I’ve been pretty busy, so my blog is about 3 weeks behind.  (Sorry!)  The weekdays are pretty consumed by a walk at the beach in the morning and then I’m at work from 9am until 6:40pm (a big shock for me after not having a “real” job in about 2 years).  My students are great so work is pretty fun!

 I’ve been keeping myself busy on the weekends.  I want to see and do as much as possible with my 3 months in Japan!  So a few weeks ago I went to a sumo match in Yokohama.  Sumo season finished in the middle of September, but this was a special performance to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Yokohama port.  There were 118 wrestlers, and it was amazing to watch.  I had thought that it would be really boring, but it was acutally really fun.  I got there when the doors opened at 8:00am, but it turned out that the real matches didn’t start until about 1:00.  So I was able to watch some scrimmages and warm ups, then they had a bunch of 9 year old boys out in the ring trying to wrestle the sumo guys.  It was pretty funny to watch.  There is a lot of tradition and rituals that go with the sumo match.  Like throwing the salt around the ring to purifiy it and all of the leg raising/slapping stuff.  I really enjoyed the day and would definetly do it again.

That same weekend I went out to Shizen Onsen to see more of the country side and relax in one of the hot springs (onsens).  It took about 2 hours to get out there by train, but the ride was one of my favorite parts.  The tracks follow the sea, so you were able to see quaint little seaside towns, mountains, and of course the sea.  At one part of the journey the tracks go through rice fields and small farming villages.  It was such a huge contrast from Tokyo, I loved it!  I got to the village famous for its onsens, but couldn’t find a single onsen to relax in.  So I ended up going to a fancy hotel and paying about $15 to use there onsen.  It turned out to be great!  I was the only person there, so I had the 4 pools and sauna to myself.  (The best pool was outside on a balcony overlooking the mountains.  How cool!) 

Last weekend, I pretty much just chilled out and went to my Japanese language lesson on Saturday.  (I’ve been going to Japanese classes at community centers on Wednesday night and Saturday morning, since I arrived in Japan.)  Then on Sunday I went back to Yokohama to go to an Indian New Year Festival.  The festival was a lot smaller than I had expected, but I got to have some great curry and naan, so I was happy.  Then I went on a short little boat tour around Yokohama Bay.

This past weekend, we had a little festival at my Japanese class on Saturday.  So I had to give a speak in Japanese.  Luckily my students helped me write and prepare it, so I had nothing to worry about.  The people working at the community center are so sweet and friendly!  Then yesterday I went to Tokyo again.  This time I went with my neighbor and his girlfriend to Harajuku (famous for the Harajuku girls and their fashion style), Yoyogi park, Meji Shrine, and Shibuya.  Harajuku girls (and boys) dress up in pretty crazy costumes/clothes with wild hair and makeup.  It was cool to see, but I sort of felt bad for the kids, since tourists were crowding around them like they were animals at a zoo or somthing.  Meji Shrine was intersting and very beautiful.  The best part was all of the little girls dressed up in their fancy kimonos!  (Soon it will be 7-5-3 holiday.  It’s a holiday where 3 and 7 year old girls and 5 year old boys dress up in fancy kimono and get blessed at the shrines.)  We also saw a traditional wedding procession which was really beautiful. 

Then we went to a different part of Yoyogi Park which is full of street preformers on Sunday afternoons.  It was a gorgeous sunny day, so the park was packed with people.  We saw a bunch of rock bands, some traditional taiko drumming, and some pretty crazy stuff like people dancing around to a drum beat painting all over themselves.  All over the park people were just chilling out, having picnics, and people watching.  Every cool!  I definetly need to go back there.  After that, we went to Shibuya to see the Lost in Translation street crossing.  It is a crazy intersection where the cars have to stop at the street light from all four directions and the road fills up with a solid mass of people.  It looks like a concert just finished or something, but this happens basically every minute of the day!  (We had to sit in Starbucks and watch, it’s basically a required thing to do for all tourists in Tokyo, so the place was packed!)

That is pretty much how my last 3 weeks in Japan have been going.  I have a 5 day weekend this week, so I’m going to head out to the Japan Alps National Park, and hopefully see some of the fall colors.

I’ve been in Japan for about 2 weeks now.  Work is going really well!  All of my students really want to speak English,　so doing conversation classes are great.  (It’s definetly a change from teaching moody junior high school kids, who hardly ever spoke!)  The students don’t have assigned class times, so they just show up for any lesson of mine through out the day.  Which means that I have to teach the same lesson all day long.  It sounds boring, but it works out really good, because then you only have to prepare for 1 class instead of 6 or 7. 

We have a really cushy schedule this week.  I had Thursday off for a random school holiday (school foundation day, I think).  I also have Monday off for a National Holiday.  My first weekend in Japan was really rainy and miserable, so I didn’t do much.  That made me determined to use my school holiday to the fullest.  I started Thursday off by waking up at 4:20am in order to catch the first train into Tokyo, at 5:00am.  After a little bit of trouble figuring out the Tokyo subway system (which has 13+ lines!!) I made it to Tsukiji for the morning fish market.  It was a bustling busy market place, with guys running around pushing huge wooden carts full of fish and all other kinds of seafood.  I wandered around the market for a while looking at all of the weird and wonderful things there.  It’s easy to see how the oceans are being over-fished while looking at daily fish market.  There was so much fish there!

After the Tsukiji market, I went for a breakfast of champions- sushi, of course.  I have only ate raw fish 1 time before, and I still wasn’t sure if I liked it or not.  So I figured I should try the best/freshest sushi in Tokyo before deciding if I liked sushi or not.  There are a bunch of cute little restaraunts next to the market, so I went there and had one of the sushi sets.  It was basically 7 kinds of raw fish on top of little balls of rice, with wasabi (spicy horseradish stuff), 6 of the handrolls (sashimi and rice wrapped inside seaweed), a bowl of oyster soup, and green tea. 

I really enjoyed the first few pieces of sushi.  They had a really light flavor, and doesn’t really taste like fish at all.  (I think they were tuna and some kind of white fish.)  Then the next two pieces were ok.  After eating all of the handrolls (my favorite) and all of the normal looking pieces of fish, I was sort of dreading eating the rest.  But it was pretty expensive so I felt like I should eat the rest.  I had one piece of sashimi that looked like it still had the scales/skin on it.  That was the piece that pushed me over the edge and made me decide that I’m not really a fan of sushi.  While trying to chew and swallow the massive chunk of raw fish, I kept thinking that I was on Fear Factor or something.  I was really close to spitting it out, but that would have been way too impolite!  I think the main problem with sushi is that you can’t just try a little bite of it.  You have to put the whole huge chunk of it in your mouth, before you see if you like it or not.   I had to leave the last piece of sushi, because it was just too scary looking.  It was a white and gray blob and looked like a cross between jellyfish/squid/and some mystery thing.

Anyways after my sushi breakfast, I went for a walk around Ginza (the Rodeo Drive of Tokyo) and then the Imperial Palace Gardens.  It was still really early in the morning, so nothing much was going on.  I then went to Ueno Park and visited 3 museums there.  My favorite was Shitmatchi, which is a tiny little place with hands on displays.  They have lifesize modles of Japanese houses from the 1920’s and 30’s on the bottom floor.  Then the top floor is mainly black and white photos of Tokyo in the 20’s and 30’s.  It was amazing to see how much change has happened.  In the photos most of the people were wearing the wooden sandals and the women were wearing kimono for there daily life.  Plus there was a really sweet old man who worked at the museum and showed me around. 

After the museums, I wandered around the arcade/shopping area in Ueno and then had lunch at an India restaraunt (after my sushi breakfast, I deserved it!).  And then went back to Ginza to check out the Sony building, which shows all of there latest products before they come out on the market.  They were featuring a crazy little speaker system, that was part dancing robot, part audio speakers for your computer.  I was a bit disappointed that they have done away with their virtual reality- game place that was written up in the Lonely Planet.  Then I found the train station that would take me back home.  It was one busy, fun day!

This weekend I’m hoping to go out the the countryside a bit and maybe see some shrines, or Mt Fuji or something.