Gaijin Girl

so i am happy that i finally am feeling more comfortable with the blog and can now even upload photos!  go me!  well, actually, go josh for enabling such an easy uploading tool.

so yesterday at work was really, really hard.  i guess i can’t really go into details since this blog isn’t exactly private, but i will tell you that yesterday after work and a train ride to a doctor to get some new inhalers, i came inside my apartment and lay on the kitchen floor for at least ten minutes before i could bring myself to actually start unpacking my bags and settling in properly.  and when i did get up, it was only to eat chocolate covered peanuts–an entire bag (however, it was japanese sized so a whole bag is probably equivalent to an average serving in the US).

well, enough about that….it’s saturday!  and hopefully when josh comes home tonight i can actually be a good stay-at-home girlfriend (this is my role every saturday since he always has to work) and welcome him with a proper dinner, a cute outfit, and a bright smile instead of my usual bitching and lolling about.  ha.  hopefully i will actually have something to smile about when he comes home instead of stories about broken appliances and my inability to find anything we need at the store, which have been habitual occurrences as of late, unfortunately.

anyway, luckily, my plans for today mostly consist of playing guitar, surfing the internet, doing laundry, and studying japanese–none of which is too stressful.    tomorrow we are going on a hike to see seven waterfalls and also go to a mixed onsen, where i can try out my new swimsuit and soak with my man in the relaxing healing hot spring!!  i’m pretty psyched…except for the inevitable looming chance of rain that preceeds every activity one plans here in the early summer.  anyway, i just got a new rain jacket, so whatever.  i’m going on that hike.

so let me finish telling you about some rather more interesting events of the past few months.  in my last blog i forgot all about christmas, which is kinda understandable if you’ve ever spent one in a foreign country.  well, on christmas eve we visited some friends in tokyo and looked at christmas lights in shinjuku, which i expected to be pretty spectacular, as it is the second largest & busiest train station in the world.  (i also regularly frequent the first largest/busiest train station in the world, don’t worry.)   anyway, it was kinda mediocre, the one notable display consisting of a small gazebo with a huge line to enter.  we weren’t really into the japanese custom of line-waiting at that point yet, so we instead stood off to the side and craned our necks to see inside the gazebo, probably much to the dismay of the japanese line-standers.  anyway, what we saw inside was a flat screen tv adhered to the roof so the people inside could look up and see various scenes of stars and lights moving across the screen and also hear some accompanying music.  they usually stayed inside for about 5 seconds, probably due to the pressure of the growing line behind them.  it was quite interesting, i suppose.  i thought we took pictures, but i can’t find them.  yes, i know, i’m really organized.  however, i did find a photo of a christmas display at our own little train station, which was quite lovely.

luckily christmas day fell on a series of holidays that we got off from work.  however, it also fell on a day right before a series of national holidays, so it was our last day to make imperative banking and shopping runs, so christmas was kinda like any other errand-running day.  during the rest of our vacation, we were completely broke, so we spent a lot of time watching movies, playing guitar, playing yahtzee, and having petty arguments about really important things like who that actor is, what movie to watch, etc.  (you try surviving in a tiny room with one other person for two weeks straight).  anyway, we made it out alive, and now that we have finances to go out and engage in normal social activities and even take some nice trips now and again, we realize how much we must love each other when we look back at our first five months here when we were so isolated and really dependent on one another.

hm, that is a nice segway into valentine’s day, ne?    so valentine’s day, as you may remember, was on a thursday (i think….anyway, it was definitely a week day that josh and i both worked).  i get home a couple of hours before josh, so i made a lovely dinner for us that we devoured hungrily at 9 pm

(notice the large quantity of cheese!!

and then exhaustedly fell into bed about an hour later (more in a sleepy sense than a romantic one.) so, in order to make up for this lovely but not so extensive celebration of our relationship, josh planned an outing to a park in the nearest big city the following sunday.  we went to omiya koen, which encompasses a japanese garden, a large shrine, some lakes, some museums, an archery center, an aviary and zoo, and an amusement park, in addition to a traditional park area for relaxing/exercising/picnicking, etc.  we couldn’t begin to see everything that we wanted to because we love to sleep in, but we had a really nice time and look forward to going back some time.

here i am at the shrine gate

josh scrubs up before we head to the main shrine

here is some info about the shrine we visited

and part of the shrine itself

after visiting the shrine, we had a delicious picnic near the lake.

the cold wind, however, kept us steadily on the move.

after watching some high school girls participate in an archery competiton, which was really impressive, we ended up at a history museum that had some special exhibits about ancient japanese fashion.  it was pretty interesting and definitely educational, although it was sometimes difficult to rely on the english translations, especially when the text seemed to convey life after WWII a quite pleasant for japanese people, since that is when they got to become familiar with american culture!!  another interesting thing that i remember reading in the museum is how christians were persecuted by the japanese government and how buddhism in the 1800s here was quite different than the ancient buddhism in other asian countries.  anyway, i still don’t know that much about buddhism, its introduction in japan, and/or its association with persecution of otehr religions (which was surprising to me)….i’m sure some of you know a great deal more about this topic than i do, so please share your thoughts and wisdom! researching more about the history of religion, particularly its development and the conflicts within japan, is on my ever-expanding list of things to do. 

here are some exhibits at the museum:

i vaguely remember that this is an oni (monster) face used in a festival to request fertile crop production from the gods (or something :

traditional collection of dolls, which almost every girl in japan seems to acquire at a very early age (some of the 2 year olds in my class have brought in photos of their personal collections that rival the display in this museum).

anyway, after the museum closed, we wandered around the city a bit and did some used clothing shopping (which is actually the complete opposite of thrift store clothing here, as most of the clothes are imported and marked up.)  we found cute t shirts that, probably because they had english text, were like $20.  they would probably cost around 50 cents at the salvation army in jackson, mississippi.  oh well, less clothes for me to carry around the world, which is a very very good thing.

on that note, it’s time for me to do laundry!  have a good weekend! 

Posted in Japan | 2 Comments »

clearly i am terrible at writing blogs.  i have also decided to throw capitalization out the window.  not capitalism….i’m not that enlightened yet.  i’m also lazy, hence my addiction to capitalism and my avoidance of capitalization.

i guess i don’t feel as pressured for this blog to live up to some ideals of amazingly insightful thought provoking content when it is not part of my required schoolwork.  such pressure is by no means brought on by my amazing graduate advisor nor any of my wonderful colleagues but purely by my own feelings of insecurity in the academic community.  i guess i never really thought of myself as an “expert” on any one particular subject, so choosing topics for presentations in the academic community have proved to be quite humbling experiences….not to mention the actual act of getting up in front of peers and “real” experts and talking about stuff for an hour.  anyway, i did that last august and was blown away by how unprepared and unprofessional i was.  i have since been taking a sort of hiatus from academia but of course am still self-studying and thinking about what i would essentially like my work to consist of and contribute to society.  yeah….that’s a real mind full.

anyway, i guess my main idea for this blog is to stop worrying about if it’s legitimate or relevant and just make it more me.  after all, it is calliepoole.com.    when josh bought that domain name, i instantly felt pressure to make it so me and then was disappointed when it somehow didn’t reflect what i wanted it to.  it’s so silly how we (i) can get so caught up in how we appear to others….even when it’s just a reflection of ourselves on some stupid web site.  i guess a part of is how searchable what we write becomes….i mean, just google my name, and anyone can have access to a summary of my experiences and thoughts.  and i’m sure googling my name is quite a frequent activity for most of you!  ha ha.    all 2 of you. 

so, anyway, enough about that.  let’s talk about living in japan.  that is, after all, why you’re here, i ‘m sure.  well, let’s see, josh and i are doing quite well.  we were pretty much broke until about three months ago when nova finally came through with our backpayments from the bankruptcy settlement and we started receiving full paychecks from our new jobs.  so we spent a lot of time hanging out in our tiny apaato.

on the job note, mine is stressful, as i’m beginning to think all teaching jobs will inevitably be (someone please tell me i’m wrong…and please cite a concrete example….with contact information for the person in charge of hiring).  anyway, of course the kids are really great.  they always seem to be, anywhere i go.    i just love kids for that.  they are my role models.

so some of the highlights from the last six months include a new year’s trip i took with josh (the boyfriend and creator of this wonderful site) to kamakura.  we ended up spending the day at a beautiful temple,

taking a hike to see the great buddha (second largest in japan),

(i love the two birds fllying above him in this photo)

eating really expensive and yummy tofu, seeing mount fuji from a bridge to an island in the middle of a wind storm, eating italian food for dinner, getting lost in the dark for a couple of hours, finding a lost wallet and reporting it to the police at a festival (which proved to be quite a process…i honestly wouldn’t recommend it!), and then freezing our asses off while exhaustedly waiting for midnight so we could ring in the new year at the famous temple during the festival.  we waited for the new year to strike at a temple with tons of other people, drinking coffee and sake and huddling together.  we walked outside a few minutes early to find this line

these are the people waiting to make their prayers at the very beginning of the new year.  we hung out until the countdown (which was screamed by like 5 guys and us only) and then booked it out of there to be on a packed train for a couple of hours and then asleep in our bed (um, futon) by 3 am.  the crowd stretched wayyyyyyyy down the street, as we noticed on our way to the station.  i guess it would have been cool to participate in the first prayer of the year but not cool enough to wait in that line in the freezing cold.  it is tradition in japan to see the sun rise on the first day of the new year, but i just couldn’t drag myself out of bed 2 1/2 hours later, so we missed it.  maybe some other year.

new year’s eve was a great and unforgettable experience, and i’m really glad i had the chance to take part in a traditional new year’s holiday in japan, but i think next year i’m going to stick to drinking heavily with all my friends.    i sure did miss them on this night.

hm, you know i think it is rather ambitious to sum up the last six months in one blog, so i guess i’ll stop there for tonight.  stay tuned….i might even post another blog before 2009….you never know! 

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