ocean to mountains
Craziness continued with the return of Jamie to Kashiwazaki. A big party was thrown to celebrate both spring break (during which we all still have to work) and to welcome back the missing crazy. Running late as usual, I met the crazies in Nagaoka so we could all ride out to Kashiwazaki together. We arrived just in time to meet some of the others for the pre-party session in Jamie's apartment. Some of the girls got ready while we all drank and started the party chaos.
Then it was off to dinner at a local izakaiya (restaurant bar) to meet up with some more people. There must have been over thirty people in this one large room. Lots of food and drinking followed the initial welcome for everyone. Being the party planners that the crazies are, there were plenty of activities planned for the whole group throughout the night including but not limited to: sake bombs, beer bongs, chopstick races, and kings. After doing plenty of socialized and making a complete mess of the tatami room we left for karaoke. Nice Nice karaoke was great as usual and it was where the group started randomly splitting up for their respective beds. Mine was with Jamie and Liz for a night of getting comfortable together on a single futon.
Saturday the madness continued with Michelle singing throughout the apartment waking everyone up early in the morning. Apparently she had not gone to bed so a couple of us went to get some breakfast at McDonald's for everyone. We took our time there and once we got back everyone woke up to eat and watch the interpreter where everyone but myself fell back asleep. Finally we all got out of bed and headed to a ramen shop owned by our friend Hase. After chowing down, the crazies and I headed to the Kashiwazaki salt onsen for some relaxation. We spent a very relaxing hour in the hot spring we got out and headed back to Jamie's. I was going to leave but then I was challenged to a game of Monopoly. Anyone who knows me very well knows I can't turn down a game of Monopoly and this was no exception. It was an intense game full of screaming and dancing and in the end it was I who was victorious. Some people (Jamie) might not live that one down for quite some time.
The next day I was off to Shiozawa bright and early to go snowboarding with Asuka. Luckily I managed to get up plenty early on very little sleep and caught the train with lots of time to spare. We spent the day at Maiko and, since it is officially out of season, the tickets were really cheap. However the slopes were littered with little kids because it was the first weekend of spring break for the elementary and junior high schools. We still managed to make quite the day of it. Plus, it was probably the last time I will go snowboarding this season and I was kind of sad because I was finally starting to get the hang of it. Oh well, spring is on the way and there is always next year. Afterwards we checked out the onsen and then headed back to my homestay where the whole family was around for dinner. It was nice to see the whole family again, especially since it will be the last time for at least a couple months because of how busy I will be. I got back late last night stuffed with a slight buzz. Another successful weekend of trying to living it up to the fullest in Niigata.
double the craziness
Last week it was time to catch up with the crazies, well at least 2 of the 3 since Jamie was back in the states. On Wednesday I invited Michelle and Megan over for some taco rice and catching up. Admittedly we didn't get to just sit down and talk as much at the penis festival because of how huge the party was. It was nice to just sit down to dinner with good friends and talk about life. To top it all off we had tea and ice cream with strawberries. It was a great night that had inadvertently become the stepping stone for craziness that weekend.
I was just settling down to a potentially low key Saturday night when Michelle and Megan called to see if I was doing anything. Turns out that our friend Scott was in town and a small party was in the works. Earlier in the day they had all gone to Yamaya (a local foreign foods store) in order to pick up ingredients for tacos, curry, margaritas, and a beer bong. If you think about all the things I just listed you probably have realized that it was a recipe for an absolutely amazing night! Between the massive amounts of food and liquor, we managed to get trashed and full. This actually resulted in turning Megan's apartment into an huge mess but it was all worth it. Plus, I wasn't the one who decided to drunkenly make cookies in the middle of the night despite being the one to eat over half a pan of brownies... my bad.
The following morning, after I spooned with Michelle the night before, we got up to make an awesome breakfast. Fruit, juice, apple french toast, and cheesy eggs. While eating breakfast we threw in the movie Hitch, which I had never seen, and continued out goofiness throughout the afternoon. Life never slows down when you are with the crazies. If I ever say that I am going to stay in for the weekend I am obviously lying but it is a good thing.
drink, sleep, teach
To end the madness of my traveling I did more drinking and teaching past week than I have in quite some time. It all started on Friday with a party in Maki. As I said before, Chieh was back in town so we all got together in Maki for a night out on the town. The usual crew was joined by Kristi as well, which was a welcome addition to the night's craziness. After grabbing a couple quick drinks at Melissa's we headed to a nearby restaurant, called Samurai Star. It is definitely a misplaced contemporary bar in the middle of nowhere Japan. It gave us plenty of time to get some great food and drinks while enjoying good company. Next on the list that night was karaoke. Admittedly I was a little tired that night from the previous couple of weeks and part way through the night I passed out from exhaustion. Not being my usual party animal but everyone managed to have a good time before calling it a night.
After getting a little bit of sleep and a shower, I got to head out to the small village of Tochio where the heralded Hodare Matsuri is held and visit my favorite crazies. The Hodare Matsuri is the festival of fertility and is known for people getting to ride on a gigantic wooden penis around the town. However this was the pre-party to the festival on Sunday. Food was provided for in massive quantities and everyone brought alcohol to share. Plenty to eat and drink in a group of people from neighboring prefectures and multiple teaching organizations equaled an amazing night of fun. There was everything from made up drinking games, karaoke, and various apartment madness.
Since Melissa had told me how to work my alarm, it was easy for me to get up in time to head back to Sanjo the following morning. On Sunday it had started to know and sadly I couldn't stay for the festival because of a prior engagement to teach at the Sanjo All English Day. Luckily I got some hungover McDonald's before showering and arriving at Soleil, a local community center, to start a fun day of teaching. During the day I had to teach drama class in the morning and got to teach the Japanese the rules of American UNO, which actually vary slightly from the way Japanese people play. The day was ridiculously long and I should have known better than to show up hungover but it was well worth it for the weekend of fun. Recently my days have been very low key but it will be nice to be caught up on sleep eventually.
bye bye bye...
In Japan the school year is from April to March and the 3rd graders graduate a couple weeks before school is finished for everyone else. Monday was graduation but before that the last couple weeks have been spent having farewell parties and saying goodbye to them. One of my schools had a party for each class where students got some snacks while we played games and watched a video of most of the teachers giving them messages in English, which was very amusing.
At my favorite school I got to introduce the 3rd graders to tacos in a bag complete with kool aid. One of the English teachers is also the Home Economics teacher so we combined Home Economics with English for a three period long party. The previous evening we had gone out to buy all the supplies and then had the students make the meal. It was a blast and the girls were way better than the boys at cooking and cutting but the boys made some awesome kool aid. Afterwards we played bingo for the rest of the party before lunchtime, which no one ate.
Fast forward to this week and graduation. Normally we are supposed to attend our base school's graduation, which would be Nichu. However after seeing the 3rd graders from Ojimachu every week for the past seven months, as opposed to maybe once a month at Nichu, I felt I needed to be there. Most of my students and coworkers were shocked to see me in a suit and tie but it was a definite necessity for the ceremony. If you thought graduations back home were boring, try going to a Japanese one where they are even more formal than in the States and you can't understand anything that is going on.
Thankfully Ojima had only 33 students graduating so the ceremony when fairly quickly. After it was finished we got to toss some confetti and take pictures. I really didn't think I would be as sad as I was to see those students leave. Ojima was the first school I felt truly comfortable at and the 3rd graders were a big part of that. Hopefully I made some sort of impression on them as they move on to the next phase of their lives but I guess that is what any teacher wants.
Since I was still trying to recover from Seoul they let me go back to my apartment to take a short nap before going to the enkai in Honjikoji (the bar district in Sanjo). The night was a blast and I ended up talking to some teachers that I was pretty shy about approaching previously. After we were done with the first enkai we met up with Chieh, my predecessor who had actually come to Japan on his spring break, and headed to another bar in the area. Needless to say after about 6 hours and going through 4 bottles of shochu (Japanese wheat wine) at the second bar alone, it was time to call it the end to a great night. Hopefully I will managed to recover from all this partying sometime in the near future but we'll see what happens.
seoul you later
Another weekend, a few more stamps in the passport and a chaotic 36 hours in Seoul. This time I was traveling with Nuria and Kristi, who are also teaching in the Tsubame-Sanjo area. After teaching on Friday we connected up in Sanjo before heading to the airport together. The flight from Niigata to Seoul was only a couple hours but once we got there it turned out that bus ride to our hotel, after dropping all the other passengers off, was almost longer than we were in the air.
Seeing as we were pretty exhausted from travel and speaking no Korean we trekked around the corner of our hotel and found a nice little Korean restaurant. Having no clue what the menu said, we pointed at a picture that looked decent and thought might be enough for three people. Little did we know that we would end up with a six course meal of various Korean food, I still could not tell you exactly what we had. It started out with lettuce rolls, followed by kimuchi and seaweed soup. Then there was the frying pan filled with vegetables, meat and eventually noodles. The meal was finished off with some sort of fried rice. Keep in mind that we didn't know how to do or make anything so the staff was constantly coming over to cook or show us how to eat our food. We crashed early that night from eating too much food and we had to be up at the crack of dawn.
6:30 rolled around the following morning and it was time to get ready for the day. We had to meet our tour guide for the DMZ (DeMilitarized Zone) downstairs a little while later for the hour drive out there. The 3rd tunnel area we visited was only a little over 50 km away from Seoul, which is why when the tunnel was discovered it was such a shock that the North Koreans had managed to dig so close the capital. It was here that we got to take a little adventure down the third tunnel, helmets and all. They told us no cameras which was disappointing because we were the only ones down there for a while and wanted some pictures. This tunnel was obviously Kristi's size because Nuria and I, mainly me, kept bumping our heads on the ceiling. Admittedly our tour guide was absolutely crazy but she managed to get us into everything first so we didn't have to view anything in a crowd or wait in line.
Included in the tour was a visit Dorasan Station which, in case you didn't know, is the new train station they built for when the reunification of the Korea's happens and is another stamp in the passport. From what I gathered, only a very select few people can actually use the trains bound for North Korea and that is only after a strict screening process. It was interesting to witness all the various propaganda while we were there because they made it seem that the end to the war was on the horizon. Then you see the overwhelming military presence outside and it serves as a reminder that peace is still a ways away. By the time noon came we were all ready to get out of there and it made me really happy we only did a half day tour. Oddly enough we were in a very goofy mood that day and are probably lucky that we didn't get either kidnapped or kicked out.
Seoul has an abundance of foreign food chains, more so than Tokyo or Osaka, so we couldn't resist having some good Western food. After the tour we couldn't resist stopping at the closest American restaurant which happened to be Outback Steakhouse and it was amazing to have a big juicy steak. Afterwards I had to run back to the hotel for Gavin's number so we could connect up later in the evening. Then I met back up with the girls at one of the famous temples in Seoul, that's name escapes me at the moment because of how long and difficult it is to pronounce. Before kicking off the activities for the night, we managed to get a glance at the South gate which is famous for being one of the last remaining parts of the wall that used to be around the city before the Japanese destroyed it. Luckily the weather men were wrong and all day we had some decent weather to take pictures, get lost and play around Seoul.
Earlier I had called Gavin to arrange the plans for the night and we all met up with him for dinner. We went to a Nepalese restaurant where beer, nan and curry were found in plenty. After I stopped my nose from running we decided to check out the night life in Seoul and found this bar that Gavin had been to before. Once we got some beers I realized that it seemed like I was at Sal's again. The music coupled with the people dancing brought me back to last year, granted I haven't heard a mix of music like that in a long time but still. Jokingly Gavin mentioned homo hill, which is the gay bar district, and so I suggested we all go check it out. It turned out to literally be a hill with a bunch of gay bars and was surprisingly a great time. Some of Gavin's friends were there and mentioned going to a nearby dance club. I was lucky because the guy I was flirting with ended up being able to get me in for free. On top of that we got to hang out in the VIP room and had free drinks the rest of the night. When it was all said and done I ended up stumbling back into our hotel room at around 5 am, just in time to get a little sleep before having to leave the next morning.
Our final morning in Seoul was slightly painful because our tour guide took us to a mandatory little shop that specialized in kimuchi. If being up that early after a late night wasn't painful enough, that store made it even worse by making us eat every kind of kimuchi that store had in stock. Then they decided that it would be a good idea to stalk the three of us and try to convince us to buy everything in the store, which before that I had actually considered buying something. Luckily we got out of there extremely fast, with no signs of remorse for not making a purchase, and headed to the airport. For some reason, Kristi and I were really craving Burger King, probably because I have yet to see one in Japan, and sure enough we found one after passing through security. One of the themes for the trip seemed to be "eat until you want to pass out" and Burger King proved to not be an exception. It just made the flight back to Niigata that much more satisfying. Once we arrived home it was one of the only times I have returned to Niigata to find the weather more beautiful than that place I came from. It seems that Spring had come to Niigata while we gone.
