Tokyo: Part One. The Arrival.

So, I've decided that the easiest way to tell tales about our trip to Tokyo is to divide the days into individual blog posts. That way, it also works out to each blog post being about one district in Tokyo that we went to, since we essentially went to a district a day. (Tokyo is so big that it's divided into sections, called 'districts'. Each district caters to different types of people, and is known for different things for the most part.) However, this first post isn't really going to be about a particular district, it's just about us getting there, and our first night there.

The above picture is the outside of a restaurant in Tokyo that we saw as we were walking from the train stop to the subway station. The arms and legs of the crab actually move, it's pretty amazing! I was told later that this is a fairly famous chain of restaurants across Japan, and this is the main one. Apparently it only serves crab, and crab related food though (obviously...), so I had no desire to go eat there. But I'm getting ahead of myself!


The day started with us getting up, grabbing our bags, and driving to the local train station. We rode the local line over to Ninohe, where we then transferred onto a shinkansen, or one of the famous 'bullet trains'. The picture above is of the side of the one we rode as it pulled into the station. They go so fast!!!! It only took us a little over 2 hours to go all the way from where we live, the top of the main island of Japan, down to Tokyo. As we rode it, there were a couple places where it was already snowing, so I took some pictures of the snow on the tracks outside of our window.
When we arrived in Tokyo, one of the first things we saw was a beautiful stained glass mural of a woman standing by the sea. That's the picture you see directly above. It's a good thing they have such a peaceful mural there to calm passengers, because there is certainly nothing else even remotely serene about the main Tokyo train station. To say it was crowded would be the understatement of the year, and even with the English signs it took Aaron and me a good 45 minutes to find where the subway entrance was, and how to get to the exit by our hotel. We eventually figured it out though, and got safely to our hotel to drop off our bags. We were too early to check in though, so we walked around the neighborhood of our hotel and ate lunch at a nice little cafe near-by. The Hanzoman area, where our hotel was, is mostly a residential and business area, so it's very quiet. It was nice to come back to such a quiet neighborhood over the next few days, after we'd spent the entire day in the hustle and bustle of Tokyo. I didn't take any pictures though, since there really wasn't anything going on in the district worth noting. After checking in to the hotel later and resting for a bit, we got up and braved the intricacies of the Tokyo subway lines to go meet our friend Oliver. Oliver is another English teacher here in Japan, but he works for a private company called Interac instead of the JET program. We met him in a Japanese class that we go to every Tuesday in Hachinohe, the big city in our area. In any case, he just happened to be going to Tokyo the same weekend we went, and he promised to take us to a very special place. He promised to take us to 'La Jolla'.

Let me pause here for a moment. As you may or may not know, Japan has a pretty decent variety of cuisines from around the world, in that they have a lot of other types of Asian food and some European food here, and for the most part I can find anything I want to eat. I miss things like Macaroni and Cheese and other delicious American junk food, but pasta and other things are quite gettable. There's even Indian food here. There is one exception to my ability to get food here: Mexican food. There is NO Mexican food in Japan. They do not know what burritos are, enchiladas baffle them, and they think fajitas are a type of animal. Their knowledge of Mexican food is limited to the fact that there is something called a 'taco' in that type of cuisine, and what they see on American TV shows (i.e. Taco Bell fast food in sitcoms). Most of you know that with the exception of fajitas and quesadillas, I tend not to care that much for Mexican food. Before I came to Japan, that was starting to change a little bit. I was starting to appreciate things like chimichangas and such. Since coming to Japan, I've had the worst craving for Mexican food you could possibly imagine. I would kill for some salsa and chips, let alone a full blown meal.


Enter Oliver, and his knowledge of the existence of 'La Jolla'. 'La Jolla' is a Mexican restaurant in Tokyo. It is the only Mexican restaurant I know of, in this entire country. And oh, it was so..... so..... so..... delicious. It wasn't delicious just because it was the first Mexican food I had eaten in a good three months, it was actually fantastic just by itself. The owner and chefs had all been to Mexico and America, and spoke fantastic English. The only slight downside was the price. Most of the ingredients for Mexican food don't even exist on this side of the pacific, and as such get imported in at very high costs. For Aaron and myself to eat a fajita, a small cheese quesadilla, and for Aaron to have a 2 enchilada and a taco combo platter, was almost $100. Chips and salsa are not free, they cost $8, and you get as many chips as you would in a side combo bag at Taco Bell. A single, small bowl of guacamole was $9. But you know what? It was absolutely delicious, and after 3 months of dying for the chance to even SMELL guacamole, it was 100% worth it.

Next up: Day two of the Tokyo trip! Look forward to it!

If people really looked like anime characters....

....the world would be a very scary place.

Hirosaki Business Conference

Also about three weeks ago, I had a business conference in Hirosaki city. I went there once before with Laura and Karesa (fellow ALTs), and took pictures of the castle park. This time was purely for business though, and I didn't do any sightseeing. The conference was actually incredibly informative, and it was fun seeing all the other ALTs in the area again. This conference was also attended by Japanese English Teachers too, so I got to hang out with one of the teachers I work with. It was only a two day conference, so the most notable thing about it picture-wise was the hotel I stayed at, which was also the hotel that hosted the conference. It's called Hirosaki Park Hotel, and it's really awesome. It has all this really old, antique furniture in the rooms, and the ballrooms and conference rooms the business meetings were held in were all beautifully decorated with crystal chandeliers and the like. These next few pictures are all from my hotel room, just showing off the furniture! :D


This last picture is of my room key. And yes, it's an actual key. So amazing. I didn't want to turn it back into the hotel after my stay was done. All in all, a nice little couple day conference, it really gave me some great ideas for teaching English. :)

AAAAAANNNNNNDDDDD...... We're Back!

So! It's been a long time. And I am sorry. I will have to beg for your forgiveness and understanding, and hope that you will acknowledge that getting married, making Aaron legal to live in Japan, and then subsequently getting swine flu put a major crimp in my blogging ability. But more on all that later! Let's try and pick up where we left off, shall we?

Last time I promised information on the trip to Tokyo we took, and I will get to that, I swear. First though, I have a couple other bits of information and pictures to share, starting with the above! That is from the first snowfall here in Sannohe, it happened about 3 weeks ago. It melted soon afterwards, but it was incredibly pretty, and I was stupidly excited to see real life snow. After it melted though, it was just cold, which I didn't like as much. There's currently maybe about an inch of standing snow on the ground outside, and it hasn't gotten warm enough for it to melt recently.


This is another picture of the first snow. There's much more now. Aaron and I are fortunate in where we live, however. In other cities in the area there's already about a foot of standing snow on the ground. I guess being away from the coast and a little in the mountains is shielding us from the worst of it. I actually can't wait for more though, since I have grand plans for the backyard. They involve making an army of small snowmen, or snomies as I like to call them. I will keep you all updated on the progress of this plan, and the results of the subsequent invasion I'm going to be staging with my snomie army.

Engrish of the week

"Jimny, you're a boy make
a big noise playin'in the
field gonna be a big man
someday! w'll rock you!"
23 autopartz piston

Seen on the back of a Jeep near Towada Lake. EPIC FAIL!

Coming next: Tokyo trip pics! Look forward to it!

NANDEMONANDEMONANDEMO KAIMASU!!!!!!

Nandemo kaimasu = will buy anything. It's not the actual name of this store, its real name is Game Souko. However, 'nandemo kaimasu' is proudly displayed on a huge banner outside all the Game Souko's, so a lot of people just call it that instead. It's a local chain here in Aomori-ken, and there's a shop up in Towada city, which is about a 45 minute drive from where we are. Essentially, we found the mecha of retro video games, and it rendered me and Aaron speechless on several occasions as we wandered through the store. It doesn't just have video games, as it does live up to it's 'nandemo kaimasu' nickname. It sells video games, video game systems, cds, anime, figures, musical instruments, fishing gear, clothes, tires.... anything. It mostly has video games and related paraphernalia though. Oh, and these:

Those would be used pachinko machines (think Japanese slot machines) for sale. Just in case you wanted to start your own gambling ring in your backyard or something.


There were literally just rows and rows of games, and in this picture you can use Aaron as a comparison for how tall the rows were too. They had pc engine, saturn, dreamcast, famicom, super famicom, atari, ps2, ds..... just.... everything. I did some Christmas shopping for my dad here, and I picked up a copy of Persona 1 for the psone for ... wait for it.... 3 dollars. Valkyrie Profile? 5 dollars. Rez for the ps2? 5 dollars! Everything was so cheap! Granted you would have to be fluent in Japanese to play any of these, but it was still awesome. I picked up a copy of Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan! 2 for the DS for $15, and the cheapest I ever found it back in the states was almost $60.

They also had an impressive array of systems for sale, as seen in the first picture. They're just piled everywhere. The second picture is the limited edition Cloud PS3 that I have only seen on rare import sites before. The third picture is of the original Nintendo... which ran on floppy discs, not cartridges. I didn't even know they made these things.

Oh, and I almost forgot. This is an example of one of their figure aisles. I say one, for the store has many such aisles, which increase in size and grandeur as you go along.

Game Souko also has a lot of Taiko Drum Master games, for which it has my undying adoration and love. I think it's safe to say that Aaron and I will be going here quite often. If anyone wants some awesome Japanese retro games, let us know!

Lake Towada with Aaron!

This first picture is not from lake Towada. But it is pretty. And therefore it has been posted.


This is lake Towada! :D Aaron and I went here about.... 3 weeks ago maybe? It's an absolutely beautiful place, but unfortunately we went at the wrong time. It's one of the best places in the area to see autumn foliage, but by the time we went most of it had died. Oh well, it was still pretty, and Aaron hadn't been to the lake before, so it was still fun. :)

This is the extent of autumn foliage that was left when we went. Next year we'll have to go much earlier in the year. However, we did rent one of those swan paddle boats and go out on the lake itself, which was awesomely fun! The following are pictures from our half hour paddle adventure. :) (Which I won, Aaron was complaining about his legs hurting 5 minutes in, so I paddled us everywhere. Thank you Sannohe hills for giving me awesome biking legs! :D )


After the lake, we had lunch and headed back through Oirase gorge, which I posted about a while ago, but Aaron enjoyed seeing a lot. We were just driving through, so we didn't stop, but Aaron wants to go back in Spring and see it again. :) It was a very nice, peaceful day. :)

Engrish of the week

"High-Performance
and
Fundamental Wear
RELIABLE
For Epoch-Making
Worker"

Seen on a hat marketed to construction workers in a local store in town.

Randomness

These are all a bunch of things I did recently that either weren't long enough, or had enough pictures taken of them, to warrant their own separate post. So let's enjoy them now!
The banner picture up there is from the first weekend Aaron was here. There's a local couple here in town that own a dentistry business, and I teach their son. The mother also takes private English lessons from Jade, who is from Hong Kong, but was born and raised in the UK and is married to one of the local barbers here. In any case, they are a lovely couple, and once a month they hold a sort of pot-luck dinner party, and the mother, Mieko, always invites all the local English teachers. I was told to bring Aaron to this one too, so he got to see the craziness. As it was also the weekend before Halloween, we were asked to dress up. Joe, one of the other ALTs here, dressed up as Wolverine. Somehow through the course of the evening, my student stole his hand-made claws, and used them to kill his Dad. :) It was most fun, and there is always good food and great conversation to be had at Mieko's parties. And pictures of patricide. That too. :)

These two rather blurry pictures are from Laura's (one of the other ALTs here in town) birthday party. Unfortunately for her, she happened to be born on Halloween, which really wasn't an issue, being an Aussie, until she joined JET and ran into tons of Americans who go out and party on her birthday for entirely different reasons. So, she had her birthday party the night before Halloween at a really neat restaurant up in Hachinohe. There were a lot of other JETs there that I don't usually get to see, and the food was yummy, so it was a lot of fun. :) The best part was that Laura's birthday cake had actual strawberries on it, and it was absolutely delicious (you can only get fruit in Japan in the season it actually grows usually, so there won't be many strawberries anywhere until spring). That, and the fact that Laura really enjoyed her birthday and had lots of fun. That's more important than the cake..... but the cake was really good though. ^-^

And finally, Aaron and I found a Silent Hill arcade machine in a near-by town. Aaron dragged me bodily towards the stupid thing to make me play it with him, and at first it really wasn't that bad. In fact it really wasn't scary at all, and was kind of lame for a bit. Notice both the phrases 'at first' and 'for a bit' employed in those previous sentences, as they are important. About 5 minutes into the stupid game, sirens went off, dark fell, and the creepy faceless stumbling nurses came out of the woodwork to try and cut my face off. This was when I started freaking out a bit..... Then, just because the world hates me, pyramid head comes and starts chasing us through the halls, traps us in an elevator, which we barely escape from, tries to skin some other character in the game alive, and then decides that he'd rather come after us again instead. And then Aaron died, and I was fighting the stupid thing alone. And I practically ran away from the machine. I do NOT care for the Silent Hill games, the monsters are freaky, and the one time I tried to play one on the PS2 I started crying about 30 minutes into it. Aaron gets to play this game by himself next time. Or maybe whenever my mom and dad come out here he can play it with my dad. Either way, I'm never stepping within 10 feet of it again. Stupid Aaron....

Misawa Air Show

Misawa is an American military base near here, maybe about 45 minutes away by car. It's not nearly as big as the one in Okinawa, but then again, it also seems to be tolerated better by the locals than the Okinawan air force base too, which the locals down there are currently trying to kick out of the country.... In any case, the base had an airshow about three weeks ago, which I went to with a bunch of other JETs. It was on the weekend before Aaron came out here, and it was pretty fun. I saw the Blue Angels once a long time ago though, so I'd seen stuff like this before. I was mostly interested in going so I could get some American food, which at this point I'm starting to miss pretty badly. I managed to get some Pizza Hut and some Popeye's chicken, which were both much more delicious than they had any right to be. I wanted to get Burger King, but there was an hour long wait for it... and I was hungry.



They had lots of neat airplanes on display, which were fun to see. That's Chloe, another JET posing charmingly in front of that last airplane. Again, Tucson having one of the largest air force bases in the country, and the plane graveyard, kind of made me immune to these things unfortunately.

If you didn't gather it from my earlier comment about there being an hour wait for a Burger King hamburger: there were tons and tons of people there. Tons. Millions. Billions. Not really, but there were a lot, and unfortunately the pictures above don't really convey the sheer amount of people there. It was pretty amusing to watch the sea of cameras come floating up above the crowd every time a plane flew by. :)

My favorite part of the day, absolutely, hands down, all began when Brian (another ALT) picked up Chloe for some random reason (the girl ALT pictured earlier) and started swinging her around at us. A bunch of elderly Japanese people saw this, thought it was the most amazing thing ever, and then proceeded to ask Brian to lift all of them. So Brian did. This picture is unfortunately just a little post-pickup, and I missed pictures of everything else after that. What happened after this picture was that after Brian picked up the elderly men, they decided that they wanted to try to lift him. Neither of the two men could do it by themselves, so they teamed up together in order to carry Brian around for a bit. Everyone was laughing hysterically, both American people and Japanese, and it was absolutely the most fun I had that day.

The last video here is pretty short, and I didn't get the best shot, but it's of two of the planes flying at each other and missing at the last second. It's pretty cool to see, sorry it didn't turn out better, but hey.... those planes are freaking fast!

Engrish of the week

"VIDEO-CD, BOOKS, LADY'S"
Seen on a sign for a rental store in Ninohe.

For Dad

Look! It's coming! :D

2nd Trip To Sannohe Castle

So, it's been a while. Sorry about that. I've been really busy getting Aaron set up and showing him around town. Hopefully we'll have adventures soon, so I'll have more fodder for this blog. In any case, I got bugged by almost everyone I know to update this, so here ya go! On October 17th, Chloe came to visit us here in Sannohe. Chloe is Joe's girlfriend, with Joe being one of the other ALTs here in Sannohe. He teaches at the main elementary school in town, and most JETs know us as male/female versions of each other, since we have almost identical taste in games, music, humor, etc. Anyways, Chloe came down to our little town, so we all went together to the castle park to show her around. I've been before with Yasuko, my supervisor, but this time we actually went INSIDE the museum, which was awesome. Last time I went it was closed, which made me sad, since the museum is actually inside the castle building, and I wanted to look around. In any case, enjoy the following pictures, complete with witty and refreshing commentary from yours truly! :D

I don't know the Japanese name for it, but this is essentially a palanquin. Two strong manly men carried this on their shoulders, while a noble lady sat inside and was touted around town. Apparently said noble lady was also very tiny, since I could maybe get my left leg in this thing. If I squeezed.... It's very old though, which is neat.

This thing apparently separated the peels from fruit that was tossed into it. Or something like that, according to Joe's translation. I believe him though, he's forgotten more kanji than I've ever known.

Speaking of Joe, apparently villagers in Sannohe foretold of his coming in years past and long forgotten. They foresaw, and in preparation weaved the flag of Joe's people to welcome him. :)

These things are amazing, they are hair ornaments made out of bone or something. These were actually in Japanese noblewomen's hair a few hundred years ago or so. They are incredibly beautiful in person.

Weapons! The top picture has a really old gun and some helmets used during battle, and the second picture has a short katana in it, I forget the actual name.... I think it's a nodachi?... Whatever, it cuts people, and I want it. >:(


Japanese warlord armor sets! Can't get cooler than that. These and the palanquin reinforce my idea that ancient Japanese were really, really tiny. These are, however, still awesome.

Unfortunately the glare from the glass makes this picture a bit hard to see, but basically these are woven dragon room screen separator thingies.... I was about 5 seconds away from stealing this and putting it in my living room.

The back gate entrance into the castle compound. Complete with the back of Joe and Chloe's heads.

I saved the best part for last. There are three levels in the Sannohe castle museum, and you can go all the way up to the top floor. The top has nothing on display, just some chairs you can sit in, and windows all the way around, so you can sit and admire the view. And what a view..... enjoy the video. That's my entire town basically right there. Until next time!