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Matsuri!

I’ve just come back from my first shrine festival *matsuri*! Wee!

It was the stereotypical matsuri that I was hoping it would be. Lots of food to eat, hapless swimming animals to scoop up with paper nets, and…yeah, more food.

I invited my Japanese friend from the kindergarten I teach at once a month to come with me to the festival. Once she was through with work, we headed that way. We started the matsuri in style by visiting the shrine. I threw in 10円, did my bowing and clapping, then got blessed (spiritually cleansed?…like I know) by the priest with a paper streamers wand thing. I wished for simple and beautiful lesson planning. World peace will have to wait until my lesson plans come to me a bit more smoothly!

I forgot that every child in town would be there, so every other step was greeted with a “Chyareetee sensei!”. For some reason (maybe that I’m cool, yes?), a lot of the middle school kids have decided that I’m good people. Groups of third-year girls (aka 9th grade) would come up to me and start talking to me in a beautiful Japanese/English hybrid language at times, and at other times would be all, “Enough of this English tomfoolery! Wow us with your blasting Japanese skills!”. By the way, any word I uttered in Japanese was apparently more than they actually expected. It seems to be the case with everyone though. While walking past the roadblock for the festival, my friend and I said “konbanwa” to the guards, and the guy looked startled, then said (in Japanese, of course) that I knew Japanese really well. How do you even respond to that? Oh well. The girls gossiped with me (shocking) about the new English teacher. How scandalous! Even the third-year boys were yelling out for me to notice them during the matsuri. That’s a small miracle, I believe. The “miracle” actually involved a little incident with one of the cool guys in a third-year class. He muttered a “majisska~?” *really slangy “are you serious?!?”* when I told him to do an English sentence without looking at the answers, and I replied with a deadpan “majissyo” *really slangy “yeah, I’m serious”*. He looked at me, shocked and at a loss for what to say, then started laughing out loud in the middle of personal study time. Guess he wasn’t expecting that to come out of my mouth. Apparently it won him over a bit. Now he likes to get my attention every time he sees me.

I ate a lot of food. I had expected to. I held back from every snack that tried to entice me before I went. I’m so proud of myself. I started with a something something (sorry, forgot the name) *edit* it’s called “hashi-yaki”, like okonomiyaki wrapped around chopsticks *hashi*, and grilled squid covered in sauce. After eating that, it was on to catching goldfish and turtles with paper nets.

I caught six goldfish before my net broke *what the…now I have a bunch of goldfish!*.

I caught about thirty turtles before I stopped. Yeah, that’s right. I stopped. The netting hadn’t even broken yet, but there was little reason to continue. I had filled up three bowls with baby turtles, and had reached the number the guy who was running the game had caught with one net, so I called it quits. The boys were all really getting into watching me get one after the other, but…yeah, winning so hard-core wears a girl out! I picked the one I liked the most, and he gave it to me in a little bag.

Yep. Not only do I now have a lot of fish, I also have a turtle. Here’s a picture of the temporary living conditions they’re all going to have to endure until I get something better for them tomorrow. The fish are in a tupperware container, and the turtle is in a cut up plastic bottle.

At one point while sitting down and eating, an old man spotted me and started calling out and waving to me. We both looked around to make sure it was me he was waving at, then waved back. He then did the *come here* motion with his hand (in Japan, that’s like waving to someone, only forwards instead of sideways), saying “kochi kochi!”, which, yeah, means “come here, come here!”. He then asked me (still seated on the other side of the pathway) if I wanted any shochu. If you don’t know what it is, check the link. I’ll just say that it’s an alcohol that’s popular in Kyushu, and something that I can’t quite appreciate yet. That means that it’s nasty, by the way. Not to scare you guys any more, he was part of the city government committee that was running the matsuri. They were all drinking, and the oldest guy decided to chat up the foreigner. I had mistakenly assumed that he knew that I also worked for their city. He didn’t. He was just being friendly. With alcohol.

After that, my friend had a vanilla icecream crepe, and I went for a chocolate covered pineapple stick. When I payed for it, the stall owner went right into a jan-ken-pon *paper scissors rock* game, and since I had been practicing extensively in the elementary schools, I didn’t miss a beat. I won. Because of that, I got another piece for free *wafoo!*. After finishing off our food while watching people singing enka on the stage, I confiscated my friend’s goldfish into my own bag after she straight-up dumped it on the ground (accidentally, I’m sure, but nonetheless!), then moved on to my last food for the night… takoyaki! Ah! So nice! And now, I’m so full!

I ran into one of the teachers at the junior high school I work at several times throughout the night. The teachers at my school were there to make sure all the kids left by a certain time. Still, he was the only one I kept seeing. With my luck, all the students who saw us talking together will start pestering me about whether there’s a teacher I like. Can’t wait.

Met a few other friends there who tried getting us to go to karaoke at a bar tonight. Right. Then he brought back a candied apple for me. How nice! here’s a pic of the candied fruit stall:

All in all, it was a wonderful little matsuri, and it makes me look forward to the next one! And next time, maybe I’ll accept the shochu!

And More Fun

And it seems that since I’ve updated my site, if you’re viewing from an early version of IE, it will be jacked. Firefox is working fine. The latest version of IE may be fine too.

With all of this happiness going on, I’ve suddenly gotten back the drive to work, once again, on the new teasmartgarden site. It should be more interactive. We’ll see how it goes.

Blue Box of Doom

Man, that’s what I get for updating wordpress!  Every time I change versions, I have to waste countless hours trying to get the image back on the screen.  Last time was an issue of me not appreciating that there were instructions in the code to help me out, but this time…no such luck.  No matter what I add or delete, that blue box doesn’t dissappear.  Since I’m giving up for the night, we’ll just have to live with it a bit longer.

Please read my post below.  It’s far more interesting than my blue box woes.

I’m Sick!

So, I’ve been uber sick these past few days, and have been humoring myself by playing games I can’t follow *something about them all being in Japanese*, half-heartedly cleaning, and building my gundam. The whole notion of sleeping is not uttered here, for every hour I try, I’m assaulted by violent coughing.

What games am I playing? We Love Katamari (played before in the US) and Final Fantasy XII. What’s really funny is that for some reason, I mistakenly read the “1 2″ on the price label as “1 and 2″. I had just assumed it was a re-make of the first two. that’s what I get for being cut off from the gaming world these past few months. Either way, at least the first part of the game is lovely. The inability to make out more than basic concepts of what’s going on in the billions of speech bubbles is a pain. I have just looked up a translation to make this game more bearable, and now I’m like, “oh, so that’s what happened!”.

So, as I said, I was working on my RX-77-2-Guncannon Master Grade model, and actually completed it!!! (minus most of the weaponry, but…details).

Here’s the before:

And here’s the after:

I should point out some of the other things on this “tower”. I have a cup of green tea at the top of my tower because I’m deathly sick. There’s also a picture of Abe Hiroshi, whom I love to death, and a bottle of the original cologne from Cologne behind him.

And, it’s a bit random, but check out these “Yankee Stitch” dolls acquired from UFO machines in the Tenjin district of Fukuoka City! Aren’t they adorable! “Yankee” in Japan does not allude to Americans. They are delinquent boys and girls who take on a sort of gang mentality. My Stitch dolls are both wearing school uniforms, while one has slicked back long hair, and the other has a bouffant. Think of Yusuke and Kuwabara in “Yu Yu Hakusho”, if you will. They are sitting on my couch in the pic, so you can tell how large they are. So cute!!!

I’m going to go back to doing something terribly exciting…like blowing my nose.

Gundams and Drunk Old Men

So, today was fun. There was a regional ALT meeting today in Kurume, so I got out of work at 10AM in order to catch the bus there. Amazingly, I felt a bit more confident about tackling the elementary and middle schools after this meeting (even though there were like, what, 14 people there?).

After all of that fun was over, I walked around with Collin (the Ukiha ALT) in search of an elusive １００円 *hyaku-en, or one dollar* shop. We ended up having some intelligent conversation over a few big macs and happily finding (at least for me :) ) a toy depaato which had a Ghibli section, among other things. If you ever find Ghibli shops here, they are always so lovely. They give the feeling of a warm, cozy cottage. Well, that’s not exactly perfect, but I don’t really feel like delving too much into its ambiance right now.

I bought a cell phone strap of “On Your Mark“, a Ghibli animation that is beautiful, yet not well known outside of Japan. It’s not too surprising, though, since it’s only about 6 and a half minutes long. It was made in ’95 for a music video called “On Your Mark”, sung by Chage and Aska. Please watch it (it’s lovely) by clicking on the link above. I also succumbed to a bit of geekiness and bought a Gundam Wing model. Honestly, I never really liked the shows that much, but the models are SO MUCH FUN to put together! All you need is an exacto knife to cut the pieces out of the trees, because everything snaps together. They’re freaking awesome, and even more so now that they’re dirt cheap since I’m not paying import prices. This is a great way to spend some free time, for after you’re done (they take at least several hours to make, but one…took forever…) you have a kick-ass, highly posable toy that gets you one step closer to otaku (nothing cool about being too otaku here, but…).

Oh, right. And when I got home from the bus ride, I found that my bike had been stolen.

Damnit.

I blame drunk old men…or perhaps punky young brats.

Hopefully it will be returned in a day or two. It’s kind of a problem in Japan, this “borrowing” of bikes for times like when you’ve had a bit to drink (it’s illegal to have ANY alcohol in your system when you’re driving). At least it was the crappy old bike and not the nice one. The crappy one’s locks are rusted, so I was taking my chances anyways.

And oh my god! I heard that pachinko parlors are filled with old men in underwear, but I didn’t really believe it totally until one of my Wednesday night conversation class students ran across the street to say “hi” while I was lamenting over my stolen bike (and waiting for Collin’s bus to come). He had just spent the entire day playing pachinko with his wife and… he was in his pajamas! I couldn’t believe it! I’m a bit jealous though. I had been wearing business attire the entire day (including heels…ouch), and he had been wearing cozy sleepwear! I want cozy sleepwear!

I guess I should just be happy that I can wear track pants at work. That’s a whole level of lazy that I’ll miss terribly when I leave this country.

And I’m out of here. Peace out.