Welcome back to my blog after an all-too-long hiatus! As the title of this entry entails, I’ve just returned from a 2 1/2 week journey that took me from little Awa city to Kobe, Portland, Osaka, and Seoul. I’ll take you through my trip (and observations through it) in as concise of a way as possible.
Dec 18- I leave Awa city after teaching my last classes of 2009. These were to JHS (junior high school) 2nd graders (read: 8th grade), and I enjoyed running around the school all day in a Santa hat, alternately bellowing out the occasional “ho ho ho” in my best Santa voice, or allowing the students in the hallways turns of wearing it and giving me their best Santa (or maybe John sensei) impression- somehow this activity was more popular amongst the girls. Having the fantastic Chris to drive me to the bus stop, I boarded for my 18 day journey and promptly made my way to my host family’s house in Kobe (note: I studied abroad in Japan for 11 months during my sophomore year of high school). I then had a relaxing evening with my host mother and 26-year-old host sister, catching up on family matters and watching my eldest host sister’s wedding video (see previous blog entry). As entertaining as the video was hearing about my eldest host sister’s exploits in running her own household for the first time, and bearing witness to a phone call home when she didn’t know what to do with a plugged toilet- this reminded me of calling my mother freshman year of college to ask whether to use hot or cold water when washing my clothes.
Dec. 19-28: Portland
I was off again early the next morning to catch an 11 am flight to Tokyo from Kansai International Airport (KIX) in Osaka, the second largest airport in Japan. This was a further 2 hour bus ride from Kobe. At the airport, I made a new friend in a lady from New Zealand, and she subsequently gave me her information in Auckland and let me know I was welcome to stay any time. I love kiwis J I then boarded my flight with a fellow JET from Tokushima who was heading home to California for the break, Henry, and then flew from Tokyo directly to Portland. That flight was interesting in that I sat with an American man who had moved to Singapore to work in IT 20 years before, and had married and settled there. As I’ve always considered either working abroad for a little while (like the present) or finding a career that sent me abroad often, I was keenly interested to hear his perspective on not only adapting to and assimilating into a different culture abroad over time, but also his views as an expat on America’s current foreign and economic policy. He was not overly complimentary of the Obama administration’s current policies, but acknowledged that the situation was a difficult one and asserted that he believed many of his critics were overly critical of medium-longer term policies that had not had time to reach fruition. He had a fairly positive view of the administration’s economic policies, which was interesting in that he was living in Asia during their financial crisis of 1997 for which the US was roundly criticized as not having done enough to stave off.
A strange (or interesting) thing about flying East over the Atlantic to the West coast is that one arrives a good deal of time before one actually left, chronologically speaking. After a 9 hour flight, I landed in a time zone that was 17 hours behind the one I’d just left, and so left at 4 in the afternoon and arrived at around 7:30 in the morning.
I arrived in Portland where my aunt and uncle awaited me at the airport. It was wonderful to be on American soil again for the first time in 5 months. They promptly took me home to meet their 7 month old chocolate lab, Birdie, who was just as awkward, gangly, playful, and adorable as a chocolate lab should be. She not only added her puppy energy to the house, but also enhanced all activities from eating breakfast (head resting on your knee), refilling the Christmas tree water (joining you to see what you were up to), and even a Portland tradition: playing four-square with the neighbors (she served as an active obstacle).
I greatly enjoyed helping my uncle pick out a Christmas tree, eating American-style pizza, and relaxing to read a book in a house that had central heating. As an unexpected bonus, unbeknownst to me my parents had been unable to cancel my cell phone plan, and so I received several texts on my arrival, which I then happily discovered I was able to respond to.
Two days after my arrival Mark, my younger (albeit taller) brother arrived from Texas, and the four of us (aunt, uncle, myself, Mark) took off to Timberline Lodge on Mt. Hood to ski for a couple of days (google it for pictures or check my facebook- absolutely beautiful place). The lodge itself was built during the Great Depression in the middle of Mt. Hood national forest as a project to bring jobs to the area (much like Georgetown’s White-Gravesnor building). As the name suggests, the lodge and ski slopes rest on the upper reaches of where trees stretch on the mountain. The highest lifts give a stunning panoramic of the mountain itself, the lodge and hills below, and Mt. Jefferson, the Three Sisters, and Mt. Batchelor in the distance (the closest, Mt. Jefferson, was 40 miles away). The lodge is built like an old-style European ski lodge, with wings branching off from a single, massive, three-story room with a huge chimney in the middle, accommodating fire places on each of 4-5 sides- yes, the most perfect place in the world to curl up with a book and a cup of hot chocolate after a long day of skiing. Also exciting was an outdoor heated pool and hot tub, which had a wonderful view of the sky at night. The weather could not have been more perfect for our trip- though it had snowed a few days previous to our excursion, the sky could not have been more clear and the vistas more gorgeous for our time there. I took a great deal of pictures of the mountain and the view from the lodge, as well as a few from the top of the highest-available lift. All told, between skiing the entire day and enjoying the comfort of the lodge at night (with of course great company), it was entirely idyllic and restful.
We returned to Portland, and enjoyed Christmas-eve dinner with family friends. I was informed by our wonderful hostess at the dinner that she had a daughter currently teaching English in Seoul, South Korea. Seeing as that a trip to Seoul would constitute the second half of my winter break, she enjoined me to get into touch with said daughter to see if we could arrange a meeting. This did end up occurring, but later in my story.
My parents arrived on Christmas day, and it was incredible to be able to see so much of my family for the holidays, and look forward to seeing the rest this summer. The final three days of my stay were a flurry of Christmas- and family-related activity: I very much enjoyed having an American-style Christmas evening of dinner and opening presents. I did my best to bring presents that best represented the culture of my specific prefecture: from coasters and paper made at the Awagami paper factory (since the 16th century) 10 minutes from my house, to things died with traditional Aizome indigo dye, and various artifacts from the Awa-Odori dance festival (the largest dance festival in Japan, see early entry). Even more fun than searching for these was discovering that the 100-yen (read: dollar) store was a gold mine for stocking stuffers for my younger brother and cousin. It was rife with gag gifts such as a clear, heavily made up mask upon which was written “You can be a drag queen!” and also the fake, inflatable bags made to increase chest size. Sprinkled in with the more obvious gag gifts were the things with awkward English phrases written on them, such as the bag meant to “support your more comfortable amenity life” (Mark is free to comment on the others).
I was able to see both Avatar and Sherlock Holmes. Though Avatar’s textbook plot and sometimes inane dialogue would have seriously affected another movie, the out-of-this-world (no pun intended, sadly) visuals entirely made up for them and made it a movie going experience that I’d like to repeat. I fully concurred with the opinion that instead of the movie being eye candy, it was eye crack-cocaine. As I am no movie critic (and generally very easily amused), I enjoyed Sherlock Holmes as a less-brainy-than-expected action flick.
I spent my time in Portland indulging myself in various food cravings that I had endured while abroad. Dairy is not part of Japan’s traditional diet, and beef consumption only became widespread there after the lifting of an import ban in 1991 dropped the price of it drastically. Therefore cheese (one of my favorite things in the world) is pretty difficult to find (at least out in the country), beef comes in strips and McDonald’s hamburgers, pizza is often thin and contains such ingredients as squid, tuna, and corn, and there is no Mexican food to speak of (within an hour drive at least). My cravings were easily satiated in the period of less than 24 hours in Portland: I was able to enjoy an enchilada dinner, partake in an American pizza, eat a steak, and buy some sharp cheddar cheese at the store. Talk about a hog heaven of consumption.
This is not to say that I don’t love Japanese food, but getting a taste of home was a welcome experience, especially before the sea-change that was Korean food.
It was also nice to drive a full-size car again on the right side of the road, though I must admit I several times repeated the mistake I had in first arriving to Japan of walking to the wrong side of the car (as the steering wheels are located on opposite sides). The audacity and poor driving skill of people in my prefecture happens to be something of legend in Japan. Drivers are either very slow or very fast, the concept of “slowing down” on yellow is entirely unheard of, and one must often wait any number of seconds after a light has turned green to safely traverse an intersection for fear of one of the 15 cars that makes a right (left in the US) turn after the light has actually changed because they had patiently waited for the yellow and red-light runners coming the opposite direction. For the rest of my life, I will likely refer to any driver with less-than-stellar skill behind the wheel as a “Tokushima driver”. But I digress.
The rest of my time in Portland was spent relaxing with family, visiting my grandmother and grandfather, and seeing other friends in Portland. Mark and I had the opportunity to sip hot cocoa in downtown Portland with our friends Erika and Mai (who both speak Japanese), visit Powell’s City of Books, the city-block-sized independent bookstore (and one of my favorite places in the world), and go with our friend Nadia to Portland’s infamous Voodoo Doughnuts shop at 2 in the morning (which reminded me verrry much of the many hipster-esque places in Austin).
In all, I was extremely happy to be able to spend a few days in the States before heading back out here to Asia. My next visit will hopefully be in late July/early August to Washington, DC and Austin, we shall see J
Up next: Korea!
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