梅林公園うめまつり

Gifu, as quiet as it is, has some unique aspects and places.  One of those is a park featuring exclusively plum trees – 130 different varieties of them, in fact.  Plum blossoms in Japan are associated with the end of the school year and graduation, because they tend to bloom in March, which is the end of the Japanese school year.  (Cherry blossoms, on the other hand, are associated with new beginnings, and typically bloom around the time the Japanese school year begins – early April.) 

Cultural notes aside, the city holds a festival at this park the first weekend in March.  This happens to coincide with my partner’s birthday, and with as much as she loves seasonal things and plants, there was no question about it.  We were going.

The blossoms were stunning, and I got thoroughly drooled on by a Burmese Mountain Dog. 

More pictures here!  Written-out.

久しぶり – or, I venture out (February 26-27)

Dear readers,

By the combined power of my friends, family, and degree from my Supreme Dictator, I have been hauled out of my laziness seclusion.  Until last weekend, very little out of the ordinary had been going on.  Last weekend, though, the weather turned nice – and Lauren and I ventured out. 

Last Saturday, we climbed a mountain.  And I mean legit climbed, none of that ropeway stuff.   (…in the interest of full disclosure, the ropeway was closed.)  The mountain was Kinka-san, Gifu’s main mountain and the home of Gifu Castle (unspectacular, but fun).  I can see it from my house easily, but had never ventured closer than the occasional pass-by on the bus.  Lauren hauled me out of the apartment, and we explored Gifu Park, which is located at the foot of the mountain, munched on dango, and petted the local stray cats.  I wheedled Lauren into going into the Insect Museum, but beetle-induced nausea quickly chased us both out.  Bug museums – fun in theory, bad after lunch. 

(In “It’s-a-small-world-after-all” news, I was hunting down a pharmacy in search of ibuprofen while Lauren chilled at the park, and ended up buying it from a nice lady pharmacist who had lived in Beaverton, Oregon, of all places.)

After the motrin kicked in, we headed up the mountain, via the “Meditation Trail,” rated easy.  Easy on what scale, GOD ONLY KNOWS.

It was an hour of scrambling up almost-vertical jagged rock-faces without the benefit of rails.  Lauren sustained a few shin bruises and I almost followed some rocks down the mountainside at one point, but we eventually triumphed, and celebrated with green tea-flavored ice cream.  The squirrel village(!) at the summit was closed, unfortunately, so we didn’t get to feed them, but next time!  Gifu Castle, again, was unspectacular, but our 200yen admission netted us the MOST RIDICULOUS Oda Nobunaga keychain I’ve ever seen.  He was bright green, with a face consisting SOLELY of two bright red eyebrows and a small triangle beard.  One of my third years lost it laughing when she spotted it in the middle of class.

Anyway.  The next day, we biked from my house to the main Gifu train station, which we’d been afraid to do before.  It’s only(?) a 6k haul, but given Gifu’s hilliness, we weren’t really eager to try.  It turned out to be much more doable than we thought, though, and discovered a quirky “natural cafe” on the way, with a massive white turtle who lived on the front porch and decor that reminded us of The Tao of Tea in Portland.  Lauren dropped a knitted glove somewhere along Gifu’s main drag and was most distraught, so we frantically retraced our steps only to find that some nice person had left it on a utility post along the sidewalk – back where we started.  Yay Japan! 

In the hopes you’ll all bear with me a little longer…

I offer letters.  Letters from very earnest, hardworking middle school third-year students (American freshmen) to their resultingly occasionally befuddled but always touched sensei.  (of course it's absolutely not the case that I have chosen letters from my favorite students to show you.  Nope.  >.>)

Detail:
Jazz is this student’s tiny, adorable, much-beloved silky terrier.
  A confirmation of building construction?  My students are inventive with dictionaries. 
Screech and Porter are extremely popular.  I’m not sure what a “konb” is.
  Mostly unrelated to this letter, but Harry Potter is SUPER POPULAR.  The latest craze among my second-years involves them running up to me and yelling “HARI POTA!” to which I have to reply with “avada kedavra!” or other spell of my choice.  The spells are a bit… difficult for them to say, so my pronunciation is SO INTERESTING.  Apparently. 
Examinations are a huge deal for third-years.  Japan has an extremely competitive entrance examination system for high school and college, so students attend juku (cram school) from usually middle school on. 
Can’t argue with that logic.  (Kingyou=goldfish.)

Moar (okay, a few) pictures on Flickr. U can has pictures.

And I will blog this weekend if Lauren has to tape the keyboard to my hands to make me do it. 

Note To Myself

…please, please, for the love of god, if you ever get the bright idea to have an entire grade of Japanese middle-schoolers to write letters to you again?  Don’t let the teacher ask for next-day turnaround time.  120 letters is a bit much, and while they’re individually very earnest and I can see how hard they’ve worked on them, answering variations on “What kind of sport/music do you like? I like X sport/music.  It is very interesting” one hundred and twenty times is mind-numbing.  Under the best of circumstances.   

11:24PM and fifty letters to go. 

(11:48 edit – DUDE, one of my students is an SKE48 trainee.  Damn.)

My Apartment

Or as Lauren affectionately calls hers, my shoebox.  If hers is a shoebox, though, mine is toddler-sized, or maybe one of those little boxes you get jewelry in. Don’t get me wrong, I like it – it’s functional and easy to keep clean, if rather unattractive, and there’s a nifty loft that will be very nice to sleep in once summer ends and the darn heat stops rising.  You’d be surprised how quickly you get used to preparing dinner in your living room on a table the comes up to the middle of your shins because the only space in the kitchen that is not burner or sink is the top of the microwave. 

…my kitchen is a little small.  But we’ve made peace.  I agreed not to badmouth it to the other, bigger kitchens, and it agreed not to toss my dishes off their precarious drying stack or hide things behind the refrigerator. 

It took me three days to get up the courage to go near the washing machine, and at the rate I was sweating through clothes the first week, it was no small pile forcing me to do so.  Japanese washing machines are mysteries of nature, lacking water temperature gauges and easily identifiable start-stop buttons, but possessing a plethora of kanji-labelled buttons and no apparent place to put detergent.  Two hours, many google searches, and a bit of screwed-up courage later, I had clean, wet clothes.  Clean, wet clothes.  And nowhere to dry them. 

Japanese houses, almost universally, lack one thing Americans find essential – dryers.  The attitude is very much “we have these wonderful things called time and a clothesline that together dry our clothes for us - why should we spend money and space on a machine to do it for us?”  So my apartment after laundry day looks like a transplanted Minnesotan’s autumn wardrobe fashion show – which is to say, a lot of long sleeves.  (Bad call on my part).  With the addition of an outside clothesline, however, life has gotten easier. 

And then… I got a bookshelf!  And a rice cooker.  Apartment complete.  Pictures later, after I’ve cleaned.  >.>

Today, Or How I Ended Up Getting The School A Second Pool

…not really.  But I did drag in so much water this morning it looked like I had.

It’s been a while, hasn’t it – sorry!  Everything has been either crazily busy or a precious bit of downtime I’ve taken full advantage of.  Today marks almost the end of my second week of school, though, and life is becoming a routine instead of a series of minor panics.  This post is going to be devoted to today’s crazy, and if my motivation doesn’t run off on me, next will be updates on my school, apartment, and general life.  がんばろう！

So…today’s crazy.

The weather in Gifu, when I got here, was in the upper 90s with nigh on 60% humidity – not exactly the most welcoming climate, and we quickly learned the reason for the shelves and shelves of cute waterbottles in Japanese department stores.  The temperature, after a baking two weeks or so, has dropped into the mid/low 80s- and the rain has made it’s way over the mountains and is now desperately trying to make up for those two weeks of baking hell.  There was a typhoon last week; this week, the forecast called for only a minor thunderstorm, and it wasn’t supposed to really start until 9AM today, at which time I would be safely at work.

Forecast fail.

Three minutes into my twenty-minute ride around mountains and over bridges to my little inaka school, the heavens OPEN, and me in my Japanese-sized kappa (plastic rain poncho) which doesn’t cover my legs, feet, or head fully.  Despite pedaling as fast as I could, by the time I got to school my shoes were full of water, I was soaked clear through to the skin, and the Japanese weather gods had been cursed every which way from Friday.  The clothes I’d brought tucked inside two plastic bags were damp, but wearable, and luckily my pants were long enough to cover up the fact that I went barefoot - because wringing out my socks would easily have filled a good-sized water glass.   

The staff and students have made a sort of guessing game, trying to figure out what method I took to school that day – I’m usually greeted with either 「自転車？」 “Bicycle?” or 「バスで？」 “By bus?” depending on the weather.  The day of the aforementioned typhoon, I took the bus. 

As I in came the door, dripping and fuming, a student coming in at the same time caught my eye and asked “チャリ？” (Bicycle today?)  I answered affirmatively, and his only response was a rather matter-of-fact “Poor thing.” （かわいそう） The response from the teachers’ room was much the same – a few gasps when I shuffled in through the door, dripping from every hair and hem, and quietly, from the back of the room, a tentative “So, by bicycle then…?”

Yes, sensei.  Right in one.