Kel’s trip, Kagawa trip

Time for a big photo update of the last week and a bit, mostly of when Kel came to stay for a week with Misa. Nikyu was also here, but I don’t have any photos of him right now. I think when I get Sawa’s photos she has some with him.

First, here’s a photo of a surreptitious midnight dip in the elementary school pool next door. On that note, another illicit but awesome place to hang out is the roof of the dorm, where we hung out with Nikyu when he was here.

Here’s us going to the Fushimi-Inari shrine followed by a barbecue and the greatest game of all: Settlers of Catan. Mum came along, as did our old homestay Yuko and her sister Hiromi.

The next day we climbed Daimonji, which is always awesome.

The following day, we played at the Kamogawa river, where Kel and I wrestled like the old days to try to get the ball that this awesome kid threw to us.

Incidentally, we met the same kid on Saturday night when we climbed the roof of what turned out to be his apartment to see all 5 of the kanji lit in the mountains of Kyoto. For any future fellows, definitely go to this roof to see the Daimonji Gozan Okuribi festival!

Later that day, we watched Batman (Heath Ledger’s was so awesome as the Joker!) and went to this beer garden – all you can eat and all you can drink!

After Kel and Misa got back on Friday from their trip to Kobe and Osaka (where we met up with them one night to go clubbing), we went up the Kamogawa river a little way to this cool place you can swim and, best of all, jump off this huge dam!

The next night was the Daimonji festival.

And then on Sunday it was my shamisen & koto recital, after which Kel said goodbye and headed off to Saitama for the final leg of his trip.

As I right this I think he’s in the air on the way back to New Zealand now! It was so awesome to be able to hang out with him in Japan!

For a couple of days Sawa and I had no big plans, so we tried to catch up on all the errands we hadn’t had time to do: writing wedding thank you cards, officially changing her name, my address, getting a new seal with our name for signing documents, etc.

As always seems to happen as the Fellow, though, before I knew it Hayao invited us to his hometown in Kagawa Prefecture in Shikoku island and Oli and I went with him and Kei. We mostly just ate lots of the delicious udon Kagawa is famous for, slept, and ate more udon. It was cool, although it was little weird in that Hayao invited me and Oli to his place, but then he and Kei spent the whole time chatting together in their own little world, as they’ve been doing for the last month or so. I don’t know exactly what’s going on or if Hayao’s still with his girlfriend or what, but it’s been a little weird.

When we got back this afternoon I spent the afternoon and evening with Sawa. We realized that although we’d been spending a lot of time together lately, it’s all been in the context of entertaining friends and family and we’ve had almost no time just the two of us, so it was great to have the afternoon to ourselves for once. She had to go off this evening to Yokohama to receive an English prize, but when she gets back we’re planning to try to set more boundaries between work and not work, spending time with others and spending time with the two of us, which I think will make things feel much less stressed.

Final Budget

I finished doing the final tallies on my budge, and here are the graphs of the final breakdowns (it’s two weeks shy of a full year’s worth, but this waas a good time to do it, and most Fellows would be leaving around this time anyway)

I actually ended up being closer to my original plans than I had thought. The only real things I should really point out for future fellows are:
-don’t forget to budget in the cost of outward plane tickets! Like I kind of did!
-be careful about the phone bill – I ended up spending about twice as much per month as I had intended to. Calls are expensive.
-Some food and travel costs were cheaper than they should have been because of the many times I was treated by various people, including most of the times I was staying with Sawa’s family.
-Travel ate up WAY more of my budget than I had intended or anticipated. It was all fun, but be aware of how much it adds up.
-Incidentally, I somehow wildly miscalculated my research expenses in my last budget, which is why it was so high then. It ended up being in the range I had intended, although I had hoped to buy a shamisen and given my overspending in other categories, that seems unlikely right now.

Nearing the end

As you can see, the regular updates I once had are now long-gone. For a couple of days after we returned to Kyoto, I had no real excuse, I was just catching up on stuff in Kyoto  – music practice, cleaning my room, applying for things I’ve been meaning to for a while, etc. – while Sawa frantically finished her big translation project. Then on Saturday Kel and his friend Misa arrived, followed by our friend Yuko and her sister, and in various combinations Sawa, Oli, Mum and I did various activities together, including having a barbecue, sightseeing at Fushimi Inari, a beer garden, playing Settlers of Catan, watching the new batman movie and going clubbing in Osaka, while trying to squeeze in a little bit of music practice for my concert on Sunday. I don’t have the photos now, so I think I’ll put up a whole heap next week once my concert is over and Kelly’s gone off to Saitama.

Since at that point all the activities I started while the Doshisha Fellow will have finished, I will do a final update with a final tally of my budget and then officially consider my Fellowship done and wrap up these blog posts. After that, I think I’ll probably give myself a week or so to just be alone with no obligations, then I’ll try to get a job to last me till January. So, until then…

Nebuta Matsuri

After a day of just resting up and catching up on some errands back in Yokohama, on Sunday, Sawa and I hopped onto a train with her parents for a three-day trip to the Tohoku Region up in the northeast. We ultimately hopped through three prefectures and many delicious meals and pretty sights, but the highlight was definitely the Nebuta Festival in Aomori.

I didn’t really know what to expect when going in, but as we got ourselves into position to watch the festival and saw everyone setting up, it seemed that, just like the festivals in Kyoto, the basic idea was to have lots of people dress up in traditional-ish clothes and pull giant floats through town.

Although it was the same in this respect, it was also very different in a way I really liked. While the Kyoto festivals were all pretty tame and had a sort of elitist sense of elegance, this festival was very raw and exciting. Probably the biggest difference was the huge drums they pounded, echoing through the town and giving a powerful energy, but the energetic dancing, the chanting, the dark night, brightly lit floats with warriors and demons, and even the rain that started falling halfway through all helped to give the whole thing an air of excitement that I didn’t feel in any of the Kyoto festivals. Most importantly, it just seemed that everyone was there to have a good time, there were all these people, young and old, dancing around and having a grand old time.

Of course, there were still a few cute floats, like this Totoro!

Here’s me getting all excited.

Climbing Mt. Fuji, and other adventures

It has been an extremely action-packed week. I’ll try to recap as quickly as possible and let the photos do most of the talking.

Last Wednesday I headed off to Wakayama to visit my brother and his current and former host families. We mostly did the same things we always like to do when we’re together: played basketball and made some cookies for his host brother’s birthday. Sawa joined us on Thursday and we all went off to the beach. It was good fun for us, but I don’t think beach going is really a big thing for most Japanese women, because except for Sawa, neither the host mothers or daughters seemed to want to swim, or tan, or do much except sit in the shade.

Afterwards we did the old onsen thing and Kel and I got our first chance to drink iced coffee together after an onsen.

That night we had a birthday celebration for Kel’s host brother, where we had kimchi nabe and then ate the delicious cake and cookies back at their house.

On Friday, we all got up at the crack of dawn (which was to become a theme of the next few days) to take the bullet train up to Yokohama, where Mum was meeting us that night. Kel had to go off to see some friends in Saitama and the following day me, Mum, Sawa and her parents and grandparents all went off to Hakone for the weekend. It was super-nice and ridiculously luxurious, with an amazing inn and amazing food and great baths and sightseeing.

After a delicious breakfast and a quick bath, I had to leave everyone behind and rush back to Tokyo for the wedding of my old friend Yuriko who I’d only seen once in the last 7 years. Unfortunately, I’d forgotten to bring all the appropriate clothes, so I’d had to bust some pieces of my own wedding tuxedo when we were back at Sawa’s place, but I didn’t have a jacket and I had to make do-it-yourself cufflinks from a pin and a piece of plastic I salvaged from a trash can at the train station. It was really cool to see a couple of old friends from my exchange trip days, and hopefully now I have their contact info we can stay in better touch.

The following day (Monday), Mum, Kelly and Oli all converged on Sawa’s grandparents’ apartment in Yokohama and we did our last-minute shopping and packing for our ascent of Mt. Fuji, then woke up at 5am the following day to get on the bus to take us to our target.

We were all a little uncertain of what to expect, because many people had been warning us it would be too much for my mum to handle, but there are so many people who climb Mt. Fuji and the Japanese tend to be a little over-protective. As we started our tour and saw that there were plenty of middle-aged and even elderly people, plus one 7-year-old kid in our group, we started to relax and think it would be a breeze. This was confirmed as we started taking excessive breaks after just a few minutes walking, and we started laughing at how easy it was and these silly Japanese people who were all kitted up with hard-core mountain climbing gear and water-proof packs.

Of course, after we’d gone for a couple of hours there was a huge hailstorm, the temperature started dropping and the thin air started getting to us, and we realized that maybe it would’ve been a good idea to bring rainproof packs, and that maybe the excessive breaks had prevented us from getting altitude sickness. It was a good thing that it was only a 24-hour kind of hike because the warm clothes I had packed got totally soaked in my bag, which would’ve been a serious problem if it was a longer hike.

After a 7-hour hike up to our mountain lodge, we had a funny face competition with this awesome kid

Then grabbed a few hours of sleep and woke up at 1am to trudge the final 2 hours to the summit. Seeing the line of headlamps of the thousands of other climbers snaking up and down the mountain side in the dark was pretty cool. The feeling of arriving at the top and then watching the sunrise over the unkai (sea of clouds) was pretty awesome.

We climbed down in about a third of the time it took us to get up, but because it was so steep it was actually more painful on the legs than the climb up. At the bottom we napped for a couple of hours, then our group all took a well-deserved clean-up at an onsen, where I taught Oli the joys of the post-onsen iced coffee (well, just milk in his case).

After returning, Kel and I wanted to have an epic experience, so instead of collapsing after Mt. Fuji like we probably should have, we went out for an all-nighter to a club in Shibuya, where we saw this awesome Engrish sign.

It rubs the lotion on its skn…

After taking the first train back and meeting Mum on her way to catch the first shinkansen back to Kyoto, we collapsed for a much-needed sleep. Kel and Oli went their separate ways back, and I went to meet Sawa and watch “Gake no ue no ponnyo”, the new Miyazaki Hayao movie. I’d been super-excited, because I LOVE Miyazaki Hayao, and although it wasn’t as good as my favourites (Laputa, Spirited Away, Totoro), it was still really awesome and cute and much better than Howl’s Moving Castle and Gedo Senki. It turns out this is the first actual Japanese movie I’ve seen at a Japanese theatre. Afterwards, we had a delicious ice cream at Sawa’s favourite place at the mall.

Finally, yesterday we got up early to go see an exhibit of Sawa’s aunts in Tokyo then cleaned up the apartment and had a fun night with both sides of Sawa’s family, having a delicious dinner and then watching this big fireworks disply from Sawa’s grandparents’ apartment.

(Sawa’s pic, of course)

It turned out that this was the first time ever that both sides of Sawa’s family were all together just by themselves (the wedding was the first time they were together at all), and everyone had a good time.

With full bellies and happy memories, we went home and slept, and now this morning I got to sleep as long as I wanted for the first time since before I left for Wakayama. Yay!!!