Guess what week it is? that's right, it's golden week, an entire week off school timed perfectly with when the cherry blossoms arrive, and they're everywhere believe me; outside my bedroom outside my classroom, and all up and down the streets.
For three days me, my two australian cohi, and Mikki-san piled in a van and drove up the northern peninsula of Hokkaido, to Wakkanai.
Wakkanai is the town at the very most northern Point in Japan, I stood on the monument there and I got a shell from there, but it broke. Wakkanai is Ainu language for something, but Japanese for I don't know is "wakaranai" which when said quickly or informally is "wakaanai" so there were many jokes and genuine misunderstandings regarding things like where are you going for golden week? wakkanai. whats the next town we'll hit? wakkanai. what is the first place we will see tomorrow? wakkanai. Anyway you get it. It was a really weird place to be and a really cool place to camp, first there was nothing but farms, then there was nothing but wilderness, abandoned homesteads and things destroyed by the wind. It was pretty crazy, the wind I mean, I was worried the tent was going to be lifted up and thrown into the lake sometime at night. The wind off the sea of Okhotsk is pretty serious.
We went canoeing and fishing but the wind was so harsh and the rivers were muddy with the massive amounts of newly melted snow that we didn't catch anything, but we saw a lot of weird roadside stuff, including: a museum of bear attacks recreated in wax, and a bunch of Ainu artifacts and stuffed endangered species, a couple of museums like that, a condemned lookout tower up on top of a huge hill were we could see for miles, a couple of different towers, a great wall of china made to show friendship between japan and china, a bunch of famous lighthouses and shipwreck sites, space telescopes, war memorials, and just any place awesome looking enough to stop the car and climb around. The sea was so cold, like Siberia cold (which is kinda where we were) but we went for a swim anyway almost died and did some harbour fishing and went to a hot spring and this guy tried to practice his English on me by talking about fishing but I was answering him in Japanese and he got pretty flustered and just stomped out of the sauna without saying anything after a while. the lake we camped next to was a holy place to the Ainu people (the Ainu are the indigenous people of Hokkaido and northern japan, they were very different culturally and genetically from the Japanese...) The name of the lake translated from Ainu to Japanese to English was just "god lake" and apparently the lake itself was a god to them or had a god living at the bottom of it, but there was nothing there then but that killer wind and us 4 in a tent.
Going into the wild with Mikki-san is always really cool, its like I am the karate kid and he is the fisherman version of Mr. Miyagi. He knows a lot about history and local lore, and a lot about doing something for the love of it, and always being grateful for the gift that is human life and recognizing how small you are in the great scheme of things.
He got friendlier with the Australians to a point that I'm sure he will want to take them on the kind of adventures he took me on after I'm gone, and I was really proud/weirded out to watch them sit in the tent and try their best to talk Japanese with him, it was like looking in a mirror/time machine that takes you back a year and makes you australian.
So we didn't catch any fish, (mikki san did catch one massive trout) but we saw everything there is to be seen, touristy or secret, and we had a good time doing it.
Today My host mother took me to the Hokkaido Jingu, which is like the head Shinto temple for the whole island, and she paid a lot of money to have a host of priests and...like the Japanese equivalent of nuns pray for me to have good luck in future studies and to do well in life, they chanted and played drumes and did a dance and shook a couple different things over my head, and then I made an offering of a pine branch and it was all really pretty to watch but didn't make any sense to me and I couldn't understand the singsongy language they used, but I was honoured and grateful to my host mother for doing something like that for me. In the waiting area before it was my turn someone had been having a wedding, then someone having their newborn blessed, then a pregnant couple having their unborn blessed, then a woman having her Canadian exchange student blessed.
One more day of golden week! I have a Japanese lesson then the family is having a barbecue because we live in the like best cherry blossom viewing location in the whole city.
oh also, I found a new Swedish exchange student, she's living like 300 meters from me on another program, so we will hang out I guess.
keep reading!
onsen towels are all the rage.
so many deer.
end of Japan.
Australian getting excited over being at the 45th parallel.
space viewing.
leatherback caught in a fishing net in the 70's.
none of us had the guts to go up this thing when we saw all the panels missing.
P.S. you'll never believe it but on the last day we stopped to look at seals out on the rocks and I dropped my camera, it looks ok on the outside but its not turning on, I'll read my warantee over and see what can be done, but I may have to start some kind of "alex needs a new camera" charity fund I have my Film SLR camera but I need to buy a light meter for it and it will be hard to get pics from it onto this blog. I'll keep you posted!
