Watch out, Ellen Degeneres...

Today, I finally got my hands on a copy of the video from our jazz concert at the shrine, so if you'd like to see it, it's here at the end of this post.

Before the concert, I was super nervous because I knew that I would have to emcee between the songs in Japanese, but luckily, emceeing turned out to be no problem at all.* In fact, the day after the concert, I got a call from one of the softball men. He told me that he was really impressed with my little spiel in between songs and thought I sounded just like the hosts at the Oscars or the Emmys.

heh heh heh :D

*You'll probably notice that the audience laughs hysterically after every single thing I say...even if it wasn't supposed to be funny. I assume that this is a good thing, although maybe there was a bit of broccoli stuck between my teeth or something??

Graffiti

Happy Saturday morning to you courtesy of my friends at the high school next door!

(Sorry, this video doesn't really capture the view from my apartment balcony very well, but the sound ought to give you a feel for how I wake up on lazy Saturday mornings here in the peaceful bliss of the Japanese countryside. ;)

----

In other news pertaining to peace and bliss, when I got to school yesterday morning, I found that someone had done a little decorating across the main doors of the medical school with a can of red spray paint. As I walked up to the entrance gawking at the new artwork, I nearly stepped in front of a police photographer who was taking pictures of the scene while a bunch of maintenance men waited around to clean up the mess. The huge Japanese characters adorning the main doors read, 三木、出てこい！ (Miki, get out here!) Apparently, a very angry someone had a score to settle with Miki...

At first, I assumed that the graffiti was some kind of stupid prank aimed at some unfortunate medical student named Miki, but after hearing the scuttlebutt around the medical school, I found that Miki is actually a professor here. According to one of my English students, a patient who went to see Dr. Miki felt that he hadn't been treated properly and decided to get even. Last week, the patient posted unflattering fliers about Dr. Miki all over the shopping arcades in Matsuyama, and this week he apparently decided to go about his revenge in a slightly more artistic manner.

I guess this patient wasn't into malpractice suits so much.... Perhaps people like him are the reason that there's barbed wire around the high school...??

かわいそう (;_;)

Gaahh...something is eating my poor goldfish's dorsal fin. The top of the fin's all ragged and halfway gone. (>_<);; I went to the pet shop in between lessons yesterday and bought some fish medicine (for $10...ouch...) and now he's medicated and isolated in his own little tank. I wonder if his fin will grow back at all once I get rid of the infection...although he seems to be swimming around fine without it. Anyway, I guess I will consider this fish to be my first official patient, and perhaps a groundbreaking case study for Piscean Regenerative Medicine. Do you suppose it would help if I listed this as a clinical experience on my medical school application?

Odds and Ends

Today, while editing a paper for the ophthalmology department, I discovered my new favorite anatomical term:

Zonule of Zinn

I guess it's the name of the fibers that connect the muscles in your eye to the lens, but doesn't it sound like the name of some sort of space alien commander from a distant planet?? Hello, I am Zonule of Zinn. I come in peace... (-_-)v

Anyway, the term is definitely permanently embedded in my brain now. Who would have thought that I would get this much enjoyment from correcting medical articles?

I am going to be a great doctor.

---

Yesterday, I was sitting in a cafe in Matsuyama correcting papers in between band practices when a lady came up and tapped me on the shoulder.

Lady: Excuse me, do you speak English?

Me: Yes, I do.

Lady: Can I ask you a question? (looks up at the ceiling like she is forgetting something, then suddenly remembers and looks back down at me, pointing her index finger at my chest) ....mosquito!

Me: ....?? Um, sorry?

Lady: How....how do you say....uh....um....a mosquito's baby in English?

Me: Oh, um, I think we call it larva.

Lady: ....?

(I pull out a piece of paper and write down "larva" so she can see.)

Lady: Oh! Larva! Oh, thank you very much!

Me: No problem.

Lady: (pulls out a business card) I work in this bakery. Please come and eat our cookies.

Me: ....thanks!....


Never quite figured out where this conversation was going. Any ideas? A bakery with a pest problem???

Freedom!

I've slowly come to the conclusion that I'm buried far enough down in the medical school waitlists that I'm not going to make it in this year. Sooo close but so far. These waitlists are an awfully elegant form of torture... But alas, there's nothing to do now but write a melodramatic blog post or two, and then get on the ball for next year.

My first step towards getting this reapplication ball rolling? The MCAT. I had taken the test three years ago during college, but since MCAT scores are usually only valid for three years, I had no choice but to take it all over again.

It's amazing how much you can manage to forget in three years, so I knew I had a lot of chemistry and physics studying to do. For the six weeks before my test day, I literally locked myself in my office every night after work to study, and gradually plowed my way through five big fat test prep books and four practice tests.

On the test day last Tuesday, I arrived at the test center with plenty of time to spare, took the elevator to the seventh floor and was a bit alarmed to find a door that said "This way for the English Proficiency Exam." Aha! Here is a test I can pass! I thought, but have I gone to the wrong building for the MCAT?? I inquired at the front desk with much trepidation and found that I was indeed in the right place. As it turns out, I was the only person taking the MCAT in Osaka that day, so apparently they didn't feel the need to put up a sign for me. :) (On a side note, if any of you ever have to take the MCAT, I highly recommend taking it in Japan. Taking the test by yourself is about a million times better than taking it in a crowded room with hundreds of stressed out pre-meds madly flipping through flash cards and muttering to themselves.)

Even though I was the only person taking the test, the proctors were (of course) still required to go through all of the standard anti-cheating protocol. Before I could enter the test room, I had to take everything out of my pockets, get my fingerprints taken, pose for a picture, and show the proctor my passport. I kind of felt like I was going to jail.

The test itself went ok (I think...), or at least I finished all the questions in the time limit. And after five hours of toe tapping, head scratching and nail chewing, I emerged from the testing room a free woman....again. Hopefully this will be the last time for the MCAT and me. :)

Now that I'm finally done studying, I've been gradually making my way back from the depths of my office to join the rest of humanity. First, this meant catching up on grading papers at work, but I've also played sanshin in a couple concerts and gotten back into softball. I'm also hoping to start jogging every morning and learning how to cook, but so far I'm not having much success on those fronts. Must....get...out...of...bed....in the morning and run.

Oh, one last thing. Last month, one of the jazz groups I'm in played a concert at a shrine in my neighborhood, and a news crew came to film our practice and help us advertise. Here's a clip from the news. I tried to add (rough) English captions this time. Hopefully you can read them....they're not pretty, but at least they're semi-functional....I think... (Does anyone know of a better program for adding captions than Windows Movie Maker? I wish I could format these better so they don't fly across the screen so fast...)

Update: I think I've fixed the problem with the video now....probably...
Although if it still doesn't work, you can also watch it here, the full screen version!

I'm Thinking of Something Yellow...

Events of note since my last post:

-- Last Sunday, I was invited to make another appearance in my softball team's golf tournament. Unfortunately, since my golf debut last November, I've been a tad busy working, studying for med school interviews, and pretending to be a Japanese pop star,* so I haven't had much of a chance to work on my golf swing. The softball men reassured me that I was still welcome to play, and took me out to the driving range twice in the week before the tournament. However, despite their advice/encouragement/fervent prayers, I couldn't seem to shake my tendency to slice the ball hard to the right about 3 out of every 4 shots.

After finishing up at the driving range, I casually suggested that perhaps I ought to sit this tournament out,** but the softball team wasn't hearing any of that, so I ended up playing after all. The results?

Well, let's just say I showed a lot of grit on Sunday. Got some good exercise too, chasing my ball all over the course and fishing it out of bushes and drainage ditches....I am, however, happy to say that based on a careful analysis of the trend in my golf scores, I have made a bit of an improvement since last November:

Last November: erm...quite a few strokes...lost count after the third hole or so

Last Sunday: 153

Still have a ways to go though...


-- Still no news from any medical schools, but then again, I wasn't really expecting to hear anything new until at least May 15th. I did, however, receive some interesting news involving a certain Japanese medical school.

This morning, I ran into one of the medical English students in the hallway, and she asked me how long I thought I would stay in Ehime. When I told her that I'm tentatively planning to leave in August, she looked very surprised, and then told me that there is a rumor going around that I'm going to enroll at the Ehime University Medical School next year.

Something must have gotten lost in translation somewhere...although it would be pretty sweet if I were to get accepted to Japanese medical school without even submitting a single form... Anyway, it's good to know that someone cares if I'm around. :D


-- The six elementary school girls at my Friday night lesson absolutely crack me up.

Just recently, we've been learning our colors and talking about our likes and dislikes, so last Friday, the textbook suggested that we do an activity like this. Each girl was supposed to draw a color flashcard and take turns making an "I like" or "I don't like" sentence involving that color. When I was planning the lesson, I actually thought that the activity sounded kind of boring and wondered if it would hold the kids' attention, but in actuality, it turned out to be quite entertaining.

S-chan went first, drew a brown card, and proclaimed that she didn't like brown cockroaches. Next was Y-chan, who drew pink and told us that she didn't like pink shrimp. And then came A-chan.

A-chan is a notoriously picky eater and always asks for no fruit in her post-lesson ice cream sundae, so when she drew yellow and exclaimed, "I know what I'll do!" the other kids and I were almost certain she would say that she doesn't like bananas. But then she surprised us all by saying, "I don't know how to say this word in English, though. Can you tell me?" and I leaned over so she could whisper the Japanese word in my ear.

I could tell that she was very pleased with herself for thinking of her word, because she was grinning from ear to ear and trying not to laugh, so I was quite anxious to hear what she had to say, but although she whispered the same thing to me several times, she was giggling so much that I couldn't figure it out. I finally asked her to write down the word on a piece of paper instead, and when she finished, I looked down to see オネショ (onesho = wetting the bed) written in large neat letters.

So true, A-chan, so true. たしかに、both yellow and unpleasantやね...


*More about the latest developments in my budding pop star career in another post.

**It's not that I mind looking bad in front of the softball men -- I've gotta practice somewhere if I ever plan on getting any better -- I just don't want to make everyone wait on me as I sloooowly make my way toward the green....

Plan B

Happy April! I hope that you're as happy as I am that spring has come. Here, have some celebratory sushi.


The other day, a few of my students took me to a park for a picnic, and this is what we had for lunch. I'll give a gold star to the lucky reader who can figure out what's odd about this sushi.

---

Since my med school interview at the UW last October, I've been patiently waiting in the dreaded "competitive applicants pool" for a final decision on my application. And man, five months is an awfully long time to wait...

The UW's final admissions committee meeting was two Fridays ago, so I figured it was safe to assume that I would learn my fate early this week.

Unfortunately, I was wrong.

Almost a week after the meeting, despite obsessively checking my e-mail and the UW's rather unhelpful application status web page, I still hadn't heard a thing. No phone calls. No e-mail. No snail mail. I was beginning to wonder if I ought to be watching out for skywriting or a singing telegram when my status on the UW's website finally changed to "A decision has been made on your application." (Now really, isn't it just a bit cruel that the website doesn't tell you anything more detailed than that??) Feeling so nervous that I thought I might vomit, I called the UW admissions office and found....that I have been put on the waitlist.

At least I haven't been rejected (yet), but I don't particularly relish the idea of waiting another three months to find out whether or not I can get in. It makes it awfully hard to know if I should cross my fingers and hope for an acceptance, or give up on this year and start looking for a job.

Anyway, I figure it's always best to have a plan B, so I've started to do a little job-hunting research. My first source? The kids at my Friday night English lesson:

Me: Hey, I think I might have to look for a new job for next year. What kind of job do you think would be good for me?

K-chan: Um...umm......oh! I know! Maybe you could work in a convenience store?!

True. I certainly could. I've bought enough convenience store bento lunches in my day that I know all of the pertinent convenience-store-related Japanese phrases! (あたためますか?) I wonder if convenience stores give out working visas.....

---

This weekend was the spring festival in downtown Matsuyama, so I dropped by the shopping arcades to take a peek at the annual parade. The parade is called daimyo gyoretsu, and apparently it's a re-creation of the processions that daimyo (feudal lords) had to make to Tokyo each year to pay their respects to the shogun. These processions happened around 200 or 300 years ago, so the clothes the people in the parade were wearing were pretty different and cool looking.

Here's the daimyo:



...and the daimyo's samurai bodyguard accompanied by his own personal umbrella holder:



Apparently the archers weren't important enough to merit gigantic umbrellas. :( I dig their outfits though. Just out of curiosity, does anyone know how those bows work? Wouldn't your arms have to be super long to pull that huge bowstring back far enough for the arrow to go anywhere?



Here are the ladies in waiting (I think...??) I would hate to have been a girl back then. My students tell me that it took many months to walk from Ehime to Tokyo, and I think I probably would have gone crazy wearing a kimono and walking in little tiny strides like this for days on end....



Last but not least, here are the guys who clean the chandeliers in the daimyo's house. (This one is for you, Mom. ;)



After the parade passed by, I walked out of the shopping arcades toward Matsuyama Castle and enjoyed a stroll in the beautiful weather.



The cherry blossoms are in full bloom now. They're pretty, huh.



Every day on the news here, there's a whole segment devoted to reporting the places where the cherry blossoms have started to bloom. They even calculate the percentage of buds that have opened on a certain representative tree in each famous cherry blossom viewing spot. It's really a big deal. The people in the picture down below are having ohanami, a sort of cherry blossom appreciation party. People spread blankets under the trees and eat lunch together.



Here's more cherry blossoms near the moat around Matsuyama Castle.


That little boat in the background always sits in the moat, but I've never seen anyone use it before. Quite mysterious. I plan to live inside of it next year while I work at the convenience store and study to retake the MCAT. (笑)

何が言いたかったのでしょう...

I was editing an paper about coronary artery disease for one of the doctors today, when I found this passage.

"As you know, there are many biomarkers and thus related papers regarding acute coronary syndrome and vulnerable plaque. I am disgusted and confused about that!"

I concur! What could be more disgusting than biomarkers and vulnerable plaque??

...

Reasons I Would Make a Terrible Wife: Vol. III*

One of the many perks of teaching English in Ehime is that Ehime is famous for mikan, little mandarin oranges, and when mikan are in season, my students give me grocery bags full of them literally every day. Mmmm.... Sometimes I even eat them for dinner if I don't feel like fixing something a little more substantial. Perhaps this is not the most nutritionally sound diet, but I tell myself that at least I don't have to worry about getting scurvy.

Last week was a particularly fruitful one. At one point, I think I had at least two dozen mikan in bags on top of my refrigerator, so before I left last Thursday on a little five-day trip to Kyoto, I went on a mikan eating frenzy -- must have eaten four or five mikan per day -- and finally, on Thursday night, I departed for Kyoto, having successfully depleted my rather large hoard of fruit.

Or so I thought....

When I came back to my apartment this morning, I noticed an odd smell emanating from behind the refrigerator. I wandered around my apartment for a few minutes unpacking and thinking all the while, It smells like oranges in here. Oranges...and....and...easter egg dye?? Impossible, no one dyes easter eggs here...But it definitely smells like oranges. Oranges...and....and dirty socks???

I finally decided that the strange odor required proper investigation, and peered behind the refrigerator to find that a paper sack of oranges had fallen into the crack between the fridge and the wall. I attempted to pull the sack out, but it disintegrated in my hands. The mikan fell to the ground with a nasty squelch, and an enormous cloud of green dusty mold billowed out across my kitchen. When the green dust finally settled, I ran to the bathroom, looked in the mirror and found that I looked like the Wicked Witch of West's slightly paler sister.** I washed off the green ick and then proceeded to de-mold the rest of my kitchen.

By then, the smell was much worse, and I could just imagine all of the mold particles still floating around in the air and turning my lungs green. If the mold could annihilate those mikan in a matter of days, how long would it take for the mold to eat me alive too???

Anyway, my kitchen is much cleaner now and I am still alive, so all appears to be right in the world. I guess I should find a different place to store the mikan from now on, though...



* Vol. I and II can be found in previous posts for your further (懐かしい) reading enjoyment.

**Minus the pointy hat and warts.

Run that by me again?

Yesterday, the leaders of the big band I'm in posted the set list for our next concert. The second tune on the list?

BRIDE OVER TROUBLED WATERS

I'd really like to hear the lyrics to this version... ;)

Snakes on a Plane

I was searching the internet to see if I could bring a real python-skin sanshin back to the US* when I came across this article:

"A young woman has been cautioned at Scotland's Glasgow Airport after attempting to smuggle a live snake on a journey from America** to the Netherlands.

Customs officers in Glasgow were carrying out a routine check on the woman when they noticed that her snakeskin belt was in fact a live snake. The harmless reptile had been chilled prior to the flight to keep it in a comatose state but it came to life in the warmth of the airport terminal.

The snake was confiscated and the woman was allowed to catch her flight after being given a warning, according to Scottish newspaper The Herald. "

-- Courtesy of Airline Industry Information, Feb. 18, 2002


Genius.

When I mentioned this story to one of my private lesson students the other day, he came up with a brilliant idea of his own.


Ryu: Hey, didn't you say you're going to have give your goldfish away before you go back to America?

Me: Yeah, the softball team wants to FedEx them back to Seattle for me, but I don't think that'll work so well....

Ryu: You should find a piece of opaque plastic piping, fill it with water, put the goldfish inside, and wear it as a belt on the plane!


It might be worth a try. I'd sure feel bad if my poor goldfish suffocated, though. I suppose every once in a while, I could sneak into the bathroom, take the belt off, and blow bubbles into it....


*Apparently pythons are an endangered species, and it's illegal to bring products made from endangered species into the US, so I settled for a synthetic snakeskin sanshin instead.

** Does this mean that she had already smuggled the snake on a plane once when she flew from the US to Glasgow??? Maybe it wouldn't be so hard to get the sanshin through customs after all....

嬉しいこといっぱい (Too Much of a Good Thing??)

For the last couple months, business has been booming at the medical school -- I think I've gained four or five private lessons just lately. This makes at least four one-hour lessons everyday, and that's not including the university classes and the free tutoring sessions I do for the medical students. If you add in prep time and the proofreading work I do for doctors at the medical school, I'm basically at school from 9 AM to 9 PM every day.

In a way, this is a good thing. I like my job, and I certainly don't want to be sitting around with nothing to do. As long as I'm living by myself in the middle of the Japanese countryside, it's best to keep busy.

On the other hand, all of these new lessons mean that I literally have no time to eat dinner until at least 9 at night Monday through Saturday....although on the bright side, once I come back to the states, I'll probably be a lot thinner.* Maybe I can become a super model.**

* Or fatter?? Isn't eating right before you go to bed supposed to make you gain weight? Or maybe my occasional late night snacking will be canceled out by the fact that sometimes I fall asleep in the middle of the floor without eating anything at all.

** Shoot..forgot that I'm not over six feet tall...


Anyway, suffice it to say that with the sudden deluge of work since the first of the year, I haven't been able to write too many blog posts lately. :( But as usual, there's been plenty of stuff to write about. Here's a quick rundown of the most exciting non-work related events of the past few weeks:

Since I went to Okinawa last year, I've been a bit obsessed with the sanshin, a three-stringed banjo-ish instrument that people play there. It's a little hard to describe what it sounds like, but people play it at festivals and dance to it, so it's rhythmical and fun...maybe you could call it Okinawan-style hoe-down music??

Anyway, in Okinawa, I bought a really cheap sanshin for practice, and figured that if I ever got good at it, I could switch to a better one. Real sanshin are made from wood and covered with python skin, but my cheap one was made from a tin can. (After the bombing in World War II, Okinawa was completely devastated, and there were no materials to make sanshin, so people made them out of whatever they could find -- mostly scraps of wood and empty cans. Now the cheapest sanshin in souvenir shops are still made that way.)

Unfortunately, my sanshin was a little too cheap (or maybe I am stronger than I thought.) I was tuning it one day, turned one of the wooden tuning pegs a little too hard, and broke the peg in half. I glued the peg back together with wood glue, but it was never quite the same. :( Lamenting the loss of my sanshin, I mentioned to my parents that I wished I had a real one, and they surprised me and ordered me one for Christmas. And two weeks ago, my new sanshin finally came to the medical school. The new one is beautiful, and the sound is sooo much better than the tin can. :D

The day after my sanshin came, I checked the mail again and found a postcard with results from the Japanese proficiency test I had taken last December. (The test is for foreigners who are studying Japanese, and there are four levels depending on how long you've been studying. For my level, I had to know ~2000 Japanese characters and ~10,000 vocabulary words, so all November and December, I was studying characters like a crazy person.) My postcard was kind of small, and since a small envelope usually means bad news, I figured I must have failed the test, but I opened it anyway and found that I had actually passed! I hope no one was watching me because I was so surprised that I kind of did a little jig up the stairs to my apartment.

The following day, the postman brought me yet another surprise -- another postcard from Nodo Jiman (the American Idol-ish TV show) inviting me to audition for the TV show again. The audition was last weekend, and I decided to sing an Okinawan song and play my sanshin.

Unfortunately, this time around, I didn't sing terribly well and didn't make it on TV, so there's no videotape, but here's a still of me and my beautiful sanshin:


Just like last time, the rest of the auditionees (250 people total) were very entertaining, so despite the fact that I wasn't able to make much progress in my quest to become a Japanese pop star, I was glad to have gone to the audition.

My English student's sister came to hear me sing, and after the audition was over, she invited me to spend the night at her apartment instead of taking the hour and a half long bus ride back home.

In case you're wondering how I know my English student's sister, I suppose I'd better catch you up on a little background information. Last fall, my English student, Yumi, took me to see a big festival in her hometown and introduced me to her whole family. Here's me, Yumi, and her sister, Hitomi, next to one of the festival floats:


See that gigantic pole I'm leaning on? At the festival, the men put the poles on their shoulders and carry the float and bounce it up and down. About five minutes after this picture was taken, the manly men from the float next door decided they wanted to have a fight with our float and started charging towards us. Fortunately for me, Yumi and Hitomi realized that we were about to be sandwiched between two enormous pieces of wood and we all ran to safety in the nick of time.

...but I digress....

Here's Yumi, me, and Hitomi's five year old son, Yuuto, at a little safer distance from the action:


Yuuto is absolutely hysterical. When I first met him last fall, he was really scared of me because he had never seen a foreigner before. (For the first hour or so of the festival, he kept saying, "I don't like foreigners. I hate people who speak English!!") But after a bit, his curiosity got the better of him and we became pretty good buddies:


During dinner, he kept running over to sit on my lap and ask me questions like, "What does your grandpa look like?" and "Are there dogs in America?"

Ok, so back to Nodo Jiman day... After my audition, Yuuto was apparently really excited that I was coming to stay at his apartment. When I walked in the door, he pulled me inside and immediately gave me the grand tour, saying, "I've been cleaning house all day to get ready for you. Doesn't it just sparkle??" And then we played and played all night long...with board games and play money and video games and picture books...it was the first time I had played that much in a long time, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. :D

Later that night, we went out to dinner, where Yuuto told me the whole story of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and then to the public bath. Yuuto insisted on coming into the women's side to play with me, and then almost dragged me into the men's side too when he decided to look for his dad later on. (笑)

When it was time for me to go home the next afternoon, we did one more jigsaw puzzle and then sadly parted. Yuuto told me to come back next Sunday and he would be sure to clean the house for me. I think I'm in love. <3 <3

Golf

A few days after the autumn festival, I got another call from the softball guys:

Them: We're having a golf tournament in the three day weekend in November. You're going to play this year, aren't you?

Me: Uh, gee, I'd like to play, but...

Them: Ok! Don't worry about a thing. We'll find clubs for you!!

Me: Wow, thanks...but, uh, just so you know, I've never actually played golf before.

Them: Oh, no problem. If you can play softball, of course you'll be able to play golf....

A week later, Shinohara-san called to say that he was bringing a putter to my apartment and wanted to take me shopping for golf shoes. I thanked him and asked if we also might make a side trip to the driving range, but he didn't appear to think that was necessary.

Another week passed, and my big golf debut was getting dangerously close. Feeling a bit anxious about the fact that I had never actually touched a golf club before, I finally called Shimada-san, another one of the softball guys, and asked if he would give me a golf lesson. Fortunately, he agreed to take me out to the driving range.

When we arrived at our tees, Shimada-san thrust a driver in front of me and asked me to show him my swing. I quickly obliged, and turned back to see Shimada-san scratching his head. "I think we have a little work to do," he said.

I went back to the driving range two more times with Shimada-san and once more with my Japanese teacher. By the day of the tournament, I had progressed to the point where I could make fairly reliable contact with the ball. Unfortunately, once I hit the ball, I had almost no idea where it would go, but that couldn't really be helped.

The golf course was on the side of one of the mountains near my apartment, and the view was really amazing. Looking out from the first tee, it felt like I could have flown off the mountain and soared out over my town....and a few times, my golf balls certainly did. (Or at least, they probably would have if they hadn't gotten stuck in the trees somewhere on the side of the course.)

I was unprepared for how hilly the course was going to be, and the first time I stepped up to hit the ball, I had this nightmarish vision of me hitting the ball, watching it fly halfway up the hill toward the pin, and then roll back down to where I had started. However, I quickly realized how silly I had been to worry about this, when I finally teed off and watched my ball land in the long grass in the rough. (What a marvelous thing friction is!)

The other three guys in my group were all very good golfers, (and very patient! I think I hit the ball approximately five times for every one of their swings.... (>_<);; ) so I was able to benefit from lots of excellent advice and learn plenty of Japanese golf lingo. At the end of the back nine, I heard my first "ナイスオン！" (Nice on!) , which I believe translates to, "Way to go! We can't believe you made it onto the green in less than six shots." Anyway, they were very nice to me, and even insisted that I come back to play with them again in May. 頑張ろう、わたし！

The softball men really are the greatest. In Japan, there are a lot of things that I can't do quite as well as I'd like -- with the language barrier, even little things like talking on the phone are difficult, and sometimes I feel like such an idiot. But it's so much easier to keep trying to do better when I know that I can count on people like the softball men to bear with me. I'm very lucky to have found them. :D

Hibernation

Greetings from freezing cold Japan! I'm back in Ehime with a bit of spare time on my hands, so I'll try my best to bring this rather heavily slumbering blog out of hibernation. (....although right about now, a few months of hibernation actually doesn't sound like such a bad idea...It's 32 degrees here at the most, with snow, hail, and biting winds that just about rip my face off every time I ride my bicycle home. Also, the heater in my apartment has been making some really strange sounds since yesterday and I'm getting a bit nervous. If it breaks, I will have to resort to...rubbing my poor frostbitten hands together over the warmth of the vents on the sides of my laptop??? ;)

Anyway, for now, I'll take you back to the blissfully warm days of October when the softball team invited Michael and me to this year's autumn festival. You may recall last year's festival from a previous post -- the day-long event where the men carried the huge portable shrine around town to pray for a good harvest. This year's festival was more of the same, only this time I had a digital camera to document the action.



Here's the men of the town dressed in purple happi. Every time they picked up the mikoshi, they lifted it up above their heads and twirled around in circles a few times. Click on the video below and you can see for yourself.

Then they lugged it down the streets....




...past some rice fields...




...and set it down at its next destination. Here's Shinohara-san (the manager of the softball team), me, and our little friend.





Whenever the mikoshi stopped, the shinto priest (a.k.a. jazz pianist) had to sit in front of this little altar and do a ceremony. He was chanting some kind of scripture(??) when I took the video below.

I hope that didn't make you carsick....




This goblin guy was standing around the festival all day waiting to whack people on the head with his bamboo stick. Apparently, if he whacks you, you'll have good health for the next year.




The kids of the town had been practicing traditional dances and drumming for weeks before the festival, and they took turns performing every time the mikoshi stopped. In this dance, an old man and his wife are trying to till their field, but the monkey in the red suit keeps jumping on top of the old man and keeping him from working. Silly monkey.




Here's my student's sister, dancing with a fan, while the shinto priest/jazz pianist drums in the background.




And here are two of my students, Kiko and Hinako, watching the dancing. (On a side note, I had noticed during our English lessons that both of these girls were absolutely mesmerized by my American mechanical pencils, so the last time I went back to the states, I brought back a few pencils for them as a a gift. Last week, I gave them their presents at the lesson, and I have never seen anyone so excited about a pencil before. Kiko, the little girl in the red jacket, told me that her heart was beating so fast that she wasn't sure if she could finish the English lesson. :)




Besides my private students, Michael and I ran into some other kids from town who were really curious about the two of us. They hung around us all day and brought us food and little presents. (The tan blob in Michael's hand is a bit of Silly Putty that they gave us :) We also had some great conversations which were a little reminiscent of last year's festival:

Sayaka: So are you guys boyfriend and girlfriend?

Michael: Nope.

Sayaka: Then, you must be married!

Me: Nope, we're just friends. We work in the same office.

Sayaka: (rummaging through Michael's backpack) Well, when are you getting married, then?

Michael: eh.....we're not getting married.... (moves his backpack away from little prying hands)

Sayaka: Ah....then you must be brother and sister....





This is me and Kosaka-san, another guy from the softball team who helps to organize the festival.





And here are the softball guys again a little later on in the evening. They had been carrying the mikoshi around since 4 AM that morning so I think they were a little tired out by this point. Even so, when the festival ended at 10 PM, they insisted on loading me up with extra bottles of tea and walking me back to my apartment. Aren't they the greatest? More on the softball men the next time I get around to posting...