Eddie’s Horiday Spectacular

Alright, so it’s been a long time since I updated this thing but I have been extremely busy.  Ok, maybe just lazy but don’t judge me!  The important thing is that I’m back for this amazing post which I am calling “Eddie’s Holiday Spectacular!”  This is pretty much covering October – January.  It’s gonna be a HUGE post so bear with me.

OCTOBER

                       

Soooo in October sometime I got invited to welcome BBQ at Osako-san’s house (my Eikaiwa Circle’s leader).  I decided to rep my Hawaiian roots and wore an aloha shirt to this party.  What I didn’t know was that we were going on a mushroom hunt that morning.  I pretty much got my ass handed to me by a bunch of old men in mountain climbing.  Also I seemed to only be able to find poisonous mushrooms and no edible types.

Rambling

Climbing Group

Covered in sweat, dirt, and reeking of shame, we returned to Osako-sans house and kicked off our party.  The food was delicious and we even got to eat some of the mushrooms that we found on the mountain that morning.  We ended the day with somen nagashi (basically a waterslide made of bamboo that you put somen in and catch before it hits the bottom) and picking sweet potatoes from Osako-san’s garden.

Mushrooms!

Drunk People Singing in German

Somen Nagashi

Sweet Potatoes

     

     Also, in October sometime, I moved into my new office.  The new office is a lot nicer than the older one but lacks that officey feel.  To help break in the new office I hosted a Halloween party.  I felt really uninspired at the time so I just put on an aloha shirt and board shorts and brought my ukulele to school, which was a bad idea because it was a cold ass day; luckily, I live only like a minute from school.

     

    

     To celebrate my first pay check from HJU I decided to splurge on something I really wanted.  Incidentally, I found a Bathing Apes store in this city so the decision was pretty easy.  I got me some Bapes.

     
     During that weekend, my alcoholic friend Sam came to visit me again and we went over to my friends place to celebrate Halloween.  This time I dressed up as Totoro and Sam went as Cookie Monster.  We got fairly drunk and walked down to the grocery store in costume.  I’m pretty sure the people working there got a kick out of drunken Totoro and Cookie Monster buying beer and umeshu.

 

NOVEMBER

            After being in Japan for 5 months, I’ve only been to kaiten sushi once.  It’s a shame but here is a picture of the damage we did after one visit.

 

Skipping forward couple weeks or so we arrive at Thanksgiving! On the actual day of Thanksgiving I went to an Irish pub with a few friends for dinner.  It did seem strange how an Irish place had Thanksgiving dinner but I wasn’t complaining.  That weekend I went to visit Naho and Sam in Onomichi.  Sam and I (mostly Sam) made a Thanksgiving feast for Naho’s family, including home-made stuffing, ham, salad, pumpkin pie, and a bunch of other crap. It was dericious.

Our Feast

Onomichi

DECEMBER

            December was actually really busy for me and I emerged from that month broke as shit.

It started with me meeting up with my friend Matt (Australian Matt) that I haven’t seen since we studied abroad at Kansai Gaidai 3 years ago.  He told me about a beach party on Miyajima that a local hostel was throwing and I jumped on that idea so hard.  However, once we got on the island we couldn’t figure out which beach it was at.  After wandering around the island for a couple hours in complete darkness we gave up and went home.  On the ferry ride to the island we also made a couple friends that we dragged along with us, only to be disappointed.  Haha

The Gaijin Noose we Found

     

     In December I attempted to make brownies for a Christmas party pot luck.  I consulted the venerable Christine Nishida and she gave me a few pointers.  The brownies came out great with the only down side being that it took about 6 hours to make one box.

 

December was also the month where my friend Sam was finally getting kicked out of the country for loitering too long without a visa.  To send him off correctly we drank a bunch: Surprise surprise.  We actually started hanging out a lot toward the end if his stay and we did a bunch of fun things like clubbing and going to Hiroshima castle but I don’t think I have any pics.

I lied, here's one from the castle

Now we arrive at Christmas.  I bought a Wii for Christmas since I was such a good boy.  I also spent about 9000 yen on 3 Christmas cakes for a Christmas party that I had to throw for English lunch time. This is why I am poor now.  We had classes up until Christmas Eve this year so after class we all went to eat shabu shabu and look at Christmas lights.

Wii

Christmas Party

After Christmas, my friend Aleisha came to visit for a day.  Naho came back from Taiwan that day too so we went to eat okonomiyai, it was kinda like we were back at Pacific U.

Right after Aleisha left, my super good friend Shizuka came over for a few days.  Most of her visit was a blur of drunkenness from which we emerged with messed up sleep schedules and matching Bape mugs.  I vaguely remember killing it on some Teriyaki Boyz at karaoke and tearing up the dance floor at a club.

Finally we reach New Year’s Eve.  My friend Alexis invited me to go to a festival at night on Miyajima.  Then she proposed that we climbed the mountain and waited to watch the first sunrise of the New Year since that’s what Japanese people do apparently.  I agreed, LIKE A FOOL, since I figured it was a once in a life time thing.

  Anyway, we get there late at around 7pm and miss the festival completely.  Luckily one booth is still open so we grab some food then attempt the climb the mountain.  

What we didn’t know was that there are 3 different paths to go up this mother, and we chose the hardest one.  It was also pitch black and we had to use my cell phone light halfway up the mountain.  Luckily we ran into this guy who was climbing the mountain and let us borrow a couple flashlights as we climbed the mountain together.  

My Hero!

Once we got to the top we had about 9 hours to freeze in negative temperatures before we got to see the sunrise. The view was simply amazing.  In the end it was worth it, although I don’t think I will ever do that again.  

 
     Jesus Christ I'm finally done.  I probably left a bunch of important things out like taking down  3000yen parfait with Sam, Naho, and Jin Suk, but too bad.  As part of my New Year's resolution I'm gonna try and update this sucker more often.  Anyways, thanks for reading.

- Ed-boy

Rife In Japan So Far.

Ok, so getting to Japan was a real pain is the butt because I had to transfer a million times.  Finally, I met up with someone at the shinkansen (bullet train) station who takes me to my apartment by cab.  This is what I see.

The room is a 8 tatami mat room which is kinda roomy for a 1 room apartment in Japan. However, I am sure babies have larger rooms all to themselves in America.  Another up side to this room is that I have a stand for my futon, meaning that I don't have to sleep on the floor.  The room came fully furnished with a TV that's older than I am, a small table which I use as an ironing board, and a mirror.  I also forgot to mention that the room has a PS2 that I have yet to use because all the games are in Japanese.  The room also has a kitchen that has a refrigerator that comes up to my chest, a microwave, and a washing machine. The stove has only one burner so multitasking in the kitchen is impossible, meaning all the episodes of iron chef I watched were for nothing.  The bathroom is comparable to an airplane bathroom in size.  Also, I did not know that there was a water heater outside of the bathroom that I needed to turn on, meaning that for the first couple days I took showers that were colder than a yeti's asshole.

 I heard that right down the street from my house was supposed to be a grocery store and a 7-11.  I decided to head down and pick up supplies the next day and stumbled across this baby.

It says bicycle parking area.

I became fond of this bicycle riding penis so I decided to make this shop my haircut  place.  I asked for a haircut and the owner just looked at me confused out of his mind.  At first I thought that my Japanese skills were really shitty since I couldn't even ask for a haircut properly in Japanese.  Then I found out that the barber was just partially deaf, which I though was awesome. I mean, don't people who lose a sense usually make up for it in some awesome way? Like Stevie Wonder is blind but he sings like no other, and that guy with no hands can make sandwiches with his feet.  I thought that since the barber was deaf, he could cut hair like a pro.  It turned out to be a normal haircut experience.

As for work, I would post up pictures of my students but I think it would be really creepy if I just went around campus taking pictures of girls.  So instead, here is a picture of my office.

There were a lot of stuffed animals in the office that were given as gifts to the prior TA and left here.  The office is nice and all but the administration is kicking me out this week and moving me to a brand spanking office.  Chee.

 The next week I decided to go and visit Osaka since we had long weekend and meet up with friends I hadn't seen in years.  It was lots of fun catching up with the Japanese kids our seminar house successfully turned into alcoholics 2 years ago.  For old time's sake, we spent the whole weekend drinking and singing karaoke.  Since I was really drunk most of the time, I didn't take as many pictures as I should have.  Excuse me for making memories instead of trying to capture them.

DJ Chicocks

Masayo and Tomo-kun

I know its dorky, but I was really excited when I got my own stamp.  I had it custom made and it says "ratto" in Japanese, which sounds a lot like rat but actually should be my last name.  Now instead of signing documents, I just bust out my stamp and stamp the shit out of documents.

The next weekend was the sake festival.  Of all the festivals in Japan, I have never wanted to go to any as much as I did this one.  My alcoholic roommate from Oregon, who is also in Japan living with his girlfriend, came over for the weekend and we went to the festival together.  The weather was really bad but it didn't matter much once we got drunk.  The festival kinda works like Oktoberfest would, where you pay a 1800 yen or $20 entrance fee and get a little cup that you can use to get sake from all the stands which had samples of sake from all regions of Japan.  After the festival, 5 of us went to karaoke near the train station.  although, before we did that, we stopped by a convenient store and bought a few beers to sneak in.

The enclosure that the festival was in.

The group and some random Japanese people.

It was pretty crowded.

Puke.

Karaoke.

The sake cup.

Sam feeling it the next day.

The next day, Sam and I got up nice and early in the afternoon and went to check out the Peace Park.  We had heard rumors of a Mexican restaurant around that area so we went out in search for it, only to find that it was closed.  It was a really nice day though so it wasn't a complete waste.

Gembaku (A Bomb) Dome.

Uhh, some statue I forgot the name of.

There were paper cranes from a school in Australia on this statue.

Thousands and thousands of paper cranes at Sadako's statue.

We were told that the Mexican restaurant was south of the statue of the mother and her child.  This is one of the 6 statues we found depicting a mother and child.

These are some condoms we found in Japan.  If you know Japanese products then its funny. If not then you will think I am weird for posting this.

A few days later we tried ordering a pizza from Pizza Hut. We bought the largest pizza possible and the cost was 3200 yen which is well over $30.  The diameter of the pizza was only about the length of Sam's foot.  It was a sad but at least we had the N64 version of Mario Kart to balance out the sucky of that evening.

Well this pretty much sums up the first month of my life here in Japan.  Thanks for reading.

- Eddie