Spring Break Catching Up - 節分 (Setsubun)

Next up - pictures from a traditional Japanese festival, called 節分 (せつぶん, setsubun).  This festival traditionally celebrates the beginning of spring, which began on February 3rd on the old Japanese calendar system.  Because the beginning of spring is an important time for Japanese people, the school organized a field trip to a local Shinto shrine to go take part in the festivities.  Here are some pictures!

Classmates and teacher walking up the stairs

Traditional garb - everywhere

The shrine itself, with all the people waiting for the ceremony to begin

Entrance to the shrine

The ceremony itself begins with a procession of famous people from the community walking through the courtyard up to the shrine.  This might include company presidents, current or ex-city councillors or sumo wrestlers.  Yes, sumo wrestlers.

Then, after some ringing of gongs and the like, the famous people come out from the temple and chase a "demon" of bad luck outside the temple.  They do this by throwing soy beans at him, and yelling 鬼は外。福は内。 (oni wa soto, fuku wa uchi) - Demon get out, luck come in!

Waiting on famous people

Scaring away the "demon"

I think it's been subdued at this point, or something...

Then all the famous people come out and throw bags of soy beans at the crowd.  People jump to catch these bags of soy beans, at which point you're supposed to eat the same number as your age.  This will bring you good luck, apparently.

Throwing the soy beans

Naturally, everyone wants to catch said soy bean bags.  Inside each bag is a small piece of paper, and if your piece of paper has a number on it, you win a prize!


Now, because I am taller than your average Japanese person, I managed to catch something like 7 or 8 bags.  None of them contained a prize - I was pretty disappointed.  Plus, dry soy beans are not that tasty...


And that was your introduction to the Japanese festival of Setsubun!

Spring Break Catching Up - Tama Zoo!

Continuing in my penance series on what happened during the last three months, here are some pictures of my trip to Tama Zoo!


Some context - my friend Matt told me that he'd been invited to an event by a Japanese girl.  She also told him she'd bring a friend, so he should too.  Wanting to be a good wingman, I was made too volunteered to go with Matt.  After I agreed, I found out that we were heading to a zoo in the outskirts of Tokyo.  Zoos have never been my favourite thing (tell me if this isn't true, Mom), but I figured it'd be worth checking out a Japanese zoo while I am here.


We met up in Shinjuku station - turns out it was Matt, myself, two Japanese friends of Matt, as well as three other foreigners: a British girl, a French guy and a Portuguese girl.  Definitely one of the more international events I have taken part in since getting here...


In any case, I don't think I have any other witty things to say, so here are some pictures.

Zoo entrance

Going to Africa!

For those of you with Japanese experience, you will probably facepalm at the next two pictures. English explanations will follow.

Dangerous!  Don't you dare climb this!

So, why is this sign funny?  Notice the light blue characters at the end? In Japanese, "elephant" is 像 (ゾウ, zou), but the same sound (ぞう, zou) is used in masculine speech to add emphasis.  So yeah, it's a pun.

Dangerous!  Please don't climb here.

And this one?  The word for rhinoceros is 犀 (サイ, sai), and one of the words for "please" is ください (kudasai)... Yup.  Another pun.

Now, I should frame the rest of this post by explaining that it was bitterly cold (by Tokyo standards) when we visited the zoo.  We first went to go see the lions...

For some reason this is the building where the lions were kept

For 1000Y, you can be driven around to see the lions  "up close" - seemed expensive

Soaking up the sun, it seems

The watering hole

The lions, by and large, seemed to be freezing their respective posteriors off.  I felt kinda bad for them, really.

More animal pictures follow:

Elephant!

This poor guy looked really lonely...

Flamingos which were much more white than they were pink

This cheetah

Arctic monkeys?

Only guy who didn't seem to be freezing

This poor fellow had clipped wings and couldn't fly at all

Lazy joey

This guy was walking around like a boss

Of course the Koalas were one of the main attraction

The koalas were indoors, but... their living space was pretty lame

Poor frozen tiger

This... Jaguar? kept pacing back and forth at us - I think he was hungry

Red panda!  This guy was so adorable - I want one!

 So that was the trip to Tama Zoo!

Spring Break Catching Up - Snow in Tokyo!

Welp, it's Spring (Winter?) break.  Final exam was just about a week ago.  About time I put some posts up.  I'm going to catch up on the backlog of posts that I *should* have written over the past three months.  Let's go!

Probably my happiest event ever over the past three semesters was looking outside my window at the dorm and finding snow on the ground.

My phone sucks at night pictures...

Not much by Canadian standards, but...

SNOW!

I managed to convince some friends to come prancing in the snow with me.  Definitely a great night!

I can only imagine the chaos on the roads...

The local temple was also covered in snow XD

Then we went back to the dorm, and this happened:

Yes, those are forks for arms.

Back from (unplanned) hiatus

Hello dear readers - if you are still around...


I'd like to first apologize for my long - and frankly, unplanned - hiatus.  I am now back in Japan, back in school, and have just finished my midterms.  Life in Japan has reached a sort of routine, finally.  I now have morning classes, which leave the afternoon open for...  studying.  Level 4 is proving significantly more difficult, as we now learn five (5) new kanji every day, each accompanied by 3-4 words: this translates into having to learn somewhere between 15 and 20 new words every day.  Did I mention that there were daily tests?  And that if you fail said daily test, you have to write out all your mistakes 20 times?  Yeah...


In any case, back to our regularly (haha!) scheduled programming - pictures of cool things I find in Japan!

First, a few things that I have seen in stores since coming back to Japan...

I needed hangers - is it bad that I bought these because I thought the Engrish was hilarious?

This semester, a few of us decided that we'd try cooking at the dorm more.  To do this in proper Japanese fashion, a rice cooker is necessary, so we went in on purchasing one of these:

Not actually the one we bought, but looks similar...

Restaurants and shops in Tokyo are always looking for new ways to advertise...  We saw this beauty on the way home.
 

After purchasing the rice cooker, the store actually wrapped the box up with the black straps you'll see in the next picture, and ATTACHED A HANDLE.  What a crazy idea.

Matt carrying home our rice cooker.

I've seen a lot of crazy things since I got here.  This next picture, however, was the most shocking thing to me yet.

GRAFFITI?!  IN JAPAN?!  NO WAY!

A few of us have also taken up Japanese Mahjong (called Riichi Mahjong).  This is a very different game than the tile-matching game that you may have played on the Internet.  Riichi Mahjong is most similar to Rummy, but with added complications.  It's really great!

I hear this game is often played by old Japanese men who gamble all their money away...

Finally, a few pictures from a trip to the 100Y shop...

I guess That must be good for cleaning dishes...

No clue why you'd want to drink coffee out of a burger

お知らせがある。。。

Hey!  Just thought I'd point out that I added a little box to the side of my blog: over here ->

I'll be posting links to the blogs that my KCP friends are keeping - since I show up in a lot of their stories, you can read about our crazy adventures.  And give them hits so that they feel important.

But mostly read about me - that's why you're here, right?

**************************************************
EDIT: Seems the official KCP blog mentioned me - here's a link to their post about me.  I have to say I got a few laughs...

Curry Class!

Hey everyone,

I think it's pretty obvious by this point that I'm not very good at this blogging thing.  I hope you'll forgive my serious lack of updates...  I'm going to try something new: writing.  I don't really like it, mainly because I can't convince myself that people might actually want to read what I have to say, but I haven't taken any interesting pictures in a long time, so this will have to do.

I woke up this morning to the sound of anime music, as is my custom of late.  My current alarm clock - an app on my phone - requires me to solve some basic arithmetic before I can hit the snooze button.  While this worked very well at first, I have developed a surprising ability for solving 69 + 52 = ? through the haze of my half-awakedness.  I fear that the only solution to waking up on time now may be to go to bed early, and we all know how impossible that is.

When I finally did wake up, an hour or so after I intended, I quickly turned on the hockey game.  Since the host family was out, I had my computer follow me throughout the morning so I could keep watching - yes, I'm that Canadian.  Eating breakfast, doing laundry, showe...  I mean, there's no way I'd bring my laptop into the shower, right?  Right. Unfortunately I had to catch a walk/bus/train to get to school for noon, so I didn't get to watch the end of the Habs/Bruins game.  Just as well, since Les Glorieux lost 1-0...

Class today was entertaining as usual.  I don't feel like I've really expressed how amusing class is - one day I will take notes about the funny stuff and post it here.  It really is fantastic.  We ended today's class with a composition (作文、さくぶん).  This particular composition will be used as the basis for a speech we will present to the class as our final oral examination.

Aside: every time I say/write/think "oral examination", I feel as though I'm referring to dentistry.  But that's neither here nor there.

There was no assigned topic, so I decided I should inform my class about what Canada is like.  After a long-winded introduction - as is my custom - I proceeded to explain that Canada is a very large country, so people have different customs depending on where they live.  For example, all the people in the west of Canada are cowboys, and all those in the east are fishermen.  Canada is a very cold country, so everyone lives in houses made of ice, called "igloos".  Furthermore, in the winter, all the roads ice over, and people skate to and from work.  Sometimes, though, the sun shines very strongly, melting the ice, which makes skating difficult.  In that situation, people use dogsleds.

I kid you not, I wrote this.  Curious to see what my teachers think about it.

After class, we had a cooking class!  It was really great: a bunch of students from 法政大学 (Hosei University), some whom I had met before, joined us to cook curry!  I had never cooked Japanese curry before, but I had a good idea of how it should be done...  And of course, the Japanese students that we were paired with proceeded to do approximately the opposite of what I expected.

Clockwise from top: Yuto-san, myself, Abigail and Jil

Despite my worries, we were able to make a fairly serviceable curry - it wasn't nearly as spicy as I might have liked, but it wasn't soupy like some of the other groups'...  I considered it a success.

Somehow, I got roped into doing all the cooking...

 We talked with the various Japanese students at our table about everything from portion sizes at McDonalds in Japan vs. USA/Canada, how one says "I'm full" and whether or not it is appropriate to call one's self a "baby" when referring to spicy-tolerance levels.  All in all, a really great day.

Cooking - and eating - is fun!

After a fantastic meal - of which we all ate too much - I accompanied a few friends of mine back to the dorm, and then made my way back to the host family.  Now, I'm completely exhausted and wanting sleep, so I think I'll go do that.

Hope anyone reading this enjoyed it!

My Class!

Hey everyone!  My friend Zach took this great picture of our class, and he's letting me share it!  Here is my class, A31!