So. Yeah. I have no excuse. Whatever. HAVE AN(other epic) UPDATE!!!
LAST SATURDAY/SUNDAY: Fuji
The Climb
My last post has most of the passing thoughts that I wanted to capture, so I'm just going to go ahead and do a play-by-play of the actual hike here. Left ICU at about 8:30 Saturday morning and took our awesome giant chartered bus to Fuji which took about three hours, I guess, including the stop at a rest top where I bought lunch (because I was a fool and forgot my onigiriin the fridge when I left that morning). Made it to 5th point where we stopped to eat lunch, visit the shrine, and just hang out until we left to start the actual hike at 1:30 PM. We also broke up into sub-groups to make counting off/making sure everyone was still with the group easier while we were climbing. I spent most of the hike chatting with the various people around me, including the four Japanese folks that accompanied us. We walked pretty steadily until about 4:30 PM when we hit MAJOR human traffic.
Finally got into the hostel-ish thing we were staying at at about 5:30 PM where we got set up in our itty-bitty bunks, had dinner, and slept for about 4 hours. Set out again at about 10:00 and climbed more or less straight through (not counting the inevitable traffic jams) until 12:30 AM where we stopped at the bottom of the 8th point. I had a minor freak-out because I'd been having trouble breathing most of the way up, but James and Patrick got me calmed down and convinced me to keep going. About an hour and a half into that climb though, my body got pretty serious with the protests so I bailed at about 2:30 AM at the next stopping point. The guides got me and the other four girls that decided to quit set up at the hostel for a few hours sleep. The hostel owners woke us up in the morning at 4:30-ish for sunrise, which was ABSOLUTELY gorgeous.
It was raining just a bit which made it hard to convince myself to stay outside, but I stayed out for a good fifteen minutes before the cold drove me back in for another few hours of sleep. The trip leaders came to get us at about 7:00 AM, so I got everybody out of bed and we headed back down the mountain. Walked most of the way down with Katherine (a post-grad spending two years in Japan doing Peace Studies work). It was raining pretty seriously and I was totally soaked by the time we made it down at about 10:30 AM. Wandered over to the bus and we left at about 11:20, after the guides had rounded all (47) of us up.
The Onsen
After they got us all on the bus, we drove a bit away from the 5th point and stopped off at anonsen, or public bath, one of the many great creations of the Japanese. The procedure is as follows:
1) Take a shower much like the one described in one of my first entries; seated, you use the moveable shower head to shampoo and condition your hair, as well as to wash your body.
2) Once you're nice and clean, find a bath of your choice and slip right in alongside and hang out with the other patrons. At least, the ones of your own gender; men and women are generally separated (because you bathe in the nude), although mixed baths are also available at manyonsen.
3) Move around freely from bath to bath (including absolutely STELLAR outdoor baths which were particularly fun in the rain) and enjoy the bath to your heart's content!!
While there, I chatted with a lot of the other folks from the ICU Fuji trip. I also met a sweet, older Japanese woman and talked to her for a while. As mentioned earlier, I somehow wound up telling her that I'd let her show me around Tachikawa in the first week of September. I don't know whether or not that's actually going to happen, but I'll be sure to let you know either way.
The other entertaining portion of the onsen trip was the total freak-out that ensued in the outdoor onsen when a spider took particular interest in me. The first time I was just going to blow it off, but the post-grads I was chatting with freaked out and startled me so much that I wound up slipping underwater so they could get the thing off of me. Most of the onsen just looked really confused. The second time, however, the ENTIRE onsen started shrieking and trying to kill the poor thing. It was kind of hilarious, but totally adorable at the same time.
After that, we headed back to campus where I pretended to work and went to sleep pretty early.
Fuji photos can be found here:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2033841&id=1186934580&l=6bca102f0c
MONDAY/TUESDAY: Zouri
Spent most of Monday and Tuesday afternoon making Zouri, traditional Japanese indoor sandals made by weaving cloth through specially set up rope.
The first thing you do is pick the fabric that you're going to use, as well as set up the rope you're going to be using to make the shoes.
Once you've got the rope all set up (and had the helpers get it started for you because I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to start it... I think it had something to do with wrapping it around the loop part three times and then weaving over the two middle strands together rather than one at a time), you just weave the fabric strips like so:
(Rough) Translation (Because What I'm Actually Saying Doesn't Make a Whole Lot of Sense...):
The way you make this is: over, under, over, under, over, under. Do this a bunch of times, and you've got it!!
As you're weaving, you have to make sure that you keep the strings tight to each other, but the shoe stays wide enough for your foot.
When you need to start a new strand, you start it on the string right before the string you stopped on for the preceding piece of fabric and continue in the same direction with the same strand. (Yeah, that sounded a lot better in my head than it looks on paper. *shrug*)
[I ran out of my blue fabric about halfway down and kind of had my heart set on red at the heel, so I had to go pick a different color; you can see the change below.]
Once you're about two thirds of the way down the shoe,
you set up the thong by sliding what is essentially a styrofoam support through the specially stitched fabric, leaving some fabric on both ends to weave through the rope and attach it to the shoe. You attach this base for the thong, weaving it the same way as above, but being careful to leave the right amount of length of the styrofoam support to attach the thong correctly at the end.
(This is where I quit on Monday.) When we came back on Tuesday, I wove the rest of the way down to the heel,
and then worked on finishing it up. To do this, You have to properly tighten the rope left at the heel by opening the knot at the toe, unraveling the rope and pulling on the ends to tighten the loops at the heel. Once this is done, you cut off the leftover lengths of fabric at the bottom of the shoe. After that, you unravel the rope and cut most the mini-strands from the rope, leaving one of from each of the original parts of the rope. These are used to fasten the toe portion of the thong to the front of the shoe. I didn't exactly understand what we were doing at this point, but it seemed to boil down to using the giant, really cool needle-like thing to wrap the toe piece (the red fabric in my shoe that you can see below; I don't know what it's actually called) around the rope left at the bottom of the shoe,
and the thong, thus connecting the thong to the shoe. Annnnnd you're done!!
Other Zouri photos have been added to the Sho album here:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2032481&id=1186934580&l=20525a5431
TUESDAY 2.0: Mikako
After I finished up with my Zouri I got to see Mikako, a friend of mine from Camp Rising Sun, the camp I went to summer after Freshman year of High School. We had a little trouble finding each other at the station, but once we did we wandered around Shinjuku together. It was kind of TOTALLY a blast. Found this cute little hole-in-the-wall curry place and went out to do purikuraa (the photo booth things I've been ranting about). It was tons of fun!!
WEDNESDAY, THURSDAY: Boring.
Lazy days, consisting mostly of sleeping, pretending to study, and actually studying. Wen out to some hole-in-the-wall soba place with James and Katie one of these nights, although I don't remember which. Also finished up my project translation for recording this weekend. I think something else exciting may have happened, but it clearly wasn't cool enough to remember, so... yeah!!
FRIDAY: Odaiba!!!
I wasn't going to do anything but sleep on Friday, but Charlene mentioned at lunch that she and Sarah were going to Odaiba (One of THE tourist spots in/near Tokyo) which is one of those places that I REALLY wanted to go during the summer time because--drumroll please--THEY HAD A GIANT GUNDAM ON DISPLAY!!!
Anyway, we'll get there when we get there. We hopped on a bus/train/monorail(!) combo to get there, and then proceeded to get lost on our way to the Gundam. That was okay though, because Odaiba's totally cool enough to make up for it. Found our way there eventually and took MAD photos, PLUS a video of it MOVING because it was JUST THAT COOL. Sarah's gonna put it up on Youtube for y'all so I'm just gonna link/imbed it here later.
After that we were gonna head straight for the indoor onsen theme park thingamajig that was apparently our final destination, but it started raining so we stopped and hung out in a department store. Which had a Toys 'R' Us. I knew it was dangerous to go in, but I did anyway. It actually turned out to be an AWESOME idea; I found the coolest stuff for my little nephew back home. (Now I just have to be careful that I don't end up bringing all of Japan back for him. XP)
Anyway, the rain let up a bit pretty quick after that, so we attempted to maneuver our way to the onsen. It took a few wrong turns and directions from a very helpful passing Japanese man, but we made it there. Once there, they gave us yukata to wander around the theme park in and, hypothetically, get dinner etc since we hadn't eaten yet. Instead, we spent approximately an hour and a half in the actual onsen part of the park (which was pretty much the same as the one after Fuji). We also did two rounds of purikuraa and had fun failing at the claw games in the arcade. (Actually, we did pretty well all things considered...) I did also wind up getting some soba coz I was pretty hungry. It was almost 10:30 at this point, which meant we had to head out so we could make it home before the trains stopped running.
As it was, though, it turned out we didn't have to worry too much about getting home on time. What we did have to worry about was the man'in densha. Man'in densha is one of those Japanese words that doesn't translate too well to English. For those of you that don't know, it means, more or less, 'RIDICULOUSLY CROWDED TRAIN' and... well, have a look at my immediately post-man'in densha explanation video and maybe you'll get it:
ALSO, we have additional post-man'in densha footage of Anna and company for those of you lacking a facebook:
ANYWAY, that was Friday. IT WAS AWESOME.
Also, since I didn't get home and settled in until about 2 in the morning which is about 11:00 in the morning in Denver, I got to chat with Charla, which was tons of fun. Coz she's AWESOME.
SATURDAY: Tokyo Sea Life and Ferris Wheel
Charlene and Sarah invited me along for their Saturday adventure as well, which involved going to an aquarium. It was REALLY cool; we spent a good 3+ hours wandering around and taking TONS of videos/photos. I'm going to hold off on uploading them because I don't know what Sarah's going to put up and I (a) don't want to steal her thunder and (b) am too lazy to take the time to put them up if she's just going to do it for me. :P I'll throw up a bunch of my pictures though and link y'all to her flickr below so you can see the pictures she took.
There's not much to say about the aquarium that cannot be gleaned from the photos. We saw a bunch of really cool fish, had only slightly ridiculously overpriced food, and went to a penguin show that was pretty cool; I got to attempt to translate vaguely biological stuff from Japanese to English which was kind of a blast. After that we wandered around some more until we eventually skipped out to go on what is apparently the largest ferris wheel in all of Japan.
It apparently takes 16 minutes round trip, but we weren't counting. We were just enjoying the ride. AWESOME!!
After that I was feeling REALLY tired (between the aquarium etc and Odaiba the night before, I can't say that I'm totally surprised), so I bailed on the Tokyo Tower trip and just went home to have dinner with James and then attempt to get a good night's rest.
SUNDAY: Recording
Okay, so there wasn't anything PARTICULARLY exciting about this, but it WAS pretty entertaining to watch James and Patrick alternate spectacular renditions of Sam and Dean with falling off of their chairs. At any rate, it turned out REALLY well, was super fun to do and I DEFINITELY owe those boys big time. I'm hoping to get a copy of the finished dub-over uploaded ASAP and will link it as soon as that's been taken care of.
ALSO, because I forgot...
LAST THURSDAY: Gagaku
Got to listen to some cool traditional Japanese music. There were three main types of instruments, the Ryuteki, the Hichikiri and the Sho, which are sort of like a flute, a recorder and a mouth organ respectively. They also showed us some of the traditional dance associated with the gagaku music which was also pretty cool. I'm working on getting these pictures, as well as movies of their music, posted, but it's late at night and I JUST remembered that I wanted to post those, so I'm gonna bail on doing that tonight and try to get it up tomorrow.
Today's class was kind of a joke, so I bailed and have been working on this intermittently all afternoon. I have exams this week, so there probably won't be another update for a few days again. Take care all, especially those of you that are heading out for study abroad in the next few days. Here's hoping you all have as amazing an experience as I'm having now.
Shots from Odaiba, the Aquarium, etc. can be found here,
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2033866&id=1186934580&l=070822a3f2
here,
http://www.flickr.com/photos/40163232@N05/sets/72157621861942801/
and here,
http://www.flickr.com/photos/40163232@N05/
the first link being those from my memory card, the other two being those from Sarah's.
Alright, I think that's everything... I'm gonna call it a night and if any other sort of inspiration hits me I'll put it up here tomorrow. Until then, take care!! Hope you enjoyed!!
~ Anna
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