[Taylor]

On Friday I went to school dressed as Abraham Lincoln and gave away pennies and candy to teachers and students in my free time.  Students would come up to me as I roamed the halls and ask me, “Trick or treat?”  After I ran out of pennies I searched my pockets to see if I had anything else to give.  I found a plastic baggy with tiny pieces of paper containing random English words.  It was from a lesson we did a while back on parts of the body.  For the rest of the afternoon, whenever a student would ask me for Halloween candy, I would give them a piece of paper that said “face” or “knee” or “ankle.”  Their response?  More often than not:  No thank you.

I got a rock…

[Julie]

You may remember reading about my adventure to Tokyo with my office last year. This year, we went to the bordering prefectures of Iwate and Akita, touring around from stop to stop by bus. I kept a journal during the trip, which I will take from heavily for this post.

Saturday, 6 a.m. My alarm is sounding, but I decide to sleep for 10 minutes more, knowing full well that I’ll only have 30 minutes left to get out the door. I’m scrambling, when I finally do get up, to gather my things and eat something before leaving. Taylor patiently waits, in sweats and his scruffy morning beard, by the front door as I rack my brain for anything I might be forgetting. I’m leaving later than I wanted, so we both run out to the car, which we have to park in a lot on a different block than our apartment. I worry the whole way along the drive to my office, thinking everyone must be there already, waiting.

7:15 a.m. Right on time! No one is at the office. We drive into an empty parking lot. No bus in sight. A bad feeling creeps into my stomach as I automatically start to think back on the directions I received about meeting up before the trip. I try to figure out where it was that I got something wrong. Were we not supposed to meet at the office? Was it 7:15 p.m. last night that we were supposed to meet? I call a coworker. She assures me that I have arrive first. Relief.

7:30 We set off on the bus after everyone arrives. We pick up more office members at 2 other stops. The kanji (aka trip organizers) start passing around snacks and drinks and tell us about what’s in store for the day.

8:30 The sun is bright through the morning mist. The bus is full with the bubbling sound of Japanese conversation.

First stop: Bento lunch at Kamaku Lando.

We also had to sample the famous yakisoba at this stop.

We broke off into groups and I joined in with the ladies for an adventure through Wonder Castle.

Balancing through Wonder Castle.

Little and big people room!

“Humans”

The one-armed handstand on a table room!

Sky diving!

That guy was really worried about his elephant.

Fish friends, swam right out of the pictures.

After a well-needed, hour-long nap on the bus, we stopped at a museum made from an old samurai dwelling. We picked out some souvenirs and headed back to the bus. We drove through a twisting mountain road, with no lack of the beautiful fall foliage that had followed us throughout the morning and afternoon, until we reached Tazawa Lake; the deepest lake in Japan. Our hotel was further up the mountain and we arrived just as the sun was setting.

We settle into our ryokan style hotel rooms and then we had dinner. Oh, how we had dinner.

This was my hotel room. In the evening when the guests leave the rooms, the hotel elves come out of hiding and quickly and efficiently move the table and chairs somewhere and lay out all of the futons for the guests.

Here’s the hotel dining room. Each table has a basket of food ready to be grilled on a fire at the center of the diners. This particular evening there was a pot of bear meat and rice dumpling soup hanging over one of the two fires. The soup fire was also surrounded with whole fish on a stick. The room was toasty warm and super relaxed. Many people chose to wear the yukata (light kimono) provided by the hotel. It’s comfortable and easy to change in and out of when visiting the onsen (public bath) also at the hotel.

This is what my place setting looked like before I started eating.

Here’s one of the many rounds of food grilling in front of us. The chicken is stuffed with gyoza meat and the mushrooms are shiitake with a pepper in the center.

Here’s my place setting right before my food coma set in…

After dinner, the hotel’s super hot and sulfuric onsen relaxed our muscles. I couldn’t stay in longer than a few minutes at a time because it was so hot. After the onsen, more food (!) and visiting until we were all too sleepy to not turn in for the night.

Day 2

Sunday, 6:30 a.m. Again, I push snooze to sleep for another 10 more minutes. Then I remember the onsen, so I cut my snooze short and gather my things together to head out for a morning soak.

Breakfast was fish, soup, nori, mushroom/miso salad, slimy bundle of fibrous seaweed drenched in vinegar or possible pickled, more pickled mystery vegetables, super salty fish eggs, tea, rice, and orange juice. Yum!

We had some extra time in the morning, so a group of us walked around the woods near the hotel. Here’s what we saw:

The overlook.

Close up.

On the bus again. Our first stop is a handmade goods shop. We spend an hour and ten minutes there watching people work on their crafts: iron ware, painted wooden horses, dyed fabric, and yummy treats. A few of my coworkers tried their own hand at the yummy treats.

The area had a really pretty lookout point where a snapped up some more autumn leaf pictures.

Next stop was a sake factory. After a tour through a big building with many large vats and a strong, strong smell, we were sent through the souvenir shop for taste testing. I bought a bottle of amezake; a super sweet, non-alcoholic drink made from rice. Although it tastes really sweet, there is no sugar added.

Last stop was a late-afternoon lunch. We ate at a restaurant famous for its wanko soba. Wanko soba is served bite-to-bite, so as you slurp up some noodles from your bowl, emptying it, a server is standing next to you and immediately splashes another mouthful into your bowl. The servers hold a tray filled with small bowls of these (big) bite sized servings, and stack all the empty bowls next to you so you can count how many you eat. 10 of these bowls is about one normal sized bowl of noodles. When you are full, you cover your bowl so that it can’t be refilled. This sounds reasonable, but the servers are very quick and there is some skill involved in managing to eat your last bite and then quickly cover your bowl before the server can refill it. They really do try to beat you to it and will hold a refill bowl right next to you when they see you are reaching for the lid. I stopped after 35 bowls, and the record for our group was over 80 bowls. The record for that restaurant was a guy who ate over 500 bowls.

It was the most fun I’ve ever had eating soba.

[Julie]

I’ve mentioned in earlier blogs the flower arranging class that I have been taking at the agriculture school where I also teach one beginning English class. This past weekend, the school had a huge festival featuring the different classes and what they have been learning.

The Kado (flower arranging) class spent the day before making arrangements to be on display in one of the classrooms during the festival. Here’s what we came up with:

My flowers before...

...and then after!

My classmates and teacher (top left).

[Taylor]

This week I wanted to incorporate some sort of Halloween theme into my lessons without going over the top. I asked Julie for some advice and she came up with a great idea: Describe a monster to your students (It has one big eye, a triangle head, snakes for hair, and three arms, etc) and have them draw it on a piece of paper. It was a perfect warm-up before diving into some more conversational English.

However, one of the classes where I conducted the activity was a little restless. They’re the kind of class that quiets down when you tell them to and then thirty seconds later start back up again. They’re good kids, they’re not trying to be mean to me and the other teacher, they just can’t help themselves.

Anyway, during the warm-up I told them to be quiet a few times and decided to change it up a little. In a quiet, almost whispering voice I told them that we needed to be quiet because we didn’t want to wake up the monster. The room went completely silent and I had their full attention. It was great, but the weird thing was that they had no idea what I just said. I’m pretty sure I could have said anything (for example, “Yesterday I watched the trailer for “Tron 2″ and was disappointed because it looks like they’re trying too hard.”) and the students would have reacted the same way.

The teacher I was working with was equally surprised and when I looked at her she was trying very hard not to laugh, which made me laugh, which made the students laugh, and thirty seconds later they resumed their good-natured but disruptive small talk.

[Taylor]

Leaves in Oirase Gorge

This weekend Julie and I hit the road to catch a glimpse at the fall foliage before the leaves all fell to the ground.  Our trip included stops at Mt. Hakkoda, Oirase Stream/Gorge, and Lake Towada.

We took a ropeway up to the top of Mt. Hakkoda. We missed the peak of the colors by a couple weeks but it was still amazing.

View from the tram.

View from the top of Mt. Hakkoda. In the distance is Mutsu Bay and Aomori City.

Another view from the top, this time facing inland.

After the mountain we took a stroll down to the Oirase Stream/Gorge.

Our last stop was Lake Towada, the deepest lake in Japan.

We also did a fair amount of driving on the trip.  Here’s a video of us careening through a mountain road looking at foliage and listening to Alphawezan.

Click here to see the rest of the photos.

[Taylor]

I know it’s a little early, but I thought I’d share this photo of a spider I took outside after a (wonderful) classical guitar concert we went to.  If you look close you’ll see a few other spiders hanging out along the side of the web.  You might think those are baby spiders, but they’re actually males and the large one is the female.  There’s some interesting Japanese folklore associated with this spider that you can read about here.  Jorogumo is its name in Japanese.

Alright, so maybe that’s a little creepy.  Here’s a nice antidote for the jorogumo.

[Taylor]

Over the weekend (is our blog finally up to date now?  weird), Julie and I ventured into the woods of Shichinohe to harvest chestnuts with her coworkers.  Afterwards we ate cake and drank tea at a secluded retreat located a little further into the heart of the Blue Forest.

We also befriended some frogs.

Pond outside the cabin where we ate cake.

View from Cake Cabin window.

To give you some perspective on the size of the frog, the person holding it is four years old.

More photos here.

[Taylor]

Well, the big Aomori Go Festival has come and gone.  I ended up on a five person team composed of people who work for an electric company in a nearby town.  If I had to sum it up concisely, I would choose three words;  humbling, exhausting, and fun.  Humbling because I realized how much I need to improve.  I won one game out of four and the mistakes I made in the games I lost were pretty embarrassing.  But it was also a lot of fun and I learned a lot from my mistakes.  With that said, it was exhausting in part from all the Go playing, but mostly on account of dealing with the language barrier all day.

It was especially nice to see some familiar faces at the tournament and meet other people around the prefecture who play Go.  A few of the people I met helped us out on Friday at Culture Day; a day long seminar for participants in the JET Program to learn more about Japanese Culture.  This year our prefectural organization decided to give a Go presentation.  Three high level Go players, including one of the top 2 or 3 players in the prefecture, gave introductory presentations while my friend Aaron translated their words into English and I provided some analysis during demonstrations.  Pictures below.

Playing a game at lunch before the presentation.

Getting myself into trouble against a 4 dan (a player 12 ranks better than me).

There was obviously more to Culture Day than just Go.  While I was helping out with the Go presentations, Julie learned about Japanese ceramics, taiko drumming, traditional dance, and even got to wear a kimono.

Taiko drumming

Traditional dance

Julie preparing to try traditional Japanese dancing.

Traditional ceramics

So the day after Culture Day I ended up playing in another Go tournament.  This one was much more low key as it only included six people from the Go Club in Noheji.  I won two games out of five.  One of those wins was a significant milestone for me as I beat a player who was given two stones on the board against me.  Usually it’s the other way around and I get the extra stones.

[Taylor]

My entire school climbed a nearby mountain a few weeks ago.  We did this last year too but this time I was able to climb with the students up to the top and back down again.  The hike, to and from the school, was 24 km.

Mt. Eboshi in the distance

At the summit. Mutsu Bay, Noheji Town, and Yokohama Town in the background.

More Mutsu Bay, Hiranai Town, and Natsudomari Peninsula

Most of Aomori Prefecture looks like this. When the lighting is just right, you can see why they call it the "blue forest."

Awkwardly smiling in the wind.

As you can see, at the summit we were treated to a glorious view of Noheji Town, Mutstu Bay, Shimokita Peninsula, Natsudomari Peninsula, and our neighboring towns of Hiranai, Shichinohe, and Yokohama.  To see all the places where we spend the vast majority of our time all at once was breathtaking to say the least and made each kilometer on the hike worth it.

As for wildlife, no frogs this year.  However I did get a few photos of some large grazing mammals.

[Taylor]

Here’s what it looks like around here right now.  Lots of yellow rice fields, blue skies, and green mountains.