Lauren in Japan

I found this sign outside a store in Kyoto. Ever wonder if you are using your chopsticks in the polite way? You need not wonder any longer!



My favorite is the "Pillaging Chopsticks".

I went to Kyoto with other foreign English teachers who are part of the JET program. It was consciously planned as a fun, temple-free weekend. The most strenuous activity we were to partake in was bar hopping.

Shopping – which cannot be considered a strenuous activity by any means – was to occupy our day light hours while the bars were our night time refuge. In between that we would be eating, walking, mass transit-ing (yes, that is a verb) and sleeping if we had the time.

I had never experienced Kyoto outside the touristy temples and shrines. I knew of the famous shopping area called Ginza but I had only seen it as a blur outside a bus window. I loved it so much that I went back again 4 weeks later!


A cute restaurant


Jason, KJ, Mitzi (and Anjeli who was next to me) had to wait out the rain in a coffee shop


Kyoto Tower in the background


The subway lines aren't very busy at 6am


That old guy must be a total party animal because every weekend I went to Kyoto he was in the bars until 6am with us. You really know he's hardcore because look at that young guy in purple. He's the face of intimidated!


There are lots of small rivers running through Gion


A beautiful morning in Kyoto!


We all sat down to enjoy a lovely lunch on the banks of the river...


...until a nearby eagle took an interest in our lunch and swooped down to try to steal Anjeli's hamburger out of her hands. Anjeli was lucky only to get a face full of wing.


Shopping in Sanjyu Keihan


This temple was in the middle of the shopping district that was pictured above


Need some kicks? I love all the colors!


A little restaurant that sells grilled meat on sticks and other delicious things that go well with beer


The second time I went to Kyoto, it was the 4th of July weekend. The Americans had to show their pride by singing the national anthem in a karaoke booth!


Can you tell what that says!?


We kept up our patriotic pride that night in the bars too!


We went to the cutest kaleidoscope museum! My favorite part was the kaleidoscopes that they projected onto the walls. The light was projected through the kaleidoscopes while they slowly turned to make the images dance and change before your eyes. It would me a magical night light for a child's bedroom. Heck, I wanted it for my bedroom!


Goodbye Kyoto!


Road trip back to Suzuka


Highways all look the same

As a complementary service, the restaurant offered a birthday surprise for Terry. Boy, it was a surprise! A sweet loaf of bread with fruit and ice cream on top. Not the usual dessert.

Sometimes there is nothing more than countryside in Mie Prefecture.

I love the plants in Japan. They are so different from anything I have seen in Ohio!



The bike path I take to work every day.



Now you know he doesn't live in the North Pole. They've been lying!



Anjeli takes a picture of the local train.


My name either right side up or upside down.

A limousine company has revealed its plan to create hybrid hearses using the Toyota Prius as a base:

They will cost about 7.8 million yen ($80,000) each – Let the “eco” funeral boom begin!

Apparently a bird dropped a seed into a junkyard 25 years ago and a Japanese hackberry tree began to grow there, eventually lifting an old car into the air. Branches of the tree grew through holes in old car doors, lifting those as well. Workers at the junkyard have built a small fence around the tree, and are protecting it as it continues to grow.

--Japan Probe

Many Japanese people access the internet through their cell phones. I work with quite a few people that have forgone ever buying a computer and simply use their cell phones for everything. And these are no blackberry phones they are using. Many people are simply using a normal flip phone. It boggles my mind! The cell phone is often the number one was to access the internet in Japan. Popular websites are ones for cell phone games and are widely used as a form of entertainment during train rides. It is rare not to see about a dozen people or more clicking furiously on their cell phones during a train ride.

These 2D bar codes called QR codes can be found everywhere from the backs of shampoo bottles, to advertisement posters, and even business cards. More interesting is that your cell phone can scan this bar code, which is associated with a website. Your cell phone scans it and then takes you to that website. The one pictured here will take you to Wikipedia. Convenient, right!?

When I went for contacts, I expected the experience to be different from America. For example, I am not the -1.00 prescription that I am in America, but a 0.3 prescription in Japan. The eye chart is not a series of random letters, but different C shapes with the hole facing in different directions. I expected different brand names. What I didn't expect was this:

When the guy came over to ask me about what brand of contact I wanted, I thought the differences were over at this point. I waited for him to get my brand and prescription out. I watched as he washed his hands and then ripped open the contact case. Just as I was about to ask him, "Hey, can I wash my hands too before I try to put these contacts in? I work with middle schoolers and you can never be certain where those kids have been," the man disappeared behind me. There was a slight pressure on my left temple as he tilted my head back slightly. With the contact resting on his middle finger, he pulled up my top eyelid with his index finger and pulled my bottom eyelid down with his ring finger. Then he said, "Open your eyes all the way," and boom, the contact was in. I blinked. And blinked again. Yeah, the contact was in but... did that guy really just stick his finger in my eye?! Did he really just put that contact in my head for me? You may be a license practitioner, but get outta my eyeballs dude!

Apparently this is how all appointments go.

Easter snuck up on us quickly! Just like I didn't let Mardi Gras pass with out a baby in a cake (okay, so it was more like a teddy graham in a pastry but I have to work with what I got in Japan) I wasn't going to let Easter pass without some serious egg decorating. Deysi was totally up for it. The rest of my American co-workers... not so much. That's okay because Deysi and I produced some pretty amazing eggs. Ignore the fact that they are totally toxic because of the paint markers we used on top of the dye.


Decorating eggs in my kitchen




Our favorites were the Predator (by me) and Master Chief (by Deysi)


Eh? Eh? Pretty good, huh? We do it for the boys.

But what are easter eggs without a day to hide them?! Therefore the first annual Barba-hanami-easter was created, which means it was a barbeque, a flower viewing (the sixth one for me) and an Easter celebration all rolled into one. Not only did we chow on great food, but we continued to decorate eggs and eventually had an egg hunt.


Deysi helps cook


Justin and Junko use the playground equipment


Junko made a rooster egg


Justin made a Spartan warrior egg


Dojima made a Doraemon egg (famous kids' cartoon)


Anjeli climbed a tree

It was a great Easter celebration!

Iga is the birth place of the most famous and most successful ninjas, the Iga ninjas. Lucky for me it's in Mie Prefecture and not too far!

Remember when you watched that blockbuster movie called The Last Samurai and you saw that amazing scene when the poor samurai, all of whom are battle weary, are finally taking a well deserved rest by enjoying a play put on by other villagers but have their lives upended as the evening turns into a waking nightmare when ninjas attack their village. The ninjas come very close to killing the samurai leader/main character Ken Watanabe, but of course Mr. Watanabe doesn't die because he needs to witness Tom Cruise's dedication to helping protect the samurai and therefore it acts as a catalyst for the movie to end with Cruise fighting on the side of the samurai against the Westernized Japanese government. Okay, so you remember that movie now?

So those ninjas that attacked the village were Iga ninjas! The man who trained the ninjas for the movie is also the the man who puts on the ninja performances at the Iga Ninja Museum. This man (pictured below) is the last formally trained person in the full art of being an Iga ninja. Ironically, when they filmed The Last Samurai they needed to keep this guy on the movie site with them, so they cast him as one of the prominent samurai villagers.


The big red writing behind him is the Japanese character for ninja


Ninja weapons demonstration

I was invited to go to Iga by my friends who work for the JET Program (another English teaching program). For a small fee we were guided around and shown what a traditional ninja family's house would look like. Unsurprisingly it had a lot of hidden cubbies, fake walls and escape tunnels. We got to see the weapon demonstrations, the museum and the ninja castle. The most embarrassing part was that we were given ninja costumes to wear around all day. Oh this Western girl was never meant to be a ninja! So I tried to rock the look the best I could. But hey, we weren't the only ones rocking the ninja look. Take a look at the natives wearing their samurai swords during the weapon demonstrations in the picture above!



The habit was the first thing to go. I was too prone to break out into The Sound of Music songs while I was wearing it. Kjersten rocked hers though.

I thought I had seen it all, but even the train station attendants were wearing ninja outfits. The trains themselves had ninjas painted on them! It was ninja insanity! And I was throughly ninja-ed out at the end of the day. But I did enjoy the ninja dog.

My bowling is getting better every month. I can just break 100 at the end of the game now. Haha!


Anna, Molly, Yuki and Naoko


See what I can do!?

Just after Mom and Michele left, the sakura came out in full force. The Japanese love their cherry blossom (saukra) trees. And why shouldn't they!? It's so quintessentially Japanese! They lay out their plastic tarps, grab as much food and alcohol as they can and spend all day sitting under the trees living it up!


Tsu Park

Last year I only got to enjoy two days of flower viewing before rain storms ripped all the petals off the trees. This year I vowed that I was not going to miss one second of the sakura. In retrospect, I might be too good at making vows because I did six flower viewings in two weeks. Six!

What? It's a Wednesday and you guys are going over to the park to eat dinner and check out the flowers? Yeah sure I'll come! See you in 30 minutes!

Hey, you guys want to do flower viewing this weekend? Do you think they will let us sleep in the park so we can roll these festivities over into tomorrow too?

Come on! Let's do flower viewing again today! What do you mean there are no flowers left on the trees? I still see some! What do you mean that's just garbage stuck up in there from last weekend's flower viewing? I swear I still see some petals on that tree! What did you just say about the Nile?


Gasp... this is flower viewing number five for me. Number two for Olivia.


The willing victims pulled into Flower Viewing Number Five
Molly, Naoko, Anjeli, Kjersten and Anna


We even made some friends. This is Jun and Taka. Not to mention all the friends not pictured like Some-kun (pronounced Soh-may) who helped us escape from all those middle aged men and women employees from Honda that now know Kjersten and I as Michelle and Becky. They really wanted some token white foreign friends on their tarp that night. Not happening!

Let it not be said that Lauren didn't not experience this Japanese cultural point to the fullest.

What's the first thing I did after Mom and Michele left? Well aside from cleaning my house from top to bottom -- not that they were messy, but it was impossible to see floor with all that luggage and bedding -- I packed up a tatami mat, grabbed a boxed lunch and headed to the river to have a picnic with Deysi and Justin.


Don't we live in such a metropolis... Oh rice fields.

Hosting people in a foreign country is exhausting. Therefore maybe not surprisingly the picnic quickly turned into nap time. Too bad it was cold as heck!! It was still only March after all!

Tsubaki Shrine in Suzuka is only an hour and a half bus ride from my apartment which makes it a 20 minute ride from my far school, Reiho. It was the one place I had to take Mom because they have a special little tea house where you can drink tea and eat Japanese sweets surround by a beautiful garden.


Mom examining her tea cup


Mom and Michele at the entrance to the tea house


The main shrine


Walking around the shrine


The sakura was just starting to bloom


Is this not the longest branch you have ever seen!?! It's sticking out parallel from the tree and it extends further than the length of a mini van!


The view around the shrine. It's tucked in at the bottom of the mountains.


This 65, 70 year old woman had vibrant purple hair. It's not the first woman we saw like that. What is it with Japanese grannies trying to cover up the gray with purple?!

This was the last big trip we made before Mom and Michele had to leave Japan. We had one heck of a good time! Thanks for coming all the way to the other side of the world you two! I loved having you here!

Mom and Michele had a wonderful opportunity to eat at my superintendent's house. I don't think we could have finished all that food even if we had had three days to eat it! It was painful.




Some other favorite moments from the trip that focus on eating:


Mom and Michele try beef dipped in raw egg


Mom eats her first piece of sushi at a rotary sushi restaurant. Ironically, cake is flying past on the conveyer belt as I took this picture.


Mom was convinced this was egg salad on the hot dog. I assured her that it was chunky mustard. I don't know which is the lesser evil. (P.S. Before you laugh, egg salad on hot dogs is something they do here. Site: the Egg Dog from the convenience store Family Mart)

With the help of Terry, we convinced Mom and Michele that we should skip on the trip to Tokyo. Tokyo is amazing but the crush of people can leave you feeling claustrophobic and overwhelmed. I'm not sure that I could have remained the calm, cool and collected one on a sightseeing tour of the most populous metropolitan area in the world. Traveling by my self, I had bit of freak-out during one of my extended stays in downtown Tokyo. On a four day trip to Tokyo to meet up with my various friends around the city, I had to take a moment to breathe as I tried to cram my suitcase into a coin locker. The sheer number of people was pressing down on me. I just wanted to stand still or get to a place where there weren't so many people. I remember turning to my friend HeWu and asking him how he could stand to live in Tokyo. You just get used to it he said. Get used to it? He might as well have declared that giraffes learned how to fly. It was simply too much for me that weekend.

That isn't to say that I don't love Tokyo. I have been there at least four times since I came to Japan last January. I love the stores because you can find anything and everything. The best stores are the ones you find by happenstance. I love the people in Tokyo. Their fashion is astounding and you can tell they are conscious of everything they are wearing or carrying. They are making a statement when they walk out the door in the morning. It's an entirely different feel than where I am living and it's amazing to be wrapped up in the dizzying scene that is Tokyo.

However spectacular or overwhelming a trip to Tokyo could be, it's quite an investment mentally and monetarily. So I asked if we could skip it during Mom and Michele's trip here. Selfish... possibly. A good idea... definitely!

Instead we went to Ise Shrine. I have talked extensively about Ise Shrine in this journal since I often find myself going on trips there. It's the oldest and most holy shrine in Japan and it's only an hour or so by train from where I live. I knew it was going to be a good experience when we stepped out of the cab directly into a shishi odori dance. The dancer inside the costume dances and undulates around the crowd. He uses the large wooden puppet head to clack the lion's teeth rhythmically with the music. The lion wards off evil spirits and misfortune and is therefore used to pray for peace, good health or even bountiful harvests. This dancer was accompanied by three taiko drummers. The beats shook you to your core. The lion moved around the crowd and honed on little boys. A bite from the lion is considered very lucky and is used to ward misfortune from children (and adults I assume). It was a great performance. After, we moved on to acquire some lunch. When you go to Ise it's best not to look for a sit down restaurant. There are so many delicious food stands that line the street leading up to the shrine. It's best to snack your way to you destination. We went to a great place that is known for their potato and meat croquettes. They use Matsuzaka beef which is on par with Kobe beef. It's absolutely delicious! That's the store behind Michele and Mom. After lunch we walked down to the main shrine. Every 20 years the shrine undergoes construction and they tear down the wooden bridge that crosses the river and leads you into the shrine grounds. We just happened to get there as they were building a new bridge. It was a new, exciting sight for me as well as the Japanese visitors too. There were huge crowds that weekend and I am sure part of the appeal was the rebuilding of the bridge.

Bridge reconstruction

Sake bottles donated to the shrine

One of the small shrines surrounding the main shrine

Converse shoes made from kimono patterned material

The cherry blossoms were just starting to bloom
I was pleasantly surprised when Michele and Mom agreed that their trip to Ise was probably better than any trip to Tokyo would have been. Thank goodness. I knew I didn't need another blow to my pride like the Osaka trip!

I can count on my hands the number of times we have had thunderstorms in the last year and 4 months that I have been here.

Two.

That's right, only two thunderstorms. I hate thunderstorms. I'm a big chicken and I can never sleep during a storm. However, it's weird that there are so few thunderstorms here. I wonder why? Definitely something to look into.

All my third year students graduated at the end of March. Even though Mom and Michele were still in Japan, I had to leave them for half a day so I could say goodbye to all my students.


My girls


This girl (the captain of the softball team) was my chatting buddy during cleaning time


I only came to realize how awesome Yutaro was when the school year was drawing to an end. Too bad I didn't get to spend more time with him!


This kid (Kusanoki) never stopped staring at me. He would watch me with a charming small half smile on his face whenever I came to class.

When I went to the mall later that day, I saw more of my students from a different school.


The one on the left is now the female class vice president

Osaka -- the "Venice of Japan" because of all it's water canals -- was horribly crowded when we got there. Not only did I have to watch out for the crowds, I had to be careful of Mom and Michele. If they weren't the lovely wonderful women that have known and raised me all my life, Deysi would have probably had to fish my body out of one of the canals.


The Osaka trip was meant to be a quick trip over to get a taste of Japanese city life. It ended up being a 4 hour confusing train ride resulting in only a few coin lockers forcing Michele to drag her suitcase around downtown Osaka. This might be why all in all of my pictures, they look so very displeased.





We got off the train and decided to eat lunch right away. Osaka is famous for two foods, okonomiyaki (a cabbage pancake filled with meats, seafood and whatever else you like) and takoyaki (little balls of dough with octopus inside). Mom was ecstatic! She had wanted to try these two foods ever since I mentioned them when I first moved to Japan. Michele was... not so thrilled.



But it was a good experience!



So after battling the crowds we decided to spend the day in the peaceful Osaka Aquarium.




We even got to see a sumo wrestler on a bike, which ended up being the highlight of my trip. Mom and Michele... not so impressed.



So overall, the Osaka trip was a bust. Not the greatest memory from the two weeks they were here, but interesting none the less.