Keeping Busy

Sorry it's been so long between updates. They've been keeping us really busy at school, and on top of it somone was being stupid and managed to knock out the internet for our building. So, the only place I can get internet is at school on the laptop they've issued, which is slow and all in Japanese. They keys are in slightly different places, and most of the menus are completely unreadable, but it's manageable.

The first week of classes have been a lot of fun. They're certainly keeping us busy, but the work isn't too bad, and it's amazing how much I've learned. Even in one week I think I've become much more comfortable with speaking Japanese in casual settings and improvising beyond the phrases they've had us memorize (please, thankyou, could you please...). The really interesting part of the program has been interacting with the Japanese students on such a regular basis. It's amazing to see how much you can communicate with a few words and a hand gesture, and it's really interesting sometimes to see the cultural difference. I really don't have room or time to type out everything I've noticed, but if anyone's interested I can post some of the essay I've had to write for the Japanese culture class.

This last weekend they canceled class Friday, and bused us all up to Anamizu to stay at a gym/dorm facility owned by KIT. Think of it as kind of a summer home facility owned by the college. On the way up we stopped at a museum dedicated to early Japanese "robots" and other cool ancient mechanics. These ranged from a purely recreational robot capable of serving tea to an ancient cart geared to maintain a set bearing by using differential gears in the wheels. The museum also had a lot of really cool demonstrations of optical illusions and perspective tricks.

From the museum we continued on the the facility at Anamizu. It was really nice to get out away from the city again, off the beaten path a little. Rural Japan is really strange, and not something I had really given much thought to before arriving. The US view of Japan really focuses so much on the neon lights and the urban sprawl of Tokyo that its easy to overlook a lot of the smaller villages. Anamizu, like a lot of the smaller villages I've seen so far, was really just a small down-town built up around a main street. The rest of the city was small homes and rice patties owned by fishers and farmers. More traditional houses were much more popular than the high-rises in Tokyo and Kanazawa, making for a lot of really scenic views. The whole look of the town was very traditionally Japanese, but a very different Japan from the one I've seen most of the trip. The black dots in the water are buoys you can see in the picture are used by local fishermen to cultivate clams and mussels.

After arriving, we dropped our stuff of an headed out to the docks by the dorm. KIT owns a dozen or so boats at Anamizu, and the program took all 38 IJST students out on a large one to get a better look at the bay. The cruise was really relaxing after being on the bus all day, and a really cool opportunity to see even more of Anamizu. We left at about 6PM, passing a lot of fishermen, pulling nets in small tugs, or checking mussels on the buoys. It's hard to really describe how strange it was to see such a different side of Japan. So much (basically all) of what I've seen in person so far has been cities. The entire atmosphere out that far seemed entirely different. I'm sure it's really not so different from the difference between the city and the country back in the US, but seeing it in Japan was very cool.

After the boat ride we had a barbecue with the SGE (students for global exchange) students from KIT. As I mentioned we've been seeing a lot of them, and it's amazing to really to see and interact with students living in such a different place on such a regular basis. After the barbecue we hung out for a while and played some card games. I also got the opportunity to use a Japanese style public bath back at the dorm. It was sort of strange, but would actually have been really nice, had they had the water at the right temperature. Instead it was up way higher than it should have been, and after two minutes in my hands started going numb and I decided to get out.

The next day we got up early, and were back on the road. This time we stopped at Wajima, a fishing town and port at the tip of the peninsula. Wajima was absolutely beautiful. The city is nestled right between the mountains and the ocean, surrounded on both sides by steep mountains dropping off straight into the ocean. We walked through an open air market there, selling a lot of locally made crafts, and lots and lots of fish. They had piles of crabs that were still live, and all sorts of squid and octopus, as well as a huge varitey of fish. At the advice of one of the SGE students I tried a free sample of what turned out to be "fish guts pickled in salt" according to his cell-phone translation. I'd already chewed and swallowed it by the time he gave me the translation. It was pretty good. I might have bought some, but I didn't want to carry it back on the bus. After the market we wandered around the city for a little longer. They had a small hotspring supplying a free public footbath, so we all took the opportunity to wait there for a while.

After that we got to see another unique feature of Wajima first hand. A lot of ports and fishing cities have a lot of fishing cities have a lot of gulls, etc. that are attracted by the bits and pieces left by boats unloading. Wajima had a large population (at least 20) of トンビ（literally kites), large hawks with a wingspan of about 5ft. The birds hang out over the town, stealing fish from the market and docks. We'd been warned about them at the market, but a lot of people hadn't taken the warning all that seriously. We could only see a few of them (1-2) because of the tall buildings, and they didn't really look very large up that high. It also hadn't really occured to anyone how aggressive they were, until we were warned by a local after buying icecream and walking out onto one of the larger streets. Not 30 seconds later one of the kites swooped down and knocked the icecream out of the hands of one of the students just ahead of me. They ended up being much bigger than they'd seemed, and much more aggressive than I'd assumed. We saw the warning signs on the way back to the bus.

We stopped at the Shiji temple on the way back. It was pretty cool, I saw a sweet monk. On the way back we passed a lot of really spectacular seashore, arriving back to Kanazawa in time to catch a great sunset. Below are a bunch of pictures I couldn't fit in above.

The maintains around Wajima. The seashore was just off to the right of this.

Most of the exchange/Japanese students at Shiji temple.

The seashore on the way back. Most of it looked like this, really amazing.

The sunset from the top of our building, Nishikawa Heights.