Share the Fire! Share the Fire!

Happy belated Fourth of July to one and all! I just realized yesterday that this is the 4th time out of the last five years that I have NOT been in the country for Independence Day! Which by the way, (and here is the history nerd in me) how many of you knew that the actual day that Congress voted to become the United States/signed the Declaration was July 2nd? See, this convenient thing called the internet just wasn't around back in those days...it made getting the word out a tad tricky....

Anyway, Saturday I went with the Ibaraki Cultural Association on "Quest Ibaraki Day!" (Ibaraki is the state that I live in) with a bunch of other foreigners living in Ibaraki...almost all of whom were girls...though given that we went to a pottery museum, I'm not entirely sure that's surprising. We were all on a chartered bus together, so it was quite funny to watch people's reactions as well all got on and off the bus. I don't think any Japanese person had ever seen that high a concentration of foreigners in one place outside of Tokyo, so they didn't quite know what to do with themselves but stare.

On the bus, to my surprise, I met up with Marie. Surprise, surprise! I spent most of the day hanging out with her, Marina and Phoebe, another high school student currently living in Hitachi, who is originally from New Zealand. She and I got on really well, and I was surprised how well she was fairing in Japan given that she's more punk than I think Japan knows how to handle. She's a spunky red head with gauged earrings and a tattoo of Snow White's apple on her arm...but I thought she was a hoot and we had a lot of fun wandering around the pottery museum cracking jokes about the abstract pottery that was supposedly a horse (we really didn't see it).

After the pottery museum we had bentous (Japanese box lunches) and went to Oohyo Pottery where were given a quick demo in how to make a oblong dish shaped like a leaf, a sake cup or a mug. Given that I've worked with clay before, I threw the Mr. Demo man's instructions out the window (I don't think he was to happy about this...but since I seemed to know what I was doing, he really didn't say anything) and set about making my own creation...Meanwhile, Phoebe attempted to make a Sake cup, which actually ended up looking much more like a box after I helped her smooth out all the cracks with water so it wouldn't explode in the kiln.

I haven't played with clay in a long time (since maybe middle school or high school I think), but it was very much like riding a bike once I got back into it. It was a lot of fun just playing with clay and making a general mess with my hands, and it was very cool knowing that by the end of the month, they'll have baked and glazed it and should have the final product shipped to my apartment at the Kaikan. Its an awesome feeling knowing that I'll be able to take something home like this from Japan that I made with my own two hands. I can't wait to see what the final product looks like. I wrote my name and the date on the back and told them to glaze it red, so we'll see how it turns out. :D Oh, and that little heart is supposed to represent Mito, because I'm about 99.9% certain I will be leaving a part of my heart behind when I come home.

After browsing the beautiful ceramics in the building next to where we built made our pottery, we boarded back onto the bus and headed off to nearby Kasama to visit their local shrine the (Kasama Inari Jinja), which supposedly is the home to the Ukanomitama no kami, or the diety of foodstuffs and the root of life. The shrine wasn't anything terribly special, but it was fun to just talk to a bunch of the other students from nearby Tsukuba University, and I got a kick out of this one Chinese girl who I really didn't know, but who walked up to me and asked me if we could take a picture together. Since she asked me in Japanese, at first I thought she was asking me to take a picture for her and her friend, but no, she wanted a physical picture with me. I guess even amongst a group of foreigners I'm still the one that sticks out the most?

I tossed a five yen coin into the offertory box (five yen coins are known to be particularly lucky because in Japanese it sounds very close to good luck) and got my fortune as I always do at most shrines that offer them. As per usual I got the 'Normal good luck" fortune, which, I guess if I get it all the time (seriously, I've never gotten a really good one or a really bad one), means that at least my luck is consistent :). Marie and I wandered around the little shops towards the front of the shrine and she told me about her new family while I bought some Hello Kitty Pens with charms on them that were specific to Mito and Ibaraki. Due to a sudden torrential downpour (Japan is very much prone to these I have found), we got stranded in the shops for awhile, which was okay because the shop keepers were very nice, giving us tea and asking us all where we were from and what we had done that day.

Sunday was, of course the 4th of July! I spent a large part of the daylight hours cleaning my room and doing homework before Rinda came over for dinner and I introduced him to the wonderfulness that is Tacos. Since he caught onto how to eat Tacos a lot better than Yasu did, he didn't make any funny distorted faces in his attempt to eat the taco...but it was quite funny watching him put a napkin under the bottom of his tortilla to keep the food from falling out and to eat it at least half-way decent manner. I laughed at him and told him that Tacos were just not a food that you could eat and still look good, so not to even bother. One thing that I'll never forget though, is when I took the Spanish red beans and rice off the stove...he just looked at it and asked me "What is that?!". He didn't believe me when I said rice, so being the good sport that he is, he tried a small spoonful...his face alone had me bursting into tears of laughter and assuring him that he wasn't going to offend me by not eating any more.

After Tacos we called Takami, Tony and Charles and spent the rest of the night playing LittleBigPlanet at Charles's apartment and setting off sparklers in the Kaikan parking lot. Takami showed off more of his funny side that he debuted at AKEL by striking funny poses and in general, just making a fool of himself. We were originally using Tony's $1 Zippo knock-off to light the sparklers, which worked for a time before eventually dying...so we resorted to using an incense stick that Tony had all ready burning in his room. It generally took forever for one of the fireworks to light off the incense stick, so once we got one started, we started lighting other sparklers with the lit ones as quick as we could, which prompted Takami to start saying "Share the fire! Share the fire!" every time he went to go light his sparklers.

Takami and Rinda were very much amazed that this was the first time to my recollection that I'd ever played with sparklers, since it is a very Japanese thing to do in the summer time.They also informed me that what I called a "sparkler" was actually a firework in Japanese (this confused me beyond words. I told them that by the American definition, fireworks are loud and go off high in the sky) and sparklers are something completely different that I just don't think we have in America. To them, Sparklers are little wicks of paper that burn slowly from bottom to top and the goal is try and get it all the way to the end while it glows and occasionally gives off sparks (none of us succeeded).

My American friends who read manga will get a huge kick out of this though...in a lot of Japanese manga I've read, young people are usually depicted at summer festivals or in yukata crouched down and holding a little sparkler between their two fingers whenever they do sparklers (usually right after the fireworks)...much to my surprise, when we lit them, that was the exact position that Takami and Rinda assumed. I guess some things in manga are culturally accurate.

I think though, by far my favorite part of the evening was when Takami, Rinda and Tony started twirling their sparklers around and singing "Happy Birthday Dear America".

Monday after school Miki, Yuuki and I grabbed dinner at Gusto before heading to Shidax to meet up with the Oohiras (my host family from May) to do some Karaoke. They had a new exchange student, a Viet-American student from Anaheim who was there for two weeks, named Nhu.It was a lot of fun and Nhu was really interested in asking me a lot of questions about my program and how I got into it and what not, since she says she wants to come back at some point in college. She was a pretty cool girl and I hope that she does get to come back, because I could tell just by her questions (she was asking all the right ones) that she really was passionate about this, and it reminded me a lot of myself in high school.

I was very much amazed at the difference in our language abilities despite the fact that we had taken Japanese for roughly the same amount of time. I guess me having people to talk/write with over the years has made more of a difference than I gave it credit. I also had an amazing epiphany moment when I was singing Japanese songs, and for the first time I really and truly felt like "Wow, I know I have gotten better at Japanese." Of course, I've certainly felt like I have but this was just a moment when I knew. Normally, in Karaoke, the songs that have Kanji (complicated Chinese characters that can have multiple meanings and readings per character) in them always have furigana (small Japanese letters above the Kanji that tell you how to read the Kanji), even for the most simple, daily used Kanji, so that even children can sing the songs...but for whatever reason, today, a lot of the songs just didn't have furigana...and for the most part, I was still able to read them and keep up with the songs...something I wouldn't have been able to do three months ago, not by a long shot. It felt really good.

Well, I still have some homework to finish for my Japanese studies class tomorrow, and I have a lot of freshman English speeches from E.S.S. to correct, so I best be going! Until my next adventure!