お久し振りですね!

And a little over a year later, a new post! Gasps can be heard around the world!

By now, most of you are already aware that we are still alive and mostly unaffected by the Tohoku earthquake and surrounding incidents. As such, this will probably be the only reference to it in this blog.

Last we left off, Will was on his way to Japan. He has since arrived and returned to the States and Natalie's second school year began. Our friends, Katie and Ben, also visited last year (and we went to their wedding in October). We did other things. Ate some things. Had a lot of snow over the winter (more than usual for the region - also, it is not unusual for thunder to accompany gently falling snow here). Spring arrived and a new school year began, which brings us to now. That's a heavily abridged version of events, so I will try to fill in a few details with photos (click on them for to make them larger and clearer!

Here's Will and Nat in Asakusa (in Tokyo). Most of the cherry blossoms in the picture are actually fake. Whether they were just decoration for the upcoming Cherry Blossom Festival or placed around for photographers not happy with the already extravagant number of natural cherry blossoms around, I don't recall. Our hotel was right beside the gate to this temple, so it was the first big sight we took Will to see.


Randomly, there was a wedding going on at the Shinto shrine next to Asakusa temple. The bride and groom were able to take advantage of the rickshaws at the temple (and a few other tourist attractions in the city, I imagine, but I've only ever seen them in Asakusa - at least in Tokyo).


Randomly, there's a small amusement park tucked into the city just near Asakusa.


This bird was just hanging out in a tree branch, staring at all the crazy humans only two feet away while we all clamored to take advantage of this perfect photo opportunity.

Leaving Asakusa, we noticed this udon restaurant sign. Nat took the video.

We visited the controversial Yasukuni Shrine, which just so happened to be in the midst of its own Cherry Blossom festival. Delicious festival food was everywhere.


(this photo was taken by Will)

Then we saw another wedding procession when we visited the Meiji Shrine. It must be awkward having your wedding in a prominent tourist site, what with the random foreigners and strangers snapping photos of you all over the place.


Then, we went on to Kyoto! It promptly snowed the night we got in.


The following morning, we set out to visit the Kinkaku-ji (or the Golden Pavilion Temple). The pavilion is covered in gold leaf. We also visited Ryoan-ji, but we've got over a year to cover here and I've barely gotten through one week.

Besides, isn't this video of a fountain in one of the Kyoto Station shopping areas more interesting? Perhaps not, but it's still pretty darn interesting.


We then visited Nijo Castle (not pictured) and Fushimi-Inari Shrine (partially pictured). The Fushimi-Inari shrine complex is huge and connected by tunnels made of torii gates donated by businesses all over Japan. It covers an entire mountainside and I have yet to see it all. For a time, we wandered away from the torii tunnels and followed a path through a bamboo grove. It was pretty, but ultimately led us further away from civilization than we were willing to aimlessly wander (at least when we had a bus to catch).



After Kyoto, we brought Will to our home in Yosano. We visited some of the sights. This is the gate to one of the local Shinto shrines, reportedly one of the best cherry blossom-viewing locations in town and a view of the bay.

We also visited Nariai Temple (haha, try reading that Wikipedia page!), a nice spot with a scenic view of the Amanohashidate (and our town!), Ine whaling village and a local history museum (where we live used to be part of the Tango Kingdom!)

At the end of Will's stay, we took him back to the airport where a television interviewer asked him why he visited Japan and what he thought was "cool" about the country. A few weeks later, Natalie's students and coworkers mentioned seeing us on TV. National TV! Will is, apparently, good luck to have around.

I may share more photos from Will's trip in other posts, but not today.


On to August, when Katie and Ben visited and we hit a couple Morning Glory festivals (which are, generally, less exciting than Cherry Blossom festivals, but morning glories are my favorite flower, so I was pretty excited). This photo is from the Fushimi-Inari Shrine.

For the most part, when Katie and Ben visited, we went to a lot of the same places we went with Will. We traversed a bit more of the Fushimi-Inari Shrine until the summer heat and endless stairs broke down our will to live and we stumbled back to the bus.


While in Kyoto, we took a day trip to Nara, where they have a giant Buddha in a temple and wild "tame" deer which roam the streets and eat anything they can yank out of your hands or purse. Collecting tolls for being the city's protectors, perhaps? Vendors sell crackers to feed the deer. As soon as you purchase a bundle, the deer crowd around you impatiently.

After two weeks, we took Katie and Ben back to the airport and saw them off.

(photo by Len)

Sometime last year (probably around this time, so I'm screwing up the timeline here) our Japanese professor from college visited with a class. We met up with them in Kyoto along with our college friend, Len, who also teaches in Japan (there was also another former student there, but I didn't know him and I forgot his name! I'm appalled with me!). We were all really excited.

Sometime last autumn, Nat had a conference in Kyoto. I tagged along and went to see a few things while she was busy. I walked to Sennyu-ji Temple (technically, "temple" is redundant there, but that's how it's written in the brochure) and Fushimi-Inari Shrine (again) and returned to Kyoto Station to do some shopping before meeting up with the others for dinner at Harvest, an all-you-can eat organic food buffet (for relatively cheap!)


The next day, I decided it would be wiser to take the bus. That and my feet ached from the non-stop walking the day before. I visited the Sanjuusangen-do, the Heian Shrine and the Kyoto zoo. I also wanted to visit the history and art museums but the history museum was inexplicably closed for the month and the art museum was having a special event that scared me away. Unfortunately, I don't have any exciting pictures of the Sanjuusangen-do, as it was forbidden inside the hall. But I have this nice picture from the garden!

I wandered a bit more after the Sanjuusangen-do, trying to find another sight, but almost walked onto the campus of a women's college. Note: bus and train maps are not good pedestrian maps. Note 2: if you notice that, suddenly, there are only women around, you may have stumbled onto a women-only region of the world.


There were a lot of interesting animals at the Kyoto zoo. It's a small zoo, so it had the basics (zebra, giraffe, elephant, flamingo...) and a few other interesting species (such as this vulturine guineafowl - the colors!). It was mid-afternoon and a fairly warm day (for autumn) when I got to the zoo, so most of the animals were asleep. The hippo was nothing more than a lump in the water with a nearby child yelling at it to wake up. There was also a young child there with her grandfather who would occasionally roll her face in the dirt, despite protests, until she got a very light spanking.


It was close to closing time for the Heian Shrine, so I didn't get to see the gardens (which are, supposedly, very beautiful). The buildings were really pretty, though.

That brings us to last autumn. After that, most of my photos are random textures I took for art purposes. Hopefully we'll be more diligent in keeping up with this blog in the future!

Of Christmas and Teeth

This temporary filling is weirding me out. It's kind of made of foam or something and I keep messing with it. rawr. I'll be glad when the real one is in after the 25th.

We had a party on Sunday night. Alex played Santa; a bunch of ALTs and Japanese people came. Toshiko gave us a ride (thank you Toshiko!) and it was a ton of fun. Alex made deviled (angeled?) eggs and I made pizza bread, my new favorite pizza-type recipe since pizza dip.

...I should make pizza dip.

Drooling aside.

I got the cutest Snoopy mug!! It comes with a little matching teaspoon! I almost wanted to send it home to Mom but I LOVE IT SO MUCH. MINE. Maybe I'll give it to her when I come home. :)

Our Christmas presents are going to be kind of late. In all honesty, it's really hard to buy presents sometimes, simply because we don't have a car and have to rely on other people to get to places like Mipple (our local department store) in order to do our shopping. I've got a few things for a few people, but I really want to finish out before we do our sending.

If anyone's got anything specific they want, please comment and we'll see what we can do!

I really want to take another trip to Kyoto for shopping and stuff since I think I'm pretty used to the city now, and there's a whole lot of cool things I can pick up there. But every weekend has had something pop up to make it impossible for us to go. Grrrrr.

Though maybe I can find some good stickers in Kyoto, too. I brought some awesome stickers from the dollar store for my classes when I first came here and now I'm almost out of them. They're really weird things like sparkly, strangely colored vegetables. (green carrots, blue pumpkins, purple mushrooms and the like.) The kids just adore them, and the ones here in Japan are cutesy and all but they lack that ridiculous American flavor. Oh well.

We're going to be having another party on the night of the 25th for our English conversation members. The thing that stinks is...I HAVE TO WORK! T____T (that's a crying face). Because the school was closed for so long due to Swine Flu, it cuts into winter vacation. So...work for me. :(

Oh well, it won't be SO bad.

Kyoto and More Bugs

Well, Friday I had an orientation in Kyoto that I had to go to. It was actually kind of fun. I like Kyoto. It's a big city with a lot going on, but it's less...overstimulating than Tokyo. It's still pretty overstimulating though.

After the orientation classes we walked around in the shopping districts. I got Alex a birthday present (His birthday is Sept. 2nd - No I'm not going to say what it is! He reads this thing!) and stopped at a 100-yen store to pick up some essentials that we didn't have around the house, but were just common things, like a bathroom stool and a little lunchbag for my bento box. It has English on it. It's grammatically OK, but it's all cute and stuff.

So after the shopping was done, I wasn't going to walk around with the couple of guys, 'cause I wanted to take the train home that night, and there aren't many trains that go to my local station at night because I'm out in the middle of nowhere. So if I wasn't on the train from Kyoto by...like...6:30, I wouldn't be able to get home. So I said goodbye at the nearest subway station and headed down to find my way. Turns out the subway line I took doesn't go to Kyoto station, and doesn't connect with any other lines that DO go to Kyoto station. But I had like an hour and a half, and the road I was on went straight down to the station, so I figured I'd just walk.

Bad idea.

I walked, and I walked, and I walked, and I walked. and I walked. AND I WALKED. I met some people at a big intersection, and approached them, asking them in Japanese if this road goes straight to the station. They were astonished by my Japanese and said yes, it did, but it was a little ways yet, and asked if I needed to catch a train urgently. They said they were headed down that way as well, and they would walk with me. Turns out they were Korean tourists and had just come from Okinawa, so they were flabbergasted that an American had managed to learn Japanese. It was cute.

So I walked some more with them, the pace picking up near the end...long story short, I was walking/speedwalking for that entire hour and a half and ended up sprinting to my train. But I caught it! I was bummed out though because Kyoto station is an awesome place to shop, and I was hoping to do some looking around at the import store, Jupiter. (I craaaaaaave mexican food!)

Over the weekend, we had a couple of my students prank our apartment, you know, the ringing the doorbell and running away thing. It happened like three times, so I hid out on our balcony after closing our door somewhat loudly the last time, and when they crept back up I popped up and was like, "Miemasu yo..." (I can see you...) They freaked out, fidgeted, and were like, "Natalie-sensei! ...er...Nice to see you!" *FLEE* I talked to Sekiguchi-sensei (one of the English teachers at the middle school who lives in the same apartment building) and she laughed. Since everyone who lives in that complex pretty much works for the school system, it's a common playground for the students.

Today I saw a massive, beautiful dragonfly at school. Turns out it's called an "oniyanma" and is what the Yanma pokemon is named after. I was amused.

Turns out the Japanese eat these too. I hope to god I don't have to make an entry about that.