experiencing.

Hey guys, I haven’t been writing much lately, but I’ve been busy!

I went on a white water rafting trip with the other exchange students and stayed in a Japanese style hotel, which is weird and there is no furniture. But it was loads of fun. And since I’m the only male exchange student I got to go on a camping and river fishing side trip. I’m not a very good fisherman to begin with, but this was really tricky. Wading around in Japanese rivers is really cool though and there’s a lot of nature to see. Oh yea did you know that this part of Japanese has grizzlies? I didn’t. We brought some bear spray just in case. I caught three tiiiiiiny fish and saw this awesome peninsula/cape thing where many ships have crashed and it was the coolest thing I've ever seen. I’m going to try and put some pictures up with this blog, and a video if I can figure it out.

I get to go to the zoo this week with school.

Yesterday I went to a small town to experience a jinjya festival. Now I don’t have enough of an idea of what it’s about to explain it to you, but it involves lots of carnival style games and food and carrying a huge 2 ton temple/statue thing with a golden bird on top down Main Street. It takes like 20 or more men to carry it and of course I helped out. They carried this thing for something like four hours; I had to give up after maybe 20 minutes.

I met two foreigners this week, Its fun when you do because they are always interesting people with an interesting story, but they're always teachers, and they're surprised when I say I’m in high school.

Actually I’m kind of surprised I’m still in high school myself.


I really enjoy going grocery shopping with my host mother, the supermarket is not a place people expect to see a foreigner, and when they see me with a shopping cart they look pretty shocked and a little scared. There are so many foods that we don’t have in Canada, but we should.

I’m making good use of my new cell phone, and not wasting any time here. The language is coming slowly, VERY slowly.

Don’t stop reading!

Alex

earthquake!

today in first period we had an earthquake

My class is on the top floor and the whole building started wobbling,

I hadnt been expecting this, hokkaido is outside the ring of fire and apparently only get 2 or 3 second tremors a few times a year

this was a full minute of wobbling building, i didnt panic, i guess because i didnt even know what was going on and i thought i must have just be dying of hunger and weak or something.

so this was apparently the first real quake in like 5 years, and I enjoyed it thoroughly.

___

Tonight I went downtown with some friends,

and when I got on the subway to go home it was still light out.

I got off at my station, and came up the stairs and on to the street.

The sun had gone down and there were neon signs lighting up the night, and people everywhere.

I dont know, it was just really cool.

2 weeks and two days, more thoughts

I have been here for so long! I didn't even realize, I thought maybe like 8 days maximum, saying goodbye at the airports seems like it was only hours ago, time is going by fast, I'll be sure not to waste any.

I took the subway by myself today, after giving a huge speech in Japanese that I had a friend translate for me from my original English speech.

I bought a cellphone yesterday, the cellphones here are insane, they open all kinds of different ways, and have all kinds of functions like internet and tv and email and just really high definition displays, but apparently its all old news to the Japanese.

The phone is gonna come in handy, people asked me how I had been living without it.

I don't know if i talked about this here before but there are three alphabets in Japanese, and I now know two of them, I can READ JAPANESE! but no, I can't understand what I've read.

its common to see people with English on their t shirts that makes very little sense or is simply weird. I wanted to document it all but there is simply to much, some ones I can think of from today and ones that stand out include a woman with a hat that said "princess of beans" a girl with a shirt that just said TORTOISE across it, and a girl riding a bike with one large word GENTLY. it reminds me of when people in the west get tattoos of Asian characters because they look cool rather than for their meanings.

The food here, have i talked about the food here? I'm going to talk about it some more.

Its all fantastic, i ate a huge dinner out last night with like 30 different dishes and it was delicious, I found out after that what I thought had been chicken, beef, pork, etc, had all been chicken, just different parts, such as liver, heart, and bladder.

oh man.

It was good anyway.


other than that, some weird things I have eaten here include:

seared(as in semi raw) horse
seared chicken
raw egg (not my favorite)
and of course raw octopus, sea urchin, tuna, flying fish, salmon, salmon eggs, eel, squid, the usual.

as for the not so gross sounding dishes, like fried noodles, ramen noodles and the like, they're just as tasty.

I heard it snowed in Calgary. wow. I'm glad today is cloudy because its usually blistering hot. My classroom if full of people fanning themselves and complaining about the heat.

I rode a bicycle in japan for the first time yesterday, it was so cool, after 2 weeks of not being in a car and walking everywhere I felt like I was going so fast, and when you're on an old used bike people don't think you're a tourist so much, and then they're even more surprised to see you.

I've always been bad with names, but Japanese names are extra hard to remember, I thought by now i would be getting better at it, but not really.

I really like the school uniform, well I mean I don't think its cool in itself, but not having to pick out clothes every day is really easy, and when everyone is dressed the same you judge people on things other than their fashion sense.

Speaking of that Japanese boys spend a lot of time on their hair, they bring hairspray to class and use bobby pins like girls do to keep it out of their eyes and it sticks up in all different directions and a lot of them tell me to straighten my hair. I don't think that's going to happen though.

Be sure to check back here once in a while.

For tomorrow I've volunteered to clean up the beach along with 100's of other people from Sapporo.