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The momentum we’d picked up going from Sapporo to Nagano over the same weekend snowballed into our last week of work at the hospital.  Last Wednesday, Rhys and I had our leaving party at the hospital’s cafeteria, Malon.  The turn out was a little smaller than we had hoped as half of the wards we had worked at were attending an important meeting, but nevertheless, director of the hospital Dr. Ishikawa, the head of the nursing department, and about fifty others of our friends and acquaintances came to see us off officially.

After receiving a certificate from Ishikawa Sensei, receiving the Japanese way of course with two hands and a bow, we wandered around the room talking to people, eating washoku and drinking beer to calm our nerves.  The director had said his words already, and soon it would be down to Rhys and I to deliver our leaving speeches.  We knew in advance we’d have to say something and had the chance to prepare something with our Japanese teacher, but it was still the source of nervousness.  We can speak Japanese to some degree from the six months we’ve spent here, but the hospital provided us with such a fantastic experience that it’s hard to really find the right words.

Nevertheless, we decided to make the speeches without any kind of note to help us (that would be cheating), and managed to talk for three or four minutes.  I made up for my limited Japanese with some poor jokes, and otherwise managed to remember what I wanted to say.  Dr. Ishikawa complimented us on our Japanese after we had finished.  I just hope I can build on the Japanese I’ve learnt here over the last half-year when I return to England and don’t forget it all during my travels.

After the speeches were all done and dusted we received a few gifts from the hospital, including our very own inkans, with our names written in katakana.  Inkans are small red stamps every Japanese person seems to carry and are used rather than signing.  Although far less secure than signing, which is easy to fraud in the first place, these stamps are all you are able to use when signing documents, slips and whatnot at work.  Following the leaving party, we went to an Izakaya with Yamashita, Hiromi and some others, and ate raw whale.  It was pretty tasty.

 The following day, we were invited out to a meal with Dr. Ishikawa, at a hotel overlooking Nagoya Castle.  It seemed like he’d booked the best – and most expensive – seats in the place. We had a five or so course meal whilst talking to him and his wife in half-Japanese half-English, although wearing the same clothes as the night before.  Not because we’d had a crazy all nighter and had no time to get changed, but because we only brought a single suit each.  Which is still at least one more suit than most people take on their gap years, I’m sure.

The pictures stop here.  Now I have left my apartment in Nagoya, I have no means to upload them to the internet.  They are still being taken though and will appear sometime in the future, all going well.

As I turned nineteen on Saturday, just another number but as some annoyingly pointed out “still a child in Japan”, I went out to the Hard Rock Cafe in Fushimi with lots of the people working at rehabilitation at the hospital.  We have a lot of friends in rehabiri, but none of them could make it to our leaving party due to the aforementioned meeting, so it was great to get another chance to hang out and drink with them.  The night finished with a couple of hours in a karaoke booth singing everything from Oasis to outdated Japanese anime theme songs.

On Sunday, as well as clearing out my apartment, Rhys and I were taken to Ise by Yamashita, home to Japan’s biggest and holiest shrine.  In the evening we went back to Yagoto and visited Soda Pop for a final time.  After we told one of the owners it was our last night, he called the other and she came to say goodbye which was a nice surprise.  The day after, I sent a load of my unneeded possessions back to England, handed the room key back to Tojo san and was gone.

I feel weird writing about my last week in Nagoya, because although less than a week ago it seems like an age has passed since.  As soon as I left the apartment on Monday, I met with Hiromi, and along with Akichan we began the long drive to Tokyo.  When I told Hiromi I had some things I needed to do in Tokyo before my travels, she found she had a three day holiday at the time and could make the trip.  Not only would the time in Tokyo have been a lot less fun without Hiromi and Akichan, having to get the Vietnamese visa and anti-malarials would have been a nightmare without their help, the places being hidden away on back alleys in the suburbs.

After six hours on the road accompanied by cheesy J-pop and ABBA, we arrived in the capital of Japan around half past seven in the evening.  Despite having visited Tokyo for two days right back at the start of my Japanese adventure, it felt completely different now I am accustomed to both the language and culture here. 

Over the few days I had to spend in Tokyo before my flight from Narita, we went up the Tokyo TV Tower; much like any other but a little taller, walked around the streets of Shinjuku and Shibuya, which is home to the biggest pedestrian crossing in the world, and I got to spend a couple of nights in a capsule hotel.  Whatever you’ve heard about capsule hotels is probably true.  They are cheap, easy to find and easy to book into and the rooms have little TVs in the ceiling, but the good points end around there.

After booking in at the lobby in a capsule hotel just out of Shinagawa, I went up to the third floor to my room, which is actually just a small hole chiselled out of the wall.  There were about seven floors in the hotel, each having two rows of capsules, maybe around forty capsules per floor.  The hallway with capsules lined up one after another was quite reminiscent of a mausoleum.  Mine was on the upper level so I had to clamber up a small step ladder to get into my capsule.  Due to the small size of the lockers and huge size of my backpack, I had to sleep with the thing in my coffin sized box.  It was fun for the experience, and the location of capsule hotels is usually pretty decent – the second one I stayed in was 15 minutes walk from the centre of Roppongi – but finding a youth hostel a little bit out of town is a better option. It’s no more expensive, often cheaper in fact, and a lot more comfortable.

Japan sometimes feels like the kind of city you might read about in a science fiction book from the 1950s.  Things like the capsule hotels, huge TV screens in the big cities and the fact the only birds you hear are the artificial ones which chirp out when pedestrian crossings turn green, or the woodland ambience noise which is played out from speakers in the subway systems across the country.

Sitting outside in Bangkok, where I’ve been since Friday afternoon, it was refreshing to hear some real birds for a change and the sounds of a living, breathing city.  The air pollution and traffic is unrivalled however, so my taxi ride from the airport was long enough to pick up some basic Thai from the driver.  Apparently, the word for cat is pronounced a lot like “meow”.

Anyway, it’s nice and hot, and such a different atmosphere to Japan.  I was a bit uncomfortable finding myself homeless after vacating my apartment in Yagoto, but now I’m at the start of my trek into south east Asia, I’m geared up and ready to go.  I sort of miss being able to communicate in the local language, it feels just like when I arrived in Japan in the first place.  But it’s fresh here, new and exciting.  And I feel free.

I have no idea and no way of knowing how many people actually read this, other than my family back home, but I’m sure everybody who is is probably expecting more snowy mountains and blizzards.  Recently this blog’s become more of a snowboarding blog than a travel one.  But during the last weekend of February, I went to see something at the other end of the spectrum.  A volcano.

Mount Aso, or 阿蘇山 as it is written in Japanese, is the largest active volcano in Japan.  Its other claim to fame is a huge caldera with a circumference of around 120 kilometers, and at its peak is just shy of 1600 metres above sea level.  I’d heard about it a few days in advance of our trip to Kumamoto, thanks to the immensely helpful Wikitravel, a sister site of Wikipedia – just as dense with information but from a traveller’s perspective.  Thanks to the page on Kumamoto, I knew which train to get, where from and how long it would take.  I left our hotel in Kumamoto for Mount Aso early on Sunday morning, by which time I’d already visited “one of the three most beautiful gardens in Japan”, looked around Kumamoto Castle, and eaten raw horse.

After inviting Lucy and Lee-Anna up to Nagoya last November, they returned the favour.  Thanks to some help begrudgingly given to us by our hospital coordinator Nami Tojo, we booked a return flight from Chubu International Airport to Kumamoto, from the 24th of January to the 28th.  Tojo san is friendly and speaks English well, but sometimes seems a little reluctant to help out.  “Well, you can read chinese characters right?” she asked Rhys back when we were trying to organise our transport to Kyoto last year.  She can be very helpful after a bit of encouragement, though. 

We set off from the apartments early enough to be at the airport around two hours in advance, expecting the usual awkward and lengthy security procedures.  However, partly due to it being a domestic flight, and partly because of the level of safety here, the checks were minimal at most.  We didn’t even need to show our passports or gaijin cards.  The only place we were asked for our passports, to our surprise, was at the hotel in Kumamoto.  The other oddity of our journey was that our combined ticket worth ￥60,000 was a small slip of paper we picked up from a convenience store.  It was a relief to get it changed into something a little more solid, and the staff at the airport were helpful, even with limited airport-staff level English.  At the check in, we were asked if we had what sounded like a ”collection” (read connection) from Kumamoto, causing some brief confusion.  Sometimes, peoples English accent is so strange, or on occasion just because an English word is stuck in the middle of a Japanese sentence, it can take some time to actually realise you’re hearing a word you know and use regularly.

The odd accent used by the stewardess reading out an English version of the in-flight information was one of the few points of interest on an otherwise quick and uneventful flight.  We were soon touching down in Kumamoto, one of the larger cities in the southernmost of Japan’s three main islands, Kyushu.  In Japanese, Kumamoto is written 熊本, which kind of means “bear book” (incidentally, Nagoya or 名古屋 is something like “name of old house”).   It may be much easier to see where place names may have derived from with the kanji to help, but it’s no less meaningless than in English.  Kumamoto is more modern and livelier than Kyoto, but it’s still a far cry from the hustle and bustle of our home away from home, Nagoya.  An old fashioned tram line connects the different parts of the city rather than the subway which crisscrosses Nagoya, and the main shopping and nightlife area distinctly resembles a slightly more upmarket version of the arcade in Osu, Nagoya, with a small series of partially sheltered streets packed with markets and stalls.  One of the advantages of the tram line was that it was pretty impossible to get lost around central Kumamoto.  After our practice wandering the streets in Kyoto, we found it pretty easy to follow it through to the shopping district.

Like Rhys and I, Lee-Anna and Lucy are also working at a Red Cross hospital, theirs however is in a much quieter area, and without a convenient subway line they usually either go to the centre via bus or bicycle.     We made our way to the traffic centre on Thursday afternoon and caught one of the few buses going all the way out to the hospital.  When we eventually got there, Lee-Anna came to meet us and gave us a brief tour.  Their hospital seemed a fair bit smaller than ours, after all Kumamoto is a much smaller city, though this had the upshot of her seeming to know everybody who worked in the hospital.  Unlike Yagoto Nisseki hospital, the Kumamoto Red Cross only takes volunteers for half of the year, so maybe it’s more of a special event for them.

After looking around Lee-Anna’s workplace, she introduced us to the director of their hospital.  The director, or ‘bucho’, of our hospital is friendly when he sees us, but seems to keep his distance.  On the other hand, Lee-Anna and Lucy went out with their bucho on a weekly basis after starting at the hospital for at least a couple of months.  Soon after meeting us, he suggested going for sushi.  The place we ended up going to was close, so we could walk there.  Thanks to the Bucho’s bottomless wallet – after his hospital performing poorly in the Japan Red Cross sports competition a couple of years ago, he got the hospital a shedload of exercise equipment to make sure they won the next time – we got to sample almost every kind of sushi and sashimi.  The sushi chefs found it hilarious that we were speaking in Nagoya slang, and we found out Kumamoto slang has a lot of similarities.  As with Nagoya’s dialect, most of it only involves a change in sound at the end of a word, compared to that from Tohoku, northern Japan, which can sound like a different language.

Following several plates of standard sashimi, and several glasses of sake, the bucho asked us if we wanted to try the food that Kumamoto is famous for.  Basashi is raw horse meat, or horse sashimi.  It doesn’t look much different from any other kind of sashimi, and actually tastes pretty good.  And I didn’t get tapeworm, so everything was fine.  Worryingly however, walking around Kumamoto later I saw a sign for something looking suspiciously like chicken sashimi.  My curiosity ends there though.

After a couple of hours, the bucho had to leave to go to either his family or a hostess bar, so paid the frighteningly large bill and said farewell.  We headed back to the hotel room to get some sleep, before doing some sightseeing around Kumamoto on Friday.  Although we’d mainly made the trip to see Lee-Anna and Lucy, they were working on Friday, and there are a handful of things in Kumamoto we heard were well worth seeing.  It was cloudy at Aso san, so we put that off for another day, instead deciding to walk around the city.

Kumamoto Castle isn’t all that different from Nagoya’s, but due to Kumamoto’s proximity to Korea, many of the tourists wandering the castle grounds were actually Koreans.  So many Korean tourists visit Kumamoto, that many signs are written not only in Japanese and English, but also in Hangul, the Korean alphabet.  Although the castle was not damaged in WW2, it was besieged in the late nineteenth century during something called the Satsuma Rebellion (nothing to do with small oranges) and is still undergoing some reconstruction today.  This meant that one of the first parts of the castle to come into view was actually some scaffolding.  Despite this, it still showed some beautiful architecture and from the top there was a clear view over Kumamoto.

Inside the castle, there were walls upon walls of small wooden plaques with peoples names written on in calligraphy.  After throwing around a few ideas about what they signified, maybe something dramatic like people who had died whilst defending the castle, or people who had been born there in the past, it turned out that you could get your own name put up there by donating about fifty pounds worth of yen to the castle reconstruction fund.  Even though the main building was under construction, you could still climp up to near the top.

After wandering around the castle for a while, we caught the tram going to Suizenji Koen, a famous Japanese garden.  Despite having a reputation as one of the most beautiful in Japan, the park was eerily quiet, the only life visible being the few birds resting on stones around the lake, and the army of people tending to the carefully trimmed hedges and trees.  Despite hardly anybody visiting, the stalls were all being manned, if from a distance.  As we walked past one of them, an old lady ran out of the building behind to get us to buy some weird rice-sticks.  Looked like french bread but was a lot less tasty.  The park was scenic, but the stillness detracted from the atmosphere more than it added to it.  The place felt completely artificial and crafted – which is exactly what it was.  Having been a little let down by the park, we decided to walk around one of the other recommended sights of Kumamoto, Lake Ezu.  There were several bright maps dotted around the paths crossing over and around the lake, but the place itself was depressingly dreary.  It was a little livelier than the park, with some people walking their dogs, but otherwise the murky water and cloudy skies made it feel more like a swamp than a lake.  The only colourful things in the area were some out of use paddle boats with cheap looking disney designs painted on.

After seeing the best of what Kumamoto city had to offer, I went to go find some food on my own before going out to meet Lee-Anna and Lucy in the evening.  I just picked a random yakisoba restaurant inside the large shopping arcade, and as soon as I walked in both the other customers and the people working behind the bar seemed quite surprised to see a foreigner come in, and I was soon fielding questions like “where have you come from?”.  Japan is homogenous to the extreme.  Ninety nine percent of the population is Japanese.  This is much more pronounced in Kyushu than it is in the large cities of central Honshu, like Tokyo and Osaka.  Whilst we sometimes notice a few stares during working at the hospital, it’s nothing compared to the attention we receieved in Kumamoto.  Walking to a purikura place on our last evening in the city, a woman walking ahead of us must have been able to hear us speaking English and turned around to look at us every few seconds, seemingly doubting our existence.

After eating my yakisoba, which is basically fried noodles with some meat, Rhys and I went to meet the girls in town.  One of the nice things about Kumamoto is that the shopping area seems very centralised, lots of the bars are packed closely together so it’s easy to move around.  Wherever we went, people recognised Lucy and Lee-Anna.  They ran into their yoga instructor whilst going into a random shop, and when we went for dinner at the end of the weekend, the waitress remembered Lee-Anna from when she last came, and what she was doing in Kumamoto.  That was just one time, way back in September.  It certainly seems like things move a little slower over there, and the community is close knit.  Nice as it is I prefer the bigger city.  Among the bars we visited over the weekend, the nicest was a place called Shark Attack.  The floor was covered in sand and the bartender could speak English pretty well.  Despite what I just said about there seeming to be less foreigners here, or maybe due to it, the gaijin community is also very close.  For Lee-Anna’s birthday, we went to a place called Jeff’s World Bar.  Lee-Anna’s friend Mercedes was visiting at the same time as us, and like she said to me “it was like stepping back into a bar in Canada”.  I could have counted all the Japanese people there on one hand, but it was still packed.

Whilst we were staying in Kumamoto, I checked at the reception daily to see how the weather was holding up at Aso san.  Everyday, the woman behind the desk reported to me that it was cloudy, but I still had to get up early every morning to find out if it was worth going.  However, Sunday was our last full day in Kumamoto, which meant it was either then or never.  I heard it was cloudy, but got up anyway, had my complementary breakfast; thankfully provided by the hotel but unfortunately at a nearby burger joint, and went to the train station.  One slightly expensive train ticket and two and a bit hours later, I was standing outside Aso train station.  There was nothing to see.  As I mentioned earlier, Aso’s caldera is some 120 kilometers in circumference.  The train station is actually in the caldera, but being inside it doesn’t offer much of a view.  The main sight at Aso is the crater of Mount Naka, a restless giant which spews out foul smelling sulphur gases.  Due to these gases, I was told at the information centre by the train station that today, I would not be able to visit the top of Mt. Naka by foot.  A cable car carries people up to the summit on clear days, but apparently the risk was too great from time to time.  Regardless, I wasn’t about to turn back now.  I got on a bus by the station which seemed to have already travelled a long way.  On the top of buses in Kumamoto, there is a display for the fare which varies depending on which stop you board.  When I got on at Aso station, the highest fare was over 3000 yen.  It was pretty fancy and had a guide, so I guess it was a tour bus.

I took it as far as it went to Mt. Naka, and as soon as I got off, I could understand why the cable car wasn’t going anywhere.  The stench of sulphur – if you’ve studied chemistry anytime recently you’ll know it’s like rotten eggs - was so overcoming that around the car park at the cable car base, there wasn’t a single person not coughing due to inhaling the fumes.  After admiring the view I decided to walk back along a path away from the volcano, and noticed I was even wheezing a bit from the gas.  Good job the top was closed off, after all.  On the way back, I saw the helicopter.  I’d read previously on wikitravel that there was a helicopter on the mountain taking tourists up for a very special view of Mount Naka’s crater.  Other than the fumes being coughed up from the mountain, the day was otherwise perfect and clear.  It may have been foul weather in Kumamoto, but two hours away at Aso there was barely a cloud in the sky.  I knew as soon as I saw the helicopter, waiting alone in the barren wasteland around the crater, that I’d be going for a ride.

I had to wait at the bottom for a while, as it wasn’t very economical to send one person up on their own.  I didn’t mind waiting at the bottom, as the people operating the service were friendly, and gave me a nice ego-boost by complimenting me on my Japanese.  Eventually, a Mongolian couple came along and agreed to go up with me.  The woman seemed to be fluent not just in Mongolian, but also Japanese and English, so translated everything the pilot had to say.  Getting in the helicopter, which was a first time experience for me, first we each were given a bulky headpiece to put on.  It totally cancelled out the outside sound which itself felt quite strange.  Even stranger was hearing my own voice through the headphones when I spoke.  Nevertheless, soon we were airborne, and in for an expensive but incredible four minute ride.

The view from the top was without equal, you could even see the curvature of the earth, looking past the crater, many miles into the distance.  Aside from that, through the poisonous clouds sulphur the bubbling water inside was visible, itself an alien green.  I can’t remember what the pilot was talking about as we made our revolution about the crater, the view was so encapsulating.  As they say, a picture can say more than a thousand words.

On the Chinese zodiac calendar, it is now the year of the rat.  The Japanese are a bit different though, so here it is the year of the mouse.  Quite fitting then, that around the same time the new year was dawning on the Land of the Rising Sun, I was singing about a mouse (of a sort) in a karaoke booth in Sakae.  The first words of Linda Linda, a song made famous by The Blue Hearts in the ’80s, goes a bit like this:

“Dobu nezumi mitaini,

Utsukushiku naritai,

Shashin ni wa utsuranai,

Utsukushisa ga aru kara”

In Japanese, ‘nezumi’ is the word for mouse, or rat.  I suppose that’s where the confusion over whether this is the year of the rat or of the mouse arises from.  Regardless, it’s not really important.  On New Year’s Eve, we didn’t have much of a plan.  So, we went to Sakae.  As I said in my previous post, Christmas isn’t a particularly big deal in Japan, if you look past the marketing driven rush to buy presents for friends and family, and the obsession with tacky illuminations.  New Year’s, on the other hand, is comparable to the Christmas we know back in England.  As everybody returns to their homes for the occasion, the streets of Sakae on the night of the 31st of December were almost as quiet as they were in the day.

Not to say that Sakae was empty – the main bars were throwing events and were packed.  On the other hand, Heaven’s Door, a pretty small, quaint, bar we found way back in September, wasn’t open.  It’s a bit hit and miss as far as meeting other people is concerned, since it’s a bit out of the way it’s usually empty.  The owner has a nice comprehensive collection of old LPs though, so it’s got a good relaxing atmosphere.  Our backup plan was The Hub, a supposedly English-style pub, which as we expected was chock-full of Gaijin.  After making our way through the crowd, we bought a pair of extortionately expensive Grolsches.  We tried to make them last whilst we discussed how we’d end up spending the New Year.  At that point, it didn’t look like we’d be doing very much at all.

Nevertheless, we noticed that some girls sitting near where we were standing had noticed us, and they then started singing along to some of the British music playing in the ‘pub’.  I think it was Franz Ferdinand, or maybe the Arctic Monkeys again.  It was a good chance to start talking to them, and before we knew it we’d left the bar and were walking in the direction of Big ECHO, one of the many big karaoke buildings in Sakae.  Karaoke used to be mainly in big clubs with big audiences, like it tends to be in England, but due to the shyness of the Japanese it moved into small booths.  There are probably well over three hundred karaoke booths in Big ECHO alone, spread across ten floors.  I’m not exaggerating.  After a few embarrassingly out of tune performances of both English and Japanese songs, I put the mic down and we said goodbye to our new friends.  We remembered we had a friend to call, Tom, who had come up to Nagoya from Nishio, where he’s volunteering much like we are in Yagoto Nisseki.

 We headed back towards Sakae station, where we knew there’d be a payphone.   We were there just in time for the New Year countdown – well at least, we were running down the subway stairs as they called out the last “San, ni, ichi…”.  There was a bit of a show for the event outside of Sunshine Sakae, a sort of department store I believe, with a giant lit-up ferris wheel outside.  Presenting were who I could only assume were some Z-list celebrities, like the people you see turning the Christmas lights on in cities in England.  After they finished their set, an amateur band showed up, so Rhys and I watched them for a while.  The singer was a girl, and she had a nice voice.  Also, the bassist had no fingers, but could still play completely well.  The music was inoffensive, standard pop rock and roll.  It was quite fun and allowed us to forget once again about calling Tom, but after a few songs we remembered and got to a payphone.

After walking around Kyoto for hours upon hours back in November, the layout of the city is etched onto my mind forevermore, as if every detail has been chiseled onto my skull by a little cartographer.  On the other hand, I can still get lost effortlessly in Sakae.  I’m not really sure why, it may be due to all of the buildings being so tall that any significant landmark is obscured from view, entirely, until you’re practically standing underneath the thing.  So when I called Tom and he said he was outside iD Bar, I cheerfully replied that I knew just the place, got the subway to Fushimi, only to realise I was completely off the mark.  iD Bar is actually located a few minutes walk from Sakae station, nowhere near Fushimi.  As we walked back, Rhys pointed out we had this on a small map printed on the iD cards we got the time we went in there with Yamashita ages ago.  I felt adequately stupid.

It was our turn to wait when we finally arrived at iD.  At least we weren’t bored, there was a fairly constant stream of amusingly well drunk patrons stumbling out of the building.  When Tom finally arrived with a Canadian friend he’d brought from Nishio, we went with them to a bar called Frisky, not too far away.  When we arrived, there was already a man at the bar having his face being ceremonially drawn on with a permenant marker, to mark the new year.   We hadn’t seen Tom since he came up with the other Nishioers in November, so we spent a while catching up and talking about the funny things about Japan.  Like how it’s very common in Japanese pop music for the chorus to be sung in poorly articulated English, or more accurately Engrish.  Kimura Kaela is a bit better than most, being half English herself, but you don’t have to look any further than Linda Linda – or Rinda Rinda – to see what I’m talking about.  We also talked about learning Japanese.  Rhys and I have both now been able to spend some time working on the peadiatrics ward at the hospital, so we’ve had plenty of time spent with the children there.  It pales compared to the amount of time Tom has however, as he works at a nursery in Nishio.  Although Japan is well known for having a very homogeneous population, there is a fairly large community of Brazilian Japanese, so he looks after plenty of them at work.  As a result he’s not only learnt Japanese since arriving in Narita with us in September, but also basic Portuguese!  Only the type of Portuguese that is useful for telling off small disobedient children, but still an interesting thing to take back from this sometimes very strange land.

Some more of Tom’s Canadian friends joined us, and for some reason we ended up going back to karaoke.  Well, I guess it was a special occasion.  As we left Frisky, the man I mentioned earlier had been completely coloured in black, and was now claiming to be Tupac.  Despite it being four in the morning by this point, the first karaoke building we tried was full, completely, every room of every floor.  Almost unbelievable.  We tried the next one along and were in luck.  Just like Big ECHO, we were treated to MIDI renditions of the songs we chose.  Presumably this is to save money on the licensing fees for actual versions of the songs, but it elevates the tackiness of these places by the power of ten.  They share these MIDI symphonies with all of the supermarkets I’ve visited so far.  Walking around Valor, our nearest supermarket, or Aeon, the supermarket at Jusco, I can often recognise a butchered version of a popular Japanese pop song I’ve either heard in passing or have bought, playing down all the aisles.  Often to make up for the lack of lyrics there is a tinny vocal melody line in the MIDI.  Getting back to the karaoke, this place was called Karaoke Kan – see the picture, if you can read Japanese.  Basically karaoke building, not very imaginative.  After we were finished, Rhys and I got the tube back to Yagoto.  As it was New Year’s it seems, the subway was running all night so we could go back at any time.  It was about six.  I slept for four hours, and then got up to visit Atsuta Jingu, for the second time.

It is traditional in Japan to visit the three main shrines at New Year, as a sort of pilgrimage.  I was never going to do that, but as one of these shrines is a mere stones throw away from my apartment, or more precisely twenty minutes away on the subway, I knew I had to check it out.  Compared to the relative dead of the streets in the days leading up to this, even before I got off the subway at Jingu Nishi, I had no doubt it would be packed.  Every time the train stopped on the way to Jingu Nishi, the closest station to Atsuta Jingu, the number of people riding it increased exponentially.  Not much later I disembarked from the train at Jingu Nishi.  It was, unsurprisingly, exploding with people.  So full in fact that yellow barriers had been erected to control the traffic of people inside the station.  I joined the flow of human traffic and left the station through Exit 1, also labelled ‘Atsuta Jingu’.

Just like when I’ve been to Gifu after no more than a brief nap of four hours, the fresh air made sure I was awake as could be.  But, not just the fresh air here, but the combined enthusiasm running through everybody around me had transferred across and was flowing through my veins too.  I didn’t understand the real significance of this trip, and wondered if maybe it had lost it’s significance to the Japanese too; just a trip they made because of tradition, because they always have.  Not that that mattered.  Community is very big in Japanese culture, as is family , and from there conformity.  Being carried as if a pebble caught in a stream through this crowd, I felt some of that conformity, even standing out as obviously as I did.  I didn’t notice another foreigner, and certainly not anybody who seemed to be taking as many pictures as I was, but I was still excited to be part of this mass movement for just a short time. 

Through the main gate and down another path, I saw a huge gathering of people.  They were queuing up to wash their hands before they passed under the gate that led to the shrine.  Around every side of this square pool was a dense crowd of people, I noticed quite a lot of families and couples who had come together to perform this ritual.  Around the pool are large wooden ladels, which you’re meant to use to tip water from the pool over your hands.  I don’t know what’s so special about the water, it may just be ordinary water with some symbolic meaning.  Whatever it was, it felt important at the time, such was the fervour of those surrounding me.

I continued from this well to an even more crowded pathway.  I could see why it seemed so crowded, as the tori gate in front of the main shrine presented a bottleneck junction, as everybody saw it as paramount that they pass under it on this important day.  I followed suit.  On the other side,  the main shrine was not open due to the amount of people.  Instead, it had been opened up, with a large white carpet surrounding it like a semi-circle.   Around it a fence stood, and around that stood the people who had passed through the gate.  I had heard about this, so brought some of the excess, otherwise practically useless, five yen coins which had accumulated in my apartment.  I did as everyone around me did, and threw the coins out onto the carpet, clapped twice, and wished for a happy new year. 

I have never really appreciated the difficulty other people face when they try to ski for the first time, as I’ve been going since I was too young to remember with family in Austria.  My parents have a video at home of me crying while I ski for the first time on my fourth birthday, saying I hate it.  “Is skiing good or is skiing good?” I’m asked, and I tearfully reply “bbaaaaadd”.  However if I go skiing with friends from home and see any of them struggling on their early attempts, I can’t really imagine myself doing so, or even understand what they find difficult.  Well, I couldn’t before.

On Saturday the 15th of December, I got up at five in the morning and was picked up by Yamachan and his friend Tanachan, and we set off on the road to Gifu.  An hour or so into the journey, the clouds opened up and it started to rain pretty hard.  We were a bit worried that it’d be raining up on the mountain too, and although that didn’t make us consider turning around for a second, it would mean pretty dire conditions.   Our fears were set aside pretty soon though, as we drove past a lit up sign at the mouth of a tunnel with a snowman exclaiming “ユキ注意！”, or in English, “WARNING, SNOW!”.  Sure enough, as we emerged from the tunnel the rain had thickened to snow and was beginning to set on the trees and ground.

That was when I was able to appreciate the truly magical thing about Japan, it has every natural extreme.  The cities here can be described as concrete monstrosities, but it’s only because they have to be as resistant as possible to the huge earthquakes that occasionally threaten them.  In only my second day in Japan, I walked around Tokyo at night through a violent typhoon that made the umbrella I’d bought earlier seem as useless as one of those little cocktail-stick umbrellas they sometimes stick in your drinks at beach bars.  Then there are is the mountainous backbone of the country; Mount Fuji is a dormant volcano, but there are also a number of active volconoes such as Sakurajima in Kagoshima, Kyushu, which has small eruptions every year.  Across Japan there is a huge climatic gradient, Hokkaido being pretty chilly most of the time and freezing right now, and Okinawa in the far south being a tropical paradise.

This only really hit me when I looked out of the window and had to convince myself I was still in Japan, and not some other country.  In no more than two hours, we had left the urban sprawl of the fourth largest city in Japan and landed in the mountainous prefecture of Gifu.  The snow wasn’t just falling, it was cascading onto the ground like a thick curtain, and soon there was nothing to see but the pure white powder decorating the mountains and trees and roads. 

The night before was the end of year party for my first ward, gastroenterology.  From the number of times Rhys and I have been out with people from work and not had to pay a penny recently, I was shellshocked by the 7000￥ I was asked for as I got the entrance of the restaurant.  I guess everything comes to a sort of balance in the end.  It was easily the biggest party I’ve been to here yet, as the gastroenterology ward is split into two large sections, east and west, and almost everyone from both had turned up.  I went and sat with Dr. Hayashi at the end of one of the long tables as he was on his own.  Dr. Hayashi was the person who taught me at least half of the rude Japanese I know now.  He explained he was sat at the end of the table because it was closest to the booze, and defying Japanese manners (which usually seems to be observed like law) poured us both a beer before anyone else had started.

As the night progressed I got to talk with some of the doctors and nurses from my first ward who I hadn’t seen much of since, and got to watch some of their comedy performances.  Some of it was based on famous Japanese comedians’ skits, like the now all too familiar “son nano kan ke ne!” and ‘Billy’s Boot Camp’, and a few dances, one of them mocking a children’s television program with about six nurses dressed up as blue and green aliens in short shorts.  A lot of it was lost on me, but everyone else lapped it up and if nothing else I got to dress up as a reindeer.

After that, we went to the second party at a bar called Popcorn, featuring an oldish doctor so disgracefully pissed he had to be restrained from  pulling his pants down in the middle of the room, although he still managed a few times.  I sat around and talked with various people and then went to purikura for the second time, then walked home.  Boozy was at the bar with a beer, somehow still standing, when I left, and I can only imagine he kept it up until he passed out.  I got home at half twelve which meant getting barely more than four hours sleep, but the minute I saw the snow and tasted the freshness of the mountain air in Gifu, I felt as awake as I ever had in the past.

Our journey came to a close after just more than two hours when we entered the snow park ‘ダイナランド ’, or ‘Dynaland’.  Yamachan and Tanachan were both going snowboarding, and although it’s something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, I’ve never really had the chance.  I decided to join them and board it.  I knew there were ski resorts in Nagano and Sapporo before I came to Japan, as I suppose many people do from the two times Japan have hosted the Winter Olympics.  If I’d have known how accessible the snow resorts were I would have probably brought some clothes with me, but I didn’t so it meant rental.  I got the snowboard set which included a board, boots, a jacket and some salopettes.  Yamashita lent me an extra pair of goggles, but I had to buy myself some gloves and a hat from the shop.  It was snowing pretty hard, so I wanted some good coverage of my face.  I went for the stylish panda number.  I went down to get changed and five minutes later the three of us were sat on the lift going up for our first run down.  Although it was the first time I’d put a snowboard on, I felt at home as I got on the lift.  It didn’t feel much different at all from when I’ve been on skiing trips to Austria or France.  The signs and the conversations surrounding me are in a different language, but it’s still one I can barely understand.  The landscape is one I’m used to too, as I ride the lift up with my legs dangling below, crossing past tall pylons and being able to see other snow coated mountains in the distance. 

The pylons were all fitted with amplifiers blaring out Dynaland radio.  The American influence was as clear as day, with banter between the young male and female host, speaking in broad American accents, and popular western music.  This American influence existed all around the resort, with the same radio playing through the restaurant too.  I thought it was a little depressing that it seemed so familiarly Western - but this kind of thing is creeping into a lot of aspects of Japanese culture.   Anyway, as the lift was climbing, I even got a little taste of Britain as When the Sun Goes Down by the Arctic Monkeys started to play.  We soon got to the top, and I clumsily shuffled out of the way of the following chair, falling over as I tried to get some sort of balance on the board.

Tanachan’s very good at snowboarding according to Yamashita, although I didn’t see that much of him on the day.  I kind of felt bad that I’d be holding him up whilst I learnt the basics, but as Yamachan told me, Tana already had to do it once when he was teaching him years ago.  Since I can ski well, I was pretty confident I’d be able to pick up snowboarding fairly quickly.  That was very naive – other than the surface you fall on when you screw up, snowboarding has as much in common with skiing as surfing does with cycling.  Actually, it’s a lot closer to surfing, but I’m rubbish at that too.  Either way, having fallen in the snow more times than I can put a number to, I wasn’t scared about that and was eager to get going.

Today, Yamachan would be my teacher, just as some years ago, Tanachan was his.  So, the first and most important thing Yamashita Sensei taught me was how to stand up.  Snowboarding revolves all around balance, and as a beginner mine was nowhere to be seen.  I couldn’t stand up for more than a few seconds before being reunited with the floor and getting a mouthful of the white stuff.  To stand up on a snowboard, you have to sort of lean your balance uphill.  This is also how you brake.  The problem here, which I faced throughout the day and Yamashita assured me faced every beginner, is that it’s impossible to turn like this.  And as a beginner, even knowing that you have to shift your weight forward to turn, it’s hard to force your body to.  That’s frustrating.

The snow park seemed pretty busy, as it’s still very early in the ski/board season and only a couple of lifts were open, so pretty much everyone was on the same run.  This made things trickier still, as although I wasn’t too scared about falling on my own face, I didn’t want to smash into somebody elses.  The route down was one I could navigate in two minutes or less on skis, but it took me maybe half an hour to traverse with this new and unfamiliar method.  At the bottom we decided it was probably better to go onto the beginner slope for a while until I got more of a feel for it.  The beginner slope was in fact just the latter half of the main slope open on the day, but it wasn’t too steep and was good for practice.

Due to that however, it was full of Japanese kids  who were also trying to snowboard for their very first time.  The panda mask turned out to be a pretty fun idea as many of the snowboard schools took notice and shouted out “Panda-san!”.  I had one memorable exchange with a Japanese kid who looked about six years old, at the top of the beginner slope.  “Speak, panda-san!  Speak!” he ordered me.   “Panda-san can’t speak, he’s from England”, I replied.   ”Wrong!  Pandas are from China!”.  Smug git had me there.

As I struggled down the beginner slope a couple more times, I built up my confidence a bit and for some short, few-second long sections, I was able to turn left, then right, and left before falling on my arse again.  This happened a lot.  Over the five or so hours I spent on the snow that day, the majority of it involved falling on my arse, falling on my knees, rolling over my head or just plain sliding down the hill like a lemon.  I also had a few very close calls and drifted into some other skiiers and snowboarders by accident – of course they were very apologetic even though it was all my fault, as I’ve noticed Japanese people doing in other situations – one time even somebody at a shop apologising for making me wait, when it was completely the other way around!

Just like how the main concern of a good driver is watching out for other peoples mistakes on the roads, a good skiier or snowboarder’s main worry is what less able people are doing.  As a skiier it’s these people I have to keep an eye on, so it was a real eye-opener to be put into the other perspective.  I knew my incompetance would be frustrating for the experienced boarders I held up behind me, which was quite an uncomfortable feeling I wasn’t used to.  After a final run down the big slope where I fared much better than my first attempt (though still far from properly able), we stopped at the restaurant.  I had ramen and a coke.

I thought that in the afternoon, after a break, I would have had time to think over the things I had been taught in the morning and would be able to apply them with much more finesse.  That was far from the truth – in fact all I had done was give my muscles time to register the barrage they’d received in the morning, and I reverted to breaking down the mountain most of the way.  I could see a clear parallel between the way I was snowboarding and the way a beginner skiier might.  If it had been two skis attached to my legs and not a single board, I would have been doing a straight snowplough down the hill to the bottom.  And as a result, I was making my muscles do a lot more work than they needed to.  I knew in my mind that if I did it properly and leaned bravely forwards instead of sheepishly back, I would be more likely to stay upright and unscathed, I would feel less tired and I would be able to turn down the mountain.  I knew this, but to my eternal frustration I couldn’t do it, and from there my ability kind of snowballed.  It was like learning to walk again.

The snow had also hardened in the afternoon as more and more keen boarders and skiiers got on and soared down the slope,  stealing away what was left of the fresh snow, making falls ever more painful.  At about three in the afternoon, one of the bindings in my board broke as I tried to tighten it, and rather than get it changed I decided to retire for the day.  The lifts were only open for another hour, and I thought Yamashita and Tana would probably want to snowboard together for a while without me holding them up.  I probably would have if I was in their position, although like them I wouldn’t have said it out loud. 

After an hour, I was joined by the other two and we said goodbye to the mountain, then drove to stop number 2: the onsen at 白鳥 (Shiratori).  I’ve been to onsen twice before, the scorchingly hot Japanese public baths.  To the reserved Brit, getting in a hot bath with a bunch of naked men isn’t at the top of your to do list, but it’s a part of Japanese culture which seems completely natural.  It’s totally called for after an intensive day on the slopes here, just as a cold beer and a round of schnaps is after a tiring session on the Austrian alps.  The Shiratori onsen has an indoor bath, as well as an outdoor one.  We went for the outdoor variety and after shivering through the icy cold outside air we were rewarded with a refreshing hot spring with a beautiful Japanese garden surrounding it.  I didn’t take any pictures as a matter of course, but the scene was one that will never leave my memory.

The snow was still falling heavily upon the lit garden, the centrepiece of which was a tall stone sculpture, reminiscent of a buddhist shrine pillar.  I got out of the onsen and stood at the edge of the path, letting the extreme bitter air cool me down from the opposite extreme offered by the hot spring.  As flakes of snow fell onto my body from above and I admired the forestry around, the overhanging branches dancing in the wind with the snow weighing their tips down, I felt completely at peace and content, my extreme muscle fatigue leaving me.

It was right back there the next morning though, and even as I write this now two days after my first foray into the world of snowboarding, my arms, neck, legs and especially my bottom are still complaining from the battering they receieved.  But don’t let that make you think I didn’t have fun.  The few moments I spent turning through the snow and feeling the balance between me and the slope felt incredible, and I’m sure with a few more days practice – we’re planning a 2-3 day trip to Nagano soon – I’ll feel almost as at home on a board as I am on two planks of wood. 

また　ね！

This picture may appear late, but it was actually taken at about six in the morning on Saturday. 

徹夜する, or “tetsuyasuru”, is the Japanese verb for “to do an all-nighter”.  I’ve already written about two all-nighters we’ve done in Sakae in the past, but this Friday was something else because we were with our friends who are also in Japan with GAP, although in different parts of the country.  Rhys and I are living in Nagoya, very central Japan in the Aichi prefecture.  Tom, Lee and David are also in Aichi but a couple hours train ride away in a much smaller city called Nishio.  Lucy and Lee-Anna came all the way from Kumamoto in Kyushu, which was more like a couple hours plane ride.  For some basic Japanese geography, the country is split into three main islands.  Hokkaido to the north, well known for Sapporo and the blue-eyed Ainu Japanese; Honshu, the largest of the three and containing Nagoya, Tokyo and Osaka; and Kyushu in the south west.  Kyushu is a long way from Nagoya, so it was great to have the opportunity to meet up with Lee-Anna and Lucy.

Not that they only came to see us of course.  Whilst we had our nights out in Sakae and Yagoto, and Lucy and Lee-Anna spent their days shopping in Parco, the original reason for the trip was a gig at Club Quattro.  I’ve been lucky enough to see The Shins twice in the past in England, but seeing them in my Japanese hometown of Nagoya is something I will never be able to forget.  Although the Kumamoto girls took three days holiday from work to visit us here, Rhys and myself still worked full days Wednesday to Friday – which is probably a good part of the reason for me feeling so drained today.  That said, it was all so worth it.

I managed to get off work a bit early on Wednesday thanks to all of the clocks in the surgery ward being 5 to 10 minutes fast.  This is so they’re never late, one of the nurses was explaining to me, but I’ve already been inconvenienced by it like when I go down to the pharmacy for the medicine at 9:30 and… hey wait!  It’s not ready yet.  I got changed and ran to Yagoto Nisseki station as the train doors were closing, but very kindly they opened them back up for me.  I was pretty surprised as they keep to a very tight schedule, as were the girls sat opposite me exclaiming “yasashii, yasashii!” (friendly).  After a quick change at Motoyama, I met up with Lucy and Lee-Anna at my favourite meeting place, Oasis 21.  It was a long time since we’d seen each other, so we had a bit of a chat before me and Lee-Anna took off to Club Quattro to see The Shins.

I mentioned Club Quattro, or “kurabu kuratoro” in Nihonglish, a couple of posts ago as it’s where Rhys and I went to see The Cribs last month, but I don’t think I spoke of it in much detail.  It’s situated in a slightly unusual place, on the top floor of a huge department store called Parco.  Inside there’s a bar, merchandise kiosk and a small locker room to stash bags and that kind of thing.  The room is tiny though!  I’ve been to several gigs at one of the Manchester Academies back in England and I would say Quattro is a little smaller, making it a fantastic intimate venue.  Also, because The Shins aren’t that massive over here, the room didn’t fill up early like it would have in England or America.   This meant Lee-Anna and me were able to hang out around the bar and talk to an American exhange student we met there until 10 minutes before the band appeared, yet still be mere metres away from them when they started.

Although I’ve seen the Shins twice in the past, I wasn’t so familiar with their music.  In the last couple of months I’ve gotten a hold of all three of their albums and listened the hell out of them, so I knew all but one (new) song that they played.  Lee-Anna managed to get a setlist after the gig but I can’t remember the exact order, however I got to hear all of my favourites like Know Your Onion!, Caring is Creepy and So Says I.  Additionally, whilst there were far more westerners at this particular gig than the other two I’ve been to so far, me and Lee-Anna were able to talk directly with the band during the show, something I’ve never experienced before.  Most of the talk just revolved around Lee-Anna having their babies after the gig but still!  Another very memorable moment was that during one of the songs, loads of people threw the balloons we’d been given as we entered the venue into the air and hit them around for the entirety of the song.  This reminded me of the Flaming Lips gigs where there are hundreds of huge red and yellow balloons floating in the arena, but this was special because it was totally spontaneous.

After the music was all finished with, we talked to a few english teachers who were also at the gig, and then went to meet up with Lucy and Rhys to get a couple of drinks at a bar we know in Sakae called Heaven’s Door, which is a pretty small place with a huge record collection full of classics.  It’s a nice place but can be a little too quiet, sometimes we can meet people there but sometimes we have no luck.  We both had work the next day and thus had to get the last train home, so after a beer and some tequila, Rhys and I said our goodbyes to the girls and went back home.  We’d have plenty of time to socialise on the following two nights, anyway.

We wanted to show Lee-Anna and Lucy our local bar, so on Thursday after work we met them outside Yagoto Nisseki station and walked to Soda Pop.  As it is from time to time midweek, the place was pretty dead, but we sat around with a few drinks and some food and shared some of the stories we’d all accumulated in the last two months.  We played a bit of pool too, the games were quite fair since we were both equally unskillful and equally unsober.  Drinking in a bar is expensive though, and the girls wanted to see how our apartments were so we ambled back home, stopping at Lawson on the way to get some ice for the shochu.  Shochu is a Japanese spirit I’ve grown quite fond of very recently as Lee-Anna was recommending it.  It’s mixed 50/50 with water and it must be with ice.  It has a nice flavour which doesn’t taste too much like alcohol as vodka does, and as it is made from things like potatoes it’s comparatively good for you.  I had a hangover on Friday morning but it was much more pleasant than the kind I’m used to from beer.

We went back to my apartment and had quite a bit of it.  Although Lee-Anna told us our apartments were without a doubt smaller than the ones she and Lucy had down in Kyushu, it was nice to hear that it wasn’t significantly so.  She thought they were pretty cosy, which I guess they are.  The kitchen is way too small but other than that I can live here with no complaints.  This time it was Lucy and Lee-Anna that had to get the last train home – taxis are as extortionate in Japan as they are back home - so at eleven something they took some of the excess booze and went back home.  Work the next day was a little hard going after two busy nights, but we pulled through and got ready for one more.

The red cross hospital Lucy and Lee-Anna are working for in Kyushu treats them very nicely.  After they told their coordinator at the hospital that they were planning a trip to Nagoya to see a band, they gave them an itinerary, organised and paid for the flights and the hotel.  As a result, I’m not sure whether it was them or the hospital that picked the hotel in Sakae, but either way it was amusingly in the middle of the red light district.  We met up with the girls in Sakae near the station and they took us back to the hotel to chat, wait for the Nishio guys to come up, and do a bit of predrinking.

After an hour or so with the four of us, Lucy got a call from one of the Nishio guys and went to find them.  Even though they live very close to them, this is the first time we’d seen them since the couple of days we had in Tokyo way back in September, so obviously we had loads to talk about with them.  Lee brought his girlfriend also, a girl called Yurika who spoke perfect English with a southern British accent.  As it turned out, she was also a huge Shins fan so was green with envy as soon as she found out where we’d been two nights earlier.　　Lucy and Lee-Anna had already heard of a bar in Sakae that Rhys and I weren’t familiar with, called Underground.  We wandered around for a good long while trying to find it, on the way walking past a man handing out flyers.  This is a common annoyance in many parts of Nagoya, but this time I couldn’t refuse as he was wearing a pink bunny suit.

Anyway, we somehow found it and went up to the bar.  Despite being called Underground, it was on the third floor of a pretty big building.  To get to the entrance we walked past a lot of Japanese people who looked far rougher than anyone we’d came across before.  We quickly abandoned ship on the idea of going there however when it turned out it’d cost us a couple extra thousand to get in because we were gaijin, and they were IDing us.  All was not lost however!  A couple of floors below, we found a nice bar called Soulground where we settled for the next few hours.  We hadn’t really made concrete plans for Saturday, but after hearing a recommendation for the aquarium in Nagoya, I was quite interested in going.  For some reason after many tequilas this became a burning desire, much to the amusement of the other gappers, who the next day were quoting back to me various things.  After paying a horrendously expensive bill, most of the gappers retired to the hotel but Rhys, Lee-Anna, myself and David went to Denny’s for some breakfast.

I asked Rhys the following day how good my Japanese was after I was drunk, and whilst I can apparently remember most of the vocabulary I’ve learnt, my grammar is beyond terrible.  That said, I somehow forgot the word “ramen” and when Rhys and Lee-Anna were quizzing me on what I’d just eaten, the most I could struggle out was “Soup…y… Soupy noodles!”.  Nevertheless, we got one of the early trains back and got about four hours of sleep at the apartments, only to be awoken by Tom asking if we wanted to meet them in Sakae at Outback Steakhouse for some lunch.  It was as good an idea as any, so after a quick shower the four of us went back to meet them.  I was happy to see I didn’t feel any worse than some of my companions looked, and we sat around talking about the night previous and planning our day.

In the end, we didn’t do a whole lot.  Tom wanted to buy Windows Vista because he’d bought a laptop two weeks earlier only to realise he couldn’t actually understand a Japanese only computer.  So we went with him and some of the others to an electronics shop in Osu.  Like many of the shops here it was’t just an electronics shop but it sold pretty much everything, so it was fun to look around for a bit.  The best part of this shop however had to be the salesman who was explaining the product to Yurika in Japanese.  I don’t think words can convey the hilariousness of his squeeky voice, but we were somehow able to capture a video of it that will be on this site very soon (as soon as I can fix my youtube thing out).  He was probably a eunuch.

After we finished, we meandered around various shops in Sakae before craving somewhere to sit down and settling with Starbucks.  We reminisced some on the events of the last 24 hours and then seperated – the Nishio guys were in a rush to get back for a party they ultimately missed, and Lucy and Lee-Anna were as drained of any kind of energy as Rhys and I were.  So that’s where our party came to an end.  Even though it wasn’t really a holiday for us guys as we still had work during the week, it’s felt like one.

On a completely different note, after I returned home to my apartment I decided I was probably too tired to learn Japanese but not tired enough to sleep, so I picked up a novel by Haruki Murakami that Rhys had recommended to me as one of his favourites, called Norweigian Wood.  I very rarely read at home, but I can’t recommend this book enough.  Since picking it up last night, I have done nothing but read it and sleep, and make this post.  It’s very difficult to explain why I am enjoying reading it so much, but in addition to being a real page turner, it is so thought provoking and well written (especially considering it is translated from Japanese to English) that it is making me think about my own life and experiences in new ways.  It’s kind of weird.  I think I’m reading it at the perfect time also, as it’s set in Japan and I can understand some of the subtle behaviour of the characters that would have seemed strange had I not been living here.

And so, another week passes and the fun doesn’t look near to drying up yet.  We’re planning a trip to Kyoto, the old capital of Japan, in the very near future, and on the horizon there are christmas parties and hopefully skiing holidays.  Until next time!

またね。