When It Rains, The Humidity Pours

So another weekly update from the now-rainy country of Japan. Tsuyu is out in full force, it is wet, hot and sticky to the max here right now. It's definitely South Carolina weather, so I'm used to it, but some of the more Yankee exchange students are having a little difficulty adjusting.

This week has been pretty standard so far, the weekend ended off great, with a new friend inviting me to go see a baseball game with her. The stadium was in Kobe, so I finally got my first chance to see the city some, which was not as nice as Osaka, but a change of scenery is always good.The Hanshin Tigers, Osaka's regional team, draw a HUGE crowd every game, with the normal baseball fair with a Japanese twist. Like so many other events in Japan, the Tiger fans are obsessed with synchronized cheers, which everyone, down to the 6 year old fan knows perfectly and can scream and clap in unison. Luckily, I learned quick; I didn't want to seem any more out of place than usual.

The concessions were an interesting point while I was grabbing some lunch between innings. Along with the usual hotdog, ice cream, and beer fare, the Japanese stadium had some more original meals, such as okonomiyaki (the standard Osaka fried food), japanese KFC, and bento (lunchboxes with tempura and sushi). It made for an interesting lunch in the ballpark. Also, when entering the stadium, each fan gets a gift bag of sorts with plenty of fliers and a free baseball card, so I have plenty of merch to show off from my venture.

That was a great prequel to this week, which has promise of its own of course. Yesterday we finally had soccer club again. 3 hours of pure soccer playing, with me barely covering defense, but by the last few games I had the rhythm back down again and was playing with a little bit of competency. Like always it was a little stressful for me but incredibly fun.

This weekend looks nice and relaxing. One of the girls is throwing a huge birthday party in the park for her boyfriend, so we're going shopping this week for some coolers and some sushi platters, it'll be a good chance to get everyone together and have some great food. Let's just hope tsuyu doesn't have other plans for us!

Happy Birthday Kansai!

Happy to report I have almost nothing to report!

There's satfisfaction in having a schedule and watching the amazing become the things that you get used to as you realize you're LIVING in such a diverse place. This week has been nice and quiet, the usual round of classes, watching college kids get drunk on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday nights (but god forbid Thursday through Friday...for some unknown reason).

I've met even more Japanese friends, slept through a lunch date with one (whoops) and keep showing my blatant Americanism by not being able to immediately recognize some of the others. Plus names are a nightmare, but I have two months to perfect it. I'm just glad they're not shy enough to not flag me down; Tuesday one of them screamed my name to get my attention and remind me practice was canceled, saving me a 45 minute walk to the next district! I think I know his name though, but it's anyone's guess...(Yukihiro, Yuuki, Yuutaro, Yuusuke, Daisuke, Kosuke, Keijo, Keida....on and on...and that's just the guys!)

No ISA tomorrow since it's a school holiday. Apparently we don't have to go to school because our school is turning a year older. I'm not complaining, but it does give me no excuse to be lazy, so we'll see if I can manage to do something productive and cheap tomorrow!

Cuts and Clips

Got my first Japanese haircut today. And lost about 10 pounds. It's shorter than it's ever been, but it was cool to see how the Japanese barber shops work. Apparently for 20$ I got a haircut and a therapeutic massage. Everyone's told me that'll the short hair is almost necessary for tsuyu, the rainy season. Apparently they don't know that it's exactly like the South Carolina summer.

Nothing big to update on, next week is our University's birthday, so we have the day off. Might try for Kyoto or Nara AGAIN; the rain knows my schedule way too well!

Sun and Sand

So after a relatively relaxed week (barring Friday of course: a welcome back party for someone I didn't know) I had an amazing weekend in Wakayama, an ocean front city less than 2 hours from Osaka. After the slightly confusing train ride caused by train routes and waking up way too early for a weekend, we ended up in Wakayama around lunchtime, with the host mother we were staying with not expecting us until about 5 or 6. So being mature and thoughtful, we decided to ride around and look for a themepark to occupy the time.

Wakayama is really a beautiful place, and we immediately decided we would come back soon if not just to look at the scenery. Right between the mountains and the ocean, Wakayama has some temples and castles too for plenty perfect photo opportunities, which we decided to try when we weren't on our park mission.

After navigating bus stops and stations with plenty of Japanese practice, we made it to Marine Land, or Port Europa (the park can't seem to decide on its own name).  The park is tiny but definitely a cheap touristy highlight of my trip so far. The front half of the park is modeled after Venice and Paris, while the back half hosts all kinds of gaudy American carnival rides, with plenty of live animal shows in between. We definitely stayed busy for hours enjoying being complete tourists along with everyone else for once. After cruising around until early evening, we finished with a ferris wheel ride and our hunger drove us to find the place we were staying at for the night.

Sakamoto-san, or Mama-san as we were instructed to call her is one of the nicest older Japanese people I've been fortunate enough to meet. With a daughter living in Norway and being a Lutheran (?! what are the odds??), Sakamoto-san hosts tons of homestays and makes sure all of her guests feel like her own children. We sat down to catch her up on things (one of my friends stayed with her two years ago), she instructed to sit down, relax, and help her with dinner.

I've never eaten such a huge dinner in my life. The course was sukiyaki a Japanese dish where ingredients are thrown in a huge communal heated pot and taken out individually, keeping everything hot and delicious. There were only five of us, host included, and we barely made a dent in the feast (of course you know I did my fair share). After rolling away from dinner, Sakamoto-san treated us to homemade parfaits and coffee for dessert while we decided on an after dinner activity.

We discovered our host mom is an origami expert, and it was instantly decided. The next five hours might have been one of the most interesting and frustrating weekend nights I've had in years. Origami is definitely not my speciality, but we cranked out tons and had a great time doing it, getting addicted to the point that physical exhaustion was our only reason to stop. Of course being college kids as soon as we hit our beds we couldn't sleep and stayed up way too late just sitting around talking and worrying about the massive spiders we kept finding in our rooms.

The next morning, we woke up bright and early (again...) to go with Sakamoto-san to church, and were treated again to massive amounts of delicious food, in the form of toast, melon bread, jelly, eggs, salad, ham, and anything else she could find to cook up for us. I would literally eat myself to death if I stayed more than one night! The church service was AMAZING, but being Lutheran I'm sure I got more out of it than usual. Everyone was extremely friendly and interesting, I knew all the hymns from home and could keep up the singing, and the sermon was great Japanese practice. We even had to give a self-introduction in front of the entire congregation!

Afterwards we started on our original plan for Wakayama: the beach. After an hour long walk with minimal getting ourselves lost and taking some detours for some awesome pictures, we made it to our first Japanese beach, which I was pleasantly surprised to see almost completely empty. The rest of the day was spent with lots of sun and water. The breeze blowing and the water were kind of cold (the two kids from up north did way better than me and the other girl) but we spent plenty of time swimming anyway, dodging jellyfish and even climbing up a surfbreaker and seeing some definitely Japanese water fauna, including fugu and seaslugs. On the way back one of our friends cut his feet up bad on barnacles, so we shortened our trip some to get him home. We promised to make this a much more frequent weekend stop though!

Now we have a new week of school, with lots of work to catch up on with a week's vacation, but at least there's ISA on Friday! I'm excited for my next trip to Wakayama though, as well as the other trips I'm planning, we'll see how that pans out, random decision is more my style!

Rainy Days Make Me Say...

This has been a looooong and relaxing week off...I'm really ready for lessons to start back actually!

This weekend I'm going to Wakayama with some friends to visit their old host family, so it'll be a chance to get out of Osaka and hit up the beach. But if the weather keeps the same pattern it's been doing, it'll be a grey and rainy day at the beach!

Nothing really new to report with the dismal weather, except the inevitable drama that starts up from too many people speaking English being forced to interact on a continual basis. It's manageable, but you can tell people need a distraction again. I'm just bummed they cancelled club meetings this week, so no ISA for me!

I did get to go shopping at the Japanese version of Walmart, Jusco the other day. Great prices and plenty of trendy Engrish clothes- some of the things they print on shirts are amazing. Hypoclite is a word I'd never thought I'd have to know!

SWINE FLU ALERT

haha not really.

BUT I DO GET ALL WEEK OFF SCHOOL BECAUSE OF THE 5 CASES OF JAPANESE SWINE FLU.

So yeah I'm thinking this will definitely be a travel week. If the weather ever clears up. It's way too much like South Carolina here, and by that I mean the weather is overly bipolar, but always humid. I like it when it's not continuous rain...

So this weekend was pretty epic, if I do say so myself. My ISA had a nomitabehoodai. Which meant we ate and drank all we wanted. And we did. To excess, of course. There were Japanese throwing up everywhere, getting out was like some projectile obstacle course. Afterwards, everyone decided that that just wasn't enough, Japanese-style karaoke had to follow. So for the next two hours we were all screaming into mikes, me really enjoying hearing Japanese pronunciations of American songs, them really enjoying me trying to keep up with Japanese lyrics flying across the screen. I had to leave early, around 2, out of sheer exhaustion, I texted one of my friends later and he said he didn't make it home until 7!

Saturday was fun too, but more in the it's-nice-to-have-a-schedule-finally fun. I met my Korean friend for some local food and we talked about his opportunity coming up to go to an internship in LA, and I promised to proofread his report and help him with his interview, as long as he'd practice his Japanese with me. Afterwards, I had to meet another friend in Umeda for karaoke and dinner. Umeda station on a saturday is a whole different kind of beast, but luckily we managed to find other, swim the crowd, and head out of the constant rain to a nice karaoke parlor. More singing, more eating and drinking, and we made an evening of it, but the bill was way higher than either of us expected, so we promised to keep it to a cheaper club or something next time.

Afterwards we headed to Yodobashi just to look around, and had a great time checking out all the electronics we couldn't afford, and all the gear that nobody should ever buy (500$ pen???). We found some books on Engrish, which is still alive and well on Japan, and we both put off going home as long as possible but agreed to meet up soon to go to a club or have some cheap fun.

Sunday, rainy sunday, has been slow, wet, but not without its good news, obviously. My biggest regret is being without a gym or an IT center for internet all week but I guess since I get a week to not do anything, I can't complain. I'm going to, once again, try to hit up Kyoto and Nara, but at least now I know people from both those places who have promised to show me around some!

Solar Flesh

It was an amazing weather day today which definitely helped my mood, along with the good grade I managed to get on our newest test. I wish my schedule in Columbia could be this nice!

Otherwise, today was pretty standard, I met a guy from our dorm though (of course I missed his name so I'll have to just say YOU everytime I see him until I can figure it out without being awkward) and I think he's on the soccer circle I went to a few weeks ago, so I told him I'd definitely come next week and try it out again. Talking to the people my age is a way better teacher than trying to learn things out of the books, there really isn't a substitute for the real thing.

I can tell summer is getting ready to get hot and heavy here; the storms are hitting and disappearing with no warning and it's a definite South Carolina humidity. This weekend my International Circle is having a party in lieu of a meeting (no surprise there, standard college Japanese mindset) so it'll be great to really get to see everyone again outside of campus.

I'm jinxing myself by saying it, but I'm going to try to leave town this weekend, for the day or something, even if I get rained into the aquarium or an art museum. Wherever I end up, I know something will keep it from being a typical trip, so I just hope it's not life-threatening!