pre-halloween fun

Whew! These past days have been a blur - all of a sudden life seems to picking up the pace again. Also it's finally starting to get colder in Nagoya, which is exciting because that means soon I'll be able to wear more of the sweaters and cold-weather clothes I brought. :)

So on Wednesday a bunch of international students went to this place called Cat's Cafe (not a real cat cafe, unfortunately) and take on the challenge of eating a giant parfait. It literally comes in a bucket, piled up with fruit and whipped cream, and costs 5500 yen, which is over $60, so it's not something you can just order on a whim. We had to wait for a really long time while they made it, but when it finally came we were all in awe, because it was so enormous and delicious-looking. But there were 11 of us and we were hungry from waiting, so we ended up demolishing the whole thing in about fifteen minutes. Taste-wise and experience-wise, it was very worth it. :D

On Thursday I participated in an international student tea party (for lack of better terminology), hosted by the tea ceremony club at Nanzan. There were only 5 international students there, but it was a very small Japanese-style room, so that was probably a good thing. We got to drink macha, or green tea, and eat the ricidulously sweet sweets that come with it, all while learning the right ways to bow and drink the tea, which included rotating the cup before and after drinking. They also let us try whisking the tea ourselves, but mine didn't become nice and frothy and light green like the others' - one of the club members suspected that the water wasn't hot enough (I went last), so I'll take that explanation instead of me just being a failure. :P It was all very ceremonious and a really nice chance to experience the tea ceremony (we have a tea ceremony class at Nanzan but I'm not taking it). The club members were also really nice, so I'm thinking of going back sometime.

Friday was the Nagoya Koryuu Kaikan dorm's Halloween party, which is apparently a really popular annual event. I thought it was just a party thrown for the international students, with maybe a few Japanese students mixed in, but as it turns out there were tons and tons of Japanese students (plus international students) there - I'm pretty sure there were at least 200 people, all crammed into the dorm's common room and lobby area. It cost 900 yen to go, since they had food and drinks, which made me not want to go at first, but in the end I think it was worth it. I met a lot of new Japanese people and talked to some I hadn't seen in a while, so it was pretty fun. It was also really cool to see everybody's costumes - they were a lot more into it than I expected, especially for a country that doesn't actually celebrate Halloween. I guess people everywhere like the chance to dress up in costume for a day. I suppose that also explains why there are Halloween decorations all over the stores - they don't celebrate the holiday per se (even Halloween parties aren't that common), but they really like decorating for it. Anyway, after the party one of my classmates invited a couple of us to her apartment to eat something before going home, which was very nice of her - she's an international student like us, from Mexico, but she lives on her own and is planning to enroll as a real (4-year) student at Nanzan, which is impressive.So we all bought some snacks at a nearby supermarket and brought them to her little one-room apartment, which was very cozy and fun. We also made plans for Saturday, which was the Inuyama festival!

Inuyama is technically in the countryside, but Japan is so densely populated that even the countryside has houses everywhere and looks like a city (to me). We got there by train, with really cool reversible seats (you could change which direction they faced, to make groups of seats facing each other or rows one behind the other) and pretty scenery, which made it feel like we were actually going somewhere. It was about a half-hour by train, which was impressive because one of our classmates commutes from there every day. Anyway, when we got there we found our way to the castle and wandered around all the stalls; while waiting for the aforementioned classmate-who-lives-in-Inuyama, Andy, we bought a bunch of festival food from the stalls and had lunch. Then finally all the people we were waiting for showed up and we went into Inuyama Castle! Inuyama Castle is the oldest castle in Japan, and the steps for each story were surprisingly steep - each one went all the way to my knees (granted, that's probably shin-level for most people, but still) - but fun to climb, and the view from the top was absolutely gorgeous.

When we came out Andy's host mother decided we should all try one of Inuyama's specialty foods, whose name I have forgotten, but is basically grilled tofu with miso on a stick and quite yummy, so she bought us all one stick each, which was very generous of her. And then she invited us all to her house to eat dinner before going back to the festival after dark, which was even more generous! It was also very tasty, and then she played some piano for us and made Andy play violin, and then we were off again to the festival! The big attraction for Inuyama festival is the parade of floats (like the dashi at the Nagoya festival, only according to Inuyama's website they're called yama instead), which are hung with 365 lanterns once it gets dark and then move down the streets. It was ridiculously beautiful and very impressive to see them turn them around corners, with all the lanterns swinging around and bouncing once they set the yama back down. Earlier in the day we also got to see one of the giant sheds where they keep the floats for the rest of the year, which was also cool.

And then on Sunday I went with a few of my classmates to the international fair at COP10, the international conference for biodiversity that's being hosted in Nagoya until the end of this month. We had to go for class, because we've been studying all this environmental/biodiversity vocabulary because of it, but it was actually pretty interesting. Learning all the random vocabulary like 'overhunting' and 'threatened by extinction' actually came in handy, too (which I guess was the point). We went to a lot of booths and also watched a performance of people tying their yukata/kimono obis all by themselves, which I didn't think was possible - I don't know what that had to do with biodiversity, but it was pretty cool anyway. After going around all the booths, we found a place to eat lunch, which happened to be next to a game center. Eating at the restaurant gave us free plays at the game center (though two of us didn't know what they were for so we refused them -.-'), so we went there for a bit. We didn't end up winning anything, but we did do purikura again, bringing my total purikura count up to three!

After that I met up with my friend Mary and we watched our friend Naoko do some cool fire-baton-stuff at her school festival - it was all dark and raining, but the darkness made the fire look even cooler, and the rain didn't really affect the fire at all. It was really really beautiful, though they made us watch from inside because of the fire hazard. -.-'

So that was my crazy week. This weekend is finally our fall break, which is from Friday until Wednesday, including three days of school festival time. It's our only real break other than weekends, because Nanzan doesn't observe a lot of national holidays, ostensibly because we get six days off for the festival (I think they're just mean). I'm planning to go visit my friend's mom in Osaka, then spend a day at an onsen with some of my classmates! Definitely looking forward to it. :)