mokudekiru

If you’ve ever tried clicking on the “old japanblog” link at the top, you might have noticed that the photos didn’t work, rendering the blog rather worthless. Well, I have good news! I’ve spent the last two days reconstructing the blog and all its photos. It’s also on a blogspot URL for the purposes of keeping it authentic, just how it looked in 2006-7 when I was originally posting to it.

So knock yourself out. Get inside my teenage mind as I adjusted to life as a Japanese schoolgirl, complete with loads of culture shock.

Visit the blog at: http://mojellyfish.blogspot.com/

Highlights include…

Jumping off cliffs in Kyoto:

Asking Oguri Shun to marry me on my 18th birthday:

Pulling a danjiri through mountains to welcome fall in:

The overly crowded and beautiful Kobe Luminarie:

My complete and total obsession with ikanago, the west Kobe delicacy:

Throwing surprise parties for Noriko, culture festivals, and TONS of purikura:

Sakura, Takashi, Osaka, and my first encounter with an ice dog:

The ever-popular purple-jacket boy:

And of course, rapping about tea ceremony:

Enjoy!

For the time I’m spending in Tokyo (which is purely touristy stuff), we have been staying in Shinjuku, one of the districts of Tokyo. It’s got plenty of skyscrapers, restaurants, hotels (including the one that Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson stayed at), a great subway station, and Yakuza (yes, gangsters).

Shinjuku looks basically like this:

Last night, while we were walking to find some sushi to eat, it started raining. We didn’t have an umbrella, so we stood in a dry spot next to some building. There was really nothing to do besides watch people walk by.

People who are wiser than us instantly whip out the umbrellas!

Rain, trains, people, umbrellas, skyscrapers, bikes… so one of the most impressive things about Japan is, in my opinion, the amount of girls with a) umbrellas, b) high heels, c) on bikes, d) in the rain, e) all of the above. I have a hard enough time with any one of those four things, but to do them all together is something you see constantly here. Unfortunately, I didn’t get a picture of any one of these multitasking girls, so you have to be satisfied with this:

another such shot:

the puddle, a few feet from where we were standing, in action. I like the contrast of the different shoes.

Also note how they are all walking on the left side, rather than the right, how we Americans do it. According to a tour guide Bethany and I had last year, this is because back in the samurai days, when you would cross a bridge (or other narrow path) you would want to avoid other people’s katanas. Since they drew the sword with their right hand, it was held on the left side of the body, and thus walking on the left would keep everyone’s katanas away from each other.

Anyway that’s it for Shinjuku. Tune in next time for many other districts of Tokyo including Shibuya, Harajuku, Akihabara, Ginza, and Asakusa.

P.S. I’m really not liking flickr that much for pictures, because I don’t think it’s doing a very good job as far as quality. I tried Zoto on this one. Any suggestions?

This post is for my mom, becaue of her fondness for hotel pictures. Here is our room, no smoking, two beds, and air conditioned, yesss:

my bed, and its 便利な proximity to the bathroom:

a bit more bathroom, the place of hours of entertainment, or at least hours of looking through toiletries and attempting to wash myself:

me in said bathroom:

oh no! Electrical outlet is different from Amerika! Please, conserve energy:

the obligatory toilet shot:

oh, those japanese toilet buttons, gotta love them:

one last shot:

I promise there will be pictures of things besides Japanese bathrooms later on. But who doesn’t love foreign bathrooms??

I’m in Japan! After one day in Nippon, I look like this (thanks, Japanese humidity):

As soon as I stepped off the plane I felt that wonderful Japanese humidity that I have longed for all year. jk.

So here’s the story: Pack until 3:30 am on Monday night/Tuesday morning. Go to our favorite local airport the next morning (Thanks to those of you who were there to send me off, it was definitely the most dramatic sendoff I have ever received… also the only one, but whatever!) Fly on the plane on Tuesday morning… fast forward about 16 hours or whatever, and end up in Narita. Then we are going through customs and they start questioning my dad, and asking me, “is he with you?”… and then they take us into a room and question us. Who are we and why are we here? Why is he only staying a week and why am I staying a year? Why are we going to Kobe in several days?? And then some questions he asked me in Japanese, like, “Is your dad here just because he’s worrying about you,” which I thought I didn’t understand, since it’s such a weird question, but then he said it in English, and that was it. Or, “does your dad go with you everywhere?” Eventually they gave up and decided we weren’t threats, I suppose, cuz we’re IN.

Then a bus later we are at Shinjuku station, and then eventually we wind up at our hotel, which is in none other than Shinjuku. My grandpa is also here, not because he is worried about me either, but because he was born in Kobe.

Here is my dad and Grandpa at the hotel. Note the escalator on the right, it changes which direction it goes based on the time of day. Last night it was going up (helpful for luggage) and this morning it was going down (helpful for laziness). There are stairs too in case you want to go the opposite direction though, you don’t have to swim against the escalator current.

Shinjuku looks kind of like this (actually exactly like this):

and this (better pictures to come when I haven’t been awake for 24+ hours):

After this, it was Wednesday, 7pm (or Wednesday morning, 5 am at home), so we just went to our hotel room, and I spent like two hours taking a shower and getting ready to sleep due to me not being able to find which toiletries I needed. My dad was/is really sick and kept wanting to sleep so I had to try to do this really quietly. He pretty much made me go to sleep at 9 pm, but I did successfully sleep until 8 am, so at least now I will be on a semi-normal schedule. Hotel pictures in next post.

I finally have this thing set up — nothing of interest to read today of course, but tomorrow I depart for Japan. Ideally this blog will be exciting enough that people other than my immediate family will look at it every so often. Armed with technology, I will broadcast to you from the future (well… time-zone-wise anyway). Yeah yeah it’s not really August 15.

testing testing