sayonara, japan

So I've been home now for more than 24 hours, and it feels both very weird and very normal at the same time. It was sad for me to get on the airport tram and realize that the handles are once again too tall for me to use, unlike in Japan, where they are perfect. :( I'm also not used to seeing people drive on the right side of the road again, so I'll probably put off driving anywhere as long as possible. On the other hand, it is very good to be home and see my family/friends. :)

These past four months in Japan have really been an unforgettable experience. I've met so many amazing and unique people from all over the world, who I hope to stay in touch with, especially if I start globe-hopping and visit their respective countries! I had a fantastic experience in a home-stay (almost everybody else I knew in homestays always had something to complain about, but I never did), and I not only formed a strong relationship with my host mom, but also learned a lot about day-to-day Japanese culture and life. My Japanese has improved immensely (if I do say so myself), and I will definitely have to keep studying from here on out so I don't forget everything (especially what I learned in IJ600 about formal/academic Japanese). And of course, I think I've grown as a person - for example, I feel much more confident about traveling to strange places by myself; Japan has definitely honed my map-reading skills! Anyway, basically I had a wonderful time in Japan and can't wait to go back someday! :D

So to wrap up my Japan experience, here are a couple of lists.

Things I Will Miss About Japan*
*not including obvious and specific things like people and places, though naturally I will miss them the most

- speaking Japanese! Granted, I spent probably as much time in Japan speaking English as Japanese, but I will definitely miss being immersed in the language. 
- public transportation. I loved riding the bus and subway everywhere, especially using my commuter pass!
- TV. Japanese variety shows are the best! Also I really liked the kanji/quiz shows, too. As an added benefit, no matter what I watched, it counted as studying Japanese! I will also miss being able to watch TV on my electronic dictionary, because that was just cool. :D
- convenience stores. They are everywhere and actually really convenient, whether to buy onigiri for a snack or even to print out pictures! I loved wasting time in conbini (as they call them in Japanese).
- 100-yen shops! Loved shopping there, because there was always so much awesome stuff for so cheap.  The quality is so much better than dollar shops here, too.
- vending machines everywhere. I didn't use them that often, but it was still nice to have them available. Also, Japanese drinks are pretty tasty.
- karaoke. Definitely need more real karaoke places in the States! Basements and bars don't count.
- ready availability of Japanese cuisine. Particularly things like ramen, udon, and donburi.

My Japan Experience in Numbers
- Time spent: 3 months, 3 weeks, 4 days
- Pictures/videos taken: 1,410
- Cities visited: 6 (Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka, Kyoto, Nara, Gifu)
- Classes taken: 5
- Ferris wheels ridden: 3
- Shinkansen rides: 2
- Clubs/bars visited: 3 
- Karaoke nights: 3
- Onsen visited: 1
- Trips to Disneyland: 2
- Totoro towels bought: 2
- Mugs collected: 6
- Analog Fish CDs bought: 3
- Uniqlo bags found in my room when I packed: 7

So with that, sayonara Japan! Until we meet again. :)

bye-bye, nagoya!

So I'm currently posting from a youth hostel in Asakusa, on my last night in Japan! I still can't wrap my head around the fact that this time tomorrow, I'll be back home in America (probably sleeping). But before I get too into my mental state at the moment, a quick recap of what brought me here:

On Monday night, I went for my last round of karaoke with my classmates! Naturally, it was a blast. :D The next day, my seminar class had a nabe party to celebrate the end of our group projects. Nabe is basically like hot pot, except that you start out with flavor in the pot (there are all kinds, from cheese to curry to sesame and soy milk), and then at the end you add in either rice+egg or udon to finish it up. It was delicious! Afterward there were lots and lots (and lots) of dishes to clean up, though. >_<

Wednesday and Thursday were spent shopping/packing/studying; nothing too interesting there.

Giant shaved ice!

Friday was my last final and last day at Nanzan! :( I took my Japanese final in the morning (it was easy, I think, but I doubt I'll ever get it back so I'll probably never really know), then went to go eat shaved ice with my IJ600 friends! It was a really weird shop that also served green tea pasta and banana rice, among other things...the servings were also enormous! We ordered three shaved ice things, and we failed utterly at finishing them. -.-' And then Song-yi and I went to Lily's apartment to kill time before the CJS farewell party; I finally sat under a kotatsu (a heated table with a blanket), and it was heavenly! We need to start using them in America, though I guess if we did my productivity would just disappear - once you get under the kotatsu, all you want to do is just sleep there!

Anyway then we headed to the farewell party, which was crowded with probably all the international students (both those going home and those staying), plus a lot of host families, and in some people's cases (or at least one), real families! My host mother came too, and I got to introduce her to all the people I'd been telling her about for ages (friends, classmates). Then we all took lots of sentimental group pictures, which made me get all emotional about leaving. >_<

One of many sentimental group photos

After the party, I went out to a club with my classmates! We got in for free, by using various member's cards borrowed from friends, which was awesome. It was my first time at a club and was actually really fun (and hot and crowded). :D And then I had to leave early to catch the last bus (as usual), and as it happened it really was my last bus before leaving Nagoya. :( I spent most of the bus ride trying not to tear up when I thought about leaving; I was successful, for the most part. :)

Saturday I spent finishing up packing and cleaning my room! It was really weird and depressing to see my room all bare; I guess it'll just have to wait until the next host student comes along! Then I went with my host mom to send my suitcases to the airport through a delivery service (to save me having to lug them around), and then she sent me to the station! It was a very anti-climactic farewell (my host mom is not one for sentimentality), but it's okay because I'm sure I'll come back and visit them sometime. We did exchange gifts earlier, also - she gave me some placemats and tissue holders that she'd sewn herself! Hopefully I'll put them to good use. :)

Disney hats!

Then, after meeting with Song-yi at Ueda and wandering around Nagoya Station with Mary, I was off to Gifu! There I met up with a friend I'd met at Nagoya Swings, and we went to a swing dance party. Needless to say, it was lots of fun; again, my only regret is not learning about these dance groups earlier! Anyway, after lots of dancing, I took the train back to Nagoya and got on a night bus to Tokyo! Then after a long bumpy night (hard to get too comfortable on a bus), I arrived at Tokyo Disneyland! I thought it was fitting that I came to Disneyland right after coming to Japan, and then again right before leaving. :) My friend Anna and I spent the whole day there, courtesy of free tickets my host mom was gracious enough to give me, and it was ridiculously fun! It was not the same as it was when I came in August; now everything was Christmas themed and also really cold! Anna and I bought Disney hats to keep ourselves warm (also they were extremely cute). We managed to ride all of the big attractions (except the Winnie the Pooh ride, which was inexplicably popular; I'll have to ride it someday to figure it out), and we even rode the teacups 4 times! It was a great day. :D And then I came to the hostel and here I am now!

As for my current mental state: I am still very sad to have left Nagoya; I miss all my friends and classmates already, and I haven't even left the country yet! Both Anna and I still can't believe that we'll be back in the US so soon; we are also both a little worried about reverse culture shock - I bet when I land in the airport I'll be slightly shocked by how many "foreigners" there are everywhere...anyway, I still have lots to do tomorrow, so I want to get to bed now. There will definitely be a sentimental wrap-up post eventually; these four months have meant too much for me not to rave about them a little bit more. :) So, until then!

do i really have to go home?

So inserting pictures into my last post was complete fail on my part...I totally forgot that I was going to that until now, oops. -.-' But today I'm updating from my laptop (for once), so all my pictures are in easy access! This time I will definitely have pictures!

This past week has been full of shopping and friends (not so much studying, which could be bad...), because I've entered souvenir-buying modehile also trying to see people while I still can. Anyway, as a result I've been having lots of fun (and spending lots of money...).

On Wednesday, I went ice-skating on plastic! (Or just plastic-skating, I guess). It was a very tiny little rink and was much harder to skate on than actual ice, but it was definitely an interesting experience. I had imagined that it would be some sort of really special plastic, but really it was just kind of ordinary plastic boards. I discovered that I am worse at skating than I thought I was, but my friend Evan evidently is naturally talented or something, because even though it was only his second time skating ever, he had really good form and looked like a pro going around the turns...not fair. :P Anyway, I am very happy that Evan and Andy came with me that day, because everybody else bailed. -.-'

Jana and Eunjin playing taiko!

On Thursday in my Japanese class, we had a farewell party for all the people going back home this semester - a grand total of six out of twenty. People put on little performances, and it was really entertaining: singing a song about tofu, playing the ocarina, teaching Korean sign language, playing taiko drums, imitating the teachers/classmates (everybody almost died laughing), singing a traditional Scottish song. They also gave the people who are going home presents, which was ridiculously nice and a complete surprise! I opened it later and it was a pretty little bowl plus chocolate. :) It was a nice celebration, even though the next day we had class as usual. -.-' Still, it was a great way to wrap up the semester; even though academically this class has been really hard, my classmates are awesome so it's also been really fun. <3

And then on Friday, I went to one of my classmates' dorm for dinner! It was a spur-of-the-moment event, but in the end there were 9 of us, plus the three other classmates who lived in the same dorm. We all helped make Indonesian fried noodles and fried rice, which were really yummy, and just joked and talked and had an all-around good time. :)

Mary in the light tunnel!

The next day, my host mom took me and my friend Mary to Nabananosato to see Christmas illuminations! We'd been seeing commercials for it on TV for a while, and I wanted to go but it's kind of far from Nagoya, so I didn't think I'd be able to. But I did, and it was awesome! On the way there we stopped at Kariya Highway Oasis, the place with a ferris wheel that we went to way back in September (or October?), which also had some cool illuminations. The ferris wheel was visible from really far away, while we were still driving there, because the spokes were all lit up and there was nothing else visible around it. Then we headed to Nabananosato! It's a really popular place, so on the way there we had to park somewhere else and take a shuttle there, after waiting in line for a while. When we finally got there though, it was pretty awesome. There were Christmas lights everywhere, plus light-ups for the momiji, or Japanese maples, which were also really beautiful. There was something called Island Fuji, which was basically a moving observation deck that started on the ground but slowly moved up to way high in the sky - none of us had any idea beforehand how it worked, so when we saw it we were all amazed (but nobody around us was). It looked like a giant UFO, actually. I would have loved to go on it, except the lines were ridiculously long (again, very popular and crowded place).

Me and my host mom!

Then we got to the tunnel of light, which was exactly what it sounds like - a giant tunnel made of millions of lights, all in the shape of little flowers. It was really cool and also really long, so we just kind of wandered around surrounded by twinkling lights - it was great. Then we came out and saw the main attraction: Fuji and the sea. It was gigantic Mt. Fuji made of lights, plus a huge 'ocean' that spread out from the foot of the mountain up to the spectators. It was quite a big area, and also I think it may have been on top of a pond. The lights would change colors to imitate waves, and Mt. Fuji also periodically switched from blue to pink and purple and back again. There were even dolphins that 'jumped' in front. It was pretty breathtaking. :) After that we braved the crowds in the gift shop to buy souvenirs, because with the admission ticket you get 1000yen worth of vouchers to use inside, which we figured would be a waste not to spend. And then we lined up to take the shuttle bus back to the parking lot, which ended up taking an hour and fifteen minutes! It was crazy how many people there were waiting and how long it took for all of us to get back to the parking lot - I'm pretty sure there were still tons of people waiting after we got on our bus. So in the end we didn't get to eat dinner at all, but survived on donuts that Mary had brought us, and got home late and tired, but happy. :)

Collection of our student IDs, where most of us look really different!

And then yesterday I went shopping with my classmate Lily! I managed to find some souvenirs and we had noodles together before heading to Nagoya Station, where we met up with a bunch of our other IJ600 classmates for dinner! Our German classmate Jana said that the restaurant we were going to had the best tonkatsu in Nagoya, and it was delicious! Kind of expensive, but you could have as much salad and rice as you wanted, so we all came out very full. Then we wandered around to look at the illuminations around Nagoya Station for a little bit (not as cool as Nabananosato, of course, but still pretty!), before going back up the towers to sit around Starbucks and talk. I think we were being a very obvious and noisy/obnoxious group of foreigners, but it was lots of fun. And then we walked to Fushimi Station together (because my commuter pass doesn't include Nagoya Station), and then I went home.

This morning I went with my host mom to do official stuff like canceling my national health insurance, which really made me realize how little time is left! This time next week, I'll be on a plane on my way home, probably either sleeping or watching movies, which is hard to believe. I'll definitely be very sad to leave (I'm already starting!), but at least I'll know that even after I go home, I'll have friends all over the world (and lots even just in the US) who have offered me a place to stay if I ever visit, so that's a comforting thought. :) Anyway, there's still some time and lots of things to do before I start getting (too) sentimental, so for now I'll focus on those and end here! There should be time for at least one more post before I leave Japan, plus maybe some reflections during my final layover in Toronto, so stay tuned! :D

time flies

There are literally only two weeks left before I leave Nagoya - my night bus to Tokyo is scheduled for 11:30 on the 18th, which is in exactly two weeks and two hours! Unbelievable. I've already started thinking about how every time I do something or go somewhere, it could be my last chance to do it, which is really kind of depressing. All I can do is keep telling myself that hopefully I'll be back in a couple of years for the JET program, and even though I probably won't end up in Nagoya, I can at least come back and visit. That, and just try and make the best of what's left!

Anyway, these past couple weeks have been pretty fun.  Last Wednesday, I went to a kimono lesson, where I got to try on a kimono! I even learned how to tie the obi, though honestly I think I've already forgotten how. -.-'  After we had put on the kimonos (it took a long time! There are more layers and steps than you'd think), we all sat around and had some tea and snacks, after taking pictures, of course. It was kind of short, but a fun experience; the two teachers were very nice and so were the other students - one of them was a fellow Nanzan international student! They asked if I wanted to continue and take lessons, so that eventually I'd be able to put on a kimono by myself, but I figured I wouldn't really have time so I declined. They put me (and everybody else) on their blog, though! You can check it out here. :)

The next day was Thanksgiving, but I did absolutely nothing special. Also, apparently turkey is basically impossible to get in Japan; my host mom has never eaten it, and said that most Japanese people probably haven't! Crazy. I told her if she ever came to visit me in the US, I would have my mom make some for her (because I don't know know how to roast turkey). Anyway, I am sad to have missed out on turkey and stuffing - this was my first Thanksgiving away from home! (Though not the first without family; there was that one time my parents went off to Italy without me...:P)

On Friday, though, I went out with some of my classmates, which was really fun. We ate dinner at a Chinese restaurant, and unlike a lot (most?) Chinese restaurants in Japan, this one was actually owned by Chinese people! Which probably explains why it was so yummy. After that we went to an izakaya, where our Korean classmate agreed to treat us all to whatever food we wanted (but not drinks). He said that it if it were Korea, he'd treat us for everything, drinks and all, but Japan is just too expensive. Anyway, it was very nice of him. :)

Saturday I spent at the Higashiyama Botanical Gardens! I wasn't expecting too much, but it was actually quite pretty. The momiji (Japanese maple) leaves have finally changed color, so there were brilliant red trees all over, plus flowers and all the other cool plants. All we really did was look at the plants there, so there's not too much else to say about Saturday...

On Sunday, though, I went and danced in A Christmas Carol, like I mentioned in my last post. Or rather, I swing danced for one song during the intermission of the play, but it was actually a lot of fun! I met up with the other Nagoya Swings people in the morning, and after a quick rehearsal we went to a cafe to eat lunch and pass the time before the show started. The play was actually called A Christmas Carol With A Heart, and was basically A Christmas Carol, except set in Texas. It was pretty entertaining, especially when the little Japanese kids said their lines in English. :D Afterward I went shopping with my friend Mary, who was in the play, and we (finally) did purikura (print club) together! We'd been wanting to pretty much since we got here, so it was nice to actually do it.

And then this Wednesday, I went on a field trip to tour the Toyoto plant! Toyota City is very close to Nagoya; it took us about an hour by bus. We went to a few different facilities, where we got to see the welding and part of the assembly process. It was actually really cool, and the welding was unexpectedly beautiful - the sparks flying everywhere looked like fireworks. Last we went to the Toyota Museum, where we saw a quick performance by a robot that could play the trumpet (not really sure how that related to cars, but it was cool), climbed inside lots of Toyota cars, and looked at some exhibits. :D

Yesterday, I went out for karaoke, again with some of my classmates. It's been a while since I went to karaoke, so I was really excited to go again. For some reason, the place we went to was a combination karaoke/rent-a-car place. O_o Anyway, we were there for 4 hours, all of which were lots of fun - I thought it was funny how a lot of us knew the same anime songs. :D Hopefully I'll get to go karaoke again before I leave!

So that was the past two weeks! As for the next two, they'll probably mostly involve lots of presentations and studying for finals, but hopefully also lots of fun and good memories! :) At the very least, I know my last few days will be action-packed. The plan so far is: dance party in Gifu, night bus to Tokyo Disneyland, day at Disneyland, Ghibli Museum the next morning, and then home!

P.S. Sorry for the lack of pictures in posts nowadays; I'm too lazy to get the pictures from my computer onto the family's computer. But maybe tomorrow I'll do it and add some pictures to this post, so check back later!