little room just like that model in the picture above. A dude came and started a fire in the center for us, and there was a big iron teapot hanging above it, which they still use to make tea. It was pretty cool, although I hate tea.

Then I had a nice cold drink from the spring. At these springs, there is always a little copper? cup on a stick, which everyone uses. It's pretty unsanitary, but they seem less concerned about sharing with strangers than we do. Since it's Japan, that cup probably does get washed at least once daily, too. They clean everything.

The third ryokan we went to was called Kiyashiki. This one was a bit out of the way, and we had to walk about twenty minutes or so, and up some big hills to get there. I liked this place the best, though. It had some streams of water coming down, so I was able to use them to massage my neck and back.

So after we finished using our tegatas, it was almost time for supper. Japanese traditional hotels like minshuku and ryokan often either include no meals or two meals--since the food at places like this is supposed to be really good, I went with the two meal option, which I think actually ends up being almost half the cost of the total bill. By the time it was time to eat, I was starving, so the food ended up being even better than it normally would have.

In a lot of ryokan, you get served your meals in your room. I would have really liked that, but I think maybe part of the reason this hotel was slightly cheaper than the other ones (as if) was that you don't get that benefit. We had to go to the main building to an area off the lobby to eat. However, each room does get its own private dining room, which is nice. Here's our rindou dining room.

Our meal consisted of several courses, laid out here on my own special menu. Unfortunately, I can't read it yet.

This was the first course. It's a big soup in the middle, and the black thing is a little barbecue to cook the little slices of beef and veggies on.

This is a specialty of the area--horse sashimi, raw horse meat. I really liked it, despite that I don't really like fish sashimi. But again, I was starving, so who knows how I'd feel about it now.

Pretty much everything in a meal like this can be eaten in one or two bites, which is good for picky eaters, since you don't have to deal with it for long.

The thing in the bowl is one of the few Japanese food I really like, which is some kind of egg pudding. That's also some more soup, and the requisite whole fish, all of which made another of the courses, or maybe it was two more courses...

More courses included a little plate of pickled items--the brainy thing was a plum, I think. Normally pickled plum is called umeboshi and it's freaking terrible, but this particular one was sweeter, so it wasn't bad. The other pickles I think I left, though.

Fruit and wagashi, Japanese traditional sweets, were the final course--I forgot to take the picture before I started eating it. I left the wagashi, the thing in the middle. Squishy "sweets" made of rice and/or bean paste are not dessert. They are fucking WORTHLESS.

When we got back to our room, the futon gnomes had already been there and put origami cranes by our pillows.

After resting a bit, we went to finally use our own ryokan's rotenburo, which ended up being full of torture. The other baths we'd been to all had changing rooms and lockers inside, where it was warm. But this one just had an open-air building to change in, with no heat, so now that we had cooled down from our earlier baths, and it was now dark, it was a very, very cold few minutes of getting undressed, walking up some cold stone stairs, and getting into the tub. Then the water ended up being even too hot for Misaki to tolerate easily, so we had to keep dumping buckets of the water on ourselves to try and get used to it before getting in, then slowly, slowly putting our bodies in. We were pretty pissed. But it was nice once we got used to it, and we were pretty warm for the next couple hours, especially since we got to use the kotatsu back in the room.

The next morning we got up early to shower properly and use one of the indoor baths before breakfast. Then we went back to our dining room for a traditional Japanese breakfast, which I was significantly less pleased with than the dinner, because I was less hungry. Still, there were some good things like poached egg, soup, salmon, and some vegetables. The problem with Asian breakfast is that it's not much different from Asian lunch or dinner. I've had this problem in Korea and other Asian countries, too. I think the staff were maybe surprised at the difference in the tiny amount that was leftover during supper and the large amount I didn't eat at breakfast, if they were paying attention.

So then after breakfast, we got our stuff together and checked out so I could catch a bus on to Fukuoka and fly to England to spend a couple weeks. I'll be blogging about that on Pughnited Kingdom, so czech that out next week.

Despite a couple minor annoyances on this trip, it was overall really excellent, and probably going to be the most memorable place I'll have been in Japan.

Fukuoka slash New Year's

2013-03-16T20:34:00.000+09:00

Fukuoka is the biggest city on Kyushu. It's a great place to go if you like getting free packets of tissues. Tissues are often used as advertising media in Japan, since some public bathrooms don't have toilet paper and it's good to always have some on you. People pass the packets out on the street, either with flyers or with mini ads tucked into the package. Sometimes you can also get free beauty samples in the same way, from workers just passing them out on the street.

Anyway, Ed and I were in Fukuoka on New Year's Day and the next few days after that. On New Year's Day in Japan, it seems like people are still hanging around at home, eating traditional foods. Most of them are dried or pickled, dating back to when people didn't have refrigerators and most stores closed on the day. They also eat things like sushi and sashimi, and mochi, that awful rice dough I got to pound with a mallet in Kumamoto. Glob, I hate Japanese food. Anyway, people are all about the firsts of the year--first trip to a temple or shrine, seeing the first sunrise of the year, first tea ceremony, and especially first shopping sale. I don't think the stores were open on the first, but on the second, it was frigging crazy.

We were walking by one of the big shopping centers, Tenjin Core, looking for some lunch or something, and there were so many people on the sidewalk that we accidentally got herded into the building. Here's a video of what happened. Notice the signs that force you to go one way, the packed escalators, and all the security dudes with megaphones.

Here's a shot of the sidewalk once we escaped through a different door. The cones are there to make a special line to get into the store at the front of the building. The place is so packed in the main corridors that you wouldn't be able to get to the door of this particular shop, so they made it its own entrance. Jeez.

Here's a shot of the exit-only that we took. You can see the jammed crowd inside.

When I first visited Fukuoka in 2009, I was only there for three nights, and there was a music festival happening all over the city. Consequently, Fukuoka seemed like a pretty cool place. I didn't realize that it's actually not all that cool to visit when there's no festival going on. It's mostly just full of giant shopping centers, which are filled with expensive stuff. It also has a good nightlife, it seems, with tons of bars and clubs, but almost all of them have a pretty high cover charge for absolutely no reason (i.e. there's no band or DJ there to justify charging customers to hear). There are a number of museums in Fukuoka, and we did manage to get to the Asian Art Museum after it reopened on the 4th, but other than that, they were all closed when we were there. So we spent most of the time just walking around, looking at stuff.

Here's a picture of Ed disrespecting a temple.

We saw Fukuoka Tower, but didn't go up there.

The tower has a special photo selfie spot, where you can put your camera on this little shelf and set it to take your picture, with the tower conveniently centered for you.

Here's the tower from afar. Nice view.

The reason we were by Fukuoka Tower was because Ed had read about this place called Robosquare, which has a bunch of robots that you can interact with and see demos of and stuff. This being Japan, we thought that would be pretty amazing. It was not, however. I had this image of an outdoor square, with like life-size robots doing stuff, and little robots wandering around doing stuff, and all that kind of thing. But in reality, it was just a room with a bunch of crappy small robots. At the entrance, there's a Hello Kitty robot that can respond to some simple commands like "What time is it?" (in Japanese), but it didn't move or do anything else. Siri is waaaay more advanced. Some of the other robots were just animals that moved a little and were soft, so people in nursing homes, hospitals, etc. could have something soft to touch and talk to without the risk and maintenance of a real animal. Basically, the most advanced robot in there was about that the level of a Furby. So if you're planning a trip to Fukuoka, I suggest you skip Robosquare.

Blah blah blah...

Easily the best thing we did in Fukuoka before Ed went back home was to visit a cat cafe. But that's a helluva lot of photos and videos, so I'll do that one next time.

Fukuoka Hotel and New Year's Eve

2013-03-15T20:22:00.001+09:00

On New Year's Eve, we moved on from Kumamoto to Fukuoka, on the northern coast of the island. I had actually visited Fukuoka before, for a long weekend with some friends when I was living in Korea. So I was sort of familiar with the city. Anyway that's not important. What's really important is that I had booked us for five nights at the Fukuoka Best Western, because it was reasonably cheap and in a decent location. I had read the reviews about the hotel, and pretty much everyone said how ludicrously small the rooms were, even by Japanese standards. But both Ed and I figured it wouldn't matter, since we'd be out of the room most of the time.

But man...

Our room so small, it's a quarter hallway:

Our room so small, it's got a SEMI-double bed:

Our room so small, it only fits half a chair:

Our room so small, the clock numbers have to be stacked:

Our room so small, we only get half a tissue box:

Our room so small, the fridge is just a door:

Our room so small, we get a trashcan off a Starbucks counter:

But we managed, of course. The bathroom was nice, anyway. Here's a picture of us after visiting a couple bars on our first night--which was New Year's Eve, as I mentioned.

As a side note, in Japan, they don't go out drinking with friends on New Year's Eve. They stay at home with family and eat soup. The noodles in the soup represent the crossing from the old year into the new. They also watch music and dance performances on TV, part of which we saw at one of the bars. Some people visit a temple or shrine at midnight, and at that time, Buddhist temples ring a bell 108 times, to represent the 108 shittiest earthly desires. It all sounds boring without alcohol.

Kumamoto Castle

2013-03-14T20:40:00.000+09:00

Man, this thing is killing me. I was having some neck problems for a while and then I was on vacation for three weeks, and now I'm struggling to recall events that happened like ten weeks ago.

Anyway, the whole stupid reason that Kumamoto was on our travel itinerary was because of Kumamoto Castle, supposedly one of the best castles in Japan. But when we got there we found out that it had just closed for New Year's and would not reopen until after we'd moved on. So I was pretty pissed about that. However, it was easy enough to get onto the castle grounds and take pictures from the outside. Let's just hope the inside is wicked boring.

I think this is the first part of the castle complex that we saw, and we were able to enter through a big gate somewhere.

Here is the main building in the castle from inside the gate, slightly photo-bombed by Ed.

It had a few satellite buildings like this:

And walls:

Then we got closer.

We tried to take a few selfies with the tower in the background, but Ed's giant head kept getting in the way.

Eventually he figured it out, though.

Here's the side of the building.

Then we were walking through some park or something and looked at it from a long ways off.

We did a nice selfie, then some that I ruined.

Then I must have been confused about something.

So now I'm getting my timeline confused, but at some point, we were wandering around Kumamoto, looking for the one museum that didn't explicitly say it was closed around New Year's. We got a little lost and were walking in some quiet area when I heard a little cry and my Kitty Alarm went off. Then we found this desperate kitty, who was crying nonstop and needing love. We stayed with it for a little while. Ed thought maybe the kitty had lost its peeps. It even followed us a little bit when we finally had to go. I hope that kitty found its peeps.

Here is an expression of my defeat when we finally reached the museum, which I think was a samurai museum, after like an hour of walking or something, only to find it closed. WAH' waw.

Something I Saw on TV

2013-02-12T23:15:00.001+09:00

So tonight I decided to turn on the ol' Japanese TV while I was making my supper. Usually I don't do this because Japanese TV is really terrible, at least the basic channels we get here at the dorm. The shows are mostly studio group talk shows with the same people on every time, I think, and they just talk about inane shit and watch demos and videos of other stupid stuff and react to it. It's so simple that even I, with my limited knowledge of the language, can understand a good portion of what's happening and what's being said.

But sometimes if I'm waiting for food to cook, I'll see what's on. Tonight on one of these stupid shows, a group of four people, three kids and an adult, were watching videos of these new inventions. The inventions were crazy.

The first one was a trash can that can move around and catch trash that you throw at it. The video was of a young geek (otaku) trying to draw some manga (comic book), but he kept messing up and had to throw a page away. He crumpled it up in the typical TV way, and tossed it blindly behind him. Then the trashcan slid about three feet from the other side of the room and caught it. Then he did it a bunch more time, with the trashcan moving all over the place to catch his papers. Then they showed that you can attach a sensor to your wall, which tracks the trash as it goes up, and figures out where it's going to land, then it sends the trash can to that spot. It didn't look perfect, because I saw the paper hit the rim once, but I imagine it catches stuff most of the time.

So the first reaction to that is of course, OH MY GLOB THAT IS AMAZING. But then the second reaction is, wow, that is really useless. Then the third reaction when they show you the price on the screen is, JESUS FUCK that's not even remotely worth it (about $500).

The second invention was actually quite useful, though. And simple. It's just a wide inflatable cushion that you put under your futon. Quick note here: In Japan, a futon is not a convertible bed/couch with a crappy mattress. It's a thinner version of that crappy mattress, which is traditionally put on the floor to sleep on, but nowadays is put on top of a Western-style mattress. So you could put this thing under it with no problem here. Anyway, you put the cushion under the futon at shoulder blade level, uninflated, and it's attached to an electric air pump and presumably an alarm clock. When it's time to wake up, the cushion inflates, lifting your futon and your upper body into a wicked arch. So you have to get up, unless you're really stubborn and curl up at the lower half of your bed.

The third invention, however, is neither cool nor useful, though. It's a fridge with a camera inside it at face level. Below the camera is a light display, which makes a square. When the lights make a square, the fridge is locked. In this demo, the studio group had to guess how you got the fridge to unlock. A couple people guessed that you had to do some sort of dance move, one boy guessed that you need a verbal password, and the last girl seemed to have guessed right, which was that you have to smile. Some sort of facial recognition software measures the intensity of your smile, too, so you can't do one of those obligatory flash smiles that I throw around at people. It's got to be 75% of maximum or greater, according to the animation. If you smile widely enough, the lights form a green smiley face and the fridge unlocks. That is retarded.

Side Note

2013-02-11T09:58:00.000+09:00

The other day I was out grocery shopping and there were two white-kid mannequins with giant creepy plastic smiles modeling school uniforms for the upcoming academic year (Japanese school begins in April), and the boy mannequin had been pantsed. HA HA HA.

Kumamoto Zoo and Botanical Gardens

2013-02-09T22:07:00.000+09:00

So as I mentioned before, one of the only things open to do in Kumamoto was go to the zoo, which was conveniently located on the tram line. Despite my standard inability to get out of the house before three, we managed to get there before lunchtime.

For cats, tail up = happy. For lemurs, hard to say.

Number of fucks this hippo gives: zero. The hippo's name is Momoko, and because I have two students named Momoko, I happen to know that it means "peach flower." Good name for a giant ugly crotchety animal.

Ed and Momoko are bros. This was taken before we learned the hippo was a chick.

Rhinos have big square heads.

I was trying to head butt the rhino.

One of my students this year looked like a capybara.

Really, she looked remarkably like this picture. I wish I could show you.

For lunch we found a fast food joint that had this sinister ET with chibi-Pooh. Chibi is an art style used in anime and manga that depicts characters as small and cute. Nice juxtaposition here.

Also, this:

I see Apple has made its way to the zoo.

This is me being very excited about the snow leopard. It was very cute.

Nothing like the back of a lion.

Here's a bear. I felt pretty bad for it. Of all the animals in pretty small cages, this one seemed the most distraught about it.

Also, it seemed that there had been another bear who had died. People had left flowers and some honey in memoriam.

Momoko, continuing to give zero fucks.

In the zoo, it is unacceptable to climb fences and stick your tongue out at the animals. You must stand away from the fence, holding your hands placidly behind your back. B-boy style acceptable.

Swan babies are called cygnets. I had forgotten that. The cygnets of black and white swans look similar, I think.

This animal is BORING. Unacceptable.

It is also unacceptable to kick cans at the bears, for they will cry, get wounded, and sprout wings and a fluffy tail.

We kept seeing these smoking stands with poetry on them. It's hard to know if it was intended as poetry in Japanese, though.

This guy.

I think this is one of the many types of pheasants. That's crazy man.

If you feed a pony, your finger will explode and you will cry. Your pigtails will try to escape your head. The sight of candy in a plastic bag will cause the bear's stomach to emit radio waves, which will embarrass the bear.

There was a petting zoo in the zoo. As a result, I got to pet this pony.

They also whipped out a bunch of guinea pigs for little children to pet. I was offered a try, but I'm not that into guinea pigs. They just fearfully say "weet weet" and poop on you. Hence the little white towels on the children's laps.

This is the Friendship Pavilion, for some reason.

Here I am shaking hands at the Friendship Pavilion. That's how you make friends.

After that, we wandered around the botanical gardens for a while. Outside, there were some fruit-bearing trees, and I picked a kumquat offa one, even though I figured you probably weren't supposed to do that. But when I ate it it tasted really bad, so I spat it out on the ground. Ed seemed to think that whole series of actions was very American.

Then we went into this building and looked at some photographs of the zoo and walked around the greenhouse for a bit. There was a waterfall.

Then I took some selfies and Ed was very surprised.

He photobombed me once.

Then there was this tree.

Then I kept trying to take some more selfies in front of these cool leaves, but I kept doing it too fast, and they all came out a blur of plant art, so then I took this sad selfie, but it doesn't look particularly sad, because I was in a hurry and I didn't have time to make it look sincere.

Cac and balls, HA HA HA.

I forget what the premise of this photo was, but it turned out nicely.

This is a view of everything we saw, from above.

We seriously almost left the zoo without seeing some important animals. The Ape House was disguised as a restroom and nursing area, so we didn't realize that if you went up the outdoor stairs and followed a path of painted footprints, you could actually see some apes. The chimps seemed kind of listless, though, and we didn't see their feeding show or whatever because we didn't want to wait around.

I don't really like banana that much, but I like it as a topping on cereal or ice cream.

We had seen the flamingos from afar, but it was through the ape house that we were able to get up close and take pictures.

Then we passed Momoko again, giving perhaps one fuck.

Then we started talking about Thundercats.

Then we saw the penguins before we left. We had tried to find them before, but their habitat was cleverly hidden.

Suddenly, a penguin shot out a nice stream of piss, and I took a picture of it dissipating in the water.

These penguins seem very happy, but they might not really be happy.

The End.

Kumamoto Promenade and Crushing Disappointment

2013-01-20T09:45:00.001+09:00

After our few days of kicking it in Kagoshima, we were off to Kumamoto in the central area of Kyushu for three nights. Kumamoto is famous for one of the best castles in Japan, and it also has a zoo and some museums and such.

One of the first things we did when we got there, in order to find food, was to walk around a nearby shopping promenade, where we found a restaurant with a statue of a really ecstatic chef (although for some reason we never ate at the restaurant). Naturally when you see a statue with a funny pose, you take a picture of yourself and/or someone else mimicking it. So that's what we did. Except at first Ed's camera was set to video when he handed it to me.

Then I reset it to photo capture, but notice the anguish and desperation in Ed's face as he tries to copy what must seem like a very complicated pose.

And then there's me. First time. Nailed it.

I kinda wanted to try again to really get all the angles right and to open my joyful mouth a bit wider, but by then the whole thing was getting old, and a lot of people had been staring judgily at us for a few minutes. So we moved on.

Somewhere in the promenade was a mochi shop that was attracting a lot of tourists. "Mochi" usually gets translated into English as "rice cake," but it's not the kind of rice cake that we think of when we imagine diet food. It's more of a squishy, tasteless rice dough, which is used in ball form in soups, or it can be filled with sweet red bean paste (gag me with a spoon) as a confection, and it's used in lots of other awful Japanese foods. This shop makes mochi in the traditional way, which involves pounding the dough with giant wooden mallets, which they let tourists do. So that's worth a stop. Here are a couple videos of me pounding the mochi and then getting a little gift of mochi (which I later threw away because it's gross) from the shop.

Now, had I known a key fact that I did not know before booking this whole vacation, I would not have booked this vacation, and we would have gone to Thailand or something. The key fact is that seemingly every public place of tourism, such as museums, zoos, aquariums, and castles, close over New Year's for at least two or three days. But sometimes as long as two weeks. We caught a little of this in Kagoshima when we tried to go to the art museum and it was closed. But we didn't realize the extent of it until we got to Kumamoto.

After a bunch of walking around our first evening there, and getting supper and so forth, we went back to the hotel to make a plan for the next two days. But then we found out that the main attraction, Kumamoto Castle, had been open for the last day of the year on that day, and we missed it. It wouldn't reopen until after we were gone. Then we found out that all the museums we wanted to go to were also closed until after we were gone. The only major tourist attraction that was open was the Kumamoto Zoo and Botanical Gardens, and we were lucky to catch that, because the next day would be the last day open before closing for a few days.

So next time I'll talk about the zoo. It was pretty cool.

Kagoshima Christmas

2013-01-14T21:39:00.001+09:00

For Christmas and New Year's, Ed came to visit me in Japan. First we stayed a few days in Kagoshima so he could rest up a bit from travel and see my town. Then we were actually supposed to go to a really awesome little village called Kurokawa Onsen, which is a place with a whole bunch of traditional Japanese inns with hot springs. It's extremely expensive, but that was going to be our splurge for just one night. Unfortunately, I got sick from eating too much unhealthy restaurant food, and it wasn't a good idea for me to travel that day, so we stayed in Kago one extra day. We tried to reschedule, but they were all booked up for the next two weeks. Their policy was no refund if you cancel the day of the booking, so I will end up having to go either by myself or with one of my coworkers next month.

Anyway, here are some of the pics from our few days in Kagoshima.

First is of our time at a nice buffet. Actually, most of these are gonna be restaurant pictures, I think. We didn't really do much for this leg of the trip.

The best thing about the buffet, and almost the trip, was this chocolate fountain. It was like everything I'd ever dreamed of. It could have only been improved by what they had provided for you to hold under it, which I think was only a few pieces of fruit. I got them, though. I found some pancakes and stuck a spoon under the fountain and drizzled some of the chocolate onto the pancakes and put some blueberry jam on it. Yeah.

Here are some shots we took to serve as Christmas photos for Ed's dad and possibly other family.

These two probably won't make it to the fam.

Across the road was a nice hotel, which somehow arranged their room lights into a heart shape. We were wondering how they could manage that. Like, you could always block the heart rooms from being booked and then leave those lights on, but how do you ensure that it's only a few satellite lights on, like in the picture, and not so many as to obscure the shape?

Here's another boring torii, right in town.

I took Ed over to my campus and showed him my office on Christmas afternoon. Then we had to sneak into the dormitory where I live so I could drop off all the Western food items he'd brought for me. Visitors of any kind, especially the male sort, and probably most especially the young(ish) boyfriend sort, are expressly forbidden in the Catholic dorm, even when all the students are away on vacation. However, it being Christmas, I knew that the nun in charge of the place would be off doing nunny things, and even if she was in the dorm, she wouldn't be up on the fourth and fifth floors where my room and kitchen are (and the fourth floor has the back entrance, so we didn't have to sneak by the main entrance, where she might have been). I'm such a rebel.

The point of that story was to introduce this picture, which Ed took of me petting one of the couple dozen neighborhood cats around campus. I call this one Tripod. If you look closely, that back leg is cropped halfway.

Something strange that I learned about Japan is that even though pretty much no one is Christian in Japan, Christmas is getting pretty popular around here. I imagine companies figure it's a good marketing holiday, which of course it is. So that's why we were able to take our pictures with Christmas trees outside the shopping center and so forth.

However, unlike Murrkan Christmas, Japanese Christmas is not a family affair. It's actually more like Valentine's Day, because Christmas is associated with couples here. If I would ask my students if they had plans for Christmas, they'd often say, No, I don't have a boyfriend. Apparently the thing to do is spend it with your significant other and give a gift and some chocolates or something, and the big thing is to eat Christmas cake. It's not fruitcake; it's just boringass white cake with white frosting, usually with strawberries and Christmas designs. Here are a couple examples from Google.

And then here's an alternative chocolate cake. Notice the price. That's almost 40 bucks. Cake is expensive in Asia. And so is everything else. Except electric space heaters. I got one and the price was acceptable.

Jenna, the other dorm teacher who is also American, told me that one of our students almost cried when she told her that Americans don't really eat Christmas cake like this. I think if she knew the full extent of American Christmas, she would probably cry that she only gets some stupid cake. Ha.

Another thing to do on Japanese Christmas, for reasons known only to the gods of capitalism and marketing, is to go to KFC. The Colonel statue is outside dressed in a Santa costume starting in October/November, and they have all these Christmas family sets ready to go on the day. Ed and I had gotten kind of tired of searching around three times a day for a meal, so we decided to do the traditional thing and eat fried chicken. Also, I secretly wanted to eat KFC because I love it and I hadn't been there in a long time.

It was kind of disappointing, though. When we got in there, it was pretty busy, but we didn't understand the menu. It seemed like all they had were 3000-piece family meals made of nothing but various incarnations of fried chicken and maybe some fried fish, too, it being Japan. There did not appear to be any side dishes available. Eventually we managed to find "peiya paku," as well as a cooler with some cole slaw and drinks. So we did that. Apparently there are no mashed potatoes and gravy or biscuits at Japanese KFC, which basically defeats the whole point. After we'd decided what to get and got up to the cashier, he gave us a small counter-menu, which is common at Japanese fast food, and that actually had a couple extra side dishes, like potato wedges and corn soup or something. But it still wasn't right, so we went with the original choice.

Here we are enjoying our food.

I was extremely surprised to find that a pair pack, obviously meant for only two people, was easily enough for three Western people. You could have fed an army of Japanese people with what we got. It was crazy. There were like three kinds of fried chicken--nuggets, tenders, and a couple drumsticks--plus a big roasted thigh. I think this meal was a large contributor to my sickness two days later.

During the meal, a Japanese woman came up to us and nervously told us in hit and miss English that we were such a cute couple and that I looked like Anne Hathaway from Les Miserables, which she had just seen and was able to show us a flyer of. I thought she was trying to say that we looked like the couple from the movie, but when I read the synopsis, it didn't look like there really was a couple, so I guess I misunderstood. In any case, in Asia, when I have the haircut of an actress, I look JUST like the actress, because we're all white chicks, I guess. In Korea I was Ashley Greene.

The day after Christmas we went on the ferry to Sakurajima (Cherry Blossom Island) to see the volcano. We took a selfie on the mainland first, though.

Near the port there is a little park, and on the way there, we met some kitty friends. There are a few friendly cats on the island.

In the park is a little foot spa (chutzpah), where you can stick your feet in and enjoy the hot spring water and the view over the bay. It's especially good in winter, which it is right now.

Then we went on a little walk on the lava trail, where you can see a nice view of Mt. Sakurajima and look at all the lava that previously erupted all over the island.

Here's a map of the ol' island. I wish it were small enough to walk all the way around, but it would be a good long day of walking, I think, or maybe a bit more, so I'll never get around to it.

Kagoshima is famous for shirokuma (polar bear), which I think I've mentioned previously in the blog. It's shaved ice with condensed milk poured over it, with little bits of fruit and gelatin (and sometimes sweet beans--GROSS) stuck all around it. The original is made to look like a polar bear, but now they have other flavors, like the one we got, which has chocolate syrup and cereal on top of it also. Here are pictures of us enjoying our shirokuma.

Another food experience we had was shabu-shabu. This is a popular Japanese dish, and one of the few that I actually like. Ed had never had it before, so I was glad we managed to find a place. Shabu-shabu is a soup that you get to make at your table. They bring out a nearly flavorless broth for you, and you boil it at the table, then there's a plate of very thinly sliced pork and a bunch of leaves and other vegetables to throw in there, too.

You're supposed to simmer the ingredients in the broth for like ten minutes or something to make it more flavorful, so here are some shots of us sadly slash impatiently awaiting our meal.

After you eat all the solids out of the soup, one of the traditional things to do is order rice to go in it, and you can also put egg in there. We kind of didn't know the protocol there, so we ordered onigiri (rice triangles with a garnish) instead, but then the waiter was asking us if we wanted the rice IN the soup, so we were like, yeah, that's what we really wanted anyway. The first part of that event was out loud, in Japanese, and the second part was more internal, in English. Then the owner or manager came out and took charge, presumably because she figured we wouldn't know what to do. She emptied out most of our broth, and put in the rice and poured the beaten eggs in all around, and cooked it for us. It was good.

We had a conversation with her in Japanese about what we were doing in Kagoshima and about my job and how long I've been there and where Ed was from and so forth. It was a little rough, but a pretty good accomplishment for me, considering how little I've had time to study.

After five days in Kagoshima, including my sick day where we just stayed in bed all day watching Nova and stuff, we moved on to Kumamoto, up near the middle of the island. I'll get to that next time.

Kumano Kodo Part 3: Hiking Day 3

2013-01-11T19:15:00.005+09:00

I've decided to skip the second day of hiking, because nothing happened and it's mostly just pictures of trees. It's the same with the third day, but at least there are some stairs and a waterfall, too.

Here's a view from the beginning of the trail we took. I think this was from a road that led to the trail or something...

Another boringass torii, but I like bridges.

These two big trees mark the beginning of the trail. The trail we took was quite popular, and for a while we were kind of walking with a big tour group. I think we managed to pass them shortly, though. It was mostly old people.

The red umbrella is from the hotel--we were at a different hotel for this hike, about a thousand times bigger than the minshuku. It was its own city, pretty much, on an island. Anyway, it was rainy that day, so I borrowed a hotel umbrella.

Gnome residence.

I think most or all of the trail was a rock path, so it made it easier to walk on, except for being slippery when wet.

Hollow tree.

I got quite a few shots of fog around the mountains that day, so that was okay.

View of a torii from above.

Here's another bright red shrine that a bunch of tourists were hanging around at.

Right next door was a Buddhist temple though, that another bunch of tourists were hanging out at.

There's the waterfall we were hiking to. They had a "free" photo service where they'll take your picture at this photo spot with the waterfall. First they'll snap a couple shots with your camera, then they'll take one with their camera and you are kind of pressured to buy it for like ten or fifteen bucks or something. I didn't cave, though. That's too damn much for a stupid photo.

Then down a hill a bit was a pagoda and some gardens and a Buddha and such.

This guy is rolling a wheel in that monolith. I think you're supposed to pray while you roll it.

And finally, some waterfall. It was nice, if you like falling water.

And what waterfall would be complete without a giant crane right next to it.

These stairs were pretty cool, though.

Kumano Kodo Part 2: Hiking Day 1

2013-01-06T17:17:00.002+09:00

Sorry, I haven't had time to update a lot lately, so now I'm four months behind on this bitch. I'll try to catch up.

Anyway, the areas where we went hiking are called Kumano Kodo, as I mentioned in my last post, and the whole area is trails scattered with Shinto temples and Buddhist shrines. I really hate shremples, but it's the price you have to pay if you want to enjoy nature (or anything) in Japan.

Here's the entrance to the temple at the beginning of our first hike. Shrines have these large gates called torii, so they're easy to find.

At any shrine there's going to be some bullshit in the form of souvenirs and fortunes before the actual shriney part.

Then you have to wash your hands and your dirty, dirty mouth out with this natural spring water.

Then you can go in and have a look around, light some incense or something, and pray. I don't know, man.

If you get a fortune, you're not allowed to leave with it. You have to fold the paper and tie it up here. I think the wooden blocks can be bought to write a prayer on, or just a message.

This rock shows the name of the trail we were on, but it's kind of hard to read.

This is a stamp station. Apparently you can use a special ink stamp at each of the Kumano trails as a souvenir, but I didn't bother with that.

Here are some shots from the trail. They're all kind of samey, but it was certainly a nice walk in the woods.

This is a blue-tailed skink. I thought when I took this picture it was some sort of salamander, but I just looked it up. Then I remembered that in Korea one of the animals featured in one of the textbooks I taught was a blue-tongued skink. Then I was like, yeah. That's cool.

Here is a view from somewhere.

Part of our walk was on streets through neighborhoods and farms and stuff. In a couple areas there were these really freaky "people" set up to greet tourists and maybe to scare crows.

This is a tiny shrine for people to pray for the health of their teeth. I guess it was started before dentists were invented.

This was the first time I'd ever seen tea growing, I'm pretty sure.

I also got to see the harvest and preparation of rice in various stages, which was kind of cool. Here it's drying.

Here's a little mountain cafe that we stopped at for an ice coffee and a cool-down.

Views from the cafe.

And... more trees.

This area is also famous for crows, although there's been no shortage of crows anywhere in Japan so far. What's special about these crows, though, is their mythical third foot. Apparently this guy is supposed to be a symbol of divine will. You can buy three-footed crow junk at all the shops.

This was one last shrine before the end of the trail.

The cleansing fountain had some cool dragons in it, though.

After this one trail, we took a minor detour down to this torii in the distance.

Here there were some people harvesting rice. Some people were cutting it by hand. It looked backbreaking.

Beyond the torii was another sacred site with its own name and rock, but it mostly looked like a park.

This is pretty boring for me. I think I'll try and rush through the rest.

Kumano Kodo Part 1: Minshuku

2012-12-02T15:49:00.004+09:00

Sorry, still catching up on my summer vacation. It's busy during second semester at this school, apparently...

The last adventure I had during my summer break was the second week of September, hiking on some World Heritage trails called Kumano Kodo in the Kii Mountain Range, a couple hours outside of Osaka. The trails are pilgrimage routes and along them are some sacred sites, where temples and shrines are located. I went with my teacher friend Misaki, and she planned the whole trip, so I just had to tag along, thankfully.

We stayed in two different places, one inland, and one on a small island. In the first place, we stayed at a minshuku, a traditional Japanese guesthouse. It's pretty simple stuff. You get a small room, and as many as can reasonably fit are allowed to stay in it. However, the price doesn't change depending on how many people stay there (or rather, it does). In Japan, guests are charged per person, not per room, which is partly why Japan is so expensive for tourists, I imagine.

In a minshuku, there are no beds. You are greeted in the bare room with the correct number of neatly folded futons, complete with bedding and a small pillow, plus the correct number of yukata (light kimono), one per person per night. Ha.

Basically the only furniture in there was this little table that had our tea set and electric kettle, and some tourist info.

I didn't get a shot of that fourth corner for some reason, but to the left of this frame is a safe with a little tv on top. I guess you could consider the safe furniture if it's holding the tv.

I believe in the past, toilets were shared among rooms, but in more modern setups, each room gets its own toilet. To save water, there is a little faucet on the back of the toilet, as you can see. The water that refills the basin comes out of there, and you can use it to rinse your hands off. But you probably can't use soap for toilet water, so I don't see what the point is. There are so many things about Japan that just boggle me. Also, there's not proper sink to go with this toilet, so I have to go out of the room down the hall to the shared sink to wash my stupid hands, anyway, and to do other sink-related things like brush my teeth. On the up side, when toilets aren't primitive porcelain holes in the floor, they're these new-fangled "washlets" that have functions like seat-warming and bidet. It's funny.

In Japan, all bathrooms seem to have special bathroom slippers. They had this in Korea, too, but usually just in people's home bathrooms, because Korean bathrooms are just a big wetroom, and the shower gets the whole floor wet for half the day. But in Japan, it's because bathrooms (and by "bathroom" I of course mean "toilet room") used to be outside, and were considered dirty. When they eventually got moved inside the house, they were still considered dirty, even though at this point they're probably no dirtier than any other floor.

This minshuku toilet is no different, even though it's just this tiny, tiny room. When I first went in there, I was like, why are the bathroom slippers Holmes and Watson??!!

But upon closer inspection, it's Lady and Gentleman. Sorry, Holmes.

So let's have a gander at the rest of the minshuku. This is the exterior:

This is the cluttered-ass lobby, where you can get some free tea and coffee and just hang out.

And connected to the lobby are the bathrooms. I think it wouldn't quite be a proper minshuku if they didn't have a public bathroom for each gender. No private showers like in Western hotels. I didn't take a picture of the inside, but for each one, you go through the curtain and open a sliding door that goes into what I guess you would call a powder room. It has a couple sinks and a big mirror, with hair dryers and grooming products, plus towels and such. Then another sliding door leads into the bath area, where there are three shower stations along the wall, and one bath, much like the onsen in Ibusuki, except a quarter the size. The bath is filled with hot spring water, and consequently I couldn't take a bath in it, because it was scalding hot. There is a cold tap available to cool it off, but in a tub that deep, it would take forever to get it down to a reasonable temperature. So I just took showers. Misaki said the bath temp was just right for her, but I guess being Japanese, she's used to scalding hot onsen baths.

At a minshuku, you also typically get breakfast and dinner included in your price. Our dinner was beef, famous in the area, with tofu soup, some pickled vegetables (meh), rice NATURALLY, and some other fresh vegetables.

The soup stays hot via a little candle beneath it, and the same type of candle heats the mini-grill for the meat and vegetables.

By this time in the year, it had become the off-season, so the only other guests were a bunch of guys that Misaki joked looked like they were from the Yakuza, the Japanese mafia. But then we joked that Yakuza guys could probably afford a more expensive place to stay. Anyway, here's a shot of their meal. I think it was the premium option, where we just had the ol' standard.

Breakfast was a mix of Japanese and Western style. The Japanese have started to adopt toast as thing, but they haven't really figured out whole grain toast yet, just white. I have to pay about $1.50 for three slices of what I HOPE is whole grain brown rice bread out here, so I'm not POISONING my body with inferior white bread. I'm not sure if the fried egg is a Western influence, or if they've been doing that. Pile of cabbage in the morning is not the best, though.

Our second night we were sent next door to a restaurant for dinner, because apparently they needed our dining room for setup of some major lunch boxes for the next day or something. We had what I remember to be an almost identical meal as the night before, except they gave us some sake, I think, and I hated it of course. They also gave us water with a charcoal filter in it. That was kind of a strange thing.

This minshuku was located on a little river, which made for some nice scenery. There were also some cool hawks swooping and screeching around.

In this river there were a lot of hot springs scattered about in the water. On the right of this picture, where the rocks are, are a couple of private baths constructed by the residents of the house that's just out of frame. At one point I was out snapping shots of the area, and realized that there were a bunch of naked people in the baths. So I had to stop taking photos in that direction.

Unfortunately, question mark?, the river was running pretty low.

But that may have made the hot springs more accessible. Here you can see a little outline where there were some rocks built up under water to make a bath. It captures the hot water from the several tiny springs inside, so if you go in there, it's nice and warm, but if you try to swim outside it in the river, the water gets pretty cold, pretty fast. Even though it was still quite hot out, the unspringy water was too cold for me to swim in.

Along the bank, guests from all the minshukus along the river made their own little baths. I tried some of them, including the one above, and it was pretty neat. I wished I'd brought my bathing suit, but I just wore some shorts and a tank top, and no one seemed to care so much that I was either scantily clad, or not wearing a proper bathing suit. The Japanese are so sensitive about such things usually.

I don't think this photo has any significance.

While we stayed at this place, we went hiking at one of the Kumano Kodo trails, but this has already been a lot of pictures and writing, so I'll do that next time. It's even more pictures.

Ibusuki

2012-11-11T20:42:00.000+09:00

Onsens, hot springs, are pretty common around Japan, but they're especially common in this area, because of the active volcano nearby. However, there is a town not too far away from Kagoshima called Ibusuki which is one of the few places in Japan where you can go to a sand onsen. It's supposed to be a cool (but hot) thing to do and good for your health. Asians think everything they do is good for your health, though. Also famous in Ibusuki are floating noodles, an interesting way of eating somen noodles (I think it was somen...).

I had been hoping to get down to Ibusuki at some point during my time here, and luckily over summer break, one of my Japanese teacher friends had to drive down to check up on one of our students who was doing an internship at a hotel there. So she invited me to go along.

On the way, we stopped at a rest stop and I took some pictures of Mt. Sakurajima from afar. It looks much smaller when it's not a swimmable distance away.

Here are a views from a couple other directions at the rest stop.

When we got to Ibusuki, if I remember right, we first stopped at the hotel, got a tour from the manager (it was a pretty cool hotel), and then sat down with our student for about 20 minutes. They were speaking all in Japanese, except for occasionally saying something in English to me, so I didn't understand much. Apparently the student didn't have a single good thing to say about the experience, and felt like every day was excruciatingly long (although she'd only been working there ten days at that point, in a two-week gig). I guess she won't be going into the hotel business.

After that, we went to a nice floating noodle restaurant, one side of which was a big stone wall with waterfalls and a little crick with fish.

It's a water mill.

Each table has a little circular river apparatus, with a trap door. When you lift up the flap, everything drains into the center and goes down a drain to the trash.

Then when you close it, cool water rushes around endlessly.

Then the waitress brings a basket of noodles, which you can toss into the water. Then you just grab a bite's worth of noodles with your chopsticks.

We also ordered some other stuff, which was okay. I'm not too keen on onigiri (rice triangles), but I had some, and we also had some sweet potato things, which were good.

After lunch, we went over to the sand onsen. It's a bit pricey, 800 yen compared to around 360 for a regular onsen bathhouse, but it's novel, so they can charge more. The deal is, you put on a yukata, which is a light robe, and some slippers, and you get covered in wicked hot sand by old people.

Under the canopy is a line of people, side by side, covered in sand, and the old people are hanging around there with shovels, working up and down the line as people come and go.

Actually, there were only maybe three other people there when we got there. You are only supposed to stay in for ten minutes, fifteen tops, so people come and go pretty quickly.

The deal is, the onsen provides the yukata and slippers, but you have to bring your own small towel. An old person wraps it around your head/neck and you have to hold the corners with your teeth. I guess this is so you don't get sand in your hair. Once they cover you up at the top, you can let go, and the towel stays where it is, because of the sand all around. Then they take your picture if you've brought a camera.

The sand is quite hot, heated by the hot water below the surface, and you have to wriggle around in there sometimes to make sure you don't get burned. I actually did get burned a little bit in one spot, but nothing major. We stayed under for about 12 minutes. I probably could have gone a little longer, but that was enough for Misaki, so I figured I'd get up, too. Apparently some people find the experience like really profound and the heat affects them and they get all zen or something. But it's just sand, man. I just felt like I was covered in hot sand.

After the sand-covering, you're all covered in sand, so you can go to the little bathhouse to clean off. It's a thing. First there's a little tub with buckets and scoops, and you have to take off the yukata and put it in a special basket, then dump water on yourself to get all the sand off. Then you can rinse off in the shower and get into the bath to soak. In these types of baths, you can't use soap in the shower, because the water is all recycled and they don't want it contaminated. So you're not exactly clean when you leave, but good enough. We were fortunate enough to be alone at this point, so I took advantage of the situation and snapped a couple shots of the bathroom, never having been able to do that before due to privacy issues. Unfortunately this bath isn't anything to write home about.

Outside the building is a view of Mt. Kaimon, which is called the Fuji of the South, because it has a very similar shape. You can see all the steam rising from the hot water below. Crazy, man.

They use the water to boil eggs, which you can buy for 50 yen apiece. Ha.

After this, it was time to go home. We stopped at another rest stop by the famous Lake Ikeda, which has the Japanese version of the Loch Ness monster, Issie. Here's a statue of Issie. The lake also has these giant eels. Screeching eels. So you can't go swimming in there, although some people fish.

Tankuki village. Scary.

Here are some more shots of Mt. Kaimon and Lake Ikeda.

It looks like a nice lake.

The End.

End Bali Communication

2012-10-26T20:24:00.001+09:00

On our last day in Bali, we did a full spa day. In Ubud there are tons of spas, and they're wicked cheap. We chose Eve Spa and got a five hour package. This included free pickup from our hotel, then body massage, body scrub, a soak in a bath full of flower petals, facial, hair creme bath, manicure, pedicure, and also tea and a snack and lunch. All for under sixty bucks apiece. Insane. May be worth going again and just doing a week full of spa days, HA.

Here are a few pics of Eve Spa. Nice place.

The only issue with their thing is that we had to eat lunch in the lobby, at the coffee tables. It kind of undoes part of the massage if you have to lean over for 20 minutes while you eat.

Mom getting a creme bath, including scalp massage.

As a final note, Ubud also is a big producer of excellent wood carvings and furniture. Consequently, we encountered HI-larious signs such as these.

We made a couple purchases in shops like this one, which had room upon room, absolutely filled with intricate wood carvings. The shopkeep on this one showed us a wall piece that he said he'd just finished after a year of work on it. As if.

Kay, back to Japan now.

Time Out for Something Funny

2012-10-25T17:28:00.000+09:00

Okay, so for my Business Communication class I give them a final project where they have to get groups together and pretend they are a company. They have to give a presentation trying to sell a product to the rest of the class, who are another company that wants to buy a new product that would be useful for their staff break room. So I explain what a break room is and give suggestions like refrigerator, microwave, tv, etc. Then they have to write down their group member names, company name, and two or three ideas for a product (in case two groups want to sell the same thing). This is what I get:

Group 1 ideas:

chicken tarte
supplement
fly bicycle

Group 2 ideas:

car (future car)

Group 3 ideas:

waterbed

Group 4 ideas:

confectionery company

It's like, when I talk in class, all they must hear is "wot wotwot wot wot shella shella wot wotwotwot" and when they read the simple-language handouts I give them, they must just be seeing OOOOOOO (^o^) (*^ｏ^*)(^∀^) (´;ω;｀)＼(^o^)／☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆(#^.^#)ｏ(^o^)ｏ.

End Bicycle Tour

2012-10-21T19:56:00.003+09:00

Did I mention that bicycles are wicked scary? After we left the traditional Balinese home it became sort of okay, because we were often on nicely paved, but mostly deserted roads, but we also would come upon roads that were all busted up and bumpy and hilly, so I was often in a constant state of braking and gripping. And fear-sweating. It was exhausting.

But anyway, the scenery was nice, and a few times we stopped to take pictures of things like rice paddies, as evidenced by all the rice paddy photos.

It was a holiday called Galungan, question mark?, in Bali the day of our tour, so there were a bunch of decorations like these hanging around the streets.

I took this picture because it's not pretty.

There were also processions going down a lot of streets, with drumming and such, so sometimes we had to wait for traffic to clear up before we moved on.

My mom mentioned at one point to the tour guide that she really wanted a picture of someone carrying something on her head, because it's so exotic, I guess. So the first chance he got, he asked someone carrying something on her head if we could take her picture. But unluckily, this first person was a crotchety old woman, who didn't even dignify him with a verbal answer, just gave a curt yank of her head to the side and kept walking. The group of young girls below were happy to have their photo taken, though. They were acting like they felt like movie stars, getting stopped in the street. Isn't that special.

The tour included lunch as well as breakfast, so after a couple hours of biking, we stopped at some lunch restaurant, the kind with only three choices for food. Or at least, the menu for those of us on a tour had three choices. But again, nice scenery. The toilet was some raunchy-ass shit, though, I gotta tell ya. I should have brought my camera in there.

Also on the tour we saw a couple abandoned temples. The first one was abandoned apparently because of the big tree outside it. I guess it is considered to give luck to people in marriage or something if you pin something to it, and the tour guide said that eventually so many people came over there just t put stuff on the tree, that there were more people outside the temple than inside. So they packed up and moved elsewhere.

Tree.

Stuff.

Helmet.

Then we saw this place that's meant for VIPs. The tour guide said Obama went there. We did not get to go in there.

Inside this little tower I think there was an old dude playing Solitaire or something. I could be remembering this wrong, though.

The final stop on the tour was this temple, which is the oldest shrine in Bali, triple question mark??? It's been a month just about since this all happened, so the details are now fuzzy. Anyway, it's a big deal for some reason or other.

I'm pretty tired of writing about Bali now. I've done some other things in Japan since then, but I guess I'm a stickler for chronology. I guess next time will be the last Bali entry. Thank glob.

Bicycle Tour in Ubud

2012-10-14T17:34:00.003+09:00

I'm actually pretty afraid of bicycles. I'm afraid to get hit by cyclists, and I'm afraid when cycling to get hit by cars or to hit pedestrians. Consequently, renting the bikes in Gili T was the first time in over a decade that I'd ridden a bike. That was pretty scary at first, because I was having trouble with the wobbling and feeling like I was going to run into someone, but it wasn't too crowded, so I got used to it.

The bicycle tour we went on in Ubud was different, though. It was described in a pamphlet at a "gentle downhill cycle," but man, it was terrifying. Apparently wheels go fast even on a slight incline. I was braking for pretty much the whole tour. I was like petrified on the bike, man.

The first stop on the tour, which was actually before we got the bikes and were being driven around, was to a coffee tasting on a plantation. At this place, they sold the famous kopi luwak, the coffee that gets eaten first as berries by this animal below, an Asian palm civet, then gets pooped out as allegedly better-tasting coffee beans. So people sift through the droppings and find the beans, wash them, and brew them as normal, resulting in what is allegedly a milder, better-smelling coffee. It's very expensive. I didn't buy any, though. I was tempted to buy some flavored regular coffee, but then I remembered I don't have a coffee maker in Japan, so I didn't bother.

Here are some workers grinding coffee beans.

Besides coffee and tea, the plantation also grows the stuff they use to flavor it, including peppers for some reason, pineapples, bananas, vanilla, and some other stuff that I didn't recognize.

After walking around for a few, we got shown to this little hut to taste an array of coffees and teas, and even hot chocolate. Most of them were quite good.

Nice views around there, too.

The next stop on our tour was breakfast. I was having this internal debate for a millisecond as to whether we should eat our free breakfast at the hotel also, or just wait to eat the breakfast on the tour. We ended up figuring it would be better to eat an early breakfast at the hotel and then eat second breakfast on the tour, which would come about two hours later. I was glad we made that decision, because the tour breakfast was just one thick pancake. That would have been totally insufficient.

Here's me and mom at the breakfestaurant.

After breakfast we finally got our bikes. At first we were on a sort of busy road as we made our way into the villagy areas, which contributed to my terror.

After a bit, we stopped at a traditional Balinese home for an outdoor tour. This type of home is a compound in which there are several houses, which seem like they're probably just one room each, or maybe two. There is a house for the grandparents, one for the parents and children under five, and one for children five and up, and there is also a building for the kitchen and a family shrine. All these parts of the compound are supposed to be in specific locations in the north, south, east, and west, but I don't remember which goes where, and then I just read that the mountain range running across the island (east/west) and the ocean serve as north/south orientation for the Balinese, so those in the north vs. the south have different meanings for north and south, so just forget it, man.

Anyway, the house was pretty cool.

This is the Australian couple that were on the tour with us.

This family had a bunch of animals, including pigs and chickens.

Here's another picture you can tell my mom took.

Apparently in Indonesia, this fruit is called Japan, because the Japanese brought it down there. I had no idea what it would be called in English. The Australians said they have it down there and told us the name, but I forgot. Sorry.

Lookit this floor.

After a bit more biking, we saw this home, which the tour guide said must be very rich, because it's expensive to grow flowers.

I think I'll stop for now. The tour had a few more stops, but I'll get to those later.

Bali Third Third: Ubud

2012-10-07T22:27:00.003+09:00

Our final stop in Bali was in Ubud, which is a bit inland, therefore no beaches. Despite lack of beaches, however, Ubud was probably the best part of the trip. It's the arts area, with stuff like dance shows, woodcarving, and gold and silversmithing, and a lot of nature going on. Unfortunately, I messed up with the timing of this part of the trip. Our flight was at 1:20am on September 1, but for some reason I was thinking we were leaving the next day, so I actually ended up booking three days at the hotel, when we only had two nights in Ubud. Oops. In the end it was better that I booked the extra day, though, since we were able to go out and do things all day, and then have the room to come home to and take showers and naps and get ready to leave late at night.

After we arrived at the hotel from Gili T, we managed to catch a traditional Balinese dance show in town after supper. It was about an hour long and had one dance that lasted about 45 minutes called the Kecak (keh-chahk) Dance, which consisted of a lot of dudes (the gamelan suara, the group is called) singing a capella and chanting and such and providing the general audiovisual background for the main part of the dance, which is a part of a Hindu epic called Ramayana. This part of the story is about the heir to a throne and his beautiful wife and their bad luck at staying together without people lusting after the wife and kidnapping her and stuff. The second dance still featured the singing dudes, but it was a Fire Trance Dance that featured one guy dancing around on hot embers, riding a hobby horse. Strange.

The performances we saw are done cooperatively by a small desa (village) of about 140 families near Ubud, and according to the pamphlet, almost all the adult members of the desa are somehow involved in the production, be it through dancing or singing in the show, working on the costumes or makeup, choreography, writing, etc. There are tons of other places around town to see these things, so I imagine each one has its own village or other kind of group that does the show in their own way.

This is the venue for the dance.

Someone came out to light some torches before the dance started.

I took a lot of videos and photos of the dances, which featured a lot of slow movements and Spiderman hands. Because it was dark and my camera is crappy and can't focus on anything moving, my photos didn't really come out. The video is also poor, but the audio is fine, and that for me was the best part of these dances by far. I didn't really like the style of dancing. It didn't look like it took much talent, except for the patience and strain of moving so slowly.

I like that one guy's job was to just call out Ho! Ho! Ho! Ho! for long periods of time. I was wondering if they switched roles periodically so as not to get bored, or if he had hones his Ho! Skillz for many a year.

You can catch a bit of the Spiderman hands in this picture.

Here is a part where there's no singing, just dialogue that we didn't understand. You kind of got the gist of it if you read the story in the pamphlet and really paid attention to what was going on with the characters in the show. Sometimes it was funny. Oddly, there was a moment when the younger-sounding one of these guys turned to the audience and spoke a bit of English to us, making jokes, like You need transport?, which is something tourists hear a hundred times a day in Bali. I think the main point of the English part, though, was to check in and say they hoped we were enjoying the show.

So after the end of the Kecak Dance, the thing that held all the mini torches was burned into this big fire, and when that burned down sufficiently, this dude on a hobbyhorse came out and danced all over it barefoot.

While he was dancing, he kicked all the embers around and spread them out quite a bit, so these other guys with brooms would sweep them all back into a big pile again, and it would start again. The sweeps wore shoes, though.

This is what the pamphlet had to say about this dance:

Trance Dance (Sanghyan Djaran): The Sanghyang is a god-inspired trance-dance the function of which is to protect society against evil forces and epidemics. It can take several forms and the version here presented is the Sanghyang Djaran, djaran meaning horse. In Java as well as on Bali the hobby-hourse is associated with trance and is also seen in the Kuda Kepang of West Java in a similar function. The horse rider is lulled into trance by the repetitive sounds of the gamelan suara and in his tranced state he walks on a bed of burning coconut husks responding to the rising and falling of the sounds of the gamelan suara.

Here is the end of the show.

Seeing one of these dance shows is apparently one of the major Things To Do in Bali, so it was good to be able to see one. The next day, we did a bicycle tour of some villages and stuff.

Bali Transit Interval: Lombok

2012-09-30T19:18:00.002+09:00

Included in our package trip to the Gili Islands was a return flight from Lombok Airport to Bali Denpasar. So we left Gili via a small speedboat, which was like an hour late and my mom was flipping out. The speedboat was the scariest shit ever. It was going so fast and it was so small that it felt like we were going to go flying out of the boat every time it bounced off the top of a wave, which was like every nanosecond. After that my handsarm were sore from gripping.

When we got to the harbor in Lombok after about a 15-20 minute boat ride, we were picked up by a couple dudes in a car and they drove us to the airport. We didn't realize it beforehand, but it was about a 90 minute drive from there to the airport, so it was kind of a drag.

But they made it into kind of a tour.

First we stopped at a little stand to get some water and take pictures of the scenery.

Cow.

There were a couple other scenic areas that we could have stopped at, but we were kind of feeling rushed, due to the tardiness of the morning boatman, so we didn't bother. I was tired of taking pictures of scenery by then, anyway.

Another stop we made, which I didn't feel right taking photos of, was a jewelry shop with local pearls and such. I pretty much hate pearls, unless they're an abnormal pearl color, like blue, and they're alone on a pendant. I'm no Marge Simpson. My mom seems to like them more than I do, but this place was incredibly expensive, especially compared with how much cheaper everything else was, so we didn't even consider buying anything. We mostly just allowed the stop so we could use the bathroom.

A productive stop, however, was at a little weaving village. Here's a picture of said village.

In this village, the saying goes that if a girl can't weave well, she's not yet ready to get married. The lady that brought us around said it was a cooperative, so everybody spends a ton of time weaving shit, just making patterns out of their noggins, and then they bring it over to the shop and everyone shares the profits. She also showed us how the weaving is done.

They offered to let us try, but we were still feeling pressed for time, and it looked like it would take a while to get set up at the loom, so we had to decline. We did each end up buying something, thought, because it seemed a shame not to. The quality of the work was really good, and they were charging a lot for it by Balinese standards, but considering how much work probably goes into each item and how much it'd be back home, it was still a deal. I spent about $30 on a really nice green and gold table runner. Currently, having no table, I'm using it to hang across the top of my tall bookshelf. It's nice. My mom bought something similar, I think.

So we finally got to Lombok airport, which was kind of confusing. Indonesia charges airport fees, but instead of including them in the ticket price, they make you pay at the airport and get a receipt before you're let into the gate area. But there's not enough signage to let you know you have to do this, so inevitably a lot of people proceed to the gate and have to go all the way back and find some cashier area where they're doing this and then go back again. And then there's more security at the gate and you can't leave and there's no bathroom. That seems like a really bad idea, especially considering our half-hour flight was delayed about a half hour. Jeez.

But anyway, the last leg of the trip was Ubud, and that was a lot of fun, so I'll start talking about that next time.

Snorkeling

2012-09-28T22:06:00.002+09:00

Part of our package trip to Gili T was a private snorkeling trip. This was pretty cool, although I can't say you get much for your money. On snorkeling trips in Thailand, for example, you get snorkel gear, plenty of water, fruit, and sometimes lunch included, plus of course the boat and the guide. But for this tour, which I bet we really paid more than market price for considering it was part of a package, all we got were a boat and a boat captain and his helmsman, let's call him for fun.

They took us to some place to rent gear, and I didn't even think to check it for like holes or anything, but when we got into the water, I kept getting a snorkelful of water every few seconds. As it turned out, there was a tear in the connector and so water was just flooding in. BOOO-urns. But luckily the helmsman had his snorkel hanging around he was staying in the boat, so I borrowed his. What a waste of like four dollars.

Anyway, we didn't have an underwater camera, so I can't show you all the AMAZING shit we saw under the water. But my mom took a bunch of pictures above water, so here they are, chronologically. A lot of them are pretty samey and self-explanatory, so I won't say much about them in particular.

Captain. I heard my mom ask his name at one point, but the answer was so long, I was like fuckin even AYE couldn't be expected to remember than, and I'm used to foreign names.

Helmsman. I didn't get his name, but he was a nice guy, even though he has no face here.

Lookit the water, man.

During this trip we went to I think three different snorkel sites around the three Gili Islands. The first couple of sites were where sea turtles hang out, and we saw a couple at each place. That was cool. Actually, the best part of the snorkeling trip was this moment when we found a turtle just a few meters below us. Now, the water kind of changed its quality depending on where we were. In some places it was such a dark blue that you couldn't really see more than a few feet below you, but you could still see pretty far laterally. But in other spots, it was so light and clear that you could see like a hundred feet down to the bottom. In this area, though, it was like being in a bucket of dark blue. I couldn't hardly see anything. All I could see was this giant sea turtle, literally in a sea of blue, right below me. It was very peaceful. The boat captain swam down and touched it, but when I tried to do that my eardrums felt like they were going to explode. All morning I couldn't swim down more than a few feet. I tried swallowing, but it didn't work. So I didn't get to touch the sea turtle, but that's okay. I recently heard you're not supposed to touch them anyway.

In addition to sea turtles, there were these really cool little electric blue fish, which I liked enough to remember. I don't really remember any other fish from the first two sites. There weren't many. I did keep getting stung by tiny jellyfish, though. It was like a bunch of bee stings. I finally was able to see them in the water, and they were like electric pink or blue, as I recall. Smaller than a pea, the bastards.

By the way, it was a glass-bottom boat tour, so here is the glass bottom. You don't really see a helluva lot looking through there, but actually we did catch a glimpse of a sea turtle or two, and some fish of course.

At the last stop, we kind of stopped nearish the shore, after getting the boatspider legs caught with the legs of another boat, huhrrr, but then we were okay, so I jumped out because it was wicked hot. But then the boat had to kind of turn around and move a bit, so I had to hold on for dear life so it wouldn't leave me somewhere. When I started, I was holding on to the front of the boat, but the leg is all slimy, so I slipped on down to the back. Ha.

The third site was for fish proper, and in order to attract them, the captain put a bunch of breadlings into a water bottle and put some water in there. Then we went in the water, and he'd dump out some pieces and give us each a handful, and the fish would come and eat out of our hands. Sometimes they would eat our hands, too, but it didn't hurt. My favorite fish were these bright purple technicolor ones. I think there were also like some yellow fish, and definitely a lot of uglyass brown fish, but also the blue ones I liked again, and some others. It was interesting. The captain left the water bottle in the ocean, though, which I wasn't too pleased about.

One time, I've heard tell, my sister told my mom, "I'm sorry I'm not your GOLDEN BOY, Ryan" and ever since then he's been called the Golden Boy. So we took this picture for him.

After snorkeling, we were taken to this beachstaurant for lunch.

I got this banana cappuccino shake. It was awesome.

While we were eating, several people came up to us to sell shit. We might have been more willing, except we didn't expect to need money for more than gear, water, and lunch, so we only had the equivalent of a few dollars with us. Mom did end up getting a wooden mask for a good deal, because it was kind of a take it or leave it thing, only having a little money as she did. Then once she bought that, the vultures set in, and weren't really believing us that truly, we had no money. So some guy ended up getting her to trade some little keychain or something, plus a handful of small change for a pair of Fashion Earrings--plastic pearls that matched the real pearl necklace I got her in Shanghai. We both know she got taken, especially since one of the damn things came apart the next day, but she found the experience of trade interesting, so I guess it was worth it.

Small toes only.

It's fun sitting in these beach huts. Maybe I'll get one when I buy a beach house someday.

This is some sort of offering to Dionysus, or some local equivalent. It's a lot of empty alcohol bottles and junk.

Returning back to Gili T, we had to be dropped off at the main harbor, rather than at the beach in front of our hotel (where we were picked up), because of the tide situation at that moment. That was fine, except that we were expected to bring back our own rented gear, and we couldn't remember where the hell we'd gotten it, because we didn't get there by land, but boated over to the place, not even necessarily realizing we were on the same island when we went back on land (because we were focused on the water and looking the other way and such). So I asked the captain where we should go to return this stuff, and he pointed in the direction of our hotel. I think he must have misunderstood, because we didn't see the place on the way back. So we said, well, fuck it. They probably don't expect the gear until five, and it's only like two now, so let's go swimming first at the pool, then try and walk back to find the place.

So we left the gear out on the balcony of our room, so as not to mess up the room itself. But when we got back, it was gone. I called the front desk to see if maybe housekeeping had picked it up thinking it belonged to the hotel and we should return it (which would have been pretty shitty if in fact we had rented it from the hotel). But the dude at the desk told me that the owner of the gear had come looking for it, and security brought him to our room to pick it up. As if. It's a small world around there, so it's no surprise that he knew where we were staying. But our question was, did he think we were trying to steal it? We never found out, but I hope not. Also because that happened, I wasn't able to tell the dude that the snorkel was useless. But whatever, man.

In any case, it was a fun little trip.

The End.