Tachibana Yama 橘山

A couple of days ago, Marlon and Kevin hiked with me up a mountain up the road from our dorm.
I`d been wanting to do it for a while, and I was prepared and extecting to climb stright up the hillside through the brush and trees, forging a way as we went. Fortunately, it didn`t come to that.
There was a trail.
We left about 3:30pm ad arrived home very near 8:00.
On the way up, we took a lot of pictures, saw huge spiders (No, bigger... think bigger than that too.) These buggers were easily four inches across. Without the legs. They were black and yellow striped.
We saw mushrooms and gnarly trees, and huge butterflies. the bugs in japan seem like they`re from a hundred million years ago. huge! the spiders, for one. giant black butterflies. flies three times normal size. foot long earthworms (we thought it was a snake!).
In Japan, people must stay very fit from their good diets and excercise (stairs everywhere). We passed about three old Japanese dudes who were on the way down from the summit. They seemed to be doing fine, and us three dudes in the prime of our lives were having a hard time in places. It was crazy.
As we neared the top, more light began to come through, and we could sense that we had almost reached the goal. at the last turn in the path, the way ahead was blindigly bright, and as we emerged from the jungle, the top of the mountain was clear-cut and grassy, with a ring of trees around the back. Ahead, all of Fukuoka lay spread out before us, and through the haze was the sea of Japan. It was amazing. Unfortunately, pictures of the scene didn't really work because of the haze, but we were able to pick out the college, and off to the side our little home of Kenshuso Dorm a couple blocks away.
At the summit was another old Japanese dude and his dog. It`s name was Sakura, and I don`t remember the guy`s name. But we talked with him for a little while and he took pictures of us. They`ll be around somewhere. Look for them from Kevin.
We had a notion to stick around and watch the sun set form the peak, but decided going down the hill in the dark would be a bad idea.
We headed down by a different path, and this one was even more wild.
This was where we saw the king of the earthworms (I named him Jeffrey) as well as walked into some nasty spider webs. Marlon caught one full across the face and when we looked, there was another huge spider sitting up a little higher. Fortunately it wasn't on him - we would have had to draw straws to pick it off. This one was a couple inches long, and had decided to build it`s web full across the path, hoping to catch some really big prey, I guess. Kevin took pictures of Marlon freaking out and the spider itself.
At one point, when we were beginning to wonder if maybe we`d gotten entirely lost, and if everything had given way to jungle (we went through about 5 different kinds of jungle on the mountain), we came across a little shrine set to the side of the path. Japan is funny that way. Even in the middle of nowhere, on a mountain overtaken by jungle, you can find things like this. Japan is fun.
It was on the way back to the path that we found Jeffrey, King of the Earth Worms. I guess I stepped on it, because Marlon saw it waving around like an injured snake in the leaves. I looked too, and thought it was a snake. I was going to try and pick it up with my walking stick when I got a closer look and realized it was a worm. Amazing! It was longer than my hand, which is quite large indeed, and fat and firm. We took pictures.
On the way down more, the mosquitos really started attacking, and we weren't having quite as much fun.
When we finally emerged from the jungle at the base, we found ourselves right at a buddhist shrine/temple thing. There was nobody around, just a couple of cats, but we looked and stayed there for a bit to film some things. From there, there was a real, paved road back home.
The trip took nearly 5 hours. It was about a 3-mile hike (probably closer to 3.5) and had an elevation change of 1000 feet.
It was a lot of fun.

Nothing significant has happened since last night

but here`s a new post anyway.

Enjoy!

Daily Life, or - Look, I`m on T V!

Each morning around 7:30, Crystal comes and pokes me out of sleep, and I get dressed and we go for breakfast at the Clubhouse - one of the cafeterias on campus whereat two meals a day were paid for as part of the cost of our trip.
Usually, there`s a bit of free time and then the whole group will go off for our activity for today.
Today, we went to the KBC TV studio (They`re channel 9) and had a tour. It started off with getting to look around the set for their morning show, アサデス (Asa Desu - It`s Morning) and then watched them set up and film the first ten minutes ish live. That was pretty cool.
Then, it was upstairs to the control room. There were gianormous boards of switches and knobs and sliders. I could have had endless fun in there. But I decided to let things be.
Afterwards, it was into a radio studio. We got to fiddle around with things a little, and our guide told us about how the studio we were in (one of four?) was designed for live music, since it was big and had boom microphones. We walked from there into the control room (half the group at a time) of another radio studio and watched the radio people do their show for a little bit. Takahashi loved my hair. He was one of the radio guys*.
After that we walked through the newsroom - which was a lot like you see on TV shows expet not so busy - and then into another studio, where we had some fun taking pictures in front of the blue weather screen, which I`ll have even more fun with in photoshop at home.

*Incidentally, this isn`t the first time radio people liked my head. In Kagoshima, we saw DJ Pocky and DJ (some name in japanese that I couldn`t read) in their booth near a mall doing a live broadcast, and they loved me and talked about me on air.

afterwards, we wandered around Tenjin, a bit shopping area that we all have been spending a lot of time in. Kevin and I ran into a random film crew and decided to film them because it was funny. Turned out they were doing a segment for the very show we watched from the studio. The bit they were doing was for next week. We lost the rest of the group because of that, except Crystal who waited. Yay her.
Kevin split off and crystal I and a goat got some lunch. But the goat was being rude to people, so we ditched him, not wanting to be associated with someone so boorish. I had steamed meat buns and takoyaki and some sort of yummy-cooked hardboiled egg that they do here. Oishii! Delicious, if you don`t know.
Home again Home again Jiggity Jog.

The other meal we eat every day at school is dinner. The cooks names are Moto and Tomo. For the first couple weeks, I thought it was one dude who`s name I couldn`t remember properly, and another who`s name I didn`t know. They cook different things for us every day, and it`s always good. Lunches we are on our own for.
One day, we ate at Ichiraku Ramen, the same shop that the main character of a certain anime loves to go to. Turns out, the creator went to the college I`m here at now (Kyushu Sangyo University) and frequented that particular ramen shop. Nice!

Things have become kind of routine. I can tell my Japanese is improving. I`m already doing better at understanding people and making myself known, but I have a long way to go. I want to keep getting better.
With only a week and a half left, I`ll don`t think we`ll be able to do enough to satisfy me and want to go. I like it here.


...Incidentally, the title of this post was a lie. I wasn`t on TV.

engrish and cliffdiving

Today is monday the 18th.

Saturday was a free day. Crystal and I went shopping in Tenjin and bought a lot of shirts. All but one of them are engrish shirts. the other is jsut a nice shirt.
for the uninitiated, "engrish" is nonsensical english that the japanese write on things because they think english is cool and they dont understand it. The shirts say things like "notorious pipsqueak" and "get disgustingly drunk" and "the spare time which should go to sleep is spended by the sports. he goes to school. Also play the game and chat with friends. then, what the special thing for this guy is the concert halls are in all over the world. the soul is supported by a wonderful family. this sleepy man is still in a growth phase. his only hope is to get up when he wants."
that last was the first of four paragraphs on the shirt i`m wearing right now. What does it mean? Who knows! Nothing! That`s why it`s funny. For some engrish fun yourself, write a sentence into any web translator program and translate it to Japanese and back. good for hours of wholesome fun!
here`s a website to help: http://steinhoffen.tripod.com/engrish.html

Sunday we went touring by bus a long way. the first stop was a bee farm. I bought a sampler of flavored honeys full of tastiness and joy. then we went into the caldera of a big volcano, and some of the guys and i tried to climb a mountain. a bush stole my shoe, and i fell in a river. it was great fun. there were a couple other stops as well. one was a mini-niagara falls, whereat Kevin tried to take the quick way down. perched precariously on the precipitous precipice (that`s alliteration) he tried to film over the edge, slipped, and almost went over the edge himself. That would have pretty much spoiled his trip, i think. And his shot. I wasn't looking forward to all the stairs down to the bottom to climb in the boat and fish him out, only to have him tell me to save the camera first. Yes, there was a small boat. yes, there were a lot of stairs. no, the camera wouldn't have made it. yes, writing like this gets annoying. I shall stop.

Address

if anyone wants to send me mail in the two weeks i have left in japan, here is mty address:

Mark Crawford
c/o Center for International Affairs
Kyushu Sangyo University
2-3-1 Matsukadai
Higashi-ku Fukuoka


Yay, mail! Help make Dustin not be the only one getting stuff.

Whee, I like japan

Wow, I guess I`m a failure at keeping this up to date consitently, eh? I`ll try to do better.
Yesterday was the bet day so far, I think. We started off bright and early with breakfast, and then a bus picked us up from our dorm. Better than walking to the bus stop already!
It took us to the mountains, where there was a village and an elementary school with only 7 students (plus a couple visitors that day - nine kids) and four teachers to maintain them. It`s able to be so small because they`re a branch of the main school down the hill, from whence lunch is delivered each day by taxi.
They began with some introductions, and the children did a performance for us with Taiko drums, two pieces which were written by students at the school in previous years. They were good! afterwards, we got to fiddle on teh drums a but, and it really wasnt as easy as they made it look. I tried matchign the pattern from the boy showing me, and just when i started to get the more complicated one, he started spinning the sticks. then i messed up again.
We split into 3 groups and went to different classrooms and each did a separate activity. One did calligraphy, another origami, and my group pressed flowers. I partnbered myself with Zenkou, a second grader who showed me how to do it and helped me along the way. And said things I didn`t understand because it was Japanese. Sigh... outpaced by a second grader. At one point, he said "let`s go get some flowers" and my response was "I`m nineteen." ...He looked at me funny and said it again, then I got it.

After an all-too-short time with the kids, sensei had a special treat for us - barbecue!
It was spectacular. We went to a japanese-style barbecue place, where they brought plates of raw meat and we cooked them on a grill in the middle of the table. Everybody got stuffed with meat. Yummy, glorious meat. The pineapple was really great grilled, too.

Then we went to NAnzoin temple. I liked it there a lot. There mere many statues, and a couple of little caves to crawl through with shrines. Then I wandered off into the forest, ansd that was really great too. There was nothign around, jsut hte path I was following, and it really seemed like i could get lost in time. It was a bamboo forest, with birds calling and rain occaisionally makign it down to me, and it was pretty surreal. I found myself a nice piece of fallen bamboo and made a staff. I brought it home to the dorm.
Apparently, this is supposed to be a famous temple with a huge buddha layign down, but i didnt know that and I guess I missed it by wandering into the forest. it`s ok though. sonmeone else will have taken pictures.

Afterwards, we went to costco, grouped up with the people who had menmbership cards. All I bought was some cheese bagels and a really big bag of reese`s pieces. Costco was expensive, like most of japan.

Then, back home. I sat and carved side branches off my staff for a while and managed to get only two minor cuts and a blister on my thumb. Then it was in to watch TV for a bit. Some show about foreigners. IT was really quite amusing. Cassidy came too, and together we managed to figure out that they were trying to fidn out what was the mnost popular japanese restaurant for foreigners. So they found some gaikokujin (the more polite term for foreigners) in amakusa (we were there, I`ll write about it sometime) and send them opff to find lunch. The winning thing was a sushi train restaurant, when the food tries to escape you on a little conveyor belt and you have to hunt it down. Jsut like the traditional, time honored tradition of hunting sushi. 16 people went there, out of the hundred foreigners.

the next bit of the show was finding out the most popular type of cup ramen. So the guy and his cameraman went around barging into random peoples homes and searching their kitchens for ramen.
Really.
it went something like this:
*knock knock*
woman answers the door "hello?"
guy comes in "hi there, we`re doign a survery about ramen!"
guy looks around till he finds the kitchen, then starts digging around in the cupboards to find cup ramen.
in one house, the woman was fighting him for the cupboards, trying to hold them shut while he looked for ramen.
in another, it went something like this: "oh, look at the family, mom and some kids... where`s dad?" and the guy looks around the house to find dad. "oh, here he is in the shower!" as he opens the shower door on dad.
I`m not making this up. It was on T V.

Anyway, after it ended i played video games for a while and went to bed. Then I looked at my watch and realized it was only 8. Damn. I went to bed at 8. But there was nothing to do so I stayed.

That was the best day.

This is where I live!

The Kenshusho Dorm, at　Kyushu Sangyo Daigaku (KSU).in japanese, that would be 九州産業大学. If you can`t read that, google for instructions. Anyway, come in, let`s look around.

The hallway. This time, it`s cooperating. See below - sometimes it misbehaves.

The tatami room, or Cool Room. Our other common room. It`s cooler, but not used as much. I like it though.

Cassidy spends a lot of time there playing that game. It`s about Japanese history. And guys with strange weapons who kill everything. This morning, he was someone with a hula-hoop made of swords. Or something.

The kitchen. We`re not allowed to cook in it, unfortunately (only sensei), but we use the fridge for keeping things cold. And as a punishment - twety minutes inside if you make some sort of cultural faux-pas. It`s a big fridge.

Common room 1. We eat here sometimes, and have class with sensei.

The main hallway. It blurred. Sometimes that happens. I think it`s the japanese spirits messing with us. It can be a bit disorienting when you`re walking to the bathroom in the middle of the night.

This is my room.


Crystal has pictures around too. They are here. go see.

a week in fukuoka

i copy/paste-ed this from the email i sent to everyone, so some bits may be redundant. in that case, just move on to the pictures below.


First off, the website for the show (where I have a new blog to maintain) is http://travelmoxie.tv/
Second, if anyone doesn't have it yet, my blog is at http://oberek.blogspot.com. Spread that one around. Tell everybody. My posts there will probably be pretty much the same as what I`m sending here, but you can leave comments and make me happy.

I`m probably going to forget things here, since a fair bit has happened and my memory is bad, but maybe I can fill in blanks later.
It`s been a week in fukuoka now, and the pace has calmed down a lot. There have actually been a few days that were entirely free. Our schedule did get a bit messed up - the school was closed on what was supposed to be the first week of class because of measles. Luckily, all us Americans had a shot for that ages ago. Immunity power, GO!
One night, we went out for karaoke. That was fun. I could have done better, except I`ve been sick most of the week. Getting better, but not all there yet, so my voice is a little off. Still, very amusing. We will do it again.
Gone shopping a couple days. I bought a yukata. I will get a picture at some point. For now, i have some other pictures on my blog so see them there.
Today we met the school`s president and had a bit of a tour of campus. Good to know where things are.
身ってよ日本語を書いています。面白いね
Teehee. I can write in japanese.
For some reason, most of what has happened escapes me at the moment. Just go see my blog for some pictures, then.
Ta!

Pictures

A random assortment of pictures from japan.
These are in reverse order for some reason. scroll to the bottom and go upwards.
some are doubled. please ignore the second. or the first, your choice. but not both.
some are sideways. please tilt your head to accomodate.
near the top, that mountain with smoke is a volcano that tried to kill us all. we were driving around on it.
But as you can see, I conquered it.
You can click on any picture to see a really big version of it. If you`re going to save one, I recommend it be that one.

Nihon kara...

Back in Tokyo, we had an all-day bus tour one day, and after went to the famous area Akihabara, the Electric Town. It's full of electronics shops and comic places, arcades and restaurants. it was very cool. But it rained. I didn't buy anything, because there wasnt much if you arent willing to spend a lot.
the next day we went and picked up our train tickets for the bullet train. we have a pass for a week to travel anywhere on the JR train lines, which is a lot of them. In the evening, a group went to Roppongi, which is supposed to be a fun flashy party area. But it rained. And it was thursday. So it was pretty dead. We went and ate at a little restaurant on the way back ot the hotel, we were all exhausted.
Almost the entire next day was spent on the Shinkansen on the way to Fukuoka. We stopped off in Hamamatsu and toured the Yamaha factory, where they make grand pianos, and their music musem. That was fun.
Next day, a group went on our own to Miyajima, an island at Hiroshima that has a famous shrine, and a big red arch that you see pictures of sticking out of the water. It was low tide when we were there, so it was sticking out of the sand instead. There were deer on the island. When we got off the ferry, and out of the station, we saw one, Ooh, a deer. Then there was another. And we looked around, and there were a lot more. The deer were everywhere. just hanging around. We took pictures of them and with them, and some of the other people in the group that went said the deer tried to eat their stuff. Unfortunately, we didnt have long there, but we caught the ferry back to the main part of Hiroshima and ate okonomiyaki at a nearby restaurant. This is the dish that Hiroshima is famous for, and they made it a lot better than I do. It took all evening to get back to the dorms at the college in Fukuoka.
Next day (Yesterday) we took the train to Amakusa. That took all morning, but we got to the hotel around 1:00 and met with our host families, and went out with them until evening. I was with Kevin the photographer (who gets lost a lot, but managed not to that day - though he did run out of film and made us walk back up the hill for it) and our family was very nice. We went to a flower festival at a park, and most of the other people did too. Kevin and i, and our family, and Crystal participated in a traditional tea ceremony. That was cool.
Afterward, we went with the family to a pottery shop, they had a lot of nice things, and toured to see how they make everything, and their three huge kilns. We had coffee there aqt a little cafe they maintain on site, and then stopped at a small bakery and got cakes on the way to the family's house.
It was nice there, big and clean. one room was very traditional styled and fancy. We had tea and our cakes and talked for a while, and showed pictures. Our hosts gifted upon us a bottle of sake and two crystal glasses. in the evening, we came back to the hotel for dinner. The hotel is very fancy and nice, I like my room a lot, and the view from the balcony is great. For dinner, we dressed in yukatas and were served lots and lots of food. I stopped counting after about the third course, but one of the guys said it was a total of 13 dishes. Lots of food. It was very tasty. Part way through dinner, one of the hotel people came in and found kevin and I, and told us that our family had come back for something. They brought us more gifts. It was very kind. We each got a small doorway curtain sign thing. Kevin's has a mountain, and says Japan on it, and mine has the traditional beckoning cat icon of luck and good fortune. And also a box of incense each, and a card. We bowed a lot.
In the evening, most of the group went to the onsen nearby (google it, and pay attention to the customs - the key word starts with "n"...), but not all together. most of the guys were leaving as i arrived. That was an interesting experience, but it was nice. There was an inside and outside section, and outside was also stairs leading down to a separate area with four individual tubs. I sat in one for a little while and left, back to the hotel.

That was the first relaxed day so far. Every day has always been busy busy, run run, stairs stairs stairs. This day was overall calm and very refreshing.
This morning we had a buffet style breakfast, with mostly traditional foods. Very tasty. Later, we'll be off to
someplace else, and will stay in another nice hotel again tonight, I think.
My camera's memory card is nearly out of space (700-ish pictures on it) and I forgot my cable in fukuoka so i cant get them off. No pictures for now.
Crystal wants to go see the aquarium at the bottom of the cliff, and time is getting a little short, so watch for more from me another time.
Ooh, the travel show site is travelmoxie.tv but there's not much there, and may not be until we come home. Go see it anyway.

Sayounara