Alright, so I'm still working on my longer post about the first part of November, but in the meantime, per request from my family, I figured I would introduce my new host family!
I moved to my new home about a month ago (wow, that went really fast...). I now reside in the Setagaya ward of Tokyo, which is the biggest ward, and I believe lies in the western part of Tokyo. My house is kind of out of the way from everything (30 minutes by train to the nearest major station and about an hour from my house to my school), but the neighborhood is very quiet and relaxed which is a nice change from busy Chiyoda. Also, the major street of the area is fairly close to where I live, which has all the basic shops we need. On the weekends I walk with my host grandma to the supermarket to do the groceries.
Moving on to the family! My second host family, the Fujii family, is considerably smaller than my first family. It consists of my host dad, host grandma, host brother, and (host?) dog. And like my earlier blog post, I will give each of them a short introduction:
Jo Fujii (host dad): The head of a small funeral services company (although you wouldn't be able to tell that's what it was from his office). I think he's around 40. He is also an accomplished shamisen player (you should see his trophy room) and has a second job as a shamisen teacher. A shamisen, by the way, is a three-stringed, Japanese-style guitar (but it's shaped more like a banjo). It's a traditional instrument, and if you've ever heard traditional Japanese music, you've probably heard a shamisen in the background.
Remiko Fujii (host grandma): I call her Remi, for short. Although technically she's my host grandma, I think of her more as my host mom, since she does everything for me: cooking, cleaning, keeping track of all my activities, etc. I also spend the most time with her, since she's home most of the time that I am. She's a retired Japanese as a Second Language teacher, so her English is amazing! She still works now as an English tutor to a select few people. Despite her age, she runs the whole runs the whole house single-handedly and is, obviously, extremely good at it. Her cooking is the best! Also, her daughter (who unfortunately passed away recently) lived in Switzerland with her husband and two kids, which means my host grandma has spent alot of time in Europe, so she likes to enjoy her European food as well. That means she has a great taste in bread (goodbye Japanese wonderbread!) and a nice stash of Swiss chocolate which is almost exclusively for me, as I'm the only one who really eats sweets in this family. Life is good!
Remi-san and my host brother, Reigen
Reigen Fujii (host brother): a 20-year old college student who also just happens to be one of the best shamisen players in Japan! (you should see his trophy room) Each May there is a contest among the most elite shamisen players in the country, to see who is the year's best (although I don't think you can enter again once you've already won), and Reigen was this year's champion. He's also a talented piano player and singer, so I'm always hearing music around the house, especially jazz, which is his favorite (yes, you can play jazz on the shamisen too). Surprisingly enough, he's studying law at university.
Here's part of his performance from last May:
And last but not least: Rikki the dog: My family's huge, adorable, Akida (at least I think that's the breed's name). He's around 7, so he's not super hyper, but he really likes being pet, and he comes to greet me at the door when I come home, and sometimes, if he feels like making the trip up the stairs (my room is on the third floor) he comes and sleeps in my bed with me! He's also really well trained, and can do basic tricks like sit, wait, and shake hands. I already love him so much!
So that's it for the new host family! I'll put more about my new house in the next post, because I still have to finish uploading the pictures, and blogger is being ridiculously slow at the moment (as is everything else on my computer). If my internet connection decides to start working like it should again, then I should have the new post up by next week, and if not...then we'll see...
So, I'm just going to jump in right where my last post left off...
The following week, after another boring tea ceremony practice (ugh, why are they twice a month?), a few Rotex took all of the inbounds and outbounds out for karaoke as an early Halloween party. I honestly don't have much to say about it, besides that it was fun, except that I decided to bring along a mask, that had been given to me after the summer camp, as a sort of costume, and it turned out to be pretty popular!
Like so! (That's not me, by the way)
I believe the next significant of the month was when I decided to do some American cooking for my host family! Apparently a popular thing to do among exchange students is cook food from your host country as a way of sharing your culture, and since I was going to leave them soon, I figured it would be a good time to do so. Given my lack of real cooking experience, I decided to stick with something easy: burritos! Thankfully, there was a supermarket near my house that specializes in stocking foreign food, so I got all the ingredients I needed! Well, except for the thin pizza crusts mislabeled as tortillas...but they worked out anyways.
The burritos went over pretty well I think. It was quite a sight watching my family try to figure out eating with their hands, and struggling (in vain) to not let any food fall out of the pizza crust/tortilla.
My host sister Yoko decided to go at it Japanese style anyways and ate the whole thing with chopsticks.
Like a boss
I even taught my host mom how to make them, and the next day, while I was out with friends, she made them for her grandchildren! (who came running up to me when I got home to tell me all about it)
In the end, we just cut them up
The last Saturday in October was Maxim's school festival, so Bianka, Veli (Finland), Laura (France), and I all decided to go visit together. And his high school is not just any normal Japanese boys' high school, no, it's THE train (yes, as in the metro) high school of Tokyo. Which meant trains EVERYWHERE. I'm pretty sure every single classroom had trains in some way, shape, or form (pictures, drawings, boys dressed as train conductors) in them.
Toy trains...
Mini (but rideable!) trains...
Life-size models of train cars located right in the middle of the school...
Otherwise, it was a pretty normal school festival:
One of the classrooms had a bunch of old games (e.g. Jenga, checkers), including this one, where you have to stick swords into this pirate's barrel until he pops out (whoever's sword made him pop out is the loser). And as some kind of mean joke, this pirate would only pop out when I put one of my swords in...
There was also this thing: you had to hit away the bottom block, but couldn't let it fall
Yeah, that game didn't work out very well...
Discovered this in one of the classrooms. Welcome to Japan
That night was Michiko (host sister) and Yuki (host sister-in-law)'s joint birthday party, as well as my farewell party, so my entire host family, all the children and grandchildren included, went out for shabu-shabu. Shabu-shabu is a type of Japanese cuisine (although I'm pretty sure it originated in Korea), where you dip super thin slices of raw meat in boiling (and I mean boiling) water, and it cooks almost instantly! It was actually really good! Along with the meat, we also cooked vegetables and ramen noodles. I'm pretty sure I gained a good 5 pounds that night...
What the hot water pot looked like (and Yoko when she photobombs)
Afterwards, all the grandchildren gave gifts to Michiko, Yuki, and I! Due to the fact that I have a never-ending cold through the winter months, my host family was really thoughtful and bought me a panda blanket (although it's only for the waist...) and thermal socks. Also, all their grandkids, with whom I probably hung out with the most, made me a card where they each wrote a little note to me. It was so sweet! It was really hard not to cry...I'm going to miss this family so much!
All the messages were super sweet, even the one in the bottom right corner (from Konosoke, who's 6) which is just a drawing of him and me. Everyone was making fun of it because he made me bald, but I think it's adorable.
The Hotta family! (minus my host dad) Thanks so much to all of them!
And to finish off this month, the Rotex took us to the Ueno Zoo! Now, just as the biggest (or most famous) attraction in the Franklin Park Zoo is the gorillas, the same goes for the Ueno Zoo and its giant pandas. So everyone was really excited to see it, since, there are very few zoos outside of China that have pandas, but guess what we got in the end? Panda butt. That's right, I get to see my first real panda and it's sleeping. Mooning the crowd. Perhaps it wanted to make a statement?
Actually, since it was raining that day, there were a lot of sleeping animals. But I still saw a fair amount, although not many that I hadn't seen before. Anyway, seeing as the animals were not very active, it would have been great for pictures, but my camera died! I did get a few before that though, which I will share with you now:
No idea what these things were, but they were adorable!
You can't really tell from this picture, but this cliff was covered with monkeys
Easily one of the cutest and most delicious lunches I've ever had
I present with the mighty giant panda
And even though I sound like I'm complaining, I did still have a lot of fun! I would definitely like to go back- this time with my camera (although I think Blogger would explode if I tried to upload so many pictures onto it...).
Also had the pleasure of watching this man reenact the entire movie Titanic, which ended in him dramatically dunking his head into that bowl of (probably freezing) water.
After the zoo we went to some kind of science and nature museum, but it was pretty boring so there's not much to talk about.
I think that about sums it up for October! I apologize again for being so late with these posts. I will start working on November as soon as possible to get you readers up to date. I can't believe it's almost December already! Where does the time go?
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention this guy. We met him at Maxim's school festival. He was pretty darn cool.
So I owe everyone a big apology. Time flies by so fast here, it's hard enough for me to keep up, so I forget that the people back home also want to know what's happening here too. So I apologize, and I promise I really will try to update more often (although they will probably be shorter less wordy posts). As a quick update to those I haven't talked to recently, next Wednesday will mark the end of my fourth month in Japan (Oh my god). I am now living with my second host family, which consists of a dad, grandma, brother, and dog, and I will write way more about them in a later post. Unfortunately, they live about an hour away from my school, and their internet sucks, which means a lot less time on the computer, making blogging difficult. But I will try my best!
Now moving on to October! Seeing as it's an entire month that I have to cover, I will probably break the post up. Also, since the events of this post happened more than a month ago, my memory of them is super fuzzy, so I apologize for the lack of details! But anyway...
The week after my school festival was pretty much a vacation week for me. Monday was a holiday, Tuesday was off because we get a day off after bunkasai and Monday was already taken, Wednesday was some kind of exams that I didn't have to take, and Thursday we didn't have school, but I have no idea why.
So, despite the ravaging typhoon Sunday night, Monday was an absolutely beautiful day! It was warm and there were clear skies- a complete turnaround from the previous week. My host mom decided to take advantage of the nice weather to bring me on a walk around the Emperor's Gardens: a big tourist attraction pretty close to the house.
Unfortunately the interior gardens were closed that day, but the outside was still really nice. We walked for about two hours (the gardens are huge!) and probably could have gone on longer, but neither of us remembered to bring water and, like I said before, it was hot and sunny that day. I was also really sad because I took a lot of good pictures, but something happened with my camera and only a few of them uploaded onto my computer, and I can't figure out how to get the rest...But please enjoy the few I have!
Make sure to watch out for those green-hooded dog men crossing the street...
Tuesday my friend Bianka (from Hungary) invited me to come with her and some of her school friends to do karaoke- my first time since coming to Japan despite already being there for two months. (I will also briefly mention that before going to karaoke we stopped at McDonald's for lunch and I never really ate much at McDonald's back in the States because of the horror stories I'd heard about the quality of the food, but I will admit that the Japanese McDonald's is considerably better in both taste and quality. But based on Japan's obsession with both of these elements in their food, I can't say I'm surprised.)
So for the people (like me) who have no idea what real Japanese karaoke is like, you basically lounge around in a small, dark room with one big TV (for the karaoke obviously) and sing your heart out along to a vast selection of both Japanese and English songs. The place we went to also had unlimited free drinks and provided us with tambourines. Not too shabby, eh?
You can also dance if you want
Yeah, Haruka reeeeeeally liked dancing...
Like I said, the drinks were unlimited (and these are just Bianka's and mine)
Now for some musings on the next week or two based on what I can remember and my pictures:
I think on Thursday of that same week, I met up with Maxim (from Belgium) and Kae, a Rotex who went to Belgium, where we decided to try purikura (Japanese photobooths) as neither me nor Maxim had tried it before. Now purikura ("puri" for short), is supposed to make you look very beautiful, but seeing as we are in Japan, it is the Japanese's version of beauty, which means big eyes and super white skin. And for Japanese people, it looks great! But for foreigners...well, we end up looking more like cartoon characters.
See what I mean?
But either way, it's still unbelievably fun, especially after you've taken the pictures and you get to edit and draw on them! In fact, it's such a big part of Japanese pop culture that my friends couldn't believe that we don't have it in America. My friend just gave me a surprised look and said "Then what do you do when you go out with friends?"
That weekend, I went with my host sister to a fancy lunch with some extended family, which honestly is not that significant of an event except that it made me realize just how much I went to fancy dinners with that family. I found it funny how quickly I'd gotten used to my host family's wealthier lifestyle. Anyway, the lunch was quite nice, as was to be expected, but there was just one thing that threw me (as a person rather inexperienced with fancy restaurants):
The utensils. Are four knives, three forks, two spoons, and three cups really necessary?
After the lunch, Yoko (host sister) and I went to a Noh-kyogen performance that Rotary had offered us tickets to. Noh-kyogen is a type of traditional Japanese theater, which is supposed to be more comical than regular Noh theater (it also doesn't use the masks). But the most interesting part of it is the language: the actors use a more archaic form of Japanese (like Shakespeare for English) and they deliver their lines in a loud, singsong voice, with a strange use of emphasis on some words when they speak. Obviously, I couldn't understand anything, but just the voices were entertainment enough. Unfortunately there was no filming or picture-taking allowed, but I think this video (courtesy of Youtube) should give you a pretty good idea of what it was like.
The next weekend, me and a friend from Kendo club (I can't remember if I mentioned joining kendo club yet or not...anyway, if not, or if people don't remember, it's a pretty awesome traditional Japanese sword-fighting sport that uses big bamboo sticks/swords) decided to go support our kouhai (underclassmen) at their tournament, which took place at Gakushuin, a prestigious private school in Tokyo, which I also may have mentioned before...sorry guys. Anyway, this probably all would have gone smoothly, except for the fact that there are TWO Gakushuins: a boys' school and a girls' school. My friend was convinced that the tournament was at the girls' school, which happens to be the lesser known of the two (location-wise anyway), so with the help of Apple maps on her iPhone, we set off on a nearly two-hour journey that ended in the realization that the tournament was, in fact, at the BOYS' school, which happened to be located right next to the train station where we met...Anyway, we made it to the tournament in time to watch our team fight. And we ended up getting second place, which I thought was amazing, but apparently we always get first, so everyone else was not quite as thrilled.
After the tournament, I met up with my friend from school who, after learning that I play cello, invited me to come listen to Bach concert that her dad, who is also a cellist, was playing in. It was honestly a beautiful concert (although the male alto singer surprised me a little bit), but my bored teenager instincts kicked in anyway, and I spent the whole time trying not to fall asleep. My friend had the same problem too, though, and her mom even moved to the back row just so she could take a nap!
But the best part was that, after the concert, we got to visit my friend's dad backstage and he let me play on his cello! Well, actually his friend let me play on his cello because the first one didn't have an endpin...Anyway, it was sooooooo nice to be able to play after so long. I could have stayed there for another hour, but the man had to go home. Someday I will manage to get a cello here (and then somehow find the time to play it...)
By the way, can someone let me know if there are kebabs in Boston? They are honestly one of my favorite foods here (although I'm pretty sure they're Turkish) and I had my first one that night. And when I say kebabs, I mean these:
Also had a cool international moment when I, an American in Japan, was eating a Turkish kebab sold to me by a foreigner (unfortunately I don't know from where) and heard a Brazilian song come on the radio. Go multiculturalism!
So in the interest of time, I shall end this post here, but I expect to have the rest of October up soon. I promise! This week and next week I don't have club activities so I should have plenty of time. And if I'm not up to date by the end of that time, feel free to assail me with emails and messages until I am. Also, expect way more pictures in the next post!
