Pic-post pic-spam!

Merry Christmas to those who celebrate it. I did not do anything terribly exciting for Christmas (except make yummy pancakes with a friend) so I will gloss over that and use this as mostly a picpost. Christmas is more of a romantic holiday here than anything (and they have 2 Valentine's Days - Valentine's Day and White Day. They sure love commercialized romance), since very few Japanese are Christian.

I just got photos from the yukata fan dance and the Shirakawa trip taken by someone involved with the dorm (ie, has a much better camera than mine), and organized them into my Flickr account.

So! Here's the fandance set.


And the Shirakawa photo set.


And here are some pictures of Nekobukuro.


Poor funny-looking cat




Grumpy-looking kitties!


I leave on Sunday for Osaka, Shizuoka, and Nagoya to stay with my friend's family for New Years. Should be an interesting experience!

woo, 30th post. Seijinshiki, Nekobukuro, and purple-haired obaa-sans

Woo! I got an invitation to Seijinshiki (the coming-of-age ceremony in Japan on the second Monday in January for all those who turn 20. That's the important age here, not 21). Exciting! :) Except that girls usually wear furisode kimono (the fancy kimono with the very long sleeves reaching almost to the ground) - and to rent one costs about $1000. Yeah, kimono are incredibly expensive. So beautiful though. My friends and I are probably going to have to settle with yukata or just a fancy western dress. ... Probably the western dress, yukata are cheap and casual. And generally thin cotton, which will be very cold in January.

Oh! Speaking of which, I participated in traditional Japanese fan dances yesterday. I had one practice and then did a performance for the dorm Christmas party.......... (which they also used to trick us into going to a sermon. Christian dorm. I wasn't very happy about that - wouldn't have minded if they just told us we were going to a sermon instead of "we're moving the party to the next room! There will be more food there." Anyway.)

Here are a couple of pictures.




I also went to Nekobukuro this week. I've been missing my cats a lot, and Nekobukuro is a kind of cat petting zoo on the top floor of Sunshine City in Ikebukuro. You pay about $6 to go in and play with about 20 kitties for as long as you want. Unfortunately they weren't too friendly, mostly sleeping in high, out-of-the-way areas. I'm sure they have to deal with just too many people. Still nice though, I got some pictures I'll put up later. I still miss my kitties though... Honestly, I'm rather sad I'm not going to be home for the holidays. First time away from home for them. I don't have any plans for Christmas (which is a romantic holiday here, sigh.) I'm visiting my friend Mari's family around New Years - going down to Osaka the 27 or 28, then Shizuoka, Nagoya, and back to Tokyo probably around the 3rd or 4th of January, though that's not set yet. She told me I'm going to have to "get over" my dislike of seafood though when I'm visiting her family. :( I've tried, I have been trying seafood here, and I didn't have a lot of choice on the Shirakawa trip, but I hate it still. I'm worried I'm going to have to eat everything to be polite too, and I just... can't. Argh.

Need to think of omiyage (little gifts) for her family too. I'm terrible at thinking of ideas for presents.

Hmm. There are a LOT of older women in Japan with their hair dyed purple or violet. Apart from that, they appear to be a typical Japanese obaa-san (grandmother)... I actually saw an older man today too with a purple hint to his hair. I have no idea why this is. It's kind of awesome (I love older folks who dye their hair crazy colors :p There was one really nice lady with purple streaks who came into the jewelry store one day) but random! Japan is usually not so hot on dyeing hair, except for bleaching it or making it more auburn. So there's obaa-sans in kimono at the subway and obaa-sans with purple hair, heh.

Not a terribly coherent post. Midterm essay and constant Japanese studying frying my brains. Definitely need a break. Classes go until the beginning of February, yuck!

I went to Namja Town in Ikebukuro yesterday. Man... that place is trippy. It's really hard to describe. Awesome place for a date, though. There's lots of game arcades and so forth, and a lot we didn't see. We mostly went to Gyoza Stadium, which had an overwhelming amount of different types of gyoza (dumplings); Ice Cream Castle (lots of ice creams/crepes); and a dessert place that was especially romantic with lots of little booths tucked away in corners, and two-person tables under fake trees with lights and fountains and so forth. My friends took pictures, I'll probably put them up when I see them. :p

Then back to the never-ending round of cramming and forgetting kanji and vocabulary. Ugh. I absolutely detest the Japanese language classes here. They're not at all conducive to actually learning Japanese, just stressing you out... My Japanese has gone downhill since coming here. *sigh* It's incredibly depressing, and my teachers back home are not going to be happy. =/

Shirakawa Pt. 2

H'okay. Part deux!
Day two: Gorgeous gardens, tea ceremony, baby's first castle, dharma pantings, sleeping at a Buddhist temple. Day three: museum, carving a stone necklace, hooome

We leave the ryokan and head back into Shirakawa-shi to go to Nanko Park - the first park ever built in Japan, back in 1800. We attend a tea ceremony, sort of. It's not a proper ceremony - the tea master talked a lot in Japanese, which hardly any of us exchange students understood, and the Japanese organizers didn't translate. They gave us tea and just showed us how to turn the cup, but it wasn't actually a proper ceremony like I saw in high school. We mostly enjoyed the heated tatami mats and looked out the nice big windows at the garden. Once we finished at the tea house, we wandered around the garden for a while. So gorgeous...




Following the teahouse and garden, we went to visit Shirakawa Castle. Pretty beautiful and imposing from the outside, but tiny within... Just one room, with steep stairs going up another two or three levels. I started to call it "Baby's First Castle," since it didn't really seem to have much room for a family!



We left the castle and went on to paint our own dharma (or "daruma") dolls. Dharma was an Indian Buddhist saint. Daruma dolls are red paper-made dolls that have a weight added to the bottom, allowing it to always bob back up when its knocked over. It suggests invincible will power and is often used as a mascot for good luck. Painting is rather hard though.... You make a wish, and paint in the eyes once the wish comes true.
Before being painted

My daruma doll... Haha.


Finally we head to our last destination for the day: a Buddhist temple where we will spend the night. It's unheated (in the morning, we could see our breath in the air) and the room we slept in had some rather intimidating paintings...


We go to a hotel (heat!!) for dinner and a farewell party, then go back to the Buddhist temple to drink and chat some more. No one slept very well - up late talking, and the clock in the room played a song and counted off the hour every hour... I'm a light sleeper and it woke me up almost every time, sigh.

We wake up at 7 for meditation at 7:30. Whoever thought of trying to make sleep-deprived college students wake up abysmally early and sit with their eyes closed for 30 minutes... :p Then breakfast of picked radishes, pickled plums, salty strips of seaweed, and a rice porridge thing. I didn't eat a much for breakfast.
Meditation

Breakfast

All the statues at the temple were wearing little hats and jackets or bibs.


After leaving the temple, we head to the Shirakawa Field Museum. It's a small museum focusing mainly on the Jomon era or Japan, and other early history. We get to carve a necklace out of soapstone or some other soft stone, using sandpaper. I quite enjoyed it, and now have a nice worry necklace, although my hands cramped up like crazy from sanding so much (and I also sanded my fingernails and fingers, ouch). Ramen for lunch (apparently a Shirakawa style of ramen is quite famous. All I know is that it was hot and tasty! Mmm, hot food). We stop at a small baked goods/ice cream shop (150 yen/$1.50 ice cream! Yum) and head home... to SHOWERS and sleep!

So, yes. :) A very fun trip, quite an interesting experience, and it was nice to get out of Tokyo for the first time.