Kamakura (also, microwaveable rice)

Yesterday afternoon we had our first field trip...to Kamakura!  Specifically to Enkakuji, which is a zen temple.  There are going to be a lot of pictures and not a whole lot of commentary, 'cause I'm tired, so bear with me.

We were basically a gaijin swarm that took over the train and made everyone very confused.

(My main sensei is the guy wearing the white shirt.)

Yes, that is exactly what it looks like.

Big gate!

Miscellaneous pictures from around the grounds:

Yes, those are carved out of tree chunks.  Yes, people have left a ton of coins on them.

Anyway, we wound up doing zazen, which is sitting meditation.  We did three sessions: one that was 3 minutes, one that was 10 minutes, and one that was 15 minutes.  That might seem like a pretty short time, but remember that you have to sit cross-legged with your feet on top of your knees and your back straight and then NOT MOVE AT ALL.  (Oh, and you have to breathe really, really slowly.  That's the bit I have the most trouble with.)  A lot of other people were in pretty bad pain by the end, but my feet and legs just went completely numb.  I couldn't feel my feet for a good five to ten minutes after we finished.
Also, the monk in charge actually whacked someone (with the whackee's permission) with the scary whack-y stick.  (You get whacked with the stick if you break your posture or you obviously aren't doing zazen properly.)  It was REALLY LOUD, and apparently did hurt quite a bit, despite the fact that he said he was only hitting at half strength.  Moral of the story: Don't do hardcore zazen if the idea of being whacked with a stick freaks you out.

Anyway, after that was over, we wandered around the temple grounds for a little bit, and then someone had the bright idea of hiking to the Daibutsu (the giant Buddha statue in Kamakura).  Someone (and this person is now refusing to come forward) said it was "a stroll" to the Daibutsu, which was how we wound up accidentally climbing a mountain (or four) to get to the Daibutsu.

This cool gate was on the way.

It's hard to tell from this picture, but that's a sheer cliff that we had to climb down next to.

Hahaha, "a stroll."

There was a shrine along the way, so I got to show everyone how to behave properly.

Husband and wife rocks tied together by a rope covered in five yen coins.  It was an enmusubi (marriage) shrine.

Anyway, after that, we headed off in the direction of the Daibutsu again.

You can't tell from this picture, 'cause the contrast on my camera isn't good enough, but that first picture is actually a picture of Mt. Fuji.

I told you we climbed a mountain.

Stairs, are you drunk?

(It's worth noting, these were some of the better stairs on our hike.)

Anyway, we finally arrived at the Daibutsu...4 minutes after the gate closed.  GAH.

We did get to see this exciting tsunami sign, though.

Anyway, we wound up walking back to the station and taking the train back to Yokohama, where I had dinner with a couple other folks from IUC and then headed home to crash.

Today has mostly been a chilling and homework day, but I finally took pictures of the dreaded microwaveable rice.

DUN DUN DUN.

Worth noting: This does not have to be refrigerated.

You peel the top covering back to the dotted line, and then put it in the microwave for 2 minutes.

When it comes out, it looks exactly the same.

Except it is rice.

And it is entirely indistinguishable from normal rice.

If this doesn't freak you out, you are made of much stronger stuff than I am.

(And then I put my dinner on top of it.)

Okay, I am going to pass out now because I am too tired for everything GOOD NIGHT.

Extremely short post

So it turns out that microwaveable rice is actually edible and entirely indistinguishable from regular rice.
I'm not sure whether this freaks me out more or less than the alternative.

In other news, tomorrow we have a field trip to a temple to do zazen, i.e. sitting meditation.

True or false answers (as well as pictures of scary microwaveable rice) going up at some point in the future.

This post was brought to you by Dana's class-fueled exhaustion and the gelato store in Landmark Tower, which is probably going to steal all my money.

Class, class, class

Not a whole lot to report on, since I've just been in class all the time the past few days.  I'm currently writing a two minute speech on how not to be an offensive person when you're sightseeing at shrines, which I might post here once I turn it in.  Otherwise, it's been a lot of reading and memorizing vocabulary and watching the news and pounding my head against things because I don't know much political vocabulary.  (The election was this week, and LITERALLY ALL THE NEWS has been about that.)

Since I am a boring person with nothing particularly interesting to talk about, let's have a true or false!  Anyone who gets all the right answers will get...a fabulous prize to be arbitrarily decided upon by me.  Yaaaaay.

True or false: You will very rarely see Japanese people wearing anything that reveals their shoulders, even in summer.

True or false: In Japan, you stand on the left side of the escalator and walk on the right.

True or false: You can buy all of the following items at convenience stores in Japan: batteries, shampoo, notebooks, sandwiches, razors, fresh vegetables.

True or false: It's common to hear American pop songs in Japanese stores.

True or false: All of the following are foods closely associated with summer in Japan: watermelon, eggplant, squash, cucumbers, persimmons, figs.

True or false: The LDP just lost seats in the Diet.

True or false: Wearing a hat is the most common way of protecting oneself from the sun during the summer in Japan.

True or false: Tanning is considered unattractive in Japan.

True or false: Japanese deodorant is significantly stronger than American deodorant.

You have until whenever I post my next post to pick your answers.  皆さん、頑張って！

First days in Yokohama

A lot has happened the past few days, so let me catch you up.

Thursday was our first day at IUC.  It wasn't a full day, since we only had a two-hour placement test in the morning and then the afternoon free.  That was just as well, since a couple of the people in our program arrived at 2 a.m. on the day of the test.  Apparently their flight had been horribly delayed, and thus they literally came straight from the airport to the center.  Ouch.  Additionally, a lot of people had flown in the day before and hadn't gotten over jetlag.  I guess I made the right decision in doing my visiting before classes started!
Anyway, as much as I despise placement tests, this one wasn't as terrible as I was expecting!  Although apparently my interview was ridiculously hard compared to most other people's.  My classmates got asked questions like "What do you study?" and "Please introduce yourself," and I got "What are the features of Japanese New Religions?" and "What makes certain religions 'Sect Shinto'?"  Uh, lemme just summarize 50 years of academic debates for you...  Otherwise, the test wasn't awful--even the listening section, which involved differentiating accents (something I can actually do!).
After the placement test, I went to Daiso with a couple of other students from the program to pick up necessities like toothpaste* and laundry detergent and hangers.  I also got a "cooking set" from the apartment front desk, which basically means a pan, a pot, a hot plate, and some various cooking utensils and plates.  I now have the world's tiniest kitchen.  I'm still trying to figure out how to do rice--one of my senpai** at Harvard recommended buying the microwaveable rice packets from the grocery store (she says they taste like normal rice), but they kind of sketch me out and I'm not sure I've quite reached that level of desperation.  I may just wind up eating a lot of noodles this summer.

Friday we received our class assignments and had orientation, which included a long segment on what to do if there's an earthquake/tsunami/typhoon/fire/other natural disaster.  I'm in a class of 8, and 6 of my classmates are men, which is kind of unusual as far as Japanese classes go.  (I'm used to either a male-female 50/50 split or predominantly female Japanese language classes.  Not sure why they usually wind up like that.)  The majority of my classmates are studying business, law, or international relations, which means that I am, as usual, the weird one out.  OH WELL.  Our homework load seems...weirdly heavy, but we'll see if it decreases as the weeks go on.***  Two of our textbooks (for kanji and for keigo****) are books I've used before, which means that those sections will probably wind up being review.
We had a "welcome party" in the afternoon, where I met a bunch of the other students, including a guy who is a graduate from my program (and is now at University of Texas) and studies Japanese folk religion.  I think there are a total of 4 people studying religion (plus 1 studying Japanese Buddhist art history), although I'm the only person doing Shinto, as usual.  Still, it was cool to talk to other people and hear about their research projects.

Today has mostly been a stay-at-home-and-do-homework day (partially because of the weather and partially because I'm feeling under the weather*****), so not much to report on there.  I'm going to make delicious food for dinner and watch my news broadcast and do some more reading, probably, because I live an exciting life like that.  (Well, that and get increasingly hysterical emails from my friends about the Hannibal finale.  I haven't even seen the show, but apparently people just have a lot of feelings about it.)

*Japanese toothpaste is...not the greatest, but I unfortunately underestimated how much toothpaste I would go through while away from Boston.  OH WELL.  The stuff I got this time is way better than that...other stuff...I got in Kyoto.

**Students ahead of me in the program.  The opposite of this is "kouhai."  Someone in the second year of the program would be my senpai and I would be their kouhai.

***To give you an idea, our homework load for this week is: 2 lessons in our keigo textbook, 4 essays to read (each roughly 10 pages long), 5 20-minute news broadcasts to watch, 1 10-minute presentation on aforementioned news broadcasts, 1 2-minute presentation on "whatever we want," 4 vocabulary quizzes, and however many kanji tests we can get through this week.

****Honorific and humble speech.  Basically, the bane of everyone's existence.  And, yes, "everyone" includes Japanese people.

*****YOU SEE WHAT I DID THERE?

Nagoya adventures and Yokohama first impressions

Wow, okay, I had a whole bunch of stuff typed up here and then MS Word crashed (I’m typing this on the Shinkansen) and erased everything.  Super unimpressed with MS Word right now.

EDIT:

Wow, I just found out in an ultimate moment of blogger technical fail that apparently the post I posted on Sunday morning...was never actually posted.  WOW.  WOOOOOW.  Okay.  Let's try to recreate that post from memory...

Friday evening Yamauchi-san (who works in the shrine office at Kawahara Shrine) very kindly agreed to meet up with me to help me buy a new camera.  So I have a new camera now!  My charger and battery did eventually wind up being returned to me by mail, but since my old camera is...not the best, and a new camera was cheap, I figured it was better to get a new camera.  ANYWAY, Yamauchi-san helped me pick out a new camera and then we had dinner, which was ankake spaghetti, a Nagoya specialty that apparently I failed to eat in the year I was living in Nagoya.  Anyway, it was delicious, and the company was excellent, and all was well.

Saturday evening I met up with a bunch of friends from Nanzan.

Look at these super awesome people.  Left to right: Kocchan (working at a patent office), Teitei (grad student), Ton-chan (English teacher), me (grad student), Shou-chan (grad student)
(Picture shamelessly stolen from Shou-chan.)

We wound up getting kaiten zushi, also known as "conveyor belt sushi."  Also, after dinner there was an epic struggle for the check in which Teitei emerged victorious.

[/EDIT]

EDIT #2:

Okay, so apparently it did post, but in such a way that it only shows up in news feeds and not on the actual blog, and I can't view the original post.

I am so confused.

[/EDIT]

ANYWAY, THINGS THAT HAVE HAPPENED SINCE SUNDAY MORNING:

I had lunch on Sunday with Joy, who was one of my Japanese class classmates at Nanzan.  She’s going to be studying at Manchester U. for a year starting in the fall, and might be visiting Boston in the winter, so I offered her a place to crash if she so desires.  Hopefully she’ll be able to make it across the Atlantic!  Anyway, it was nice to see her and catch up with her and all that fun stuff.  Apparently one of our mutual Japanese classmates will be getting married in August while another will be having a baby.  I don’t know how I managed not to hear about this before now.

(Picture shamelessly stolen from Joy.  Yes, we are at CoCo Ichibanya.  No, I don't have a problem.)

Sunday evening I met up with the folks from Kawahara Shrine for dinner at That Indian Restaurant.*  It wound up being me, both the priests, Yamauchi-san (who works in the shrine office but isn’t a priest), and three miko, so we had a pretty big group.  It was really nice to see everyone again, and apparently if I ever come back to Nagoya, Mariko-chan (one of the miko) is going to make me cosplay with her.**

Monday morning I was invited to the tsukinamisai*** at Susanoo Shrine, where I remembered how to do everything correctly and didn’t horribly embarrass myself!  Hurrah!  On the downside, mosquitoes chewed up my legs pretty badly.  But anyway, afterwards I helped clean everything up and wound up having a portion of the food offerings thrust upon me, which is why I am currently on the Shinkansen with a whole pineapple.  I live an exciting life.  Afterwards, I wound up going out to lunch with Nakano-san (Susanoo Shrine’s priest) and a bunch of the ladies from Susanoo Shrine.

SEMI-RELATED: I brought saltwater taffy as omiyage for everyone, and everyone liked it, which was good, although a couple of people accidentally got their teeth glued together.  OH WELL.

Tuesday night Itou-san invited me to go karaoke-ing with her and two friends.  One was my age (okay, 27, but I’m in my twenties so close enough) and one was closer to Itou-san’s age, so we had a pretty wide spread of music going on there.  I probably heard more enka**** than I have ever heard in my life, basically.  Also, I apparently impressed everyone because my singing voice is, uh, “unexpected.”*****  It became a game of “what can we get Dana to sing,” which mostly ended in me singing a bunch of stuff from Les Mis, because apparently that’s difficult to sing and thus impressive if you can sing it properly?  I dunno.  I’m cool with singing stuff from Les Mis, though.  I also got to sing the dude’s part on a lot of duets with Sakura-san (the 27-year-old).  So anyway, that was a lot of fun!  And Sakura-san lives in Tokyo, so she said she would contact me to meet up at some point while I’m in Yokohama.

Anyway, now I am on the Shinkansen to Yokohama (well, Shin-Yokohama station), where I will hopefully be able to navigate myself to my apartment without getting horribly lost.  It’s pretty grossly hot right now,****** but it’s supposed to cool down starting tomorrow, so hopefully I won’t be soaked with sweat all the time.  OH WELL.

[APPROXIMATELY 2 HOURS LATER]

I got lost.  But it's okay because Floris (first year PhD student at Harvard) rescued me, which is to say that I saw someone with a Harvard backpack, followed them for a while, and it turned out to be Floris.  Thanks for wearing your Harvard backpack, Floris.  I appreciate it.

ANYWAY, Yokohama first impressions:

- IT'S REALLY WINDY???

- my room is super tiny

- no seriously look at this room:

This was taken while standing with my back against the front door.

SUPER TINY.

- at least there is a mini-fridge

- I am probably going to go grocery shopping tomorrow, and get a frying pan and hot plate from the people at the front desk ('cause that is a thing I can do)

- I should probably go figure out how I'm supposed to get to school tomorrow haha, welp

- following people wearing Harvard backpacks is a surprisingly effective way to get places

Tomorrow is the placement test for IUC (ewwww, placement tests), so I will have more to report on then I guess?

*Louki and Kim, if you are reading this, you are still remembered as “those Dutch girls who really like cheese naan.”

**She sews her own costumes from scratch, and, DANG, they look good.

***Monthly festival

****Ballads, often about lost love.  Here’s an example.

*****”Unexpected” features of my voice include (but are not limited to):

-          my lung capacity

-          the fact that I can hold the long note on “shame” in “I Dreamed a Dream”

-          the fact that I can sing men’s parts on songs

-          the fact that the microphone had to be turned down most of the way every time I started singing

******You too can experience summer in Japan by following these three simple steps!

Step #1: Climb into a wet sauna fully clothed.

Step #2: Have a friend dump buckets of lukewarm water on you at random intervals.

Step #3: Lie on the floor and cry.

EDIT #3:

So apparently blogger is erasing random words from this post if it's viewed through a newsfeed and also randomly italicizing things.  I am so sorry; I don't even know what's happening here, UGH.

[/EDIT]

In which I ride the bullet train and forget my camera

I managed to sleep impressively late this morning!  I went to bed at ~9:30 and didn't get up until 6:30, which is way better than I normally do when I'm severely jet-lagged.  Unfortunately, it isn't even 8 p.m. here and I'm pretty exhausted, so I think I'll be having another early night.

I took the bullet train from Tokyo to Nagoya today, which went pretty well, except for the bit where I decided to plug in my camera battery on the bullet train so that it would be charged when I arrived in Nagoya and then managed to forget both the battery and the charger on the train.  AUGH.  I've contacted the station lost and found, and they're going to contact me in the morning when they find out whether the Hiroshima lost and found has it or not.  Guh, I can't believe I did that...  If I can't recover my battery, I guess I will just get a new camera; I've been needing a new one for a while and I guess this is a reasonably good excuse.  Oh well.  We'll see how it goes.

Otherwise, my day hasn't been terribly exciting.  It's currently too hot for living and 97% humidity, and, no, it's not raining.  It's just THAT HUMID.  It feels like drowning in the air.  And it's only going to get worse!  'cause summer hasn't even properly started yet!

Other exciting things that have happened today: I had CoCo Ichibanya for dinner,* which was an excellent decision; I still remember where everything in Nagoya is despite having been gone for almost a year; Beard Papa's** special flavor for June is matcha, which means that I am prepared to say farewell to all my money.

...wow, okay, I am really tired now and falling asleep on my keyboard, so I should probably head toward the shower and then bed.

*Best curry house ever.  I had their "summer vegetable" curry, which had pork and chicken and asparagus and eggplant and cherry tomatoes and okra and was DELICIOUS.

**Beard Papa is a cream puff store in Japan.  Every month they have a special cream flavor and this month it's matcha and I can never say no to matcha.
Also, weird bit of trivia, Beard Papa (the character) appears in Wreck-It Ralph.  He's the guy guarding the car factory.

来日

Hey, everyone!

Just to let you know, I made it to Tokyo safely.

The flight was fairly uneventful—I even made it through security without being pulled out of line for a pat down!  I cannot remember the last time that happened while I was flying in the US.  I guess I looked less threatening than usual today?  Oh well, I’m not complaining.  Since nobody thought I was carrying weapons today, the most exciting thing that happened on the flight was that some guy thought I was an unaccompanied child???  I know I look young, but I don't think I look THAT young.

By the way, Delta's in-flight service totally trumps United's, 'cause they let you pick what movie you want to watch when instead of just running four movies constantly and making you skip between channels all the time, trying to figure out when one of them is starting.

Anyway, I have now reached the "everything sucks and I feel like I'm going to die" stage of sleep deprivation* so I think I am going to pass out and pretend that it's totally normal to go to sleep at 9 p.m.  It is, right?  Totally normal.

*Stages of sleep deprivation:

Not sleep deprived

Getting tired

Okay, pretty tired

EVERYTHING IS HILARIOUS

Wait, no, EVERYTHING SUCKS

Everything sucks and I feel like I'm going to die

[...]

DEATH

Obligatory starting post

Soooo I've decided to run a blog again this summer while I'm in Japan,* mostly because I don't want to tell the same story over and over and over.  I definitely won't update every day,** and my posts probably won't be super long, but at least you will know that I am alive.

To recap for those of you who don't already know: I'll be in Japan from June 12th to August 8th.  I'll be in Nagoya visiting folks from my Fulbright year for the first week or so, and then I'll be heading to Yokohama, where I'll be studying at IUC for a couple of weeks.  Also, I will get to the Ghibli Museum if it kills me, because I have been thwarted so many times at this point that it isn't even funny.

So, yeah, not sure what else to say at this point.  I made an FAQ (which will probably be updated as I think of more things).  I will be leaving tomorrow morning, and making the usual horrifying 10-hour flight to Tokyo, where I'll be crashing for the night before heading out to Nagoya.

Anyway, I should probably go to bed now (well, after I finish downloading a small library to my Kindle so I don't go stir-crazy on the plane).

*At this point, running a blog while I'm in Japan is pretty much obligatory, as is including some sort of reference to squids in the title.
If you have somehow been fortunate enough to miss my previous blogging attempts, you can click here and here.

**Anyone who emails me on a day that I haven't updated asking if I'm still alive is going to get...uh...I dunno, pictures of exasperated animals?  Horrifying pictures I found on the internet?  Something weird and random?  I dunno.  The point is, DON'T DO IT.  OR ELSE.