The Tokyo Orientation A for the new ALTs is officially over. We cleaned up the rooms and stuff, and thankfully, the Program Coordinators have let us keep our rooms until 3 pm instead of the normal check out time of 11.
Huzzah.
I had a graveyard shift working the hospitality desk from 2-4am, and then again another one from 8-10a, so I'm kind of... tired right now. I did get sleep though; about three hours.
My bus leaves the hotel soon. It's kind of more expensive, and may or may not take longer (depending on traffic) but that way I won't have to haul my luggage down to Shinjuku station (that place is CRAZY) and then on the train and then on another train. I just get on the bus. The end. It takes between 1 and 2 hours.
Yesterday was a lot of fun. I had amazing okinawan food (Goya is just too damn bitter for me). I went to a british pub. They had cider! Chatted a bunch with some cool people. Very chill. I'm going to miss hanging with these people. They're so far away. ;_; But I suppose at least I have a couch/place to crash all over Japan now...
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh I leave for California soon! My flight is at 4! I am armed with lots of tiredness, Japanese sleeping- I mean study materials, Game of Thrones, and my DS. Pretty sure I can make the 9 hour flight disappear like magic.
♬ Californiaaaa Californiaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa here I cooooooooooooooooooooo~oooooooooooooooooooome~ <3 ♪
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
Saturday, July 23, 2011
Tokyo Orientation
I keep getting this horrid, nagging feeling that I have forgotten something really really important. I suppose that's what I get for not packing until last night. I have my passport though, and my money, my laptop and charger, iPhone, clothes for Tokyo... iPhone charger. Phone charger. Game boy. Japanese study materials. Clothes for the US, though if I really need anything else I'll probably buy stuff. There are a couple things I need to buy anyways, like capris, because both of my casual black capris have torn giant holes in them. I don't know if that's because of Japanese washers, or if they were just old or not made to be very durable. One pair though I bought last year. And a couple of shirts have lost their stretch; my tanks are super lose on me now, and I'm pretty sure I didn't lose weight. It's annoying because when I bend forward, since they're loose, the tend to fall forward too. It's a constant battle to make sure my bra isn't showing over the top of my shirt. Sigh. I'm also figuring all my old clothes are at home, including flip flops. :D My pair here aren't very travelable, so I just left them at home. I think this is the first time I've brought only one pair of shoes with me for a trip. The business shoes don't count, since they're exclusively for Tokyo. I'm planning on leaving them at home, since like... I haven't needed them at all in the past year since we change shoes anyways when we get indoors. And there are men in suits wearing crocs for chrissakes. They make my hello kitty indoor slippers look totally fashionable.z
Tokyo Orientation starts today (for us Orientation Assistants anyways)! Hundreds of new JETs are flying into Tokyo tomorrow, and hundreds more the weekend after. I can't believe it's been a year! I mean, if you want to get technical about it, I've a couple days before the year mark since I came over on July 31st, but it's pretty much a year that I've been living and working in Japan. I think it's the longest I've ever been away from home, since even when I was at University, there was always Thanksgiving, or Christmas where I'd return home.
Interestingly enough, Takahashi, Japan, will also be the place I have lived the longest outside of my parent's house. I pretty much moved every year in college. It'll be nice to not have to move stuff.
But yay, Tokyo Orientation! I swear it's cooler than it was last year, though I'm not sure if that's just Okayama. I'm glad to be on the other side, and not super jet-lagged and hit by the sudden change from dry to humid like I was last year. I guess I'll get that when I get back from my California trip. Super excited for the new JETs though, and super excited to meet them too!
...we just passed a giant dinosaur statue on the shinkansen. I kind of did a double take, like, what? I guess it's a good advertising technique. Japanese farms are some of the prettiest sceneries that we've passed on the shinkansen so far, I think. It's not like in the states where it's just acres and acres and acres... it's more like just a couple fields connected to a house and then more fields and a house. The rows of bushes are so neat! And I've found that I really do love how rice fields look when they're all green. Absolutely gorgeous. So far I've mostly slept, though I've been practicing for my presentation a little bit. I'm nervous about that. I remember thinking last year that the rural presentation was helpful, so I'm really hoping that this year it'll be helpful too. I remember too well how boring and unhelpful some of the other presentations were.
It's been really interesting collaborating with everyone on the powerpoint presentation, since we have to use the same one between both Orientations, and challenging since everyone has different ideas about what they want to convey as well as how. Seeing different styles manifest is also interesting, and I get the feeling that my portion, the rural aspect of the presentation, will be vastly different than my counterpart's in Orientation B. I have a much plainer, more colloquial way of speaking. When he talks he sounds really smart; I feel like I have to flip a switch in my mind and go into academic mode. If I focus really hard, I can use those kind of GRE words, but it doesn't feel natural (unless I'm writing an academic paper or talking to a professor, which is essentially academic mode). So blending our two modes of speech has been really interesting. I've tried to keep in mind, "what will people find useful" in our presentation, so I hope that comes across!
Oh god, we're near the ocean! IT'S SO PRETTYYYYYYY. <3 I love Takahashi, but sometimes I wish it was a fishing village instead of a mountain town. I swear to god though, there are so many tunnels that we've gone through. Normally, tunnels are pretty sweet. but it kills my internet connection each time. And we go through at least a tunnel a minute. Or more. Oh shinkansen. <3
Tokyo Orientation starts today (for us Orientation Assistants anyways)! Hundreds of new JETs are flying into Tokyo tomorrow, and hundreds more the weekend after. I can't believe it's been a year! I mean, if you want to get technical about it, I've a couple days before the year mark since I came over on July 31st, but it's pretty much a year that I've been living and working in Japan. I think it's the longest I've ever been away from home, since even when I was at University, there was always Thanksgiving, or Christmas where I'd return home.
Interestingly enough, Takahashi, Japan, will also be the place I have lived the longest outside of my parent's house. I pretty much moved every year in college. It'll be nice to not have to move stuff.
But yay, Tokyo Orientation! I swear it's cooler than it was last year, though I'm not sure if that's just Okayama. I'm glad to be on the other side, and not super jet-lagged and hit by the sudden change from dry to humid like I was last year. I guess I'll get that when I get back from my California trip. Super excited for the new JETs though, and super excited to meet them too!
...we just passed a giant dinosaur statue on the shinkansen. I kind of did a double take, like, what? I guess it's a good advertising technique. Japanese farms are some of the prettiest sceneries that we've passed on the shinkansen so far, I think. It's not like in the states where it's just acres and acres and acres... it's more like just a couple fields connected to a house and then more fields and a house. The rows of bushes are so neat! And I've found that I really do love how rice fields look when they're all green. Absolutely gorgeous. So far I've mostly slept, though I've been practicing for my presentation a little bit. I'm nervous about that. I remember thinking last year that the rural presentation was helpful, so I'm really hoping that this year it'll be helpful too. I remember too well how boring and unhelpful some of the other presentations were.
It's been really interesting collaborating with everyone on the powerpoint presentation, since we have to use the same one between both Orientations, and challenging since everyone has different ideas about what they want to convey as well as how. Seeing different styles manifest is also interesting, and I get the feeling that my portion, the rural aspect of the presentation, will be vastly different than my counterpart's in Orientation B. I have a much plainer, more colloquial way of speaking. When he talks he sounds really smart; I feel like I have to flip a switch in my mind and go into academic mode. If I focus really hard, I can use those kind of GRE words, but it doesn't feel natural (unless I'm writing an academic paper or talking to a professor, which is essentially academic mode). So blending our two modes of speech has been really interesting. I've tried to keep in mind, "what will people find useful" in our presentation, so I hope that comes across!
Oh god, we're near the ocean! IT'S SO PRETTYYYYYYY. <3 I love Takahashi, but sometimes I wish it was a fishing village instead of a mountain town. I swear to god though, there are so many tunnels that we've gone through. Normally, tunnels are pretty sweet. but it kills my internet connection each time. And we go through at least a tunnel a minute. Or more. Oh shinkansen. <3
Tokyo Orientation
I keep getting this horrid, nagging feeling that I have forgotten something really really important. I suppose that's what I get for not packing until last night. I have my passport though, and my money, my laptop and charger, iPhone, clothes for Tokyo... iPhone charger. Phone charger. Game boy. Japanese study materials. Clothes for the US, though if I really need anything else I'll probably buy stuff. There are a couple things I need to buy anyways, like capris, because both of my casual black capris have torn giant holes in them. I don't know if that's because of Japanese washers, or if they were just old or not made to be very durable. One pair though I bought last year. And a couple of shirts have lost their stretch; my tanks are super lose on me now, and I'm pretty sure I didn't lose weight. It's annoying because when I bend forward, since they're loose, the tend to fall forward too. It's a constant battle to make sure my bra isn't showing over the top of my shirt. Sigh. I'm also figuring all my old clothes are at home, including flip flops. :D My pair here aren't very travelable, so I just left them at home. I think this is the first time I've brought only one pair of shoes with me for a trip. The business shoes don't count, since they're exclusively for Tokyo. I'm planning on leaving them at home, since like... I haven't needed them at all in the past year since we change shoes anyways when we get indoors. And there are men in suits wearing crocs for chrissakes. They make my hello kitty indoor slippers look totally fashionable.z
Tokyo Orientation starts today (for us Orientation Assistants anyways)! Hundreds of new JETs are flying into Tokyo tomorrow, and hundreds more the weekend after. I can't believe it's been a year! I mean, if you want to get technical about it, I've a couple days before the year mark since I came over on July 31st, but it's pretty much a year that I've been living and working in Japan. I think it's the longest I've ever been away from home, since even when I was at University, there was always Thanksgiving, or Christmas where I'd return home.
Interestingly enough, Takahashi, Japan, will also be the place I have lived the longest outside of my parent's house. I pretty much moved every year in college. It'll be nice to not have to move stuff.
But yay, Tokyo Orientation! I swear it's cooler than it was last year, though I'm not sure if that's just Okayama. I'm glad to be on the other side, and not super jet-lagged and hit by the sudden change from dry to humid like I was last year. I guess I'll get that when I get back from my California trip. Super excited for the new JETs though, and super excited to meet them too!
...we just passed a giant dinosaur statue on the shinkansen. I kind of did a double take, like, what? I guess it's a good advertising technique. Japanese farms are some of the prettiest sceneries that we've passed on the shinkansen so far, I think. It's not like in the states where it's just acres and acres and acres... it's more like just a couple fields connected to a house and then more fields and a house. The rows of bushes are so neat! And I've found that I really do love how rice fields look when they're all green. Absolutely gorgeous. So far I've mostly slept, though I've been practicing for my presentation a little bit. I'm nervous about that. I remember thinking last year that the rural presentation was helpful, so I'm really hoping that this year it'll be helpful too. I remember too well how boring and unhelpful some of the other presentations were.
It's been really interesting collaborating with everyone on the powerpoint presentation, since we have to use the same one between both Orientations, and challenging since everyone has different ideas about what they want to convey as well as how. Seeing different styles manifest is also interesting, and I get the feeling that my portion, the rural aspect of the presentation, will be vastly different than my counterpart's in Orientation B. I have a much plainer, more colloquial way of speaking. When he talks he sounds really smart; I feel like I have to flip a switch in my mind and go into academic mode. If I focus really hard, I can use those kind of GRE words, but it doesn't feel natural (unless I'm writing an academic paper or talking to a professor, which is essentially academic mode). So blending our two modes of speech has been really interesting. I've tried to keep in mind, "what will people find useful" in our presentation, so I hope that comes across!
Oh god, we're near the ocean! IT'S SO PRETTYYYYYYY. <3 I love Takahashi, but sometimes I wish it was a fishing village instead of a mountain town. I swear to god though, there are so many tunnels that we've gone through. Normally, tunnels are pretty sweet. but it kills my internet connection each time. And we go through at least a tunnel a minute. Or more. Oh shinkansen. <3
Tokyo Orientation starts today (for us Orientation Assistants anyways)! Hundreds of new JETs are flying into Tokyo tomorrow, and hundreds more the weekend after. I can't believe it's been a year! I mean, if you want to get technical about it, I've a couple days before the year mark since I came over on July 31st, but it's pretty much a year that I've been living and working in Japan. I think it's the longest I've ever been away from home, since even when I was at University, there was always Thanksgiving, or Christmas where I'd return home.
Interestingly enough, Takahashi, Japan, will also be the place I have lived the longest outside of my parent's house. I pretty much moved every year in college. It'll be nice to not have to move stuff.
But yay, Tokyo Orientation! I swear it's cooler than it was last year, though I'm not sure if that's just Okayama. I'm glad to be on the other side, and not super jet-lagged and hit by the sudden change from dry to humid like I was last year. I guess I'll get that when I get back from my California trip. Super excited for the new JETs though, and super excited to meet them too!
...we just passed a giant dinosaur statue on the shinkansen. I kind of did a double take, like, what? I guess it's a good advertising technique. Japanese farms are some of the prettiest sceneries that we've passed on the shinkansen so far, I think. It's not like in the states where it's just acres and acres and acres... it's more like just a couple fields connected to a house and then more fields and a house. The rows of bushes are so neat! And I've found that I really do love how rice fields look when they're all green. Absolutely gorgeous. So far I've mostly slept, though I've been practicing for my presentation a little bit. I'm nervous about that. I remember thinking last year that the rural presentation was helpful, so I'm really hoping that this year it'll be helpful too. I remember too well how boring and unhelpful some of the other presentations were.
It's been really interesting collaborating with everyone on the powerpoint presentation, since we have to use the same one between both Orientations, and challenging since everyone has different ideas about what they want to convey as well as how. Seeing different styles manifest is also interesting, and I get the feeling that my portion, the rural aspect of the presentation, will be vastly different than my counterpart's in Orientation B. I have a much plainer, more colloquial way of speaking. When he talks he sounds really smart; I feel like I have to flip a switch in my mind and go into academic mode. If I focus really hard, I can use those kind of GRE words, but it doesn't feel natural (unless I'm writing an academic paper or talking to a professor, which is essentially academic mode). So blending our two modes of speech has been really interesting. I've tried to keep in mind, "what will people find useful" in our presentation, so I hope that comes across!
Oh god, we're near the ocean! IT'S SO PRETTYYYYYYY. <3 I love Takahashi, but sometimes I wish it was a fishing village instead of a mountain town. I swear to god though, there are so many tunnels that we've gone through. Normally, tunnels are pretty sweet. but it kills my internet connection each time. And we go through at least a tunnel a minute. Or more. Oh shinkansen. <3
Friday, July 22, 2011
English camp
I meant to write about this and finish my post about Fuji as soon as I came back from English camp, but Cardcaptor Sakura came on TV, and that was followed by two episodes of Ouran High School Host Club and well...
At least I got the laundry done that night, I suppose. That's important, right? Right now, I'm supposed to be packing for my trip and cleaning up my house, lest my house become a cockroach-infested hell hole similar to houses left alone in Animal Crossing for too long. Nobody wants that. Or I could be practicing my presentation for that. That seems like it would be a good idea. Or, rehearsing for this impromptu English lesson I'm doing for 10 JHS students and 2 adults who are visiting Troy, Ohio (how random!). Our former Japanese Prefectural Advisor who moved to Takahashi, asked me to do it. So I'm doing it, cause I'm a nice person. For free. Or well, I'm going to make him buy me a drink (or two) later since technically we're not allowed to have alternate sources of income. Yeah though, a 55 minute English session/lesson on self-intros and shopping phrases. No idea what level their English is at. Never worked with a group this small. I guess worse comes to worse, we can play a game...? But - small rant here - the class goes from 5-6:30, and then, on top of that, I'm going to the Japanese culture class (originally, it was billed to me as a Japanese language class "for beginners" which turned out to be complete BULL) that starts at 7 and goes until 8:30. Then I'm going to watch Harry Potter 7.2 with one of the JETs who's leaving... at the 9:40 showing. Gets out after midnight. Work Friday is in Niimi. No classes, but gotta leave at 7 instead of 8. On top of this, he was saying that, should we need more time for the English stuff, we can just extend the time into the 30 minutes between classes... so I can stay later and answer questions! I might have to put my foot down and say "No, that's the time I was planning to eat dinner," because, well, I was planning on eating dinner since I'm going directly from school to the class, and then from class to class, and then from class to train to movie theater and we all know how expensive movie theater food is. /end rant. Yay for a full day and very little time to pack.
I should also probably be studying Japanese, since I can never do enough of that. ~_~
But instead of doing these more productive things, I choose to work on writing blog posts. Very smart of me, I know. But as long as it gets done in the end... right? Actually. I'll probably write half of this wednesday night, and half thursday while I'm at work (cause lord knows I've got nothing else to do...).
I'm... excited, I suppose you can say, for today.
Last Thursday and Friday, I was at an English camp for a junior high school in Okayama, where one of my friends and fellow JETs is an ALT at. It was a huge English camp - 3 classes of students for a total of around 120 students. Trying to speak only English for two days. 3rd year junior high school, no less. Granted, this was a special junior high school (I keep wanting to say middle school) that they had to test to get into - though, they get automatic acceptance into the high school that's attached. Basically, instead of taking an entrance exam for senior high school, they took it instead for junior high school. Either way. They did superbly, as I almost forgot that I was in Japan! They were all fantastic kids and really enthusiastic and good at speaking English. I had to speak a little bit in teacher English, but I didn't need to modify it nearly as much as I normally do. It makes me feel like a bad parent. I wanted to steal these kids and make them my students lol. My students are lovely, don't get me wrong, but their English level is just... wow.
I'm sure though, it'd be a completely different experience. Oh city kids. :)
One of my teachers at school is wearing sandals WITHOUT SOCKS. I applaud his fashion choice, since I feel less bad about not wearing tights or socks with my own shoes and occasionally taking my shoes off. Seriously though, he's the first person I've seen do that in all 4.5 of my schools.
Anyways.
Since the English camp was for an Okayama JHS, I got the pleasure of (leisurely) taking the train in to Okayama, and then caught a bus that drove for 40 minutes to a place that was probably between 10-20 minutes from where I live. Yay lots of traveling. Amusingly enough, both of the guys I was walking to the bus station with (one I randomly bumped into at the station) had both forgotten that we were supposed to bring our own lunch, which resulted in both of them scrambling to buy food for lunch before we walked to the bus station. Which almost made us late. It's a good thing the bus came later too! It gave us time to cool down and question if we had come to the right bus stop, which involved several people pulling out the directions and double/triple checking - and we were at the right place, they just probably told us to get there early so they wouldn't have to worry about late people.
The bus ride over was fun; we sat in the middle seats (they fold out) and we chatted with the kids - most of my conversation was dominated by music and manga (specifically One Piece). We did however, exchange jokes and tongue twisters with some of the students. I found that it was incredibly... hard, to come up with jokes that weren't slightly racist, appropriate, blonde jokes, or dead baby jokes.
I think we managed to come up with two or three knock knock jokes, and the chi-chi-chi-chichi monkey joke. That was it though. I later recreated this conversation with a couple of other ALTs (1 other californian and 3 brits) and we managed to come up with awful yo' momma jokes and blonde jokes and I figured out that I'm really really BAD at telling jokes. I think I botched the interrupting cow joke... three times. The first time I forgot to say it. The second time I said it too late. There was no actual third time. But we also started talking about awful pick up lines... and well, that's a story for another day.
It was silly though, because I wrote a paper about this exact topic - (appropriate) jokes, more specifically, puns - in one of my college classes. You'd think I'd remember at least one!
So... in the staff room is a very bad place to look for amazing puns, as I have just found out.
I like this site for
This body doesn't dance. Not well anyways. And not without copious amounts of alcohol. Then maybe. But I'm a very not-well-coordinated person, and their ALT happened to be a particularly good dancer.
So yeaaahhh. It was almost alright. They were doing Poker Face. I haven't even seen the video for that and I was like... wat. Actually, I would have been slightly more willing to make a fool of myself (more than I had anyways) had I known that there was little chance of seeing anyone in that room ever again. I mean, realistically, the one person in the room whom I knew (a fellow JET) was going to be leaving for the US and not doing a second year, but he's also one of the ALTs whom I counted as a friend (albeit however infrequently we saw each other) and one of the nicest guys in the prefecture. Not bad looking either, everyone agreed. So having to dance like Lady Gaga in front of him of all people was like auuuuuuuuugh. Slow painful death. Dancing in front of anyone I knew, really, would have been a slow and painful death.
In the end, I put on my pair of huge sunglasses (they lended well to the costume aka, the bright "wig" of multicolored paper strips I wore) which made it much harder to see, and kind of tried to forget where I was and just... danced. Probably awfully.
To make matters even more embarrassing, when I went to sit down afterwards, I actually missed my chair completely and sat down hard on the floor. Like you know when people pull out the chair from underneath you? It was like that. Except nobody pulled out the chair (I think). SO EMBARRASSING.
I felt like such a bad supervisor, because while I did want my group to do well and win... winning meant that we'd have to do it again. In front of EVERYONE. So part of me really didn't want to win. I'm a bad supervisor. ._.;
The rest of the skits were really amazing though. Everyone worked really hard on their skits, and the content of all of them were amazing. AND they memorized their whole skit! Can you say wow?
The second day, they had to give a presentation on something from Japanese culture, and again, I was highly impressed. One kid brought her koto and played for us (twice, since she ended up going twice). It was absolutely beautiful. The kids in my group did different things, from yukata to Japanese new years, to that top spinny toy and sushi and washoku. It was fun; I got to pick the brains of the washoku kid after, and it's one topic I love asking them about.
Speaking of food, this was the best camp food I've had. It was "viking style" which is essentially buffet - you can take what and however much you want. One meal we had pineapple slices and one kid - no joke - took 20 slices of pineapple. The boys could eat an amazing amount. I could only sit there in awe as I at my green veggies probably soaked in butter and stir fried. But seriously, the food there is really really good.
Parting was sad, in the end. Even though this was a short camp, the kids were all super friendly and nice, and eager (generally) to speak English. It also made me wonder if I'll actually have students recognizing me when I go in to Okayama now! I only see my students there sometimes (for which I'm kind of grateful, since it avoids the whole BOYFRIEND?!?!?!? question).
But yeah. Despite having to miss a couple classes at my schools and it being at an inconvenient time, I had a lot of fun. Hopefully next year I'll be able to go again!
At least I got the laundry done that night, I suppose. That's important, right? Right now, I'm supposed to be packing for my trip and cleaning up my house, lest my house become a cockroach-infested hell hole similar to houses left alone in Animal Crossing for too long. Nobody wants that. Or I could be practicing my presentation for that. That seems like it would be a good idea. Or, rehearsing for this impromptu English lesson I'm doing for 10 JHS students and 2 adults who are visiting Troy, Ohio (how random!). Our former Japanese Prefectural Advisor who moved to Takahashi, asked me to do it. So I'm doing it, cause I'm a nice person. For free. Or well, I'm going to make him buy me a drink (or two) later since technically we're not allowed to have alternate sources of income. Yeah though, a 55 minute English session/lesson on self-intros and shopping phrases. No idea what level their English is at. Never worked with a group this small. I guess worse comes to worse, we can play a game...? But - small rant here - the class goes from 5-6:30, and then, on top of that, I'm going to the Japanese culture class (originally, it was billed to me as a Japanese language class "for beginners" which turned out to be complete BULL) that starts at 7 and goes until 8:30. Then I'm going to watch Harry Potter 7.2 with one of the JETs who's leaving... at the 9:40 showing. Gets out after midnight. Work Friday is in Niimi. No classes, but gotta leave at 7 instead of 8. On top of this, he was saying that, should we need more time for the English stuff, we can just extend the time into the 30 minutes between classes... so I can stay later and answer questions! I might have to put my foot down and say "No, that's the time I was planning to eat dinner," because, well, I was planning on eating dinner since I'm going directly from school to the class, and then from class to class, and then from class to train to movie theater and we all know how expensive movie theater food is. /end rant. Yay for a full day and very little time to pack.
I should also probably be studying Japanese, since I can never do enough of that. ~_~
But instead of doing these more productive things, I choose to work on writing blog posts. Very smart of me, I know. But as long as it gets done in the end... right? Actually. I'll probably write half of this wednesday night, and half thursday while I'm at work (cause lord knows I've got nothing else to do...).
I'm... excited, I suppose you can say, for today.
Last Thursday and Friday, I was at an English camp for a junior high school in Okayama, where one of my friends and fellow JETs is an ALT at. It was a huge English camp - 3 classes of students for a total of around 120 students. Trying to speak only English for two days. 3rd year junior high school, no less. Granted, this was a special junior high school (I keep wanting to say middle school) that they had to test to get into - though, they get automatic acceptance into the high school that's attached. Basically, instead of taking an entrance exam for senior high school, they took it instead for junior high school. Either way. They did superbly, as I almost forgot that I was in Japan! They were all fantastic kids and really enthusiastic and good at speaking English. I had to speak a little bit in teacher English, but I didn't need to modify it nearly as much as I normally do. It makes me feel like a bad parent. I wanted to steal these kids and make them my students lol. My students are lovely, don't get me wrong, but their English level is just... wow.
I'm sure though, it'd be a completely different experience. Oh city kids. :)
One of my teachers at school is wearing sandals WITHOUT SOCKS. I applaud his fashion choice, since I feel less bad about not wearing tights or socks with my own shoes and occasionally taking my shoes off. Seriously though, he's the first person I've seen do that in all 4.5 of my schools.
Anyways.
Since the English camp was for an Okayama JHS, I got the pleasure of (leisurely) taking the train in to Okayama, and then caught a bus that drove for 40 minutes to a place that was probably between 10-20 minutes from where I live. Yay lots of traveling. Amusingly enough, both of the guys I was walking to the bus station with (one I randomly bumped into at the station) had both forgotten that we were supposed to bring our own lunch, which resulted in both of them scrambling to buy food for lunch before we walked to the bus station. Which almost made us late. It's a good thing the bus came later too! It gave us time to cool down and question if we had come to the right bus stop, which involved several people pulling out the directions and double/triple checking - and we were at the right place, they just probably told us to get there early so they wouldn't have to worry about late people.
The bus ride over was fun; we sat in the middle seats (they fold out) and we chatted with the kids - most of my conversation was dominated by music and manga (specifically One Piece). We did however, exchange jokes and tongue twisters with some of the students. I found that it was incredibly... hard, to come up with jokes that weren't slightly racist, appropriate, blonde jokes, or dead baby jokes.
I think we managed to come up with two or three knock knock jokes, and the chi-chi-chi-chichi monkey joke. That was it though. I later recreated this conversation with a couple of other ALTs (1 other californian and 3 brits) and we managed to come up with awful yo' momma jokes and blonde jokes and I figured out that I'm really really BAD at telling jokes. I think I botched the interrupting cow joke... three times. The first time I forgot to say it. The second time I said it too late. There was no actual third time. But we also started talking about awful pick up lines... and well, that's a story for another day.
It was silly though, because I wrote a paper about this exact topic - (appropriate) jokes, more specifically, puns - in one of my college classes. You'd think I'd remember at least one!
So... in the staff room is a very bad place to look for amazing puns, as I have just found out.
I like this site for
This body doesn't dance. Not well anyways. And not without copious amounts of alcohol. Then maybe. But I'm a very not-well-coordinated person, and their ALT happened to be a particularly good dancer.
So yeaaahhh. It was almost alright. They were doing Poker Face. I haven't even seen the video for that and I was like... wat. Actually, I would have been slightly more willing to make a fool of myself (more than I had anyways) had I known that there was little chance of seeing anyone in that room ever again. I mean, realistically, the one person in the room whom I knew (a fellow JET) was going to be leaving for the US and not doing a second year, but he's also one of the ALTs whom I counted as a friend (albeit however infrequently we saw each other) and one of the nicest guys in the prefecture. Not bad looking either, everyone agreed. So having to dance like Lady Gaga in front of him of all people was like auuuuuuuuugh. Slow painful death. Dancing in front of anyone I knew, really, would have been a slow and painful death.
In the end, I put on my pair of huge sunglasses (they lended well to the costume aka, the bright "wig" of multicolored paper strips I wore) which made it much harder to see, and kind of tried to forget where I was and just... danced. Probably awfully.
To make matters even more embarrassing, when I went to sit down afterwards, I actually missed my chair completely and sat down hard on the floor. Like you know when people pull out the chair from underneath you? It was like that. Except nobody pulled out the chair (I think). SO EMBARRASSING.
I felt like such a bad supervisor, because while I did want my group to do well and win... winning meant that we'd have to do it again. In front of EVERYONE. So part of me really didn't want to win. I'm a bad supervisor. ._.;
The rest of the skits were really amazing though. Everyone worked really hard on their skits, and the content of all of them were amazing. AND they memorized their whole skit! Can you say wow?
The second day, they had to give a presentation on something from Japanese culture, and again, I was highly impressed. One kid brought her koto and played for us (twice, since she ended up going twice). It was absolutely beautiful. The kids in my group did different things, from yukata to Japanese new years, to that top spinny toy and sushi and washoku. It was fun; I got to pick the brains of the washoku kid after, and it's one topic I love asking them about.
Speaking of food, this was the best camp food I've had. It was "viking style" which is essentially buffet - you can take what and however much you want. One meal we had pineapple slices and one kid - no joke - took 20 slices of pineapple. The boys could eat an amazing amount. I could only sit there in awe as I at my green veggies probably soaked in butter and stir fried. But seriously, the food there is really really good.
Parting was sad, in the end. Even though this was a short camp, the kids were all super friendly and nice, and eager (generally) to speak English. It also made me wonder if I'll actually have students recognizing me when I go in to Okayama now! I only see my students there sometimes (for which I'm kind of grateful, since it avoids the whole BOYFRIEND?!?!?!? question).
But yeah. Despite having to miss a couple classes at my schools and it being at an inconvenient time, I had a lot of fun. Hopefully next year I'll be able to go again!
Monday, July 11, 2011
富士山： Let's Mount Fuji Pt. 2
I'm finally going to finish my post about climbing Mount Fuji! It's kind of turned into a really really long post. Hopefully this makes up for the lack of posts in July.
So, as an edit to the last post I made about the three different groups, actually, even people who were in the second group, due to the enormous crowd of people climbing Fuji, were not actually at the top at sunrise. They were close, but they still had a bit to hike to reach the actual summit.
Really then, I had no chance of making it to the top and back down again without missing the bus and also probably missing the group at the onsen. I probably would have had to take a bus to the train and then shink back to Okayama. That would have cost an exorbitant amount of money, especially if I had to taxi instead of bus back, and I currently do not have those kinds of funds.
I'm a little disappointed that we went all that way and didn't reach the top. In retrospect, I should have realised that this hike was slightly out of my range, and that I would have had a much better time (and would have reached the top) had I done it in two stretches: hike up to the 7th or 8th stations, rest for a while in the huts, and then make my way leisurely to the top, sunrise be damned. Really, you can see a fantastic sunrise from the 8th station. Fuji is definitely not a mountain that you should rush, so it's far better to overestimate the amount of time you think you're going to take. Like I said before, we did an overnight climb, leaving the 5th station on the Yoshida trail between 9 and 9:30. Sunrise was at 4:20ish. Websites quote that it takes between 5 and 8 hours to do the climb to the top. It took the moderate group about 8 hours to reach the top. The top part, just before the summit is actually quite crowded so places that shouldn't take a long time, do. I think one of the groups said it should have taken them 30 minutes, but took them an hour instead. Many people, as we were talking after the climb, had extreme amounts of rage at the tour groups that had done the climb (there were a lot of them). Thankfully, I didn't have this rage. I'm still proud that I got as far as I did, but dunno, sometimes it's kind of embarrassing to admit that no, I did not make it to the top.
Anyways.
The Fuji trip started off way before we got to the actual mountain. I caught a train in from Takahashi to Okayama, taking the second train that got me in 5 minutes before the meet up time rather than the earlier train that got me in a full hour before the meet up time. Figured it wasn't worth trying to rush out of my house and forget something important.
I met up in Okayama Station with all the other crazies who had decided to climb Fuji, where we'd all catch the bus together. We were waiting at the West Exit, where the buses usually come and happened upon this gem of a bus:
Yeah Space Dolphins. :D
It turns out though, that through miscommunication (or just bad information or something) we actually weren't supposed to be at the west exit, so we all moved over to the east exit bus stops, and then eventually to granvia grandvia? - the fancy hotel where the bus driver walked over to escort us to the bus. Yeaaah. The first of several hiccups on our trip. But no matter. We all boarded the bus, and off we went!
A bunch of people brought movies, though half of them weren't region 2 so we unfortunately missed out on some Men in Tights and Mulan. We did watch Hot Fuzz and Amadaeus, though some people were trying to sleep during this leg of the trip since, you know, we'd be hiking all through the time when normal people sleep.
I think I managed to doze off several times throughout the trip, but not for very long each time. Our bus also stopped every 2 hours at a rest stop - and damn, I gotta say, Japanese rest stops are absolutely amazing. They're even more amazing when compared to california rest stops. In California, our bathrooms are kinda gross and dirty, and there's usually only bathrooms and maybe gas at the place, or a convenience store attached to the gas station. Sometimes there's fast food. But the Japanese ones, oh man. Ohhhh man.
One of the places we stopped had a map of the toilets that had lights to tell you if they were occupied or not. There were bathroom grandma's staffing the bathroom making sure it was spic and span; I'm pretty sure they thought I was some crazy Chinese person, especially since I took pictures in the bathroom, and came back again LATER to take more pictures. That whole place though, is CRAZY. Sadly, I had no idea where this actually was.
Eventually though, about 9 hours (that's pretty much the average time it takes to drive from San Diego to San Francisco, albeit with far fewer rest stops) and lots of snacks later, we arrived at the 5th station of Fuji, right at the Yoshida trail and the Kawa-soemthing 5th station. It's the one where most people go; there's tons of omiyage shops and shops that sell those wooden sticks and other things to climb the mountain with. It was dark when we arrived around 8:30ish, and it was COLD. Or well, not cold, but quite chilly! A nice change from the blazing heat that we had traveled through during the day, but when we looked out and saw people in their jackets and everything, it took us by surprise.
After arriving, we unloaded the bus and everyone went to go change and put on the necessary layers (we were still in our "damn it's hot" clothes). I put in my contacts, as well as my light longsleeve heattech shirt from Uniqlo - usually I wear this long sleeve, thermal-like layer under my clothes in the winter. I figured that it was better to start off with the bottom layers first, and then add as we go on. My bottoms, I was just wearing the lightweight pants that I had been wearing on the bus ride over. My legs don't normally get cold easily, so I figured that I could put on the tights that I had later when it actually started to get cold. In retrospect... I'm not sure. While it would have gotten quite warm with them on, I'm sure I would have lived. Changing anything below the waist involved a lot of work; when I actually did put my thermals on, it was really really really really tiring. I had to unlace my boots and pull them off, careful not to step on the gross bathroom floor (though, for public toilets, most were fairly clean). It also took a lot of time to do. So I'm not sure.
Anyways, we all gathered as a large group after we had all finished changing and our group leaders told us about the trail and stuff and about how long it would take, and what to expect going up and coming down, and about altitude sickness (actually called acute mountain sickness though, AMS). We double checked our climbing buddies. Adjusted our headlamps. My headlamp was TINY. Not so good an idea, actually. It was cute, yes, and it made it look like I had a giant power button (and was waterproof, which I wasn't sure if the other was) as well as not super expensive. Yeah, I kind of wish I had picked a different headlamp. One that rotated would have been excellent, because then I wouldn't have to move my head as much in order to figure out what was directly below me. That got annoying.
Everything in check, I decided to start off with my climbing buddy. Our friends were still taking a little bit of time to get ready, and the main group had already gone off. And well, I'm really slow. I know this. So I didn't want to wait around for longer because, I figured, I needed as much of a headstart as I could get if I was going to get up the mountain in time. So off we went.
Initially, from the 5th station, the Yoshida trail is actually really really easy, and really nice. We were walking down it and were like "yeah, if Fuji is like this the whole way, piece of cake." Oh how naive we were. At some point, we actually started walking *down* and I was kind of like, what, why are we going down? This downhill part became an annoying and aggravatingly long uphill walk on the way back.
We hit a more gravelly area, and I got tired of not being able to see stuff as easily with the headlamp on my head, so I pulled it off and attached it to the top of my walking stick instead. It reminded me of Gandalf a little bit, so we had a good laugh fooling around, pretending it was a magic staff, pretending it was He-man's sword, the thundercat sword... Yeah. This was while we still had energy and thought all was well.
Eventually, we hit this part that was lots of rocks going up. We saw this and were like "ah, so Fuji, you start to show your true face" and began our ascent. Shamefully, I was/am far more out of shape than I thought (and I had already assumed I was pretty out of shape) but the altitude hit me really fast and it wasn't before long that I was huffing and puffing for breath as we continued our climb up. I had to rest several times to catch my breath before I could continue. It was kind of embarrassing, and I felt bad for my climbing partner.
Eventually, our group of friends caught up to us; they said they had started off extra fast in order to catch up to us. I felt kind of bad. They would have caught us eventually; this was inevitable at the rate that I was going. But after they caught up, the six of us set out together. This was right before the sixth station, I believe, for we soon hit the really boring zig-zaggy bit after the sixth station where you're basically just walking up loose gravel (like, really lose gravel) and rocks for a looong while. It was here that it became apparent that our group had several different speeds. Alia and Lok were the fastest, followed by Hannah and Gemma (my climbing parterner). In the rear with me was Caroline. Both of us were not having fun going up the hill. Mountain. Have I mentioned how much I hate going uphill?
Eventually, it got to the point where the two fast ones would hike ahead, wait for us, and then we'd catch up, wait a bit more, and then set off again. If that were me, and I was trying to make it to the top by a certain time, I'd definitely be... annoyed a little. So eventually, we decided to swap climbing buddies - Caroline and I would be partners, while my partner, Gemma, and her partner, Hannah, would be climbing buddies instead. That way we were with people around our same speed. Happily paired, we let them go on ahead while we continued to tackle the route, bend-by-bend. Literally. We'd go from one bend to another, resting a little bit (or a lot if it was a harder path) at the end of each one. I've never felt more out of shape in my life. But the path that we were treading on was this volcanic rock stuff, large pebbles that shifted as you stepped on them, making your foot sink in and slide back a little bit each step. This is my reasoning for why such an uphill climb felt harder than it looked.
But hey, it worked I think. Small goals, we told ourselves. Small goals. Each bend in the road. More frequent, short rests meant that we could catch our breath faster without feeling like we're dying, thus saving time over all. I thought it was pretty effective.
At each station, and each hut, actually, as well, there's a guy who sits next to this giant kettle with the embers of a fire and a big giant brand, which he'll burn into your stick for 200 yen. They're really cool brands, and if you're looking for a souvenier, this one is pretty good. Plus my stick came in fairly handy when I was leaning or pulling myself up rocks or whatever with it. It was a little annoying when it got to the rockclimbing parts (I tried stowing it between me and my backpack, like a sword-stick, but I underestimated just how damn long the stick was, and ended up in constant danger of hitting things like the rocks and my climbing buddy), but otherwise it was perfect. I didn't spend too much money on hiking poles (though they would have been useful going down I think) and it also gave me something to stamp at each hut that we made it to. It kind of felt like I was unlocking achievements with each hut I got to, and then was thusly rewarded with a stamp that got branded into my wooden walking stick.
Most of the guys manning the branding bits were young dudes (won't complain about that) and generally, when you walk up to the station, walking stick in hand, they can tell that there's a chance you'll want a brand. Especially if you already have lots. So a lot of them actually came up and were like "braaaaand?" and I was like "YESPLS *pant pant*" in the least attractive way possible lol. Not that it mattered. But as the night wore on, a couple of the huts actually weren't giving out stamps because the brander was sleeping. One of the dudes though, let me in to the nice warm branding hut and entertained a couple of questions while we waited for the fire to warm up that I managed to piece together in Japanese and a little English. We had a fun conversation about how the kettles used to heat water in the old days, but now they just used the electric pottos and didn't really use the giant kettles so much. It was a nice break from walking.
Also, at these huts where they sold the brands, they usually also sold food and beverages, so in case you ran out of or stupidly forgot water or sports drink, you could buy it there... for a price. That price being an arm and a leg. Water, if I remember correctly, was around 400 yen. Food was more expensive. I think a cup ramen was going for 600 yen or something. EXPENSIVE. And it only got *more* expensive as you got closer to the summit. Since I didn't make it all the way up, I dunno how much it cost up there but I heard it's a pretty yenny.
On a related note, water is HEAVY. I never noticed this as much before. I took 2 L of water in those GIANT 2L bottles, as well as a 500 mL bottle of pocari sweat. I'm actually really really glad I took the pocari sweat along, because drinking from the 2L bottles is a giant pain in the rear. Like seriously. When you have to stop, unzip your backpack, haul out the 2L bottle, then repack your 2L into your backpack with all your layers of clothing, it gets tiring really fast. Wasted energy. So instead, I poured some of the 2L into the smaller bottle and stopped every so often to fill that up when I ran out. I drink water like a fish though, so the 2.5L of liquid lasted me about until we started our descent, and then I ran out. Luckily, my climbing partner had barely touched her water (which might explain why she got such a bad case of AMS) so I "liberated" some of the weight she was carrying as we went back down.
I digress though. After we made it to the 7th station up the zig-zaggy loose large chunky gravel path, we got to the dreaded region between the 7th and the 8th station. The view from here was absolutely phenomenal though. Looking up, you could see the huts that lined the path between the 7th and 8th, giving you some kind of tangible goal to work towards, and the line of lights as people (headlamps and flashlights attached) made their way upwards. We wondered, many times, which group of lights were our friends, and wondered if they wondered how far behind we were (actually less than we had thought, kind of). The sky, too, from that area was absolutely gorgeous. Anyone who climbs the whole way without stopping for a little bit to look at the night view is truly missing out. The sky was clear; you could see hundreds of stars dotting the sky, and the faint wispy path that we assumed was the milky way. Below us were the city lights, though there were far fewer those than there were natural lights above. Honestly, had it not been for the stars, climbing at night would have utterly sucked.
Why? One, I bought the wrong kind of headlamp. A rotating headlamp, so that you can point it at the ground while you look on ahead at the steep cliff of a chunk of rock you're supposed to climb up. So that you don't have to move your entire head to aim your light at what you want to look at. I found out later the headlamp I wanted to buy but didn't because it didn't say it was waterproof actually was. Sigh. But yeah, hiking - and rock climbing to a small extent, though my rock climbing friends would probably laugh in my face if they saw what we were calling "rock climbing" - in the dark was just kind of annoying because you had to go slower since you couldn't see half of the things and had to actually look around for good handholds and footholds (there were plenty though, and as long as you had good hiking shoes, it was actually not too bad). It just got kind of tiring. I imagine, if I were the kind of person who just scrambled up rocks without being so concerned and worried about where I was putting what foot and falling off the mountain - some people would call this overly cautious - it would have been much easier and less tiring. But I'm not. Oh well.
This was the part where I abandoned my stick and relied instead on my hands. This is where having gloves and thick pants come in handy, because the rocks are rather... sharp sometimes. One girl actually ripped her pants in this area, so an underlayer isn't a bad idea either.
Have I mentioned how much I hate rocks right now?
A number of people passed us on the way up to the 8th station, and the cool thing about hiking Fuji is that everyone hiking it tends to be pretty friendly (at least, below the 8th station). We actually struck up a conversation with some of our fellow hikers as we rested and gawked at the rocks we had to climb. There was a man who was over here for business and had just decided to climb Fuji. There were some people our age from the Bay Area (small world!). Lots of Japanese. But everyone had this kind of fighting spirit and sense of camaraderie, kind of, that we were all going through this together.
As we going up from the final hut at the 7th to the first 8th station, we actually passed a guy from HiroshimaAJET who was heading down. He didn't look so great. He said that his climbing buddy was actually at a hut at one of the 7th stations, and that he had gotten a bad headache and felt a little nauseous so he was also heading back down the Rocks of Doom. I offered him some of my oxygen, since he had none, and he said after it helped a little, and then continued his descent downwards.
You could not pay me to climb down those rocks in the dark, especially after we spent all that energy climbing up.
This is about when my climbing partner's headache started to get worse. But, like I said, neither of us wanted to climb back down, and we wanted to make it to where we could take the supposedly easier path back down (little did we know!) so we started resting more often, but continued our climb up.
After what seemed like forever, we made it to the 8th station, and pretty much collapsed on the floor, out of breath and really really really tired. We actually ran into one of the other girls from Okayama pretty much right after that. She had also split from her hiking buddy, and was feeling really nauseous so was similarly heading back down. My partner wasn't feeling so hot. I decided to use the bathroom and put on my underlayer of pants while my partner rested and hopefully started to feel better.
Changing was a battle in itself. Hiking boots are a pain to take off, and there was noooo way I was letting my clothes touch the floor.
When I finally finished (out of breath), my hiking partner informed me that yeaaaah she really wasn't feeling good. At all. Like was not able to go on. So we stopped to assess our... options. We could continue going really really slow and try to get as high as we could by sunset (which was around 30-40 minutes away at that point). This would get us closer to the summit. We thought we would have to make it up there in order to get the easy path down... and at one point, we weren't sure if we would make it back down in time. Caroline suggested we email our leader and let him know that we won't be meeting them and that we would take a taxi or bus back to a shinkansen station and then shink our way back home. I told her that I was not going to miss our bus back, since I could not afford that (taxis are ridiculously expensive and Fuji is not super close to a shink station) and I didn't want her paying for me. I was in favor of the climb-to-keep-warm-and-get-as-high-as-we-can plan. We took one look at the path to the next station and my partner was like yeaaaaaaaah... no.
The other option was to stay at the huts, which, I found out after asking, was going to cost us 3500 yen, and we could stay until 5 am. Expensive. But she was in favor of this plan, since she didn't really want to split up. Don't blame her either. I feel like a bad friend since I was considering it. Since I didn't want to stay in the place, but she did, I figured that she could stay, I'd hike up to the next station, and I'd meet her on the way back down.
We had actually found out from the hut-dude (who spoke pretty good English) that once the sun came up, the short-cut paths that linked all of the huts on Fuji to the "easy" downhill path would be open. So we wouldn't have to go back down the rocks again (thank god). So I figured this plan of mine - meet her on the downhill path - would work out just fine.
Except, when she went in to pay to stay at the hut, she paid for me too. At this point, it was like... 4 am, and predawn was already giving us a fantastic array of colors in the morning sky. (Someone made the comment that now, they understood where those stupid rainbow gradients come from). We had like, 15 minutes til sunrise. And she had already paid and said not to worry about the money. I felt so bad since I was totally ready to just wait until sunrise!
So I got 10 minutes of sleep before I woke up to see the sunrise. And wow. Sunrise was GLORIOUS. One of the most beautiful I've seen in my life. Above the clouds, clear sky, gorgeous colors... it made me question if I truly loved sunsets best.
Really, I think what's so amazing is that we were above all of that. Far above that.
After we had our breath stolen by the sunrise and the lack of oxygen, we decided that it was better to head down sooner or later so we weren't left at Mount Fuji stranded without a bus. Cause who knew how long it would take to get back down.
Our climb down looked something like this, times 50, and less gorgeous the more times you zigged-zagged down it. It wasn't like it was a particularly hard descent; it was just monotonous, boring, hard on the knees and feet, and full of small-to-medium sized mars rock colored volcanic rock where your foot sank a bit every time it stepped. It made slipping really really really easy. If it weren't for the bends in the road that would have you tumbling down the mountain should you overshoot, I would have considered running most of the way down (cause let's be realistic, I wouldn't have been able to run the whole way down). Taking larger steps and going faster (and generally, not caring whether or not I slipped) made it much easier and less painful to go down.
The whole way would have been much more beautiful and much less annoying had it not been for the - I kid you not - swarms of small flies and wasps that were populating the area. I was already surprised by the vegetation that started about halfway between the 7th and 8th stations, but this? This surprised me much more. I had not expected bugs, let alone this many, to be up close to the summit! I mean, seriously, the area is mostly rock. What do these dudes eat? (Tourists, obviously). It's part of what motivated us to get down the mountain so fast. No joke. We would be resting at one of the bends and a wasp would come land on one of us... and I figured out early on that swatting at a wasp was totally not a good idea. So instead, I ran. Generally the wasp came off as I ran (silently screaming) down the hill to the next bend in the road, where the process would repeat itself.
The downwards path has exactly one toilet in between the summit and the 6th station, and they're biotoilets, which is code word for the water looks disgusting but is actually probably good for the environment.
Even after the zig-zag path ends, it's still quite a ways away from the 5th station. We continued to walk downward, realizing just how freaking far we had come. We went down at a pretty steady pace, and it still took us something like 3 to 3.5 hours to get back down all the way. There were a bunch of really cute small children who kept passing us and saying "OHAYO GOZAIMASU~" to which we were obligated to say "ohayo gozaimasu" back in a far far less genki and half dead voice. Not my first choice for what my precious oxygen and energy was going to.
So we were nearly there, at the bottom of the 6th station, when we came to this bend in the road. Both ways said Yoshida trail, and we had been warned earlier about making sure to stay on the Yoshida, since way way way further up the Yoshida trail splits into a completely different train that takes you to the opposite side of the mountain. This was not that split. This split was whether we wanted to go to the base of the Yoshida, or back to where the buses came. And clearly, we wanted to where the buses came, but my climbing partner wasn't completely convinced, so out came the direction paper we received on the bus... that was no help. We also couldn't find the name of the bus station on the map, though we did see the buses. Either way, the trails eventually connected. But the one that we weren't supposed to take was 10 extra minutes long. And I did not want to hike for 10 more minutes on top of everything (I was tired at this point, alright? Or well, I'd been tired most of the hike). We settled for asking one of the Japanese lady tourists we saw near the map, and she pointed down the path that a) we had come and b) that led to the buses.
Yeah... I'm still a little smug about that. That my directional senses weren't completely off. Cause I mean, I'm used to getting quite lost ahaha.
It was at this point that that early nice downhill part on our hike up started to become agonizing and annoyingly uphill. We were like whaaaaaaat. Theeeeeee. Heeeeeeeeeell. WORST PLACE TO HAVE AN UPHILL PORTION EVER.
But I mean, we made it, finally, to the end. And met up with the Hiroshima people who had also gone back, and sat on the ground, and were sorely tempted to just flat out lie on the ground. But we didn't. I had meat on a stick (that had been taken off the stick and cut into pieces) for breakfast. I thanked my hiking boots.
Eventually, people started to trickle down and unbeknowst to us, the others were regrouping at the drop off point about 50 feet away. One of the guys came over and was like "oh yeah we're meeting over near the drop off point, and glad to see you down here because nobody had heard from you guys and we didn't see you at the summit." I was tired, and pissy at that point, but I held back my reply of "yeah I know I didn't make it to the summit jerk, thanks for rubbing it in, but I didn't want to be left behind." Instead I imagined him tumbling down the mountain - wee!
Actually, not going all the way to the top turned out to be a prudent and responsible decision. We would have been very very very late, and probably left behind. Our leader wasn't exactly the sympathetic to being left behind type (wonderful guy though, don't get me wrong). As it was, there were two groups that came in behind schedule (but some came back before the bus was supposed to leave). One was my group of friends. We had gone back to the bus by then, and then they came back and we were still missing 3 people at that point. We were supposed to go to an onsen at that point, so people started to look a little annoyed and uhhh... uncomfortable about having to make a decision about whether or not to leave them.
Thankfully, right before we decided to leave, everyone turned up and we all made it to the onsen - hooray! The only thing was, that left us with like, not very long to eat, and not very long to shower and onsen. Like, by the time people were finishing their meals, we had between 20-25 minutes to shower and utilize the onsen.
...my normal showers take about 20 minutes to shower and then dry. The onsen meant we had to change into the robes, walk to the onsen, take off clothes, shower at the stall thingies, go back to the room, dry off, change into rental robes, walk to locker room, and change into normal clothes. At a minimum. 20 minutes was laughable. One girl decided not to shower because with her hair and everything, it would have taken far longer (though I don't know why she couldn't have just washed her body). But like, I mean, girls take forever. And as long as I wasn't amongst the last few... it'd be fiiiiine.
Unfortunately though, the showers were FULL when I got there and I was like OH CRAP. Embarrassment aside. But thankfully, a spot opened up, and I still had enough time to take a fast dip into the lovely hot onsen. And I still wasn't the last one out.
Seriously though, onsen are meant to be leisurely enjoyed. Like, 1.5 hours minimum for eating and onsen-ing. Silly late people.
Guess this means I'll just have to onsen again!
Maybe after the next time I try to tackle Fuji. I wasn't scarred enough from the first time, lol. I want to do it again, and reach the top, so that I can say I reached the top. Because I felt really really stupid as everyone came back and was like "hell yeah I made it to the top of Fuji" and I was like "...yeah I made it to the 8th station". Silly for me to feel this way, I know, since 8th is still an accomplishment, but I dunno, it just... didn't feel completely. I want to go again, but take more time to go up and not worry about rushing or about missing trains or what have you. Maybe go up for the sunset instead.
At least I won't have to buy another walking stick.
So, as an edit to the last post I made about the three different groups, actually, even people who were in the second group, due to the enormous crowd of people climbing Fuji, were not actually at the top at sunrise. They were close, but they still had a bit to hike to reach the actual summit.
Really then, I had no chance of making it to the top and back down again without missing the bus and also probably missing the group at the onsen. I probably would have had to take a bus to the train and then shink back to Okayama. That would have cost an exorbitant amount of money, especially if I had to taxi instead of bus back, and I currently do not have those kinds of funds.
I'm a little disappointed that we went all that way and didn't reach the top. In retrospect, I should have realised that this hike was slightly out of my range, and that I would have had a much better time (and would have reached the top) had I done it in two stretches: hike up to the 7th or 8th stations, rest for a while in the huts, and then make my way leisurely to the top, sunrise be damned. Really, you can see a fantastic sunrise from the 8th station. Fuji is definitely not a mountain that you should rush, so it's far better to overestimate the amount of time you think you're going to take. Like I said before, we did an overnight climb, leaving the 5th station on the Yoshida trail between 9 and 9:30. Sunrise was at 4:20ish. Websites quote that it takes between 5 and 8 hours to do the climb to the top. It took the moderate group about 8 hours to reach the top. The top part, just before the summit is actually quite crowded so places that shouldn't take a long time, do. I think one of the groups said it should have taken them 30 minutes, but took them an hour instead. Many people, as we were talking after the climb, had extreme amounts of rage at the tour groups that had done the climb (there were a lot of them). Thankfully, I didn't have this rage. I'm still proud that I got as far as I did, but dunno, sometimes it's kind of embarrassing to admit that no, I did not make it to the top.
Anyways.
The Fuji trip started off way before we got to the actual mountain. I caught a train in from Takahashi to Okayama, taking the second train that got me in 5 minutes before the meet up time rather than the earlier train that got me in a full hour before the meet up time. Figured it wasn't worth trying to rush out of my house and forget something important.
I met up in Okayama Station with all the other crazies who had decided to climb Fuji, where we'd all catch the bus together. We were waiting at the West Exit, where the buses usually come and happened upon this gem of a bus:
Yeah Space Dolphins. :DIt turns out though, that through miscommunication (or just bad information or something) we actually weren't supposed to be at the west exit, so we all moved over to the east exit bus stops, and then eventually to granvia grandvia? - the fancy hotel where the bus driver walked over to escort us to the bus. Yeaaah. The first of several hiccups on our trip. But no matter. We all boarded the bus, and off we went!
A bunch of people brought movies, though half of them weren't region 2 so we unfortunately missed out on some Men in Tights and Mulan. We did watch Hot Fuzz and Amadaeus, though some people were trying to sleep during this leg of the trip since, you know, we'd be hiking all through the time when normal people sleep.
I think I managed to doze off several times throughout the trip, but not for very long each time. Our bus also stopped every 2 hours at a rest stop - and damn, I gotta say, Japanese rest stops are absolutely amazing. They're even more amazing when compared to california rest stops. In California, our bathrooms are kinda gross and dirty, and there's usually only bathrooms and maybe gas at the place, or a convenience store attached to the gas station. Sometimes there's fast food. But the Japanese ones, oh man. Ohhhh man.
One of the places we stopped had a map of the toilets that had lights to tell you if they were occupied or not. There were bathroom grandma's staffing the bathroom making sure it was spic and span; I'm pretty sure they thought I was some crazy Chinese person, especially since I took pictures in the bathroom, and came back again LATER to take more pictures. That whole place though, is CRAZY. Sadly, I had no idea where this actually was.Eventually though, about 9 hours (that's pretty much the average time it takes to drive from San Diego to San Francisco, albeit with far fewer rest stops) and lots of snacks later, we arrived at the 5th station of Fuji, right at the Yoshida trail and the Kawa-soemthing 5th station. It's the one where most people go; there's tons of omiyage shops and shops that sell those wooden sticks and other things to climb the mountain with. It was dark when we arrived around 8:30ish, and it was COLD. Or well, not cold, but quite chilly! A nice change from the blazing heat that we had traveled through during the day, but when we looked out and saw people in their jackets and everything, it took us by surprise.
After arriving, we unloaded the bus and everyone went to go change and put on the necessary layers (we were still in our "damn it's hot" clothes). I put in my contacts, as well as my light longsleeve heattech shirt from Uniqlo - usually I wear this long sleeve, thermal-like layer under my clothes in the winter. I figured that it was better to start off with the bottom layers first, and then add as we go on. My bottoms, I was just wearing the lightweight pants that I had been wearing on the bus ride over. My legs don't normally get cold easily, so I figured that I could put on the tights that I had later when it actually started to get cold. In retrospect... I'm not sure. While it would have gotten quite warm with them on, I'm sure I would have lived. Changing anything below the waist involved a lot of work; when I actually did put my thermals on, it was really really really really tiring. I had to unlace my boots and pull them off, careful not to step on the gross bathroom floor (though, for public toilets, most were fairly clean). It also took a lot of time to do. So I'm not sure.
Anyways, we all gathered as a large group after we had all finished changing and our group leaders told us about the trail and stuff and about how long it would take, and what to expect going up and coming down, and about altitude sickness (actually called acute mountain sickness though, AMS). We double checked our climbing buddies. Adjusted our headlamps. My headlamp was TINY. Not so good an idea, actually. It was cute, yes, and it made it look like I had a giant power button (and was waterproof, which I wasn't sure if the other was) as well as not super expensive. Yeah, I kind of wish I had picked a different headlamp. One that rotated would have been excellent, because then I wouldn't have to move my head as much in order to figure out what was directly below me. That got annoying.
Everything in check, I decided to start off with my climbing buddy. Our friends were still taking a little bit of time to get ready, and the main group had already gone off. And well, I'm really slow. I know this. So I didn't want to wait around for longer because, I figured, I needed as much of a headstart as I could get if I was going to get up the mountain in time. So off we went.
Initially, from the 5th station, the Yoshida trail is actually really really easy, and really nice. We were walking down it and were like "yeah, if Fuji is like this the whole way, piece of cake." Oh how naive we were. At some point, we actually started walking *down* and I was kind of like, what, why are we going down? This downhill part became an annoying and aggravatingly long uphill walk on the way back.
We hit a more gravelly area, and I got tired of not being able to see stuff as easily with the headlamp on my head, so I pulled it off and attached it to the top of my walking stick instead. It reminded me of Gandalf a little bit, so we had a good laugh fooling around, pretending it was a magic staff, pretending it was He-man's sword, the thundercat sword... Yeah. This was while we still had energy and thought all was well.
Eventually, we hit this part that was lots of rocks going up. We saw this and were like "ah, so Fuji, you start to show your true face" and began our ascent. Shamefully, I was/am far more out of shape than I thought (and I had already assumed I was pretty out of shape) but the altitude hit me really fast and it wasn't before long that I was huffing and puffing for breath as we continued our climb up. I had to rest several times to catch my breath before I could continue. It was kind of embarrassing, and I felt bad for my climbing partner.
Eventually, our group of friends caught up to us; they said they had started off extra fast in order to catch up to us. I felt kind of bad. They would have caught us eventually; this was inevitable at the rate that I was going. But after they caught up, the six of us set out together. This was right before the sixth station, I believe, for we soon hit the really boring zig-zaggy bit after the sixth station where you're basically just walking up loose gravel (like, really lose gravel) and rocks for a looong while. It was here that it became apparent that our group had several different speeds. Alia and Lok were the fastest, followed by Hannah and Gemma (my climbing parterner). In the rear with me was Caroline. Both of us were not having fun going up the hill. Mountain. Have I mentioned how much I hate going uphill?
Eventually, it got to the point where the two fast ones would hike ahead, wait for us, and then we'd catch up, wait a bit more, and then set off again. If that were me, and I was trying to make it to the top by a certain time, I'd definitely be... annoyed a little. So eventually, we decided to swap climbing buddies - Caroline and I would be partners, while my partner, Gemma, and her partner, Hannah, would be climbing buddies instead. That way we were with people around our same speed. Happily paired, we let them go on ahead while we continued to tackle the route, bend-by-bend. Literally. We'd go from one bend to another, resting a little bit (or a lot if it was a harder path) at the end of each one. I've never felt more out of shape in my life. But the path that we were treading on was this volcanic rock stuff, large pebbles that shifted as you stepped on them, making your foot sink in and slide back a little bit each step. This is my reasoning for why such an uphill climb felt harder than it looked.
But hey, it worked I think. Small goals, we told ourselves. Small goals. Each bend in the road. More frequent, short rests meant that we could catch our breath faster without feeling like we're dying, thus saving time over all. I thought it was pretty effective.
At each station, and each hut, actually, as well, there's a guy who sits next to this giant kettle with the embers of a fire and a big giant brand, which he'll burn into your stick for 200 yen. They're really cool brands, and if you're looking for a souvenier, this one is pretty good. Plus my stick came in fairly handy when I was leaning or pulling myself up rocks or whatever with it. It was a little annoying when it got to the rockclimbing parts (I tried stowing it between me and my backpack, like a sword-stick, but I underestimated just how damn long the stick was, and ended up in constant danger of hitting things like the rocks and my climbing buddy), but otherwise it was perfect. I didn't spend too much money on hiking poles (though they would have been useful going down I think) and it also gave me something to stamp at each hut that we made it to. It kind of felt like I was unlocking achievements with each hut I got to, and then was thusly rewarded with a stamp that got branded into my wooden walking stick.
Most of the guys manning the branding bits were young dudes (won't complain about that) and generally, when you walk up to the station, walking stick in hand, they can tell that there's a chance you'll want a brand. Especially if you already have lots. So a lot of them actually came up and were like "braaaaand?" and I was like "YESPLS *pant pant*" in the least attractive way possible lol. Not that it mattered. But as the night wore on, a couple of the huts actually weren't giving out stamps because the brander was sleeping. One of the dudes though, let me in to the nice warm branding hut and entertained a couple of questions while we waited for the fire to warm up that I managed to piece together in Japanese and a little English. We had a fun conversation about how the kettles used to heat water in the old days, but now they just used the electric pottos and didn't really use the giant kettles so much. It was a nice break from walking.
Also, at these huts where they sold the brands, they usually also sold food and beverages, so in case you ran out of or stupidly forgot water or sports drink, you could buy it there... for a price. That price being an arm and a leg. Water, if I remember correctly, was around 400 yen. Food was more expensive. I think a cup ramen was going for 600 yen or something. EXPENSIVE. And it only got *more* expensive as you got closer to the summit. Since I didn't make it all the way up, I dunno how much it cost up there but I heard it's a pretty yenny.
On a related note, water is HEAVY. I never noticed this as much before. I took 2 L of water in those GIANT 2L bottles, as well as a 500 mL bottle of pocari sweat. I'm actually really really glad I took the pocari sweat along, because drinking from the 2L bottles is a giant pain in the rear. Like seriously. When you have to stop, unzip your backpack, haul out the 2L bottle, then repack your 2L into your backpack with all your layers of clothing, it gets tiring really fast. Wasted energy. So instead, I poured some of the 2L into the smaller bottle and stopped every so often to fill that up when I ran out. I drink water like a fish though, so the 2.5L of liquid lasted me about until we started our descent, and then I ran out. Luckily, my climbing partner had barely touched her water (which might explain why she got such a bad case of AMS) so I "liberated" some of the weight she was carrying as we went back down.
I digress though. After we made it to the 7th station up the zig-zaggy loose large chunky gravel path, we got to the dreaded region between the 7th and the 8th station. The view from here was absolutely phenomenal though. Looking up, you could see the huts that lined the path between the 7th and 8th, giving you some kind of tangible goal to work towards, and the line of lights as people (headlamps and flashlights attached) made their way upwards. We wondered, many times, which group of lights were our friends, and wondered if they wondered how far behind we were (actually less than we had thought, kind of). The sky, too, from that area was absolutely gorgeous. Anyone who climbs the whole way without stopping for a little bit to look at the night view is truly missing out. The sky was clear; you could see hundreds of stars dotting the sky, and the faint wispy path that we assumed was the milky way. Below us were the city lights, though there were far fewer those than there were natural lights above. Honestly, had it not been for the stars, climbing at night would have utterly sucked.
Why? One, I bought the wrong kind of headlamp. A rotating headlamp, so that you can point it at the ground while you look on ahead at the steep cliff of a chunk of rock you're supposed to climb up. So that you don't have to move your entire head to aim your light at what you want to look at. I found out later the headlamp I wanted to buy but didn't because it didn't say it was waterproof actually was. Sigh. But yeah, hiking - and rock climbing to a small extent, though my rock climbing friends would probably laugh in my face if they saw what we were calling "rock climbing" - in the dark was just kind of annoying because you had to go slower since you couldn't see half of the things and had to actually look around for good handholds and footholds (there were plenty though, and as long as you had good hiking shoes, it was actually not too bad). It just got kind of tiring. I imagine, if I were the kind of person who just scrambled up rocks without being so concerned and worried about where I was putting what foot and falling off the mountain - some people would call this overly cautious - it would have been much easier and less tiring. But I'm not. Oh well.
This was the part where I abandoned my stick and relied instead on my hands. This is where having gloves and thick pants come in handy, because the rocks are rather... sharp sometimes. One girl actually ripped her pants in this area, so an underlayer isn't a bad idea either.
Have I mentioned how much I hate rocks right now?
A number of people passed us on the way up to the 8th station, and the cool thing about hiking Fuji is that everyone hiking it tends to be pretty friendly (at least, below the 8th station). We actually struck up a conversation with some of our fellow hikers as we rested and gawked at the rocks we had to climb. There was a man who was over here for business and had just decided to climb Fuji. There were some people our age from the Bay Area (small world!). Lots of Japanese. But everyone had this kind of fighting spirit and sense of camaraderie, kind of, that we were all going through this together.
As we going up from the final hut at the 7th to the first 8th station, we actually passed a guy from HiroshimaAJET who was heading down. He didn't look so great. He said that his climbing buddy was actually at a hut at one of the 7th stations, and that he had gotten a bad headache and felt a little nauseous so he was also heading back down the Rocks of Doom. I offered him some of my oxygen, since he had none, and he said after it helped a little, and then continued his descent downwards.
You could not pay me to climb down those rocks in the dark, especially after we spent all that energy climbing up.
This is about when my climbing partner's headache started to get worse. But, like I said, neither of us wanted to climb back down, and we wanted to make it to where we could take the supposedly easier path back down (little did we know!) so we started resting more often, but continued our climb up.
After what seemed like forever, we made it to the 8th station, and pretty much collapsed on the floor, out of breath and really really really tired. We actually ran into one of the other girls from Okayama pretty much right after that. She had also split from her hiking buddy, and was feeling really nauseous so was similarly heading back down. My partner wasn't feeling so hot. I decided to use the bathroom and put on my underlayer of pants while my partner rested and hopefully started to feel better.
Changing was a battle in itself. Hiking boots are a pain to take off, and there was noooo way I was letting my clothes touch the floor.
When I finally finished (out of breath), my hiking partner informed me that yeaaaah she really wasn't feeling good. At all. Like was not able to go on. So we stopped to assess our... options. We could continue going really really slow and try to get as high as we could by sunset (which was around 30-40 minutes away at that point). This would get us closer to the summit. We thought we would have to make it up there in order to get the easy path down... and at one point, we weren't sure if we would make it back down in time. Caroline suggested we email our leader and let him know that we won't be meeting them and that we would take a taxi or bus back to a shinkansen station and then shink our way back home. I told her that I was not going to miss our bus back, since I could not afford that (taxis are ridiculously expensive and Fuji is not super close to a shink station) and I didn't want her paying for me. I was in favor of the climb-to-keep-warm-and-get-as-high-as-we-can plan. We took one look at the path to the next station and my partner was like yeaaaaaaaah... no.
The other option was to stay at the huts, which, I found out after asking, was going to cost us 3500 yen, and we could stay until 5 am. Expensive. But she was in favor of this plan, since she didn't really want to split up. Don't blame her either. I feel like a bad friend since I was considering it. Since I didn't want to stay in the place, but she did, I figured that she could stay, I'd hike up to the next station, and I'd meet her on the way back down.
We had actually found out from the hut-dude (who spoke pretty good English) that once the sun came up, the short-cut paths that linked all of the huts on Fuji to the "easy" downhill path would be open. So we wouldn't have to go back down the rocks again (thank god). So I figured this plan of mine - meet her on the downhill path - would work out just fine.
Except, when she went in to pay to stay at the hut, she paid for me too. At this point, it was like... 4 am, and predawn was already giving us a fantastic array of colors in the morning sky. (Someone made the comment that now, they understood where those stupid rainbow gradients come from). We had like, 15 minutes til sunrise. And she had already paid and said not to worry about the money. I felt so bad since I was totally ready to just wait until sunrise!So I got 10 minutes of sleep before I woke up to see the sunrise. And wow. Sunrise was GLORIOUS. One of the most beautiful I've seen in my life. Above the clouds, clear sky, gorgeous colors... it made me question if I truly loved sunsets best.
Really, I think what's so amazing is that we were above all of that. Far above that.
After we had our breath stolen by the sunrise and the lack of oxygen, we decided that it was better to head down sooner or later so we weren't left at Mount Fuji stranded without a bus. Cause who knew how long it would take to get back down.
Our climb down looked something like this, times 50, and less gorgeous the more times you zigged-zagged down it. It wasn't like it was a particularly hard descent; it was just monotonous, boring, hard on the knees and feet, and full of small-to-medium sized mars rock colored volcanic rock where your foot sank a bit every time it stepped. It made slipping really really really easy. If it weren't for the bends in the road that would have you tumbling down the mountain should you overshoot, I would have considered running most of the way down (cause let's be realistic, I wouldn't have been able to run the whole way down). Taking larger steps and going faster (and generally, not caring whether or not I slipped) made it much easier and less painful to go down.The whole way would have been much more beautiful and much less annoying had it not been for the - I kid you not - swarms of small flies and wasps that were populating the area. I was already surprised by the vegetation that started about halfway between the 7th and 8th stations, but this? This surprised me much more. I had not expected bugs, let alone this many, to be up close to the summit! I mean, seriously, the area is mostly rock. What do these dudes eat? (Tourists, obviously). It's part of what motivated us to get down the mountain so fast. No joke. We would be resting at one of the bends and a wasp would come land on one of us... and I figured out early on that swatting at a wasp was totally not a good idea. So instead, I ran. Generally the wasp came off as I ran (silently screaming) down the hill to the next bend in the road, where the process would repeat itself.
The downwards path has exactly one toilet in between the summit and the 6th station, and they're biotoilets, which is code word for the water looks disgusting but is actually probably good for the environment.Even after the zig-zag path ends, it's still quite a ways away from the 5th station. We continued to walk downward, realizing just how freaking far we had come. We went down at a pretty steady pace, and it still took us something like 3 to 3.5 hours to get back down all the way. There were a bunch of really cute small children who kept passing us and saying "OHAYO GOZAIMASU~" to which we were obligated to say "ohayo gozaimasu" back in a far far less genki and half dead voice. Not my first choice for what my precious oxygen and energy was going to.
So we were nearly there, at the bottom of the 6th station, when we came to this bend in the road. Both ways said Yoshida trail, and we had been warned earlier about making sure to stay on the Yoshida, since way way way further up the Yoshida trail splits into a completely different train that takes you to the opposite side of the mountain. This was not that split. This split was whether we wanted to go to the base of the Yoshida, or back to where the buses came. And clearly, we wanted to where the buses came, but my climbing partner wasn't completely convinced, so out came the direction paper we received on the bus... that was no help. We also couldn't find the name of the bus station on the map, though we did see the buses. Either way, the trails eventually connected. But the one that we weren't supposed to take was 10 extra minutes long. And I did not want to hike for 10 more minutes on top of everything (I was tired at this point, alright? Or well, I'd been tired most of the hike). We settled for asking one of the Japanese lady tourists we saw near the map, and she pointed down the path that a) we had come and b) that led to the buses.
Yeah... I'm still a little smug about that. That my directional senses weren't completely off. Cause I mean, I'm used to getting quite lost ahaha.
It was at this point that that early nice downhill part on our hike up started to become agonizing and annoyingly uphill. We were like whaaaaaaat. Theeeeeee. Heeeeeeeeeell. WORST PLACE TO HAVE AN UPHILL PORTION EVER.
But I mean, we made it, finally, to the end. And met up with the Hiroshima people who had also gone back, and sat on the ground, and were sorely tempted to just flat out lie on the ground. But we didn't. I had meat on a stick (that had been taken off the stick and cut into pieces) for breakfast. I thanked my hiking boots.
Eventually, people started to trickle down and unbeknowst to us, the others were regrouping at the drop off point about 50 feet away. One of the guys came over and was like "oh yeah we're meeting over near the drop off point, and glad to see you down here because nobody had heard from you guys and we didn't see you at the summit." I was tired, and pissy at that point, but I held back my reply of "yeah I know I didn't make it to the summit jerk, thanks for rubbing it in, but I didn't want to be left behind." Instead I imagined him tumbling down the mountain - wee!
Actually, not going all the way to the top turned out to be a prudent and responsible decision. We would have been very very very late, and probably left behind. Our leader wasn't exactly the sympathetic to being left behind type (wonderful guy though, don't get me wrong). As it was, there were two groups that came in behind schedule (but some came back before the bus was supposed to leave). One was my group of friends. We had gone back to the bus by then, and then they came back and we were still missing 3 people at that point. We were supposed to go to an onsen at that point, so people started to look a little annoyed and uhhh... uncomfortable about having to make a decision about whether or not to leave them.
Thankfully, right before we decided to leave, everyone turned up and we all made it to the onsen - hooray! The only thing was, that left us with like, not very long to eat, and not very long to shower and onsen. Like, by the time people were finishing their meals, we had between 20-25 minutes to shower and utilize the onsen.
...my normal showers take about 20 minutes to shower and then dry. The onsen meant we had to change into the robes, walk to the onsen, take off clothes, shower at the stall thingies, go back to the room, dry off, change into rental robes, walk to locker room, and change into normal clothes. At a minimum. 20 minutes was laughable. One girl decided not to shower because with her hair and everything, it would have taken far longer (though I don't know why she couldn't have just washed her body). But like, I mean, girls take forever. And as long as I wasn't amongst the last few... it'd be fiiiiine.
Unfortunately though, the showers were FULL when I got there and I was like OH CRAP. Embarrassment aside. But thankfully, a spot opened up, and I still had enough time to take a fast dip into the lovely hot onsen. And I still wasn't the last one out.
Seriously though, onsen are meant to be leisurely enjoyed. Like, 1.5 hours minimum for eating and onsen-ing. Silly late people.
Guess this means I'll just have to onsen again!
Maybe after the next time I try to tackle Fuji. I wasn't scarred enough from the first time, lol. I want to do it again, and reach the top, so that I can say I reached the top. Because I felt really really stupid as everyone came back and was like "hell yeah I made it to the top of Fuji" and I was like "...yeah I made it to the 8th station". Silly for me to feel this way, I know, since 8th is still an accomplishment, but I dunno, it just... didn't feel completely. I want to go again, but take more time to go up and not worry about rushing or about missing trains or what have you. Maybe go up for the sunset instead.
At least I won't have to buy another walking stick.
Cool Biz
I'm back from Fuji! It was so nice there (as far as weather goes); dry heat, and cool as you went up the mountain. I miss the weather there. It's blazing hot here, and humid to boot. Humidity makes me unnnnnhappy.
I was just looking today at the poster they have for the dress code here. So here in Japan, there's this campaign called 'Cool Biz' which basically dictates appropriate dress code in the summer during the hot weather. Instead of wearing the full suit, businessmen and teachers alike are allowed to not wear their jacket and tie, or dress a little more casually in some situations. 'Super cool biz' - they introduced that this year - dictates that shorts and jeans, as well as polo shirts, are okay in the workplace. My schools are only doing cool biz, but a lot of teachers just wear polo shirts anyways.
The reasoning behind this, is so that workplaces can save on power by not having to put the air conditioner so low. When it comes on, it's set at 28 degrees Celcius (that's a warm 28.4 degrees Fahrenheit). Setting it this high means that it's still a little warm inside, so wearing long sleeves or jackets is really really really warm still. Hence the cool biz. Everywhere saves on energy, nobody is completely baking (since after all, it's still cooler and drier than outside the room) and hooray, the power bill is lower too. Basically, it's an alternative - I don't want to say excuse, though sometimes when it's still hot inside it feels that way- to using the air conditioner at a really low temperature. Oh, and before I forget, workplaces (at least, at schools) aren't allowed to actually turn on the air conditioner until it hits 30C or a certain day of the year. Some places are a little more flexible on that last bit, especially where it gets warmer faster. Like at my schools. Takahashi is supposedly one of the hottest places in the whole of Okayama Prefecture (we have the valley to thank for that); it makes going to Niimi exciting because it will be noticably cooler usually.
So that's cool biz. Makes sense, right? Personally, I'm thankful for the relaxed dress code. But, get this. So it's a summer thing, right? This year, the dates for cool biz are from May 9th until October 31st. That's pretty much May to November. NOVEMBER. It's going to be hot until NOVEMBER. Does that mean fall is going to be November only? Another fast fall this year I suppose. But seriously, NOVEMBER. That's like, half the year that we're in cool biz! And then in the winter, we have - you guessed it - warm biz. Sweaters and socks are OKです。This is because there's no central heating in places (very few schools and classrooms have actual heaters like we have in the states, but have instead kerosene heaters).
As if the weather in Japan weren't extreme enough! Even if it isn't, these kind of things compound the sense of 'oh god it's hot' or 'my my it's FREEZING COLD' so that when you compare it to places that are warmer or cooler (and by that I mean hotter or colder) it's sometimes less comfortable since the other places are actually better equipped to deal with such weather.
That's indoors, anyways.
And at least in the summer, there's always shaved ice, or かきごり (kakigori). Love that stuff. It's... kind of healthy. Healthier. Than ice cream anyways. It's just ice and syrup after all... right?
Also, Fuji post to come! It's just kind of long, and I still need to download my pictures :3
I was just looking today at the poster they have for the dress code here. So here in Japan, there's this campaign called 'Cool Biz' which basically dictates appropriate dress code in the summer during the hot weather. Instead of wearing the full suit, businessmen and teachers alike are allowed to not wear their jacket and tie, or dress a little more casually in some situations. 'Super cool biz' - they introduced that this year - dictates that shorts and jeans, as well as polo shirts, are okay in the workplace. My schools are only doing cool biz, but a lot of teachers just wear polo shirts anyways.
The reasoning behind this, is so that workplaces can save on power by not having to put the air conditioner so low. When it comes on, it's set at 28 degrees Celcius (that's a warm 28.4 degrees Fahrenheit). Setting it this high means that it's still a little warm inside, so wearing long sleeves or jackets is really really really warm still. Hence the cool biz. Everywhere saves on energy, nobody is completely baking (since after all, it's still cooler and drier than outside the room) and hooray, the power bill is lower too. Basically, it's an alternative - I don't want to say excuse, though sometimes when it's still hot inside it feels that way- to using the air conditioner at a really low temperature. Oh, and before I forget, workplaces (at least, at schools) aren't allowed to actually turn on the air conditioner until it hits 30C or a certain day of the year. Some places are a little more flexible on that last bit, especially where it gets warmer faster. Like at my schools. Takahashi is supposedly one of the hottest places in the whole of Okayama Prefecture (we have the valley to thank for that); it makes going to Niimi exciting because it will be noticably cooler usually.
So that's cool biz. Makes sense, right? Personally, I'm thankful for the relaxed dress code. But, get this. So it's a summer thing, right? This year, the dates for cool biz are from May 9th until October 31st. That's pretty much May to November. NOVEMBER. It's going to be hot until NOVEMBER. Does that mean fall is going to be November only? Another fast fall this year I suppose. But seriously, NOVEMBER. That's like, half the year that we're in cool biz! And then in the winter, we have - you guessed it - warm biz. Sweaters and socks are OKです。This is because there's no central heating in places (very few schools and classrooms have actual heaters like we have in the states, but have instead kerosene heaters).
As if the weather in Japan weren't extreme enough! Even if it isn't, these kind of things compound the sense of 'oh god it's hot' or 'my my it's FREEZING COLD' so that when you compare it to places that are warmer or cooler (and by that I mean hotter or colder) it's sometimes less comfortable since the other places are actually better equipped to deal with such weather.
That's indoors, anyways.
And at least in the summer, there's always shaved ice, or かきごり (kakigori). Love that stuff. It's... kind of healthy. Healthier. Than ice cream anyways. It's just ice and syrup after all... right?
Also, Fuji post to come! It's just kind of long, and I still need to download my pictures :3
Sunday, July 10, 2011
富士山： Let's Mount Fuji Pt. 1
This last weekend, I got the crazy idea into my head that I was going to climb Mount Fuji, Japan's tallest and most famous & iconic mountain with other people from my prefecture (and Hiroshima). What's more, because people who are in unnaturally good shape planned the excursion, the plan was to hike overnight and get there by sunrise, then hike back down, get back on the bus, hit up an onsen, and come on home. Seriously. I know I'm not in fantastic shape (or even good shape) but, my biggest complaint about this hike is that there were three different groups of hikers.
There were the people who were pretty fit or really skinny, or had really good stamina. These are the people you see doing sports and stuff, though I think even if I was in good shape, I would have still been part of the slow group. Most of the people in this group reached the summit between 1:30-3 o'clock, well before sunrise. These were most of the people who organized the trip. They were also among the first people who were back down the mountain. They made it up the mountain in about 5 hours or so.
Then, there were the people who weren't necessarily in shape, but weren't out of shape too badly either. Or maybe they were out of shape, but they were skinny enough to where it didn't matter too much, or they had more stamina wee. They were the moderate group. Most of them barely made it to the summit in time to start heading back down. Most of these groups were either standing in the line to reach the summit (apparently there were a lot of people close to the summit), had just made it up for the sunrise around 4:20; either way, they barely made the estimated time to get to the summit. And if they barely made it up, then what chance did I, in the third group, have?
The third group was the slow group. Yeah, we were not in shape. I didn't think I was in THAT bad shape though - I mean, I still bike to work and stuff, and walk to work, and finished doing the Shimanami Kaido bike ride. I'll admit that I'm overweight, and fatter than is probably healthy and that I'd like to be, and that I don't exercise as much as I did in college because I don't have scheduled classes or an easily available gym and I hate running. But I didn't finish the bike ride last (and I finished it in the first place). It just so happens that I'm ridiculously slow when it comes to going up things, especially rocky areas. The question of how far up Fuji then, was not a matter of stamina and CAN you, but more a matter of time. The people who were skirting the edge of the moderate and slow group - most of my friends. They made it up to the summit around 5:30, right at the time it was recommended we leave the summit. So yeaaaahhh I was even slower than that. I would have been left behind.
The hard part though, was being able to estimate how long it would take you to get up the mountain. A lot of the people in the moderate and slow group had never climbed/hiked a mountain before so had no idea how long it would take. Finding a climbing buddy (which was really good to have) also was difficult because of this, and because it was hard to estimate how fast you were going to go.
Once we were there too, I suppose there was another group - the 'oh snap son altitude sickness' group. The altitude at Fuji affected people differently - some of us got headaches, others felt nauseous, and pretty much everyone at some point on Fuji felt breathing get much much harder. Mine just happened to come relatively early. I'll touch on both of these in the next post, probably.
Anyways, on to what happened BEFORE Fuji - the equipment and set up and stuff.
PRE-GAME SETUP
I didn't actually start to worry that oh hey, I was going to go climb THE BIGGEST MOUNTAIN IN JAPAN until about a week before we were leaving and when getting supplies was entering into that crucial stage. Emails were sent out over facebook recommending what things to buy (or borrow) and I was like 'oh snap, I don't have X, Y, and Z' so it was off to sports stores I went since I was silly and didn't ask my co-workers at school earlier. I was going to ask at my base school since they were the only people I was going to see twice before I went, but they ended up having a holiday on the second day so I was like weeeeeell to the stores I go!
This was the advice of the organizers, annotated with my thoughts along the way. Most of it was really good advice.
Definitely definitely recommend getting hiking boots. They don't have to be expensive, just something with good tread on them because as you're going up or down the rocks, something with grip will come in extra handy. I actually found mine at the local hardware/home store that sells everything (Juntendo, whose name is constantly reminding me of Nintendo) for pretty cheap. The laces were pretty crap, and it had been a while since I had worn shoes with ankle support, but I'm really glad I had mine. I'm pretty sure I would have died without them.
Ditto to the wind-and-water-proof shell, though make sure it can go over all your stuff. The things I have double as rainy season/rain gear since I have to bike/walk to work, so it's extra handy (especially now that rainy season has ended).
Actually though, I found that it was still pretty chilly at the bottom of the mountain; chilly enough to where I started the hike out in hiking pants and my thermal long sleeve under my shirt at the bottom. So warm really mean 'warm as compared to the top of the mountain' rather than 'warm like a summer day.'
I spent soooo long trying to find good pants to hike in. Like literally, I have jeans and capris, but that was it. I didn't want to destroy my jeans either. I got a pair of track suit pants (which are more expensive than I thought! But mine were on sale) for general use and walking around with in the fall/winter - I decided not to use these on the hike though. I also got a pair of hiking pants from the Sports Chalet in Kurashiki - they were pretty pricey, but they're light, flexible, I actually wouldn't mind wearing them in the heat, and more importantly, they fit. Seriously. It's ridiculously hard for me to find pants over here, and I'm just out of range of normal young people size in the states (hooray women's sections). Japanese women, and most Japanese men, are really skinny.
I did however, succeed in finding 3L men's rain pants to wear. And the hiking pants were LL and they were super super stretchy so that somehow managed to work.
In retrospect, thick pants would have been really good, since there were places with rocks, and rocks on those stretchy, thin, pants made me worried.
Related: damn, water is HEAVY. On a good note though, your pack will be ridiculously light coming back down.
I brought way way way too much food with me. Rice balls were really good, and the dried fruit was nice to snack on, but we didn't really eat much during the hike itself. We kind of munched on the dried fruit and meat, as well as Calorie Mate. This was the first time I had calorie mate, so I tried the chocolate flavor. It basically looks like a biscuity cookie. And it is like a dry, dry, biscuity cookie. I was super glad I still had water left.
What food I didn't eat eventually got squashed at the bottom of my bag. Someone else brought bananas that also got smashed at the bottom of her bag. Oops.
Most of the huts/stations on the Yoshida trail have bathrooms - decent bathrooms (though I heard from my friends that the one at the summit was disgusting)- attached to them, and they all had toilet paper, so next time I would skip out on that. They do, however, ask for a 200 yen donation for upkeep, so make sure you bring change.
The hiking sticks were really really cool, and useful if you don't already have poles. Pretty much every hut and station along the way offer stamps/brands for 200 yen, so you can actually spend quite a bit on the brands if you aim to get them from as many stations as you can. Just know though, if you're doing the night climb that some of them might be closed or not giving out stamps during the wee hours of the night. My friends also said that at the summit, you can get two different stamps too. They're pretty badass; they're burned into your stick with an iron rod.
I also brought a small first aid kit - and by that I mean band-aids, neosporin, tape, and wrapping for under the tape. Oh, and headache medicine, but I put it into a smaller bottle.
I was super freaking out right before the climb because I wasn't sure if I had everything, but now, in retrospect, I probably packed too much. I did end up putting on all my layers (save the rain pants), but that might have been in part because we were going slow enough and resting often enough to where it was getting kind of chilly. But yeah, it as long as you keep moving, you actually stay pretty warm throughout your hike until you get to bits where you slow down or rest.
I, along with a couple other people, brought cannisters of oxygen. The guy who organized the trip said (with a touch of distain and contempt since he's a really fit dude) we shouldn't need oxygen, even those of us who weren't in good shape cause we were all young and blah blah. I talked to someone else, who recommended bringing some with, and I found it was a good idea. It helped some of us with altitude sickness or tiredness - when I started to get really short of breath, take a swig of oxygen and everything is good again. Slight headache? Oxygen away! It doesn't help everyone though - my friend and climbing buddy tried it on her headache and nausea, but it didn't help one bit.
Yeah though, that was just the set up! Another one of my friends who's done Fuji has told me that she went with far less preparation, but since we were doing a night climb... to not be prepared implied that there was a chance that we would die on the mountain.
More to come:
bus ride
rest stops
Starting out.
gandalf stick & good headlamps (or not good headlamps)
altitude sickness
zigzag paths & small goals
guys who brand sticks
price of water D:
water is HEAVY
rocks of stupid annoyingness
hooray rock climbing... in the dark!
8th station
Friendly people
Going back down
ohmyjesus hornets and other flying things
Nearly getting lost
hiking downhill on the way over...
hiking boots are awesome
onsen
20 minutes, LOLS
There were the people who were pretty fit or really skinny, or had really good stamina. These are the people you see doing sports and stuff, though I think even if I was in good shape, I would have still been part of the slow group. Most of the people in this group reached the summit between 1:30-3 o'clock, well before sunrise. These were most of the people who organized the trip. They were also among the first people who were back down the mountain. They made it up the mountain in about 5 hours or so.
Then, there were the people who weren't necessarily in shape, but weren't out of shape too badly either. Or maybe they were out of shape, but they were skinny enough to where it didn't matter too much, or they had more stamina wee. They were the moderate group. Most of them barely made it to the summit in time to start heading back down. Most of these groups were either standing in the line to reach the summit (apparently there were a lot of people close to the summit), had just made it up for the sunrise around 4:20; either way, they barely made the estimated time to get to the summit. And if they barely made it up, then what chance did I, in the third group, have?
The third group was the slow group. Yeah, we were not in shape. I didn't think I was in THAT bad shape though - I mean, I still bike to work and stuff, and walk to work, and finished doing the Shimanami Kaido bike ride. I'll admit that I'm overweight, and fatter than is probably healthy and that I'd like to be, and that I don't exercise as much as I did in college because I don't have scheduled classes or an easily available gym and I hate running. But I didn't finish the bike ride last (and I finished it in the first place). It just so happens that I'm ridiculously slow when it comes to going up things, especially rocky areas. The question of how far up Fuji then, was not a matter of stamina and CAN you, but more a matter of time. The people who were skirting the edge of the moderate and slow group - most of my friends. They made it up to the summit around 5:30, right at the time it was recommended we leave the summit. So yeaaaahhh I was even slower than that. I would have been left behind.
The hard part though, was being able to estimate how long it would take you to get up the mountain. A lot of the people in the moderate and slow group had never climbed/hiked a mountain before so had no idea how long it would take. Finding a climbing buddy (which was really good to have) also was difficult because of this, and because it was hard to estimate how fast you were going to go.
Once we were there too, I suppose there was another group - the 'oh snap son altitude sickness' group. The altitude at Fuji affected people differently - some of us got headaches, others felt nauseous, and pretty much everyone at some point on Fuji felt breathing get much much harder. Mine just happened to come relatively early. I'll touch on both of these in the next post, probably.
Anyways, on to what happened BEFORE Fuji - the equipment and set up and stuff.
PRE-GAME SETUP
I didn't actually start to worry that oh hey, I was going to go climb THE BIGGEST MOUNTAIN IN JAPAN until about a week before we were leaving and when getting supplies was entering into that crucial stage. Emails were sent out over facebook recommending what things to buy (or borrow) and I was like 'oh snap, I don't have X, Y, and Z' so it was off to sports stores I went since I was silly and didn't ask my co-workers at school earlier. I was going to ask at my base school since they were the only people I was going to see twice before I went, but they ended up having a holiday on the second day so I was like weeeeeell to the stores I go!
This was the advice of the organizers, annotated with my thoughts along the way. Most of it was really good advice.
What to bring:Hiking poles were also useful for hauling yourself up when you became short of breath, as well as something to lean on. I'd recommend, if you can get them cheap or borrow them, the kind of poles that collapse because there will be portions (especially between the 7th and 8th station) where it'll be easier to just ditch your poles and use your hands instead. It didn't rain for us while we were up there (thankfully) but I got rain gear that doubled as rain gear for the rainy season. Win-win!
Gear
Since this is started as a night hike, you'll need a torch (flashlight) or headlamp (recommended) and enough batteries to last 6-8 hours. You'll want a pack large enough to hold your stuff along with a waterproof cover in case it rains. A set of hiking poles is nice but not necessary; they do help take the strain off your knees on the way down. Hiking boots, not shoes. Band aids/blister pads. Rain gear. Sunglasses and/or sunblock. Camera. Rain gear.
Footwear
Hiking boots are strongly recommended. You want something that has good tread on the bottom and ankle support/protection as there's lots of scree (loose rock) on Fuji. You're going to be walking over a lot of roots in the dark to start, and if it rains... shoes just aren't going to cut it.
Socks are equally as important. Friction is the enemy when you're wearing boots, so here's a little trick that helps a lot: Wear two pairs of socks - a thin, silky or very sheer and close fitting pair underneath (thin business socks will do in a pinch, guys), and then thick pair of good hiking socks on top. That allows the socks to slide over each other instead of rubbing against your skin. Bring a backup set of both.
When you get to the top, take your boots off for a while and let them dry out a bit. Water (sweat) makes your socks to stick and causes most of the friction (that's why you gets blisters later in your hike as opposed to the outset and they seem to get worse). Remember, pain is a message. Listen to your body and stop and fix problems early before they get worse.
Definitely definitely recommend getting hiking boots. They don't have to be expensive, just something with good tread on them because as you're going up or down the rocks, something with grip will come in extra handy. I actually found mine at the local hardware/home store that sells everything (Juntendo, whose name is constantly reminding me of Nintendo) for pretty cheap. The laces were pretty crap, and it had been a while since I had worn shoes with ankle support, but I'm really glad I had mine. I'm pretty sure I would have died without them.
Clothing
The key is LAYERS! It'll be relatively warm at the bottom and then really cold up at the top at 4am. You'll want to bring several thin layers that you can mix and match, not one bulky one. That said, don't skimp on the warmth; it's possible there'll still be snow up there. You'll have to decide how best to balance the heat of the bottom with cold of the top. You may also want to swap out a sweaty layer or two at the top so you don't get cold.
Suggested layers -
Top: you want at least two if not three layers
Close-fitting: thermal underwear (or something similar) with a short or long sleeved shirt
Mid-layer: polar fleece vest, hoodie, etc…
Top-layer: heavy fleece, jacket, etc…
Bottom: you want at least two layers, DO NOT WEAR ONLY SHORTS
Close-fitting: thermal underwear (or something similar), tights, etc…
Top layer: thick pants
You can change/add layers on the side of the trail or at the stations.
*I highly recommend that you bring or invest in a good wind-and-water-proof shell set that will help keep you dry and warm.
Ditto to the wind-and-water-proof shell, though make sure it can go over all your stuff. The things I have double as rainy season/rain gear since I have to bike/walk to work, so it's extra handy (especially now that rainy season has ended).
Actually though, I found that it was still pretty chilly at the bottom of the mountain; chilly enough to where I started the hike out in hiking pants and my thermal long sleeve under my shirt at the bottom. So warm really mean 'warm as compared to the top of the mountain' rather than 'warm like a summer day.'
I spent soooo long trying to find good pants to hike in. Like literally, I have jeans and capris, but that was it. I didn't want to destroy my jeans either. I got a pair of track suit pants (which are more expensive than I thought! But mine were on sale) for general use and walking around with in the fall/winter - I decided not to use these on the hike though. I also got a pair of hiking pants from the Sports Chalet in Kurashiki - they were pretty pricey, but they're light, flexible, I actually wouldn't mind wearing them in the heat, and more importantly, they fit. Seriously. It's ridiculously hard for me to find pants over here, and I'm just out of range of normal young people size in the states (hooray women's sections). Japanese women, and most Japanese men, are really skinny.
I did however, succeed in finding 3L men's rain pants to wear. And the hiking pants were LL and they were super super stretchy so that somehow managed to work.
In retrospect, thick pants would have been really good, since there were places with rocks, and rocks on those stretchy, thin, pants made me worried.
WaterDefinitely bring water. I also brought a bottle of sports drink with me as well, then used that bottle as a kind of easy-access to water since the other water I brought was in the 2L bottle. Having easy access to your water - like in a side pocket or something, is really convenient, cause otherwise you have to stop, haul out your giant 2L bottle, drink, and then fit it back into your backpack. Much easier to pour water into your smaller bottle and drink from there. You could buy drinks at the hut, but nothing was less than 400 yen at the 7th station, and sometimes these huts were closed since we were going in the middle of the night. Also, make sure you have at least a bottle (500ml) for the hike back down. There are NO huts on the downwards (yoshida) path, and while it's not as strenuous as going up, it's still difficult.
You should bring at least 1 liter of water but personally I recommended bringing 2 liters. It depends on what you want to do, and how much you can carry up the side of the mountain, but better safe than sorry.
Related: damn, water is HEAVY. On a good note though, your pack will be ridiculously light coming back down.
Food
Do not bring foods high in sugar and salt. Bring food that will give you energy and not make you thirsty, or crash from a sugar rush.
Bring enough to last you up the mountain and back down. There are some food shops at the top where you can get hot udon and even beer, but prices are steep! We're talking around 1100-1500 yen for a styrofoam bowl of udon, and 800 yen for a beer (though admittedly it may be the best beer of your life). If you don't mind the prices, you can warm up a while and take your boots off to dry out.
Good food to bring:
Onigiri
Trail mix / gorp / nuts
Dried fruit
Dried meat
Sandwiches
I brought way way way too much food with me. Rice balls were really good, and the dried fruit was nice to snack on, but we didn't really eat much during the hike itself. We kind of munched on the dried fruit and meat, as well as Calorie Mate. This was the first time I had calorie mate, so I tried the chocolate flavor. It basically looks like a biscuity cookie. And it is like a dry, dry, biscuity cookie. I was super glad I still had water left.
What food I didn't eat eventually got squashed at the bottom of my bag. Someone else brought bananas that also got smashed at the bottom of her bag. Oops.
Other Supplies
Although you will want to pack as light as possible - you gotta carry it - below is a list of additional items you may want. Please bring what suits you!
Extra batteries
Sunblock (important!!)
Hand/face towel
Toilet Paper (esp. ladies - when is there ever TP in the ladies' bathroom?)
Headache medicine?
Camera
Small blanket
Sealable bags for food and supplies
Money (you can buy food/water at the stations, but be warned that the closer to the top, the more expensive items will be)
Gloves and a hat
Plastic bag for wet clothes
Trash bag(s) - pick up along the trail for extra kudos
Hking stick - available at the bottom (5th Station), you can buy a fetching wooden hiking stick for 1,000 yen and then have it stamped (branded) with a seal at each of the stations. Each brand costs 200 yen, so in total it costs 2,000 yen, but it's a pretty kickass memento if you're into that kind of thing.
Most of the huts/stations on the Yoshida trail have bathrooms - decent bathrooms (though I heard from my friends that the one at the summit was disgusting)- attached to them, and they all had toilet paper, so next time I would skip out on that. They do, however, ask for a 200 yen donation for upkeep, so make sure you bring change.
The hiking sticks were really really cool, and useful if you don't already have poles. Pretty much every hut and station along the way offer stamps/brands for 200 yen, so you can actually spend quite a bit on the brands if you aim to get them from as many stations as you can. Just know though, if you're doing the night climb that some of them might be closed or not giving out stamps during the wee hours of the night. My friends also said that at the summit, you can get two different stamps too. They're pretty badass; they're burned into your stick with an iron rod.
I also brought a small first aid kit - and by that I mean band-aids, neosporin, tape, and wrapping for under the tape. Oh, and headache medicine, but I put it into a smaller bottle.
I was super freaking out right before the climb because I wasn't sure if I had everything, but now, in retrospect, I probably packed too much. I did end up putting on all my layers (save the rain pants), but that might have been in part because we were going slow enough and resting often enough to where it was getting kind of chilly. But yeah, it as long as you keep moving, you actually stay pretty warm throughout your hike until you get to bits where you slow down or rest.
I, along with a couple other people, brought cannisters of oxygen. The guy who organized the trip said (with a touch of distain and contempt since he's a really fit dude) we shouldn't need oxygen, even those of us who weren't in good shape cause we were all young and blah blah. I talked to someone else, who recommended bringing some with, and I found it was a good idea. It helped some of us with altitude sickness or tiredness - when I started to get really short of breath, take a swig of oxygen and everything is good again. Slight headache? Oxygen away! It doesn't help everyone though - my friend and climbing buddy tried it on her headache and nausea, but it didn't help one bit.
Yeah though, that was just the set up! Another one of my friends who's done Fuji has told me that she went with far less preparation, but since we were doing a night climb... to not be prepared implied that there was a chance that we would die on the mountain.
More to come:
bus ride
rest stops
Starting out.
gandalf stick & good headlamps (or not good headlamps)
altitude sickness
zigzag paths & small goals
guys who brand sticks
price of water D:
water is HEAVY
rocks of stupid annoyingness
hooray rock climbing... in the dark!
8th station
Friendly people
Going back down
ohmyjesus hornets and other flying things
Nearly getting lost
hiking downhill on the way over...
hiking boots are awesome
onsen
20 minutes, LOLS
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
Hospitals
Today was my first time going to the hospital in Japan. They're a little different than how hospitals work in the US - at least, in my experience anyways. Generally, I think of hospitals as emergency kind of places where you go as a "oh crap things have seriously gone wrong" or "woah major allergic reaction" or something. Not for minor things like colds or what have you. Something wrong? Go to the doctor's or to the health center/clinic.
But here... while there are clinics, a lot of people also just go to the hospital for simple things like doctor's notes or when you're ill with fever or something. It's not just for emergencies. They explained this in the "Learn Japanese through Life Situation/Cultural things" class I'm taking through Takahashi. Clinics here do function like clinics back at home. You can go there when you're sick and stuff, but they can't actually give you medicine. They can prescribe it for you to take to a pharmacy or something, but generally that pharmacy is somewhere else. Hospitals on the other hand, often do have the medicines on hand or at least have a pharmacy close by. They also do surgeries and so on. But if you're not close to a clinic, you just go into the hospital. So if someone says that they went to the hospital, it may or may not be a major thing. In my case, it wasn't really.
And here I was thinking my blue health card was going to be useless. Seriously, this thing is almost like a magic card here.
The hospital I went to today was in Niimi, right next to my school because I told myself that I had to go in to work and stuff since, for chrissakes, they were just bug bites. Lots of them.
Oh yeah, I haven't mentioned what I went to the hospital for. So when I woke up this morning, my arms were COVERED in small red bumps that itched like a bad joke. And when I say covered, I'm talking like, around 30 bumps/rashy looking things between my right and left arms. And hands. I can't actually wear my ring on my right hand anymore because my ring finger has a bite on it, which caused the finger to swell up (in addition to the swelling due to heat and my gaining weight thanks to four birthdays within the last month and no self-control). Needless to say, my commute in to work was something aong the lines of miserable, not to mention the fact that I was also running late because I had gone back to sleep after my first alarm clock. Thankfully, I slept most of the way in on the train.
Also thankfully, I had no classes today since the students were taking tests and stuff, so I actually didn't really have much to do during the day other than help eventually make the listening portion of the English test. So I made my way to the hospital sometime around 9:20; it was pretty much right next to the school, so finding it was pretty easy.
At first, I went in the wrong door. A really nice nurse lady who spoke a little English (and wasn't afraid to!) directed me to the actual reception area. And woaaahhh there were a lot of elderly people there. I guess that makes sense since all the young people are in school and stuff, and the people who are probably going to need health assistance are old people to begin with... So I'm not sure why I'm surprised.
But I managed to get my form filled out (by answering no to most questions, figuring that was a pretty safe bet), and then began the hard part. The waiting. I think I was waiting there for... an hour and a half. I was kicking myself for not bringing my Japanese books to study with. But I did have kindle on my iPhone, so I went through and read Arabian Nights (and wow, just wow, at all the layers of stories). Then I got bored and went on my phone. I thought they had forgotten about me for a while. I got up to use the bathroom and came back to find my seat taken, but the A's/Mariner's game on the TV.
Alright, I thought. Waiting was going to be way more fun. It took a while, but the TV quickly reminded me that not only was Ichiro playing (on the mariners) but Hideki was playing on the A's. Seriously, you should have seen the amount of time the cameras spent on them. Them in the dugout. Them standing on the base. They'd quickly cut back to the person who was actually at bat, or to the pitcher if he thought someone was going to steal a base. But then the camera went straight back to Hideki or Ichiro. It was kind of amusing. It wasn't long though, before Hideki went up to bat and go out on a pop fly to left field, and one of the old men watching the game got up and changed the channel to some Japanese oldschool drama that I couldn't actually hear. That was kind of unfortunate. Waiting was boring once more.
Eventually though, right before I thought I was going to have to go back home (around 11:15) they called my name and I followed the nurse into a small room where we talked for a little bit and I showed her the bug bites on my arm (which, ironically, had ceased to itch insanely and had actually faded a little bit so they weren't that angry red color). I also gave her the note that my JTE had written for me.
Eventually she left and came back with a doctor who was saying ti was probably dani and that I need to bug bomb my house (probably) and asked if I was allergic to anything and a couple of other questions I kind of just said no to.
He gave me a prescription for two medicines: a topical medicine that's like a clear gel stuff you spread over the bug bites, and a pill to take twice a day. The pill, I found out, was actually just Allegra; I was amused to find that they actually have to prescribe it here, but then again, Japan's drug laws are much stricter than the US's.
To get the drugs, after I got out of the office, I had to wait for them to call my name so I could collect my prescription and pay the ~1000 yen for a doctor's visit. Then I had to go to the pharmacy where I had to wait some more and fill out another form before they sent me on my way with medicine. That cost like, 760 yen. Total cost was around 1800.
Magic, I tell you. Super nice to get drugs for that cheap, especially when you have to wait so freaking long at the hospital.
I accidently took 2 allegra instead of just one for today. My bad. It shouldn't kill me, I think, since the American dosage is a a little different than the Japanese one.
But yeah, that was my adventure today. Lots of waiting. I swear, Japan is making me more patient, or it will so-help-it-god.
I am not really looking forward to going home right now. I'm kind of dreading it. They said that I probably have dani - bed bugs or tatami bugs. Usually you hear about them living in old tatami or in futons. I guess mine are the futon type, because sweat builds up and they eat that stuff.... gross. But I thought I'd been decent at putting away my futon and upkeeping it, but apparently I was very very wrong. Sigh.
I swear, I'll never take a bed or the noticable lack of major bugs in California for granted ever again. I'm getting tired of having to deal with bugs all the freaking time.
On a happier note, this weekend was absolutely packed full of things, both good and bad. I already mentioned the JLPT, but I didn't talk about any of the awesome things that happened.
On monday, when I went in to school, some of my students at Jounan asked me what I was doing with the eggplant. I was kind of confused at first, like, what? Then they told me that they saw me on TV with Joaquin-sensei (one of the other ALTs in Takahashi). And I was like, what. And then I remembered. Saturday, my insanely busy day, I spent like, an hourish at the Japanese class about Tanabata Matsuri - or the Star festival. There was a story to go along with it; I'll retell it later. But suffice it to say, that part of the class was learning how to make animals out of vegetables. Unfortunately I have no pictures of this... but we turned a cucumber into a... something with legs. Horse! The eggplant became a cow. And ginger turned into a rooster. They actually looked pretty cool too. This kid at the table we were at stuck a bunch of legs into his cucumber; we asked him if it was mukade and he was like "NOOOO IT'S A _____." He was really freaking adorable though. Also, according to Joaquin's librarian, they played that several times over the local news channel. Hooray, I've officially made the local news. Making eggplant animals.
EMBARRASSING-YOOOOO. I wonder how many of my kids saw that.
But here... while there are clinics, a lot of people also just go to the hospital for simple things like doctor's notes or when you're ill with fever or something. It's not just for emergencies. They explained this in the "Learn Japanese through Life Situation/Cultural things" class I'm taking through Takahashi. Clinics here do function like clinics back at home. You can go there when you're sick and stuff, but they can't actually give you medicine. They can prescribe it for you to take to a pharmacy or something, but generally that pharmacy is somewhere else. Hospitals on the other hand, often do have the medicines on hand or at least have a pharmacy close by. They also do surgeries and so on. But if you're not close to a clinic, you just go into the hospital. So if someone says that they went to the hospital, it may or may not be a major thing. In my case, it wasn't really.
And here I was thinking my blue health card was going to be useless. Seriously, this thing is almost like a magic card here.
The hospital I went to today was in Niimi, right next to my school because I told myself that I had to go in to work and stuff since, for chrissakes, they were just bug bites. Lots of them.
Oh yeah, I haven't mentioned what I went to the hospital for. So when I woke up this morning, my arms were COVERED in small red bumps that itched like a bad joke. And when I say covered, I'm talking like, around 30 bumps/rashy looking things between my right and left arms. And hands. I can't actually wear my ring on my right hand anymore because my ring finger has a bite on it, which caused the finger to swell up (in addition to the swelling due to heat and my gaining weight thanks to four birthdays within the last month and no self-control). Needless to say, my commute in to work was something aong the lines of miserable, not to mention the fact that I was also running late because I had gone back to sleep after my first alarm clock. Thankfully, I slept most of the way in on the train.
Also thankfully, I had no classes today since the students were taking tests and stuff, so I actually didn't really have much to do during the day other than help eventually make the listening portion of the English test. So I made my way to the hospital sometime around 9:20; it was pretty much right next to the school, so finding it was pretty easy.
At first, I went in the wrong door. A really nice nurse lady who spoke a little English (and wasn't afraid to!) directed me to the actual reception area. And woaaahhh there were a lot of elderly people there. I guess that makes sense since all the young people are in school and stuff, and the people who are probably going to need health assistance are old people to begin with... So I'm not sure why I'm surprised.
But I managed to get my form filled out (by answering no to most questions, figuring that was a pretty safe bet), and then began the hard part. The waiting. I think I was waiting there for... an hour and a half. I was kicking myself for not bringing my Japanese books to study with. But I did have kindle on my iPhone, so I went through and read Arabian Nights (and wow, just wow, at all the layers of stories). Then I got bored and went on my phone. I thought they had forgotten about me for a while. I got up to use the bathroom and came back to find my seat taken, but the A's/Mariner's game on the TV.
Alright, I thought. Waiting was going to be way more fun. It took a while, but the TV quickly reminded me that not only was Ichiro playing (on the mariners) but Hideki was playing on the A's. Seriously, you should have seen the amount of time the cameras spent on them. Them in the dugout. Them standing on the base. They'd quickly cut back to the person who was actually at bat, or to the pitcher if he thought someone was going to steal a base. But then the camera went straight back to Hideki or Ichiro. It was kind of amusing. It wasn't long though, before Hideki went up to bat and go out on a pop fly to left field, and one of the old men watching the game got up and changed the channel to some Japanese oldschool drama that I couldn't actually hear. That was kind of unfortunate. Waiting was boring once more.
Eventually though, right before I thought I was going to have to go back home (around 11:15) they called my name and I followed the nurse into a small room where we talked for a little bit and I showed her the bug bites on my arm (which, ironically, had ceased to itch insanely and had actually faded a little bit so they weren't that angry red color). I also gave her the note that my JTE had written for me.
Eventually she left and came back with a doctor who was saying ti was probably dani and that I need to bug bomb my house (probably) and asked if I was allergic to anything and a couple of other questions I kind of just said no to.
He gave me a prescription for two medicines: a topical medicine that's like a clear gel stuff you spread over the bug bites, and a pill to take twice a day. The pill, I found out, was actually just Allegra; I was amused to find that they actually have to prescribe it here, but then again, Japan's drug laws are much stricter than the US's.
To get the drugs, after I got out of the office, I had to wait for them to call my name so I could collect my prescription and pay the ~1000 yen for a doctor's visit. Then I had to go to the pharmacy where I had to wait some more and fill out another form before they sent me on my way with medicine. That cost like, 760 yen. Total cost was around 1800.
Magic, I tell you. Super nice to get drugs for that cheap, especially when you have to wait so freaking long at the hospital.
I accidently took 2 allegra instead of just one for today. My bad. It shouldn't kill me, I think, since the American dosage is a a little different than the Japanese one.
But yeah, that was my adventure today. Lots of waiting. I swear, Japan is making me more patient, or it will so-help-it-god.
I am not really looking forward to going home right now. I'm kind of dreading it. They said that I probably have dani - bed bugs or tatami bugs. Usually you hear about them living in old tatami or in futons. I guess mine are the futon type, because sweat builds up and they eat that stuff.... gross. But I thought I'd been decent at putting away my futon and upkeeping it, but apparently I was very very wrong. Sigh.
I swear, I'll never take a bed or the noticable lack of major bugs in California for granted ever again. I'm getting tired of having to deal with bugs all the freaking time.
On a happier note, this weekend was absolutely packed full of things, both good and bad. I already mentioned the JLPT, but I didn't talk about any of the awesome things that happened.
On monday, when I went in to school, some of my students at Jounan asked me what I was doing with the eggplant. I was kind of confused at first, like, what? Then they told me that they saw me on TV with Joaquin-sensei (one of the other ALTs in Takahashi). And I was like, what. And then I remembered. Saturday, my insanely busy day, I spent like, an hourish at the Japanese class about Tanabata Matsuri - or the Star festival. There was a story to go along with it; I'll retell it later. But suffice it to say, that part of the class was learning how to make animals out of vegetables. Unfortunately I have no pictures of this... but we turned a cucumber into a... something with legs. Horse! The eggplant became a cow. And ginger turned into a rooster. They actually looked pretty cool too. This kid at the table we were at stuck a bunch of legs into his cucumber; we asked him if it was mukade and he was like "NOOOO IT'S A _____." He was really freaking adorable though. Also, according to Joaquin's librarian, they played that several times over the local news channel. Hooray, I've officially made the local news. Making eggplant animals.
EMBARRASSING-YOOOOO. I wonder how many of my kids saw that.
Monday, July 4, 2011
This Ain't A Scene, It's An Armsrace
I swear, it's like I'm at war with the bugs in my area. Can you see why I'm not super fond of summer now?
The latest battle in my ongoing war with the bugs has pitted me against the endless army of small, tiny, annoying ants. I know I'm way bigger than them, yes, and that they can't really do much, but I'm not wholly convinced that this speces is one of the non-biting ones. I keep finding more and more bumps mysteriously appearing over my body, and I can't help but assume that while I sleep, some little bug is crawling over and using me as a buffet. Last night, I returned home from my Japanese test in Okayama City to find that the stray ant or two I'd been finding recently had a source - a source that was interested in something in my bedroom! They were EVERYWHERE. It turns out that one of the chocolates I had at the bottom of a box had melted and was attracting them into my room... so I put the box outside, but was too paranoid to sleep since I kept finding groups of ants popping up here and there. And vacuumed. Boy did I vacuum. it was almost as if my room was giving me a sign saying "Jessica, you haven't vacuumed in AGES well now is a really good time to do that."
I thought about spraying my room but well, the problem was that this was my bedroom, which has tatami. So if I sprayed... my room has little to no ventilation so basically I'd be sleeping with my head in a cloud of pesticide. I have a spare room, but I'd kind of put a bunch of stuff in there from when they were coming to fix my fridge and I had to clean the place up real fast. Yeaaaaaah.
Needless to say, I didn't go to bed until pretty late. I'm really glad that this week is test week and I have very few actual classes to teach...
But okay, so that was last night. I don't know if these bumps/bites on my arm are from the ants or not, but I've got a good couple on my arms. What's more, tonight, I also found three clusters of ants in my house: one near the umeshu (plum wine) I tried to make (we'll see how that goes), one cluster near the light switch/soup, and one sparse group in the shower. I was like omg, wat, this is WAR.
It's a good thing I went to buy ant stuff today. Seriously, I loaded up on what I could find (in addition to buying hiking boots - I'm going to attempt to climb fuji this weekend! AHHHH. There's a small chance I'm going to die. I'm so incredibly out of shape right now it's not funny. I need a hard schedule to follow, otherwise I end up slacking off. I've also been eating too much recently - I blame the billion birthdays that have happened lately.). This included this nifty ant killer spray with a thin nozzel that sprays a very direct cloud versus one that's kind of wide and eventually ends up just floating down. Very happy with that purchase. Also bought bug trappy-bug-takes-this-thing-back-to-nest-and-it-hopefully-kills-everything thing that reminds me of the cockroach ones. I put those outside my house... hopefully they'll sufficiently distract the ants from the inside of my house. :x
I'm getting better though. I stay under enough control to where I could actually get teh vacuum and take care of it, since before even doing that would be questionable.
So that's my battle with ants, in my war with the bugs. I also fought a battle against the mosquitos. That one, I'm pretty sure I lost. I was waiting for my bus after the test on sunday, and not one, but TWO full buses went by us. It felt like I really was at school again.
Oh, as an aside, I've been taking "beginner" Japanese classes through the city. They're "learning Japanese through real life situations and learning about Japanese culture" kind of classes, and mainly aimed at foreigners - students, mostly since there's an international college really close to where I live. Except most of them are Korean or Chinese. And since I know the guy who's organizing it... he asked me to come and I said sure why not. It's good practice. Definitely not beginner though. I saw at least 4 people from that class at the Japanese proficiency test, all all of them were taking either N2 or N1 - the top two levels (out of 5). I was taking 3 (and got my butt kicked). Yeaaaaaaah. It's fun though.Anyways, I digress.
As I was waiting for the bus, I felt this stinging and then intense itching on my legs. Those little mosquito bastards had bitten my legs at least 5 times. FIVE. They're all painful too. And itch like something rotten. I went from having no bug bites to BAM having a lot. That only made me not like the test even more haha.
Yeah, so the mosquitos won that round, but eventually i pushed my way onto a bus haha.
Oh yeah, and did I mention that on the bus ride over, I found a tiny little spider hanging by a thread from one of my hairs? I was very impressed that I didn't freak out or scream. I just, carefully, with my voucher, pushed it off. Super gross. Do not want.
So yeah, bugs, you may be winning the battles, but I shall win the war.
The latest battle in my ongoing war with the bugs has pitted me against the endless army of small, tiny, annoying ants. I know I'm way bigger than them, yes, and that they can't really do much, but I'm not wholly convinced that this speces is one of the non-biting ones. I keep finding more and more bumps mysteriously appearing over my body, and I can't help but assume that while I sleep, some little bug is crawling over and using me as a buffet. Last night, I returned home from my Japanese test in Okayama City to find that the stray ant or two I'd been finding recently had a source - a source that was interested in something in my bedroom! They were EVERYWHERE. It turns out that one of the chocolates I had at the bottom of a box had melted and was attracting them into my room... so I put the box outside, but was too paranoid to sleep since I kept finding groups of ants popping up here and there. And vacuumed. Boy did I vacuum. it was almost as if my room was giving me a sign saying "Jessica, you haven't vacuumed in AGES well now is a really good time to do that."
I thought about spraying my room but well, the problem was that this was my bedroom, which has tatami. So if I sprayed... my room has little to no ventilation so basically I'd be sleeping with my head in a cloud of pesticide. I have a spare room, but I'd kind of put a bunch of stuff in there from when they were coming to fix my fridge and I had to clean the place up real fast. Yeaaaaaah.
Needless to say, I didn't go to bed until pretty late. I'm really glad that this week is test week and I have very few actual classes to teach...
But okay, so that was last night. I don't know if these bumps/bites on my arm are from the ants or not, but I've got a good couple on my arms. What's more, tonight, I also found three clusters of ants in my house: one near the umeshu (plum wine) I tried to make (we'll see how that goes), one cluster near the light switch/soup, and one sparse group in the shower. I was like omg, wat, this is WAR.
It's a good thing I went to buy ant stuff today. Seriously, I loaded up on what I could find (in addition to buying hiking boots - I'm going to attempt to climb fuji this weekend! AHHHH. There's a small chance I'm going to die. I'm so incredibly out of shape right now it's not funny. I need a hard schedule to follow, otherwise I end up slacking off. I've also been eating too much recently - I blame the billion birthdays that have happened lately.). This included this nifty ant killer spray with a thin nozzel that sprays a very direct cloud versus one that's kind of wide and eventually ends up just floating down. Very happy with that purchase. Also bought bug trappy-bug-takes-this-thing-back-to-nest-and-it-hopefully-kills-everything thing that reminds me of the cockroach ones. I put those outside my house... hopefully they'll sufficiently distract the ants from the inside of my house. :x
I'm getting better though. I stay under enough control to where I could actually get teh vacuum and take care of it, since before even doing that would be questionable.
So that's my battle with ants, in my war with the bugs. I also fought a battle against the mosquitos. That one, I'm pretty sure I lost. I was waiting for my bus after the test on sunday, and not one, but TWO full buses went by us. It felt like I really was at school again.
Oh, as an aside, I've been taking "beginner" Japanese classes through the city. They're "learning Japanese through real life situations and learning about Japanese culture" kind of classes, and mainly aimed at foreigners - students, mostly since there's an international college really close to where I live. Except most of them are Korean or Chinese. And since I know the guy who's organizing it... he asked me to come and I said sure why not. It's good practice. Definitely not beginner though. I saw at least 4 people from that class at the Japanese proficiency test, all all of them were taking either N2 or N1 - the top two levels (out of 5). I was taking 3 (and got my butt kicked). Yeaaaaaaah. It's fun though.Anyways, I digress.
As I was waiting for the bus, I felt this stinging and then intense itching on my legs. Those little mosquito bastards had bitten my legs at least 5 times. FIVE. They're all painful too. And itch like something rotten. I went from having no bug bites to BAM having a lot. That only made me not like the test even more haha.
Yeah, so the mosquitos won that round, but eventually i pushed my way onto a bus haha.
Oh yeah, and did I mention that on the bus ride over, I found a tiny little spider hanging by a thread from one of my hairs? I was very impressed that I didn't freak out or scream. I just, carefully, with my voucher, pushed it off. Super gross. Do not want.
So yeah, bugs, you may be winning the battles, but I shall win the war.
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