The rest of the time I studied, read, chatted with other teachers, and generally just screwed around. Oh, I did practice swordplay with Elvis, too. Turns out he actually has a 2nd degree black belt in iaido, so we trained in the gym for a while on Monday and Thursday. On that note, holy shit Ms. Giggles wants to be a samurai! She's the girliest, bubbliest, most effervescent teacher there, and she suddenly has developed a serious interest in learning how to use a Japanese sword. I'm still stuck somewhere between happy, perplexed, and a little afraid.
Getting to the topic of this post, though, I have been meaning since I got back to put up pics of my trip to Tokyo/Yokohama/Toyohashi, and I am just now remembering to do so.
Ok, before that, this is a few from our ALT Christmas party before I left, just for gits and shiggles.
Blogger is retarded. I used to be able to rotate my images just fine, but now apparently not. Oh well, just turn your head sideways and it will mostly look how it should. This is the world's skinniest mosque, found while Mike and I were wandering around looking for a public bathhouse.
Part of Kourakuen in Tokyo. It's basically an amusement park right in the middle of the city. Yes that really is a giant roller coaster and ferris wheel.
This picture of a public trash can is amazing simply because, as any of my fellow English teachers can attest, it's impossible to find the godddamn things in Japan! It's a sacred mystery to all of us how the citizens of this country manage to keep it so clean.
I had to laugh here once I figured out what this large and confusing structure in downtown Yokohama was. It's a public toilet.
Local Yokohaman wildlife.
Included simply because I'm immature and stuff like this still makes me laugh.
The best Ma-and-Pa noodle shop in the known universe.
More cabs in front of one train station here than in all of Northern Akita, I think.
This picture is probably insignificant to most of my foreign readers, but it makes some of us English teachers here laugh (even though we shouldn't). The unlit NOVA sign is of a former company, now bankrupt, that used to run English conversation classes in large cities. They were known for overworking their employees and paying utterly deplorable wages. Considering the options out there, I'm shocked that anyone ever came to Japan on a NOVA contract; the company was basically thought of as the red-headed stepchild of the business. When they went under they pretty well screwed all of their employees; many were left with bills to pay and suddenly no monthly income. So I guess the reality is that we all feel quite sorry for NOVA's former teachers, but the company itself deserved to die.
These four pictures show kind of a neat (did I say 'neat?' dear god...) view of Yokohama, as they were all taken from the exact same spot, looking north, south, east, and west.
Random shot of Tokyo, which is probably only special to me because I don't get to see populated city streets anymore :)
Yokohama has the biggest Chinatown in all of Japan. Here are shots of one of the main attractions, and then a view from a back alley. Yes, I know it's clean. As my my friend Andrew put it, it's Chinatown, not China. I've never been to China myself, but he says Shanghai is filthy...
And then New Year's Eve. Noriko and I went drinking at this bar a friend of hers owns, and it was a pretty sweet place. 'Course, it helped that we drank for half price, courtesy of the owner. He introduced himself to me in broken Eng(r/l)ish like this: "Hi Noriko American boyfriend! This my bar! I master, master-bator!" He even completed it with the classic fist-shaking gesture of pleasuring one's self, at which point I nearly fell out of my chair laughing.
So, I taught them some American cocktails, and then we later stopped by a shrine. That fire, on the shrine grounds, is not built of wood but actually gigantic, thick ropes that had been hanging over the main gate. Every New Year's, they burn the old ropes and put up new ones, continuing the circle (of life! and it moves us all...)
I also spent a day with one of my other former host families in Toyohashi. We got lunch at this awesome Italian restaurant, where I met my former host brother, Ken, again. He was 16 back when I first lived here, so I remembered him as a high school age video game junkie. Now he's in grad school studying to be a composer, and he looks like a hippie. He was always pretty chill, but when I met him at the restaurant he seemed just a bit too...out of it. I asked him if he was feeling ok, and he turned to me ever so slooooooowly and blinked before saying, "I have a bitch of a hangover."
Priceless, I tell you, absolutely priceless.
And here's a beach in Hamamatsu, where I went with that host family after we had lunch. Too cold for swimming, but still just lovely.
And finally the inevitable return to the frozen wastes. That'd be my car, which I was in the process of exhuming then.
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