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.