Okazaki Castle, Grand Shrines of Ise, Miscellaneous

I can't find the time to write in this blog, but I know at least a couple people are subscribed to it so I should at least make a cursory effort to write something. So here goes.

Hanami

A bridge across the river, decked out in Hanami gear

I guess the first thing to write about would be the Hanami festival we attended at Okazaki Castle. The number of people who were there were absolutely huge. I and the two guys I've mentioned before (the Swede and the German) all walked up together with the intention of finding the Yamasa area, but as soon as we got there we realized what a ridiculously impossible task that was gonna be. Realizing this, we kinda just decided to walk around and see the sights, since two out of the three of us had never been to the castle before.

As we wandered around, we couldn't help but notice all of the group dance competitions. It seemed like maybe some of them were high school events, and others had older people participating. Everyone was dressed up in kimonos and other traditional clothing and it was really quite impressive. There were tons of shops set up along the river with all sorts of carnival-type games: archery, some fish-catching game, tons of booths selling unhealthy fried food (I bought a corn dog), and even a haunted house. We totally would have gone in but I'm pretty sure it was for children and we didn't want to be the gaijin making the haunted house even MORE scary for the little kids. Still though, it was a good time.

A bunch of good-looking Yamasa students and also me

Eventually we managed to find another similarly-sized group of Yamasa students aimlessly wandering around for the same reason we were, so we resolved to double our wandering-around efforts together. I have to say, it was pretty awesome walking around and hearing little Japanese kids unabashedly pointing us out to their mothers and excitedly talking about foreigners being in such proximity to them.

Well, long story short, eventually we found the Yamasa tarp and I proceeded to join the other people already cracking open their beverages at a healthy 2PM. The admissions guy brought his beloved Guiness as well as a bunch of sake and lots of barbeque-able meat, so it was a really good time. I met a lot of awesome people and did my best to be as sociable as possible, which is kinda the idea I guess. After it had become a bit later and I had finished my bottle of horrible sugar-liqeur and a couple beers, I decided it was a good idea to go pay ¥200 (I think) for 5 arrows at the archery competition. I missed every single one, but I still got a box of powdery little sugar pellets which ended up being pretty okay. Think American smarties, but smaller and less hard.

That's about all of Hanami I figure is blogworthy.

Class was pretty good. It's getting progressively harder and harder and culminated in this past Friday, a day when I didn't have enough time to eat breakfast in the morning and subsequently was a brainless Japaneseless zombie all day. We had a kanji (an incredibly complicated writing system that the Japanese language uses that was borrowed from China in ancient times and shoehorned into a language it wasn't designed for) test that day and I honestly have absolutely no idea how I passed. But I passed, so I guess that's the most important thing.

Saturday and Yesterday

This was taken early on--more people showed up later

Saturday was the unofficial opening of a bar called Zigzag, but the new location wasn't ready or safe for human occupation yet, so we all piled into the old location with boxes everywhere and hung out and generally had a very good time drinking tons of Guinness and Japanese sake. Never having been to the old location before, I was very grateful to have been able to experience it before it was lost to the sands of time and Facebook. It was also someone's... let's call it 21st birthday at midnight, so we all stayed up way too late the day before the Matsusaka trip drinking way too much. Ah, youth.

The rope is changed in a ceremony on a yearly basis

So then after that, we woke up really freaking early and piled into a Matsusaka-bound van and proceeded to play a bunch of annoying travel games until I was absolutely sure Declan was going to kill us all by swerving off a bridge just to end the torment. The goal of the trip was to see the castle at Matsusaka and the shrine at Ise, both of which were pretty impressive. As an American, I kinda get jealous of other countries whose history goes back thousands and thousands of years. Still, it's pretty amazing that the same ceremonies and rituals we saw at the shrine have been handed down over so many generations. Kinda humbling, really.

You know, that's actually a good point. In America (and I would assume this goes for European countries as well), it seems like a lot of the cultural tourism is relic-based. That is, people want to go see a tree because it has a carving from the 1800's on it. People want to go see such-and-such building because it's the oldest in the region or something. But here, it seems like the idea of going to shrines and castles is not necessarily to see a really old thing--in fact, the shrine we saw at Ise, by tradition, is rebuilt every 20 years--but instead to witness something less tangible: the tradition and culture that has survived for way longer than I can even imagine. Fascinating.

Anyway, that's about it for this past weekend. Now for something far less interesting.

Today marked the first day of elective classes. For me, that meant two extra classes today. For most people, the classes are spread out through the week, but it just so happened that the two classes I felt addressed the things I needed to work on the most both fell on Monday. Whoops.

Unrelated picture wherein everyone looks directly into the sun

The first one was a listening and speaking class, which was a ton of fun. I spent most of the class having getting to know a classmate (in Japanese, of course) from Brazil. Pretty cool stuff. Is it weird that one of my favorite things in Japanese is when I don't know a word so I have to find a way to describe the thing that I want to talk about using simple words? Today's hurdle was trying to describe a nursing home without knowing the word for nursing home. I think I conveyed it pretty well, if I do say so myself, though I'm sure I sounded like an idiot in the process.

The second elective class that I had today was kanji level 2. We spent most of the class drawing kanji on white boards, being sure to get the proportions and stroke order correct. Apparently penmanship is extremely important to some Japanese people so I suppose it can't hurt to try to get my handwriting as perfect as I possibly can. It's also pretty fun to do because I don't consider myself artistic in any way whatsoever, but when I get a kanji character looking the way I want it I kinda feel like an artist of a certain sort. Maybe I should get myself a calligraphy pen and/or take a calligraphy course. That would be so much fun.

Anyway that's about it for now. It's getting late and I want a bright and early start tomorrow morning so that I have time to eat one of my famous (to me) breakfasts of spaghetti sauce and cheese on buttered toast. Lates.

P.S. I've started keeping a blog sort of thing in Japanese on lang-8 so if any of you know Japanese and want to laugh at how awful I am at it, こちらへ

P.P.S. I tried Pocari Sweat and I did not enjoy it :(

P.P.P.S. Goodnight.