On my second day in the Japan Alps National Park I  borrowed a bike from my ryokan and explored Matsumoto a bit.  The main highlight in the city is the castle.  It is ranked as one of the top 4 castles in Japan, and I wasn’t disapointed.  The other castles I’ve seen in Japan (Osaka and Odawara) are new reconstructions.  The inside of those ones looks more like a gift shop or a museum, but Matsumoto’s castle looked very old and well kept.  It was much better than I had been expecting. 

After my trip to the castle, I went for another bus ride into the Alps Park.  I went to Kamikochi, which is probably the most popular spot to go hiking in the park.  There were a lot of people for a weekday, but the scenary was very beautiful.  It actually made reminded me a bit of Minnesota with all of the pine trees.  The hike trail followed along side the river/stream and made for a very picturesque walk. 

After Kamikochi, I decided to go to an onsen and relax for the evening.  I went to a place recommended in my Lonely Planet and it turned out to be my favorite place in Japan (so far, anyways).  The hotsprings part was mainly outside and there were at least 12 different baths on the woman’s side.  Each bath was a different temperature and had lots of minerals and things in the natural spring water.  The setting was perfect!  Everywhere you looked you saw the beautiful mountains surrounding you and all of the fall colors.  After soaking in the hot springs, I had a chance to relax in the main building.  They had a great room where you could eat icecream, drink tea, sleep, or get a shiatsu massage.  Unfortunately the massuese was busy when I was there, so I had to settle for a reflexology machine.  But it was still nice.

My final vacation day was mainly spent on the bus.  I checked out of the ryokan at about 7:00 am and caught a bus to Takayama.  I wandered around Takayama and went to the morning market, looked in the cute traditional style shops, and had some great soba.  Then it was time to take a bus back to Matsumoto, and then another bus back to Tokyo.  (Followed by a train ride back to my apartment in Tsujido.) 

It was a busy vacation, but I really enjoyed it.  It was nice to get out of the city and a bit of the tourist trail.  I saw a lot of Japanese tourists, but maybe only saw 5 foreigners the whole time I was in the Alps.

A few weeks ago, I had a 5 day weekend and took a trip out to the Japan Alps National Park.  I took a bus out to Matsumoto and stayed at a great little ryokan there.  (A ryokan is a traditional style guesthouse with tatami floors, futons, and onsens.)  The couple running the ryokan were so sweet and took such good care of me.  Lending me a bike for the day, giving me maps, finding cheap tickets for sightseeing things, even lending me there dvd player and movies.  My room was really cool.  It had tatami floors, a comfy futon, and a traditional tea set.  They also give you a yukata to lounge around in, which is basically like an informal kimono. 

I bought a 3 day unlimited ticket for the bus, so I could explore as much of the national park as I wanted.  The first day I went to Shinhotaka to go on the cable car ride to the top of the mountain.  The bus ride out there was amazing!  I lucked out and made it to the park at the height of fall color season, so it was breathtaking.  I didn’t realize how popular the cable car would be, but I ended up waiting about an hour to ride up the first leg of the trip.  (It stopped in the middle of the mountain and I had to wait another 70 minutes to take the second car up to the top and the viewpoint!!)  But I befriended these nice Japaneseladies who were waiting behind me in line.  They only spoke a little bit of English, and I only remember a few words of Japanese, but a lot of smiling and laughing made us friends for the day.  The view from the top was worth all of the waiting! 

After the cable car, my new Japanese friends invited me to their hotel to go to the onsen.  It turned out that they were staying in one of the poshest hotels in the park and the onsen was unbelivable!  It was a totally natural setting with the spring water pooling up inbetween big boulders, and a river running by on one side.  We even saw a monkey walk by!

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. 

I’ve been in Japan for 1 week now, and am still really enjoying it.  I’m pretty situated in my apartment and am still loving the fact that my apartment is so close to the beach.  So far I’ve gone for a walk down to the beach everyday.  Ushually I don’t swim or anything, but it’s just nice to walk along the boardwalk. 

I’ve been to Tokyo twice, but it was for Westgate training both times, so I didn’t really see much of the city. On Saturday after our training, I went out for sushi with one of the girls who lives in my apartment building.  I tried sashimi (raw fish) for the first time ever.  I was a little worried that I would hate it, but in the end I didn’t　really hate it or love it.  I tried a little sample plate with different kinds of fish rolled up in rice with seaweed around the outside.  The tuna and salmon were fine, but the eel was definetly not for me.  (Way too chewy!  Yuck!)  I really enjoyed the shrimp and egg sushis, but those don’t seem very adventureous since they are cooked. 

The next night, after training, I went out with about 10 of my fellow teachers.  We went for dinner and a few drinks in Shinjuku, which is a really lively part of town and is very close to Harijuku.  Dinner was pretty good, but there was a time limit for our table. We were chatting too much so the waiter basically had to kick us out after we exceeded our 2 hour time limit.  We did see a few of the “harijuku” kids around.  They were dressed up really funky and ushually a whole group would have a theme or at least be color coordinating.  It was pretty interesting!

Today, was my first day of work.  It seems really bizarre that I am basically a professor at Nihon University for Biosciences.  (That sounds like way too professional a title for me!)  My school is 4 train stops from my apartment, so it takes about 30 minutes to get there.  The campus is pretty nice, but I haven’t really checked it out much besides our building and the cafeteria and the dollar store.  my students seem pretty good so far.  I am teaching the 3rd level of beginners, and the goal is to have them talking for 30 minutes out of a 40 minute class period.  Some of them are really outgoing, but I had a few challenging classes with really shy students.  My teaching hours are 9:50am to 6:40pm with some breaks thrown in.  So it is a much longer working day than I’m normally used to, but hopefully I’ll adjust soon.

Tonight some of my coworkers and I are going to go to a Japanese language lesson at the City Hall.  They have them for free every Wednesday evening, so I’m really looking forward to brushing up on my Japanese!

Leaving Thailand turned into a huge ordeal.  I was supposed to have a simple 5 1/2 hour flight leaving at 12:00 (midnight).  When I arrived they told me that my flight had been delayed until 6:30 in the morning, so they were going to bring us all to a hotel.  I got checked into the room at about 11:45pm, and then they told me wakeup call was going to be at 2:30am.  What was the point of even going to the hotel?!  When I woke up at 2:30am and went down to the front desk, they told me that the flight was going to be delayed at least another 2 hours.  I got really annoyed at this and was determined to get put on a different flight.  Me and the front desk staff called about 20 different people, and I finally got a hold of someone who could help me.  He put me down on the waiting list for a United flight.  It turned out that only 2 of us were switched to the earlier flight, so I was really happy that I had made a fuss about it!

I arrived in Tokyo at 4:00pm.  Everything went super smoothly.  Westgate (the company I’m working for) is really efficent.  They had tons of people at the airport waiting to help us, take our luggage, give us cellphones and train tickets.  Then there was a whole other group of people waiting at different train stations around to assist us and make sure we made all of our trains.  I am living near Yokohama in Kanagawa prefenture.  It’s about a 1 hour train ride from the central Tokyo train station.  And the best part of my apartment location is that I’m a 15 minute walk from the beach!  It’s still in the 80’s here, so I’m planning on going to the beach this weekend.  (I went for a little walk there today, and saw that there were tons of cute surfer boys in the water, so I might have to look into getting surfing lessons or something!)

Next I’ll tell you a bit about my apartment.  It’s really awesome!  It’s brand new and totally high tech- very Japanese.  I have all of the fun gadgets: a tv that has the Internet on it, a video camera so I can see the people at my front door, and a toilet with the water squirting thing.  My “bedroom” is my favorite part.  It’s basically a tiny little hide away.  It’s on the “second” floor and has a steep ladder (like a treehouse) to get up there.  The ceiling is only about 3 feet high in my sleeping space and I have a nice futon mattress to sleep on up there.  It’s so cool!  I love it!  I also have all of the normal kitchen stuff, fridge, microwave, and stove top.  (I can’t wait to show it off, when Mom and Dad come to visit.)

There are 7 other people living in my apartment building and most of them are working at my school, so it’s nice that I have people to hang out with.  Most of them are older, but they all seem pretty cool.

Well, that’s enough for now.  I’ll write more later about my school etc.  I’ll also take some pictures of my apartment and send those out to people.