Indi Tries To Remember September
September, September... okay... I know I was in Japan... hmmmmmmm
Sunday is an interesting day to visit Osaka Jo (castle) and the gardens, since everyone and their dogs (literally) visit the park every week. There are many booths set up, some specifically catering to English-speaking tourists, as well as dance exhibitions, dozens of amateur singers and bands performing, and all sorts of interestingly-dressed people. This is where you'll see all the Victorian-style goths, the Japanese hippies, and fashion trends we all wish died in the 50's, 60's, 70's and 80's. I've not seen legwarmers since Jane Fonda, but Japan has changed all that. ^.^
If I recall, the station one rides to is Yodoyabashi, the last stop on the Keihan line. You then follow the Osaka Business Park walk through tunnels and various buildings, until you come out into a business district with various art exhibitions showing year round in these little bubbles in the ground. Strange, but cool. Then you walk past the inevitable McDonald's, and also a Subway, and the veggie sandwich I had there was the best food I've had yet... FAMILIARITY!! Why didn't I get something else? B/c everything else scared me. They had all sorts of strange-looking fish sandwishes, shrimp sandwiches, a interesting looking egg-salad sandwich and a cajun-chicken sandwich. Nothing else was Subway!! AAAHHH!!! ^^ To those wondering, they don't have Ranch, Italian, MUSTARD (of any sort), but they do have Vinegar and Pepper. This remains along the familiar line of similar, but just different enough to remind you that you are NOT at home. Not that I mind much, really. It's just amusing.
We (Lauren, Dominique, and I) crossed the lovely stone bridge over the first outer moat and into the gardens. The one thing to remember about Osaka Castle is stairs. STAIRS!! So many stairs!! You must climb about fifteen flights before you can reach the bridges to cross the inner moat, then about ten more flights before you reach the castle, and then inside the castle, assuming that you are not handicapped if you've gotten this far, they make you climb seven flights of stairs and start the tour at the top. You'll notice I have no pictures of the inside of the castle, this is because the inside is entirely a museum, and a modern one. None of the original interior remains, sadly, but a lot of the exhibits are really nifty. There are several extremely old suits of samurai armor, all beautiful and intricate. One suit the museum acquired from someone who had SHOT AT IT (it still has bullet marks) to ensure that it was legitimate (I guess samurai armour was supposed to be tough enough to deflect bullets?? I don't know). But it was sad to see the armour and helmet so pockmarked from bullets.
They also had a recreation of the "Golden Tea Room," which was a royal traveling tea room whose interior was entirely red velvet and gold, more gold than red velvet! The entire tea set was gold as well. Extremely gaudy, but pretty to look at.
The exterior of the castle was the most impressive of the site. A beautiful and stately green and white, inlaid with gold everywhere, with gigantic golden dragon-fish standing guard above the city of Osaka. On the roof, one is able to see for miles in every direction, to the mountains surrounding the city. It is quite an impressive view.
Explanation of the Need for a Computer
Soooooooo there we were. We rode the train to Kyobashi, then took the Midosuji Subway line to Namba, then walked a mile or so in an underground mall to the exit for DenDen Town (passing reluctantly a Baskin Robbins, which we swore we would return to someday... and still have not done so...). And it was true. Cheap electronics stuff... everywhere. Now, let it be known that Dominique and Ursula are both die-hard Mac people. You know the type. ^.^ Ursula uses them because she's a graphics art major, while Dominique is just a dyed-in-the-wool, must-convert-world-to-Mac-usage person. So, we found ourselves in MacWorld, unsurprisingly, with a growly Lauren (who hates Macs) in tow. I think Macs are cute, but I prefer PC's, especially as desktops. But IBooks are very cute creatures. And unfortunately, we made our way to the fourth floor of MacWorld, which held the used laptops. Oh, that's trouble, I thought. And there... there I saw it. A graphite IBook, virtually brand new, 466mhz G3 processor (which is much faster than a 466mhz P3, it's about equivalent to a 667mhz, I've been told), 64mb Ram (need more), 10Gig HDD, DvDRom, etc., etc., etc... and built in ethernet (all Macs have this apparently). It was a thing of beauty. It called to me... It said "Indi... Indi... you need me... with me, you won't lose a pint of blood a day for an hour on a system... you can update your site in peace... you can answer emails... you can listen to mp3's... you know you need me..." I stood as though transfixed... I looked at the price... I flinched. 130000yen. Ouchie. Doing some quick mental calculations, I realized that was about $1000, given the current exchange rate. That's a lot. Doing some more quick mental calculations (they'd given me more food allowance than I thought they would)... I thought.. hm. I might just have enough. Especially since I have to use my credit card anyway to get me home...
Her name is Fawkes. I hope you all will love her and accept her into the family as one of your own. Please don't hate me for my alternate lifestyle, and don't hate her for it. It's not her fault she's such an attractive and cute little computer. She's enabling me to finally update my site. She's enabling me to actually write my school papers and save them. And she breathes when she's asleep (Macs have a little green light that gets softer and brighter and makes it look like they're breathing when they sleep). ^.^ I have a Mac. Indi stands in front of the support group. "My name is Indi. And... I am a Mac user."
As a postscript, Lauren, who hates Macs, also bought one. That is disgustingly cheap for an Ibook.
For Those Curious: A Description of My Classes
Reading and Writing Japanese: Funny thing is, we're expected to SPEAK more Japanese in this class than we are in SPOKEN Japanese. I think a lot of that is due to Kageyama-sensei, who is very rapid-fire. It's often a little difficult to understand her, since she thinks it is important (and it probably is) to get used to hearing Japanese at a natural speed. Both Japanese classes are astonishingly demanding and very fast-paced, of course, a lot of that may be the fact that I'm having to catch up so much.
Religion in Japan: I love this class. Professor Kenney is great, she's very funny and irreverent. Her teaching style is very off-the-cuff, throwing in as many field trips as humanly possible. We have five (?) scheduled this semester, I believe: one to Fushimi Inari, Tenrikyo, a Zen temple, the Kurama Fire Festival, and I think there's another in there somewhere. The New Religions are pretty interesting, and some are quite strange.
Anthropological Perspectives and Studies of the Japanese People and Culture: I THINK that's the whole title.
Did it put you to sleep? If it didn't, then the class surely would. The material is actually quite interesting, and Professor Hester knows what he's talking about, but the room it's in doesn't have very good AC circulation, and Dr. Hester tends to speak in a bit of a monotone, so it's difficult to fight sleepiness. Nonetheless, I would recommend it. Right now we're going over the Japanese school system.
The Hojo-E Festival at Iwashimizu Shrine or How Japan Attempted to Destroy Me with Stairs.
So that Friday night, we boarded one of the last trains going two stops away, to Yawatashi. As we got off the train, we realized that there wasn't really anyone around. Hmmmm, we thought, Surely there should be people around a festival? The guard at the station sort of pointed us to the left and said "Yama", or "mountain." Okay... so we started walking in that direction down a dark, black totally isolated street, wondering which of the mountains surrounding us we should be heading to... when they came. We saw dark shadows approaching, heard the steps, and stopped, waiting....
And who should appear but the baddest, youngest street gang in all of Japan? They were chain-smoking, cell-phone using, "ore wa" this "ore wa" that, r-rolling 9 year olds who were very amused to see a bunch of gaijin strolling down THEIR street at midnite. We asked them where the festival was, and the youngest one puffed up his chest and told us in no uncertain terms that we had missed the festival, it was last night, but he could take us to where it WAS. This caused in us some consternation, but Byron was pretty sure he was lying his head off. They took delight in leading us the LOOOOOOOOONG way around, while engaging us in conversation to fuel their giggles. They also called us Gaijin-san. Byron's eyes goggled. Gaijin, as most know, is an impolite short form of "gaikokujin", or "outsider." "Gaijin" is sort of like saying "damn outsider," or at least saying "outsider" with a really derisive sneer. However, "-san" is an honorific... so they were very rudely making fun of us. Byron wanted to throw them into the nearest river, but we convinced him that we were quite lost, and they were really our best bet to get to where we needed to be.
They did indeed lead us in the right direction, and when we approached the festival grounds, they yelled "Sayonara, GAIJIN-SAN!!" to Byron and ran as quickly as they could out of his fuming reach. Laughing, we strolled through the booths, most of which were closed. Very few people were here. One person pointed us to a set of dark stairs leading up the mountain. Since we knew the shrine was AT the top of the mountain, we put 2 and 2 together and assumed we needed to go up to see the preparations. Ohhhhh, we foolish mortals....
We decided about halfway up to start counting flights of stairs. Remember that. Each flight had about 30 steps before it switched back, much like mountain trails will switchback. From when we started counting, we climbed no less than 36 flights to the top of the mountain. Panting and clutching our chests, we saw that we weren't able to enter the shrine due to the festival preparations. Also, we noticed that no one else seemed winded at all. Shocked, we saw why. Did anyone else climb seventy flights of stairs to get here?? Nooooooooo no no no. They all took the CABLE CAR. Which sat not fifty feet away. We laughed, we cried, we climbed back down stubbornly.
The actual festival began at about two in the morning. The story behind the festival is that it is the one night when the god (each shrine has an artifact which is said to house the god or goddess of the shrine, Iwashimizu had several lovely arks, which looked like the Indiana Jones ark of the covenant, each with a gorgeous soaring phoenix on top) descends the mountain to pass into the inner gate and accept a letter from the emperor. These were escorted by hundreds of priests and shrine members, as well as solemn dancers, and beautiful flute and drum music, and oh yes, lots of FIRE!! Yay!! At sunrise, thousands of fish, turtles and birds were released into and above the river, and the festival came to an end.
I thought the rides were a bit of a letdown, at least the coaters. There weren't any good drops at all, all the coasters were pretty substandard. But on one of the rides (these are kid's rides, remember), there were women painted on the side, starkers as they day they were born from the waist up, laughing as you spun around. Byron got very sick on that ride, but I think he was just staring at the painted women so the vertigo hit him harder. ^.^ The spinny and upside down-y rides were cool, but they were the same as one might find at the fair. They DID have the swings. ^.^
On the way home, we found a great Chinese restaurant. I DO like the Chinese food here, and I'm certain it's much more authentic than it is at home, but I still prefer Leo's to anything I've ever eaten here. *sigh* Must go to Leo's!!!!!!!
Main Journal Page
Mid-September, I am beginning to notice that the computers in the lab are a very sought after commodity. Really, it makes sense given that there are four working computers in a dormitory that houses over 150 people. But it started to irk me terribly when, in the hopes of avoiding more blood spilling in the name of "That is my PC!! I saw it FIRST!!" among the inevitable dozen or so people waiting at any given time for a 'puter, the lab put a strict hour time limit on each 'puter. UNLESS YOU HAD YOUR OWN. Then you just came in, picked up an ethernet cord, and did what you needed to do. The laptop owners spent a lot of their computer time smirking patronizingly at those wasting away in line for a computer. Some waiters would challenge each other to deathmatch type duels, with the laptoppers placing bets on which could reach a free PC first, and how many limbs would be remaining. After two such encounters, and the unfortunate loss of my left leg, I decided to accompany Lauren, Dominique and Ursula into DenDen Town, the famed "Cheap Electronics" district of Osaka.
Spoken Japanese: I have this class five times a week, with Miyauchi-sensei, who is a great and funny teacher. It's level 2 in the Genki textbooks. This is sort of unfortunate, since my classes at OSU went on a totally different system, so I knew too much to be in Level 1, but honestly, I had/have a TON of catching up to do to understand everything I'm supposed to in Level 2!!! For instance, we were supposed to know all the plain/short forms of every verb, dictionary forms, plus the formal forms. We had never learned the dictionary forms, which is how you come to the plain forms. That took some frustratingly long nights of study.
Dr. Hlawatsch told his history class of a very cute, little, quaint middle-of-the-night festival at a shrine called Iwashimizu. Ursula, Dominique and Richard, all being in his class and of course listening raptly to the lecture, decided it would be great fun to go. This is how the stage was set for Japan to kill me using stairs.
So came a Monday off, we have a lot of three-day weekends here, which no one is complaining about. This particular Monday was a lovely sunny day, and we had nothing planned. So, we figured we'd go check out the local amusement park, Hirkata Park (Hirakata Kouen). Though it cost a bit more than we'd planned on to get in, once in, we were very pleased college students. There were tons of rides, two big coasters, and a mini-zoo. They had Red Pandas, which are the world's cutest animals, and these river otter looking creatures whose name I don't recall, that are native to the area. They also had a petting zoo with bunnies, hamsters, goats, sheep, and get this, (only in Japan) about fifteen different breeds of dogs that you could go play with. Japan is very big into dogs.
Next Journal Page
Previous Journal Page
