#13 Saying Goodbye

Life in Japan is coming to a close now. I’ve been in Japan for 2 years and it’s gone by quickly and slowly. I’ve spent one year in Kurashiki, Okayama and one year in Shiroi and Matsudo, Chiba which is right by Tokyo. Life has been interesting and difficult and it’s time to head back. But I find myself growing sentimental as I’m tearing through my apartment, trying to decide what to throw away and what to keep, what to sell and how to ship things to different places. I’ve met some of the kindest people in Japan and my heart is breaking at the thought of having to say goodbye to these wonderful people. I wish I didn’t have to say goodbye to them, but I know that I must. (Seriously why haven’t teleporters been invented yet?) I’ve grown so much in the last two years. When I left America to come to Japan I was a big hot mess. I didn’t even know how much of a mess I was either. That first year in Japan was rough. It was really rough and I was working in a company that I didn’t meld well with at all. I spent the majority of that first year just trying not to bite off people’s heads from all of the stress I was under. However the upside of that was all of the traveling I was able to afford. The company paid well and so I was able to go on a lot of different trips to see Japan. This past year I spent working in the public school system. I definitely meshed with this system a lot better than the first company even if they pay significantly less. I haven’t been nearly as stressed and unhappy as I was the previous year and I’ve had a good chance to reflect on things. I’ve learned so much about myself and how I behave and how I react to things. I’m proud because I discovered these things about myself, by myself. I’ve been writing all year long, mostly at school to help keep my thoughts from exploding all over the place, and writing things has been a great help. We all know that I’ve never been much of a blogger seeing as I haven’t been able to keep up with this blog very well at all. But I have been writing. However the journals I’ve written are not going to be published due to the ramblings and sometimes unpleasantness of the content. But writing has been a way for me to cleanse out the negative thoughts I have so that I won’t keep thinking about them all day long. Through my journals I’ve been able to get out a lot of the poisonous thoughts that were lurking inside of me at the time. It’s been a very beneficial process for me. I never knew I could write so much to be honest.

While I can definitely say I am more enlightened as a person than I was two years ago, I do know that I still have a long way to go. But who I am today is different from who I was when I left. And for that, I am glad. But now that time is dwindling before my departure I feel the anxiety rising up again, hence the writing. Nobody likes to change. Change is scary and change is hard even though it helps us grow. I’m not looking forward to the hardships this change will bring, but I am looking forward to seeing my friends and family again, to attend conventions again, to speak English outside of the classroom again. I’m looking forward to being able to read my mail and to not have to worry about international charges and shipping anymore. I’m looking forward to going back to school and studying costume design and to finally pursue a calling that I realized I had all along but was blocked by all of my other goals. (Aka going to Japan being the first life goal I ever had.) I finally know what I want to do with my life and I’m excited to get started on it. I just had to write it out and remind myself of all the good things in my future since my pre-move anxiety is only reminding me of the bad.

#12 Kyoto and Future Plans

I think it’s safe to say that I’m pretty terrible at managing a blog. None the less I’m still trying for some reason. Probably because I’m rather bored at the moment and I’ve come to a standstill with all of my other projects for now.

My year in Japan is coming to a close now, and I’ve really only made a few posts, the last one promising stuff from Kyoto… Oops. I might get to that still. But anyway let’s move forward before go back and talk about my travels. First of all, my contract with AEON Amity ends on April 7^th, which I find to be a relief. The company was… an experience to say the least but I found that it wasn’t a good fit for me. I chose not to renew my contract even though I was offered lots of money if I stayed on for another year, however in this case, the money wasn’t worth another year. Kurashiki is a nice small city and would be really nice to live in if I had a family or something of the sort here, but I don’t and the city doesn’t have much to offer to a single woman in her mid 20’s. So I have opted to move on to bigger and better things.

Where to now?

Nothing could get bigger or better than: TOKYO. Yes that’s right folks! I am moving to Tokyo this year! It only seemed right since I spent nearly 100000 yen on trips to Tokyo in just Shinkansen fare alone. So I might as well save myself some money and just move there.

But you won’t be with Amity anymore, so what will you do?

I’m still going to teach. I’ve signed up with Interac and they definitely want me. (More details on my placement to come in another post.) So I’ll be teaching in public schools, I’ll have fewer, larger classes than before and I’ll be given the chance to help out with school club activities.  I’m definitely taking a pretty big pay cut, but I think it’ll be worth it to enjoy life in Japan more than I am now.

So when are you coming home?

Depending on when my contract starts I can roughly say that I will be home next year in either April or May 2013. But if all works out well enough, I want to make a visit home this summer. I miss my adorable Bichon and my family and I really do miss the USA like crazy!

And at the moment that is all I know about that. I’m hoping I’ll have the energy to write updates as they come. But we all know my track record…

Now, let’s jump backwards and cover what I should have covered a LONG time ago…

Kyoto.

Wish me luck. I’ll try and remember what details I can.

Kyoto was a weekend trip towards the end of the summer, so it was still BRUTALLY hot and humid outside, but it was the only time that was good for me and my travel buddy, Misty. We took the Shinkansen on a Saturday after work and got up to Kyoto no later than 10 pm. The hostel we stayed in was REALLY NICE. Seriously I don’t think there will ever be a hostel to match it. The common room is just about the prettiest thing I’ve ever been in. There was a very large kitchen and then a dining area and then the tatami mat section where there was a plethora of couches and bean bag chairs to sit in and computers to use too. The majority of the hostel was no shoes too. It was just so comfortable! If I wasn’t so determined to go shrine hopping, I would have hung out in the common room all day. Ha ha.

Here’s the link: http://www.hostelworld.com/hosteldetails.php/Khaosan-Kyoto-Guest-House/Kyoto/45698

Okay, enough about the hostel. So Misty and I decided to go out on Saturday night since it was still early when we arrived. I wanted to wear my new flats that had crazy blinged out bows on them so I did. Buuut.. I didn’t realize in the store that the shoes were not going to stretch out at all. They technically fit, but not well enough, so the shoes ended up carving huge holes into the back of my heels while we were walking around. It resulted in the rest of my weekend being really painful for me as Kyoto is all walking. But the bars were still fun. I was hit on by a dentist that had no clue what a personal bubble was and kept trying to compliment my teeth. I got tipsy pretty quickly too because I didn’t have much to eat for dinner as I had forgotten that Misty was coming from a work dinner and I had thought we could get food in Kyoto. Ha ha I was wrong. So All I had for dinner was some apple bread from the French Bakery chain in Japan. We met some cool folks and they were interesting. I think one of them was from England and he was hitting on Misty in a very suave manner the whole night. It was cute. I think I would have enjoyed it more had I not made such a poor footwear choice that night.

So the next day we started right away as the Fushimi Inari shrine. It’s the shrine with all of the red gates and you see it a little in the movie Memoirs of a Geisha. But this shrine is HUGE. It literally takes up and entire mountain. Misty and I were there for 4 hours and we still hadn’t reached the top. It was still really fun though and we did pretty well at climbing since we were both in decent shape from Bodyrocking (Bodyrock.TV is the home workout-person’s dream!) I still want to go back to Kyoto and try and reach the top. We stopped halfway up because so much time had passed and there were lots of other shrines to visit.

Lots of torii (gates) all lined up really closely

There's stuff written on the back of them!

These are all personal or family shrines

CAT. SUNBATHING.

Kyoto horizon

Delicious special Kyoto tofu-something... basically its fried tofu and udon.

Next was the Golden Pavilion. It’s literally covered entirely in gold plating. I remember learning about it in my Asian History classes in school, but the details escape me at the moment. It has a sister pavilion called the Silver Pavilion. But unfortunately it is not covered entirely in Silver.

They even had the bottom opened up that day!

Proof I was there!

Silver Pavilion

So on Sunday we managed to get to 3 shrines. But the end of it we were pretty tired. So we camped out at the hostel for a while, then got dolled up and went out to find us some Geisha….only to find out that you can only see them at their scheduled performances during the week….. blargh.. BUT. We found this neat restaurant with a Ducati in it and took pictures on it. :3 So either way, successful night.

pretty hot, huh?

On Monday, we stopped by the Geisha corner and I took photos of the display cases cause they had pretty things inside them. Then afterward we went to Kyomizudera Shrine. Which is probably the largest shrine in Kyoto and we gained a 3^rd member to our party! Her name was Hazuki and we saw her when we ask Turkish food on Sunday night and invited her out with us. She was already friends with Misty beforehand. (No we did not invite some random stranger to go sightseeing with us) Anyway, when we got to Kyomizudera, we took a lot of photos of the Kyoto horizon and of the super tall pavilion. Then we went on a “ride” so to speak. Basically you can go underground below the shrine where it is completely pitch black and you have to follow a rail on the wall. I’ve never been in that kind of darkness in my life before. Not even on Halloween “spooky rides” because I can always see the emergency exits. But this place was the genuine thing. And I was terrified. I could feel my innards shaking the whole time and while logically I knew that if I followed the rail and not bump my face on the person in front of me and not trip the person behind me I’d get out just fine, but my body wanted to crouch down and scream for someone to get me out. I had a little reprieve halfway through because there was a lit spot that was on this stone ball that I didn’t know what it’s significance was but I was thankful for the light and then we turned the corner and it was dark again. But we finally got out and I successfully managed not to scream like a child and burst into tears. So it was a successful scary ride for me.

Just past that gate at the top led to the scary basement

The tallest pavilion is also very pretty!

Kyoto horizon

this was a really neat "hand washing" fountain. usually they just have bamboo

Hazuki and I and the gorgeous scenery behind us!

Better view of the gorgeous scenery

one of the prayer spots.

varying Geshia hair ornaments.

After my near panic attack we walked around the rest of the shrine. There were TONS of people there which I was surprised by since it wasn’t a holiday anymore. The rest of the shrine was very large and very pretty and I wish I could see it at either the Spring with the Sakura blossoms or in the fall when the leaves change color.

After Kiyomizudera, it was almost time to hope back on the shinkansen to head home, but before we did that, we stopped by the International Manga Museum. It was super cute and kind of a giant library, but you can’t borrow anything. But you can sit there all day and read manga to your heart’s content. They even had an English section, and for Japan it was a pretty big English section. The museum was converted from an old school so there was a mini-museum to the old children’s school inside too on an upper floor. It was really fascinating to see the kind of school books they had and all of the photos of the previous Principals. (Some of them were pretty scary-looking.) There was also a REALLY INTERESTING room that had a section of wall dedicated to a year. So I looked at the 1987 section and of course at the 1991 section to smile at Sailor Moon and compare old and new releases of it and then in the middle was a nice display of all the different aspects of manga and even a place to place with making faces.

TOTORO

part of the English section

art in the museum

Surprising deliciousness!!!!

Before we left Kyoto, Misty wanted to do some shopping, so we stopped in a very “hippie” store of which I forget the name. But it was neat in there and there was a fabric shop on the second floor and I found myself wishing I had a project to buy any of it for but I didn’t… and Afterward we went to a hole in the wall pasta place. I wasn’t expecting much, but then we saw that there was 1 cook and you could see into the entire kitchen and that she made everything from SCRATCH. So I got pasta with “white” sauce and clams and spinach. And it was soooooooooooooo GOOD. Just. Wow. Definitely a surprise treat!

Once we finished eating we grabbed our bags and headed back to Okayama and Kurashiki!

And I’m all blogged out…  I know I still need to talk about the winter vacation but… who knows when that will happen plus I have few photos from it so remembering will not be as easy. (I remember easier when I’m looking at a timeline of photos, it’s how I remembered this entire Kyoto trip.)

Thanks for reading!

#11 Traveling Finally!

I. AM. SO. SORRY. I should have posted a long time ago but to be honest nothing really happened until I had my Obon vacation which I got back from about 4 weeks ago. Then I started typing this up after 2 weeks had passed but then I ran off to Kyoto and was too wiped out all week again to type more. Oops.

Anyway Obon is one of the religious holidays in Japan where folks commemorate their dead and their ancestors. In Japan it’s just kind of a family reunion-type of holiday. Sometimes people put lanterns in the river or families clean their ancestor’s graves or reveal new memorials to their families. Then there’s food. 

Here's a helpful wikipedia page about the holiday if you want to know more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obon

So my work gave us 9 days off coinciding with Obon and for us foreigners it’s just (an extremely short)  summer vacation.  So I started off my vacation by going to Nagoya. It was about an hour-ish on the Shinkansen. I left Kurashiki at about 8 pm on Saturday (right after work) and caught the 8:30 Shinkansen in Okayama. I had a rolling suitcase that weighed about 50 lbs and a garment bag that I took with me. (I had forgotten my garment bag and had to turn around halfway to the train station and walk back to get them. Yes, I NEEDED it.) Overall I feel like my entire Obon vacation was incredibly blessed because I always had help everywhere I went. Friendly strangers helped me find my way to the right platform and the right train and the right car and then other friendly strangers offered to let me use their hanger for my garment bag on the train when I ended up with a seat without one and when I couldn’t navigate the Nagoya train station to save my life, I happened to find a hotel inside of the station and their other entrance happened to lead directly to the subway I was looking for. It was nearing 11 pm and the subway was PACKED but people were kind enough to let me have a seat with all of the crap I was carrying plus one girl had asked me where I traveled from that day and I told her Kurashiki and she was like “WOW” since Nagoya and Kurashiki aren’t close at all. She helped me get the seat. When I left the subway I managed to miracle myself to the correct station exit and in the right direction towards the hostel.  For not really have any idea of where I was going, I only REALLY got lost once, and that was inside of Nagoya station. By the time I checked in it was basically 11 pm which was an hour after my proposed check-in time that I put on my reservation. Oops.

Now I’m sure you’re all wondering “Why go to Nagoya?” and the answer is quite simple if you know me at all. Cosplay. I love it. And in Nagoya is where the World Cosplay Summit takes place and my work vacation happened to have landed right in the middle of the World Cosplay Summit festivities. So of course I had to go. I also knew the people who were competing as Team USA this year and they contacted me when they were selected to represent USA so that we could meet up and hang out; which we did.  It was soooo much fun hanging out with them and being able to see other Americans that DON’T work as English teachers was just so refreshing! I also got to meet up with one of my cosplay photographer friends too as he was acting as kind of press/manager/handler for the USA team this year because the regular USA organizer was unable to go this year. (It worked out really well for me ‘cause I ended up with her All-Access pass anyway. :3)

So here is the breakdown of my two days in Nagoya.

Day 1: Competition Day. I had missed the first two days of the Summit but I managed to arrive in time for the competition day which is the day that matters, so that was really fortunate. Nagoya was humid and hot in all of its sweaty glory and everyone at the summit was drenched, including me. I had made a bright red cotton dress to wear to the competition because 1. I didn’t want to be stuck sweating in a costume in that heat. 2. I didn’t want to be stuck sitting and watching the competition in a costume in that heat.

But I did wear a wig with my dress and it wasn’t so bad. I knew I would be fine in a wig because I wore a wig to Disney World once and everything was just fine. Here is a photo of my before I went out into the heat. Please forgive my silly expression. It’s what I do. Photo courtesy of LJinto.

 Here is a video of team USA's performance!

just a little bit of the crowd long before the events started.

Day 2: Sweet Castle Photo Event. This is the day that I dressed up in a costume. I dressed up as Sailor Venus from Sailor Moon. It is the only costume I have with me in Japan because everything else was too bulky and I needed the space for real life stuff. Anyway, this was a really nice event. The place called Sweet Castle is literally what it sounds like. The building looks like a castle and the whole thing is dedicated to sweets and cakes and candy. It has a buffet of just sweet things and there is a GIANT cake that goes through the middle of the castle with a spiral staircase around it. The cake is something like 4 stories tall. And just to answer any questions now: No the cake wasn’t real and neither was the icing. There were also other smaller giant cakes throughout the castle.

Sweet Castle was out in the middle of nowhere-land Nagoya and I had managed to magic myself onto the WCS bus with team USA on the premise that there was still room for me. (I was tiny and so was my stuff.) It was lucky because I would have had to pay an arm and a leg for a cab as the ride was about an hour long just to get there.

We get there by 11:30 and we only have half an hour to change. Which is silly ‘cause these people are all top-notch cosplayers and they all have crazy costumes that take at least an hour or more just to put on, let alone doing makeup.  After all the introductions and speeches and “official” photos were had, there was a short time where we could wander around and take photos wherever around the room we were in, then after lunch and more meetings and speeches, we could use the majority of the castle for photos. Lunch was good and thankfully it was not made entirely of sweets and sugar. It was clear that the castle staff had definitely put effort into trying to make the lunch menu as culturally diverse as they could muster, which still underwhelmed most of the WCS teams, but I was glad to see pizza and meat and potatoes again. I also tried the cake. It was delicious!

So the photos that I have from Sweet Castle are pretty much all from LJinto, the photographer friend I mentioned before. He takes a darn awesome photo too. :) We got to go into a giant room with mirrors on all four walls and the floor was black and white tiled. Then there was an all red room with red walls and red carpeting and red chairs. It was really sassy. But one of the silliest things at the castle, sillier than the red room, sillier than the giant 4 story cake, was the fountain at the front of the castle. It had a life-size Santa in his sleigh with like 2 reindeer at the lead. It was the first thing I saw at the castle and it made me burst out laughing when I saw it.

After Sweet Castle there was partying and fun times. I left early cause the music was legitimately too loud. This is the second time I’ve been somewhere where my ears actually hurt from how loud it was. The first time was at an awful dance club and I didn’t even bother to stay for 5 minutes. This time I had ear plugs and it helped immensely but it made socializing impossible, so I just went home early.

NEXT DAY.

I went to Tokyo.

I did so much sightseeing! The first thing I did was go to Akihabara and do a little bit of shopping. It was sooo crowded that it was hard to really see anything at all. The rest of the week is kind of a huge jumble right now so I’ll list all the places I went to:

Akihabara

Ueno Park (there were pandas and an old pagoda!)

Asakusa Shrine (I drew out the stick with the fortune that read “The Best Luck!”)

Sweets Café (Everything was based on the zodiac. I got the most ridiculous thing on the menu.)

Sunshine 60 (Great view of the city and had a Prince of Tennis mini-museum in it)

Tokyo Fish Market (Went really late, it was neat seeing chopped up fish, fisherman hate tourists so hard.)

Tokyo Tower (Awesome, awesome and more awesome!)

Harajuku (Awesome shopping and SOOO crowded! Did not go on a Sunday though so no crazy dress up time)

Gundam Café (Fun café, awful food)

Madoka Magica Café (Beautiful café! Needed a ticket to eat???)

Comiket/TFT: (Worst changing rooms in my life. Stand around hoping for photos. Everything is SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO CROWDED. Overall glad I did it but never again.)

ShabuShabu party in Shinjuku (Partying with the folks still in Tokyo from WCS. We got drunk and had a blast together. Shabu Shabu is delicious.)

and some photos!

If there is anything you want me to elaborate more on, please ask in the comments. I’ll try and make a post elaborating on it for you. I just couldn’t do it in this one as there was just too much to talk about with this trip to a point where I just had it do it that way in order to get it down. But I have a pro account on flickr now so please enjoy the photos! There are a lot of new ones!

Up next: Kyoto!!

#10 Happy 4th of July and Happy Canada Day!

 Hello everyone! Again this post is late, but I have a proper reason that doesn’t include laziness!

So of course the day after I made my last post, my computer broke, and it stayed broke for 2 weeks. Ha ha such is life! But it is alive again! I took it apart myself and cleaned it out and now it works better than before it broke! There was an outrageous amount of dust built up inside and that was the only problem. I think I may have to clean it out again before I leave Japan because things get REALLY dusty REALLY fast here.

So let’s get caught up. Teaching has been quite an experience. There has definitely been a steep learning curve and its had its ups and downs to say the least. Some days the kids are fantastic, and other days it can be like pulling teeth to get them to do anything. It’s also a thing in Japan that parents rely on teachers to teach their kids discipline where it American it is the other way around and society expects parents to teach discipline to the kids. So that is sometimes interesting. (I have yet to learn how to teach the 5 and 6 year olds to stop trying to punch me, anyone have any ideas?) Overall I find that I really like teaching high school level kids and above the most. Mainly because I can get more creative and use less energy trying to keep them entertained/awake.

In other news, those of you who know how much I completely love to sew, I finally got a sewing machine! It’s super exciting and the machine is really pretty! I was having a tough time finding one that I liked because ordering online would have been a major hassle since it requires registering with the website in Japanese and that whole process and I really just didn’t want to do that. So just when I was going to buckle down and shell out the money for a machine I liked at my local sewing store, I found the exact same machine at the electronics store for $50 less! So that is what I bought. It is a Jaguar machine and it has 28 stitches and 2 buttonholes (Which is okay since I hate buttons.) And it can sew through denim without a problem! I can’t wait to start sewing up a storm! I also think that having a sewing project will keep me motivated throughout the week when I start feeling really sluggish and down and homesick.

Last week I went back to Okayama city for a friend's birthday party. It was a lot of fun! I met up with Misty and Melinda (They are some of the folks who trained me for the job when I first arrived in Japan. We became pretty good friends!) and it was a while before we were supposed to meet up with the birthday people so we went out to dinner next door to where we needed to meet them. The restaurant was set up where several different parties sit at one big table. So we sit down, order drinks and order some food. Just as we get our salad, this group of 3 guys get the courage to talk to us and ask if they can scoot their party over to join us. Because you always need to be polite in Japan we said yes since it would have been super awkward if we said no. So they shifted down and started chatting with us to the best of their ability. They knew broken English and we knew broken Japanese. It was really amusing. Then the group of guys from the other side of the table (to my left) started talking to Misty and kind of joined our group too, then no more than maybe 10 seconds later these two girls show up and sit down right next to me and one of them is really really drunk and she starts talking to me about how she studies English and that she's in college studying English and she wants to be my friend and practice English with me and so on... She was very touchy feely but only because she was so drunk. Overall she was a completely harmless girl.

We ended up staying at the restaurant until 1:30 am. I had more wine than food because the guys talking to Misty (one of which totally fell in love with her) kept offering me wine and free booze is free booze. When we left we hadn't really eaten anything and I had only had like 2 glasses of wine and one of the guys drank Melinda's beer but someone ended up paying for our bill and it wasn't any of us. So we got a free dinner that we didn't eat and free drinks from someone else's tab and our drinks were dunk by other people and paid for by yet a different person. (Confused yet? Cause I am!) After our dinner, we met up with the birthday folks and went to a club called MARS. It was supposed to be a dance club of some sort but it was only playing really really awful rap music and people were just standing around bouncing their knees acting like wannabe be-boys. The whole place reminded me of an awkward middle school dance. The music was way too loud too and it was the first time that my ears actually hurt because of how loud it was and Misty had to scream in my ear in order to talk to me which hurt even more. Needless to say Misty and I left and went to Matador which is a bar that is owned by a guy from Peru which we had the pleasure of meeting two weeks ago on a Sunday night. (We chilled at his bar that night until 4 am. And the place was empty! This is how entertaining he is!) But on Saturdays its a dance club so we went to dance and it was great and the music was awesome and the loudness levels didn't hurt and I was about a billion times happier. We stayed at this place until 4:30 am. (again...) and went home after that and showered and went to sleep by 5:30 am. I woke up with a bunch of heat rashes and was really sore but it was all worth it. :D So that was a really fun weekend last weekend.

Yesterday we had a fancy dinner for one of our Japanese teachers because she is leaving. She was at the school for 3 years but she chose not to renew her contract because she is getting married. So there was delicious fancy food in a really nice upstairs room. It was really nice to eat good food for once since I usually get my food pre-preared from the convenience store or the grocery store. Here are some photos!

Next week my old Co-Net is leaving! My next Co-Net is already here though. Her name is Natalie. She is also excited to travel around Japan and see things so it should be a lot more fun and a lot easier to plan trips now!

That’s really all that’s new. Not much has happened since golden week because I’ve been working so much all the time and it’s going to get busier because I will be teaching extra classes as summer seminars… which I still need to plan out…

Next post: Who knows! We’re all caught up now! :D