christmas and new year in review,

hello,

I am currently on winter break, which is about a month long.
there are 6 days before the Australians go home, and about 22 until the new ones come.

New years was supposed to be be amazing, but I just watched the TV specials with my host parents new years eve, and prayed at a temple new years day. Interesting enough.



I didn't think there would be many chances to ski this year, having no skis and all. but I've gone probably ten times now! My old host father keeps taking me, and paying for me, or paying for me to go with his 29 year old son, who I am good friends with. last time I went(yesterday) I gave his granddaughter and a boy from china (who's father is here being supported by rotary on some kind of advaaaaanced university science study thing) ski lessons for a full day, entirely in Japanese. That kind of made me feel useful, I made sure they had fun, but they both improved by then end of the day.


He also had me go for a full day lesson with him, but we were separated because of our skill levels, and I got to learn a lot more about mogul skiing and stance for it.

The powder snow here is delightful.

This same host father bought a new pair of skis and boots because his old ones were outdated, but also so that I could use that pair, but the new boots hurt him so much he has given the new set to me for the winter, they are quite light weight and good quality, and fit perfect.

I am lucky as balls in the ski department to be honest.

When we go home we each have to give a presentation on what we got out of the year other than the obvious language and cultural perspective that everyone gets, the last group did things like a martial arts demonstration, origami, the traditional twangy three string guitar and that kind of thing.

So I can show some pictures and talk about all the skiing I did, and how much I improved, and how much fun I had, and how weird it is that the ocean is rolling in at the bottom of the mountain you're skiing on.

Host dad's son wants me to go for a ski instructors license, like he has. It wouldn't count for much back in Canada, but would be fun to train for.


Instead of presents at Christmas, Japanese kids get money in envelopes at new years. I'm a little old for this tradition, but I got 20 000 yen regardless. 20 000 yen used to be 200 USD but is now some unfathomable fortune. that's good too.



I hope everyone had a good Christmas and new year, I certainly did, but it's no fun being away from family on such occasions.


I surprise myself daily with how well I'm speaking the language. I also surprise myself daily with how much worse my English is getting.

クリスマス。

Hey everyone,

So my new host family is just fine, although our house is a lot farther from school and the subway station etc, and to make matters worse I lost my bus/subway card yesterday, it had about ichi man en on it, or 100ish US dollars, this is quite a tragedy as I will now be walking 40 minutes in horrible winter conditions to and from school every day until next month when I get a new card from rotary. Oh well its good exercise, but this is one financial strain I did not need.

It’s definitely winter here now, but not as cold as I hear home is getting. Christmas is coming, Japanese Christmas deserves mentioning. Now obviously Christianity is not a major religion here, I have met zero Christians since my arrival here except for exchange students and a couple of Mormons trying to harass my Swiss friend into a German bible. Despite this, Christmas is fairly huge in Japan, or Hokkaido anyway, and it makes sense, winter is cold and depressing and we need a reason to look forward to it. Pretty much every culture that has winter has some kind of big winter celebration. Now, Japan has New Year, but maybe they just couldn’t wait, or maybe companies couldn’t pass up another chance at making a killing. KFC has a huge Christmas ad campaign about like eating KFC on Christmas and how that is what you're supposed to do, same with other fast food companies, There is a German Christmas market set up in the downtown park, and they sell hot chocolate and all kinds of foreign Christmas junk. Oh yea, in Japan Christmas presents are not the norm, cakes are, you give people cakes, and they give you cakes in return, then they go to the bar on Christmas eve. With that said, I think everything is very commercial in Japan and I should not be so surprised that Christmas is any different. I am very much looking forward to my Christmas box from my family.

Not long now until the rugby boys go to a tournament for a month and my Swiss friend goes home for Christmas, and not long after that the Australian exchange students go home for good, and I get three more, one of which will be living in the same house as me. With them gone me and the Finnish girl will be the sempai ryuugakkusei, or senior exchange students, the ones who are supposed to know what’s going on and show the new people the ropes, and speak Japanese. We’ll see how I do with that.

Anyway happy holidays everyone
Stay tuned.

hostfamily

alright sailors, i'll keep this one short.


I've been doing plenty of fun stuff lately, it has snowed a lot.

I am changing host families tomorrow,

I like my current host family, they dont have any very comfortable furniture, they dont bend any rules for me, and the laundry system has officially stretched several of my favourite tee's beyond redemption, but they are fantastic people. They have treated me with the utmost hospitality since my arrival, but at the same time have treated me like a real member of the family; I do my own chores, I have cut wood for them, I have helped renovate a building they own, I call them Mother and Father, I have climbed mountains and harvested sunflowers with them and their grandchildren, I play basketball at the community center with my host brother and his friends.

I dunno, I owe them a lot. I have Japanese life figured out here, its going to be lame having to adjust again, being twenty minutes farther from my friends in their apartment, and that much farther from school as well.

here some pictures i havent posted anywhere else yet.

class trip, kyoto, nara, osaka, tokyo, okinawa.

Although pricey, the class trip was really fantastic. previously I had been to the Tokyo airport for an hour, and then just in Hokkaido doing pretty much zero traveling. Now I've been to most of the most famous places in Japan, all in one week.

I don't even know the names of most the places I went and their was often no English information available. Regardless everything was breathtakingly huge or made of gold or really really ancient. there was a fountain outside one temple that my teacher told me was 1,200 something years old, that's much older than my entire country. It was a little bit surreal being in these places that were of such historical and cultural importance, places kings had lived, battles had been fought...we don't have that so much in Canada.

Once again I regret that there is a 5 pictures per post limit, and I took 500 pictures during the trip.

First we went to Kyoto, I took the train with some friends and we got on the plane together, the first day we saw this really famous ancient temple, part of which was 60 metres tall an built without nails. i was surprised by the amount of foreigners I saw there, I asked a couple if in English if they knew who was ahead in the American election, but they were unfortunately Russian, and very confused.

That night on the news, in Japanese, we found out Obama had won, and we slept on straw mats and hard pillows and got up at 6. the second day in Kyoto was a free day, me and my group must have seen 10 different temples and landmarks that day, we used a map and the bus routes to get around and even saw the old shogun headquarters palace thing, after lunch we got on a train to Osaka, were we saw the famous Osaka castle and had a fantastic dinner.

Day three the class went to Nara, a city outside Kyoto that is most famous for its Edo period style architecture and many important Japanese cultural heritage sites. there were tame deer everywhere that could be hand fed, and one had either been trained to bow at everyone who passed through the temple gates, or had something wrong with its neck.

I should say that in my personal experience Japanese (high school kids at least) like to rush through a museum, aquarium, castle, what have you, as fast as they can so they can buy garbage at the gift shop. Actually maybe its just my group of friends.

That night we flew to Okinawa, When I got off the plane, the air was so hot and wet I thought I would be dead within minutes, but the bus was air conditioned and our massive expensive hotel was as well. There was a fantastic view of the ocean and the beach and I even won the largest bed in the room by Japanese rock paper scissors.

Okinawa is a place I knew little about, it is quite unique from the rest of Japan and I was surprised how dark skinned the people were, being kind of rushed through everything and having very limited reading ability in Japanese, I still knew very little about places we went to after we left. I will include some Wikipedia links to things I've been too at the bottom of this post.

The Castle in Okinawa was being restored, it smelled like wet paint and all the colors were really bright, apparently Americans blew it up in world war 2 and they've been putting it back together from photographs and memory since the early 90's.

It was pretty awesome to see but there was a kind of falseness to a lot of stuff there.

the aquarium in Okinawa was really cool, there were animals I'd never seen, including whale sharks and manta rays. The tank for them was so huge. We went snorkeling after the aquarium and I saw a lot of the things I'd just seen in the aquarium but now in their natural state. I feel i should add that all the coral was gray and dead and I had the feeling the exotic fish were only surviving there still because of the bread given to them by tourists every day. I am a much stronger swimmer than my classmates, and a lot of them cant actually swim at all, i did not expect that. I've never been anywhere tropical before, and that day was really a lot of fun.

The next day we climbed down into a cave that had been used as a shelter in the battle of Okinawa, the guide told an hour long story in Japanese as everyone huddled together in the dark, I'm sure it must have been a pretty interesting story, but all I understood was to watch my head, and that many many people had died there.

That night we flew to Tokyo, driving through there at night was pretty breathtaking, I'm sure you've seen pictures of Tokyo at night, but going through it is something entirely different, there were so many raised highways I don't think we touched the ground once from the airport to the hotel, it made me think of the Jetson's a little. We ate a buffet style dinner in a hall with a view of both the downtown and the harbour.

The next day was Tokyo Disneyland, it was so busy we only got to go on two rides. one was a mistake, it had the shortest line but turned out to be a slow train ride through a very crummy old west, which included extremely red faced native Americans moving robotically and living in a bamboo forest. the other ride was an hour and a half line up, but by far the greatest roller coaster I've ever been on, and almost entirely in the pitch dark, it was called space mountain and was beyond illin. Again they spent massive amounts of money on massive amounts of junky Disney memorabilia. there are other places I would like to have seen in Tokyo, but this was a really fun day with my friends regardless of the waiting and crummyness and disneyness, and that roller coaster was honestly almost as good as Obama winning the American election on Japanese TV in the hotel room. those are two things I shall not soon forget.


I've taught English in a few times to a few classes, I enjoy it and it goes over well, but I think I taught the most English on this trip, and learned more Japanese, but also more about Japanese people, and feel a lot closer with my classmates.

thank you to my parents for their massive contribution, and thank you to superstore for the tiny paychecks that made up the rest.





Here are some wiki links to places I went.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todai-ji


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinkaku-ji


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiyomizu-dera


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osaka_Castle


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryoanji


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nijo_castle


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okinawa_Aquarium


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuri-jo

this is just what I could find from names on ticket stubs and pictures I recognize in my book.

Thanks to anyone who reads,

and you don't have to sign up with this website or anything to comment on my posts, I appreciate knowing you're reading, and having your input and criticism.

Alex,

student abroad

i have nothing to say about this.

コナンフチャボイ。

So i went camping again.

I caught four rainbow trout this time, one of which was huge.
I also saw a lot more of Hokkaido, including a volcano, the tallest mountain on the island, a lot of the coastline, and this fantastic peninsula.

The volcano was dormant, but there was boiling water bubbling up, and sulfur everywhere.

the hot spring water was used for an onsen, a japanese public bath. They sold us hard boiled eggs boiled in the hotspring, and in case you dont know sulfur kind of smells like rotten eggs, so this was like eating a rotten egg, but its apparently a very famous japanese food.

I also visited a whiskey factory, with a very interesting story about the founder going to scotland to learn the secrets of making whiskey, and gettign married while he was there to a scottish woman and bringing her back to japan, something very strange for the time period,

I also went on a tour of the nuclear power plant, although the tour was really just getting on a bus, going through a gate and up a hill, then looking out the window for 5 minutes listening to the guide talk in Japanese, then going back. I read later that the two reactors there provide 25% of this part of japans power, and when the third one's construction is complete it will be 40%, they are also painted and camouflaged, to make them less of a target, (for Russia I'm told).

The part that got me was that tons and tons of extremely hot water is simply dumped into the ocean, raising the temperature a full seven degrees, apparently its all OK and that environment is actually causing a lot more life to grow there, but it just doesn't sit well with me.

Anyway,I'll provide a picture of this huge mountain we camped near, when we drove in there was a cloud on top of it, and that night there was a huge rainstorm, and the next day there was snow covering the top, which I thought was cool.

Driving along the seaside was really fantastic, there are huge cliffs and massive crashing waves everywhere. A crazy amount of tunnels has been built to get through all the low mountains, way longer than any mountain tunnel in the Rockies.

We stopped at this peninsula that ended in a really high cliff, and the sea was rough and the sun was coming through the clouds, it was the most fantastic view I have ever seen, I took up my camera to take a picture, and the battery was dead. I took some on my cellphone camera, but they're terrible,I got one decent one before it died, which I will include.


Mikki san (the guy who took me) is a great man, and I have a lot of respect for him. He is one of those people who has learned a lot of his English from movies and stuff, its really quite good, but also very animated and funny. He knows it.

In between jokes he told me that　has studied Japanese legends, western legends, and non fiction stories,

therefore he can see the future, a little,

which he says is good for business


I agree.

Angry blog.

Lets begin with Maruyama zoo.

During exam week at Yamanote, me and the 5 other foreign exchange students had nothing to do, so we spent most of our time studying together in the study center, but on the second last day of exams they took all of us to Sapporo's zoo for the day. We were all pretty excited to just be out of school for a day and to see somewhere new.

It was the most depressing place I have been in my entire life.

The animals where in very unrealistic enclosures that were much too small, and dirty.
Everything was rusty and in need of repair. The animals were dull colored and looked sad.

Lions were in a desert environment, with sand, in a small space on a very steep hillside. Tigers had a similar enclosure with more plants. The Giraffes were almost gray in color, and ate branches tied to the walls. The bears had brutally small environments and really nothing to do but sit, or sit in a pool. The polar bear's enclosure was kind of dangerous in how it was set up, and the bear itself was covered in some kind of green fungus. Giant fruit bats with like two foot wingspans or whatever were in an all glass box that couldn't have been 3 feet across, in full daylight. The penguins where in a very rusty pool and the only thing that separated them from people was a thin plastic mesh that was torn to shreds anyway. They also had armbands that had been put on when they were young, and the wing had grown around it. THE SEALS had it worse by far. these ocean animals where in literally less than three feet of water, and the one I saw was completely blind and its eyes were gray and glazed, I'm pretty sure that from some parasite in the water I read about. Two feet of water is not enough at all. I looked Maruyama zoo up on the internet also, and all I found in English was another tourists review, and it sounded very similar to mine.

Japanese zoo's have been in trouble with animal rights dudes for a long time, and Japan as a whole is said to have little regard for animal rights. This particular zoo was just a dirty park full of Japanese 6 year olds in school uniforms watching animals waiting to die.





Now something that gets me even more angry;
I wrote previously that I haven't seen any homeless people and that everyone seems to have perfectly comfortable middle class lives. I mentioned this to the other other exchange boys at school and they gave me a string of extremely shocking information, which was then backed up and expanded on by the English speaking Japanese teacher.

"You haven't seen one yet, eh?"

no.

"yea we see them in the subway station sometimes"

-Sensei jumps in and explains to me that you do not see many homeless In Sapporo because they're all dead. They die of cold, and you sometimes see them dead and frozen in a park or station she told me the Hokkaido (northern japan) word for homeless is the same for a frozen fish or something. I have also stated before that there is not a whole lot of drug use in Japan, so please understand these human beings are not drug addicts, probably not alcoholics, or even mentally ill. These are people, whole families even that lose their jobs and can not find a new one in time to keep their home. There are apparently no homeless shelters or rehabilitation programs here, Panhandling is dishonorable, and there is no way a Japanese is going to offer money or a hand out to a homeless person. My friend, a New Zealand exchange student said he gave ￥1000 (10 Canadian dollars) to a homeless man once and "he shit his pants over it".


I found a long article on Google about this from another Canadian living in japan, they said:

I have been told that the homeless in Japan are on the streets because of shame and their own accord. They have lost their jobs. They have lost their social positions. They are on the streets because they are too ashamed to admit to their families their changed circumstances. How tragic! Honor and shame values continue to exercise a pivotal role in Japanese life despite its Westernization even though these values have been pushed to the background in the West.

Why is it that the individual must bear the brunt of a society's mishaps and economic failures? No one deserves to be on the streets.

It can happen to anyone. It can happen to you, to a family member or to a dear friend. Marital breakup, domestic violence, child abuse, mental illness, job loss can all contribute to someone falling through the cracks and ending up on the streets.

http://www.thingsasian.com/stories-photos/3540

So yea, a fresh crop dies of cold each year, and the government and media try not to talk about it too much, and especially not let it become part of their international appearance. There are no programs trying to get these unfortunate people back on their feet, not even a soup kitchen. There is an American teacher at my school and he explained to me that Japanese often ignore something if they do not want to see it through to its end, as in if someone looks lost, and a Japanese offers to help them, they will follow through with helping them until they get where they need to go, if they do not have the time or desire to help them they will simply keep walking. He said it went farther than that, and that someone could fall down on the ice and people would simply ignore it because they didn't want to get involved, I was a little shocked at this, but I was more shocked when I saw a girl fall off her bike at a crosswalk quite painfully and although she was tangled and trapped under her bike, no one helped her up, or even turned their head. I was most shocked today though, when I found out this can go as far as men and women freezing or starving to death in the street.



I do not consider myself a bleeding heart, and I know for sure my friends don't...
Dinner's ready, and there's a crazy game show on,

There are things I really like here, and things I really don't.