More funsies...

Well, today, I attended graduation for the older kids who have been here for two years already. It was kind of touching and moving. I had to go to recite a tanka (短歌, special five-line poem, a haiku [俳句] with two seven-syllabic lines at the end) that I wrote for graduation. It was pretty cool. Here's the tanka if anyone is interested (note that if you want to read it aloud, use Spanish vowel pronunciations):

生きる意味 (ikiru imi)
夢見る時に (yume miru toki ni)
空の中 (sora no naka)
今日より高く (kyou yori takaku)
飛ぶ将来に (tobu shourai ni)

(The meaning of life is that, at the time you see a dream, you fly higher than today towards the future...)

Though I like the one I wrote in class on the subject of "me" better:

俺の中 (ore no naka)
天地陰陽 (tenchi inyou)
永遠に (eien ni)
木火土金 (ki ka dou kin)
水様に舞う (sui you ni mau)

(Inside me are heaven and earth and yin and yang, dancing for eternity like wood, fire, earth, metal, and water...)

Yeah. I'm a poet and I didn't even know it. :-P I used a lot of old poetic words (like "mau") for those non-Japanese-speakers in my reading crowd.

So anyway, graduation was cool. We got to watch the koto (琴) class perform, which was really cool. I forgot my camera, but Terry taped most of it, so I'll just have to grab the videos from him sometime. It was really kind of sentimental too, even though I wasn't graduating. It still felt like I was leaving. It's going to be hard to leave all my teachers here, I think. They've all helped me so much these past six months, it'll be hard to think of life without them.

After graduation, I got some shopping done. Angela's newest CD (which was supposed to be released tomorrow) was on the shelves, so I nabbed it. The new CD is called "PRHYTHM," which looks very odd, but it's supposed to be a combination of "prism" and "rhythm." Gackt's "Moon Child" novel and Yumemakura Baku (夢枕獏)'s most recent (3/10) Onmyoji (陰陽師) novel also found their way into my shopping bag, so that was nice. (As for the CD, it's probably at least as good as their last one, I/O, but there isn't any really crazy song like "Maybe.. Maybe.." on this one. However, still two thumbs up from me.)

And after I got home, I checked angela's website and realized I made a fatal error. The Shibuya (渋谷) AX concert wasn't on April 1st like I had previously thought. It was on April 8th. This is good news since I'll hopefully find my way to Kyoto () during break, and will be back in time to catch the concert on the 8th. I waited too long to get tickets, so I'm stuck standing, and they probably won't see me, but I wouldn't be surprised if my lip-prints are still on Atsuko (敦子)'s hand from last summer. それは本当の「渋味」だ。

Three Great Weekends...

Hey everyone. Bet no one checks this anymore, right? Oh well. For those of you who do, I have a nice little condensed three-week update. Classes are still going well, though finals season approaches. So far all is well.

I came to the decision today that I really live in a great part of Tokyo (東京). It's not really Nishi-Kokubunji (西国分寺) persay; it's really Koigakubo (恋ヶ窪), but that makes as little difference as living anywhere in the "Greater Utica Area." For starters, the supermarket is a three-minute walk from my dorm, the post office (complete with really convenient ATM) and the train station I don't take is about three minutes beyond that. The train station I take is a ten-minute walk, and my favorite teacher's house is three minutes past that. So everything is nice and handy really.

I found out today, though, that the Satou (佐藤) family, my old host family, lives only about 20-25 minutes farther out than the post office. I took the train to go to their place for lunch, but I walked back (since it is only one stop on the train), and I was amazed at how close it was. It's really interesting to have everything you need all around you. I mean, it's still an hour to Shinjuku (新宿) every day, but that's what it would be anywhere. This area also reminds me a lot of home. It's urban and rural all at once, and many things seem to remind me of Utica in a kind of nostalgic way.

So anyway, backing up to two weekends ago. Since one of my teachers, Tanabe-sensei (田辺先生), lives in the same area as I do, we both thought it would be nice to arrange an out-of-class meeting sometime, so I offered to come by and cook the good 'ol soon-to-be-world-famous chicken. She had invited several other older students of hers, and we all had a nice little party. She is extremely nice, and it was nice to play with her dog, Lotta, since Jesse is somewhat unavailable. So we had a great time. I think I was at her house for around five or six hours. She and I finished two bottles of wine together -- one the Chianti I brought -- and just talked for awhile. It was really quite fun.

I also got to meet her husband and daugher whom are both really nice. The other thing that's kind of cool is that she calls me Joe in class now, as opposed to Joe-san. (For those who don't know, -san is an honorific used for respect at the end of people's names. However, when people become good friends, they don't use this honorific at all.) She also said to call her either Kaoru (馨, I think...) or Kaoru-san when we're out of class, so that was kind of cool. She also speaks really decent English as I found out, so that was kind of cool too. I had a lot of fun and I'm sure I'll be over there again before I know it.

Last weekend was also very cool and very full. The school had planned a bus trip to a hot spring, but had to change locations for some reason, so we ended up going to visit a farm-type place. It was kind of neat and reminded me of the good ol' days when we would go to farms and stuff for field trips in elementary school. But we had a lot of fun. First off, on the bus ride down, we passed two locations on my to-do list that haven't been checked off yet: the Tokyo Tower and Rainbow Bridge, both locations from X. Hehe. So it was good karma to see those both right in the beginning of the day -- despite the ridiculously early time I had to wake up -- and that karma led to an even better weekend.

At the farm, we had an OK time. There wasn't too much fun lurking about, cause, well, it's a farm. We did do some fun things though, like make our own blueberry jam. The landscape was also amazingly breathtaking, so I took lots of pictures of that. It got pretty cold though, so none of us really wanted to do anything but stay indoors. Which was funny because at that time there was a show where some caucasian guy (not sure what English-speaking-country he was from) was talking about -- and introducing -- many types of "big sheep" on the farm. And yes, mom and dad, ironically enough, there was a Horned Dorset. I took pictures. Anyway, this guy's Japanese was really bad and his English was pretty scary too. It was really weird to listen to him talk. Then he shaved an entire sheep onstage in under two minutes, and though I've never been to a sheep-shaving before, I'll admit that it was interesting on some level. So yeah, we had a lot of fun and eventually went back to Shinjuku, going over Rainbow Bridge once again (sowaka!) and seeing Tokyo Tower as we pulled back around into Shinjuku. It was a lot of fun, really.

I ended up spending the rest of the weekend with my friends from last year's class: Jin-fun, Lisa, and one of Jin-Fun's friend's from the Don-chan restaurant we like to go to. We had a really great time, and I guess it was kind of like a bonding experience for Jin-Fun and I. I mean, we know each other pretty well, despite the partial language barrier (the only language we have in common is Japanese since he speaks no English and I speak no Korean), but just being able to go off and have a good amount of fun during the weekend just seemed to bring us into a much closer bond of friendship, which was really cool. I'm definitely going to miss him when I go home. He's certainly my best friend here that doesn't speak English; Terry being my best friend here that does.

So this weekend, you already know I went to my old host family's house and stayed with them for awhile, but I have a brief story before that. On the way back from school on Thursday, Terry decided that he wanted to have steak for lunch, so we went to the Saizeriya in Nishi-Kokubunji. I should have written about Saizeriya a long time ago in a past post. If I didn't, I meant to. It would have been one of the first few though, cause the first time (out of three) that I was there was back in Seya. Anyway, so we ate a lot at Saizeriya (Rump Roast, rice, garlic bread...), but I asked if he was full and he said he had some room left, so I convinced him to come back with me to the Chat Noir in Kokubunji (国分寺) for another round of parfaits and orgasmic toast. After that, we were both pretty stuffed, but I couldn't resist ducking into McDonald's and snagging a large fry. Now THAT, my friends, is an eating tour of where I live if I've ever been on one. It was pretty fun, and ironically, when I was done buying food, I was down to exactly one yen in my pocket. Not zero. One. Yeah. It was really funny.

So, eating tours aside, I originally thought it was going to be a relaxing weekend for me, compared to the last two, but NO, life had other plans. Which I'm sort of fine with. Anyway, I got to Satou-san's house, and showed them all the Japan pictures I had taken since I last stayed at their house. Then, Shogo, the father, took Mike (their current KCP homestay student) and I out for a walk. We walked way way farther down that foresty road -- for those who remember my post about when I lived in Kodaira (小平) -- and saw some amazingly beautiful scenery. We ended up in a very nice park in Tamagawajousui (玉川上水), with a lot of historical monuments from World War II, including a building that had been machine-gunned, and never restored or knocked down. Right now, it's a historical monument, as is the American plane engine/propellor on the ground next to it. That was pretty fun.

After that, Shogo-san took us out to a Chinese restaurant where I was absolutely surprised at how much I ate. Shrimp and rice and soup and gyoza and shumai and all sorts of stuff. Really really filling. Meanwhile, Mike and I exchanged stories too. I don't know him very well since he's new this semester (which is almost over) and he's in the afternoon class, not the morning class, like I am. So it was nice to get to know him a little better. He's also from Washington state. (Evan, if you're reading this, that's two people now from your neck of the woods!) But anyway, it was a lot of fun. We came back to their house, talked for awhile, and looked at the albums they keep of all the homestay students they had over the years, cause they've been doing this for at least the last four or five years. I was really impressed, and found in their albums the last picture we took before I left them. We had taken a lot more pictures today during the walk, and now, I knew exactly where they were all going, which made me feel happy. Once my book gets published and translated, I have to send them a copy. They'll totally die. Hehe.

So those were my last few weekends. Now I get to not post for another month! (Just kidding!)