Hello Tokyo ♡

Hi Tokyo, long time no see. :D 

It's actually kind of funny because I swear it's been ages and ages (or at the very least, two years) but actually I left Japan one year and seven months ago, so just over a year and a half. I was just commenting to a friend that for me, it didn't feel as much like a big trip so much as just another trip to somewhere that feels like a second home sometimes. 

It explains why this trip was the most disorganized I've been on this far. That and the fact that school is a little crazy (or cray / cray-cray as the young people aka my sister and my former roommate for example would say). I still don't have a firm itinerary in mind. 

When immigration and customs asked me where I was staying I kind of didn't know what to put; I'm staying at my aunt's place for a couple days but I don't actually know their address. Oops. So I put my old address in Takahashi down. I wonder if that place is super run down now since I don't think anyone has been living in it for a year and a half (I'm sure there's probably a bunch of nice bug families there now though, like mukade/centipede families... That or it looks like a war zone between bugs for control of the house. If that wasn't such a disgusting image, that's be kind of amusing). 

I digress. I'm on a bus so I can't type too much; buses make me kind of carsick if I'm reading things now. I might also be unable to do that on planes now too, because I felt super queasy on the plane today. 

So uh, pictures! 

Yeah I have no idea what to even think of this, other than I'm pretty sure on a scale of 1 to inappropriate it's definitely not 1 or 2. Probably higher than 3 and 4 too. 

The fact that there's a kid with a Captain America looking backpack standing in front of him too... American god mascots are strange. This one looks kind of creepy. 

This was really cool. It shows you what the traffic conditions around Tokyo are. 

We just passed this cool looking apartment. It looked like it had steps in order to give each floor an open patio so you could actually look up and see sky. 

Yep, we just hit traffic. I should have taken the earlier bus. Oh well. At least it makes it easier to type without feeling sick. :D #silverlining? 

OMG WE'RE PASSING DISNEYLAND. How do I know? I saw the Disney hotel, and then I saw Cinderella's Castle. One of these days when I have money again... Wait for me, Disney hotel! 

This building had stairs winding up the sides. I would say I bet it's really cool to walk up but then I realized how tall it was and changed my mind. 

You can even see sky tree, AKA huge mall you can shop in for days and an observatory and aquarium and oh yeah also some tower I guess. Kidding, the view from inside is actually pretty fantastic. 

This means we're close(r) though, so until later then! 

Tottori

So I realized, I don't think I ever wrote about any of my trips to Tottori, the prefecture north of Okayama where I was staying. Surprisingly, (since Tottori is considered one of the least two populated and one of the two most rural prefectures I believe?) I've actually been there several times, though all different places.

One of my friends from undergrad was posting on facebook on how she was on a train to Tottori, and I couldn't help but feel nostalgic. I actually really enjoyed Tottori, and kind of wish I had spent more time there despite our initial assessment that it was totally the perfect weekend trip spot. In theory, a weekend is enough to hit all the big "to do" spots around Tottori city, especially if you're relying on public transportation to get everywhere. That's not even including the other larger city to the west, Yonago, and the area around it. And Mount Daisen, one of the tallest (also ski-able in the winter) mountains in the region, as well as I'm-not-sure-if-it's-okayama-or-tottori-but-it's-pretty-much-in-between-Hirzuen, where all the delicious milk products come from in my area (and beef -- also, I'm still referring to the region like I live there but I can't help but feel like it's my adopted area still).


The big things to do in Tottori, anyways, are the sand dunes and the sand sculptures when they have the exhibit there. I think I always meant to post about those... and then forgot. I have those pictures somewhere. Maybe that'll be my new summer project, for the short duration of summer we have left. Upload pictures, finish reading for my independent reading course so that my adviser doesn't think I'm a slacker (so much for an actual summer vacation). Other than the sand dunes... the curry. It's a weird thing to go to a prefecture for, kind of, but Tottori has the highest per capita consumption of curry (keeping in mind as well, that Tottori has one of the lowest populations, though in my opinion, that's still pretty impressive).

I was journeying with one of my JET friends at the time specifically to see the sand dunes, and when we arrived at the station, we were perusing the information booth with the million fliers and brochures, when one caught our eye. It was something like, "the curry walk" or "curry street" or something like that. Basically, a guide to the top curry restaurants in town and places that you absolutely had to try if you were in town, as well as rankings and everything for which curry was the most popular, sweetest, etc etc.

Seriously, at that point I think I knew that Tottori was going to be a place I liked (as a kid, Japanese curry and rice was my favorite food, and only sophomore year where I consumed like, at least three packages of microwavable curry a week changed that). Actually, if I think about it, if I were to choose a place to live again in Japan, Tottori would be in my top 3 list, possibly even tied three ways for first with Kobe and Yokohama.

We ended up trying this pear curry close to the sand dunes, along with pear gelato. Oh my god. It was amazing. I was highly skeptical of putting pears (and fruit in general) into curry, which usually is pretty savory and not very sweet). Also though, by pears, really I mean nashi which we identify as "Asian pears" though my whole life I've always considered them more apple than pear. They're that kind of yellow or golden color, with the small white spots and the crunchy insides that almost snap as you eat them? They're really crisp and delicious. Also, now I totally understand why we call them Asian pears. Cause they're actually called pears in Asia.

They had a TON of pear flavored products in Tottori (as Japanese places with local flavors and specialties are wont to do). Pear cider, pear wine, pear candy, pear soda, pear curry, pear soft serve, pear... pears, and my absolute favorite, pear shaved ice. Holy. Cow. Best flavor syrup for shaved ice ever. It tasted exactly like pear, and not like some overly sweet syrup, and was also light and refreshing to taste. Paired (or "pear'd." as several of my friends would say -- also oh dear, they're rubbing off on me) with the cool yet light and almost fluffy ice, it really made the pear flavor come through more clearly than it had in the soft serve version. Also, I love shaved ice.

The sand dunes themselves were also pretty cool, while still being not quite what I had expected. In my head, when I hear "sand dunes" I think something like, "Sahara desert" or "those amazing sand dunes in Journey" (Journey is a PS3 game with an amazing soundtrack and even more amazing visuals where you go on... a journey... through this desert like world. It's really an amazing game that's not quite what you would think of as a "game"). In reality, it is much much much smaller than that, but still surprisingly energy consuming to walk across. They also had camels that you could ride around on too (and, walking back up the hill on our way back, we wished we had a camel). Running down it was surprisingly fun, and somehow, walking around to make paths and tracks never got tiring, nor was it only enjoyed by young people. They actually (they being the sand dune volunteer group thing) had a dude stationed at the bottom of the giant hill to make sure people didn't run graffiti into the side of the hill, not that people didn't try. We actually watched him stop several groups. One group was walking around in a circle. Another couple was trying to make a heart. They almost got it too, but he made them walk down. We spent a good portion of time scheming ways to distract the watchman with one group while the other completed a picture behind his back while he was busy scolding the first group. It would totally work too.

The hills were also surprisingly steep. On the way back down I ran back part of the way, and it was kind of exhilarating in the "OH MY GOD I CAN'T STOP" kind of way, though running at an angle helped.

On the other side of the giant hill though, wasn't more sand dunes. It was the ocean. Or well, the Sea of Japan (so technically not ocean, but large body of water). Tottori is actually home to a really awesome looking geopark a couple miles down from the Sand Dunes; regretfully, I ran out of time to go before we left and I never had enough time to return. The dunes overlooked a small beach, which you could run down to from the dunes at an abrupt and steep angle. Running back up however, was much more difficult. We chose to not run down to the water, choosing instead to just sit there and snack on our conbini sandwiches (and the inevitable sand that got into them) and enjoy the view. Mostly I think this is because neither of us wanted to have to walk all the way back up hahaha. We were kinda short on time as well. Buses, and all that.

Pretty much right next to the sand dunes was the sand sculpture museum (kinda). Every time they opened it, they invited people from around the world to create sand sculptures around a certain theme, and after they were done, they'd build walls around the sculptures. Every time. New walls. They also didn't look quite as janky as some fairs in the US that come around once a year and then close shop and come back a year later.


In 2012 (a whole year ago now), the theme was the UK. So there were a bunch of kind of medieval sand sculptures, one with the Globe and a play going on, the Tower of London, one of the Queen, one that was a scene of rainy times and people walking around with umbrellas, another of Galileo I think? And some other famous scientist, I don't remember. They were really awesome sculptures. There was also one of King Arthur and the sword in the stone... I think.



Oh wow, I just realized it's been almost a year since I've been back in the US. Technically a few days short, but wow. I haven't gone anywhere since I've been back, nor have I traveled nearly as much as when I did over there. I have, however, gone home WAY more often than when I was living in Japan. Ahem. Anyways.


Those things were all part of day one, and I want to say we went somewhere else too... but honestly, I don't really remember. We stayed at a business hotel though, I can remember that much. The day after, we decided to split up. My friend went to see a castle I think and went to the Detective Conan (a really popular manga/anime about this high schooler detective genius who gets turned into a little boy but retains his deductive genius) museum, while I, on the other hand, couldn't resist the siren call of large bodies of water and the beach, and went off to find a beach to go to, along with the other thing I couldn't resist: an aquarium called 鳥取かにっこ館 (Tottori Kanikkokan).



This aquarium though, was by far the most specialized of them all. It was a crab aquarium, and I think literally, they had over 70 species of crabs there. It was actually a pretty small aquarium, with this really awesome touch zone for small children that had a ton of those small crabs and like, hermit crabs and stuff there for people (ie: kids) to touch. There was also a couple of small tanks with examples of the wildlife found around Tottori (which honestly, is why I like to visit so many aquariums, because they all showcase the local marine life) as well of course, as the crabs that could be found in the area. Apparently, the crab was supposed to be delicious.


Right next to the aquarium, they also had a bunch of seafood restaurants as well as a fish/seafood market -- you know, just in case you started to crave the things you were looking at. I mean, I think we do that here in the states as well, but Japan takes these things to a whole new level that people here I think, would be shocked at haha.


Fortunately for me, also next to the aquarium was this amazing small beach that wasn't really that crowded, though regretfully, I had not brought along a swim suit. Instead I walked along the beach where the waves break and the sand is wet (since if you didn't you risked burning the soles of your feet because the sand was so hot), walking in and out of the water. It was super refreshing, and I really regretted not bringing a suit. The further away you got though, the fewer people were around until I was in a small, almost cove-like area by myself with the closest people a good 200-300 feet away. I think I took a nap there until it was finally time to go back and meet up with my friend so we could return to Okayama, a trip that would take at least 3 hours, if memory serves me correctly. Plus another hour+ to get back to my house from Okayama.


But just being able to reconnect to the sea again was energizing and invigorating. I felt completely recharged after that. :) I'm definitely a water kind of person haha. Walking up and down the beach is still one of my favorite activities. It's kind of therapeutic. No land locked places for me... even being here at Stanford feels like it's too far away from the ocean lol, though really, it's like a 40-1 hour drive to the ocean and even less if I'm okay with settling for a smaller body of water.



My first trip to Yonago on the other hand, could probably be classified as a disaster, but also as awesome. I swear I thought I posted about it, but I've been trying to look, and I can't find anything. The night I arrived/the day after, a typhoon decided to BLOW ON THROUGH THE CITY and it poured super hard, rendering it kind of difficult and miserable to do any sort of site seeing around the city. I did, however, the following day, take a day trip out to this place called Mizuki Shigeru Road, a like... 1.5 hour trip from Yonago by train I believe? I went because I heard there was a museum about 妖怪, yokai, which are like fantastic creatures like ghosts and goblins and supernatural spirits in Japan. They're kind of fascinating to read about, and there's a super popular comic in Japan called Ge Ge Ge Kitaro which is about, to the best of my knowledge, this kid (I think he's also a "good" spirit... maybe... I honestly am not too sure) and his interactions trying to help others and keep the bad spirits from being too evil. I think. I watched one episode, but I kind of forgot what happened. Minor details. But this city is the hometown of the author to Ge Ge Ge (Mizuki Shigeru) so they decided to honor him by commercializing the hell out of their city and installed statues all along this road complete with stamps that you could get of each of the yokai in the book (which you could stamp in this handy passport booklet they sold, which then semi-obligated you to finish and collect all the freaking stamps).

There was also a museum for the yokai and a museum-- wait. Wait. I think I remember posting about this. Because in addition to the yokai museum, there was also a museum that had "living" in its title and I thought I was going to see a real sunfish and SURPRISE it turned out it was a TAXIDERMY museum and everything, including the giant sunfish, was STUFFED and I was horrified and incredibly creeped out by it. I remember writing about that. I remember the picture I put up of this one room that had at least a hundred small tiny pufferfish that had been preserved. Hanging from the ceiling. Some of them had googly-eyes glued on them. Creepy. As. Hell. This picture:

It looks upon museum patrons with murderous eyes

I can't find the post associated with it, but google says I posted it? I can't seem to find the post though. :x Actually, that was when I was still writing my newsletter home, so it might have gotten put into that. Alas, I take way too long to write about things. As proof, I sat down to write this post an hour and a half ago, and I'm still typing. This is actually getting kind of long huh. I should probably go to bed. This is what happens when I have nothing to regulate my sleep schedule... ugh.



Oh, I also realized this now, but my astrological sign is Cancer... the crab. Hahaha. Maybe that's why I felt so relaxed and enjoyed myself so much there, both at the beach and at the crab aquarium. Coincidence? I think not!

Anyways, long story short (or the TL;DR version), Tottori was awesome, had a crab museum and pear everything and a beach in addition to sand dunes, and I want to go back some time.

Nara

Now that I'm homeless, I've been using my newfound free time to A) sleep a little B) travel a little and C) see some people and stuff. For a while, I was living at my friend's place (who was gracious enough to put a bunch of us up, though, we were put on the no-air conditioner-sweaty-diet {though really, it wasn't as bad as I complain since there was usually a nice breeze, just ohman humid} and I think at one point there were seven people). I feel like I've been doing a bunch of day trips, since finding a hotel or hostel or anything within a reasonable price range (ie, under $100ish a night) is pretty impossible even a week beforehand.

Today, I did a day trip to Nara, the first permanent capitol of Japan, and the capitol prior to Kyoto. Actually, yesterday I went roaming around Kyoto for a bit since that's where I'm staying, currently.

Before that, I did a day trip to Yamaguchi to see Akiyoshi-do, the longest cave system in Japan (and one of the biggest too, I'd bet). Like seriously, it's HUGE compared to the caves in Niimi. Quite magnificent too. They had explanations in English, which was an extra nice touch.

Limestone caves in Japan. Who would have thought.

Nara though, is where, really, I got a sense of enormity and the scale to which Japanese palaces used to be built. I made the mistake of walking to the palace grounds, so when I got there the primary thing on my mind was distance, but oh man! I went in through the Southern Gate - the Suzaku (tee hee, Fushigi Yugi) Gate, and the main palace was nothing but a small house in the distance. And the main palace, is quite quite large. I mean, there's a *train line* that goes through the palace grounds beyond the Suzaku gate.

My face looked a little bit like this: ；▽； ("Oh god, that's so far away. I should have taken the bus here. At least I'm getting all these steps in my pedometer...")

Seriously though, this place was huge. I'm probably exaggerating a little bit, but it felt like I was walking for a good ten to fifteen minutes at least! Then I got to the main imperial palace (reconstruction) gates. There was still another massive courtyard inside! I was like HOLY FRIGGIN COW THERE'S MORE?!

Yes, there was.

I had just been walking straight too. There were actually grounds to the east and the west that had things like gardens and museums, but I decided to forgo those due to time and holycrap they were far away.

It really made me marvel though, at just how big the palaces were back then. Seriously, that was a lot of space. You could fit a small village in there (and they probably did).

Needless to say, I took the bus back to near Nara Park. And then I had *more* walking to do, since there were a lot of world heritage sites in the park area. I don't think I even hit them all.

I'll get the names of them later, but I think I managed to go to three of the WHS, including, of course, the famous Giant Wooden Buddha. That was pretty awesome. Again, the scale to which both that and the building that housed it was amazing. I mean, these were built ages ago! How did they manage to build things that high? Blows my mind to look at things that tall.

There was also a gorgeous candle light kind of lantern festival that loads of people in yukata came out for. It was really pretty. I wasn't planning on staying until the evening in Nara, but it kind of ended up that way when I saw them put all the lanterns out. I killed time at this awesome little restaurant that had pretty tasty curry, an unlimited drink bar, and a fantastic (working) model train set. I felt like a twelve year old boy. It was pretty freaking sweet. I took so many pictures. :)

Today, I say bye to Kyoto though and make my way to Tokyo! I'm super excited. I'm supposed to meet up with two sets of relatives. :D Yaaay fun! I was also supposed to meet with two friends, but one turns out to be busy instead so hopefully we'll meet again in California.

Here we gooooooooo.

People talk

Today I'm returning to Okayama! I dunno if typing this in the bus is the best idea (me and buses don't usually play well. Like, I only get motion sick when trying to read on buses) but! What else am I gonna do for 40 minutes? Can't really sleep right now, and I can't read anything (see above) wooo.
Here are some impromptu pictures from my bus ride back! These pictures are brought to you at the expense of my dignity a littl bit, since I was That Person who was taking pictures with their iPad.



I'm sad to be leaving though! Last night I was talking with a bunch of other guests, most of whom were from tokyo. They were super chill, and we had a pretty good time. I think I might have offended the owner a little though, because we were giving people nicknames, and I used his first and last names and came up with Tako... Yeahhhh... Oops.
But other than that kinda faux pax, it was nice to talk and chit chat in a mix of English and Japanese. Mostly Japanese, though I would have to ask the two people who spoke both for a translation sometimes.
Oh, weirdly enough, there was one woman from Santa Monica, the owner dude worked in Newport Beach, and I met a masters student who was gonna work for Foursquare in San Francisco who went to UCSanta Barbara while diving! :) talking to random people is kinda fun. :) hahaha I also bragged a bit about going to Stanford (ohohohoho) since they were trying to think of famous universities in California for some reason (I didn't bring it up!) and they were like "ahhh oh yeah Stanford!" and I was (a little smugly) "actually... That's where I'm going to grad school"
Inner me is still giggling gleefully. Tee hee. That's probably gonna last until I get there and go "YABEI" because it's so hard. ^^;
Oh yeah! There are loads of pineapple fields here. If you saw a pineapple growing for the first time and you didn't know how they were grown... Wouldn't you think they grew in the ground? I did. At first I thought they grew in trees, but when I found out they didn't and I saw this (minus the pineapple), I assumed that you pulled pineapples out of the ground like carrots or something.

Lol yeah.. Did I mention I'm going to stanford? Looools.

Day 1.5

Today was my first full day on Ishigaki, since I spent most of yesterday just getting here. However! That's not to say I didn't do anything my first half day! The guest house I'm staying at, Maetakaya, offers dinner and breakfast, so I figured I would sign up for both, though personally, I think dinner is a little steep seeing as how cheap you can buy taco rice from local restaurants and stuff. An well. At least it's always pretty good. And actually, given that it's a set meal and that so far, it's come with some form of seafood, it would probably cost around the same price in a decent restaurant. Last night there was sashimi and pickles with I think champuru (a stir fry with Goya, and ours had ground meat and tofu and veggies). Plus dessert. Plus it's the closest I've had to home cooked food (of the Japanese variety) that I've had for a while. So other than the fact that I can't quite justify eating more taco rice, I really can't complain about the food!

Anyways, I was ready to write off last evening as a kind of dude "go to bed early" day but after dinner, the chef guy (who actually worked/lived in CA -the OC- and later Maui as a sushi chef) drove a few of us out into this jungle thicket area, where we were advised to suit up in long pants, long sleeves, and boots if we had them or close toed good shoes. We got there during dusk, so we killed time by spraying ourselves with bug spray to avoid being eaten alive. After night fell, we trumped through the jungle on a small muddy path to this small grove, where we were privileged enough to observe magic happening. Truly, it was amazing.

Though it was nearly pitch black, small light green and yellow lights floated in the air, while others seemed to sparkle in the distance. I had no idea there was more than one kind of firefly. The shiny ones were so pretty! It reminded me a bit of Christmas. The regular ones though... I dunno, there's something that just makes them seem so magical when there are ten or more floating around high in the air. So pretty. :)

But yes! That was my evening. :) I honestly cannot think of a better evening. Or well, okay, we'll I mean I can, but that ranks up there in the top. It's kinda nerdy, but I would choose to go watch fireflies like that over going to a club any day.

Today though, I got to go diving! It was ridiculously fun, even if we didn't go to the manta point. Kinda disappointed about that, to be honest. The waves were pretty choppy at our first dive site, and they said that they would probably be choppier at the manta point. As a diver, choppy waters make surfacing a pain in the ass, but it doesn't really matter once you're underwater. Our group, however, also had some snorkelers (waves, as I'm sure you can imagine, are not so great for snorkeling), one of whom got seasick at the first point. Having been with people who freak out with choppy waves (I swear, one day, that post about the Philippines will be finished), and knowing how scared people can get.... and the fact that the poor lady was seasick, I didn't want to be the douche and decide that the whole group is going to go to manta point. Despite the fact that I would have loved to go there and see manta possibly twice.... since I'm going tomorrow I decided to be a nicer person and let them take us somewhere calmer.

Don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed the second dive as well. Actually, we saw a bunch of really cool things that almost made up for not seeing manta. Almost. Among the fish we saw, we saw a couple of cool lionfish, a b ch of small tiny black fish hiding In an anemone, loads of clown fish, and a moray eel. But. Y far, my favorites were a sea snake I swam behind for a while (seriously, those things are so awesome! It was at least as long as my whole arm, and possibly as long as my leg, though it was hard to tell since it was swimming). That was freaking sweet. I don't think it was (too) dangerous (and by dangerous I mean poisonous). It was white with black stripes. I'll have to look it up later.

Oh! And the other rad thing we saw was an electric.... clam! Who knew clams could be electric! I didn't that's for sure. This one was a bright vivid orange color, and was I a small crevice-like hole inside a small cave/tunnel thing we went into. It had long tentacles coming out of it and when our guide, Harvey, shine his light on it, it was like watching lightning streak around the outside! Freaking sweet.

What else did we see that was awesome.... Hm... well, we also saw a puffer! They're actually quite large; I was kinda surprised. And we saw oh! We saw an octopus, though it wouldn't come out of its hiding spot. Lots of sea slugs, an orangutan crab, ghost pipe fish... Those were cool. Really large Nemos. Angelfish. I think I saw all the fish from the Tank except for Peach, though I did see some starfish, some no bigger than your thumbnail. Oh! And some awesome spikey sea slugs.

I also met a fellow JET from Fukuoka, where I quickly established that I suck at geography lol. Apparently, she came the same year I did. She was part if the snorkeling team, and we had a good time chatting away in English :)

Our trip finished way earlier than I expected though, so I was left with an over abundance of time on my hands... So I walked around Kabira, the name of the city/area I'm staying at, for a bit. They're well known for their cultivated black pearls (less known for their soba) so I visited one of the vendors there, learned about how they inject oysters with irritants in hopes that it'll take and produce a perfectly spherical pearl, and window shopped hahaha. I also walked around the beach a bit, before going "back into town" and grabbed some ice cream and checked out the souvenir shop. They had a bunch of cute things! They also had Jasmine gelato! It turns out, Sanpin-cha is Jasmine Tea - had I known this last time I would have only bought that lol!

Actually, when I went to eat my gelato, the cashier lady came up and started talking to me, and we chatted for a bit in Japanese before she introduced me to her coworker who spoke English and lived in Pennsylvania! We chatted for a bit in English hahahaha. It was really weird, but I keep hearing from Japanese people that they don't like the states much, or places where there aren't many Japanese people to talk to and stuff. That was fun though. I also got into a conversation with the vendor of a glass store who lived in South Africa for a while; he spoke English, and I spoke Japanese. Super good practice! It was a lot of fun too (also apparently according to him the unemployment rate is 50%, or was when he was there, so it was super dangerous in the city he was in).

Actually, that's why I enjoy traveling alone sometimes. I find that I get into more random conversations like that (and will even start some myself!) which, if the conversation is in Japanese, does amaz g things for my Japanese. :)

OH YEAH. ALSO TODAY A COCKROACH THE SIZE OF MY THUMB WAS CRAWLING ON MY ARM. MOST DISGUSTING THING EVER.

Oh also, so I learned a little bit today from the local man at the glass shop about the kind of places you can stay here in Japan. I knew most of them.... Just not about guest house, which is what my place is.
Hostels are super cheap of course, and feature dorm style housing. Guest houses, however, while still economical offer individual rooms and stuff apparently? That's what Maetakaya is.

Anyways, for future reference, if anyone ever decides to go to Ishigaki and stay in Kabira, here's a rundown of the place I stayed:

Maetakaya guest house
Regular price: ¥4700/night
W/breakfast: +600¥
w/dinner: + 1600? I think.
Dinner & breakfast: 6300¥

Good points: Own Room. Clean. Close to Kabira (everything). Good food (albeit a little early). Clean bathrooms. Deck. Free wifi downstairs. Hotaru viewing. English ある！bathroom has paper towels. Has shampoo and body soap. Nice view.

Meh: tatami rooms and futons. Ridiculously skinny stairs. Dinner is kinda expensive and kinda early. rental towels are kinda small. Only four showers and three bathrooms to share with the while guest house (our wing anyways).

Bad: pay for AC! 400 yen/8 hours. Windows have no screens! If you're going to make us rely on our windows and a fan, at least make sure the bugs can't crawl in while we sleep! So many bugs. :( seriously, while I've been writing this, I've squashed four bugs. Four!

Overall thoughts: not too bad. Kabira is hella quiet, and it's probably one of the cheapest places here, but I would splurge for a bed and free AC. Also I think if I came again, since there's free shuttle pickup, I'd totally stay I. Ishigaki for
Ty next time, since the other JET chick said she was at a super cheap hostel. But ,
Maetakaya Wasn't too bad; I've stayed at worse I guess.

Visitors

This past week, my parents came out to visit me in Japan! (Hi mom and dad! Hee hee) It was definitely... hm, interesting haha.

I was originally going to say snarky things about it, but when I came home to an empty house, it hit me a little hard. I guess I do miss them a lot after all. That they came all the way out to my little house in the country town is really kinda touching for me, even if traveling with them was a bit stressful at times.

Wednesday after work, I caught the shinkansen up to Kyoto, where we were staying for a few days before traveling down to Takahashi. Some stupid idea popped into my head when I was waiting for the shinkansen. I was waiting in line for the nozomi train - the fastest shinkansen - when I noticed that the Hikari train (the fastest train that people with the rail pass can take, and generally the second fastest, while the kodama tends to be the slowest and stops at the most stations) had no people in it, while the nozomi was probably going to be very crowded. So hey, I figured, I'll just catch the hikari because it's not *that* much slower than the nozomi, and while it stops at more stations, that shouldn't add that much time onto it... right?

WRONG SO WRONG. Not only did it stop at all the stations between Okayama and Kyoto, but it also waited at said stations for sometimes up to 15 minutes! I watched THREE trains pass us at one station. THREE. OMG WAT. I was so angry, haha, but it turns out I timed it pretty well, because I arrived at the shuttle stop a few minutes before my parents did (which according to my mother, was a good thing, since they might have missed it otherwise, which sounds plausible to me).

We only stayed in Kyoto for a day and a half more, but I felt like almost every moment was packed! We trekked out to Arashiyama to see the monkeys - and holy cow, there were a TON of monkeys. You have to climb up a small mountain/large hill to get to the monkeys though (and I can proudly say that I am in better shape than my mother, and not too far behind my father but that's okay because he runs every day and I... I sleep). So worth it! We went right around noon, so there were a ton of monkeys hanging around (lols) despite our prior worries about them being cloistered away due to the sporadic showers we were having (I got a super cute umbrella out of it though!).

There must have been like... twenty monkeys. Or well, to be proper, Japanese Macaques. Macaques! The potato and hot spring primates! That's the same kind of monkey as Imo (the macaque who first introduced the phenomena of washing potatoes in the ocean to add a salty flavor to it - also HA I totally understand the name now. Clever scientists.). I saw a macaque hitting two rocks together (tools!) and geeked out a little bit. Or a lot of bit. You don't understand (or maybe you do?). Cognitive Science (one of my majors) was like... 40% stuff about primates (mostly chimpanzees, bonobos, and some macaques and orangutans). I detest primates now because of that, but seeing them in person was pretty crazy.

After the mountain, we decided that we would go check out some of the shops and then some of the shops along the street and then walk over to the oldschool shopping area in the Arashiyama district. The tentative plan was to do that, and then head over to the Gion district to hopefully see it at night (and unbeknowst to me, if I had bothered to read the signs earlier, I would have noticed that that whole area was doing a special light up that we could have gone to. REGRETS, I HAS THEM).

Unfortunately, walking over to that district was a very... not great idea seeing as how we were a) somewhat on a time schedule and b) my mother has a stamina bar that decreases as she walks and decreases at a faster rate when going up or down stairs. Don't get me wrong, the area was pretty, but I wish we had gotten a taxi or something... By the time we got there, most of the shops were closing up since it was nearly 5 -- and all things that are country-esque or oldtimey Japan-esque (and government buildings and banks) close around 4:30 or 5. We did get to go into a really cool bamboo shop (they gave us free tea!) and we walked along and it was pretty and stuff. But it took us nearly an hour and a half to get back to Kyoto station (and the train ride is only 20 minutes). By the time we got back we were pretty tired, and my parents thought it would be a good idea to stop by the hotel and drop things off before heading out.

My mom estimated it would take us about an hour - I was hoping for half an hour or something, but as usual, my mother was spot on. We didn't get into Kyoto station until around 7:30 and we didn't get to the restaurant (we had to wait) until around 8, and then we were finished around 9 and at that point we kinda gave up on the Gion (REGRETS. Though, by the time we got there they would have finished the light up at Kiyomizu Temple). Instead we went to the Lipton restaurant (eee Lipton has a restaurant!) and had tea and cake instead. They had berry tart too, though it was a bit sour.

Probably was better we didn't go to the Gion district, since it was clear from our attempt to get there the next day that we had very little idea how public transit worked. Or well, *I* wanted to take the bus since it would only cost 220 yen to get there and we didn't need to worry much about walking or whatever. My plan was to bus to kiyomizu then walk to the Gion. Or take the bus the website told us. But no. We took the subway instead - the subway, NOT the private train line that stops a block away from the gion. Then we got off at a super far station and I swear we walked for at least an hour before we were in the Gion proper. As expected of going somewhere with dad though. Sigh.

We didn't actually go all the way up to Kiyomizu though. We only went to the part where the temple starts, because we were looking for this tofu restaurant we had eaten at seven years ago. I mean, I had also kind of assumed that it would just be sitting there the same, and the thought that it could have changed didn't enter my head until we were standing there (and was accompanied with a facepalm). I was a little cranky from having to walk so far and it being rather late for lunch and (probably most of all) for my time schedule to be thrown off by somewhere around an hour at least, but man, was lunch amazing. We ended up at a place that did Yudofu and also Yu...ba... I think? It's the tofu that you skim off the top. Lots of work, that one. I didn't have the patience. The yudofu (boiled tofu) was amazing though. Most of the meal was tofu, but we also got - swear to god - some of the best tempura I've had in my life. NOMMMM. I think they put the salt into the batter or something. Everything was vegetarian though, and I actually got really really full. I felt super healthy too! Yay!

It made up for the fact that later that night we had Kobe beef, godmeat of beef. Seriously. I've always heard that it melts in your mouth, but I did not know how beef could literally melt in your mouth until that dinner. It was pricey (100,000 yen for the super fatty one and 140,000 yen for the fatty big one!) but OH GOD SO WORTH IT. Also, how often are you going to eat this stuff? But I got the sirloin steak (a nice balance between having a lot of meat -- which the rib steak had -- and tender, which obviously was the tenderloin). But with the super fatty one, my sirloin was just as tender as the not-as-fatty tenderloin my mom got and when you put it into your mouth, the juices just kind of seeped out and your mouth would fill with ridiculously tasty wonderful meat flavored juice. I was so unbelievably happy. Mouth full of meat juice hahaha.

So worth the expensive price tag. I've never chewed my meat that much in my life haha.

Oh, the place we went to - and I highly recommend it - was called "Moriya" 「モーリヤ」and we went to the "honten" or main branch restaurant near Sannomiya in Kobe. We reserved early, so we got to sit next to the grill where we watched them cook our delicious meat (with less of a flair than benihana, but I think it made up for that with the quality of the meat). The chef who was cooking our food was really nice, and he gave us really fantastic recommendations for flavor combinations for our meat and veggies (my personal favorite was just salt and pepper, but a little bit of wasabi as well was pretty good. My dad was a fan of the wasabi/salt/pepper combo and my mom a fan of salt/garlic chip).


Man though, that was the best meal of my life so far I think. Because you know what's better than super fatty Kobe beef? Super fatty Kobe beef that someone else has paid for.

Love you mom and dad :D

You know, I'm actually considering lifting the self/mom-imposed ban on having my parents as facebook friends. Almost. Maybe. Still kinda wary about that though.

Okinawa Part II (& the Great Teacher Shuffle)

Okinawa Part I in case you haven't read it yet. :)

The second day we got up and hit up the local Family Mart on our way to the car rental dealer, OTS. Oh my god. Family Mart has these amazing rice balls that are pretty much like spam musubi - but they were spam rice sandwiches. Spam and egg (some with miso) sandwiched between rice and nori. Oh my goooood amazing. Anyways, after our foray into the convenience store, we headed on over to the rental place and sat down with the lady, who helped us - with our limited Japanese and the occasional assist from the lady next to her who spoke a little English - and managed to get ourselves a car for cheaper than the coupon price. I'm still not entirely sure how, since they told us that it was high season so we couldn't actually use the coupon. But I'm not complaining.

Our car was a bright blue... car. I forget the model. Hyundai? To be honest I didn't really pay attention to the model. My friend, the lovely Miss Melody has a car in Kibichuo (cause it's like, super boonies and puts my complaining that Takahashi is small to shame) so she, bless her, offered to drive us around and stuff. The plan that day? Aquarium and the Pineapple Park, both of which were near the city of Nago, north of Naha.

A word of advice for anyone who goes to Okinawa: if you intend on leaving Naha proper (which has pretty good public transportation), rent a car. Your life will be a billion times easier, since there's a bunch of stuff around the island that you can't reach easily via bus alone. There's a bus that goes to the aquarium, but if I remember correctly, it takes about three hours (by car it took us about two-ish hours), and it doesn't go to the Pineapple Park, which is on the way back to Naha.

So anyways. We hopped in our car, stopped at another convenience store, and were on our way! It's amazing how fast time flies when you're in the car talking to good company. I'm afraid I wasn't the best navigator, since we missed our turn a couple times since I was reading the wrong turn on the iPhone GPS. Sigh. The GPS that came with the car was really cool though! It had an automatic gas/parking lot/conbini locator. Couldn't quite figure out how to input places though, since the system was all in Japanese. Either way, all of us really liked the car -- especially our driver, since she was used to driving a small K-car that doesn't have much power (and has a top speed of somewhere around 80 km/hr). It was pretty nice.

As we drove up, we drove along the coast and maaaan I forgot how much I love living near the ocean! Clear blue the whole way up - gorgeous colors that made me nostalgic for San Diego. We stopped at a 道の駅 「michi no eki」Or station of the road, or in just English, road station/rest stop. They sold a bunch of discount tickets for the places around there, so we picked up tickets for the pineapple park since the rental car place had sold out of those.

Then it was off to the aquarium... after a quick stop for lunch. We passed this crazy spiral structure along the way (I don't remember what we theorized it was, but it turned out to be a "dream" house or something and was supposed to have a field of orchids, though I don't know if they were in bloom) and right outside of it was a place we thought specialized in vegetarian food (we also passed a taco rice stand on the way). Though it didn't actually specialize in vegetarian foods, they were able to make omurice vegetarian (Okinawa, as it turns out, is much more vegetarian friendly) and Mel and I crossed our first "Okinawa must haves" off our list:

Soki soba and papaya tempura

Soki soba is an okinawan specialty (though I'm not sure if it's the same as okinawan soba). The noodles are a bit thicker, the kamaboko was a bit tougher (and huge) and it was served with delicious pork and soba. It was alrightish; I much prefer taco rice. I think I could eat that stuff all day and night! But the papaya tempura was delicious. I think it was made with a non-sweet kind of papaya or something (didn't know they had that) because normally I dislike papaya (it reminds me of vomit) but this was amazing.

Anyways. Bellies full, we went to the aquarium (where I promptly lost a hair clip I had just purchased. Sigh. This is why I can't have nice things.) and wandered through it. They had a touch pool with loads of sea cucumbers and a couple of chocolate chip starfish. Those were cool. Sea cucumbers are so squishy, which is weird because they aren't like that at all when you eat them.

These are my favorite. ^_^

The aquarium at Okinawa, the Churaumi Aquarium, is really really huge. So freaking awesome. The main attraction is a giant tank that holds not one, but two whale sharks along with a number of giant manta rays. God I love giant mantas. They're so graceful and powerful when they swim. ^_^

There was also a pretty cool exhibit about sharks, and they had a bunch of shark jaws and stuff, along with preserved sharks and other interesting tidbits about them. Outside, they had a manatee tank (manateeeeeeeeeeeees!) and a sea turtle enclosure that also had a makeshift mini beach for the turtles to occasionally go up on. That was pretty cool. I got lots of pictures of turtles. They're one of my favorites to take pictures of.

Right as we were leaving, it started to rain, lightly at first. As we neared the car, it started to come down a little harder, until by the time we were out of the garage in our car, it was downright pouring. Crazy, how good our timing was.

Our next stop was the pineapple park, a place that grows pineapples and takes you on a tour in these crazy pineapple cars. The tours were pretty informative, even if they used very uh... scary pineapple dolls and had a video of these very unhappy looking/bored girls doing this pineapple dance. Sadly (or thankfully) there are no pictures of this frightening scene, because they prohibited cameras past a certain point since they took your picture there in order to sell you the creepy pineapple mascot picture later on. It still makes me kind of shudder.

So the pineapple fields were really interested and they had a whole bunch of different plants other than pineapples (plus a bunch of different types - I had no idea there was more than like... one kind of pineapple...) but what I wasn't expecting was what we saw after the tour had finished.

A room full of seashells. All sorts of seashells. Like holy wow, that's a lot of seashells. There were gorgeous conch shells, and lots of different colored scallop shells, and abalone shells, and other shells I don't know the name for. Some would twist and turn, while others shone brilliantly, and even more had spikes or holes. Personally, I really enjoyed that room, but it was really random hahaha.

The pineapple park also had an omiyage or souvenir area with a wine cellar and sweets (and also vinegar, which was kinda random). The best part about this part... that while the restaurant had already closed (wtf) the gift area included about a billion stations to sample things before you bought them. Like pineapple wine, both reds and whites as well as dry wine and sweeter wine. The passion fruit was my personal favorite (and also the most expensive, so I bought some to ahem, celebrate my parent's anniversary with when they visit).

Seriously though, that place had more samples than costco, and the best part was, the people would sometimes encourage a second or third sample (to help you make up your mind of course...) The guy who was serving the wine cake (super rich and delicious, btw) was like "HERE HAVE TWO~" Who am I to refuse that? hahaha.


We finished up the omiyage place and I arranged to have some of the wine and heavy things sent to my house (very convenient, that. Much better than having to take it on the plane with us... which I did with another wine haha) then enjoyed a completely fantastic cream puff with pineapple chunks.


Man does Japan know cream puffs - or shuukuriimu (shu cream), from choux à la crème. They're a billion times better than the cream puffs we usually have in the states (you know, those small soft things). In Japan they're quite large and sometimes have a crunchy almost exterior (at least on the top) and ohhh they ar delicious. Actually desserts in general, they're really really good at. Parfaits especially. Mmm. Waffles. I never thought of waffles as dessert until I came here. Belgian waffles. Oh god, they do them better than Americans do. But it makes me giggle to think that every time I have waffles for breakfast, I'm actually having dessert. Heheheh.


Right. Anyways. We finally left around the time the park was closing (they closed the shop at the front that sold boba... I wanted to buy some so I was super sad). After we thought that maybe we'd be able to get to fruits land and they wouldn't be closed, but alas, they too had closed. Their shop hadn't though, so we went in and browsed around (and sampled things) and I picked up an amazing mango soft cream before we finally left to head back towards Naha.


Before we went back to Naha though, we decided to make a pit stop like... somewhere along the coast. So instead of taking the express way all the way back, we got off a bit north of Naha and headed towards a place that looked like there were a lot of restaurants (at least it said that on our map). We got a little lost (I pointed the wrong way to turn... oops), but eventually we saw this giant, brightly lit, colorful ferris wheel and decided that we were going to head to that place.


Turns out that place was American Village, a place that had as many lights as the Vegas Strip almost. Everything was brightly lit, and we quickly parked our car (thankfully the rain had stopped) and walked over. There were loads of marines there as well (I mean, with a name like that it should have been a duh) and some of them tried to join our conversation about how cold it was but we just kind of... ignored them haha. We stopped first at this store called American Depot, because I had left my jacket at the hostel and was actually kind of cold (it had gotten really chilly).



We spent some time in the store, me hunting in the men's section for a sweater or sweatshirt since even though this was American Village, this was still Japan, and my friend hunting for something for her boyfriend :) They had a bunch of like... sweats stuff and like, comfy loungey sweatshirts that you wear when you're at home alone or having a crap day or something that I almost bought. The sweatshirts were all kind of expensive (as sweatshirts/sweaters are wont to be). Thankfully though, it being Japan, I found this really cute looking polka dot sweatshirt that zips up super high and is just pretty cool overall. According to Mel, my style is casual sporty cool? lol. I hadn't thought of it like that, but I guess that's pretty accurate? I don't really do girly, since I don't really have the figure for that, and generally it's been too cold (recently anyways) or too hot (I sweat enough to drown, which is not the best for things like skirts and dresses. Ugh.). That's just me kinda complaining though haha.

There were so many delicious places in American Village (like curly fries and chili fries! OH MY GOOOOD) but we eventually decided on a Taco Rice place (did I mention I LOVE taco rice?) and that place did not disappoint. The food was amazing. Like seriously, I think I could eat Taco rice every day (and be ridiculously fat).

After feeling like we were going to explode (yet still wanting more taco rice) we walked around for a bit before deciding that we were tired and that the hostel seemed like a rather attractive place (oh and that we'd have to get parking, which was kind of a pain but there were loads of parking lots all over).

Day three started with us retrieving and returning the rental car, which happened to conveniently be located at the ferry port. Catching a ferry out to one of the local islands was pretty easy (though slightly more expensive than I had imagined) and we luckily were there right as the 10 o'clock ferry was taking off. We grabbed a quick lunch from the conbini (did I mention how awesome the pork sandwiches at conbinis are? Well they are.) and it was off to the beach we went!

The island we went to was called Tosomethingshima, and it was a suuuuper tiny place in the Kerama archipelago. Not so tiny though, that there wasn't a bus waiting at the docks to take us to a tiny white sandy beach named Aharen Beach (which also had a small port area). Since it was so tiny, it basically was also going to come back once - some time around 3, so that we would be back in the port in time for our return ferry. The weather was kinda cruddy though; cloudy, kind of chilly water, but occasionally the sun would peek through for a nice treat. There was a really nice (if slightly pushy) old man who kept trying to sell us hot showers after we were done with our time on the beach. There were also a butt-ton of stray cats around the area that kept mewing at us for food.  


We passed the other beach - named after the island - and wow, just wow. It was absolutely gorgeous. Probably should have picked that beach, but there were also far less shops/potential kayak/snorkle rental/scuba places around there. I really wanted to go diving, but I kinda got there too late... so I settled for snorkeling instead (which turned out to be super fun anyways).


When we first arrived to the beach, there was hardly anyone else there, so my friends and I lay out our stuff and they prepped for a nice relaxing sun bathing session while I went up and rented snorkeling equipment and asked around about kayaks. They said the kayak guy was out on a tour, so I went down with the snorkel stuff back to where our things were...


...to find that many people had since returned, including a really loud group of teenagers who set themselves up literally right in front of us. The swimming area at this beach wasn't actually that big (and the water was actually a tad chilly) so I wasn't super comfortable taking off my swim shorts (I had a two piece on but yeah, my legs could be used as a source of light in a dark room). Instead I sat with my friends and enjoyed what sun there was until the kayaking man returned. It was really funny, because I tried to ask him in Japanese about renting a kayak and he actually asked me if English was okay and I breathed a super huge sigh of relief at that point haha.


I kayaked out to the small island in the bay (which was pretty much the only place I could kayak, since he warned against kayaking to the eastern part and northern part of the bay as well as behind the small island) and beached myself there, dragging the kayak up the little hill of sand well away from the water. It was like a mini pinnensula and bay there, and I was stupid enough to land near the edge, which meant that waves were washing up to the beach from behind me AND from my side. Not helpful in trying to get out of the kayak without completely flipping. Somehow I managed though. The bay was a much calmer place, so I stripped down to my bikini (in blissful privacy, since I was the only one on this small island and I couldn't blind anyone but the fish) and went out snorkeling into the small bay.


Wow. Just wow. I wish I had bought an underwater camera. There was an amazing amount of fish in that small bay, and I spent nearly an hour just swimming around there. It was interesting too, since there were small pockets of warm water that (thank god) fish tended to be found around so I was able to watch fish while staying warm. Conversely there were pockets of ridiculously cold water. Those sucked. There were decently large fish down there, brightly colored pastel fish (I think parrot fish?), large ones that looked like the Hawaiian state fish, small, brilliant bright blue fish that lived in the coral and rocks, hidden fish, sea cucumbers (oh god so many sea cucumbers) and loads of other fish.


My favorites though, were: 1. the weird four armed starfish I saw. It was a periwinkle blue. 2. The angelfish I saw swimming around in pairs. So very pretty! I was like EEEEEE GILL~~! 3. The clownfish I saw. They weren't your movie clownfish (they only had two brown stripes) but they were chilling in this jungle of sea anemone arms that looked like something out of a postcard/national geographic picture. That was freaking awesome. 4. The... abalone? Clams? I don't know what they were. I think I knew but right now I can't remember what they're called. Giant clams? They were kind of small. But they came in such bright mottled colors - purples, greens, blues, and I even saw an orange one - and they would shut any time I tried to get close. Their colors though were absolutely glorious.


I really love the underwater world. It's so beautiful, and every time I go diving or snorkeling, I feel like I've entered into a completely different world than our own, and I'm stunned and awed each time by places that have preserved this beauty. When I was diving in the philippines, it felt like I was swimming in a national geographic video or something. It was beautiful, mysterious, and I don't think words can sufficiently express how much awe I felt in looking at the coral shelves from below them. Or well, here's my best approximations: "Woah.... This is Nature."


Brilliant, I know.

Oh right, I forgot, I haven't actually typed out the Philippines yet (working on that...) and that I'm talking about Okinawa! Right. So. The rest of our day was fairly uneventful though - we got ice cream, went back home, showered, went out to the Kokusaidori street. Went towards an izakaya we had heard about from our hostel, but decided to go somewhere else instead. They had amazing amazing food. We also looked around this book store with the most amazing English section I've seen in my LIFE. They had academic books! Like, two giant rows of books with books on English on both sides! Manga in English! My neuroscience textbook! MATH and science texts! A used book section! Oh right. So that was kind of eventful.

We managed to knock everything off our "to eat" list at this izakaya restaurant. They had avocado pasta for our vegetarian friend, so that left me and Mel to go through the meat. Oh god we ordered so much. We got kaarage (Japanese fried chicken, which is really different than our fried chicken) that was as big as my palm. They were HUGE.  We got agubutu (agu pork) which was my favorite favorite favorite. Rafute pork, which was super tender and fatty pork. SOmething else... uh, I don't remember. Really good fries. They tasted like curly fries! Mm. Curly fries. A tomato and something else al fresco kind of thing that was also delicious and had tons of avocados. I think there's a small chance I raised my cholestorol and blood pressure that night and added to the likelihood that I'll die from a heart attack, but the food there was soooo good. They also gave us some goya champuru which - I found out later - is tofu stir fried with veggies (in this case goya, or bittermelon. It's really really bitter unless you cook it the right way) and pork that was probably spam (or some knock off). It was super tasty. NOMMMMM. I love okinawan food.

After that night, we did a it more omiyage shopping, and then went back to the hostel and woke up and did last minute omiyage shopping haha before heading back to the airport. I grabbed a few more pork sandwiches - and some taco maki (taco rice in sushi form!) for later that night/as snacks and found out my friends were going to the conbini for their lunch. I was super hungry though, and there were loads of awesome looking places, so we went to check them out. Sadly they didn't have many veggie friendly things - but there was an A&W (actually, there were a lot in Okinawa!). And it had CHILI CHEESE FRIES AND CURLY FRIES. OMFFGGGGG. Yeah. Needless to say, I got that for lunch haha. Dude, A&W is super tasty. Why don't we have more of them?

Our flight back to Takamatsu actually got delayed a bit, so we had some time to kill at the airport (which was fine - none of us were in a rush and we were still well earlier than our last trains). Other than that, the rest of our return trip went smoothly and uneventfully (especially since the bus didn't leave the airport until most of the passengers had gotten their bags).

Oh, there was giant plastic udon on the conveyor belt at the airport (since that's what Takamatsu is famous for). That was... interesting. And different. But kind of a nice quirky touch to the end of a fantastic trip.

Okinawa was super awesome though. Definitely want to go again!


*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

On a different note, right now is the time when teachers change schools: The Great Teacher Shuffle. I've yet to find out what my situation is like at my Niimi schools, but most of the teachers I like (whom I teach with anyways) are staying at my schools. However, I'm not teaching with the same lady as last year at my visit school, and we don't know yet at my base school. Oh also one of my favorite teachers is leaving to participate in a teacher exchange program with Southern Australia. SUPER SAD FACE. He was the one I talked to the most probably, and who was the easiest to talk to since he was super laid back and also his English was super. Plus I taught with him the first academic year I was here, and he's constantly explaining things to me about Japanese (and I explain things about English to him - or at least, try to). So I'm really sad about that, but I guess I'll be moving on in less than half a year anyways. As the Japanese say, "しかったがない" or, "it can't be helped."

This also didn't get posted as soon as I had wanted it to, so I'm sitting here in a BRAND NEW SPANKIN' DESK. They actually had four extra new desks (all the third year teachers got new desks) so since I'm now sitting in the rows that are touching the 3rd year desks.... I got an upgrade! (Honestly though, I was kind of annoyed that like, I had to change desks because I liked my old one and I also liked the fact that I didn't have to empty out all of my drawers!) The teachers were all really surprised with how much crap is in my drawers... and the funny thing, is that a lot of it isn't actually mine (really, I should just chuck them, but I can't help but feel that one day they'll come in handy or something, or that my successor can use them for ideas or use them or something).


Also, I swear, my entry about the philippines will probably happen around the time I actually get those pictures uploaded.

Okinawa

(now with pictures!)

I swear, some day, there will be a post written about the Philippines. Before I forget about everything even. Sadly, that day is not today, since what's fresh in my mind right now is the trip I took with some friends this past weekend down to Okinawa.

Okinawa - for some quick basic geography and facts - is a cluster of islands (and a prefecture I guess?) southwest of Kyuushu. From Takamatsu in Kanagawa Prefecture, Shikoku, it takes approximately two hours to fly to the main island of Okinawa and the capital city of Naha. This is further away than Korea is. There are a bunch of islands, and it's often referred to as the Hawaii of Asia (or of Japan).

Indeed, it is kind of like the Hawaii of Japan as far as climate and culture goes, but with a more Japanese twist. The main city is Naha, where most of the flights go into. The airport is ridiculously close to the rest of the city proper, and connected via monorail (called the Yui Rail I think?). From there, you can travel down the line for a fairly decent price; about 290 to Kokusai Dori (one of the main tourist shopping areas) or double that(ish) down to the end of the like where Shuri Castle lies. Either way, it would have been a nice airport to have a layover in, since the domestic security area took a relatively small amount of time to go through (can't say anything about international though). Fly in, pop over to Kokusaidori for an hour or two, pop back in to the airport.

I went with two other JETs - both ladies - so we had a kind of girl's trip. My friend, who's amazing, organized the hostel we were staying at, which was about halfway down the monorail and a short walk from the station. We managed to get a discount through booking through hostel world, so the hostel - called Guest House Kerama - was ridiculously cheap: 1000 yen only (about $11 per night). They had a washing machine and drier available, as well as a bunch of games and a kitchen, refrigerator, and showers. Oh, and probably most importantly, free wifi.

For the price that we paid, we got a pretty sweet deal. The showers were relatively clean (though there was a pervasive kind of moldy smell) and there were always people hanging around. We kind of chalked this up to islander attitude. The staff was friendly and helpful (even if sometimes the places they told us about were closed) and the whole place had this really relaxed attitude. Can't say too much for the quality of sleep though. I'm biased and can sleep almost anywhere, but like, occasionally, despite it being lights out in the rooms the downstairs was still fairly noisy enough to where I almost pulled out my headphones. Oh, and it was really really warm in the room, but no plug for the fans and no air con (though, they did have a unit, it just wasn't warm enough I guess, despite the fact I was sweating). We were really close to the ferry terminal as well, which is where a lot of the day ferries depart from for the Kerama Islands (another archipelago). I guess I'd stay there again, if I was really looking to save money. I think though I'd need a day at least in a nicer place. Call me spoiled but after years of using the public showers at swim meets, I'm willing to pay a little extra for a nice clean shower area.

We landed sometime in the afternoon, and after dropping off our stuff, made our way to visit Shuri Castle (and stopped for some amazing Taco Gratin. That probably took a year or two off my life, since it was potatoes and taco meat and cheese and cream sauce and ohgod heaven. But this was because they didn't have rice {wtf} to make tacorice with).

Shuri castle is very very different than the rest of the castles in Japan. Rather than being built in the typical Japanese style, it was built in the Ryuuku kingdom style, which feels distinctly more... Chinese. Probably because of all the red painted onto the buildings and the dragons. So many dragons. It's like they combined Chinese and Japanese styles into a fusion or something. The Okinawan kingdom was famous for dragons, and used this motif EVERYWHERE. Even the tops of the castle - which, on Japanese castles, often have this kind of fish thing on the edges and corners - are full fledged dragons in the same kind of pose as the fish things on Japanese castles. I wonder if they're better at keeping the birds off the top of the roof.

Sweetest chair ever.

Inside was also pretty amazing, though these castles, due to all the fighting and wars that have gone on in Okinawa, have been rebuilt multiple times. The interior was more Chinese or Korean in design, with a couple of sliding panel doors here and there. There were also lots of pillars (red of course) and small Japanese courtyards with bonsai around it. The castle also has a bunch of people dressed in period wear, which is pretty cool.


Actually, it took us a little bit of time to find the castle at first. There were signs, yes, but they were spaced out just far enough for us to question whether or not we were going the right direction. Such questions led us past a small lake with these wild... I'm not sure if they're ducks or if they're geese. They're as big as geese are, definitely (which honestly, made me slightly paranoid about walking too close to them). But obviously, we eventually found the castle.

The castle, in addition to its multi-language brochures, also turned visiting the sites into a kind of game, presumably for the kids that visited it by encouraging them to collect as many stamps as they could (and alas, only junior high school and younger kids were allowed to win a prize for collecting all the stamps in a given path). Oh Japan. Our own trip slightly transformed into "spot the stamp booth" as well, and we merrily stamped our way through the castle grounds. Quite an interesting way to go about doing that though. Not too expensive either, after the initial setup costs. You basically just need to keep buying ink, assuming the stamps don't get stolen. And man were there a lot of stamps. We didn't even get half of them.

This is what 8 bowls look like. Pretty!

We walked back to the station and decided to hit up Kokusai Dori, a street with a bazillion different shops geared specifically towards tourists and Okinawa souvenier gifts (omiyage). There were several stores that I think had one shop on both ends of the long street, and a dozen places that sold pretty much the same snacks and pretty glass cups. The street is actually really pretty at night though; everything is lit up, giving the street a very different feel than if you walk down it during the day. Also, since it was saturday evening, we saw a lot of foreigners (probably Americans) and marines walking around. Despite the list of food things that one of the girls had on foods to eat in Japan, we ended up at an Indian place with a fairly cheap all you can eat curry special thing. It wasn't too bad, but I had like... so many bowls lol. We also ran into this group whom we saw at the castle, then had separated from, then saw again getting off the monorail, then saw again in the restaurant. Stalkers. lol. They were there first though. But it was like the Philippines all over again.

Oh, and my personal favorite:

We saw two Green Rangers. You know, from the Power Rangers? Tommy the Green Ranger. Two guys (my friend confirmed this with the power of uh... observation) in the green ranger spandex suit, shoulder gear, boots, and helmets. I mean, these were really good cosplays of the green ranger. One of them had a video camera as well. We were kind of like "...wtf?" while some inner part of me (and a little outer bit too) freaked out and was like "OMG OMG OMG GREEN RANGER." Actually, seeing other people's reaction to seeing two Green Rangers walk down the street was kind of priceless... especially because people were usually really loud and vocal in their reactions. I heard two guys across the street flip out about it haha.

Ahhh, the 90's. My childhood. Good times. It makes me kind of sad that a bunch of my students have probably never actually watched the Power Rangers (or at least, seen them in that style/version).

Thank you Japan, for making that day freaking awesome.

Okinawa Part II (coming soon)

Okayama Adventures

Normally, I don't get to go to places that you need a car to get to (since that means relying on the kindness and time of the people around me who do have them). Today though, I went with one of my teachers (whom I'm losing in the spring due to the Great Teacher Shuffle, sadface) to an onsen in the eastern part of Japan called Notoro Onsen Tenkuu no yu 「のとろ温泉天空の湯」って。It's up in the mountains - the highest onsen in Okayama, according to my teacher. It had three baths for the women: two indoors and one huge outdoor bath that had a super amazing view of the mountains.

Oh yeah, and it was snowing. HECK YES. So we had the view of the mountains, trees covered with snow, and it was outside. :) The only thing that wasn't super awesome was the little worm thing I found on my teacher's arm from the wood haha. That was kinda gross. I blame it on the warm weather (despite the fact that it's getting colder now for some reason!).

I love onsen though. We ate lunch, stopped by a 「道の駅」"Michi no Eki" or "road's station" that sold a bunch of kinda rural things haha. I bought strawberries and veggies and zucchini seeds for really cheap. I was thinking of growing zucchini again (or trying to at least haha). Who knows how that'll go...

The last place we visited (before the supermarket anyways) was one of the three sets of caves in Okayama. I forgot the name. But there are two famous caves in Niimi City: Ikura-do and Maki-do. Ikura-do is accessible via train, while you must drive to maki-do.

We went to a different one. It was called 「備中鐘乳穴」（びっちゅうかなちあな）"Bicchu Kanachiana." It was really really pretty inside, and kind of hidden in the middle of the mountains. Like seriously, we had to drive up the mountain and then walk down to the cave. We were walking and suddenly, it was like WOAH there's a huge crack in the earth WOAH cave. I was so busy looking down (trying not to slip) that I didn't notice the entrance until really late and was so startled I nearly fell. XD


Inside was simply amazing. It's so crazy to think that inside these mountains are caves like this (I was warned not to go exploring in this area, since there were more of these kinds of hidden caves here). To me, seeing these caves is like looking at those amethyst rocks - the ones that look plain on the outside, but on the inside is just, woah. SPIKY. And beautiful.


My teacher was really surprised that I liked these kinds of things though. She told me that ALTs who like caves are kind of rare, and I think was really amused that I was constantly like "WOAH NATURE" and "OMG BEAUTIFUL" to everything along our drive to and from the onsen and inside the caves haha. 

I'm working on the post for the Philippines, but it's kinda long haha. Oops. Maybe sometime this week (I hope!). Also sometime I need to post about 大味 since I think it's an absolutely fascinating topic.


Also, facebook reminded me that today marks the one year anniversary for the Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami disaster. I've been so impressed and so touched by the compassion, the hope, the whole... feeling of the entire country banding together to help out this one area. That area is still in need of help, make no mistake. It's been a long year (or short year) and there are still people who have no jobs, no livelihoods, who are still missing... 


Stay strong Japan (and everywhere that has been affected by large scale earthquakes, tsunamis, and disasters).

Korea Part II

Time to finish writing about Korea :) Part I in case you missed it.

One of the major things I did on the second day I was in Korea was go to the Gyeongbokgung Palace, which was one of the royal palaces in Korean history. They have free tours in English, so since I knew absolutely nothing about Korean history, I decided to join in on one of those. We had stopped at one of the East Palaces (the smaller, non-World Heritage one) and I had gone through it really fast and read some of the signs... but it was only slightly of interest. Figured hearing more about the place would be more fun than just cruising through it (as much as I wanted to spend the whole day just eating haha).

A lot of the architecture was really similar to Chinese palaces, which isn't much of a surprise since both Korean and Japanese cultures kind of stemmed from Chinese (Confucian) classical culture. The four directional guardians were there as well, surrounding some of the structures within the palace ground: the red phoenix in the south, white tiger in the west, blue dragon in the east, and black turtle to the north. Thank you, Fushigi Yugi, for teaching me about these mythological creatures.

There were three main gates in the front of the palace, which extended so that from the front palace, the royals could see the peasants in the street (and be reminded of who they were supposed to be representing, our guide said). The road to the palace was also divided into three: one road for civil servants, one for the military, and one for the royals (I think? Or was it two roads...).

What was super interesting to me was the color choices the Korean royals decided to paint this place (since presumably, despite this being a reconstruction, they tried to keep the colors true to the originals that had been destroyed by the Japanese during wartimes). Normally, palaces in Japan - not that I've seen the Imperial Palace beyond the gated walls - tend to be fairly earthy colors, or blacks or something. Chinese palaces tend towards the auspicious color red. But this place... was painted green, and had bands of other very bright primary colors all over. There was also this amazing structure with a square pond (that had frozen over since it was so cold). I swear it looked like the scene from some kungfu movie or something.

In the rear of the palace, there was yet another pond - this one more "feminine" because of its roundness, or something. Our guide also informed us that these rear gardens were the home to tragedy as well, since one of the Empresses was actually murdered back there by Japanese assassins. That was kinda crazy to hear about, how that happened. Actually, I've been reading a little bit (and by reading a little bit, I mean looking on wikipedia) on the Korean Joseon dynasty and daaaaaaang, it's super interesting and full of drama. It was really interesting to hear them talk about the Japanese though, since even in Koreans today, there's still this kind of dislike that seemed to be voiced whenever something Japanese came up in our tour (though, after looking at the history, I guess I can't really blame them for really hating the Japanese).

Before meeting back up with my group, I had to get lunch from somewhere. My original plan was to grab pho or korean deliciousness... but unfortunately, I ran into a problem and had less than half an hour to eat. I was in a 大パンニク - big panic lol. I also didn't know where to go for food, since everywhere looked good, but also looked like I was going to maybe not make it in time.

Then it happened. I saw people walk down the street with a huge hotdog on a skewer... with a whole (probably) potato spiraled around it and deep fried. What. I thought those were only in places like county fairs in the US. So I found myself one of those, got it with some Korean spices added, and bam, there was half of lunch. A few minutes later, I ran into a small vendor that was selling these mochi-like things in cups. Inside though, were different things like kalbi, bibimbap, and pizza. The outside got all crispy (since it had the same mouthfeel/texture as mochi, but the outside wasn't sticky really) and the inside was an amazing explosion of flavor in your mouth. THe kalbi and the bibimbap ones were SO AMAZINGLY DELICIOUS. And so, since I was running out of time, I decided that those things were going to be my lunch, and that I was probably going to die early from a heart attack or something. Either way, I moved my death date up by at least a year from that lunch haha.

The ride back was fairly uneventful; we made one last stop at this last minute places where you could buy Korean souveniers and food to take back home (like nori and kimchi). They were a little more expensive though, and I also grabbed a coffee (and was a little late back to the bus because they were so. freaking. slow.)
The rest of the plane ride was rather quiet and nice. I watched Cowboys vs Aliens rather than sleeping on the way back.

And that was South Korea (or well, really, just Seoul), in less than 48 hours. Amazing. Exciting. Tasty. Gorgeous. Full of history. Full of food. NOT ENOUGH STOMACH.

I definitely want to go back. ♡

Korea!

Right, so I know I said I would post something about the Philippines like... a while ago, and I haven't gotten around to doing that yet (or even taking them off my camera). I figured that during all this down time, it would be more or less the perfect time to do so (if I don't go stir crazy from sitting in my chair all day long).

My goal for March is to be ridiculously productive and churn out a bunch of things I've been sitting on for a while. Such things include but are not limited to:

1. Looking at scholarship information. Yeah I should do that soon.
2. Reading the Food & Culture Reader by Counihan. It's GIGANTIC. And I mean like, it's about as big as my neuroscience textbook, and that thing was huge. I'm getting it from my school on wednesday, so we'll see how long I have to get through that beast.
3. Study more Japanese (and turn in the test on time for once).
4. Write, speak, and read more Japanese. I really want to try to write more in Japanese, since I think it'll help me remember things like grammar and so on that I'm struggling with.
5. Read through Axis.
6. Get my stuff together for Okinawa. YAAAY.
7. Upload pictures from the Philippines, the hospital in Thailand (which had kind of amazing sunset pictures).
8. Write more blog entries (new goal: two or three every week!).
9. Write about the Philippines.
10. Look up crazy cooking projects
11. Attempt to make tortillas again (despite the fact I'll be stateside in about six months).
12. Study kanji via the kanjibox app - at least 30 minutes every day. (Or like... an hour. Split into ten minute segments, with 5 minutes drills and then doing the quiz portion. Also, good god, doing drills gets kinda boring.)
13. Study kanji from the JET book, at least one or two a day.... yeah about that.
14. Mend black pants (or find a tailor...).
15. Do silhouette paper cut out art with water colors
16. Write letters to people and stuff.

Right. So those are kinda goals for the month I guess... and not necessarily in that order.

Anyways, Korea! Korea gets written about first since it was more recent and also shorter (and thus, will take me less time).

Where to start.

Oh right. Korea was awesome. I went to Seoul for less than 48 hours - we left Okayama on a flight around 10 am on Sunday (which for some reason required us to leave Takahashi around 7ish), and left some time around 5 o'clockish Sunday. Oh wait, the 7 o'clock makes sense now. It was a (kinda) secret trip with the other female teachers at one of my visiting schools; none of the men at school knew about it. Or well, one did, since if something happened to us - all of us - the school would need to know something about where we were and stuff. So our vice principal had been informed about the trip.

One of the teachers who lives in Takahashi offered to give me a ride to the airport so that I didn't have to meet my Japanese Teacher (JTE) in the neighboring city, which I gladly accepted. She came over to my place a little before 6:30 am. I was... mostly ready, haha. I had been packing the night before (since I seem to be incapable of packing before the night before). We went to pick up another teacher, and then swung by the school to see if the other teachers were there. They weren't, so we assumed they had left before us (since we were a little late)... and turns out, we had assumed wrong. We actually weren't the late ones!

We flew out of Okayama Airport, which apparently, does international flights. The airport itself is kinda small, but not too bad? I guess it could have been worse. Security was kinda... yeah. For some reason they did a full body pat down on me. Maybe because I was a foreigner; who knows. But I thought it was kind of amusing they had a person standing there whose job was to hand baskets to people for them to put their stuff in. Ahhh, Japan.

From Okayama to Seoul, it actually doesn't take very long - a little bit under two hours, or not quite long enough to watch an in flight movie since the announcements (during which they paused all videos) were repeated in Korean, English, and Japanese. Korean Air also gave us food for the short flight (much to my surprise) and they had the in flight consoles in the headrest of the seat in front of you. Awesome. This flight was ridiculously better than pretty much all of my flights to and from Japan. Video consoles! Movie choices! I found myself wishing the flight was longer so that I could finish watching Cowboys and Aliens. They also had the Puss in Boots movie (which I really wanted to watch).

I liked Korean Air. Definitely will fly them again.

But on to actual Korea! Seoul's airport (Incheon) is really really nice inside. It reminded me a little bit of the domestic wing at Manilla, or the airport at Thailand. Nice interior, even if the walk towards the baggage claim and immigration took ages. Immigration was a speedy process as well, as was baggage claim (though I think the fact that our group moved slowly helped too). There were twelve of us on this Korean spa-shopping spree.

Actually, that was the whole reason (the majority of) the teachers were going in the first place: to take advantage of cheap Korean cosmetics (at least, cheap compared to Japan), eat Korean food, and do a beauty treatment. Some of the art teachers were going to a museum... but that was about it.

We met up with our tour guide lady, whose name I can't remember, and boarded the bus that would take us to Seoul. The trip took about an hour, and required us to wear these ridiculously large seat belts that made me feel like I was strapping in to a space ship or something. Seriously, buckle does not need to be that large. When we arrived at Seoul (after passing a cute place called Jessica's Kitchen, which I woefully didn't get a picture of), we went straight to the duty free shopping center, where you could buy things from Korean cosmetics to Korean souveniers (like chopsticks) to brand name merchandise (Louie Vitton anyone?). I don't think they were actually much cheaper than the states are... but Japan has this bad habit of making everything outside of Japan look ridiculously cheap in comparison.

An hour later, when we boarded the bus again, everyone had armfuls of bags with stuff except for me. I had a bag of... man, I don't even know what I bought. Korean spoons?

The next place we went was the hotel, where we were able to drop off our things and freshen up a bit before we set out to do our next activity: beauty treatments!

We walked and took the subway to this place called Este, and wow, just wow, the streets of Seoul are, quite simply, amazing. Along the thoroughfares, the sidewalk teems with vendor stalls selling small things, clothes, and food. The street food looked kind of amazing, and more than once, I saw a stall selling churros. Churros! There was life everywhere, but it never got the feeling of being too crowded, or too much. Totally different than Tokyo, or even Osaka. Osaka I just feel kind of lost in and I'm like ahhh I don't know what to dooo, but Seoul has enough small shops with friendly looking exteriors that invite you in without the throngs of people like Tokyo. It's weird though, because, like Tokyo, Seoul is a megacity, and the national capital area is supposed to be the second largest metropolitan area, and its subway the second busiest in the world, according to Wikipedia.

At the beauty place, we split into two groups so that we didn't overwhelm the place, and one group dressed up in Korean costumes and the other group (the one I was in) went in first. After changing into these pajama-y looking things, we went and dipped our feet in a little foot bath, then went into a room that we thought looked curiously like the entrance to hell (actually, I think it might have been named that too). The floor was stone and heated to a comfortably warm temperature, so we lay down on the floor and relaxed for a bit until they moved us to the next room. The next room was down a small hallway and through a tiny wooden framed door I had to duck to get under (yet still hit my head on). Inside, rock salt covered the floor with a blue towel laid out for the three of us to lay on, with small pillows for our heads. About halfway up this small room - I think it was tall enough for me to kneel and not smack my head, but it wasn't much bigger than that - the walls changed from giant pink rocks of salt to round charcoal pieces. Not like, grill charcoal, but you know the ones that look like wood? Those lined the top halves of the walls and the ceiling. It wasn't too long (especially since I was running on little sleep) before we all drifted off to sleep. I have no idea how long I slept, but I awoke to the soft sounds of snoring, and tried to fall back asleep, unsuccessfully. So I just lay there in a semi-meditative state, waiting for them to come fetch us. I swear, it seemed like they forgot about us or something. It was like a low temperature sauna in there, and I could feel myself starting to perspire from having been in there so long.

Thankfully, they came to get us not long after I woke up, where they led us back upstairs to the tables and had us lie down before covering us in a heavy blanket. Massages, facial masks, more lotion massages, and facial treatment followed. It was super nice and relaxing. The masks were kind of weird - it was my first time using one. They used this stuff that had snail essence in it (I swear, it's all the rage right now in Korea since practically every company had something that was snail essence they were trying to sell - and that people were buying). It left my face soft... but kind of sticky. Like a dry sticky, so it wasn't really a bad feeling?

After we finished, we changed and waited for the others to come down to the lobby area. They served us tea and snacks before I remembered that I had brought my makeup and figured why not. So I went back up and put make up on, and when I came back down...

You would have thought I had done something like transformed into Sailor Moon or something. The teachers were super shocked haha. I guess I never wear makeup to school - let alone purple eyeshadow - so it was really different than how they normally see me? I'm not sure what they were thinking.

I'm also not sure what they were thinking when they were like 'YOU SHOULD MAKE UP Soandso-SAN BECAUSE MAKE UP GENIUS." I am far from a make up genius. But we were in a fun kind of mood, so I agreed and we all ran upstairs and looked at what they had (not much) and what I had (even less). Another teacher did a makeover for this other teacher, giving her a very natural, light makeover with a bit of green and white eyeshadow (the teacher giving the makeover was an art teacher, go figure).

For my vict- I mean, subject? Volunteer? They kept calling her my open canvas lol. For the teacher I was working with, I decided - since I didn't have many options - to go with a blue that would match her sweater. And black eyeliner. As I was putting it on though, two awful thoughts went through my head.

1. Oh god, I'm going to make her look like a hooker.
2. Oh god, it looks like I'm giving her black eyes.

This was the first time I'd ever done makeup for someone that wasn't me... and now I understand how freaking hard it is. You're never sure (if you're using a pencil) if you're stabbing them too hard as you put on eyeliner. We couldn't find any black eyeliner... so I had to go with brown.

Overall, it ended up looking... alright? Not the best, that's for sure. I was worried that others would think she looked like a clown or a hooker. It was really... dramatic makeup. Really like, obvious too. Dark blue isn't the most subtle of colors. When all the other teachers saw her, they all had interesting... reactions. Most of them were shocked. Most also started laughing (which made me feel really bad). This was a teacher around my mom's age... so yeah, blue probably wasn't the best of choices. She took it in stride though, and gamely. I told her she could take it off if she wanted and I wouldn't be offended but she decided to keep it on. It did make her look a lot younger - like maybe, in her mid-thirties.

After beauty treatment came my personal favorite part: korean bbq. Oh man. They had 8 colors of pork that you could cook, and as much kimchee and lettuce/etc as you wanted, along with a spicy kind of hot pot soup. I love how like, everything in Korean cooking is red haha. BUt oh man, the food was freaking delicious. The best part is that it only cost about 1,000 yen - or like, $10. Or at least, it should have. It turns out, the vice principal gave us money to go on the trip (wtf? WIN.) so we didn't actually have to pay for dinner in return, someone was in charge of buying a gift for him haha. But holy cow. He just gave us money to use and we were all like... shocked. I guess he likes Korea too?

After food was more shopping in Myongdong, which is kind of like a cross between Harajuku and Shinjuku but so much more awesome. We passed a Taco Bell (!) and several vietnamese places (!!!) before arriving at this store that sold things students at the local design university made. They were pretty cool things, no doubt. We got about an hour to run around and shop, so I kind of wandered with a group who looked at cell phone and iPad cases... and along the way we found FRO-YO but I was TOO FULL (which was the other thing preventing me fromgoing back and buying a taco from Taco Bell).

The last thing we did that day was take the subway to the Lotte department store/super market, where we loaded up on nori, kimchee, and all sorts of other wonderful korean goods. I managed to find nacho cheese (!), jalapenos in a glass jar, and mondu or whatever you call those round tasty korean rice things. Oh, and ridiculously cheap shin ramen. I wanted to cry since I didn't have more space in my suitcase. I think my suitcase was half korean nori haha. In case you're wondering, Korean nori is sold in little plastic containers with enough for one person (or I guess two people sharing) for one dinner. They have the big ones too, but usually they're a little bit smaller than palm-sized (for medium sized palms). They're also flavored quite strongly, unlike their Japanese counterparts. Additionally, they're a little thinner and crispier, lending to a different eating experience. They're also really really tasty. So glad I brought a suitcase over.

Now, for the most part, people seemed to understand either Japanese or English relatively alright (at least, easy stuff) so we were able to get around using pretty much only Japanese with a smidge of English here and there. At the checkout counter, however, the girl I think only spoke KOrean, so when it came time to ask her for a bag (since you had to buy your own bags, or bring one from home) I did lots of gesturing and saying things in other languages that weren't Korean. She just looked at me dumbly. Even with pointing at the bags and gesturing that I needed them. Eventually though, she understood, but I was just kind of... shocked I guess.

We took the subway back to our hotel - by then it was almost midnight - but found out that the last subway train didn't go all the way to our stop... when we got kicked out of the train. Lame. We were about two stations away, and a relatively straight shot but seeing as how everyone was carrying shopping bags, we decided to hail a taxi and split the costs. So worth it. I was so dead on my feet at that point.

The next morning, we woke up bright and early, packed, brought our stuff down, and set out to an okayu place. Okayu is rice porridge, or as we call it in my family, jook. In my family, it's also known as sick food, but I guess in Japan they make it taste better so people actually eat it on a more regular basis? Korea too. They had things like abalone okayu, but I settled for boring potato okayu... which ended up tasting a lot like the jook I have when I'm sick, but slightly better. Oh well.

After this, we split up, with some people going shopping, others going to a museum, and others (like me) kinda wandering around. Or well, my plan was to go to the river canal, then to the Gyeongbokgung Imperial Palace and then back to Myeongdong for some lunch and shopping. A couple of teachers had nothing to do, so we all went around together for a bit. We stopped by this old church place (I think, as they were starting service) just to take a look at this old cathedral in Seoul. After that, we went down to this canal (cheonggyecheon) they had turned into this cute walkway with painted walls. During the summer, some people take a dip into the stream. I was also told there were shops along the canal,.. but that must have been outside the canal area proper. I did spy a place that said 'Dos Tacos' and was like OMFGGGG but managed to hold myself back.

While there was no beautiful vegetatation when I went, the canal was still there, and along the canal they had created this amazing frozen ice sculpture... thing. They had made it by letting water drip down and freeze so that it froze in things that looked like icicles on a tree. Really really gorgeous (though it also drove home the fact that it was absolutely FREEZING). Eventually, we left the canal and went off to look for this oldtowny place two other teachers wanted to go to, passing this amazing looking temple along the way.

Korean temples, like Japanese temples, tend to have the same kind of shape as Chinese temples, but the colors they use for all of them are really different. Korean temples were really brightly colored, with a green base kind of color. I noticed this on the palace ceilings and roofs and walls as well. It was a kind of... tealish green, but there were also lots of bright primary colors. I forgot what Chinese ones were like (probably lots of red) but Japanese ones don't tend to be so brightly colored (excluding the 'gold temple' and the 'silver temple').

Along the way to our destination (am I even saying that right? Look what staying in Japan has done to my English!) we walked through this little shopping district, and something caught my eye so I made the other two teachers also stop haha. What caught my eye?

Shin ramen socks.

Heck yes. They were white socks with the shin ramen logo on it. I thought it was hilarious. The shop also sold an assortment of knicknacks and gifts and souveniers, like chopsticks and spoons. I found a really gorgeous spoon and chopstick set with flowers on it that cost somewhere around the neighborhood of eight dollars. Probably on the expensive side. But they're metal and oh-so-pretty. I also found turtle chopsticks, deer chopsticks, and cellphone charms with things like kimchee or korean BBQ on them haha. Oh, and another really cute pair of socks with a bunny on it! I'll have to try to get pictures of them up sometime. :) Fingers crossed!

Dang, this is getting kinda long. I'll wrap this one up and finish talking about the Gyeongbokgung Palace in the next entry. :D

Part II here!