Wrapping Things Up!

My past couple weeks have been spent preparing for my move back home. Actually, I'm starting this post sitting in a hotel room surrounded by backpacks, suitcases, and boxes that will hopefully get shipped off within the next few days (Won't be taking them with me through the airport, but more on that later). However, I do have a few adventures to write about that have happened since the last post, so here goes.

One weekend Cheryl visited and we went with Rodney to see a day of the sumo tournament. Sumo tournaments take place over the course of two weeks, with matches being held every day. Since we could only go on a Sunday we tried to get tickets in advance (Here's how awesome Japan is. If you want tickets to any kind of event in advance, go to your nearest convenience store and there's a machine where you just search for the event, select your seat/options, then take a slip to the register and pay for your tickets right there. They have everything from sports to concerts to exhibitions, etc.) but all of the advance tickets for sumo were sold out. Luckily there were 300 tickets that could only be obtained from the box office on the day of the tournament, and they were 2200 yen (whereas the cheapest advance ticket was 3800 yen). So we woke up at what my father would call "o dark thirty," met Rodney at the train station and got in line an hour and a half before the ticket box opened. At 8 AM the box opened and we got the 98th, 99th, and 100th tickets. Now, one sumo match takes about 4 seconds, which means in an hour you can watch perhaps 40 matches (the math may seem funny but before each match some official guy sings a song to each of the wrestlers). And sumo isn't just a 2-hour deal. The matches start at 8:30 AM and go until 6:00 PM. In the morning, the unranked and then the lowest-ranked members of the sumo dojos are paired and compete with each other. There are a lot of these, so most people who buy advance tickets don't even show up for these. Cheryl, Rodney, and I watched these matches for perhaps an hour and a half and then left the stadium to go on a quick jaunt to nearby Asakusa, where there's a popular shrine. We happened upon a festival (as occurs about 50% of the time you go somewhere unfamiliar in Japan), so we got to eat steak-on-a-stick and walk around the shrine grounds. We also got to see a short taiko performance in the street, which was quite awesome. We then headed back to Ryogoku (where the sumo stadium is) and sat back down in our seats at around 1:30 with plenty of time to catch the higher-ranked matches, which started around 2:00. Overall, sumo was fantastic. It was great to read the brochure about the history and sanctity of the sport, and seeing it in person allows you to appreciate just how awesomely big and strong these wrestlers are. The rules were really simple to learn and using our smartphones we even got to research a bit of the techniques that the wrestlers use. It's way more exciting than the typical person would describe it: "fat men in skimpy underwear shoving each other around." Drinking beer, eating a bento box, randomly picking a wrestler and cheering for him was really fun. In all actuality, watching sumo is definitely among my top 5 experiences in Japan. The following weekend I even turned on my TV at home (for the first time in forever) to watch the final day of the tournament.

On a later weekend I met up with Rodney, some friends and one of our students to go to Tokyo for a beer festival. It was held in a large wooden-floored room lined with tables and about 70 different small breweries from around the world represented. Upon arriving you were given a special beer glass and then you could go around getting samples of the different kinds of beer. I tried a lot of different specialty beers including chocolate,  rice, and yuzu flavored beers. I also had beer from various countries, the most exotic of which was probably Palestine. Sipping beer, chatting with everyone there, and meeting other foreigners made it a pretty fun day.

On another weekend I went out drinking with Rodney and some students at a nice little seafood restaurant. There I tried some of the strangest food I’ve had here in Japan, for example an entire fish skewered, spiced up a bit and roasted over a fire. By far the most interesting (and worst tasting) was the squid sashimi. Picture a squid in your head, with head, tentacles, and all. Then shrink that image down to about the size of your thumb, and that’s what I ate: an entire squid in miniature. Whole. It was awful. After the first bite I felt something pop and knew immediately this would not be a good experience. After chewing a few more times (which was actually futile) I decided I didn’t want to be chewing it anymore and just swallowed what was left. Blech.

Cheryl made a trip to Fujisawa so she could use my apartment as a base for a Saturday dinner meeting in Tokyo with some friends. This meant we got to spend Sunday together, so we took a quick train down to Enoshima and walked across to the island. I had been there a couple of times before, but hadn't explored the entire island, so it was nice to do a bit of walking, go up the tower again, and then to the back of the island where they have a shrine of some sort inside a cave with a cool dragon statue. We also got ice cream. If you haven't already gathered from my talk of ice cream in the past, everywhere you go in Japan, you'll find different flavors of soft serve ice cream. The place in Enoshima actually had a wide variety of strange flavors (most only have vanilla and one or two specialty flavors). I had sakura (cherry blossom) flavored ice cream and Cheryl had wasabi flavored ice cream. Mine was pretty good and Cheryl's was better than you would expect. Unfortunately it was too cloudy to see Mt. Fuji from the island, but we did go up the tower and take some pictures of the coast from there.

I met my Japanese teacher and Rodney at Rodney's apartment not long ago to make sushi and try my hand at some calligraphy. We had all kinds of different raw fish cut up and then we assembled the sushi by hand (there's a special name for this kind of sushi but I can never remember it) using seaweed, rice, some leafy green vegetables and other ingredients. It was a good opportunity to practice my Japanese with my teacher in a casual, everyday setting. Then we sat on the floor and practiced writing kanji with the fancy calligraphy brushes. We got a crash course on the different strokes and then practiced writing various characters. Of course Rodney and I sucked, but we got a few good laughs out of it and generally had a good time. At the end of the night the three of us played Portal 2 on the XBox together. For those of you that know how difficult it is to explain the concept of Portal to a non-gamer, imagine trying to do it in Japanese. This is what Rodney and I attempted to do, which also produced a lot of laughs.

That about wraps up the small tidbits. Unfortunately I don't have access to my pictures at the moment but once I'm back in the States I'll have to upload them. Speaking of, I won't be returning directly to the U.S. On my way back I'll be going to Nepal for a two-week backpacking trip. That's why I'm having to mail a lot of my stuff back home. I may include a later post on this blog for Nepal, though I think that goes outside the purpose of this blog, which is supposed to be about the time I spent here in Japan (well, and the side trip to Korea). Anway, I'll leave this post here and post a new one for Mt. Fuji.