スイーツみたいな毎日

So Andy and I did a lot of cool things over Golden Week, as per usual. We started out in Kobe　and did the hip things, like hang out at Harborland hitting up some Golden Week sales, since Andy had to buy some new shoes because he lost one of his. Yeah, just one.





For some reason, Harborland has a ridiculous amount of gelato and boba.



One of me and Andy's favorite things to do has become going to bakeries. These are turtle melon pan I guess? Really fucking cute.

I've got a lot more pictures and stories, so stay tuned. I'm doing a pretty good job convincing myself there isn't that much more school left and I can just chill out. And my birthday is in one week when I will turn 21! And more adventures are just around the corner.

karaoke and Kobe

So, gosh, I have so much to catch up on... I had a pretty cool weekend after a pretty lame week, but today (I wrote this on Sunday) I'm glad that I finally have some time to myself because... it's been a while.

This weekend, one of my host family's former host students Mary came to visit with her boyfriend, Taka. She's been doing JET for the past 3 years in Nagano. It was really great to hang out with another native speaker of English, and she brought a lot of upbeat energy to the house. We went out for karaoke (my host dad, Aika, Ryoto my younger host bro, Mary, Taka and I) and sang our hearts out. I hadn't been with my host family yet, even though I know they all really like to sing (and they're all very good, as well). Hiro, my host dad, was taught how to sing by (are you ready for this) his host dad's ex-wife in New York City, where he then had a job as a lounge singer for a short while. His favorite singer is Billy Joel. It was really a pleasure to hear him sing finally (he sang in Japanese, English, and Korean). I hear my host sister Aika singing to herself all the time, and she belted out some JPop, sometimes teaming up for a duet with Ryoto, who surprised me the most. He's 16 (almost 17 I suppose, he's pretty much the exact same age as my brother) and he sang soulful JPop ballads that will surely make any girl swoon. His English pronunciation was also excellent (his "major," I guess specialty? concentration? in high school is English, but I don't ever hear him speak it). I busted out my usual fare and kicked off with the Evangelion opening, since it's by far the nerdist song I know in Japanese. My host family likes to make fun of me for being a nerd (otaku), and I figured it doesn't get much nerdier than Eva (probably the most influential giant robot anime of the past 15 years). They had never heard me sing before and said nice things about my Japanese pronunciation. I fully stand by karaoke as a great means of improving your language skills, since you have to read fast, and also you can hear what you're supposed to sound like and mimic that to your best ability. It's pretty effective.

Sadly, I don't have any really cool PVs to share (this karaoke place, or maybe it was our song selection, wasn't so big on the official PVs).

The next day, Aika, Mary, Taka and I went to Kobe, which is a really cool city. It's not all that far from where we live (maybe an hour and a half all together, including the 20 minute walk from our house) and I would really like to spend more time there. It's very international, which is maybe the most interesting thing. We went to this cute district with lots of European-style houses that you can walk through (you have to pay to get in, though), which isn't that exciting if you've been to Europe or New England, but I can see how native Japanese people (or someone living abroad here) would get a kick out of that kind of architecture. We took a lot of great pictures, although unfortunately my camera battery was dying so I had to conserve.


Uroko House, so named because the exterior walls look like uroko (fish scales).



We ate all-you-can-eat Chinese food in China Town, which was welcome at the time because I was starving (it was about 3 PM by the time we finally ate), but towards the end I definitely started to feel a little sick, probably because I ate too much.

I took this from my cell phone since my camera battery was dying. This is Kobe Port Tower, I think it's called.


Pirate ship, I'm not sure why.

Our next stop was Merikan Park/Harborland, which is definitely another futuristic date spot. I think if there's a Ferris wheel, it automatically counts as a futuristic date spot. We took some purikura and rode the Ferris wheel and walked through the malls, which were really cute. I wish I weren't so broke right now, because I would really love to go shopping... I desperately want another pair of Japanese shoes, but they're pretty expensive and they also don't carry my size a lot of the time. I'm an LL in Japanese sizes (that's large large) despite being an average 8 in the US, and most places don't carry that size (or at least, whenever I ask they're like, no way). Harborland also had a disproportionate amount of gelato and boba (which is called "tapioca" in Japanese, you may know it as bubble tea), but I am definitely okay with that.

お台場 Odaiba

We spent our last day in Tokyo (well, evening--the first part of the day was spent getting Andy a cell phone, which was no small feat, and doing karaoke) in Odaiba, which neither of us had heard of (shocking, I know), but hit up at the suggestion of Koizumi-sensei. Odaiba is a fancy shopping area on the coast, and also a futuristic date spot. Maybe my favorite part was that we found a cat store where they not only sold cat-related goods (both for humans and for cats), but had a kind of cat petting zoo where you could pay a ridiculous amount of money (it was somewhere between 800 and 1500 yen) to play with real live kitties. I can't bring myself to sink to that level though, no matter how much I love kitties.

We were pretty exhausted and dreading our night bus back to Kyoto and the subsequent train ride to my host family's house in Osaka, but we managed to take some pictures anyway. I hope to go back when I'm not so dead sometime.




The lights on the boats in the water were great, very pretty.


And for some reason, they have the Statue of Liberty there. You can also see Tokyo Tower in the distance in this picture... it's that orange thing to the left.

We ate dinner in a fancy Italian restaurant that had a great view of the city over the water.

横浜 Yokohama

Andy and I have this joke about おしゃれデートスポット (oshare deito spotto) trendy date spots in Japan, mostly because of Detroit Metal City. But anyway. We went to a couple, including the futuristic Minato Mirai 21 in Yokohama before we had dinner with Koizumi-sensei, my former Japanese teacher who was at Oberlin for my first 2 years.





One of the clearest indicators of an オッシャレデートスポット is a Ferris wheel (観覧車 kanransha). The one at Minato Mirai is beautiful, and huge, but we couldn't ride it because it was the one day of the year that it wasn't open. So we took pictures instead.








It was windy.

Yokohama is totally cute. We also had an adventure trying to figure out where all these gothic kids were coming from... at first we thought they just like to hang out at Minato Mirai, but eventually we followed them and found out the cause: a Nightmare concert in the convention hall. They did the OP and ED to the first half of Death Note... unfortunately, those are their only good songs. I really love that fashion though, and want to try it out sometime. It's so fancy though, so it's expensive. But we had a great time checking out all these kids in their crazy outfits.

We had a great time eating delicious tonkatsu (fried pork cutlets) with Koizumi-sensei at a restaurant which overlooked the street by Yokohama Station, which was delightfully filled with taxis and pretty lights (I'm an absolute sucker for nice cityscapes). It was so great to see her, and she told us that she just signed a contract with Oberlin and is coming back in the fall! I told her everyone is going to be so excited to hear, and it's true. Man, I love Oberlin, and Oberlin's presence in Japan is also pretty fabulous. I'm glad I picked a school with a great East Asian Studies program by coincidence.

Tokyo Disneyland

So I have approximately a million things to say about Tokyo Disneyland... I really wanted to write an academic comparison paper comparing it to the one I am familiar with in Anaheim (god, what has a liberal arts education done to me?). Andy kept mentioning an article he read about it in a book called Remade in Japan which I guess I'll have to check out now.

Anyway, in case you are not familiar with my relationship with Disneyland, I grew up in LA, and therefore have been to the original Disneyland quite a few times in my life. This summer, I went 3 times with different people, and had lots of fun! So naturally, I wanted to check out Tokyo Disneyland.

The first big difference was that TDL (as they call it) is really only about 30 minutes away by train from central Tokyo, which makes it a hell of a lot easier to access than the one in Anaheim, which in itself is a good distance away from LA (maybe an hour in good traffic) but you also have to brave the 5, a treacherous freeway, which when faced in rush hour can mean about 2-3 hours. But even with crowded trains, it was no problem to get to TDL, and they drop you off almost right in front of the park. I was proud of Tokyo for not renaming the stop to Tokyo Disneyland (it's 舞浜 Maihama).

They have Cinderella's castle at TDL, where we have Sleeping Beauty's, and I liked Cinderella's asymmetrical design a lot more.


Here's me being a snarky American in front of it. It's their 25th anniversary. We had our 50th a few years ago.

Probably our biggest mistake was that we were there during spring break, which is Japan's equivalent of summer vacation, so everyone in the world Japan was there. I generally avoid Disneyland at its busiest times, so perhaps it's that I'm not used to being there when it's crowded, but I've never experienced 2+ hour wait lines before. The longest we saw, as we were getting ready to go, were 210 minutes (that's 3 and a half hours, kids!) for Splash Mountain and Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, I think.

Another interesting thing was lines for snacks, which were absurdly long. I really wanted a churro but never got one because the lines were always too long. T__T Also, their flavors of popcorn ranged from very strange to delicious-sounding (soy sauce and butter, curry, honey, and caramel) and tons of people had purchased the fancy popcorn buckets shaped like characters.

We did eat something Mickey-shaped... it was this pizza, which did a really good job of tasting like American and not Japanese pizza.



I wish we had a picture of the Mickey-shaped manju (meat buns), because we decided that was the quintessence of Tokyo Disneyland.

While we were waiting to get on Pirates, a cast member dressed as a very convincing Jack Sparrow came through, and when he passed by us he patted me on the shoulder and said, "'Allo, mates." Future career options: cast member at Disneyland in Anaheim who speaks to Japanese tourists, or cast member at TDL who speaks to English-speaking tourists.

The crowd was mostly Japanese college students, I felt. Of course there were families, and high school/middle school aged kids, but I saw a lot of groups of girls and also couples (Disneyland is a popular date spot in any country, after all). There were only a handful of non-Japanese people, but I imagine it's the off-season for them... although what with cherry blossom-viewing season right around the corner, they'll probably show up soon.

Everyone was wearing their special Disney headgear, which changes pretty frequently from what I gather. The must-have item of the moment were little hats that are attached to hair clips, so they're comically small. Probably the weirdest one I saw was a girl who had a Stitch hood/cape thing that pretty much looked like you had skinned Stitch and made him into a cape... his head was a hat on your head, and it went down to his hands which were little mittens for you. Kind of weird?

One of the more strictly Japanese parts of TDL was the gift shop at the end. As we were leaving, the crowd in the gift shop for omiyage (presents you bring your friends and family after visiting someplace special) was enormous. The line for making your purchases was just as bad as for the rides. I was glad I bought mine ahead of time in Adventureland. The sheer variety of differently packaged boxes of chocolate, snacks, candy, etc., was also staggering... omiyage is such an important, crazy part of Japanese culture, one I have definitely not mastered. But I get cut a little slack since I'm a 外人... hopefully.

We had a lot of fun, despite it being mad crowded. I hope to go back someday when it's not so crazy.