one month left

Oop, big gap between posts, sorry! Life in Nagoya has been alternating between normal (class days/during the week) and exciting (weekends). Since it's nearing the end of term (I go home in less than a month!), classwork and final projects are piling up like crazy. >_<

Anyway, on to the fun parts. Last Saturday I rustled up some friends and we went to the Nagoya City Art Museum, which was rather small but also had cheap admission, which was a selling point. It was mostly modern art, by artists from all over, plus one room of works by locals. My favorite piece was a self-portait that was really just a canvas with the words 'head' and 'feet' indicating his height, plus some descriptive words in between. After that we went to the Electricity Museum, which is free and meant for little kids (we were definitely the oldest people there who weren't accompanying children), but I think we all enjoyed it much more than the art museum. There were lots of interactive things where you could generate electricity and learn about it (though I'm pretty sure all of us were too lazy to actually read/figure things out in Japanese), plus a room of optical illusions. Very fun. :)

And then on Wednesday I went to Cat's Cafe to tackle the giant parfait again - nine people this time; we left about 2cm of sludgy chocolate ice cream melt at the bottom, so I guess that was technically a failture. But it was just as delicious, so that's all good. On Thursday I went shopping at Hills Walk, the new subway station/shopping area near my house (though the subway isn't done yet), with my lovely friend Mary, who used to be my bus buddy every day but has now moved into the dorms. :(

This weekend I had a gasshuku (kind of like camp?) with one of my seminar classes! We met Saturday afternoon on campus and then split off in our groups to various parts of Nagoya, gathering data for our projects. My group had some hazy/complicated ideas of trying to observe if people responded differently to international students/see how much onomatopoeia/mimetics they used when describing people. We had people describe their favorite foods and then Christmas trees; judging by the answers we got these were apparently very hard questions. It was also really hard finding people who would talk to us and who were also willing to be videotaped; we spent at least two hours wandering but were rejected by at least half of the people we approached. -.-'

With the hard part of the project over, the fun part began! We met up with the rest of our class for dinner, which of course included a nomihoudai (all-you-can-drink) menu, plus yummy food. It was really funny to watch everybody (including the professor) get progressively drunker as time went on; Japan really is a drinking culture. After dinner we walked to a nearby supermarket to buy breakfast for the next day, and then we went back to the 'Nanzan hotel', aka the living space underneath our student center. I'm pretty sure it's often used for this sort of class/club campout; there were several big rooms of tatami mats, plus bathrooms, baths, and meeting rooms. I found the pile of futons underneath one of the shelves very comfortable, so I spent a lot of time holed up in there (and eventually ended up sleeping there, too). It was a fun night, with card games (with penalties for the losers) and chatting and chilling out.

In the morning we had to be out by 9, which sucked because we didn't sleep until late, and then we continued our project work. Our main task was to get the video files from our cameras onto our computers; as far as I can tell only one group actually succeeded. -.-' So after trying for about an hour and a half, my group gave up and just watched the video on the camera and starting taking notes from there. Since one of our group members was gone this weekend, we ended there and then I went home and went straight to sleep.

A few hours later, I got up, ate dinner, and then headed out for Nagoya Swings! Basically it's a group of people (foreigners and Japanese people alike) who meet once a month to swing dance. I only found out about them this month, from their blurb in a newsletter I picked up, but I really wish I had known about them before! Even though I didn't know anybody there when I went in, it was a very friendly atmosphere so that didn't seem to matter at all. I got there in time for a basic lesson, which was basically just review, but after that there was open dance, which was ridiculously fun! I haven't danced at all since June, so it was good to know that I hadn't forgotten how (except for apparently lindy hop -.-' Almost everybody danced east coast though, so no real problems there). There were some really good dancers there, and one of the teachers said I was pretty good, so that made me happy. :) It also turns out that Nagoya Swings is performing during A Christmas Carol, which is happening at Nanzan this weekend, and I volunteered to dance with them then, too! It's especially cool because my friend Mary is in the play, and now I get to go see it for free. :) So I will get to dance at least one more time before leaving Japan - although one of the guys I met yesterday said he knew of another dance thing somewhere and would give me details later, so there could be even more chances! Anyway, I was really happy to dance again, and it was definitely worth having to stay up late to finish my homework afterward. :D

fall break!

Apologies for taking so long to update; I am bad at finding time to post. -.-'

Anyway, last Friday morning was the start of fall break, so I got up bright and early to take the trains to Kyoto! My mom's friend was working there for the day, so the plan was for me to go to Kyoto, meet up with her daughter for a little bit, then drive back to Osaka. The train trip was uneventful, minus the part where I got on the wrong train and got to Kyoto half an hour later than expected. I met up with my mom's friend's daughter Kiko, who has lived in Japan since she was 5 and so mostly speaks Japanese instead of Chinese (like me with English!), and we had lunch, wandered around some shopping streets, and went to a cat cafe! Kiko wouldn't let me pay for anything, which was really nice of her. After that my mom's friend took me back to Osaka with her, which was a 4-hour drive, including stopping for dinner. And then I was really tired so I went to bed.

On Saturday my mom's friend and her husband both had work (they're both Chinese/Chinese literature professors at different universities), so I planned to explore Osaka by myself. My mom's friend took me to her university, then snagged a random student who happened to be going to the station and asked him to take me with him. He agreed, luckily, and we got on the train together, where I found out his (last) name was Watanabe and that he was on his way to a part-time job in Kyoto. He even looked up where I should go after getting off the train for me on his iPhone, which was really very nice of him. And then he got off the train and I continued on my merry way. After spending a long time wandering the underground of Umeda/JR Osaka station and staring at maps, I made a plan for the day. First stop: Shitennouji, Japan's first Buddhist temple (according to Wikipedia). It was still pretty early in the day so it was very quiet and peaceful. It was actually part of a big park-ish area full of temples and shrines and stuff, so I wandered around for a while.

Then I went to Osaka Castle, which led me to the conclusion that all Japanese castles are pretty much the same. The architecture is very similar, so they all look similar, and inside is usually a museum or at least has exhibits of some sort which encompass several floors, and then after climbing a lot of stairs you get to the top and see an amazing view. That said, I still really enjoy visiting them - Osaka Castle was quite pretty, with lots of gold decorations on the outside, and the view from the top was gorgeous, of course. When I wandered out of the gate, I was stopped by a volunteer tour guide who offered me a map of the castle. Since I'd already been I asked her instead where the nearest station was (the Osaka castle park is enormous!), and she said she'd take me there. She was a very lively middle-aged lady, and talked basically non-stop while we walked. And then somehow by the entrance we got mixed into a group of young (probably late 20s) salarymen who were also from Nagoya, and who got excited when they heard I was from America and took a picture with me. And then after some explanations of the castle architecture that I didn't understand, the tour guide entrusted me to the group of salarymen and told them to take me to the station, which was the second time in one day I was told to go somewhere with some random Japanese people. Anyway, we only went as far as the parking lot before splitting ways, and then I got back on the subway to head to my next destination, the HEP 5 building.

The HEP 5 building is really just a big shopping mall, but it has a big ferris wheel on top, which of course I went to go ride. I went around sunset because I figured that would be pretty, but I couldn't actually see much sunset so it would have been cooler to go when it was all dark. Still, a ferris wheel is a ferris wheel, and I enjoyed it. After that I wandered around killing time in stores before meeting up with Anna and Liz from Carleton, plus their friend from Kansai Gaidai. It was great to see them again (and meet their friend), and we had dinner together, which was fun. And then I went back to my mom's friend's house.

The next day my mom's friend took me to Nara, which was maybe an hour and a half away by car. It was a rainy rainy day, but there were still deer everywhere, just hanging out. My mom's friend said that they're basically wild deer and nobody takes care of them or anything, but they're completely used to people. You could buy deer senbei (crackers) to feed them, but I decided I wanted to see the giant Buddha at Todaiji first. The giant Buddha, or daibutsu, is the world's biggest bronze Buddha (again, thanks to Wikipedia), and it was huge! According to my admission ticket, its ears are over 8 feet tall, if that's any indication. It was very impressive. Next I decided I wanted to feed the deer, even though I know it is bad to feed wild animals. The interesting thing is that even though the deer can easily get to the stacks of deer senbei that the vendors sell, they don't even try to eat them until somebody buys them. Once you do, though, they crowd around you and starting nipping and pulling at your clothes until you feed them - they were really impatient and one of them even bit my butt! It was a little alarming, really. But then once I ran out they understood right away that I didn't have any more and lost interest. Much better than feeding monkeys. >_<

Once we got back to Osaka we collected my mom's friend's husband and went to eat dinner! I'd planned to take the train back to Nagoya in the afternoon, so I could get home around the same time as my host family and eat a late dinner with them, but my mom's friend and her husband wanted to have dinner with me and even insisted on buying me a shinkansen ticket for Nagoya! It was incredibly generous (shinkansen tickets are at least $100 each) but they wouldn't let me refuse, so I'm very grateful for how nice they were to me. :) Dinner was yakiniku and absolutely delicious! It was all-you-can-eat for a specific time period, so we ordered a lot of things, including beef tongue (which was surprisingly tasty) and stomach (not bad taste-wise but had a weird texture). The all-you-can-eat included dessert, so I had one vanilla ice cream with blueberry sauce and then another vanilla ice cream with hot sweet potatoes; needless to say, they were really really yummy. And then I got on the shinkansen and was back to Nagoya in less than an hour.

The next day I went to an onsen (hot spring) with some of my classmates! Actually it is apparently more of a public bath than a real onsen, but it was basically like a spa and fantastic. The one thing about going to an onsen in Japan is that you always go in naked, which was a little awkward, but the water was so nice that we stopped worrying about it. There was an outdoor bath, which was really great with the wind blowing, plus things like a milk bath, sauna, and what were basically giant pots that you could climb into. It was very relaxing. After that we dressed in the loose-fitting clothes they gave us and met up with the boys to eat lunch, and then we decided to try out the sauna-type rooms. Basically they were rooms of varying (hot) temperatures where you could go in and lie down (and sweat) on top of heated rocks (or just on the floor). It was nice but too hot for me, so I ended up just taking a nap on the mats outside. It was all in all a very lazy experience, but I was still somehow really tired when I went home.

On Tuesday I took it easy and didn't really do anything, but then on Wednesday I went to the university festival! There were booths run by various clubs and teams selling food lining the road, plus a big stage with various performances all day. There were also lots of things going on inside the buildings, like an okama (male cross-dresser) cafe, which I slightly regret not going into because I think it would have been amusing, but there were actually a surprising number of boys in school-girl uniforms wandering around (maybe the cafe members on break?), so I probably didn't miss much. I think the school festival is a chance for people to dress in costume to advertise their events, because I also saw a lot of other random costumes, too. Anyway earlier I had been recruited to talk about America (aka bring pictures of Carleton/Atlanta and explain them) at an international cafe-type thing, so after lunch I went and did just that for an hour.

And then this Saturday I went to Meijo University's school festival, which was much bigger than ours and also more crowded. I spent the whole day watching dance performances, some of which were really cool, plus participating in a Ghibli trivia quiz. :D

Sorry this ended up being such a long post; thanks for reading it all (if you did)!