Now that we have come full circle and I haven't written anything for a complete year, let's just pretend that year never happened and we'll pick up where we left off.

The hottest summer in Japan history is finally over and I can wear long pants again (hooray!). This year has been much busier because I have a lot more classes, kids and otherwise. I am actually enjoying my adult lessons (which are 80 minutes long and have around 10 students).

As some of you know, Elliott is also in Japan now. He's looking for a job in Yamanashi prefecture which is closer to Tokyo and about a 4 hour train ride from me. He came to visit me last weekend and madness ensued.

(undeniable photographic evidence)

First there was a raucous gathering in honor of 2 of my friends' September birthdays. We went to an izakaya near my apartment and then to karaoke. The next day (Sunday) we went to the wedding after-after party of the school director at my favorite school. In Japan actual wedding guests are supposed to give large sums of money as wedding presents. There's a western style ceremony with the bride in a white dress, then an after party with relatives and close friends in kimonos, then there's the after-after party which is more casual and no one is expected to give monetary presents. Apparently weddings in Nagoya are some of the most expensive in all of Japan. Depending on how ridiculous the bride is, she may change outfits up to 5 times during all the wedding festivities. Elliott mentioned that the party was pretty much what you'd expect from any wedding reception, until this happened...

Words fail. After the wedding party we went to karaoke again. I lost my voice the following week. Too much singing. Monday was a national holiday so I didn't have to work, but that didn't stop Elliott from getting the earliest train he could back to Yamanashi.

In short, things are going well. The Nationalist party still circles my block on a weekly basis shouting racist things out of a megaphone while playing the Japanese national anthem. Recently I've also spotted several polka-dotted hybrid priuses driving around my neighborhood as well. Maybe it's some kind of campaign.

I leave you with some photos of this year's Cosplay Summit.

Silver Week

Of all the things I love about Japan, National Holidays have to be my favorite. Silver Week (like Golden Week, only shorter) was from Sept. 20th-23rd. My friend Jenna from college has been teaching in Fukui prefecture (about 3 hours north of me on the Japan Sea side) since last August and we finally worked it so we could get together. We met in Osaka on the 21st and wandered the city a little. We went to the castle and walked around the park.

This was the biggest castle I've seen in Japan so far. There are golden tigers up near the top which is why Osaka's baseball team is the tigers.

We didn't actually go up in the castle, but we sat in the park catching up and people watching for quite a while. That's where we saw these poor dogs. Even the Japanese people were doing double takes to look at them. I don't know if you can tell from the picture, but their hair is dyed that color.

It seemed like every one's idea of a good time for silver week was to go to Osaka. Several of my friends and many of Jenna's friends were also there. We met up with some friends and went to a really good Thai restaurant where there happened to be a wedding party going on on the first floor. It was pretty loud, and when I had to walk through to get to the bathroom I caught a glimpse of the bride and groom who were pretty normal, except for the giant, gold sequined bow-tie the groom was wearing.

The next day Jenna and I went shopping in Osaka, then came back to Nagoya for Indian food at my favorite restaurant here. Jenna is deprived of any kind of food besides Japanese food, she lives in a rural area of Japan, so she was pretty excited for a change of pace. The next day I showed her a little of the city, mostly from the TV tower (which I had never been in before).

Left is Sakae, the biggest downtown area of Nagoya. Right is Oasis 21, a bus station/shopping and dining area. That's a fountain in the oval on the top. I live about a 3 minute walk from there.

It was a pretty cloudy day so the Nagoya skyline isn't exactly radiant, but on the bottom left is a picture of the Nagoya Castle in the distance. On the right is my apartment building which you could barely make out from the vantage point of the tower. I live on the 7th floor of the side of the building you can sort of see.

It was a good vacation. Osaka was pretty fun and I'd really like to go again for a longer stay. Also now that Jenna has visited me I'm going to visit her as well. She has a car because she has to drive to some of her schools. She says that when she went home over summer vacation it was really disorienting to drive on the right again. I'm pretty excited for my next vacation.

Jenna and me on the observation deck of the TV Tower

Tanjobi (Birthday)

Since I don't normally live close enough to a beach to take advantage of my summer birthday my friends and I decided to have a beach party to celebrate the day. We went to Utsumi beach which is about an hour south of Nagoya by train. The beach was really nice, not too crowded, and the water was warm and clear.


We brought a cooler of libations and beach balls, bubbles, squirt guns, and other such fun beach items. Around 4:00 most of the Japanese beach goers start to pack it in and head home, but we were all excited to watch the sunset on the beach.


Vacation is over tomorrow and we wanted to make the best of our remaining free time. We stayed until it was dark (unsure of what time it was) and then found a little beach bar that had good food and more drinks. By the time we decided to head back to the station (which was about a 15 minute walk from the beach) it was a little after 10:00pm. No one thought to look at what time the last train left since we didn't think we'd be there for that long and usually the last trains leave around 11:30-12:30, depending on where you are. The last train from Utsumi left at 10:20. We arrived at the completely dark station at 10:26.

Doug, Takuya, Shannon, and Kate, dismayed at the train station.

We briefly considered taking some taxis but it would have been ludicrously expensive, so we opted for Mos Burger (the Japanese equivalent McDonald's) until it closed and then sleeping on the beach like bums until the sun came up/the trains started running again (which was around 5:30). It was definitely a memorable experience, and now I can cross "sleep outside like I'm homeless" off my "things to do in Japan" list.

On the train home I felt pretty out of place, considering my get up looked something like this (minus the hat)...

The other train passengers at that time of morning were all businessmen with their briefcases on their way to work. I hope I didn't get them sandy.




I put up pictures from my summer vacation in Nagano on Flickr (www.flickr.com). Search for me under people. The pictures from the trip are titled Summer Vacation. The short of it is My friend Kate and I went to Nagano prefecture for about 5 days from Aug. 10th-14th. We took the train to Matsumoto, stayed there overnight, then took a bus to Kamikochi (a national park of sorts). We camped for two nights with hiking and other such activities. Then we took the bus back to Matsumoto and went sightseeing around the city. The last day we went to a hot springs and then took the train back to Nagoya. It was pretty great and relaxing and everything a summer vacation should be.

Marine Day

July 20th was a national holiday (Marine Day) so I had three days off work in a row. Huzzah! There was a pretty spectacular fireworks display down at the Nagoya port. All of my students told me they weren't going because it would be really crowded. They weren't wrong. Some friends and I went and even though it looked as if it would start raining again at any second, there were thousands of people down by the water.



The show started around 7:30 and lasted a good hour. The fireworks were pretty great, as was the crowd reaction. They don't literally "ooo" and "ahh", but it's pretty darn close. I must admit I got a little carried with the fireworks setting I recently discovered was on my camera. I'd never tried it out before, and some of them came out pretty well.


We found a place sort of behind a tree (which you can make out in the pictures) so by the end my pictures started looking more like forest fires. Especially with how smokey the finale was. They were pretty spectacular. It seems like in the summer here someone is setting off fireworks practically every weekend.

Work is going pretty well, summer vacation is just around the corner. Hurray!

It's been a while again. The month of June was brutal with it's lack of national holidays. The weekend of the 4th of July I took a day off and went to Tokyo to see Elliott before he left Japan. We went to Odaiba, some man-made islands near the bay. Sights there were a mini statue of liberty (left) and a giant robot (right).














I particularly like how the robot looks like it's going to start terrorizing the populace at any moment. Allegedly its head moves sometimes, and its eyes possibly light up, but we didn't get to see that happen.

Odiba also had a lot of places to shop, a strange looking building which I think was Tokyo TV station (pictured below) and a large Hello Kitty ferris wheel. There were also some museums. Elliott and I went to a robotics museum. The robot dog and the video of a 4-robot Japanese idol group were the best things there.

This picture is a view from the Kitty Wheel at night. The blurry orange and white thing in the distance left of middle is the Tokyo TV tower.


Tokyo was more fun this time as it didn't rain on us. Sunday we had lunch together and said our farewells, then I shinkansened back to Nagoya.

Nagashima Spaland

This week on my day off my friends and I went to Nagashima Spaland which is an amusement park about an hour drive outside Nagoya. For unknown reasons Peter Rabbit is the mascot of Nagashima Spaland. In the summer it also has a water park and there's a public bath which we didn't go to, so I'm sure we'll go back sometime in the summer when it gets ridiculously hot. I went with two of my fellow ECC teachers and three Japanese friends. My friend Yu has a van so he drove us all there. Below most of the group is pictured in our sweet ride (Kate and I were in the back so we're not visible). In the middle seat are Takuya and Shannon, and in the front are the Yu's (it's confusing enough having one person named Yu when you're speaking in English, much less two, but we managed it somehow).

I went on a Japanese highway for the first time. We went over this really huge bridge, and our Japanese friends mocked us for getting excited about the highway. Since we went on Tuesday it was pretty empty so we didn't have to wait for rides at all. As we were wandering around we stumbled across these performers. They juggled flaming torches for a while and for their grand finale they balanced on boards on top of cylinders on top of boards on glasses. It was quite intricate. Oh, and they were wearing flaming hats too. The one that's facing the camera's hat said "fire ok" on it. It was pretty impressive, they juggled the torches back and forth.

The roller coaster below is the Steel Dragon 2000. Apparently it's the longest roller coaster in the world.

We rode this one twice. There was also this ride that was kind of like a luge that was pretty fun. Nagashima also has a big outlet mall so after we just couldn't stand to ride rides anymore we got some food and went shopping. We split up in the outlet mall and the girls and I ended up in the lego outlet building a house at the lego station. This is the finished product.

All and all I'd say it was a spectacular day off, even though personnel tried to ruin it for me by offering me some overtime on my day off.

Golden Week 2009!

Greetings. Golden week is sadly over. I can't express how much I didn't want to return to work this week. Elliott came to Nagoya on the 1st and I showed him around town. We had some ramen for lunch and then drank in a park with some of my fellow teachers. God bless Japan and it's lack of open container laws. The next day Elliott and I went to Kyoto with only minor set backs. We were tired and uncertain of where we were supposed to change trains, so we spent about 30 minutes at a tiny station in the countryside of Japan waiting for a local train to come by and watching the shinkansen (bullet train) whiz past us (clearly it was mocking us). Other than that the trip was relatively uneventful. We stayed in a ryokan (traditional Japanese guesthouse).

It even had the kind of closet people always live in in anime shows, although if you're taller than me you won't fit. I could have lived there quite comfortably. On the right is our room. They had a basket in the corner with 2 yukatas so Elliott and I had no choice but to put them on. Then we got some dinner and walked around these 2 temples that were on either side of the place we were staying.

The next day we took a bus to a large temple up on a hill called Kiyomizu (pictured below). It was pretty big and had a good view of the city. Then we walked back down and did basically a large walking circle of Kyoto. We stopped in at any temple or shrine we passed (which were numerous). We hit up Heian Jingu shrine which was pretty huge. Then we saw the old imperial palace (or the wall that surrounds it, since you're not actually allowed inside). It's in a big park in the middle of the city. Then we went to the castle (Nijo-jo). It had a fabulous garden and squeaky floor boards so intruders wouldn't be able to sneak up on the residents. Then it was back to Nagoya for us to stay in my apartment for free.

The next morning we went to Tokyo on the shinkansen. It was ridiculously fast. It took less than 2 hours to get from Nagoya to Tokyo. The first day I saw Elliott's school and where he lives and whatnot. Day two we discovered that I wasn't actually allowed to stay in his dorm, so we went downtown, found a locker to store my bag in, and spent the rest of the day walking the rainy streets of Tokyo. We went to Shibuya, Harajuku and Shinjuku. That probably doesn't mean much to anyone, but they're three big areas in Tokyo. Shinjuku is mostly a business district. There's an observation floor in the Tokyo Municipal Building (in Shinjuku) that we went to. It rained the whole day so I couldn't actually see how ridiculously huge Tokyo is, but apparently on a clear day you can see Mt. Fuji from there.

We went to a club, stayed out all night, and I caught the first shinkansen back to Nagoya, which is at 6:00 am if anyone is wondering. I wish every week was golden week.