Hotaru Matsuri

Tonight, I went with some of the ALTs in Takahashi (and one from closer to the city) to a local firefly festival in this area of Takahshi known as Nariwa. Technically, until a couple years ago, Nariwa used to be its own town proper. Then Takahashi, giant sprawl that it is, kind of swallowed up Nariwa. But even still, a lot of the things are kind of distinct about it, and you kind of need a car to get there proper.

They were holding a firefly festival along one of the riversides in this absolutely gorgeous area. I'm quite sad that I didn't have my camera on hand to capture the gorgeousness of the area; nestled between mountains, the firefly festival area is considerably more rural than where I live. There are loads of rice paddies in tiered hills with traditional style houses. There's also a river that's mostly overgrown with grass where we watched the fireflies. Some of the roads were about as wide as my friend's (tiny) Kei-car and had no guard rails and lead to a steep drop into a flooded rice paddy.

The festival itself was held at one of the middle schools (that I don't teach at). They had festival snacky foods, but I had come from my friend's birthday celebrations in Okayama city prior to this, so I wasn't super hungry. They had the usual though - takoyaki, fries, crepes, karaage, meat on a stick...

The area it was held in is also famous for this dance story thing about a monk who has his holy water stolen by demons who then transform into a giant 8-headed snake. Kagura... I think it might be called? I forget. Either way this town is famous for that, and you can find statues and other references to the dance all over the area. They performed the dance in the gym for us, and afterwards were throwing out snacks and mochi. Like, hard mochi in plastic bags. Like, potentially dangerous if you weren't paying attention and got beaned in the face by one. As it was, everyone (adults included) were scrambling to get the food so if you weren't careful, you might find yourself elbowed by a sweet looking grandma.

I actually ran into a couple of my students at the festival, and two of them hung around to talk to me in this Japanese-English kind of hybrid. It was quite fun actually, and the kids were sweet. It was really fun talking to them too, outside of school. I got to dispel the "you're with boys therefore boyfriend?" thing yet again, but this time, I explained to them that the other ALTs in Takahashi were all dudes (no joke) so that if they saw me with a guy he was FRIEND ONLY since there were lots of guys out here. Thankfully, they understood. Hopefully they will spread this to the other students so that the first years aren't constantly thinking I'm dating a bunch of different guys haha. Ha.

Anyways, the fireflies were gorgeous! I don't remember ever seeing fireflies (though I suppose it's entirely possible since we used to go to Minnesota in the summer), so I counted this as my "first firefly seeing experience."

And wow. They're absolutely gorgeous. They also stay sufficiently far away so that I don't get freaked out. There were tons along the river. Some floated high in the air, their lights easy to see against the backdrop of the forest-covered mountain/hills. Others floated just off the road, making it slightly dangerous for those who were trying to catch them. It was so serene though; we were in an area with not many people, so it was really quiet, and you could just hear nature all around you. It was in a super rural area, so there were little to no lights around to compete with the fireflies (though the moon was pretty bright).

Absolute gorgeousness. I can see why they put a level like this into Katamari, and how well it's paired with the music on that level.

Japanese Eye Doctors

So today I went to the optometrist in my city for the first time. My JTE had called them and they said there was someone who did a little bit of English (which, when I hear that, means that they speak pretty decent English but are really shy about it).

It was really interesting. There were a lot of the same things, like those giant large things that you look into and they make your vision go woaaaah - even if you're there without glasses or anything. The one where they ask "one, or two. One or two. Three or four... three or four."

Their vision checking thing though... where we would look at the letter chart, the japanese optometrist has a circle with a segment of it gone; either the top, left, right, or bottom. So instead of squinting to look at Ps and Qs and Ds, you're trying to say which way the circle opens to.

Turns out, it makes for a much easier time when the patient can't speak Japanese really well. I ended up pointing for a lot of it.

There was also this machine that sounded like an old video game or something the way it moved - in chunky blocks. Very mechanical, a sharp contrast to the way everything else smoothly operated in the office. And they would get it up really close to your eye and then... blast a huge puff of air straight at your eyeball making you go "WTF?!"

Then they'd do it again. So glad we don't have that much in the states. It's quite annoying.

Oh yeah, and my eyes are fine. The people in the office were super nice, so I didn't have to pay anything since they said my eyes were fine and all. I was like, hooray! Two of the staff members could understand a little bit of english, and one could speak it pretty well too. :) The main sensei/doctor though, he was very adament in his "I don't English" and I was like "日本語大丈夫。少しわかります。”

Hooray though. Oh, we had to do it twice because I forgot to mention that I wore contacts. Woops. And they told me I'm near sighed. Yep. :D

Mu-friggin-kade

Mukade are the poisonous (giant) centipedes in Japan. While there have been stories about people dying from these bug bites, most of the stories end up with people getting sick and horrendous scars.

Either way, I don't want one of those things touching me.

I found one in my sink today tough. Anyone who's seen me and bugs interact (more like me running away from bugs) knows that I scream. Loudly.

Thank god that they don't move as fast as cockroaches. Or jump. Or fly. I think I would have cried if they did.

I got back home and I was being all productive, doing my laundry, washing the dishes in my sink... when I noticed something moved from under my dishes. That something looked like mukade legs.

Naturally, I freaked out, but stopped just shy of being completely useless. THank lord I found it in my sink. I turned the water to almost the hottest (the hottest would have just been a small trickle, and I wanted full on like, lots of water) and sprayed it so that it slid back under the frying pan, and kept the water on so it couldn't come out. Every so often I would fill a cup with more water and pour it around the sides, just in case.

I had heard somewhere that you're supposed to boil it in water, and figured, that no way in hell was I getting close enough to pick it up. Pouring boiling water over it was going to have to suffice - and someone said later that it's actually what you're supposed to do. We ridiculed this at first, saying "we'll never have the time to boil water if there's a mukade in our places." Ha. Ha. Ha.

God bless hot water boilers. Scalding water in less than a minute. Beautiful. I poured it around the drain thing and refilled the pot and boiled more water.

I didn't see it after a while, so I was hoping it was dead. By hoping, I mean, some rational part of me figured it was dead but the more dominant, completely irrational part was like OMG IT'S STILL ALIVE. I also have that kinda small problem that well.... I don't want to get within arm's reach of the thing, let alone touch it. So I left the water running (god my bill is going to be high this month) and ran to fetch one of the students that live either across from me or the boys dorm. After cautiously checking my shoes for more mukade, I ran outside, looking slightly hysterical. There were two girls just kinda sitting there checking their cell phones. I don't remember which school they went to. I know they're not first or second years at Takahashi. They might be from Jounan (the other school I teach) but I'm not sure.

My conversation with the two girls in front of the dorm went something like this:
Me: 男の人がありますか？　「Are there any boys here?」 (yeah, I realize now I totally used the verb for inanimate things. Oopsie).
Girls: Eh? なぜ？「Why?」
Me: 台所でむかでがあります！SINK の中で。「There's a (MOTHERFUKKIN) mukade in my kitchen! In the sink! OMFG」
Girls: ... *run to put on shoes* (I thought they were gonna go to get the boys) *run over to my house*
Me: EHHH? 大丈夫ですか？
Girls: DAIJOUBUYO~
Me: O_____________O 皿の下で！「It's under the dishes! I'M REALLY SORRY IT'S SUPER DIRTY」
Girls: *run inside after customary "Sorry for intruding on your house but Jessica forgot the japanese word ness"*
Me: 一番下！！

(Note: the above is a paraphrasing of what happened)
At this point, they were lifting up the pot and pan that was in my sink (I hadn't done dishes for two days) and I caught a glimpse of mukade and SCREAMED super loud. The girls were quick to assure me that it was dead. They were all, "IT'S DEAD IT'S DEAD." I think that's what 死ぬ means anyways. I still freaked out. I think this amused them. I think they might have said "dead" in English too.

Then they picked it up with (my favorite pair of) chopsticks and asked if I had a tissue. There was a moment where they debated where to put it. I kinda motioned towards where the paper towels were. They wrapped it up and I think took it with them, bless their souls. I'm so thankful they didn't put it in my garbage can. I think they figured since I had freaked out at them picking it up and just from looking at it that leaving it inside my house was probably not the best idea.

Ugh, the idea of being able to feel the body through the paper towels grosses me out though.

But yeah. That was my mukade adventure that I never want to have again (though if I have to find mukade again I'd rather it be in my sink where I can pour water over it). I mean, I never want to have any mukade experiences ever again. Unfortunately, I don't think that will be the case. They said mukade come out with rainy weather. It's rainy now. Crap.

I'm stuck in this weird limbo of I really want to clean but I really don't want to clean because I might find more bugs which means that it would be better to clean, じゃろ？

Looks like I'm sleeping in the mesh tent again tonight.

Achievement Unlocked

Slave to consumerism and pokemon-collect-em-all-ism.


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Today, I rode 9 km to get McDonald's coca cola glass because I had heard that they're actually ending the promotion in a couple days (for these colors anyways). The closest McDonald's to my place is 4.5 km one way; you can either take the bus for 100 yen (one way) and it comes once an hour, or you can bike there. I biked there since I figured, if I was going to eat McDonald's I might as well burn the calories before I gained it all back. My legs hurt in the good way. :) This is a googlemaps of my town :D My place is near "B" and McD's is at yumetown where "A" is.

Oh, did I mention that it was raining decently hard the entire time? Yah. Not the smartest thing I've ever done. It was probably not-so-safe either. But it's alright cause I made it back intact and only slightly damp. My fingers did prune a bit though. I also looked like a hobo cause I was wearing these pants that I thought were waterproof (they weren't) and a regular t-shirt, so it was like I was going to the gym or something, or rather, it looked like I just came BACK from the gym. Very not glamourous. Of course, I ran into my students too. ~_~

Sometimes, I marvel a little bit at my stupidity. But the boxes have Japanese on them! They're really cool looking! They're real glass! And all you need to do to get them is upgrade to a LL set - Large drink, Large fries. I just got iced tea, so the L sized drink wasn't like it was that bad. The fries though, yeah. Yeaaaaaaah.

I was gonna pick up milk too, but all the grocery stores in the area seemed to have gotten rid of their nonfat milk; they only have lowfat and that's STILL enough to make my stomach not-so-happy. ._.;

CHALLENGE-MASHO

Last night, I had this amazing conversation about food with one of my JTEs. We were talking about how recently, there's this category of food called B-rank-gome. It includes places that serve food that's not quite restaurant-y, but isn't quite fast food. It's good food, it's cheap, and it's fast. It includes things like takoyaki, okonomiyaki, and ramen. Apparently, Tsuyama is quite well known for it. They even have contests to figure out which place is the best B rank restaurant.

The interesting thing though, is that the ranking kinda stops there. There's no C rank. A rank is really just like, sit down food, so there's not much of a point of differentiating between A ranked restaurants.

But there's more to that, other than the rankings not being an indicator of general cleanliness and likelihood to pass health inspection (though, I really would rather not think about that since there may or may not be a link to this; I know next to nothing about how Japanese kitchens operate, but when I was at this Izakaya place learning to make torimomo oroshiai, well, I dunno if kitchens in America do that too but yeaaahhhh). The place has to have backing from the community, or something like that. I'm not entirely sure. More research is required. So the JTE I was talking to said he'd email his anthro prof from college and ask him for resources on that, since he was pretty sure there was a good deal of scholarly articles/books written on the topic of food in Japan from the Japanese perspective.

I find this all completely fascinating. （≧∇≦）Seriously, if I get into grad school, it's the kind of thing I want to study. But. This means that my kindergarten level kanji skills need some serious level up grinding, cause it really is that low. Sigh. I need to be able to read newspapers. Sigh. LET'S KANJI SHIMASHO~

Speaking of grad school, several of my friends were kind enough to tell me about/point me in the direction of a different ranking style for the GREs: the percentile ranking. Hooray. But, basically, my Verbal scores are fiiiiiiiiiine.

That's (not) my Donald, McDonald~

Before I came to Japan, I scoffed at the idea of eating too much McDonald's while I was over here. Wait, no, scratch that, I scoffed at the very idea of eating or wanting to eat McD's while we were in the land of Japanese food and beef bowls and curry and rice and ramen and omurice, among other things.

Ha ha. If I could have seen myself now.

Not only have I eaten at McDonald's at LEAST once a month (way more if you count breakfast) but for a while it was almost once a week.

Who have I turned into?!

Now, to defend my position, the Japanese McDonald's is about 50% like the American one. That is to say, not very much. Seriously, they are my FAVORITE breakfast place here, for several reasons. The first, is that unless you go to an expensive breakfast place at a nice hotel, your breakfast options (in Okayama anyways) are limited to mostly carb-only things: there's a place that does Bagels, Belgian Waffles (oh god they're so good though), Bread (oh god the types of bread you could have here for breakfast) and uhhh... riceballs (which are actually usually breakfast every tue/fri since I just grab conbini food in the morning). Note, lots of these things are of the sweet type; there's less savory things, and even less than that if you take out anything covered in cheese (though, I do love me some cheese).

Perhaps it's just from living out here, but there are very few places that actually do breakfast and serve you like... meat. There are some bakeries that will have bread that has like, bacon on it or something, but sometimes I crave egg, and I always always always crave breakfast sausage (I miss Jimmy Dean's lol).

...yeah, I know I can MAKE breakfast and it'll turn out far better than most of it. Japanese breakfast is super easy; it's just rice and miso soup, but I never wake up in time to start the rice. :x Also, whenever I do want to make breakfast, I swear, I never have potatoes or eggs, so I have to bike down to the store, which is about an hour and a half trip because I NEVER make quick trips to the grocery store. Plus McD's breakfast is for when I'm out and about; very few places and grocery stores open before 10 (at least out here in the boonies).

No joke, McDonald's has the only CHEAP breakfast sausage I have been able to find outside of the expensive hotels. One of these days though, I'm going to go pay for one of the nice breakfasts. Maybe when I'm in Tokyo. :) Maybe I'll skip out on the free JET breakfast one morning haha. Plus, their hashbrowns are made of crack. SO TASTYYYY.

Oh, but I wasn't writing about breakfast. Not originally anyways. I was talking about dinner and lunch. Like seriously, why would you ever have McDonald's when you could go to a super tasty ramen or curry place?

Because. Japanese McDonald's are awesome.

Here is my evidence for this assertion:
1. They're doing a promotion where if you essentially supersize your meal, you'll get these really really cool glass coke can bottles. Seriously, this is going to be gifts for several people back home. I apologize in advance, but I'm probably not going to ship these out; I'll just bring them back with me and ship them from the states. ...which means that I'll wash 'em real well before I get back lol. Because these cups are SO FRIGGING COOOOOOOOL.
2. Burger challenges. So right now, they're doing the mega mac (not so exciting). Instead of TWO beef patties, you get FOUR. Woah. Yeah though, that's not what I meant. Japan has come out with the American BUrger series, which were available exclusively in Japan (or at least, definitely not in America). They were actually like... tasty burgers. I mean, they weren't even to say, fuddrucker's quality, but for McD's they were tastyyyyy. I have pictures. I will put them up here eventually. :) Along with the coke bottle pictures.
3. Their Chicken-Filet-O is really really really tasty. Like really. THeir chicken products, in my opinion, taste better than KFC's.

Oh, the title isn't a typo either. In Japanland, instead of being called Ronald McDonald, he's Donald McDonald. That doesn't even go with the stereotype, since it's the L/R rather than the D/R sounds that get mixed up.

So while some part of my heart weeps to say this, today I am going in to the city to study Japanese and get me a Coke glass. :) THEY'RE SO PRETTY~

Superstitious

Now, normally, I'm not much of a superstitious person. I don't believe in ghosts or zombies or magic or anything like that... but at the same time, I won't go into a haunted house, scary movies will have me not sleeping for weeks, and stepping on a grave is very very very bad.

There are a couple of other things I do believe in though. Being able to jinx/bacchi yourself is one of them. The phrases that invite bad luck, like "what else could happen" or "what could go wrong?" or "it can't get any worse".

I also believe in test luck. Lucky underwear? Sure. Can't hurt. I don't think it'll do much really... but like I said before, can't hurt.

As some people know, I took the GRE (Graduate Record Exams - you need them for grad school in the states) in Osaka this past weekend since that was the closest location they offered it. Basically, I was studying this entire past week like a mad person when I wasn't procrastinating or working (which was often...). Paying for it turned out to be a really good motivator to study more.

So I was at my academic high school (Niimi South) on Friday, and I had gone to ask the kyuudo kids if there was any practice on tuesday since I couldn't stay for practice that day. Stupid studying. And I was talking to one of the students and we got into this conversation how both of us reaaaally don't like to study for tests lol. He's a nice kid. :) We have a similar dislike for math and studying English lol (though his English is pretty good, so I dunno what he's talking about). I swear, he looks like every single stereotypical smart boy in an anime who personifies the Japanese "theme" like Andou in Yumeiro Patissiere (see right).

But I mentioned that I was ahhhhhhh stressed and he was like "relax relax!" and he held out his palm and traced the kanji for person "人” three times in the middle. And then he pretended to eat it. And I was like... "what?"

This, he explained, was how you get rid of stress while you're studying. So I asked him if basically you ate people to feel more relaxed, and he said yes, and (as a friend pointed out later) who am I to argue with a Japanese student's study method? Especially one at an academic school? I guess it kinda worked; I generally felt silly enough to where the stress would lower a little lol.

I got my results back for the verbal and math. It's not bad, but I'm not sure how it weighs against the programs I want to apply for. I know my math is fine; I'm not applying for one of the hard sciences. So a 740 is fine. I'm more worried about the verbal score; I got a 650 and I haven't received my essay score yet. That's kinda lower than I wanted. >_< And if I'm going in to a social science... well... my verbal matters a lot more. Arrrrrg.