Brent's Blog

Brent's Japan adventure, part 4!!

8:09 PM June 22nd, Hakone; 4:09 PM June 21st, Arizona
We're leaving the Hakone guest house this morning. The hot springs there were absolutely amazing. After typing for about an hour last night I hit the indoor hotsprings, and they were very refreshing, some guys were hitting the baths two or three times and then again this morning. There's just something about that steaming hot spring mineral water. I'll be sad to leave the guest house, but it will be nice to have air conditioning again. Today as I understand it we have a long drive ahead of us the the Aichi World Expo 2005, which is in fact the World's Fair. This will be exciting, I'll write some later.

10:16 PM June 24th, Kikugawa; 6:16 AM June 24th, Arizona
Well, sorry I haven't been able to post anything yet, the place we were staying for the past two nights didn't have an interweb connection. After riding in the bus for about four hours on Wednesday we finally arrived at the World Expo. That place was amazingly huge! I could probably spend a week there and still not see everything, partially because the majority of my time would be spent in line. We did however manage to see the Canada pavilion. If you ask me Canada did a pretty crappy job of representing their country. It was all this new age music and nonsensical videography with the theme of "Canada is diverse" sure it is. Nothing screams diversity like a 98% Caucasian population. After that we wandered around for a while to the tech company pavilions, but we needed a reservation to get in unless we wanted to wait three hours (which we didn't). So we wandered some more through the massive crowds until it was time to go. The place was a bit of a disappointment, because it was not exactly the "world of the future" I had envisioned. But I did learn that in the future all ferris wheels will tell the time and that robots will become our new overlords (Honda is coming up with something big). So after wandering around the expo for a while, we went to the place where we were to spend the next two nights. It in fact turned out to be a dormitory for athletic teams. The trip organizers are hearing from me about this one. It was about seven people to a room and there was one shower room for the entire building. A communal shower room. Fortunately we were the only people staying there the first night, so we took showers at our leisure. The next day we went to a traditional castle village and to a Shinto shrine. We also went to a traditional Japanese village. The village was awesome, it was like being in an episode of InuYasha or something. Then we went back to the sports complex. On Friday we packed up and checked out of the dorms at 6:30 in the morning so we could be on time to Kikugawa. Turns out that 6;30 was a wee bit too early and we made lots of long rest stops along the way to compensate. We arrived at the West kikugawa middle school right on time however. Our guide there was their American English teacher. He explained about the school to us and the JET program that got him to Japan. It sounds cool, but also very selective about 1 in 10 applicants are accepted. After visiting the school and with the mayor we finally met our homestay families. Someone screwed up the schedule and I ended up paired with Ricky instead of Jeff, but that's a change I can live with. I was kinda dreading being in the same homestay as Jeff because he is the stereotypical loud, rude American. But Ricky is pretty cool. Yesterday they took us shopping, and to my surprise we even went to an electronics store. Even the Best Buy like stores are years ahead of us. I saw technology we won't have in the US for years. I also bought a black Nintendo DS. I have been planning to buy one for some time, but this trip has provided me a good opportunity because not only are colors available here which the US will never see, but it was also about twenty dollars cheaper here. After that we went to the daughter, Sakura's, school to see a special parents day. School children here are similar to the US. Very noisy and unruly. After visiting the school we went to a barbecue hosted by some homestay families in the area. There were some Mongolian students there who are studying in Japan for three years. They seemed very nice, and one girl started talking to me a lot. So it kinda freaked me out when Erin started proclaiming she liked me, but I don't really trust Erin's judgment in such matters. Come to think of it I don't trust her judgment in any matters. But turns out the girl from Mongolia (her name was really long and hard to pronounce) was very nice and also trains in Shotokan karate. We started talking about things like tekui katas and stuff, so it was pretty fun. After the party we went to see one of Sakura's friends train in Shorinji Kempo. It seemed to be an interesting style with the majority of the techniques focused on defending yourself from an opponent who grabbed you. After the class Ricky and I talked with the sensei for a while, he seemed really cool and he showed us some basic techniques.

That's all I have time to post for now. I might be able to put up a little more Monday or Tuesday night. Today we are going to see the green tea fields that Kikugawa is famous for and to visit the Kikugawa castle.

¶ 6:22 PM

1 Comments:

Yeah it was funny, the next day the homestay mother was talking to me and she was like, "Mongolian girl attack you, ne?" So I guess it wasn't only Erin who thought that.

And yeah they were a pretty sterotypical Japanese family, the father was an engineer and they called their daughter Sakurachan, to name a few examples.

By Brent, at 6/28/2005 07:34:00 AM

1 Comments:

Random Picture:

Current Reading

What I'm playing