Hokkaido!!!! 北海道！！！

If you can imagine a long couple of entries....then you can read a couple of long entries. I just got back from a week long trip to two of the more famous cities in Japan: Sapporo and Tokyo. This entry is about 北海道の札幌。Last Tuesday started off the festivities. After finishing class around 12:35 Regina and I waited for about an hour before heading out to Chubu International Airport. Chubu, like many Airports in Japan, was built on a man-made island out of Nagoya. Check in and all of that was a little bit confusing because you had to constantly scan a bar code to move onto the next level like some kind of video game (leave it to the Japanese). The flight to 北海道　takes about an hour and a half and so we arrived by about 6:30pm or so. The cool/strange feeling of it all was that we left when it was light out, then fell asleep on the plane, and awoke to a pitch-black sky with the lit-up city of Sapporo beneath us--eerie. Now, if you ever go to 札幌 be sure to beware and pack some extra cash for the g-dizamned subways which will eat you up (the ride to the center of 札幌 from the airport cost about $10!)
Honestly thought, 3 days is not enough at all to do 北海道 or 札幌 any justice. However, with limited time on my hands, I feel like we did as much as we could with the time on our hands! The first night we arrived in the city relaxation was on my mind. Regina's friend Phillip is studying in Sapporo so we met up with him that night to devour some of the worlds freshest すし！写真を見て下さい！After stuffing my face with easily 12 plates of the stuff (24pieces) we paid (about $12) and made our way out to check out this place called Don Quixote's....sound strange? Well, it was! The Don is a store to destroy all other stores. It was a Spencers/grocery/Kohls/arcade/Walgreens all wrapped up into one chaotic mess! WHAT A MESS! しかし。。。。you could find anything that you wanted to in that store. So after spending some time there we headed out to go back to the hotel (Green Hotel 2) where we all chatted the night away. Phillip didn't end up leaving until about 1am and he had class that day! The next day, after some forceful rousing of the sleeping beauty, we headed out to see Hokkaido Shrine 北海道神宮....and it could NOT have been a more BEAUTIFUL day!!! The sun was out! There were no clouds!! The temperature was cool and brisk but we were in 北海道 which lines up with southern Minnesota for the most part and so I wasn't phased. I wore the hat and the scarf that わかえさんmade for me along with my sweatshirt and I was actually quite warm in the fall sun. The leaves fell in the breeze and colored the paths that we walked on until it seemed that we were walking on an artist's palette of orange, red, and yellow (not to mention some brown from earlier leaves and green of the leaves yet to fall). The massive structure stood almost in the middle of the city in a dense forest of 昔の北海道 and I felt a sense of transportation to an ancient time (except for the fact that I was using my Cannon camcordoer to capture this amazing experience; note to self: buy a better camera for still shots--dad, I have officially become interested in those cameras that you spend so much time around! haha) We spent the morning there, taking in the smells of fall and the crazy likeness to Minnesota--Stillwater in particular. It made me very はつかしい to be quite honest. 札幌 is known for its corn, milk, and ramen....but why their ramen? Well because they put their corn and milk (butter form) in it of course!! When in Sapporo take some time to check out the famous Ramen Alley (refer to pic) and sit down and one of the nearly 50 shops that serve the famous dish: コーンバータラーメンCorn butter ramen！You might run into some of the locals there and surely you will be able to see the cooks whip up your bowl of soup right in front of your eyes. The best part of the ramen in Sapporo? (forgive the abundance of rhetoric) It warms you up from the inside out! So bye bye chills, hello shopping! All of Japan seems to pride itself on its covered/open air strip malls and 札幌 is no different. We all wandered around there for about an hour or 2 in search of some gifts for ourselves and to bring back home. That's when I saw that Ainu shop. The Ainu are a small race of native Japanese that have lived exclusively in the northernmost island of 北海道 for centuries. Their facial features are similar to those of the Native American, with darker skin and slimmer eyes. I couldn't resist the temptation to invest my time and money in a little bit of this dying culture. So I walked in and attempted to not look to strange (being that it was me vs. 4 Ainu women) by browsing around. They immediately approached me and inquired as to who I was and what I was interested in. They marveled at my Japanese (to which I replied "no no, you musn't") and admired my eyes and my Chile bag before asking...if I was a girl or a boy....yeah...pause here for effect...They just thought I was really pretty I guess! Everything was really 高い but in the end I bought a good luck head-band which they said I could wear around my neck (I prefer that instead). It's the same concept as all other good luck charms: bad stuff out; I just couldn't help buying it though. It's colors echo the season.
That night we all went to the famous Sapporo Beir Garten: the renovated brewery-turned-restaurant serving it's signature Yenghis Khan or 焼き肉。Basically you order a plate of raw meat and you cook that deliciousness right there at your table. You pay for the novelty of it all but it's worth it. They have an all you can eat and an all you can eat & drink option for $25 and $30 respectively but we went for a set menu for about &17 with a medium stein of Sapporo's freshest brew. What an amazing meal! What an amazing experience! There was this group of four businessmen sitting next to us that must have devoured a couple pounds of the meat within the hour and a half that we were there. They were a satisfied bunch of Sapporans! Oh yeah, i almost forgot, to grease the pan you can forget Pam because they hand you a couple cubes of pure beef-fat that you stick right on top of the cooker and just let the juices ooze. Yeah, after that meal you don't really have to eat too soon afterwards (except now just thinking about this meal is making me drool at the mouth!) Karaoke later in the night with Regina&Phillip. The best part of the experience there was that we all sang America the Beautiful as our last number as loudly as we could! Then adios to Phillip and we returned to the hotel to talk about the last couple months and the coming many months. It was a relaxing & enlightening night.
I woke up with the worst headache the next morning...and it didn't go away until later that night (but that's Tokyo's entry). It was raining the day we left 札幌 and I couldn't have been more thankful for the perfect weather that we were blessed with the day before. The airport became manageable. The flight attendants were more than accommodating (hell, they spoke in English just for us --being that we were the only 2 Caucasians on the plane) and we touched down in Nagoya an hour and a half later. That's when I purchased my 新幹線きっぷ and headed out on my first ride aboard the fastest way to travel in 日本。。。東京へ！

So that sums it all up. Oh and Corn Chocolate, pigeons in parks, dropped flowers to the dead, and hotel yukattas & slippers. BTW that really pink picture is of at Pericura arcade. That was my first time (sob!)

Check out more pictures aqui!

Really Short

Yesterday they played 雪やコンコン outside my window in the morning for who knows how long. I guess they are anticipating winter. さーな。 Either way, that was annoying. My host mom made yet another hat for me. She really is inspired, and i really like this new one too. I wore my new pants today to school and I got a lot of comments. They were really nice comments too. I even confused a couple blokes into thinking that I was wearing a dress! haha. Tomorrow I leave for Hokkaido which should be awesome! I'm very excited! It was beautiful yesterday. It was so perfect that I wore shorts and a T and went and laid out in the sun next to some harvested rice fields. That was awesome. I also woke up late today for school, by about 45 minutes, but I made it in time! woot, talk about luck. I even had time to try my luck with the bank to no avail; for some reason I cannot withdraw any money despite having seen the direct deposit sheet in my e-mail. Also, there are these poop-shaped sugary snacks that my family likes. I was afraid to try them at first, but once i had one or two....I couldn't stop! There's the picture.

Sometimes there is a quick change in attitude and feeling that you can't explain. I'm sorry for feeling that way with some people.

雨が降ってるの

It has been raining now for almost, if not for a full, 24 hours and I am quite certain my pants are going to get wet again. I'm just going to say that next week I only have 2 days of school before break so I am very excited about that-woot! Hokkaido and Tokyo are on the horizon and it should be loads of fun. I have just spent the last of my October stipend ($400) last night on food and so I was really worried that I wouldn't get my November one for a while and need to borrow from friends for a few days while I recovered and waited for the direct deposit. No worries though, today I received the confirming e-mail of another direct deposit and so I am back on top. Either way, Dad or Mom if you're reading this could you please transfer some of my money into my ND account? I'll try and contact you. I know that Tokyo's hotel for 2 nights is going to cost me only a little less than $60 (way to go hostel!) and then my train tickets are going to be a bit steep but I imagine around $100 round trip should be about right. That leaves me with 240 to spend on food & souvenirs in both Hokkaido and Tokyo over about a 4 day period (this trip is going to be nuts by the way. Luckily Hokkaido is only about an hour and a half away by plane so the trip so that shouldn't wear down the energy level. Prolly have to arrive at the airport about an hour before departure (which, logistically has not been calculated as far as time and money). I have to do a little more research about what I want to do and see in Hokkaido but I think I have a certain couple things in mind that would make me a happy traveler. As far as Tokyo goes though...I'm pretty clueless except for the fact that I want to see Harajuku and Tokyo Tower (maybe even go up in it). For the most part I feel like I might go head first into the whole experience with vary little foreknowledge of the city. Karen says that she has a friend there that could show us around and that idea seems like the most ideal to me.
Yesterday I went with Regina and Marla to an Izakaya to chill. Basically these places are the coolest restaurants that you have ever seen. I felt like a kid in a treehouse with room service! And the room had little tables and those great square pillows that I really should know the 日本語 for. The music was not of Japanese origin but it did not distract me or annoy me at all; they played some grand piano and brass for most of the time. There were sayings written on the walls (next to caveman-quality drawings of little boys falling down??) and the food selection was wide while the service was impressively alert. It has been the only place so far that I have gone to in Japan (besides my house here) that requires its patrons to remove their くつ, shoes, before entering. It was so cool! I was pretty spent and not that hungry but I somehow ended up paying 1000 yen by the end of the night (you go ahead and look up the conversion on that baby). Totally worth it. Rob, Cristine, and....yeah I don't remember her name, all joined up with us later and partook in the festivities until it was late and we were tired. G

げり all over the place.

デスノート

Things keep happening. Today I drank some coffee, sent a letter home (finally), e-mailed my adviser (finally), ate some boiled peanuts (no good), almost missed my stop in Ichinomiya from drifting asleep, cancelled my trip out to the Zen Monastery next week because I'm going to be in Hokkaido during that time, received a knit hat from my host mom! (It has a big ball on the top and a pin on the side), sang to Mohawk Mike while wearing Regina's scarf, got a 9/10 on a quiz when i should have been marked as an 8.8 (didn't inform the authorities), ate a panini for lunch while talking to my Nihonjin friend Yuka about what I did yesterday, faked that I forgot about the takoyaki party yesterday, realized that I had an extra 5 days to turn in my homework, learned that Ikebana (or the art of flower arrangement) students actually have midterm and final exams on how to arrange flowers, did not have enough money to buy lunch so i had to borrow 500yen from a friend, felt uncomfortable with my spanish-speaking abilities, wondered why or if my Japanese-speaking abilities were worsening, finally did my job as a student and got paid for it (basically I had to listen to two sets of teachers-in-training today and then review their performance....for money! FINALLY!), got a few comments about my Walgreens hat, talked about Kosovo, Serbia, and Albania with Diana, met up randomly with Marla and Reinosa-san on the way out of the subway station, found a grown up version of Alicia with much curlier hair and felt all homesick for a few moments, was asked by my hostparents if i could take three days off of school to visit her sister's apple orchard (wtf?), watched another episode of Death Note (strange show), considered buying a bottle of wine, stayed up until midnight, wrote a really long and incorrect sentence, and did and thought many other things that I cannot remember now and probably had told myself at the time that they were thought to remember them so that I could write them here...things, and yeah I'm in Japan.

Cher Cher

Ah Tuesdays, the wonderful Tuesdays. Why are they so perfect? It's the fact that class always gets out early on a Tuesday, leaving the whole day open to do whatever you want. Which meant that I went to see Starfish. The results from the oral exam that I took yesterday (funny story there) will be in by Friday or Thursday i think. Ok, but about yesterday: I show up really early right, like a quarter to nine or so, and I check the day's schedule and see that my turn comes up at 11:10am. So I have plenty of time (I wasn't too upset that I had so much time on my hands. I didn't look up the times last week and now I had the chance to study more....or to lay down on the grass and enjoy the sun.). However, for some reason between that time and my exam time I got the notion that my exam was at 11:50 instead of 11:10. So I mosie on over to the examination room around 11:40, take a look at the schedule on the board there, and freak out because I had missed my exam by a half hour! To make matters more asinine, I had drank an espresso shot to pump myself up for the test. SO I'm totally pumped and nervous now and then the prof walks out and I say, "I'm sorry! I thought my test was at 11:10!"......yeah. So he pauses then says, "It was." They ended up letting me take it after everyone had gone. Whew!
I went home after my crazy history class. I need to e-mail Kathleen Opel, shoot I keep forgetting that! Not good! Then today was Tuesday so we all left early and Regina and I went to this little cafe that she had been raving about for about 3 weeks or more, Cher Cher, and it was awesome! I had the best parfait I have ever had! It was a vanilla/coffee/caramel/almond?/cookie/minty goodness in a tall glass with a long spoon. Reckers did not compare. The shop is only open for mildly erratic times which made it very hard to get there while it was open. There is only one person that works there and she has done an amazing job decorating the place to have a real, almost American East Coast beach house/Northern minnesota, built-in-the-1890s-and-then-given-a-modern-renovation-type feel home/shop. It felt like one of those ice-cream parlor/antique malls mom and dad take all of us kids out to sometime in eastern MN. You guys know the places: the ones with the random old garden & kitchen tools hanging on the wall, chipping paint, those places. It was so homey. And she played this French song that I recognized!
Then I watched the Tiplets Belleville (strange movie that will take a second watching to really appreciate) and headed home. It was a wonderful stay is all I need say.
I made it home, ate, worked on hw, and wound down the night. It is very hard to mail a letter out from Japan because they do not sell envelopes in their post-offices....yeah, weird, Japan.

Complainte de la Butte

Chilean food and Aquariums

チリ料理と水族館。Saturday Regina came over (after a long delay) to whip op some delicious Charquican. We were missing a few main ingredients (namely the aji Chileno) but it still turned out nicely. We even put together a little tomato/onion/olive oil salad on the side and served some Chilean wine to top it off. レヒナさんのホストファミリー一宮市に来た。Her host dad sits up so straight on the floor that it kindof freaked me out. He had better posture than Regina and that's saying a lot. The food tuned out OK overall and my host mom even offered that the Mr.牛田 take the wine with him--that was generous of her.
I worked on making some warasole (I think that's how it's spelt), a traditional Japanese indoor shoe. I feel like wearing it out to school one day though. They are made out of straw and my first one turned out quite ugly. I'll have to post a picture some time, so for now just do a search online. I had some sake with my host dad that night (The picture is of the glass you use to drink sake, a gyunomee) . It was cool. We joked around a bit. He was SO red from his little bottle of the stuff but then again he is 82 and Japanese! The Nagoya baseball team, the Dragons, won a really big game yesterday too so he was really happy about that and we watched a couple highlights before we called it a night.
Today I we went to the aquarium. By we I mean Wakae, Kento, Satsuke, & I went to the very beluga-loving aquarium at 名古屋港。Now, it wasn't rip-roarin fun--no--but I had a good time with my family there and I think that they had a good time too. We saw so many fish (some which I had never seen in a zoo before), a show with jumping dolphins (you'll have to ask me for the video for that one), and a very convenient observation tower from which you could see all of the port, the Italian Village, and a small flea market which we didn't end up going to because we wanted to head over to Osu to see the festival. Either way it was wonderful (Kento poked this strange-looking whale model in the eye a couple times), but I became so SO tired out that I ended up really sleeping on the subway ride back to 金山。金山からオスへ行ってまつりを見た。て埋まらなかったと思った。I mean, it had some strange shows (not including the taiko show which has not ever let me down) but overall it wasn't too much different that Osu on a non-festival day: shops and people everywhere. I was soooo tired by the end of it all. I napped when I got home, finished the shoes later, and then indulged in the best sushi of my life as made by master-chef Wakae. The meal was easity worth in the $30-40 range and made up of salmon, tuna, shrimp, eel, octopus, caviar, and a few others that I could, and still cannot not name.

so all's well that ends with sushi.

SICK!

This past week i was sick. That's all there is too it. Sick. I went to the Matsuri on Sunday with Uchi and Yuuka and Regina and I had this fried chicken at a restaurant and i got sick. REally Sick. I was sick from Monday morning (monday sucked) until yesterday (thursday). Headache, fever, stomach ache, back cramps, dizziness, and the most sleepy feeling i have ever had in my life. I basically drank about 5-6 liters of water between the last 2 days to recuperate from my dehydration (stomach ache, dehydration...you do the math) Oh it bit major balls. Not to mention that mondays are one of my longest days. That was the worst case of the Mondays that I have ever had. Mallory actually asked someone else if I was on crack because I looked like a druggie monday morning. Yeah, that bad. I am SO glad that I packed those Pepto-Bismol before coming though! Those things saved me these last couple days. Yay Pepto-Bismol! But to some I either played off the sickness so well (or they just don't care about me) because they didn't notice that i was sick at all this week. I'm going to go with the later mentioned idea miself.
I don't want to re-cap the entire week so i wont (being that this is my own, by-he-力-of-my-own-will blog), instead skipping ahead to today. Except to say that that fateful Sunday we saw these Peruvian peeps that set up on the streets of Nagoya playing Andean music! (Thanks Regina for the pic) Regina was SOOOO excited! And they were pretty good too! It was such a surreal moment because we're in Japan, listening to this Peruvian band...oh and there was this poster with Brad Pitt on it in the background advertising for a cell phone company; what a crazy global world we all live in! Ok moving on-------- Today I had a test in Japanese; they have tests each week that encompass 2-3 chapters at a time. Then we were givin' a heads up on this upcoming project for our class that has to be an oral 発表 on some place that I would like to go (within Japan) someday. All the major cities are going to be taken i know, so I think I'd like to pick a small city in the middle of the main island to research, somewhere "on the neck of the dragon so to speak. That way people begin to see outside the box of the regularly traveled areas and into the real Japan (I should talk, seeing as I haven't the foggiest). Then after class I headed with Regina over to a local supermarket with dirt-cheap prices to grab some of the food for tomorrow's Chilean lunch: Charquican. Oh and it was POURING RAIN. I was soaked so badly that I actually stopped at a convenience store, bought a new pair of socks, and after slipping them on -- and before putting them in my squlauwshy wet shoes--covered each foot in a plastic bag. Yes, genius. I had dry feet for the rest of the day.

I looked silly on the subway with my two bags of groceries.