The school where Linda and I teach is at the end of a subway line. This means that the trains come into the station and sit on the platform for 8 or 9 minutes before heading back into town. It happens in the evening sometimes that we will board the subway train and there will be a business man sleeping on one of the seats. We are never sure if they were sleeping when the train came in and they just never woke up or if they boarded at our stop and promptly fell asleep.
This evening is a prime example. We sat down on the seat across from a businessman who half sprawled across 3 seats fast asleep. As the train pulled out of the station Linda and I expressed concern that he may have missed his stop (as in he slept through the long stop at Nonami) but were amused by his lolling left and right depending on the motion of the train. A few stops before I got off, we noticed that he was leaning perilously close to the end of the seat which is a rather hard metal armrest thing. I had no sooner said, “I hope he doesn’t hit his head,” than he of course fell all the way down hitting the top of his head on the side of the armrest.
“Oh, he hit his head,” I said.
“And didn’t wake up!” Linda replied through her silent laughter.
–Linda just notified me that he was still asleep when the train reached Nagoya Station which is only 2 stops before the last stop on the other end of the line.
So I finally hopped on one of the mass-networking fads. I opened a Twitter account today. It was actually quite fun, so I think I’ll keep it up pretty well. Hopefully by tweeting about interesting things, i’ll be reminded to write more about them here later. As you can see, you can read my stuff there on the right or you can go here.
Yesterday I went on a day trip with Linda, Summer, and 11 other people from Linda’s part time job (all Japanese English teachers or students). We met at the train station at 8:45am (too early for me) and drove together in two vehicles. There were 9 people in the van and 5 in the car. We rode in the van and had a super awesome driver. It was a strange experience though because I think I can count the number of times I’ve been in a car (busses don’t count) in Japan on two hands and I’ve been here 2.5 years. Anyways, our driver made it more like a roller coaster especially on the winding road in the mountains that was only wide enough for one car, though it was a 2 way road. Anyways I’m getting ahead of myself. Our first stop was a place whose name I can’t remember where there were a very large and creepy amount of tanuki (the legendary kind, not the real animals). There were literally hundreds of tanuki statues and figures all over the town. We stopped here to paint plates and to eat lunch. I had tofu nabe. It was good. Then the winding road through the mountains took us to Iga which is a ninja village. We all (all 14 of us) were able to dress in ninja outfits of black, red, blue, or purple and wander around the museum area. We went into an old ninja house and saw a lot of trick walls and hidden nooks for hiding weapons and little secret spaces for spying. It was fun. Then we had a long ride back through traffic. All the pictures are here. I suggest you look at them!
It is now time for me to go to sleep. Sleep is interesting. Two nights recently I had dreams that I remembered when I woke up. I have now forgotten them, but it’s still unusual for me to remember my dreams. Does that mean I am sleeping well or not?
Remember how excited I was when I got my loft bed with the built in desk underneath? I have almost exactly the opposite feeling now. Hot air rises and my fan doesn’t aim high enough.
I really hope I don’t dream about the spider that was on the window at school today. Now that I said that I probably will. It was about 4cm across but that’s still a “medium” spider at my school. I dread the “large” sized ones that appear in the height of summer.
Fluffy bunnies! Kittens! Think of things that aren’t spiders. Pink elephants! Those give me the heebie jeebies too… stupid Dumbo.
Ok. Really. I should go to bed.
I will leave you with this: Did you know, on the Japanese keyboard the ‘ key is actually above the 7 and the ” can be found if you press shift and 2?
Though I am well aware of the ecological and environmental benefits and necessities of humidity, I am not inclined to appreciate it when the weather is as oppressive as it has been the last two days. It didn’t even rain today, in fact it was downright sunny, but it was humid enough that I desired to grow gills. Or at the least, to have one of those big bubble helmets the deep sea divers wear. So despite my concerns for the environmental impact, I really hope that summer ends unseasonably fast and with an exceptionally long period of comfortable warm/coolness before it becomes cold.
In other news, I was riding the subway this evening. Well of course I was, I usually do. But that’s not the important point. The point I was going for is this: There was a young man riding the subway with me wearing a t-shirt and toting a messenger bag. This messenger bag was slung across his shoulder in just such a way that it obscured only one letter in the writing that spanned the back of his shoulders. I stifled a giggle as I stepped off the subway past the man who had “gassy sea” written across his back.
It’s June. June is rainy season in Japan. That means that for the next month it will rain about 4 days in 7 if not more. This wouldn’t usually be a problem except that during rainy season my laundry is never truly dry. We don’t have a dryer, so we hang our clothes outside to dry. But, when it’s raining outside and humid inside it’s a bad time to wash clothes. So I look forward to a whole month of bad laundry days. This year though, I’m going to try to find some way to rig a clothesline in my room so I can run my fan and maybe dry my clothes better.
Question: Would you ever consider attending graduate school for philosophy? I read an article that has me at least looking for more information about the future of a philosophy major. According to this article, philosophers are great at foreign and international relations because of their ability to see and understand different cultures. I do enjoy traveling and meeting people from different cultures. And I like to think that I can think in a logical manner. But then, I was rather over my head in my undergraduate ethics class, so I’m not sure I’d really understand. Anyway, it’s a question to ponder.
Yesterday I went to Shiga prefecture with Summer and Linda. We went to Nagahama, a town on the shore of Lake Biwa and renowned for glass work. We met at Nagoya Station at 7:40 am and got seats for the train. When we arrived in Nagahama (about 2 hours later) we walked down to the lake but we passed through a park with a playground on the way. It was a very short walk, only about 10 minutes. We played in the playground on the 4 way see-saw and the rope zip-lines. We played with grass on the shore of the lake, got thoroughly blown about by the wind, and I got a sunburn on my nose. When we’d had enough of the lake, we walked back to the train station and then beyond to Kurokabe Square which is where they make the glass.
We walked around, did some browsing, and ate Nagahama ramen for lunch. We visited a figure museum where they have over 800 figurines on display but we only entered the gift shop. They have some very weird figures in the gift shop. I particularly remember a display with figures from the manga Fist of the North Star in which there was one figure attacking another figure and that figure was made so that you could see his guts flying out. Weird stuff.
We made reservations in advance to try our hands at glass-working. I may have to go back again to try glass blowing, but this time we tried “burner work” which involves making glass teardrops. It’s much more difficult than you may think. I very proudly made three! Then we had a class on making tonbodama which are traditional Japanese glass beads. That was fun, I think the instructors were a little daunted by the 3 foreigners showing up again for the class, but we had fun and I think we entertained them a lot.
After that we went back to buy the things that had caught our eyes before and then boarded the train back home. None of us slept on the train, but it’s not because we weren’t tired, it’s because we were so tired we were silly. Summer threatened to eat Linda’s pendant and I pointed out that Linda’s heels don’t touch the ground when she sits in the train seats. I made vampire faces with my jagalico and we all laughed a lot.
Here are my pictures and Linda’s pictures.
Recently life has been good, just an overall not badness kind of good. I’m gardening with my students at school. I karaoked yesterday and sang the pants off of some JC Superstar (we were excited to find it in the song library, we usually sing Phantom). I didn’t bake this weekend (GASP!). My room is mostly clean. The weather has been on the good to tolerably hot side. I’m not looking forward to full summer and walking around in the heat and humidity, this year I may have to grow gills. I’ve been reading a lot (hurray!!). I’ve been sleeping well. I haven’t been studying my Japanese. I washed the dishes today and made a cup of tea at 5:20pm. I ate my vitamins (grape flavored chewables, I had to ask the lady to be sure they were for adults). Tonight I’m going to make mabodofu (a tofu dish with a spicy meat sauce) and rice. I forgot to buy milk when I went to the grocery store this afternoon. It looked like it was going to rain yesterday but it didn’t. My purse had some kind of sticky thing in one of the pockets and my headphones became gooey. I bought new headphones just like the old ones, I like them. This morning I found Darcy licking the inside of my slipper, it was cold and wet when I put my foot inside. Lizzy likes to play with kitty litter. I bought funky cute new socks.
This train of though has been brought to you by the number 8 and the letters R and L. Thank you very much.
So, this is Golden Week. It’s a series of national holidays in Japan that is a week long, so everyone is on vacation. My school is closed for a whole 8 days! What am I doing to pass the time? First, I cleaned my room and apartment. Then I made honey wheat bread that turned out absolutely fabulous. I invited Summer over to help because she always gets so happy to bake because she doesn’t know how bake many things from scratch. Today it was Summer’s choice. She wanted to make cinnamon rolls, so we did. Here are some pictures from our two baking parties.
