3 weeks or something left

hey guys,

thanks for reading all the time.

I had my final private japanese lesson tonight at my volunteer teachers home. i gave her a cup i painted and glazed in japanese style and she cried, and then she gave me a brand new electric dictionary with spanish english and japanese in it, which is like so expesive and useful and so many things. this lady took me from konnichiwa to my current level in this short time and did it for no reason other than the love of teaching. She told me study hard and see the world and that I am her hope and dream. I'll have to send her a lot of postcards. Anyway I've never met such a fantastic person as she, she helps out at old folks homes and teaches all kinds of foreigners at all kinds of levels and just recently took on the job of teaching one of my Australians who lives in really far away town, but since there's no one there to teach him she goes out there like thrice a week on the train.

yesterday I went to the city north of Sapporo, Asahikawa, it is about half the size and an eight of the awesome. I'm glad I finally went, they have a famous zoo there and The animals looked happy but It still didn't compare to the zoos I've been to in Canada, although I was quite impressed with the penguin and chimpanzee set ups.

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We also went to flower field things which are just miles of bright flowers that you ride a balloon over but we just walked around. It was a nice day with my old host mom. Long train rides in Japan are also worth doing.

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After that we got back on the train and back to the city and had dinner in a pretty fancy place on the 8th floor of Sapporo station and I could see the whole downtown out the window and all the taxis and hordes of people and I was really glad I got sent here. The end.








The day before yesterday I went to an Ainu Museum with the other exchange students form school, then we went to a big dam that supplies 80% of Sapporo's water and had a picnic and I caught some lizards and a huge snake scared the shit out of poor little jay. That dam was really huge.

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Shiretoko. holy. It was like three weeks ago now but I can't leave it unwritten, I wanted to do a good job of it, and I also have to write about The district farewell party for me and the Finnish girl, it was a big deal, but if I don't go to bed now I'll never make it to school in the morning. thanks for waiting and thanks for reading.

the approaching end.

shiretoko.


play some sad yet uplifting ambient music for this one kids.


So I've gotten a lot of stuff out of the way, but theres still a lot to be done.


I had my rotary club going away party and gave a speech about what I thought about things and how grateful I am to the people that were in the room.


All my host families said things about me, they spoke in chronological order, in order of when I lived with them, I have never had people say such nice things about me, and I will never forget that night or any of those people. The man who always took me camping, took us to Kyoto, and taught me so much about whats important in life and where man's standing is in terms of nature and in terms of existence, who showed me Japan for what it is and nothing more, and what he himself is and nothing more, he gave a speech too. he said he worried I didnt understand everything he tried to show me, and I agree, when I went to the tomb of the meiji emperor with him I didn't understand what was special about it, or what that man had done, and I'm still not very knowledgeable, I couldn't see back in time like he could and see all the important people who had passed through all those ancient temples, but I kind of can now. I think I understand now. I'm not Japanese and I never will be, but Japanese people should be proud to have a such a culturally and historically rich background. all of it. the good, the bad, and the ugly. I am so grateful to have experienced it on such a level.



The end approaching makes me more appreciative of everything; food, places, familiar things, using japanese language, friends, everything.

I'm excited to be home but I will miss Japan, and I'll be back.

ok so I didn't write about shiretoko, sorry, I will get to it one of these days. and I wrote this blog a week and a half ago and didnt post it, but its worht posting so I will now.

in response to the nagging

hey guys, I know should update my blog, lots is happening, i have to pack so much into my last month and a half, i dont waste a minute. I went on a three day trip to this really amazing and unique place and there is no time to write about it, i have going away speeches to write and final reports and slideshows and just so much stuff to do. i'll find time to write about it for you, but now is not the time.

housing update

hello again

if you read my last post you know i was a bit stressed about the move, I'm on day two now, My host father is one of the funniest men I've ever met, my host mother is super kind, and my host grandmother is like the cutest 88 year old alive and makes everything funny, she comes from a part of japan that became Russia after the second world war, it really really interesting to hear her talk about it, and having to move over here. older folk have a lot to offer in terms of stories. I showed them a picture book of the Canadian Rocky mountains and they were just like dumbfounded and spent like 15 minutes looking at each individual photo and talking about it. also the futon is the most comfortable thing I've ever slept on in my life, maybe next time i have a chance I'll explore the area, but I'm busy for now tomorrow they're talking me to baseball (they told me they had a ticket for me just before I told them "I hate watching baseball" so it was very good that I hadn't had a chance to say it. then the day after I'm off on another trip! I'm going to Shiretoko, there are two peninsulas at the top of Hokkaido, I went to the most northerly one last time, this time its the other one where all the ainu are living and the territory issues are so great, I'll get into it when I get back and have learned something about it. thanks always for reading.

i hate baseball

hey there,

I'm at my new house, I have a very small room with no bed, just straw mat floors and a fold up futon, also no dresser or drawers or anything, its a bit crazy, they're nice though and our flat is on the 6th floor, but school, friends, everything i know is an hour away by subway.


2 months to go.

stay tuned .

filler blog

hey guys,

I was biking home today and thinking hey you can probably read my whole blog in an hour, thats not very long for a whole year of living, so maybe i'll write more often.

last weekend i went to a small town called Naganuma for and international festival, it was pretty
cool the whole town shows up every year and i had my own table that said Canada and of course i was the only Canadian (like always) and I spoke to like the whole town and stamped their passports and autographed their shirts, then me and jono from Australia lead like dancing for the children and then we made mochi, which is where i smash a huge mortar/hammer into a huge carved out stump full of rice and the crowd cheers and then it turns into just like gum and they add sugar and flavoured powdery stuff and its so good when its fresh. we had like all we could eat at an izakaya and we homestayed in a huge mansion, I forgot houses could be big.












Back in sapporo Its getting really hot and green and I have rugby practice everyday, the cherry blossoms came for a week and they were just as nice as everyone said they'd be, ill put some pics up. so they do only last for about a week then they fall and blow around everywhere in the wind like its pink snow going in circles even outside our classroom on the 5th floor. then the trees are all leaves instead of flowers,

i ran my bike into a car today.

i change host families in 11 days and i dont want to at all.

i go home in 2 months and a few days

a huge motorcycle gang just sped by across the river woawoawoa

that seems like long and short at the same time, its gonna be weird and scary and I have this weird adopted accent and I say blatantly australian/new zealandish things all the time.

oh i havent got the cherry blossom pictures off my host families camera yet so here are some other older ones.

the international night pictures a re courtesy of my exchange student friends.

golden week, camping, and being blessed,

well, it hasn't been nearly as long as it usually is between my posts but what the hell, I'm not even here that much longer.

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!