Happy St. Nicholas Day (belated)

Upon the feast day of Santa Claus 1.0, I found myself back in Nagoya again, gettin' presents for myself and others. Would have gotten my parents' Christmas box, except the post office tends not to deliver big honkin' boxes when there is no one to which they can hand 'em over. But it got re-delivered tonight, and I gotta say, for spending a week derping through the international post system, those cookies sure aren't too pulverized :D Yay!

While in Sakae, I found the perfect way to illustrate to many hiLOLities of Kurisumasu-toki in Yapan:
Yes, that is the Colonel. Yes, KFC's Colonel. Doesn't your family uphold the cherished Western tradition of the Christmas bucket o' chicken parts? Heathens!
(and incidentally, yes, this IS a digital picture of a picture on my cell phone...I um, left my memory card at the office. Oh technology.)

The other main activities of Christmas are eating big white-frosted cakes with strawberries on them and going on dates. Perhaps dates where you eat big white-frosted cakes with strawberries on them, I dunno. The general atmosphere of Christmas and New Year's is basically the reverse of what it is in the States, except only New Year's Day is a national holiday here.

Luckily, this year the school is giving everybody the three weekdays leading up to January 1 off, no paid leave needed, thus I will be spending the holiday season up in Hokkaido :3 There I will hopefully see such wonders as their free-range moss balls (this is not a lie), only-two-snowballs snowmen, and the Japanese yeti (this may or may not be a lie).

Thanksgiving

...is not celebrated in the J-pan, but Monday was some sort of national holiday, so I went to Nagoya to see a couple people I'd met at the art show. It was pretty much the best day ever, and since I ended up eating tons of food in a cozy home with a lovely family it was almost kinda like Thanksgiving, only lunch was curried potatoes and beef kebabs.

I haven't done much of the giving-thanks thing for some time, so I would just like to say THANKS MOM & DAD ♥

Thank you for the pre-Christmas Christmas gift, he is stupendously shiny and I have named him Lucian :D

Thank you for investing so much time and effort into securing the education and opportunities that have gotten me hop-skipped around the world a couple times over.

And thank you for making sure I made it to 18, as Dad likes to say, while at the same time letting me keep some basic faith in humanity and trust in my own gut reactions, such that when a large Pakistani man stopped by my art show and after some polite small talk about art and culture and the British occupation of India invited me to eat at his house & meet his wife and five children, I did not immediately think "oh my god, potential abductor." That thought came maybe third or fourth, was duly weighed, eventually proved quite wrong, and by the end of the day on Monday I was very saddened that it had sprung up at all. I cannot remember the last time I felt so welcomed and loved by near-strangers.

"Lunch" stretched out to four hours as I was urged to second and third helpings and we talked about many things - our home countries, Japan's education system, Islam and Christianity and religion in general, The Da Vinci Code, and how we all agree that Vegemite is about the grossest "food" ever synthesized by man (sorry Australia). Then Mr. S and his wife presented me with a small patch of beautifully hand-woven carpet from Pakistan, drove me to the subway, insisted on paying for my subway ticket to the main city station, and asked that I call them to let them know I got back to my apartment okay.

exposed in public! O:

By which I mean, please to enjoying my arts exhibition pictures very much yes! ~/o/

First off, lemme just say that all the other exhibitors at the Nagoya Foreign Artists Exhibition are amazazing artists and superfantastic peoples. There is a core circle of folks who've been showing their stuff there since the first one 24 years ago - I heard a couple veterans marveling at the fact that this was the first year they had a few participants who were younger than the event itself (that would include me <.< but only by a few months!)

On opening day (Tuesday) it was a bit slow in the morning, but a big rush hit around lunchtime and a few of my friends showed up in the afternoon (it was a public holiday, so everyone was off work) Here are a couple Japanese ladies enjoying the artstuffs. Check out that wicked pencil portrait of Billie Joe Armstrong! And the pretty birds as well c: And the dood in back there is a German photo-journalist living in Nagoya who just started a new English-language magazine with his friend. How awesome is this show?! The answer is purty awsum, guys.
And of course, here is my stoof.

A bunch of people had name-cards next to their artist profile, so I decided even though I don't have a website or anything yet I may as well make my own. Y'know, for poops 'n' giggles. There were 14 left when I departed on Tuesday night, so we'll see how many are remaining on Sunday.
And finally, proof that I was indeed there. A lovely volunteer coordinator by the name of Jan kindly took some pictures for me, as well as chattin' with me during the lulls and gently funneling people past my panel (n___n)

i do things sometimes

One week until my first evar for-srs-you-gaiz art exhibit aaaaaaaaahhhhhh @.@

Should I wear the necktie-skirt what I made? I am thinking yes. OH HEY here it is.

It only took me....I don't even know how long, between collecting just the right vintage / novelty / amazing ties and I was a little lazy with piecing it together. Nevertheless, I have a skirt made of ties now c: huzzah

The other thing I am doing is kind of a zen-thing, in that I am doing by not doing. The thing I'm not doing is spending lots of monies, because the thing I'm trying to do is save a bunch of monies for a service trip in March. When the cost estimate came, I kind of stopped breathing for a minute, but it is still totally doable since I got half a year's notice. (Good gods, when did "half a year" become such a small and trifling thing? That ain't right.)

I've stashed away (i.e. left in my bank account in Japants) a good 72,000 yens thus far, and if I keep aiming for 40,000 yens per month --- that's in addition to my monthly minimum savings goal so that I can have a life after I leave here --- it should cover the service trip with a little bit left over. Which would mean I could stay a little longer to travel around after the official build-a-house, hug-a-kid business is done.

This is definitely doable, I have saved 180,000 yens in a single month before. Maybe not during the winter, because heating bills add up, but if I limit my splurges at foreign food stores, take short showers (HA. No really.), stop the snackyfoods from adding up, and don't buy that emerald green PSP I have been wanting so badly, I should be able to pull it off and probably drop a few pounds in the process. Since I won't be munching on fancy Swiss chocolates or making Betty Crocker fudge brownies anymore. And exercising to keep warm in my drafty apartment.

There is no way I am skimping on the whole foods, though, because I have tried that once before and it just isn't worth the paltry amount of cash I save to feed myself ramen and insta-dinners until I am literally sick from the lack of proper nutrition. Also I just like cooking too much. Japan is no different from other "developed" nations, where the stuff that is worst for you is the cheapest stuff on the grocery store shelves, but there are ways to save money AND eat healthily here as well, if you only pay attention to restocking schedules and keep an eye on the reject-vegetable-bins (I LOVE those ♥ absolutely nothing wrong with most of them other than they are not pretty enough to warrant full price)

Teeveeeeeeeee \o\

MY TV WORKS AGAIN. A week after Typhoon Melor plowed through the country's power grid like Godzilla without his morning coffee, I can watch my local stations static-free and see the Friday night Engrish movies again!

Obviously this is the post-storm recovery item of chief importance in my town. Which is kind of remarkable, considering that THIS is the view of typhoon #18 as it made landfall directly above my peninsula:
See that faint white outline underneath all the angry sky? That is Japan. See the wee-tiny dot in the middle of the red-zone? That's me hiding out in my front entrance because it's the only spot without the potential for susploding glass flying everywhere. Fun times and great sound effects.

Actually there was a point of damage that matters a lot more to me than the little picture box I use maybe 4 hours a week at most - the shortcut from behind my apartment building to school that winds through a little forested hillside.This is what it used to look like ( ; _ ; )

The before and after shots here don't even begin to convey the swath of destruction back there. It's very sad that I no longer have a plan-B for when I sleep in past 7:30 or forget a bunch of stuff and don't make it out the door until 8:15, but I'm thankful it all went down into the ravine and not onto any of the houses surrounding this hill on three sides. Who knows, with pretty much no property damage, maybe the city or whoever oversees the land back there will get somebody to clear off the old road. It'd be a shame if whoever gets my job next year won't be able to enjoy the sights and smells of the woods and 10 minutes shaved off their walk to work.

Typhoooooooon /o/

Despite the season's 18th typhoon having been downgraded from a Category 1 (of the sort that blew directly through my city last year) to a Tropical Storm, it looks like it's gonna pack quite a punch.

This "storm" has a diameter well over half the length of the Japanese archipelago. It is literally covering a good 60 - 70% of the islands right now.

From the warnings scrolling across the top of my wee-tiny TV screen, I have gathered that my prefecture will have the special privilege of receiving 60 cm of rain (that's a good two feet, Americans). The second-highest number I saw throughout the entirety of the warnings was 20 cm, so we are clearly #1. Go us! On top of that, our coastline (and technically I am in a coastal town, even though I am surrounded on all sides by mountains; there is an ocean inlet that runs almost up to the train tracks a mere mile or so from my apartment) can expect 9-meter waves.

Last year my biggest concern was wind blowing out my big glass patio sliding doors. This year the hubbub around here is obviously the water levels, but given that I'm on the second floor I'm not TOO too worried. Talk about the office has it that we're definitely-maybe showing up for work tomorrow (please see Japanese Work Ethic), the only question is whether or not the students get sent home early.

the good with the bad

Soooo the September rain that had been strangely absent all month came today, and it was misery-season again. I was, in fact, all set for today to be the worst day of the term, more because I would very much like to believe that there won't be any more really bad days than because of how it actually turned out. In the morning I skipped breakfast because my stomach was giving me trouble, then promptly got hunger pangs during my first- and second-period classes. Was all set to collapse by the end of first-year communication. Because of the heat, though, I didn't get any trouble from students today, just sleepy-moans :T

Throughout the rest of the day I was constantly replaying a song on my iPod, convinced that I would have to know the lyrics by heart at 3 pm. See, yesterday a couple students came into the office and wanted to know if one of us ALTs could sing a couple English songs with their band for the bunkasai (school culture festival). The festival starts Friday, so that means whoever volunteered would have 3 days to learn it and practice with the students. They ambushed AJ first, but he's doing a lot of music stuff with our jazz-man vice principal already, so I offered to fill in on one song. It's by a band called Ellegarden ( "L-garden" ) that essentially is the Japanese incarnation of Blink 182.

Practice after school meant I would have no time to nap and recuperate from my daylong stomach problems before my 2-hour eikaiwa class at the community center tonight. But I'd wanted to get in on some bunkasai action like I did last year, and as I'd thought it was too late already this actually was a nice surprise. As it turned out, the students weren't practicing with their band today anyway; we're meeting tomorrow after classes end. No 13-hour gauntlet for me, hooray! I took the shortcut down the hill and through the forest back to my apartment and promptly passed out on the floor until it was time to warm up some soup for dinner.

The last eikaiwa class I did wasn't so successful - in fact I would say my recent dental work at a Japanese clinic was less painful - so I wasn't expecting a great turnout. 7:30 came and sure enough the only two people who showed up besides the organizer dude were two of the older men. One guy is a retired English teacher and pretty chill, but the other is a Grouchy McNaggypants who has been dogging both my and AJ's classes with complaints and ill humor for the past couple months, pretty much expecting us to make him fluent in English in 2 hours ever two weeks with no preparation or active effort on his part.

Great, I thought, well I guess I'm being punished for all my past slacking-off on lessons. But over the next 10 minutes three of my favorite adult students filtered in, and I had prepared an easy but fun lesson this time, which they all took to surprisingly well. In no time the mood in the room turned from awkward as Tom Cruise speaking at a pathologists' convention to relaxed and groovy. Afterwards the woman who has sorta become my Japanese grandma drove me back and gave me some homemade lemon cake. Luckily I'd baked cookies over the weekend, which meant I could give her some okaeshi straight away :3

All in all, despite waking up wishing I could just spend all day in bed, the day has taken a nice upswing. And it's the longest, hottest day the week will throw at me, so whatever other setbacks and speed bumps pop up, it's still a gentle downhill run to the weekend.