This past Tuesday it snowed - hard. A small layer actually stuck to the ground, but by evening it was gone. When I saw that it was snowing, I decided I didn't really want to ride my bike to work - so I walked to the train station in order to catch a bus to my base school. I've never taken a bus before... but my supervisor told me there was a bus that ran from Ube station to the bottom of the hill to the school - he just didn't know what time. Alright, so I made my way to the station and got there around 7:40am (plenty of time). A bus pulled up around 7:45am and I asked the driver if this was the bus that went to the school. He just looked at me, smirked, and informed me that there was no bus that goes there. Awesome. So I just walked to work that day... it took about 35 minutes.
Wednesday night I decided to make spaghetti for dinner. Never try to cook spaghetti on a gas stove in a pot that is too small. Just don't even try it. Why? Because. Half of the pasta is in the water and the other half is sticking out... and while you wait for the pasta in the water to soften, the water will boil over, causing the flames of the gas stove to get really big... and then catch fire to the dry pasta that is not yet in the water. Yeah...
Thursday, I taught my last class to some of the 3rd year students at the technical school because they're graduating at the end of February and I won't have another class with them between now and then. I'd actually ran into one of the students on my way home from the commercial school on Wednesday. I have to go under the train station through this creepy, dirty tunnel and he was smoking with some guys on the steps to this tunnel. At first he was surprised to see me, and a little nervous because he was smoking, ha... but then he realized that there wasn't much I could do about him smoking, so we just chatted for a few minutes. He informed me that his last class with me was the next day because he was graduating. He didn't seem too excited to be graduating. From talking with him, I got that he was just going to start working some technical job in Ube... I don't really blame him for seeming bummed about graduating from high school. But it was a nice conversation.
Didn't do much this past weekend. Hung out with some friends Saturday night and watched a terrible movie called "Le Divorce"... don't watch it, it sucks. Today I went shopping in Kokura with Meng. I bought 2 scarves for pretty cheap and some ear muffs - all for my upcoming trip in February to a snow festival in Hokkaido.
Last weekend was a 3-day weekend because Monday was a national holiday for Coming of Age Day. I went to Osaka by way of a 9 hour overnight bus with Meng and we stayed in a capsule hotel. It was interesting. Basically, there are all these "capsules" - which are stacked on top of each other... and that's your "room." There's a tv and radio in every one! You have to go down the hall for the bathroom and showers. The showers are the typical Japanese public bathing type of thing.
We got to Osaka early Saturday morning, dropped our stuff off at the capsule hotel, then made our way to Kobe in Hyogo Prefecture. I'd been to Kobe before... back in 2003 when I stayed in Osaka for the summer. All
I did then was go on a boat ride with my host parents... and it was basically a boat ride to nowhere. We decided to go on a boat ride in Kobe on Saturday... and it was seriously the same thing!... a boat ride to nowhere! After that we went to China Town in Kobe for awhile. We couldn't find it and this really nice man helped us. This man is the only reason I didn't completely hate Japanese people after that weekend because the rest of the weekend we seemed to encounter some pretty rude Japanese people... it was weird. For example, the waiter at a restaurant who refused to acknowledge that I was there and would only look at Meng, the Asian, ... even though she doesn't know Japanese... and I had to tell her the words to say or else the man would not have brought us water or taken our order. Why? Because western-looking people cannot and never will be able to speak any Japanese and no Japanese person will ever be able to understand any words that come out of their mouths even if it is perfectly fine Japanese. Just various encounters like that one. But anyway, China Town was cool. There were a lot of interesting things there - like bottles of alcohol with dead lizards in them! What is that?!?!
Sunday we checked out of our capsule hotel and made our way to Nara. I had been to Nara before as well... back in 2003. I remembered there were a lot of deer everywhere and a really BIG Buddha. This time around we saw a lot of deer and the really BIG Buddha. Nara is nice. The deer are REALLY aggressive though and they are everywhere. I thought it would be fun to buy some of the deer food and feed the deer... bad idea. Literally the INSTANT money was exchanged for deer food, I had at least 5 giant deer surrounding me, head butting me, and chewing on my coat. I had intended to buy the food to feed to the cute baby deer... but that did not happen. At one point I was running away from a mob of deer throwing the food in every direction trying to get them to leave me alone. It was a rather traumatic experience. If you go to Nara, you should try feeding the deer simply for the experience : ) I would've been really pissed if they ripped my coat from chewing on it... but they didn't... just ended up with a lot of deer slober on it.
After we made it past the deer, we finally made it to Todaiji Temple. This is a picture of Daibutsuden at Todai-ji Temple. It's the largest wooden building in the world and is a listed UNESCO world heritage site. This is where the GIANT Buddha sits with his GIANT friends. I tried to get people in the picture in order to show just how big this Buddha is...
Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.
Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.
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