I can feel it coming...

The weather is not behaving favorably.

Last year, from what I’ve heard, the snow had already started and the ski resorts were open. Currently that is not the case. Yes, the weekend was sunny and warm and beautiful and yes I wore shorts and sandals and a sweatshirt, but I want snow. I want powder. I want lots and lots of white frost everywhere so I can drive up to the mountains to conquer them.

Of course everyone else I know writhes in pain on the floor whenever I say this. They say I don’t understand. That the winter is cold and driving dangerous. I normally retort with “But the mountains! They LAUGH at me!”

I’ve got this image in my head that I’m going to throw on my board and be an instant expert carver. Like I’ve been doing it my whole life. In my head, I’m doing back flips and spins and tricks.

In real life I can’t imagine that’s how it’s actually going to be. Most likely it’ll be more like me going down the bunny slopes 10 times trying desperately not to break my neck while five year olds whiz past me on their skis because they’ve been doing this since they could walk.

But what I lack in skill I’ll make up for in determination! Just try and stop me mountains! Bring it!

紅葉

One of the things I find fulfilling about the Japanese language is the word “Kohyoh”, which when you look up in a dictionary is defined literally as "Crimson Leaves." It essentially refers to the period of time when fall rolls around the country side, turning all the trees different colors. 

It really stood out to me in a really surprising way. Suddenly all the trees are this fantastic mixes of reds, yellows, and greens. Other trees will be rich, velvety purples and reds, others will be screamingly bright yellow. The mountains, which in the summer had all be a lush green so deep it very nearly hinted at blue, are now reds and browns so alive it looks like it’s all on fire. There’s such variation in all the trees around quiet Murakami these days, that it’s like there’s some sort of secret party that all of nature is celebrating right now, before our very eyes.

And today? Today is one of those days we don’t see much any more. The sky is blue, the sun in shining, and there’s just a few clouds sailing softly overhead.

Really, it’s all very lovely.

K Pop (also known as crack)

So I'm involved in this musical that's going to help raise money to help build a school in Papau New Guinea and a lot of it involves taking famous Korean, Japanese, or American pop songs, rewriting the lyrics, and then acting a fool on stage all in the name of building a school for those in need.


Unfortunately there was a horrible side effect.


I didn't realize K-Pop was like crack. Once you start, you CANNOT stop.


Take this video, for example, which I just found today.





Notice the bad clothes, the oddly hypnotizing choreography, the wonderful dance beats, and the awful, awful hair choices.


I think I watched this about 20 times and sent it to everyone who happened to be online with the message "WHAT IS THIS!?!? =-O"


Bad news. That's what it is. 


Mostly because it then led me to this video:





All this video did was make me say "Man, I want to buy ALL of those clothes. Right now." And notice the ridiculous light-swinging-above-their-heads-overly-dramatic close ups that are just so obscenely ridiculously lame that you can't help but die a little inside.


BUT I LOVE IT. I love it so much I downloaded this stupid group's album, and then to balance things out I had to add some ladies to the mix.


Here's the one that came first.





It almost hurts the eyes to watch it because of how much color is involved in this music video, but it's just so damn cute that I can't help but enjoying every awful second.


Now, for our final evidence to support how I'll be collapsing into insanity while locked up in my apartment this winter to avoid the cold, the finally video I've allowed myself to watch this evening:







At this point if you feel mildly ill, much like I do, I can't really say I blame you.


But... ugh... it's just so damn catchy.


Please punch me in the face.

The Cutest Damn Thing

The cutest damn thing happened today.

As most of you know, or have heard, my middle school isn't the easiest place to work at. It's stressful in ways I wish I never had to be stressed, but it is what it is, and so I'm trying to do everything I can to make the best of it.

Today, however, was oddly peaceful, and since I only had two classes, I took it upon myself to finally finish another posting to the English Board that I've been working on a bit over the past two weeks. It's about school lunches from around the world, so I posted pictures from school lunches from 8 or so different countries with information about the ingredients, the country's flag, and the country's population. I color coded everything (following the ROYGBIV rule to make a nice rainbow).

Finally, after two hows of work the thing is finally ready to go up, and our school lunch hits. I go off to eat, and afterwards it's lunch break, and all the students are running around the school going crazy and having fun.

I wander over to where my English board is to post it up and there are some girls milling around just hanging out. I start to put it up and one of them bravely asks "What's this?" as I'm posting the first picture. The rest of her crew gathers around, and I tell them "This is school lunch!"

"Ooooh" they say, looking at the picture. "For Korea!"

"Yes!" I say beaming. They talk about how it's similar to their school lunch, and giggle about the Kim-Chi (because all my students think Kim-Chi is funny for some reason), and I keep tacking up all the different pictures of all the different countries, and we talk about each one as I put it up, looking at the flag and the different foods. Sometimes they shout out things like "Cracker!" or "Olives!" or "Grilled fish!" and I beam and say "Yeah!" with a great, big impressed look on my face, which would make them smile like they accomplished a great feat of excellence (which as far as I'm concerned, they had).

You girls all get an A for the day.

Finally, the last one goes up. We stand back, take a look at it, I ask them which one they think looks the tastiest, and they choose Germany's (mostly because it involved lots of yogurt, fruit, and ice cream), I put in some final tacks to make sure everything sticks, I stand back, the girls say "Yosh~!" (All right!) and then all the girls turn to me and suddenly burst into applause.

Talk about warming my heart on a cold autumn day.

Cue me turning beet red, denying that it's any good (although on the inside I'm really rather proud of it), and we walk off talking about how the girls have science next, and they all like science.

I sat back down at my desk, super pumped about what just happened and really just happy that I managed to have a bit of a connection with some students at one of my most difficult schools.

It was a good day.

Hair Cuts

It's bizarre coming home from a haircut and finding myself compelled to write a blog entry specifically about hair cuts, but haircuts here are such glorious, wonderful thing that I find myself not minding having to sit in a chair for an hour while I use my awful, awful Japanese to have a conversation with the stylist about movies and snowboarding and how driving to Sapporo in February is a terrible, awful idea.

Every time I get an hair cut here, whatever happens is different. The past two times I've gotten shampoos with my hair cut, this time I got a weird scalp massage and shoulder massage where the stylist said "Man, sit up straight kid, you've got awful posture" not in words, but by pulling both of my shoulders back as hard as he could.

Sometimes there are other stylist there, and they're always super excited that I'm there. Today I was greeted by a girl I've never seen before in my life who said the equivalent of "BRYAN!! YOU'RE HERE! YOU'RE SUCH A GOOD GUY!" and I had to quickly put on my "Oh, yes, I've seen you before and know exactly who you are" face before it was explained to me that I'd never met this person before. Well, in that case, hajimemashite!

After the cutting process was over, there was quite the shampooing experience followed by me getting my ears shaved (that was new), and he topped it off by spraying something cooling and nice on my scalp.

And all for less than I pay in America! Hurray. =)

Rare Days

Today was one of those days that's becoming rarer and rarer. I woke up at the glorious hour of 5:30 (mostly because I was on fire from sleeping underneath my Kotatsu once again) and spent the early morning hours mostly catching up on Project Runway by falling back asleep to it. As the sun rolled out from behind the clouds I noticed something strange.

The sun had rolled out from behind the clouds.

By noon there was no mistaking it. The sun was out and it was making its presence known. I took one squinty eyed look out my window -- unshaved and hair a mess -- and decided I had no other option but to grab the nearest book, a towel, and make a mad dash to the nearest park before the sun decided to change its mind and go into hibernation again.

And so there I was, sitting next to the Miomote River in some grass facing into the sun, sometimes reading, sometimes just closing my eyes and being happy it was unusually bright out, and sometimes fighting off this weird crab spiders that had decided my towel was their towel, which it was most definitely not.

The trees are changing colors. Not in the "Yesterday I was green, over night I changed to yellow, and tomorrow I won't have any leaves left" California way that I'm used to, but in a very slow and steady progression. Some trees are the most such amazing mixture of reds, yellows, and greens all at once in a bright display of what I had always heard Autumn was supposed to be like.

I'm still waiting for the snow. Having acquired my snowboard -- well, allow me to rephrase -- having acquired the most beautiful freakin' snowboard in the world, I'm ready to throw on some snow pants, a hefty jacket, and start falling down some mountains. Because I can't snowboard. I think it'll be fun.

But the snow is coming. I can almost feel it. And I'm waiting in the most desperate anticipation of the first Friday where I can leave straight from work to get to the slopes so I can start becoming a snowboarding super star.

Update: Today I figured out how to turn a $120 round trip train ticket to one of the biggest ski resorts in Niigata into a $30 round trip ticket. Yeaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhh. SNOW SNOW SNOW SNOW!

Apples

Whenever you move into a different country with an entirely different culture, you have to prepare yourself for the unpreparable. And since my first entering Japan, I've noticed a bizarre mindset has started to take hold over my brain surrounding one particular round, usually red fruit.

Apples.

I find myself constantly boggled and driven mad by the Apple Situation in Japan. And it is quite the situation. One about which they should write front page news articles.

You see, on my first day here, on my very first grocery shopping trip, as I'm running through the store to randomly grab things because I only had about five minutes time to spend in the grocery store, I figure -- hey, in this crazy land of unrecognizable foods I'm not quite ready to try, I know what apples are. I can recognize apples. Heck, I've even had Fuji apples back in the States being the cosmopolitan I am, so I will purchase myself some apples because I like fruit even if I don't necessarily like apples.

Surprise, surprise, that apple cost me about... well... when I got the bill (and consequently rifled through my bag -- singular -- wondering where all this mysterious food I had purchased to warrant such a hefty bill had disappeared to), I realized that, no, apples weren't $4.50 per kilo.

Apples are $4.50 per apple.

I don't even like apples! I don't enjoy eating them, they sometimes have a weird mealy texture I don't care for, and if they're red and not yellow I'm usually prone to hate them out right.

So why on earth would I want to spend $4.50 on AN apple. Clearly, I need to learn more Japanese so I can understand the produce advertisements more clearly...

Two months go by and I'm beginning to realize my fruit choices are somewhat slimmer than I'm used to and normally include bananas (cheap and delicious!), pineapple (expensive and delicious!), and apples (expensive and not so delicious!).

The problem is I like fruit. I really like fruit. I like fruit juice, I like fruit yogurt, I like fruit for breakfast, I like fruit on my pancakes, I like fruit salad, and no I don't necessarily like fruit pie but I'll eat it anyway because it involves fruit. I enjoy the whole ecological family of which fruit is comprised and therefore I resign myself to start buying expensive apples.

So I start frequenting the grocery store more, pursuing the produce and keeping an eye on the prices.

"Hah!" I sometimes get to tell myself. "TWO dollars for an apple!? It's not worth it. No, Mr. Grocery Store, you will not be receiving my yen today!" And I speed away in my Suzuki cackling, like I just robbed the joint.

But sometimes they get sneaky -- they put the apples right out front, you see -- and sometimes they lower the price to $1.50 per apple.

Now here's my dilemma. On the one hand no, I don't necessarily like apples as they are not my fruit of choice, but in this country, $1.50 for apples is a steal, and if I don't buy apples NOW for $1.50, what if I want apples next week and they're $4.00 again? Then I will have missed out on some prime discount apples which would've made for a good breakfast. So I really have no choice. Once the apple market hits a low of about $1.50 per apple, I MUST buy apples. My hands are tied and there's nothing I can do about it.

I'll choose two or three (making sure they're the largest and most beautiful of the bunch. I want my money's worth) and then stalk off to pay the Grocery Store their fee, and then I take them back to my wee apartment where I throw them in my wee little fridge...

...where they proceed to take up space for the next two to three weeks before I end up throwing them in the trash.

I don't eat them. I never do. I buy them because they're cheap, and then they just sit in my fridge -- that doesn't have much space as it is -- just takin' up space bein' apples that I really, honestly don't even like.

WHY DO I DO THIS TO MYSELF!?

Thankfully I've found a loophole to spare my sanity. If I just keep AN apple in the fridge, I know that in the future if I desperately need an apple it's there, but if I'm at the store I don't have to buy any apples because I've already got one back home just in case.

And this is why I hate apples.

If I End Up Dead, You Now Know Why

On any given cold evening during the week I usually take solace in a heaping bowl of mutton curry and a big chunk of garlic nan. The spiciness of the curry along with the freshly baked nan is usually just what I need to keep my next facebook status from becoming "I'm Tired of Being Wet and Cold" followed by a series of equal signs and opening parentheses.

Tonight was much the same, only this evening was the first time I thought "Well, I never thought I'd be using that speed on my window wiper settings," as I drove down the dark, flooded streets of Murakami, thunder and lightning holding up the rear of our soundtrack in this scene.

Nicole and I arrive innocently enough at the curry shop. I order my mutton curry and nan and start eating when a young man enters stage left to the tinkling of tiny little bells affixed the doors at the front of the restaurant. He sits down at the table next to ours, proceeds to order in English, which I immediately found very disconcerting mostly because Nicole and I would have to change the topics of our conversation to something that at least closer to what the MPAA would give an R rating to.

Sarada, our friendly neighborhood Nepalese Curry Restaurant Owner comes in again to give the young man his order, when Nicole does that sneaky cover-one-side-of-your-mouth-while-whispering-and-pointing-at-the-person-next-to-you thing to inform me that we're sitting next to Jeff, a teacher from about 20 minutes south.

Aaah, crap, so whatever we say he's going to understand. Time to scale it down to a PG-13. But in the interest of being friendly and neighborly (since I've heard about the man but have yet to meet him and he's supposed to be coming to my Adult English Class this week), when we pull out things together to leave I step over to him and have this short little conversation.

Me:  Ah! Excuse me! Are you Jeff?
Jeff:  Oh! Yes, I am! Are you Bryan?
Me:  Yes! I am! It's nice to meet you!
Jeff:  Nice to meet you! My name is Watanabe.
Me:  ...eh... wha--...huh?
Nicole:  Are you Jeff from two cities over?
Not-Jeff:  No! My name is Watanabe! I work at the Murakami hospital!
Me/Nicole!: Oh! You're not Jeff? We thought you were Jeff! So sorry for interrupting! We thought you were someone else!

And we were on our way.

Cut to five minutes later, driving down an abandoned, dark and rainy road.

Nicole: Bryan... did you tell him your name?
Me: I...uh... well I did, didn't I?
Nicole: No, I don't think you did.
Me: I...uh... I didn't... did I?

[Insert appropriate ominous thunder/lightning combination here]

The man knew my name. HOW DID HE KNOW WHO I AM.

Sometimes I don't lock my door at night because Japan is a pretty safe country. I've decided to make a change in that behavior starting this evening...

My Faith In God Is Renewed

One of my schools has been pretty rough so far, and I’m not talking about the one where the students were attacking teachers. 

No, one of my schools has given me literally nothing to do. I don’t plan lessons, I don’t have an English board to work on, and I don’t eat lunch with the students so I have really limited contact with them. Needless to say this school usually resulted in me being bored to tears by the time 4:00 rolls around.

Today, however, two very important things happened.

First, today was the first day that any student ever has come into the teacher’s room and said “Bryan-sensei imasu ka?” 

“What?!” My ears perked up, my heart was all a twitter. “One of the students wants to talk to me!?”

“Bryan-sensei, for afternoon break will you please play baseball with us?”

YES. YES I WILL. HOW COULD I SAY NO TO YOU, OH SWEET CHILD!?!?

So, with my renewed sense of purpose, I scarf down my food so I can go head out to the baseball field.

Oh, but one quick note.

I don’t like baseball. I hate baseball. Baseball was always that sport I was awful at. I can’t bat, I can’t catch, I can’t do much of anything when it comes to baseball, so I absolutely detest it. 

The kids tell me I’m up to bat, and the only thing running through my head is “Oh Dear God, please, for the love of everything that is holy and good in this world, just let me hit this ball. Please. Please don’t make me look like a chump.”

So I step up to the plate (in my nice slacks and button down shirt no less), take a practice swing, and squat down into my batting position that I’ve spent years perfecting.

Here’s the pitch and PIIINNNGGGG away goes that ball! I can barely believe it, but I’m cackling to myself as I ruuuuuuun all the way to first base and get there safely… except for slipping and falling and getting mud all over my sleeve, but that’s beside the point!

My faith in God is renewed.

Oshiro Yama, the movie!

Youtube has finally decided to be much less of a jerk, which means I can show you this video from my first day in Murakami.

Accompanied with this movie is a drinking game for those of you who are of age. Any time I am generally obnoxious, take a drink. Anytime I make over use of the word "So" or "Super", take a drink. I'll count for you in the beginning, but you're going to have to count later on.

Have more than one drink available.




I smell an Oscar nomination!

A Typical Day in Japan

My days usually begin around six o'clock. That's when I roll over to throw my alarm clock against the wall to get it to shut up. Normally, however, this only activates the snooze function, so around 6:09 I'm dragging myself out of bed, hair a mess and eyes puffy and red, to find my alarm to get it to shut up again. I spend the next 10 minutes or so sitting on my futon mostly being angry that I'm awake while trying to see how long I can get away with doing nothing before I absolutely have to jump in the shower.

I run the hot water for about 20 minutes trying desperately to stop the dreaming and wake up so I can mentally prepare myself for the battle I'm about to undergo. Because when it's just you and 200 screaming children aged anywhere from five to fifteen, you need some morning mental preparation.

Next is ironing my shirt, something that also usually frustrates me because I always tell myself to do it the night before, and I never do. Ever. The next thing is one banana and some peanut butter on toast and I'm out the door by 7:30. I enjoy about 10 minutes of loud music in the car now that I'm officially awake (sometimes practicing for karaoke on the drive to school) and then I'm at my desk and furiously sorting through my list of activities to prepare something for my lessons for that day while I still have some time left before the madness begins.

For the next eight hours I'm either in class trying to get kids to speak English (sometimes I'm more successful with this than others but all the while I'm talking LOUDLY-AND-SLOWLY), or sitting at my desk trying to plan for other lessons, or sitting at my desk while my coworkers teach me slang and I teach them the various different ways to say "cool" or "awesome" or "sweet" or "sick", or I'm still fighting off sleep and desperately trying to figure out where I can get some coffee.

Then lunch time rolls around. By this time I'm positively starving, but for the most part all the lunches, while pretty tasty, always include some sort of weird assortment of vegetables that always give me gas, so I spend the last few hours at school trying to figure out how I can relax my stomach and blame it on one of the students or the dog.

Sometimes I eat with the students and then for afternoon break I'm a human jungle gym for them to climb on. Sometimes I remember to bring my track suit for this. Other times, I don't. For some reason the elementary school kids love climbing up onto my back so I can run them around school, or spin them around to make them go "WOoOOAAhhHH" and laugh. Sometimes they just want to stare at me and giggle, sometimes we play tag (where I'm the "demon") or dodgeball, and for the most part my middle school kids ignore me.

You win some, you lose some.

Finally four o'clock rolls around and the "going home from school" song plays over the loud speakers that are placed throughout town so that no matter where you are, you know school is done. Depending on how busy the day is either I'll stay for an extra half hour or so to help teachers out with work if they have any, or I'm out the door by four-oh-one, speeding home so that I can get ready for either the gym/taiko practice/going out to dinner with friends/running errands/grocery shopping or if I'm particularly lucky I'll have a few quiet hours at home to read, write out some postcards (only god knows I have no idea when exactly I'm going to get to the post office to send them), or work on my cross stitch, hoping desperately that I'll be in bed before 11 o'clock. If I'm in bed by ten, this is a good day.

Sometimes I lay out my futon, sometimes I fall asleep in my chair because it's comfortable, sometimes I wake up at 1am realizing I haven't set my alarm and I drag myself over to the stupid thing to set it, knowing I've only got five glorious hours of peace left before I wake myself up to do it all over again.

Life here is good.

Bryan Acts a Fool in Tokyo!

Part Two: Sumo and Exhaustion

Also Starring: Sumo butt. Lots and lots of Sumo butt.

After spending a pretty restless night in our capsule hotel (sleeping next to 23 other people, many of whom wanted to talk about the morality of eating dog meat in Korea for long enough to make me want to lean out my capsule and hiss wildly at them), it was time for Sumo!

Waking up early, me and Nicole head off to the arena… with lots of other foreigners. The gates opened at 8, but nothing started until 10, so for a couple hours it was just us and lots of other not-Japanese people.

I’d say I was surprised, and at first I was. I mean, eight hours of sumo means eight hours of big fat naked man butt. 

Eight. Hours.

Thankfully for the majority of this I was sitting up in our second story seating well away from all the butt, but Nicole brought her telescopic lens, which meant we didn’t have to miss one cottage cheese back side.

It all started without a whole lot of pomp or circumstance. The judges enter the arena and sit far too close to the ring for my own personal liking in an area I lovingly refer to as The Splash Zone. These judges are taking their lives into their own hands, because on more than one occasion, one wrestler full on picked up the other and threw him out of the ring. 

Now when there weren’t very many people in the arena, this is perfectly fine. The judge can sort of lean to one side, and the tumbling sumo can get back on his feet pretty easily. But once the stands fill up, there’s pretty much nothing you can do when you’ve got a giant of a man flying towards you. Especially if you’re a wee little old Japanese man like most of the people in the front rows were.

Over the next several hours the stands filled up, and you could feel the tension building as we approached the final match: Hakuho vs. Baruto.

As the match came up, Hakuho was undefeated, 12 wins to 0, while Baruto had only won 9 of the 12 matches, but the last five times these two butted heads, Baruto always came out the victor.

By the time the two enter the arena, everyone’s officially gone nuts. There’s screaming and yelling and fan girls are fainting in the stands, and finally the two lover themselves to the ground and prepare for battle.

Take a look!

And Baruto wins!

The rest of the weekend was spent mostly trying to stay awake. After a 14 hour day at DisneySea and an 8 hour day of sumo, there was pretty much no way I was able to stay conscious for our remaining time in Tokyo. I vaguely remember us visiting a temple and Shibuya (this really incredible area of Tokyo with tons of nightlife and neon), but for the most part I just needed a good night’s sleep.

Our return home took about 9 hours or so, but I passed most of it by watching Changeling and Star Trek on the bus on the way home (it was a good way to pass the time).

But finally I got home to my filthy apartment, spent the next several hours cleaning, and then positively collapsed.

Still, Tokyo is an amazing city. And I can’t wait to go back!

Bryan Acts a Fool in Tokyo!

...also starring: Nicole and Edgard!

Part 1

Disney Sea, or, How I Got Lots of Angry Glaring from Japanese Mothers

Originally I wanted to go to Korea for my September trip. Originally I wanted to walk on the demilitarized zone and be as unhelpful to the political relations between South Korea and Best Korea as possible. The plan was mostly to wear my heart boxers and moon those pinko-commies on the other side, but then I found out that flying to Korea costs a great deal of money that my bank account doesn’t have for some reason that must clearly be beyond my control, so the original Korea-acting-a-fool plan had to be replaced with the subsequent Tokyo-acting-a-fool plan.

So a few weeks ago my friend Nicole and I booked our overnight busses to Tokyo from Niigata where we would sleep (hahahahahahahahaha) our way to Tokyo Disney and awake refreshed and ready to physically assault any characters we would come across via camera flash.

And so, that’s how it happened. Away we went on our bus at 11:30 in the evening. As soon as I could I exited consciousness, but the evil bus driver who stopped once an hour turned on the lights every single time forcing me like a screaming child back into the reality that my back hurt and I was drooling everywhere. When we arrived at Tokyo Disney 7 hours later, the only problem was that I hadn’t taken my contacts out (and its a well known fact that contacts turn themselves into razor blades if you don’t soak them in saline every night. Thus, my eyes were angry).

But we were at DISNEYLAND! And not just any Disneyland, TOKYO DISNEYLAND, which I’ll have you know only costs $58 per ticket. 

How about them fuji apples? 

Well, Tokyo Disney actually has two parks, Disneyland and Disney Sea. We decided since we’ve both been to a Disneyland before that Disney Sea would be the best bet for this trip. Hopefully it would be new, and exciting. And Sea-like.

And there we are! The entrance to Disney Sea. Brass bands are playing, it's wildly decorated for Halloween, giant chipmunks are hugging children (and doing their best to ignore yours truly. EXCUSE ME. FOREIGNERS WANT PICTURES TOO, YOU KNOW. We eventually just started photo bombing all the children’s pictures just so we could get in, and the parents were none too happy about it.), and there’s the ever present possibility of a typhoon basically destroying us at any given time. More on that later.

Disney Sea is separated into a few different areas, all of which have some sort of Sea theme going on, hence the name! Right when you walk in you’ve got this giant lake across from which sits Aladdin’s castle and a neat little pirate area that you can wander around. 

Immediately we saw (and heard the screaming emanating from) the Tower of Terror! Right next to this big boat which has an all you can eat buffet (on which poor Edgard had his heart set, but the 30 dollar price tag dissuaded us from going and we opted for street food instead).

Then there’s Triton’s Kingdom. 

It’s so incredibly full of neon colored whacky things that you’ll convince yourself that you’ve traveled to an alternate universe that is hell bent on making you all headachy/vomity thanks to the tea cups ride and ever present black lighting. (Don’t get me wrong, I loved the place and went back for more).

Also, Disney Sea has the Indiana Jones ride from California! It’s actually the exact same ride except it’s Crystal Skull themed rather than Temple of Doom. It was great, and made me think of home!

(Also, why buy those pricey photos when you can just take pictures of the screen? Here we are!)

As you’ve probably noticed, the sky was a pretty ominous color all day and the threats of typhooning destruction lead to the following series of events.

1. Me buying a silly hat and wearing it around Tokyo for the next three days and us buying rain coats to protect ourselves from said typhooning destruction.

2. Hiding mostly in the carousel to avoid the rain at all costs.

3. The destruction of my umbrella by uncontrollable events, i.e. Nicole.

Happy functioning umbrella:

Unhappy angry umbrella after Nicole gets ahold of it:

Then, of course, there was the food. I hunted and hunted for Churros, thinking that Disneyland could not be Disneyland without $10 Disney Churros of which I would buy at least twenty seven. It was in between rides, as we wandered hungry, cold, and wet that Edgard suddenly shouted “THAT GIRL HAS A CHURRO!” to which I responded by yelling at the girl “WHERE DID YOU BUY THAT CHURRO!?” She took a bite of her seemingly delicious churro, pointed to a nearby churro stand, and off we went happy as clams… until we saw they were sesame flavored.

Nevermind. I don’t want a churro that bad.

But remember that piratey area I mentioned earlier? While wandering through there, Edgard’s keen perception led to him finding this sign here:

Now PUMPKIN flavored churros, especially this close to Halloween, is something I can get behind.

I got two. I double fisted those churros. 

….and they were DELICIOUS.

As the night went on and the rain continued to pour, the crowds began to disperse towards the exit where the Disney Sea show began to take place (appropriately named BraviSEAmo. I didn't add the capital letters to the name, that's just how it is), so we wandered right on over that way, and in the process took my favorite picture of the evening. Here's Edgard looking surreal!

BraviSEAmo was a very Disney-esque tale about a nice, peaceful water…. ship… thing... and an angry fire dragon who was very angry until the nice peaceful water ship comes along and sings its song of happy peacefulness and sprays its water and then the angry fire dragon isn’t so angry any more.

After the nice little show all the crowds headed right for the souvenir shops (of course) which mostly consisted of this weird bear I’ve never heard of before named Duffy. He’s everywhere. He has tote bags and sweaters and stuffed animals and mugs and everything in the world is all about Duffy the Disney Bear that I’ve never heard of before. Duffy, Duffy, Duffy. Every kid walking around had Duffy the Bear tucked under one arm.

But how easy do you think it was to find ANYTHING at all labeled Tokyo Disney? I think Nicole and I hunted through every single store and we found ONE mug labeled Tokyo Disney. That was it. No sweaters, no purses, no magnets, no necklaces, not even a damn trash bag. Nothing. Consider my mind boggled.

But if you wanted Duffy the Bear, by God you could have him.

Personally I wasn’t interested. I don’t know who Duffy the Bear is, and since he’s not Pluto or Mickey, I don’t care.

After the hunt Nicole and I called it quits. Edgard had taken off after the show because he had school the next day and so Nicole and I were left to wander the underground labyrinth that is the Tokyo Metro until we found our capsule hotel. But more on that later.

So that's my little tour of Tokyo Disney for you via pictures and blog. Honestly it was way too much fun wandering around and going on rides and trying desperately to photo bomb pictures with Disney characters, but then, I imagine Disneyland pretty much anywhere would be a good time.

Movies My Blog Won't Post

Yesterday I had a plan, and that plan was to post all sorts of movies, one of which had a drinking game involved for those of you who are of age, but for some reason the Internet Gods have decided that they don't want to show my movies to you. So last night I sat there, staring at the web page while my Mac's little spinny rainbow wait thing was spinning away, and eventually it turned into a giant evil laughing clown face that haunted my dreams until I woke up shivering, cold, and alone.

Okay not really. I mostly just woke up groggy and annoyed that 6am had come far too fast.

In any case, it looks like you'll just have to settle for pictures on this blog. Check again soon. This evening my plan is to update a whole lot about what's been happening lately. I know I promised you this in the last entry, but this time I'm actually going to do it.

Stay tuned! Stories to come!

It's Been a While!

I know, I know, it's been a while. I've let all of you down and have shamed myself for my serious lack of updating this blog. But in truth, I went from summer vacation to hard core working teachery stuff so my time has been a little occupied!

But, here's on major announcement. After two months, various calls to the Japanese technical support department for Yahoo BB DSL where my end of the conversation was mostly kept up by saying "I don't understand" over and over...

I HAVE INTERNET. I HAVE GLORIOUS, BEAUTIFUL INTERNET. I can watch the news! I can upload movies and pictures on to my very own Scary Foreigner blog! I don't have to sit in the window sill of my apartment any more!

Yes, I was sitting in the window sill of my apartment in order to steal--borrow--my neighbor's internet. In order to make a Skype date I even had to drive around town for a little while to hunt down some free internet. But now I have my own! And I have lots of stories I now need to write that will include pictures including:

The Mountain of Screaming Birds and the Typhoon
Sports Day and the Typhoon
The 50km Challenge Walk and My Swollen Foot
Welcome to My Apartment!
My New Hobbies Which Mostly Include Currey and Nan
and coming soon: Tokyo Disney and Bryan Acting a Fool!

I've got quite a bit of work ahead of me. So stay tuned! I'll have lots of stories to share pretty soon here.

Kasai-san and the Rotating Sushi

I feel like I’m writing a series of Harry Potter novels.

So in Japan they have these restaurants called Rotating Sushi. Kasai-san kept calling them Mawaru Zushi, which litterally means rotating sushi, but I think there’s another name for them. Basically it’s a noisy restaurant where chefs put sushi on a conveyer belt and you pick up the ones you want and they charge you based on how many plates you have and their color.

I’ve never been before. I’ve never even seen them, so I was really excited to go and Kasai-san kept promising me that we’d go as soon as I got a car. Well the car is here, and it was time to go, so off we went (Kasai-san with her eyes closed while I drove) listening to funky J-Pop on the radio and singing along to the words we knew.

Aaah, the restaurant. It was very, very cool. Lots of weird looking fish I’ve never seen before and all Kasai-san could do was tell me the name in Japanese, to which I would shrug and pop the sushi in my mouth.

Well there was this one particular sushi I kept seeing come around filled with quite possibly the most … interesting thing I’ve ever seen. It was some sort of slimy white thing next to a VERY familiar slimy brown thing wrapped in sea weed. Both were in very generous amounts. I’m eyeing this thing like an angry bull eyeing a novice matador. I view it as a challenge, one that yours truly will overcome with grace and poise and elegance because I’m a cosmopolitan!

...or so I tell myself.

I take the slimy thing off the conveyer belt. “Ika!” Kasai-san said. I recognize that word. The slimy white thing is squid. But she tells me she’s not sure what the slimy brown stuff is. That’s fine. I know what it is. I know what I’m about to get myself into, so with a sense of reckless abandon, I pop the thing in my mouth and start to chew. Slowly. One fermented soybean at a time.

I had a snarky grin on my face for about two miliseconds where all I could taste was the squid. Extremely quickly the natto spilled out of the sushi and all over my poor tongue and I could FEEL the slime covering my tongue. The snarky grin is gone and it’s replaced with a look of sheer agony.

At this point I have my hand over my mouth and I’m trying desperately to chew and drink tea at the same time in order to wash it down as quickly as possible without looking like I’m dying. My stomach is having none of it. Suddenly, it lurches. I can feel my esophagus squeeeeeeeze as it begs me "Stop, Bryan, Stop! You don't have to do this! You can just spit it out!" and I’ve officially entered into fight-or-flight mode and I’M NO LONGER INTERESTED IN FIGHTING DEAR GOD MAKE IT STOP. 

I clasp both hands tightly over my mouth at this point to keep myself from retching and poor Kasai-san (on her seventy-seventh birthday, no less) starts tearing through her purse trying to find a tissue for me. I’m not sure if it was so I could spit it out or so I could dry my eyes which had begun welling up with huge tears as my taste bugs begged for mercy, but either way she’s suddenly in panic mode, terrified that this scary foreigner she’s brought to the rotating sushi is just going to lose the 20 bucks worth of sushi he’s just eaten all over the table.

At this point I start to panic, too. The restaurant starts to fade to black since the only thing I can currently focus on is keeping my stomach exactly where it is while I chew and chew for what seemed to be the longest two minutes of my life with my gut fighting me every step of the way.

Focus, Bryan! Focus! You’re not going that 外国人 that pukes in the restaurant! I refuse! Kasai-san is filling my cup up with tea again but that’s not going to be any use because they make tea with SCALDING hot water but at this point scorching my taste buds seems like a safer option than the alternative.

Finally. I get it down. And my stomach is not pleased. Kasai-san is looking at me in terror, and I ask “Hazukashii desu ka?” You’re embarrassed aren’t you?

And god bless her, the lovely, tiny Kasai-san doubles over with laughter and shouts “Hazukashiku nai! Hazukashiku nai!” “I’m not! I promise!” We laugh. I cry. I pick up the next plate of salmon that comes by and decide that this was an awful experiment.

Ten or fifteen minutes later we’re ready to go, but I pull out my camera because I need a picture of this beast. Kasai-san notices I want to take a picture and calmly waits, not really paying attention to what I’m doing. When we get up she asks to see what I took a picture of, and as soon as I show her, she literally punches me in the arm and walks away laughing.

Natto is not your friend.

Planes, Trains, and Used Cars That Make Funny Noises

There are some silly things about Japan. When you call up an internet company and you want to start up some web surfing, normally they ask you when you’re available, and you’ve probably got internet in about a week.

The Japanese system has taken me thus far about eight. The first step was going to the Japanese version of Best Buy called K’s Denki, where I had a very painful conversation with the store clerk there. Mostly just painful because I didn’t really understand a thing that he was saying. He finished the half hour long conversation by saying “Owarimashita!” It’s done! And I sat there thinking “WAIT! What’s done!? What did I do!?” 

A week later I get something in the mail, I have to send them a copy of my Alien Registration Card along with some dates that are good for me for them to come and install the internet. But those dates have to be at least 17 days from the day I send them my alien registration card.

I’ve now been here about six weeks and no internet company wants to take my money.

Cut to: Leasing a car. I’ve been with my parents to car dealerships before. It’s always an obnoxious ordeal where you sit down with the salesmen and you have a long conversation and you negotiate prices and you try to convince them to give you accessories for free and then you talk to someone about insurance and yaddah yaddah yaddah. It’s seriously an all day event.

I met with the lady at the car dealership with my very-good-at-speaking-Japanese friend Aaron where we sat and he asked her if they good do the same deal for me that they gave him. She said it was no problem but that I’d have to come back another day because the car wasn’t ready yet.

So yesterday I give them a call to figure out when I should come in, and the lady says that she’s going to come pick me up from my apartment to have me fill out the paperwork, and by fill out, I mean I throw my signature down on a piece of paper and she hands me the keys. We drink some tea and I speed away in my new-to-me black Suzuki with custom break lights and some seriously tinted windows. So seriously tinted, that you CANNOT SEE into my back passenger windows. So seriously tinted, that I CANNOT SEE ANYTHING through the rear view mirror.

It’s very safe, I’m sure. 

Life is good! I can get to the beach in five minutes instead of 30 or 40! I can go buy a trunk load of groceries and I won’t have to bungie cord it to my bike. I can go wherever I want…. as long as I have cash to pay the toll roads, and sure gas if five bucks a gallon, and SURE there’s some sort of weird scratching noise the car makes in first gear, but repairs are INCLUDED in the price of the lease AND I have a CAR.

CAPITAL LETTERS.

Anyhow, life is good. And tonight I have a sushi date with Kasai-san. We’re going to one of those rotating sushi places where the sushi comes by on a plate and you pick it up and eat it and it’s delicious.

Hurray!