It is neither morning nor Sunday at the moment, but I'm posting now, of all times...
Jeez. An entry like this needs an outline and a couple of drafts, but I suppose I'll wing it, the way I do everything else.
Where did I leave off? Last Monday? The baseball game, right?
So, last Monday we got to see the Hiroshima Toyo Carp play the Softbank Hawks, and lose humiliatingly, even as the unsinkable fans cheered for them to do their best. It was so sad, and so cute. Before that, though, we all got to
meet Dennis Sarfate, an ex-ASU-student himself, and I had the pleasure of realizing that my "all my red clothes are dirty but at least the colors are coordinated" outfit was black and yellow, as were the Hawks... needless to say I felt like quite the tool sitting in the Carp cheering section.
NOBODY TOLD ME. ><
Anyway, yeah, they lost 17 to 2, but as I am a goth kid that didn't matter, considering I was engrossed in the shrimp and salmon sushi bowl I'd acquired earlier for like 200 yen, in addition to other comestibles (including but not limited to a drink that was sold frozen, like an ice pack. It was so hot there, so out of an almost Native-American sense of gratitude to inanimate objects, I took its photo, which can be accessed from the photos page, which is a thing now). Besides, the fans were so awesome. Americans would've got up and left around the fourth inning of a game like that. Not these guys. The lead ouen-dan guy stood up and gave an inspiring ninth-inning speech, none of which I could understand firsthand, but which boiled down to "even though we're getting just mercilessly slaughtered out there, let's put our best foot forward for the last inning, right, guys?" D'awwww. It reminded me of my attitude towards the kanji tests in my 300-levels. :3 Also, I got a ridiculawesome souvenir for my dad that I'm kind of hoping he lets me keep, lol. It's just /so awesome/.
Wednesday (the next day I didn't spend cooped up in my room doing homework and taking naps, which are a new and strange phenomenon to me), we went to visit a Japanese elementary school, and spend a day with a sixth grade class. They split us all up into groups of two or three, had us make posters about Arizona to present to the class that day, and sent each group to a different sixth-grade classroom.
It is important to note here that American sixth graders are, without exception, intolerable, unenthusiastic brats who think they're too cool for every last thing anyone should dare suggest they try (I know this because I was one once, and my siblings, with the exception of the fifth-grader, were too). Japanese sixth-graders, however, are so cute. If we'd had a guest-speaker day in my sixth-grade class, every last student would have been all, cool, so we can doodle and pass notes and generally be jerks all day, and we won't have homework either. If the guest-speaker in question happened to suck at English, that would be extra-super-boring to us, and we would probably snicker at him and teach him to say things wrong. THESE KIDS, on the other hand, were just freakin' thrilled to see us, and they had so many questions about America and what it's like to live somewhere where there's no ocean, and what we got in our school lunches if not fish with their heads still on. Also, they clean their classrooms every day. Dear siblings, your lives aren't that hard. As for my sixth-graders, they and I helped to clean the first-graders' classroom. The first graders did little more than stare up in awe and terror at the tall (!!) lady with the metal in her face. THEIR FEAR IS SO CUTE
Then we herded everyone into the auditorium to learn the hokey-pokey, and in return they taught us how to make little dowel-helicopter things. Like those sky dancer dolls everyone had in the late 90s, but less sparkly, and hand-powered. We also played weird Japanese dodgeball, to which the rules are just different enough to confuse American college students.
Remind me to expound later on the arbitrary nature of the boundaries between places-where-you-wear-slippers and places-where-you-wear-shoes. It was hella arbitrary.
Also, "o-gaijin-san" (literally: honorable mister/miz foreigner) is totally my favorite thing to be called, ever.
Friday! As though we hadn't done enough stuff already, Friday after class... like, right after class, to the point that we all had to pack our stuff Thursday night... we got on the bus for Izumo.
Here's a map: the bus ride from Hiroshima to Izumo was four hours long, but mostly because there are no highways through Shimane prefecture.
I'd say Shimane is like Japan's Arkansas, but I don't have the same irrational hatred for Shimane that I have for Arkansas, and the Matsue-Izumo area is nowhere near as farmy, and there is no mythic history surrounding Arkansas, so really they're nothing alike. I'm not sure there is an American analogy that fits: Shimane is sort of an untamed, half-legend half-reality sort of place. Like, an Athens sort of place. Jerusalem. Utah, if you're Mormon. We read a bunch of Shinto myths for our class from the Kojiki, which is quite an old text, written in old Japanese, about stuff the kami did way back when. The excerpts we read, by no coincidence, took place near Izumo, such as the story of how Ookuninushi pulled the land of Izumo together (the secular history of it is, the
two lakes near Matsue were manipulated for agricultural purposes by the ancient Japanese, rendering the previously-flooded area dry, as though someone had pulled land out of the ocean).
Friday, though, we were too tired to care about what gods were where and when. We visited the old residence of
Lafcadio Hearn, a Greek guy who just traveled all over everywhere and wrote a lot of stuff about Japan, as well as a tiny museum dedicated to him. It was all rainy and miserable, and no one wanted to go anywhere, so we went straight to the ryokan (a traditional Japanese inn) after that.
The ryokan was reeeeal nice. :D There was a hot spring, and two huge meals, and the family running the place was really nice, and we played with fireworks and caught fireflies, and we got to switch roommates, and a good, naked time was had by all. Suffice it to say there aren't photos.
Saturday was the day we went to Adachi art museum and the Shimane Museum of Ancient Izumo and Matsue Castle (which I periodically spell Matsuei because that's how you pronounce it) and Izumo-taisha. Crazy freakin' day, which started at like seven. Lots of hour-long drives between places, lots of walking, lots of rushing. My legs were out of commission until yesterday because of those castle stairs...
At the art museum, I spent far too long trying to take photos of the garden, so I missed the ceramics room. /: However, I did get to see a bunch of awesomecool stuff, like lacquered writing desks and paintings from storybooks and geisha paintings and other cool stuff I wasn't allowed to photograph.
At Shimane Museum, I missed a bunch of rooms because we were rushed through, and also because one of the docents accosted a bunch of the sophomores and tried to explain some of the exhibits in Japanese to them, so I helped translate. (I carry around a step-stool, by the way, so I'm always ready to get on high horses when they present themselves.) I bought an awesome folder there with all the kami gathered to party it up at Izumo. I'm running out of papers to put in all my folders.
At Matsue Castle, I took a bunch of crappy photos with my crappy camera, and nearly ate it on the stairs no less than ten times, because you take your shoes off to enter the castle, and apparently old-timey samurai socks had more traction on them than the red ones I bought at Miyajima. Those stairs were both narrow and steep, so aargh, my legs hurt for like two days after. I did, however, get an awesome panorama shot from the top floor, because panorama mode is the one redeeming quality of my phone camera. I also watched a pretty Japanese guy stare at water striders in a puddle, and considered taking his photo. But that would have been creepy...
And at Izumo-Taisha, we saw two wedding parties and a couple other miscellaneous ceremonies, all while the main shrine was under renovation. Izumo's big for weddings. You'll notice, if you look at the photos, there's a big knot tied out front of it. The adage is the same as in English. I also acquired a little ceramic oni mask for my wall, which if it breaks on the way back, I'll be sooo sad you guys ;-;
Then we drove home for four hours, guhhhh. Then we had okonomiyaki! Yaaay!
Now it's... Tuesday night! Yesterday I went to town, and found a used clothing store, where I got a couple of awesome things my mother will hate for "is this missing a zero" type prices. I also acquired a crappy pair of fishnet tights which will break properly with wear. This is a thing non-punkygothtypes don't ever have to consider, but imagine for a moment that you're me. I plan to make them into a shirt later.
Oh, and I found this handmade perfume shop! If any one of you blog-readers ever wants an inordinate amount of my money, man, invest in perfume-making. I'm a sucker for it. >u> It smells incensey, but not at first. Also it's one of those chapstick type ones that you just rub on...
...good gracious, I'm boring...
...um. That said, I'm gonna go study now. I've decided that a C in Kajiwara-sensei's class is fine as long as I get an A in Takada-sensei's class, but getting a C in Kajiwara-sensei's class, at this point, seems like it will still require a lot of work.
Also, I promised myself I'd bleach my hair tonight, so to not have to bring the bleach home with me. Tomorrow's the Mazda factory tour, Friday karaoke, Saturday peace park. Maybe I'll try this updating thing? Maybe.
-Vic, who will be tired all of tomorrow
