College and Revenge in Kyoto

My host sister Noriko goes to college in Kyoto. This is a whopping 2.5 hour each way commute from home, so she spents 5 hours a school day going to/from class. Some days, like last Friday, she only has a single, 1.5 hour lecture.

Makes me feel pretty guilty for sometimes skipping class when it’s a 5 minute walk away from my apartment.

Luckily, she’ll move to Kyoto in the spring so all this commuting can stop and she doesn’t have to leave parties at 8 pm in order to make the last train home.

Anyway, I got to go with her to school on Friday, and since she only had one class, I would sit in on it, eat lunch with her and her friends, and then spend the day with Noriko in Kyoto. Woo!

We left the house around 8 am. Bus to the train station, a long train ride involving one changing-of-trains (so you can’t sleep the whole way), and an easy walk up a hill at the very end. We made it to class with 10 minutes to spare and I met Noriko’s friend Aya, who was in the same class, some Greek/Roman Mythology lecture. Eventually class started and I recognized a lot of katakana-ized names like Romulus & Remus and Agamemnon. But I didn’t really have the patience or interest in the subject matter to pay attention, so instead I looked around the room, and wrote notes on what blog posts I needed to write still (I kid you not!)

I noticed that this lecture was about 95% girls — exactly the opposite demographic of CS classes I am used to (woo humanities!)

I also spent a lot of the class period being tired and wishing that the hot cafe-au-lait-in-a-can I had bought from the vending machine 10 minutes earlier was much bigger. Sleep deprivation + already being exhausted from the journey to school left me sleepy. And really really thankful for my utter lack of commute to school.

At last the class ended, and Noriko, Aya and I met up with their other friends in the cafeteria/store where everyone bought random lunch items like instant cup noodle soup or an-pan, etc. I bought some soup and also ate this satsuma-imo (sweet potato) Noriko’s mom had given me that morning. I do love imo, but I felt a little overly rustic eating a whole potato in the middle of this very rural school on the outskirts of Kyoto.

Once we had bought our items, we went to this other building that had a sort of stadium seating area with no tables, and an upstairs, where Noriko’s friends were all sitting on the floor. I’m not sure what the intended purpose of the room was, because it wasn’t quite an auditorium, but it didn’t seem like it was to be used for eating either.

This is where i discovered that Noriko’s friends are awesome. I was actually able to follow most of the 1000-miles-a-minute-dirty-talking-Kansai-ben conversations (hooray!) Of course, dudes acting stupid yet hilarious really needs no translation anyway.

Acchan and Chi-kun showing off their socks

Acchan 近い！！

Aya and Acchan

manlove

Nao-chan & more friends

Afterwards, Noriko and I left for Kyoto shopping! On the way we looked through a guidebook to figure out what temple/famous traditional Kyoto thing we wanted to go see. I decided on Byoudouin, which is apparently the place on the back of the 10-yen coin, and also a place I haven’t been yet (kinkakuji: check, Kiyomi: check… needed something new) First we shopped for a few things I needed from Kyoto (a great place to buy tsugegushi, or boxwood combs, in case you were wondering. Also tons of traditional Japanese-looking stuff is sold for decent prices). Then we headed to Uji to see Byoudouin, which took a while because it’s pretty far away from the part of Kyoto we were in.

Scenery leaving school

Big staircase in the inaka

When we arrived, I wanted to have the all-too-necessary matcha parfait (Kyoto is pretty well known for these, and they’re DELICIOUS). We went to one store and they were closing. CLOSING!? It was barely 4:30 pm. Then we looked in the guidebook and found out that Byoudouin also closes at 4:30 pm during the winter. FAIL.

So now we were effectively in the middle of podunk Kyoto with nothing to do and all the parfait places closing. We found one that had JUST closed but conveniently turns into a bar at night, so we begged a bit and they decided to make parfaits for us. HOORAY! We were also the only customers.

Parfait of yumminess

Lotsa pretty sake bottles at the bar

Still feeling rather stupid, we went back to Kyoto station, shopped a bit, bought some pickles and Yatsuhashi (Japanese sweets local to Kyoto), and had some okonomiyaki and takoyaki before starting the 2.5 hour journey home.

Still, note to self: don’t go sightseeing in Kyoto in the winter late in the afternoon. Or better yet, check the hours of the place you are going! I wasn’t too torn up about it because I still had a fun day and got to meet her friends and eat my long-awaited parfait, but Noriko promised me that next time I come visit we’ll go and we’ll do it RIGHT this time. She calls this “Kyoto revenge.”

I am totally looking forward to getting revenge on Kyoto. *shakes fist*

A 27-hour Journey to Japan

I am in JAPAN. Right now. Surprised? So am I, sorta. Mostly because of the timeline of planning this trip:

Plane ticket for Saturday – purchased on Wednesday
Train ticket for Saturday at 6:10 am – purchased on Saturday at 5:30 am

Yeah, ギリギリ (leaving things until the last minute) is how I roll, apparently.

One troublesome thing about traveling to Japan:
Getting here (here being my friend Yuka’s house) took 27 hours, but really, it took the entire weekend, because with the time difference, I left my home at 5:45 am on Saturday morning, and arrived here around midnight on Sunday night. Whew. But with a few hours to the airport, 2 hours of delay while sitting in the plane (waiting for connecting passengers, de-icing the plane, and otherwise chillin’), 12 hours of flying (6+ of which were spent asleep! I won’t be a 時差惚け！) in business class, which is freaking amazing, an hour or so of customs and finding my bag, picking up my rental phone, changing some $$ into 円, and buying an adapter so I can actually charge my laptop here… I decided it was time to find out where I was going.

For my first week in Japan, I’ll be staying with my friend Yuka. I contacted her about a week ago on the off-chance her family would be nice enough to let me stay here, but realized that her email address had changed and the only way I could contact her was via mixi-message (Mixi is sort of the Japanese equivalent of Facebook.) So I’d told her when I was coming, my flights, etc., but we hadn’t quite gotten around to exchanging email addresses and phone numbers. So right before I left America I sent a mixi message asking Yuka for her contact info. I was pretty certain she’d have time to respond before I got there.

So I picked up my rental phone, stood in the station, figuring out how to use the damn thing, found the web browser, logged into mixi, was delighted to see there was in fact a message from Yuka, opened it, realized there’s no way to copy/paste from a website (or at least I couldn’t figure out how to do it), got out a piece of paper, and wrote down phone numbers and email addresses.

I found some appropriate train and shinkansen (bullet train) tickets and headed towards Tokyo, and wrote Yuka an email on the way. Contact stablished!

At Tokyo station I looked around for some food to eat. None of the typical bento looked particularly more appealing than any of the other typical bento, so I was unimpressed. Instead, I found a girl giving out free samples of Earl Grey flavored bagels, which was one of the most amazing tasting things I’ve ever had, and decided I needed more of whatever they were selling. I gazed longingly at various green-tea flavored pastries and settled on this green-tea-white-chocolate muffin. It was one of the most delicious things I have eaten in a long time. Look at that green, moist fluffiness…

After paying, I made a run for it and actually made the bullet train in time, with at least 1 minute to spare (doing great!) I changed trains at Shin-Osaka and started heading toward Yuka’s house.

Or so I thought.

I made a critical mistake, which was that after stop #2 or so, I completely stopped paying attention. This means that when we got to Amagasaki, I should have changed trains. But I just sat there, because, again, I wasn’t really paying attention. I played with my cell phone, I people-watched a group of guys across from me on the train (who were talking about me briefly, and I got to hear the inaugural “gaijin” said about me). Anyway, after a couple more stops I was thinking “this is a strange train station name that I’ve never heard…” and after one more, I was in Itami. ITAMI!??! I know where Itami is, and that’s NOT where I’m going. Okay, time to turn around. I got back to Amagasaki and made sure to take the correct train. Suddenly the station names were extremely familiar and comforting. I emailed Yuka to explain why I was late (whoops). It should not have taken over an hour of riding local trains, but it did.

Finally I made it to Yuka’s. Her dad predicted exactly where I had gone wrong on the train AND at what station I had realized my mistake. Yuka gave me some soup and kurumi-pan and chocolate, and we hung out for a while. Walking into her house was a bit weird, since I came here once, at the very end of my stay in Japan. So it’s been 2.5 years, but actually being in her house, it feels like no time has passed at all…

So I’ve only come to Japan from outside the country twice before this. Once in 2005 (my first visit) and once in 2006 (the beginning of my study-abroad year). Each time I arrived, everything would always seem extremely weird, bizarre, foreign, cute, polite, stylish, small, etc. I was always hit in the face with the pure Japanese-ness of it all in a very jarring, Lost-in-Translation kind of way.

The weird thing with this trip is that everything seems totally normal. Yup, there’s suddenly a lot of Japanese people, stores selling Japanese things that I love, ads featuring celebrities that I fangirl, those train station sounds, riding on one side of the elevator, every professional person in a cute and very ironed-looking uniform, kanji freaking everywhere… I’m still thinking oh-my-god-I’m-in-Japan but I’m not reacting to things in that fresh-gaijin EVERYTHING IS CRAZY HERE kind of way.

Is culture shock like riding a bike?

Or maybe it’s just that this time, instead of everything being weird and overwhelming, it just feels like home.

But in the first almost-24 hours of being here… there have been a number of things that I hadn’t actually forgotten about existing, but I sort of forgot to expect, and were pleasant surprises:

- Heated toilet seats. I am back in “it’s winter so your toilet should be cold” mode from America. What a freaking pleasant surprise the first time I went to the bathroom here.

- Exactly how pleasant Japanese baths are. Yeah I miss ofuro on a daily basis, but after primarily taking showers for most of college, the whole ofuro routine is SO NICE. Especially after traveling for 27 hours, soaking in 42°C water late at night in the winter… so completely wonderful.

- amado (storm shutters) – they’re on the outside of the windows in the room I’m staying in. They just make the room pitch-dark even when it’s midday. I used to actually not like amado when I lived here (one of my host families always closed them) because it threw off my sleep cycle to have it be dark like 4-am in my room at 10 am, but again, after the whole 27-hour journey thing, the ability to sleep soundly until 10 in complete darkness is very appreciated.

For now, I’ll indulge in a little bit of tv before Yuka brings back μ (her singing group) to practice here and I reunite with 5 other people I haven’t seen in 2.5 years. I’m going to their concert tonight, and it should be FAB.

Jya ne.