After classes I met up with Yuuki in the Ryuugakusei Center (International Student/Exchange Student center) because she gave me a bunch of Japanese music...and it occurred to me that
that was quite possibly the last time I'd ever be in that room, and that the last lunch I'd ever had at the arm chair/love seat set near the window had been on Thursday with Yasu. Forgive me if I've established a bit of an emotional attachment to those chairs, but I've had lunch there almost every day of the semester with Tony, Yasu, Takami, Rinda, Yuuki, Masashi, Adon, Miki, Rola and some other miscellaneous exchange students. (Not all of them every day of course. But certainly some variant of them.) You also have to understand that aside from Ikeda-sensei's house, these are the only arm chairs/sofas I've seen at all for the last four to five months. They were essentially the "Aquarium" at the HUB to Ibaraki. Whenever I was meeting a friend for lunch or they were helping me with homework or vice versa, it was almost always understood that that was where we were meeting. A lot of homework correction, trip planning, party planning, laughter and just general goofyness occurred here.Around 5:30 Tony and I headed outside to the front of the auditorium where there was dance practice for the Mito Komon festival. We practiced the festival dance around campus for a good hour, and after awhile most of the students practicing left for other obligations, leaving Tony and I and a bunch of random school employees/teachers that I'd never seen before dancing around with clappers. So of course we got stared at. I'm excited for the festival though, because we get to wear Tabi (what I've heard some westerner's call "Ninja socks"), Hapi coats and Japanese headband like things in the festival, all very traditional festival wear. The only thing is that we'll be dancing to the same two songs over and over again...for four hours. It will certainly be quite the experience that I'm likely never to have again though. :) You only live once, right? I'll try and get a friend to be nice enough to take video of us dancing throughout the parade next week!
After dance practice, Tony and I met Yuki A., Yasu and Takami at every one's favorite Ramen place (well...maybe its tied with Ho-Chi), Taiko. I may never have explicitly stated this before, but Taiko is the traditional after meeting hang out of E.S.S.. Of course, we went to other places throughout the semester, but for the entire month of April, and at least once every 1-3 meetings after that, we would find our way back to Taiko. So of course, I had to go one more time with some of my favorite people from E.S.S..We have this kind of running joke that I can't decide what I'm going to eat without either Takami
deciding or at least giving some input. This comes from the fact that at our first time at Taiko, I was so overwhelmed by the fact that they didn't have a menu, but rather sets/combo meals written out on very distracting bright yellow strips of paper on the walls that I couldn't really read. This led to me almost always getting either the Smile Number 2 or the Regular Number 2 order because that's usually what Takami got. However this time, I got to proudly tell him that I finally knew what I wanted for myself. :) (The number 5 if your wondering...and it was oh so delicious). Yuki also suggest filling my little spoon with vinegar and dipping the noodles in it, and so I figured, why the heck not, and did. It may sound disgusting to dip your Ramen noodles in vinegar, but its actually really, really good and adds an extra kick of flavor that I traditionally find Japanese food lacking. Japanese food isn't exactly known for its flavor. It usually either has none, is salty, bitter or salty and bitter (I'm still trying to figure out how that one works). It was so good. I can honestly say I'm going to miss Ramen, because Japanese Ramen is a far cry from "Cup o'Noodles."After a late movie night with Takami, Yasu and Tony, I was up early to meet up with the Oohiras to go the movie theater to watch Karigurashi Arrietty, the newest movie from Hayao Miyazaki/Ghibli. The movie literally started at 8:40 in the morning. When I told the Atsuko-Mama that generally, movies don't start playing in America until the earliest, 11:30, and anything before that is a special occasion, she was very surprised. I was just as surprised to find out that the first movie of the day and the last movie of the day are the cheapest to go to, and movies after 6 are than ones cheaper than ones before six (the opposite of America). It was really fun to go with them, plus I got to see Arrietty, which I've been wanting to see since I first heard they were coming out with a new movie back at the Tokyo Anime Convention with Araragi in March. :) Oh yes, and the wonderful thing about Ghibli movies? They're children movies, which means that I basically can understand everything that is being said. :D
After Atsuko-Mama made me an awesome lunch of french toast with caramel ice cream and a round on the Wii with Haruru, I met Yuuki, Ayako, Marina and Miki to go spend the day at Ooarai! It was SO hot, with not a cloud in the sky, so it was the perfect day for the beach, and for the first time since I've been here, I was actually able to go into the water. It was really, really hot, so after all that sun, the water certainly felt good. Miki rented a big inner tube that we all took turns floating around in the water with and Yuuki brought a table and big umbrella, so along with the food we brought and Karage/Onigiri lunch Miki's mom had made us, we were set for the day. I have to say, I was surprised at the amount of Bikini's I saw (since generally, Japanese people are not fans of tanning or being directly exposed to the sun for longer than 15-30 minutes without some layer of clothing or am umbrella to shield them.)We walked to the nearby Outlets to window shop until the fireworks were supposed to start that
night, and on the way back to the beach we walked passed all these carnival vendors selling traditional Japanese festival food such as Karaage, Shaved ice, Takoyaki and my favorite (what I got for dinner), Yakisoba. They also had a bunch of light up toys for children, masks that people wore on the sides of their heads as opposed to their actual faces, balloons of popular anime characters and other blow up toys that I didn't understand the reasoning behind. And walking up and down that street was like walking through a rainbow of Yukatas. It was really cool and completely like I walked into a manga. I'm really pumped for Mito Komon Festival now, since apparently its huge.Unfortunately, the fireworks were a bust since it was so cloudy, they didn't amount to much more than colored clouds. After half an hour of waiting for the clouds to clear, we eventually gave up, and apparently everyone else had the same idea, because we got stuck in a 2 hour traffic jam on a normally 20 minute drive back to Mito. Japan doesn't to expressways quite like America...if you could call it that. It was all good though because we ended up having a Karaoke Jam session almost the whole way home. :)
On Sunday, my exchange student who stayed with us three years ago, Araragi, came up from Tokyo to visit. If you had asked me three years ago if I'd be in Japan, showing Araragi around my Japanese home town and speaking Japanese, I might have called you crazy. Three years ago, I couldn't say much more to her than "Konnichiwa" and had no real aspirations of speaking Japanese, much less majoring in it. Araragi taught me some, thought I was learning really fast, we looked into enrolling me in some beginner Japanese classes at Penn State...and well, the rest is history. :)
Tony was nice enough to lend us his bike so we could go around the city at will and not be constrained to the costs, schedule and locations of buses, which was really nice. I met Araragi at the Station around 9:30, and we started out our day by heading to Kariakuen, since she had said
she really wanted to see it. I took her the longer way via Senbako (the local lake) since it was a nice scenic area that connected up to the gardens. She got really excited when she saw the swans (remember, she's from Tokyo) and so she wanted to take a picture with one. I said sure and told her to stand on path by the swan. When I said that I expected her to stand on the path in front of the grass that the swan was sitting on, a good 3-5 healthy feet away from the notoriously territorial bird....but she took it quite literally and got about 1 foot from it before it started hissing and puffing up its feathers. I don't think she's ever seen a swan in real life, because until it attempted to bite her as I was screaming "Araragi get AWAY from the swan!", she didn't make an attempt to move away from it. I then explained to her that the was the international bird symbol of "You're in my bubble...and I will attack", before we tried to take the picture again. I/the swan would only let her get as close as 5 feet away....but we got the picture!The we headed up to Kariakuen and Tokiwa Jinja (Shrine), which Araragi really enjoyed, and she had a fun time explaining in depth to me the things of a shrine that I thought I knew, but didn't actually. She is really into Japanese art that is simplistic (she said this is her favorite quality of
Japan...her answer seemed that much more deep compared to my answer of "The people and the culture") and was completely floored by the gardens of Kariakuen and I got to see them in a completely different light -- through her eyes. Things like this never fail to astound me. I know I've been to this garden before, but because of Araragi and how she saw things, I felt like I was in a completely different place. She knew so much and she pointed out that every single tree, flower, plant and even rock (yes, rocks) had been placed where they were completely intentionally. Especially in the inner gardens of Kobuntei, the lord's house at the center of the gardens. I'm usually not a huge art person, but I could actually see what she was talking about. And it was really cool.There were a bunch of people painting at the gardens (one every 50-100 feet) so we finally
stopped at a man who was painting a 750 year old tree to ask him what they were all painting for and to comment on how pretty his art work was. He was really nice and was so surprised that we were there given that Araragi was from Tokyo and I, the foreigner, was showing her around. He told us too that entrance into Kobuntei (the name literally means Love of literature or something like that...so I think this is where the feudal lord entertained people came to read literature/poetry back in the day. Back then in Japan, being literate, being able to appreciate fine literature and being able to create poems on a dime was essential for being part of the upper classes) was free for the day. We were really excited, because we were originally going to pass over it because of the cost, so we headed through the bamboo grove to Kobuntei.When we got there, we were even further surprised by the tour guide, when he told us that in one of the rooms of the house there was a tea ceremony going on. I wasn't 100% sure what he meant by that, but when we finally got to the room, we saw that there were three separate set ups so that three tea ceremonies could take place at any given time...and it was free! All you had to do was sit and wait. Araragi did tea ceremony club in high school (she's very much into traditional Japanese arts/clubs. She is also in the calligraphy club at Tokyo University now :) ) so she was really excited, especially because this was a different style from hers. I had no idea until
after Araragi told me during the ceremony, but Summer tea ceremonies are different from Winter ones (I chalked the differences up to it being a different school than ones that I have attended in the past). It was really cool. They ladies actually saw right away that I was a foreigner, so they gave me this little elevated pillbox pillow that I could sit on while my legs were still to the side in a formal Japanese sitting position (my legs still cramped up though), and the ceremony began. It was so elegant and pretty....the only thing that ruined the atmosphere was the Joban train that would occasionally run along the tracks at the bottom of the hill between Kariakuen and Senbako. The ladies running the tea ceremony were so nice and so patient with me because I haven't memorized the proper etiquette of accepting/turning the tea cup in your hand quite yet (yes there is a formal way to do that) and we talked and they were really nice. Their pupil even saw me stand up with an expression of pain on my face and chased after me to tell me to try walking backwards for a minute...and it really worked!...and did I mention this was all free? We lucked out big time, because apparently on the 1st of every month, entrance into the Kobuntei is free and this tea ceremony group puts this on.After Kariakuen we grabbed lunch at Strazeria so I could show Araragi a view from the 10th story of the LABI Building, and we discussed all kinds of things from her time in America to my time here, and how her family was so worried that I wouldn't have anything to eat. I laughed when she said that but completely understood her concerns, and told her that I was eating a lot more fruit here and that while here, I may not have liked it, but I did try mashed fish cakes, fish eggs, raw shrimp, raw crab, Octopus balls and Natto. She was really happy that she would be able to tell her family to not worry because I hadn't starved!
On the way home we stopped by the art tower, which was nice since it was an actual sunny day, so we got some pretty good views, and Araragi grabbed some post cards as come souvenirs. (Japanese are really big on bringing back presents for loved ones in case you didn't know.) Apparently NHK will broadcast this building and the Mito skyline from time to time on their network, and since Mito is famous for its Natto, Araragi and her friends have taken to calling it the "Natto Tower", so she was excited to tell them that she had gone to go in said Natto Tower. On the bike ride home to return Tony's bike/show Araragi my apartment, we did a quick bike tour of the campus, and I showed her the E.S.S. club space. (I really should get a picture of it one of these days...note to self.)She wanted to know all about my time here in Mito, so back in my room we drank Lemonade
(did I mention how hot it was today? Because it ridiculous....and I'm completely rocking a farmer's tan because of it.) and looked through all of my pictures and just talked. It was really cool. Three years has changed us both in a lot of ways, but talking with her was just so natural, and I think we actually connected on a deeper level than we first did (though I'm going to say at least one third of that is because her English is better and I can actually speak Japanese this time), it was really, really nice. Its felt really good to know that 3 years may change a lot of things...but it didn't change the important thing -- our friendship! It gives me so much hope for a lot of the friendships that I'm leaving here with!
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