How to eat a hot dog in Japan:

Falling leaves and Christmas lights

Here's a little of what I've been up to since I got back to Japan:





Photos:

• Top left: I made a short trip to check out Kawasaki, just a few minutes away by train, and got to see some beautiful fall colors.
• Top right: This is my Christmas tree--it's the first one I've had in two years!
  
• Middle left: Last night I went to Roppongi Hills. Known as a rather up-scale shopping district in Tokyo as well as for the $10,000/month apartments in the neighboring high-rise, they also have a beautiful display of Christmas lights every year. This photo really doesn't do it justice. The trees on this particular street just sparkle at night, and last year was just as gorgeous. Quite possibly my favorite lights display in Tokyo.
  
• Middle right: In the same area, there's a really nice viewpoint where you can see the skyline and Tokyo Tower. I absolutely love coming here after dark--any time of the year.
  
• Bottom left: Just a few minutes walk from Roppongi Hills is the newly-opened Tokyo Midtown, another shopping/restaurant/art museum area and also a very nice place to visit. This is part of their Christmas lights display.
  
• Bottom right: As we walked back towards the subway station, I caught a glimpse of the moon through the trees.
  

American Thanksgiving...and lots of Mexican food

For those of you that I didn't get to see when I was home last week, my apologies. There are a lot of you that I didn't connect with, and I wish I'd had time to see more people than I did.

Instead, I can offer the next best thing. Here are some pictures of what I did while I was in Portland:





Photos:

• Top left: had an early Thanksgiving dinner on Wednesday night. It was soooo nice to eat turkey and cranberry sauce and mashed potatoes and stuffing...you get the idea.
  
• Top right: Two days later I followed it all up with the best Mexican food I've had since leaving the states last year.
  
• Middle left: Took some photos of Portland to show my students in Tokyo
  
• Middle right: came back to Oregon just in time to see the turning leaves.
  
• Bottom left: and here are those evergreen trees that I've been missing so much.
  
• Bottom right: took time to meet some of my friends for a cupcake party at Saint Cupcake downtown. I told everyone to act natural in the photo--and for the record, I think the result is pretty accurate. :) (Sometimes I miss you, Ted.)
  

Soccer practice and Japanese take-out

Photos:

• Top left: Take-out from a true Japanese restaurant: they bring it to you in real ceramic bowls, not styrofoam. And then when you're done...
• Top right: ...all you do is put them out in front of your house and someone from the shop picks up the tray later.
• Bottom left: this is from the youth soccer club that my host family helps coach every weekend. Yota and my friend Jake were having a lot of fun with the kids.
• Bottom right: the little ones are my favorite--they're so tiny!

This is YOTA

This is Yota, my host brother. He wanted to be the "model" for some pictures. :) The last one is of him digging for what he likes to call "nose treasures." Ewww....

Three weeks in a blog-shaped nutshell

Just a few pictures to let you see what's happened since the last post:

 


Photos:

• Top left: as I may have mentioned in a previous post, my school illegally evicted me from my apartment, but a friend of mine graciously offered me the extra room at his place until I could start my homestay with a Japanese family. This is the room I slept in for 3 weeks. Needless to say, I positioned my futon very carefully in case there was an earthquake. I didn't want the sword to fall over and chop off my leg. :)
• Top right: after we didn't get paychecks, most of my coworkers stopped going to work. Instead, we all took a day to sit around at my friend's apartment and play card games. I made taco salads for everyone as incentive to get them to come.
• Middle left: a few of my favorite students. We took this photo just a couple of days before my school closed. L to R: Yumiko, Ayako, Me, and Kiyomi.
• Middle right: later in October, I began a homestay with a Japanese family in Tokyo. Since my friends were still not going to work, I recruited them to come help me move my things. (They're so nice!) Here they are taking a break while we rode the train from Yokohama to Otorii.
• Bottom left: This is the outside of the house I live in now. It's way cool and modern.
• Bottom right: My new home is only a 15 minute walk from the Tama River (which separates Tokyo Prefecture from Kanagawa) as well as Tokyo Bay. In the distance you can see Haneda Airport. I love the view here!

Tokyo Disneyland!!

I finally made my first trip to Tokyo Disneyland last week. Two friends and I went on a weekday in spite of a forecast of rain. I imagined we'd have a pretty easy time getting on rides, but oh how wrong I was. Who would have thought there would be a three hour wait each for Space Mountain, the Haunted House, and Big Thunder Mountain on a day like that? I couldn't fathom how anyone would want to wait that long for anything until one of my students summed it up rather simply for me. "I'm Japanese. Japanese people like to make lines," she said. I'm not that patient, though. The longest we stood in line was 90 minutes for Pirates of the Caribbean. But anyways, here are a few pics from the adventure:






Photos:

• 1st row left: the castle. You may not have noticed right away, but a large portion of it is under construction. Those clever Disney people had the good sense to put a picture of the castle over the scaffolding. At the bottom of the photo you can get a pretty good idea of how crowded it was and nearby, you can see one of what I'm sure is actually thousands of pumpkins that are currently spread everywhere at Disneyland. Happy Halloween.
  
• 1st row right: This is Kim in the line for Small World. It was our shortest wait of the day: just over 20 mins. And for the record, yes all the rides at Tokyo Disneyland are EXACTLY like their counterparts in Anaheim.
  
• 2nd row left: We got to see the Halloween parade.
  
• 2nd row right: this is the Disney version of torture: a gigantic Pinocchio fountain right next to the world's longest line for the bathroom.
  
• 3rd row left: this is not only a picture of me eating food, it's a photo of me enjoying my first bite of turkey in over a year. It was amazing, just in case you wanted to know.
  
• 3rd row right: Laura and Kim also enjoyed the turkey.
  
• 4th row left: Furthermore, Japanese people enjoy turkey as well. This is a photo of the line for the street vendor whose only product was roasted turkey. Yet another brilliant example of Japanese people and their skillful Art of Line-Making. I think we waited about 15-20 minutes for ours.
  
• 4th row right: quite possibly my favorite picture of the day. Some kids just don't last as long as others, even in the "happiest place on earth". I had been watching his family and all of the sudden he just dropped and wouldn't get up. I also love how instead of helping him, his grandmother just took out the camera and started taking pictures of him.
  

I have such thoughtful students!

I was having a pretty rotten week: my boss called me on my birthday to tell me that my school isn't renewing the lease on my apartment and, consequently, I now have EIGHT days to find a new place to live and move out of my home. Add that to various other stresses (ironically also caused by my employer) and I was left in tears. The next day one of the students I have known the entire year I've been here heard the news about both my birthday and my apartment. She offered her kindest sympathies. At the end of our conversation, I went out to get some lunch. Not even a full ten minutes after I arrived back at school, the staff called me to the front desk. My sweet student had gone out and returned with this:

I couldn't think of a nicer way that anyone could have made my day brighter!

A Sunday Afternoon in Tokyo

A while back I knew I had a long weekend coming up this month and made plans for a trip to Hiroshima this weekend. Unfortunately, those plans fell on the same days as a National holiday and it turns out the entire country has a 3-day weekend. Needless to say, tickets were booked solid. So here I am, with 5 days off work and nowhere to go. Today I ended up just visiting some places around Tokyo that I'd never been to before, and here are the pics:




Photos:

• Top left: the stunning-yet-controversial Yasukuni Shrine has a splendid little antiques market from sunrise to sundown every Sunday. (To see photos of the shrine, see my post from January 16th of this year.)
• Top right: after the shrine and a quick trip to Ueno I was off to Harajuku, a place known all over the world for its fashion. Sunday is a particularly interesting day to stop by, because that's when all the local young people "put on their Sunday best" and go out and let people take pictures of them. (But in this case, "best" actually means "weirdest".) I got there after most of them had gone, but this pic is one of my favorites out of the few that I took.
• Middle left: still at Harajuku. This man was doing some kind of weird interpretive dance in his boxer shorts and chanting. I think it goes without saying--though I'm going to go ahead and say it anyways--that this was one of the most intriguing attractions for the tourists.
• Middle right: a photo of the main street in Harajuku (Takeshita-dori) with all of the Sunday shoppers. Click on the photo to enlarge and take a look at how many people there are...
  
• Bottom left: concluded the afternoon with a trip over to Gakugei-daigaku (the area of Tokyo where my school is located) just in time to see the local annual harvest festival. Think of it as Thanksgiving for Buddhists, only without the turkey and football games.
• Bottom right: as in the previous photo, groups of (usually) young men carry portable shrines in a parade-like procession around the streets. Buddhists believe that this spreads the blessings of the god around the city.

P.S. by the way...speaking of Thanksgiving, mark your calendars; you're going to have something extra to be thankful for this year. :) A tentative visit back to PDX has been scheduled for the week of Nov. 20th to the 27th. I say tentative because there's a lot that hinges on how things go at my school over the next few weeks, but I'm keeping my hopes up...

It's rainy season...again.

The long awaited update

OK, so I officially haven't posted anything in a month. Sorry guys. This summer, especially August, has been particularly busy for me. But I'm happy to report that I have successfully renewed my visa and don't have to worry about being deported or anything like that. Things aren't going as smoothly at my current job, though, so there's a possibility that I'll be actively looking for a new job or maybe even checking into one-way tickets back to PDX (not my first choice, though). I'll try to keep things updated here.

But for now, here's a smattering of pictures that I've taken over the last couple weeks:




Photos:

• Top left: This is a picture of my friend Laura about 30 minutes before she went into surgery to have her tonsils removed. She's just giving you one last look at them. (Sorry Laura, I couldn't resist posting it.)
  
• Top right: Ran some errands in Shibuya one night and this is the sunset I had the pleasure of seeing. Honestly, it's one of the most beautiful I've seen recently.
  
• Bottom left: this one's just for kicks. I thought it was funny that they actually illustrated the poo. In true Japanese style, it looks so...neat.
  
• Bottom right: Azamino, which is the area of Yokohama where I live, had it's annual "matsuri", or summer festival. I got there just in time to see the fireworks!

IKEA in Japan

There's an IKEA about 20-30 mins by train from my apartment, but all this time I've never gone. All the talk from folks at home about the new store has made me pretty curious, though. So today I went for the first time. Actually, it was my first visit to an IKEA store anywhere. Pretty cool place:


Photos:

• Left: Entrance to the Kohoku IKEA in Yokohama.
• Right: my purchase. I thought the blue pot was too cheery to pass up. I've named him "Dennis" because it seems like a good name for something green, whatever that means...

P.S. Bonus points to anyone who can tell me what kind of plant Dennis is. I have no idea.

Hakone

This week I took yet another day trip. This time I went to Hakone, a popular hot springs area close to Mt Fuji and about 2 hours by local train from my apartment. After arriving in the town, I took another train even farther up the mountain and went to the Hakone Open Air Museum, which I think is possibly the best museum I've ever visited. If you ever make it to Hakone, you must go. Later, when I stopped at the Tourist Information office after leaving the museum to ask which bus to take to Lake Ashi, they told me that there would also be a fireworks display on the lake that same night. How lucky am I? Here are a few photos from my day:






Photos:

• 1st row, left: group of sculptures on the "Green Plaza" at the museum
  
• 1st row, right: inside the "Symphonic Sculpture" at the museum; all the walls are made of stained glass.
  
• 2nd row, left: close to the entrance to the museum, the "seats" are designed like eggs. They're even cushioned so you can take off your shoes and walk on them.
  
• 2nd row, right: another sculpture at the museum
  
• 3rd row, left: traditional Japanese drumming at the "Hanabi" (fireworks) festival at Ashinoko.
  
• 3rd row, right: my very first glimpse of Mt Fuji. It's beautiful, isn't it?
  
• 4th row, left: some lucky kids are getting new pet goldfish at one of the summer festival tents near the lake. It took a serious amount of will-power for me to NOT come home with a new fish myself...
  
• 4th row, right: fireworks over the lake. You can also see the hundreds of paper lanterns that they floated on the water, if you look across the bottom of the photo.