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.

some thoughts

So,

It’s really time consuming to paraphrase a day’s events and put them into witty sentences ( maybe not that witty) and chronoligify them and everything, SO, maybe only expect a good post like that once a week, I’ll do what I can, but for now here are some sentences you might like to read.
I have now eaten raw egg, raw chicken, semi-raw horse, skewered pigs nipples (It tasted like pork, but when I asked what it was my host father just pointed to some imaginary nipples. Maybe it was dog.) It was all really good. The food is like one of the best parts about being here.
Every dish is a surprise, and usually I don’t like surprises, but not when it comes to Japanese food.
I’ve picked up two of the three alphabets, I can READ Japanese! But alas, I cannot understand what I’ve read.
Manners are really different here, and privacy is kind of different, I’ll get back to you on that.
Me and my host dad went for a longlonglong walk in the park today, and he like power walked, and I lost him, and then I got lost myself, and then I asked someone for their cell phone and called home. I wasn’t worried and I knew my way home, I just didn’t want anyone else to worry, but when they picked up the phone, it was difficult to explain my situation. You can’t use hand signals on the phone. Anyway, I got home in ok time for my in home Japanese tutor who makes things very easy to understand, and has quite a vocabulary despite being very firm about not being able to speak English.
These two Mormon missionaries live near me and I see them all the time and kind of talk to them, kind of.
Oh yea, book stores are huge, electronics stores are 8 floors, train stations are attached to massive department stores, then the next station is attached to another one.
Baseball is 10 times more popular in Japan than in America, Kentucky fried chicken too I think.
Today I climbed a mountain. And at the top of the mountain was one of my teachers, crazy.
Everyone has a bike, no one has a helmet. They go so fast on the sidewalk, never on the road.
I was in my first car in Japan on Friday, it was so scary being on the other side of the road, in a car about as big as a cabinet zooming around corners, I don’t know.
There are bears in Japan. I didn’t know that. Well I think that’s what they were trying to tell me. I’ll look it up.
There are active volcanoes in Hokkaido where I live,

There is massive flooding in some of the other islands. It’s like New Orleans or something, but you guys probably don’t even hear about it.
Here the commercials are 10 to 15 seconds instead of 30 seconds; they come at you fast, and are usually awesome if they don’t give you a seizure. You know who you are.
Everything is about consumerism in Japan, well anything that’s not traditional, maybe I’ll wait until I've experienced more here before I get into that.
School is awesome and my classroom has an awesome view and there are no bars on the windows and no one will steal your stuff. I’m not expected to do anything and only study Japanese on my own during class, or sleep.
They try to avoid waste here, there’s still over packaging but all garbage is recycled or incinerated, I think out of necessity rather than ecology, see there isn’t a lot of room for junk. They make good use of recycled tire pathways and the like, but incinerating so much garbage caaaaaaan’t be good.
Wow, I didn’t think I had this much to say.
Game shows are hilarious.
People point at me.
Some people like walk extra fast to get past me.
We have a pretty crummy TV. I was like, this is Japan, where's the HDTV? Then I found out they have a huge HD projector attached to the ceiling and pull down a screen to watch movies on it.
I have a classical music class. Hmm.
My bed is so hard and so fantastic, my pillow is hard and not so fantastic.
Watermelons cost like 20 dollars, but I told them they're my favourite before I knew that, and they keep buyin em.
Here, we buy groceries 30 bucks at a time, and one or two days at a time and anything you could ever want to purchase is within walking distance.
The cars. Oh man.
The phone like answers itself and puts itself on speakerphone, suddenly a man’s voice will be in the room, woa. Or maybe that’s the doorbell I don’t even know.
They’ve had like 8 exchange students (留学生) here before me.
This island, Hokkaido (the big one at the top) was originally home to an indigenous people called the Ainu, who were genetically closer to the people of Siberia than to the Japanese. Then the Japanese killed them, there are like 300 full blood Ainu left in the world and many more “Métis” I guess. They face many of the same problems first nations Canadians do today.
Dinners almost ready, but I just ate like a whole watermelon.
It turns out I was using chopsticks (端) allll wrong.
There’s no smog, I thought there would be smog.
The hiking trails are steep, but the mountains are generally puny.
The Olympics were held here in 1928, winter.
I can hear fireworks.

Day two

Today I got a bigger dose of this city. It’s big and spread out just like Calgary. My neighbourhood is pretty quiet, I think its an older neighbourhood. My host father and I went to the weekly meeting,
The subway is probably the fastest thing in the entire world. And its so smooth I don’t even know how it’s possible.
I finally met the other exchange students today. There is a girl from Finland, she got here Tuesday, her English is really good and I’m glad for that. There are two Australians, one who has already been here for six months, and already studied Japanese for 5 years >_>. The other one I couldn’t meet because she’s at home with an injury. In our district at home in Canada we must have had 20 exchange students from all over the country, but there are only four of us here, and they only accept/send students from/to Canada, America, Finland and Australia, that’s it! Not to mention, there are no male inbound exchange students but me, and all the Japanese students who just got back from their outbound exchanges are also girls.
After that, a bunch of us went for karaoke, which I’ve never done before.
Now you should know that I’m no singer, especially if you're an ex member of the band Dead Reckoning. HA. But this was really fun; we went into a little dark room with a table and sang to words on a screen and They made me sing when a song came on like, I think I’m turning Japanese, or Barbie girl, or hey hey you you I don’t like your girlfriend or whatever, it was quite a good laugh, I was happy just to have English speaking people around me.
Since I don’t even know my way home one of the girls who takes the subway in the same direction got off where I get off and waited with me for my host father to walk and get me. I could recognize some of the buildings when we came out of the station, and I felt like an big dork when I saw that the station we got off at had been only like 200 feet from home all along.
As much as I liked Japan yesterday, I like it more today.

There were about 5 people at the airport and they all introduced themselves and shook my hand and bowed and I didn’t catch any names. Then in about one minute we took a picture as a group, said sayonara, and then it was just me and the man who introduced himself as my first host father.”

The airport turned out to be attached to a train station and after hauling my bags down a few escalators we were on a train. It was pretty much empty and we spent an hour working out what we could in English and Japanese. He has very little English but I think he understands more than he speaks. He explained that I was to call him Otou-san which is literally father, and his wife was to be called Okaa-san, which is mother. We got off that train and on to another. This one had a lot of people, they were all dressed in different Japanese fashions and school uniforms and suits, and they were all looking at me. I’m going to have to get used to this staring thing, or perish.

After the train we hopped in a taxi, the cars are almost all different in Japan, everything is small, but occasionally you see a model you recognize. They drive on the left side of the road here and the steering wheel is on the right, they drive very fast and it didn’t appear to be important to have your seat belt on, I attempted to put mine on but it was some complicated high tech thing, I think.
Our apartment is on the third floor above my host fathers shop, he sells house and car paints on the first floor, and has an office on the second. There is an elevator. The house is very clean and has lots of floor space. Everything is hardwood. My room has a sliding door and a very hard bed (wood with a thin mattress on top), but that is something I really like. I have two huge windows but the only view is of the tops of the tall buildings around us.

We spent an hour attempting to communicate at the dining table, and then went to bed. I woke up to find breakfast on the table. It was really good, but I have no idea what it was.

Then okaa san took me out to register for something at the government office because I am staying longer than 90 days. Sapporo is hard to describe, the air is humid and the sun beats down on you, people are riding bikes everywhere, the trees completely alien and usually huge. Unlike Calgary there is no litter, and unlike Calgary not everything is brand new, many roofs and drainpipes are rusted and the rust has stained the buildings. There are bumpy strips in the center of the side walk absolutely everywhere, for the blind to feel their way along I guess, but who knows. There are constant sirens and tiny ambulances go by once in a while.

After registering for whatever it was, we walked to my school to meet the principal. My school is 5 stories high, and from what I can gather it is the top rated sports school in all of Hokkaido prefecture (province), with the number one rugby team in all of northern Japan. It is baby blue and yellow and everyone wears uniforms and looks at me like I am very interesting, or very disgusting.

We met people my host father knew as we walked, it was strange to me that something like that should happen in such a big city, but I realized everyone here runs a shop, and lives in/above it, or lives in complex, Whereas in Canada we all live in suburbia, and drive everywhere in our SUVs. My host parents are maybe the nicest people in the world they keep effusing to let me pay for anything and are so patient and so happy when we are able to communicate. I’m surprised at the amount of Japanese I know and how much I understood today, even though they we’re all single words and I just guessed at the rest of the sentence.

By midday I was really tired of walking, and reaaaally jet lagged, and really hot, and really worried about the speech I have to give tomorrow, and the one I have to give on Monday, and starting school on Monday with pretty much no school supplies, and no uniform, they told me I could wear suit pants and a shirt and tie instead. I guess that means the same one for a whole week until my uniform comes in.

Right now I’m in my room, but since they don’t know the password to their own wireless network I have to go into the kitchen and use a cord when I want internet. I’m Still on Calgary time, making it 5:08 AM for me, and 8:08 pm for Japan. Everything is super formal, really hard to understand and kind of scary, but I’ve got 364 days to go.



p.s. you can't indent your paragraphs on here. I'm going to have to work on that.