To Japan, with Love

It's been approximately nine months since I first landed in this beautiful country of mine. It seems like ages ago, and yet the time has been flying by so fast I can hardly believe it. There's definitely a sort of 'winding down' emotion going on--I'm making plans for the summer, I'm sending some stuff back to the house. There isn't a word in English that I can use to describe it. In Japanese I'd definitely say 'sabishi!', which I guess the closest translation is 'lonesome'. It's like sad, only more wistful. That probably sounds pretty strange, haha.

Anyway, all this talk of going home is indeed making me sad, so I'll talk about what I've been doing these past two weeks. 

About two weeks ago, I went to Kyoto with my host family and their niece, a sweet little girl named Remi. That's probably a nickname, but since I don't know her full name, I'll just stick with Remi. Kyoto was really amazing; it used to be the capital of Japan, and for a while was the home of the emperor. Because of this, there's a lot of really interesting buildings and history all over the place. We went to a temple called 'Kiyomizu', or pure water, that got us a really nice view of basically the entire city. 

Remi and I also got to ride in a rickshaw, which in Japanese is 'jinrikisha'. It's like a horse-drawn carriage, only a person pulls it instead of an animal. I was a little worried that the person who was giving us the ride would have a hard time, but it was mostly just walking around. Also, the ride was only fifteen minutes long, so that was pretty good. We also got some interesting history about the buildings around us. 

Then I went and got turned into meiko by a bunch of professional makeup artists. We rented a kimono, and I got to take a bunch of professional pictures. Here's a photo! 

The makeup was really cold, and I was having a hard time smiling, just because the lip stuff was kind of caked on. It was an interesting experience, though. 

Then we went shopping. If you ever come to Kyoto, I highly recommend you visit one of the street markets. They sell a lot of very interesting stuff, and while it's a little pricey, it's very cool. Probably because there are a lot of foreigners, but a lot of stereotypical 'Japanese' type items are being sold there. 

On the right is my host family's niece, Remi.

Then last week, I went to Osaka and then Kyoto again, because my host mom wanted to go to a tea ceremony, and then a festival. 

Here's the thing about tea ceremony: it's very interesting to watch. There's about a thousand different steps to one ceremony, and every motion, every word, is planned right down to the inflection. Even the people drinking the tea have a set role. It's a graceful art, and requires a level of patience that a lot of people simply do not have. 

That being said, because there are about a thousand different steps, there are about a thousand different ways to mess up. For example:

Before the tea ceremony began, my host mom handed me a little fan and said, go place the fan horizontally on the floor and bow in front of it before entering the room. 

I said okay, I can certainly do that. I placed the fan on the floor in front of me, and bowed. Score one for the American. 

No no no, said my host mom. Your fan is backwards. Your fan is upside down. You have failed your test.

So she didn't actually say you failed, but it was very strongly implied. 

Also, during the ceremony itself, you have to sit in a certain way, called seiza; it's where you fold your knees in front of you and tuck your feet under your butt. You've probably seen it in martial arts movies, or something along those lines. If you want to understand what I'm about to tell you, try sitting that way for more than five minutes. 

For me, after about five minutes of sitting seiza, I was starting to get an uncomfortable tingling in my toes. 

After about ten minutes, my feet were dead. 

After twenty, I was wondering if my legs were still attached and whether or not walking had been a very vivid hallucination. 

However the tea was delicious and the snacks were equally so. It was a very interesting experience of Japanese culture, so if you get the chance to watch a live tea ceremony, I recommend you do so. 

Then I went to Kyoto to watch the aomatsuri, or 'blue festival'. I'm not entirely sure what the festival was for, but it was very cool. A bunch of Shinto priests walked around decorated carts, horses, oxen and other such things. My host mom and I walked alongside the parade, and got some nice pictures. Well, my host mom got some nice pictures. My phone was out of battery and I had forgotten my camera, so I wasn't able to get any. 

Finally, I want to talk, once again, about the Japanese weather. 

A wise man once told me to pick a season to complain about, and stick with it. Well, I have picked my season. The season is called tsuyu, which means rainy season, and let me tell you something. I miss the cold. I want the cold to come back. 

It has consistently been around seventy to eighty degrees the entire week, which okay, is actually pretty nice. However, one thing that I failed to take into account was that it is rainy season and we are next to the ocean. There is so much humidity in the air, it feels as though I'm breathing more water than oxygen. At least with the cold I could just put on a few more layers and be okay. The humidity is disgusting; it feels as though I'm going to turn into a puddle of melty human sometimes. 

I suddenly see the wisdom of my host parents buying water bottles by the dozen. 

Catching Up Pt. 3 (Final)

Alright, here's the final installment of my 'catching up' series. I'm on break right now, so I have a lot of time at the moment, luckily.

At the beginning of April, I had to say goodbye to my second host family, which was actually a little traumatic. I'd really gotten attached to these people, so you know. There was much crying, hugging and all that jazz going on. I told them, though, that if they ever decided to travel to America they should stop by my place and say hi.

Anyway, my new host family is...well, they're kind of the 'quintessential Japanese' family that you think of when you imagine traditional Japanese. The house is an enormous, old building, and it's very traditional, in that it still has tatami mats on the floors, and uses sliding doors. There's a shrine in the kitchen dedicated to the grandmother's late husband, and a monk comes in every week and prays over it. I have a host mom, a host dad, and a host grandmother, and the father is a doctor at a private hospital nearby.

In other words: they have a lot of money and it is vaguely nerve-wracking.

However they're very nice people; the host mom does things like flower-arrangement and tea ceremony, and we go to a lot of cultural performances. Just the other day I went to a Japanese puppet show, though I have to warn you: Japanese puppet shows are really morbid. Someone always dies at the end for reasons I can't really parse out because it's a cultural thing.

(Also the food is also a little horrifying, because they keep feeding me whole fish. I of course eat the whole fish, because I am a Good Exchange Student and sometimes that means dying a little on the inside for cultural experiences. But still--veeeeery Japanese.)

I don't have any pictures of my house yet, but I'll post some later.

Also just...two days ago, was it? Anyway, two days ago my brass band had it's annual concert, where we played about an hour and a half of music. The pieces were pretty difficult, but we'd worked for ages on them, so we killed it. In case anyone is wondering: yes, my host family recorded the entire thing and is planning on giving me a copy. If anyone wants to see the concert, I'm planning on posting the videos...somewhere. I'll get back to you about that later. Just to warn you, there's a lot of talking in Japanese in the third section, so you might not understand that one as well.