New Laptop is Here

My nice new laptop has at long last arrived in the mail. I have been without an internet connection at home for a solid month now, which has super sucked. I am embarrassingly dependent on my computer, even more so because I live in a foreign country. A week from now 3 of my friends from college will be in Japan wanting to do everything the country has to offer, and I'm relieved to have the beautiful trip-planning power of the internet.

Minus a couple of days off I am going to take when my friends come to visit and a trip to Utsunomiya to do some work visa tweaking, I have 14 days of actual work left. My Japan time is quickly drawing to a close.

I've been doing some fun stuff and taking a few pictures over the past couple weeks so stay tuned while I post a few things.

An Easy Week

This is a nice little week for me. Monday was a holiday due to Labor Thanksgiving Day. Wednesday, I had only a couple of classes due to testing. Thursday and Friday, then, the ALT crew all goes to Utsunomiya for a teacher conference. Its a good thing.

I still have yet to visit the library to find some English books as I had planned. Its on the other side of town, so I figure I should wait until I have another reason to venture that far on my poor old bicycle. Maybe I'll enlist a friend to go check it out with me. On Google Book Search, I am currently reading Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne. I am really enjoying it. Google lets me make a little library of what I've read, where I can give ratings and tags, write little reviews, and generally try to make myself look well read. I added a link to my library on the right under Interesting Links. Check it out. I think that my next purchases from Amazon.jp will be the lonely planet guides for Hong Kong and Bangkok. I've gotta get my travel research done before winter break!

Speaking of my winter break plans, it seems that there is a bit of political unrest playing out in Bangkok recently. Masses of anti-government protesters are angrily demanding something or other, while completely ignoring my travels plans. Very rude. Can you guess where they are protesting?

12/10/07 Surrounding Cities

Lately we have been branching out in our activities a bit. Having scoured just about every new area of interest that we can find in town, we have turned our attention outward, toward a couple of nearby cities. Me and my friends have a joke that everyone our age has left Ashikaga in search of more exciting places. So on the rare occasion that I do meet someone under 30, I ask them where they live. One of the common answers is Ota.

Ota is only a few train stops away from Ashikaga and costs less than 2 dollars to get to from the station that sits a block away from my house. The first two times that I traveled to Ota I barely left the train station, as it is connected to a good size mall complex. This building by itself has maybe ten ethnic restaraunts inside, safely more than the whole city of Ashikaga. Apparently there is a large immigrant population(by Japanese standards) here. Without even asking I can tell there are a good amount of Brazilians in this town, as there is a Brazilian eatery as well as a supermarket. There are also a fair amount of shoppers of Hispanic decent, which is quite common in the US but in Japan it is quite rare.

Here's a fun one. Mike posing with an excellent looking arcade game, The Typing of the Dead. No guns to defeat zombies here, just keyboards. We both agreed to use our imagination instead of actually inserting money into this goofy thing.

As all we did in Ota was eat, buy things, and play arcade games, there weren't a whole lot of notable happenings. Fun, though.

Tung had to sort out an issue that he was having with a travel company in Utsunomiya in person, and being the awesome friend that I am I tagged along. We took care of business quickly and early in the day, so we had plenty of time to discover the potential of our surroundings. Utsunomiya is the capital city of Tochigi Prefecture, and it quite a bit more urban looking than old Ashikaga. There are at least two very long streets lined with shops and completely covered by roof, creating a little tunnel-like strip mall setup that so far I have only seen in Japan.

We were on our way to a shrine that we had noticed earlier when we walked by a store advertising Japanese handmade goods and an inviting window display, so we took a peak inside. The lone store lady inside began picking up and showing us quite a few little uninteresting trinkets and I started to wish she would leave us alone. I must have feigned too much interest in her explainations or seemed a bit too nice because she pointed to the staircase leading to the second floor and mentioned that there were Japanese dolls upstairs. Great. Dolls. I humored her and sighed a bit to myself as I walked up the stairs. I'm glad that I did.

She wasn't kidding around when she said there were dolls. The well lit room was lined on all sides with all kinds of expensive things. As she started to explain the first grouping of things for sale, I realized that she was just being nice to a foreigner. There is just no way that she could possibly think I would ever consider buying a 400 dollar, traditional Japanese doll set. I obviously couldn't even read the boxes let alone have any understanding of their significance. Yet, she chatted away about Japanese culture, and I listened intently, frequently asking for clarification of some Japanese word I didn't quite grasp.

Here's the nice lady showing off an intricately detailed paddle from a game played a long time ago. I chided her a bit about this while she explained the game.
She started: "So you take this little feather thing with a weight on one end-".
"You mean, like badminton?", I interrupted.
"No. You see, two people will hold one of these paddles-"
"Yeah, with a net in the middle, right? I think I've played this game before..."
"No, no. There was no net..."
I'm sure she thought I'm just as hilarious as I do. The one she is holding is priced about 315 US dollars.


Here is a multi-tiered Hina doll set(they get much larger) for sale. They are apparently displayed in people's homes on Hinamatsuri, or Girl's Day. The two at the top represent the emperor and empress, the next represent the imperial retainers, and the price represents about four months rent.

I didn't fully grasp the next explanation, but I took a couple of pictures of the signs that were about in case I was bored and needed something to translate later. I think the pretty badminton paddles are given to parents when a girl is born, and the ornate war-implements when a boy is born. Here's a couple shots of both groups.

These were especially cool. Little swords, arrows, and samurai helmets were set up in the glass cases.


This one was complete with little bows.


I thought that this little set up looked pretty dramatic. Perhaps a depiction of an old story or something.


I resisted the urge to play G.I. Joes feudal Japanese style.

Back in on the ground level after the tour of the expensive museum, I was pretty much bound by my moral code to buy something. I found a nice little something that might just be one of your Christmas presents.

Cats. In a sailboat.

We said our goodbyes and continued on our original quest, to check out the temple. While the approach leading up to the torii gate was really nice, the inside was like most temples I've seen. Meh.

I really like the contrast of the traditional Japan with the modern one.


Futaarayama Shrine at night. The lighting was sure nice, but not much to see on the inside. Maybe because it was dark.

Closer shot of the entrance.

Utsunomiya's famous food is the gyoza, called potstickers where I come from. We had a few of the little pork and veggie-filled dumplings on our way out of town. Yum.

Gyoza-man, Gyoza-man, does whatever a Gyoza can.

12/5/07 Busy Busy

I have had so much going on lately. It's been super crazy. Last Thursday and Friday I attended an English teacher's conference in Utsunomiya. I really enjoyed it. We had a few speakers at the beginning, as well as several workshops in smaller groups. We all traded ideas about effective ways to teach and interact with the kids.

One of the main ideas expressed in several conversations involved connecting English with the outside world. Quite often what we teach in class is restricted to the contents of the textbook. We were encouraged to try to find ways to connect the English we are teaching to some interesting things that are happening in the outside world. This makes everything seem more relevant and worth learning. The whole conference really motivated me to think about how I am doing my job. Hopefully I can put some of those ideas into practice.

Last Sunday I took a Japanese test at Hakuo University in Oyama. The Japanese Language Proficiency Test is a standardized test that measures one's ability in reading, listening, and grammar. I took the lowest of the four levels, but I was still really surprised about how hard it was. I am not completely sure that I will even pass it. I won't get the results of the test back until February, apparently. An awful long time to run a paper of filled-in ovals through a machine, but whatever. If I pass I get a cool certificate and the supreme admiration of my peers.

Here's a clip from two weeks ago from a bar in nearby Sano. Its one song from a Japanese band that I particularly liked. Not only was the music good, but the lead singer had an awesome energy to him. He did lots of little dances that were super cool... only a couple of them are in this song. He wore a really nice suit, but he would strip a piece or two of it off every song until he was singing in his undies. Then at the end of the last song he mooned everyone. Unpleasant, but in a funny way. Enjoy. (Note: This is just one of the normal songs at the beginning. Moon-free.)





Oh, one last little thing. My favorite text message, maybe ever. So I talked a few posts ago about Nounours, a cool French guy that I met a few weeks ago. We were supposed to play poker last weekend. He replied with a pretty damn good excuse:

cant.got married today.hanging with the family.

Mind you, he is the one that suggested playing poker the week before... We all had a good laugh.