Okonomiyaki party!

Today was pretty excellent. I woke up at 11am, then we had an okonomiyaki party with some of the new and old students from the surrounding dorms.

They seem like pretty cool people, and it was really nice to just hang out, make some good food and chat. We did that for a long time – around 4pm! Afterwards, I was feeling really sleepy for some reason, so I indulged in the luxury of a nap, something I rarely do. It felt pretty great. I woke up around 6pm, made myself a delicious bowl of coffee and read the NY Times for about an hour. There was a really interesting article about cellphones in developing countries and how they help improve efficiency and reduce poverty.

All the articles and books and talk I’ve been reading/hearing lately really makes me think this is a pretty fascinating time in human history. It seems like kind of a battle between, on the one side, the fascinating new technologies of globalization and the new spirit of helping all people all over the world rather than trying to subjugate them, and on the other hand, overpopulation and environmental destruction and inequality. I can’t help but thinking that the world is going to be radically different well within my life time. It’s hard to guess whether the radicl change will be mostly for the better or mostly for the worse, or both, but I actually think it looks pretty optimistic, as globalization allows everyone to work together more. I predict that the UN might take up more of a world government-like function. Also, I read something today that predicted that the 21st century will be the “Asian Century”. Good thing I’ve got a head start on being friends with the Asians. I also think I’m going to try to learn Chinese – which will be much easier after having spent years memorizing Chinese symbols for my Japanese study. But it won’t just be China and India, it looks like many other countries will also be rapidly developing, and I think if Sawa and I are able to spend a few months or a year doing aid work in developing countries like we’re thinking about doing, it would be a really great experience to get perspective on the rest of the world.

Anyway, after reading that and thinking about big-picture stuff, I focused back on the specific details of getting ready for the wedding. I had been putting off a couple of these things for a while, but when I finally focused I was able to finish writing a draft of me and Sawa’s wedding vows, my introduction of Sawa, and my letter to my parents. It was actually a really nice way of forcing myself to think about me and Sawa’s whole lives and remind myself what I like so much about Sawa and about all the things that I am grateful to my parents for.

First class of the spring

Today I had my first class, and it went great! I think last semester it took me a few classes to build up my package for how I teach, but I was able to start off this semester knowing what and, maybe more importantly how I was able to teach, and I think this made it easier to engage my students. For example, it took me a few classes last semester till I had started giving out candy AND making sure to reward students equally for answering questions whether they got the answers right or not, but since I started off like that, they got the idea that the key was for them to participate and they seemed to respond to it very quickly and get into it. I ran out of time because we spent fifteen minutes having everone introduce each other in pairs, then probably 40 or 45 minutes playing this name game where you gradually repeat all the names of the people behind you, going round in a circle, until the last person repeats everyone’s name. When people got stuck it got a little slow, but I really think it’s worth investing that time in the first class to make sure all the students know each others’ names to get the atmosphere of an interactive class. (Not to mention it helps me learn their names!)

This time through I think I’m going to do a lot better identifying specific things to teach them progressively, rather than trying to teach them everything at once or doing things that are too vague. Like, in the 20-odd minutes left after all the introductions and logistics and what-not, I think I did a pretty good rush job of teaching them about syllable emphasis and rhyming, although I think I’ll have to revise when we have a little more time.

Oh, one thing that’s weird is that, while last semester there were about the same number of guys and girls in my class, this semester there are only 6 girls in a 34 person class! Last semester, I found that the girls were better students on average, so I hope the ratio doesn’t affect the class adversely.

Tonight and yesterday I caught up on two weeks of lacking Bimota, and it was oh so sweet. In case you think it’s only me who’s so obsessed, I must report that yesterday when Hayao came with me, he said that while he’s been job-hunting these last few weeks, eating Bimota has been the thing that keeps him going!

I sorted through a bunch of photos, so here are some good ones from my week in Tokyo/Yokohama:

Loren at the maid cafe

At Yoyogi park (note to people trying to find Yoyogi park: don’t get off at Yoyogi station. Get off at Harajuku instead.)

Loren at around 4:30am, ready to go to Tsukiji!

Amazingly fresh tuna at Daiwa Zushi

Mum posing in the fish market.

Fish people at work. Actually, every time I go back there are more tourists and the people who work there seem more and more pissed off at the tourists in the way. If you include the horrific accident that is sure to happen some time with tourists waltzing around while mini-flatbed things carrying fish go zooming by, I feel like things might change at Tsukiji before long…

People loving the hanami in Ueno park

The birthday cake Loren and I cooked for the hanami to celebrate Sawa’s birthday, since she was working all day alone in Yokohama for her real birthday… Unfortunately, the cake didn’t fully survive the subway ride to Ueno…

Sawa, Loren, Mum and I hanami-ing it up in Ueno park. This cool homeless guy took this photo for us, and gave us bowls and chopsticks and trash bags to clean up after ourselves. He also tried to give us a bag of tobacco, but we told him that we didn’t smoke.

I really don’t understand why, but these people were all dressed up as greasers or something and were dancing around to old American music. Earlier that day, someone was in a Scottish kilt playing bagpipes too… go figure.

Shibe was so excited to come to yakiniku!!!

I just thought this was pretty bad-ass when I saw it lying on Sawa’s desk – it’s a package sent from the Japanese Ministry of Defence, to Sawa Matsueda of PBS!

Ready for the new semester

Yesterday I just had a chill morning/afternoon, having a relaxed breakfast with Sawa and then working on my introduction of Sawa for the wedding during the afternoon.

Around 3:30 I headed into Tokyo to meet my mum. Although we only had about 4 hours till I had to go back to Yokohama and catch my overnight bus back to Kyoto, we managed to get her set up with a cellphone and an electronic dictionary, meet up with Sawa, have dinner and teach her how to use the aforementioned electronics. I was proud that I was able to help her set up the phone, very slightly paying back all the help she has given me for the past 22 years. Sawa had to help out with the dictionary though, as I didn’t understand all the complexities.

The night bus was fine – I’m pretty used to them now, and I also had a seat at the very front with slightly more leg-room than others. There was another foreigner next to me, and I’m starting to suspect by the percentage of times I’ve lucked out into good seats that they might have a policy of putting foreigners in more spacious seats, which is totally fine by me!

When I arrived back in Kyoto, I caught a couple more hours of sleep, went to English club (only Takada-san and Fukushima-san this week), and then spent the rest of the day mostly planning my new semester of classes, which start tomorrow. I’m actually pretty excited about teaching this semester, because I think now that I have taught it once I’m able to frame the class as a whole better than I could while I was making it up as I went. The only thing is, it would be nice if the new semester didn’t start this close to the wedding, but that’s just what it is.

As I think I’ve mentioned before, I’m going to focus on teaching English as an aural phenomenon, not worrying much about reading and writing but focusing on correcting the pronunciation, speaking and listening. I also realized that there are a few recurring areas that most students made grammatical mistakes (especially plurals vs singular noun-verb agreement, use of tenses, a vs the vs neither, and prepositions in general), so I’ll try to make my way through them over the course of the class to correct the main weaknesses I noticed last semester. It’ll be interesting to see how my students are. I’ve only had an experience with one set, so I’ll see whether a different group of students makes a big difference or not.

All right, I wanna get a decent sleep before my first class tomorrow, so I’ll call it a night. Tomorrow I’ll try to go through my Tokyo/Yokohama photos and post them.

Sawa’s Day Off

Today Sawa had a much-deserved day off, and it was wonderful to sleep nice and late. Don’t tell anyone, but we’re now officially married! We went to the district registration office this morning and filled out all the forms, after Sawa translated them last night. In Japan, the civil registration is the only official part, so the ceremony is actually just symbolic., and we needed to get this out of the way while we were both in Yokohama. However, we feel and are still thinking of it as if we’re not really married yet and that the wedding is the real marriage ceremony.

The rest of the day was lovely and relaxing: we went to the mall with Sawa’s mum, had some coffee and got me some much needed socks and pants, we watched Family Guy for the first time in a long time over tea back at Sawa’s place and went out for yakiniku. Sawa didn’t want to take Shibe (the stuffed dog), but he always wants to eat meat and I said that if Shibe didn’t come I wasn’t going either, which Shibe was very grateful for. I didn’t bring my camera cord thing with me, so I can’t upload any photos from today or the last couple of days.

This evening, Sawa and I brainstormed our wedding vows a little bit. I had been leaning towards maybe just doing the traditional vows, but when we started thinking about we realized how important it was to us that we came up with vows that we wanted to officially promise to guide the way we want to make sure we have a happy life together. Now that I think about it, thinking about what his marriage means to us, making that promise and having all our family and friends there to share in it are the most important parts of the wedding.

A brief rest in Yokohama

Before I forget, I’m finally joining the world of YouTube, and here is the link to slideshows I put to recordings of the four movements of my thesis.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOnLKQ35EkQ

This is to movement four – the rest should be up soon and you should be able to reach them from this.

As always, sorry for not updating more frequently, but as you can tell from Loren’s guest post, the last two weeks have been a crazy whirlwind of sightseeing and fun stuff. When Loren left for her little two-day jaunt to Hiroshima/Miyajima last Wednesday, I spent a day jamming in all of the wedding stuff I had to finish (making a slideshow to show during the reception, finalizing and burning the music, etc.) then took a night bus to Yokohama. Despite sleeping on the night bus, when I got to Sawa’s place at 7am I proceeded to fall asleep again. I didn’t believe my eyes when I woke up and looked at my watch and it told me that it was around 4pm. I had slept for 9 more hour son top of the 6 I slept on the night bus!

Anyway, having recovered a little sleep, I rushed to meet my mum, who had just arrived in Tokyo for her 6-month sabbatical! Incidentally, a couple of days ago my brother Kelly arrived in Wakayama, where he’ll be doing a 6-month high school exchange programme, so only my Dad has not relocated temporarily to Japan, although he’ll be here in two weeks for the wedding!

For the next couple of days, Loren, my mum, Sawa and I, in various permutations, did a whole lot of sightseeing around Tokyo, including early morning sushi at Daiwa sushi at Tsukiji (whose sushi I found back in June with the Zumbyes and is the title photo for my blog), and lots of cherry blossom viewing, since those three or four days were the peak of the cherry blossoms, which all started falling like snow around Thursday or Friday. On Saturday night all four of us went to Ueno Park, bearing a bottle of plum wine I got for Sawa’s birthday and a cake me and Loren made for Sawa, bought some delicious street food and did a hanami (flower-viewing). I really love the Japanese tradition of hanami – it’s one of the few times I’ve seen such a fun, friendly, loud singing and dancing and drinking atmosphere in public in Japan.

After a disappointing last Saturday night in Shibuya (salvaged somewhat by my breakdancing battle with this Japanese due when me and Loren tried to invigorate the sad dance floor at the club) we got two hours of sleep and woke up at 4am to see Loren off. It was very sad, but it was so much fun to see her again and get to explore Japan together! I think she was right, though, that the only thing that would have made the trip better was if we had given ourselves a little more down-time to just do mundane things, have some stupid adventures and just hang out. All our activities were so well-coordinated and successful that few of them ended up being super-memorable, unlike those memorable stories when everything goes wrong but it’s so much fun because of how ridiculously bad it was.

After seeing Loren off, we went to this mall where I finally got my haircut while Sawa and her mum went off to do some mysterious woman things. Then we went into Tokyo where my mum met Sawa’s family for the first time after she arrived in Japan (they met once before at graduation). We went to this really cool little restaurant and had a wonderful dinner of delicious food, sake and wine, and talked about all the great things we’d do in Japan and in New Zealand when Sawa’s family comes to visit for our New Zealand wedding celebration in January. Sawa’s mum loves cute little bird things, especially penguins, so I can’t wait to take her to see the penguin colonies down in the South Island, as well as the one-of-a-kind native bird sanctuary a 20-minute walk from my house. I don’t think we’ll be able to see kiwis, there but we might be able to hear their mating calls.

Now I’m finally catching this all up from Sawa’s house after a blissful sleep where I’m enjoying the blissful feeling of not having to wake up at 4am and being able to lounge around and drink tea without having to rush all over Japan. At some point I’m going to have to prepare myself for teachin again – my first class of the new semester is on Friday, and the following week I am teaching my first class of this new English programme. But for now, it’s pretty nice to just enjoy a brief rest!

Here are a bunch of photos from the last little while:

Me and Loren stumbling upon Touji while meandering through the back streets of Kyoto.

Stumbling upon a neko bus from Totoro!

Biking along the Kamogawa river.

At kaitenzushi (about ¥500 for a meal of sushi – not amazing quality compared to other Japanese sushi, but better than all but the best sushi elsewhere and with the thrill of the hunt as they go past you on a conveyor belt!

With Mum in Tokyo.

Covering the graduating ryosei with beer at the sotsuryo party two weeks ago

The new logo that Rambo designed for the Full House (Friend Peace House, Richards Hosue and Hawaii House)

Sweet Like Tofu (Loren’s remix)

Wow! I can’t believe it is my last day in Japan.  These two weeks just FLEW by, probably because we were so busy — so busy poor Pat tried every day to post in his blog and never had time.  It seems like we tried every day for me to do a guest entry, too, but only now are we getting it in, and that’s only because we have to sit and wait a round a bit anyway because we are waiting for Sawa’s matcha birthday cake to finish cooking. (Shhh! It’s a surprise. And yes, I know, we are adorable.)  We are going to eat it at hanami tonight, which is when Japanese people get together to sit under the cherry blossoms and eat, drink and hang out.  Japan seems to have a very different idea of what one does to ‘go out,’ like all Pat’s roomies will go out to sento(=public bath) at night, or karaoke, or looking at the cherry blossoms. More fun than a bar, I’d say.  Karaoke I hope to do more now at home, but I think we’re not going to get sento to catch on in the states.

Generally, it seems like there are endless fun things to do in Japan, although I’ll admit I have a skewed view since I can be easily entertained at any time by 1)Having tea 2)Looking around a conbini (convenience stores.  In Japan they are EVERYwhere and AWESOME) or 3)Getting tea at a convenience store.  I think it is not random that I enjoy the little things so much here though, since Japan seems to focus on the things I love most in life (food, tea, natural and man-made beauty, details, heated toilet seats).

It doesn’t hurt either that we have done an extremely wide variety of things though, and pretty much anything you’d expect to do in Japan, like see Geisha dance and intense Times Square-ish Shibuya area of Tokyo, world’s freshest sushi, a million temples/shrines/gardens, karaoke and less traditional tourist activities like baseball, “maid cafe” for lechers/teenage girls, long lovely bike tours etc.  We even caught an earthquake last night!

It will be hard to head back to DC and work tomorrow, but there is little more I could have asked for from my time here, except maybe some more down time to let it all sink in.  But blessedly, I had the world’s best tour guide, and some cameos from his wonderful bride to be.  I feel incredibly lucky I got this once in a lifetime chance here, and a little glimpse of their charmed life.  I hope I will manage to take a little piece of it back with me.  Wishing them all the happiness in the world and then some!

Sayonara (for now?)

Loren “Bath-lotus” Crary

Bike tour

Will be brief, because we’re leaving at 7:45am tomorrow to bike to Katsura Rikkyu for a tour, but here are some photos from today.

After a nice rest and going to the local district office to get some paperwork done for the marriage certificate, Loren and I went with Jiiko for an hour-ish bike ride to Arashiyama.

It was really gorgeous and fun biking and walking around, and we checked out Tenryuji temple.

Here are two photos Loren might not be too thrilled about me putting up: the first is this shot this volunteer photographer guy got her to pose for for him after he had taken a bunch of photos for us. If it wasn’t Japan, it might have been a little creepy, but it was really just kind of funny.

In the second one here imitation of the devil face is just a little too close for comfort.

Here’s a shot I took blindly over my shoulder as we biked back along the river.

We just made it back in time to meet my friends Konomi and Masaru from when I was in chorus. We had been planning a nomikai (party) for a while, and it worked out great because I had been meaning to take Loren to Gyuukaku for yakiniku for a while but was worried we wouldn’t have time, when it turned out that’s where they were taking us for the nomikai!

Afterwards, we went and introduced Loren to Karaoke.

Earlier, Loren had given me great news: Haagen-Dazs hadn’t abandoned coffee ice cream after all! So, to make sure this was true, before we biked home (in the cold rian), we grabbed some ice cream at Haagen-Dazs and came home to crash for our early morning.