Transients beginning to wear off

* Update – tried fixing the links to the pics, hope it helped *

So, yeah, the last week was a *little* rocky. And something is still wrong with my system, because I’m waking up at like… 6… and anyone who knows me knows that this sort of thing, similar to life spontaneously generating, doesn’t just happen. But things are starting to level out. I’ll have a car soon, and my friend Matt, at work, took his truck to my storage unit and helped me haul home my futon, and a lamp and some things, so I’m not sleeping on the carpet anymore.

Something nearly as shocking as culture re-entry is discovering who missed you and who didn’t. This is seriously weird. Sometimes people who you thought hardly noticed your existence really miss you when your gone. Other times, people who you hung out with constantly are sort of… indifferent. Still scratching my head. But spirits are up. No more alarmed, S.O.S. type Japanese paragraphs should be posted in a while, I think. But there are still good stories to tell.

Oh, here’s one funny thing – I had no intention of taking a Chinese class this semester, but I went to visit my teacher from last year. She really missed me, gave me a big hug, and insisted I take Chinese 3 (3????). Even though the class was full, she manually installed me, and now I am taking the class every day. This is actually one thing that has made life significantly better. I need something like that. Anyway, it’s gonna be a little tough since I almost forgot all the previous lessons. I am now refreshing like crazy (well, sort of, I guess, I’m busy doing other things too) all the old material. Good news is, my pronunciation seems to still be pretty good.

Ok… so… real quick then, I want to post some pics from my trip to Hokkaido. This was only 3 weeks ago, but it sort of seems like a separate universe ago now. But here you go!

Takuma met Eria, Shinju (Pearl) and I at Izumi Chuo that Monday evening.

Before going to far, we stopped to get some drinks and stuff. (Eria-L, Shinju – M, Takuma – R) . Everyone (well, except me) had slept normally the night before, and we weren’t cranky yet.

We got on a tollway, and in Japan they are really expensive (around $50). The drive to Aomori is a long drive, so here we are at one of the rest-stop locations on the Toll-way. Pearl had some bad tasting ramen, Takuma and I had some sort of beef on rice thing that I am getting hungry thinking off, and I can’t remember what Eria ate.

We got to Aomori at about 2AM. Our ferry to Hokkaido was going to leave at 2:50, so we ran to a konbini, grabbed some moderately tasty and reasonably cheap konbini crap food, and headed back. The ferry was amazing. Didn’t look like a Puget Sound ferry, looked more like a regular ship. It was huge. There were a million cars inside, on lots of floors. To board the boat, the front folded up.

Unfortunately, I was a moron, and didn’t take any photos of the interior. It was really interesting – there is a large lobby inside with chairs, couches etc. A second floor with a large room full of computer games, smaller rooms for the rich people, and a large observation deck.

(looking down on a ship next door)

If you want to sleep and are a normal class person, you go into a very large tatami room, (no shoes) and just lay on the carpet. There’s tons of people trying to sleep, so you just try to find a place where you can sleep w/your buddies. An old lady saw me trying to sleep and gave me this squishy block thing to put under my head. It was nice. Anyway, the boat was about 4 hours long, I think I got about 2 hours sleep.

Here is Eria. Eria is Japanese for “Elijah.” Stout Christian, he is a dentist student. He wants to be a dental missionary. He was working very hard at learning English, and so we had an arrangement – he would speak to me in English, and I would speak to him in Japanese. Had many long interesting conversations with him while boiling in the Sento’s (spa).

Some mountain visible from the boat before docking.

Anyway, when we got to Hokkaido and popped back in the car.

Here’s Shinjuchan in the back. We were all really tired, and a little hungry so we stopped at a rest stop and Takuma got some sort of smoked ika stuff. There was a park, and a really cool mountain in the background:

We had another 6 or so hours of driving ahead, so we hit the road again. Hokkaido, if you don’t know, is the frozen northern island of Japan. Only, this summer, it was roastingly, unbelievably, boilingly hot and humid (as was all of Japan).

Impressions of Hokkaido: very few people (Japan has some expansion room, I see), gorgeous, green, the coast is dotted with a million small fishing villages (Japanese floats!), tons of onsens, and tons of wildlife (avoid the foxes, they carry some sort of disease). I’ve asked a lot of Japanese people if they’ve gone to Hokkaido, and most of them say “no.” When I ask them why, they normally say “well, it’s a different Island.” This just seems so weird to me. I mean, nothing in Japan is really all that far away from anything else. Another funny thing is, it seems that people in Hokkaido don’t seem to get out of Hokkaido all that much.

So, we stopped at some shopping mall because we were supposedly going to play basketball on a nice court, and I needed some cheap but clean basketball shoes. Whatever. After searching 2 stores to find shoes big enough for me, I found a pair that were almost large enough and shelled out 3000 yen (~$25) for them. We finally got to the camp, brought our stuff in, and had some hang out time so we played basketball. Turns out they were too small and gave my toes blisters. Eventually, I just took them off and played barefoot, heh. Oh well.

The camp had already started 2 days before, so we brought our bags to our rooms, and found some empty seats then went to the sento, washed off, and headed to dinner where everyone else was. After that, there was a worship time and message. Came back to the room, and saw bugs crawling all over the windows outside the room. One in particular looked gigantic, so to everyone else’s amusement I jumped out the window and caught whatever it was. Brought it back in, and everyone was like “wow! That’s huge!”

It’s called a “kuagata.” The males (with the giant pincers) wrestle each other when they encounter, and little boys find this incredibly entertaining. So, they find or capture Kuagata and have bug wrestling tournaments. There’s even computer games here based around kuagata matches, or kuagata vs. caputomushi (another wrestling beetle) matches. Speaking of, in my dream last night, there was a cuagata vs. caputomushi match. Anyway… Takuma, Eria and I, bonding in our mutual exhaustion, took photoes

We hit the hay and woke up then next day at 6:00 AM. We were supposed to meet out front for… “exercises.” ok… these were absolutely hilarious. You tune into the radio and do these really funny stretches. You have to be there, to understand why it’s so funny. Japanese radio broadcasts are just really… weird.

(Little boys wrestling Kuagata, before the exercises)

Had some free time at this point, so like normal I went exploring. I went on a small hike up a path. Here’s a cool dragonfly. I did not crop this shot, I had to make several attempts and approach very slowly!

Afterwards, we had another worship time. Here they are practicing.

The worship/talk was the last event of the camp, so here we are posing with some of Takuma’s friends. This was a church camp for Takuma’s home church (he’s from Hokkaido) so he knew just about every one else, it seems. It’s like his yearly catching up time with his friends.

This girl is Kumiko. I think she has some type of palsy, but she was a lot of fun and she sang the songs with more enthusiasm, and louder than anyone else. When her church was taking a group photo, she ran up and pulled me into the pic. heh heh

Since we caught only the tail end of the camp, we weren’t there very long. Our boat left Hokkaido at 2:50 AM again, so we had some time to spare. Takuma followed his pastor’s car, and drove us to Sapporo, where we visited his old church.

(Sapporo Rainbow Chapel)

Rainbows don’t have the connotation that they do here, it’s an Assembly of God church. We hung out at the church for a long time, and I met the pianist for the band at the camp, her name was Saki. She was really cool. Really really cool. Infact, er… well… yeah. Think about these things logically, Marston. Anyways, that was my favorite part of the expedition.

Finally, we left the church and went downtown Sapporo

Sapporo is a really amazing city. It is ultra modern, and arrayed Chess board like. They think it’s like an American city. Well… maybe… there’s plenty of un-chess board like cities in the states. Seattle, for example. But it was a really cool city.

(this was a rad shot, I think)

Sapporo is famous for its Miso Ramen, so we went in search of some. Takuma knew a great place near the top of a building. It’s a whole floor of ramen shops. We ate and were satisfied.

We then began our long and tedious drive back.

The drive back was fairly uneventful. Once more, we got to the ferry station. My hours of sleeping for the previous nights was something like 4, 2, and 6, so I wasn’t doing so hot and neither were the others. Takuma had been drinking these straight caffeine pills (the box illustration was a giant bloodshot but very stimulated looking eye). I didn’t really sleep that night at all, actually. The next morning totally sucked, but we went to a spa the next morning and felt a lot better afterwards. The trip home was sort of a hazy memory for me. All I remember is that they put up w/my crankiness really well, and Takuma was an unbelievable stud for driving and not falling asleep.

 

Good times. If you can go to Hokkaido, Sapporo specifically, I highly recommend it.

 

~ by timu on August 31, 2007.