Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Candyblog: Halloweenday Edition

HEY DUDES
Halloween is a day for candy. This is why a good candyblog would come in handy on a day such as Halloween. Unfortunately, all you get is this.

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Sunday, October 28, 2007

HALLLOOOOOWEEEEEEEEENNNNNNNkinda

Yesterday I went with my host father to go see the Shimabara Castle, which is about an hour away from here. As you can see from the photo , it was a really nice day. A little windy, but nothing too too strong; just strong enough to mess up my hair for every photo I was in.

Photos weren't allowed inside the castle which was a bummer because there was plenty of interesting stuff that I wanted to show you guys. They had a ton of samurai armor, lots of really interesting sword hilts and other stuff from that sort of time period. On the top floor they had an observation deck. The view would have been great but they put a dang fence up to make sure people wouldn't fall off.

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Monday, October 22, 2007

I don't really have enough for a full blow CandyBlog Deux, and really, this stuff isn't candy. It is, however, the best idea ever.

Dear readers (apparently there are a ton of you now) I give you baked potato flavored potato chips.Just think about that for a moment.
What they've done here is amazing.
They've taken a potato and said, "Hey, I feel like having some baked potato. Why don't we cut this up, fry it, and pile a bunch of artificial flavorings to make it taste like a baked potato? Also let's put some Hokkaido butter on it. I love that stuff."
Note to Japan: Next I would like to see some sausages that taste like bacon, cold noodles that taste like ramen, and fried chicken that has the texture and taste of boiled meat.

For some reason, the Japanese are all up ons Hokkaido butter. Apparently it's the best butter in the country, but I'm pretty sure it's the only butter in the country. I think Hokkaido is probably the only main island that has conditions that allow people to raise cattle (I think it's about the same latitude and climate as New York state), so the whole thing just sort of seems kinda dumb to me. Kinda like seeing a bunch of grass and being all, "Oh man was this grass grown in soil? Oh dang that must be some pretty superior grass you got there. Much better than non-soil grass."

Also, they do a bunch of weird flavors for anything over here. It's kinda like how England has some pretty unusual but delicious flavors, only uh, weirder. So far I've only really had these baked potato flavored chips and some bologna flavored ones, but I've seen some dumpling flavored ones around that I've been meaning to try. I'll keep you posted.

Ain't nothing much happened here for a bit, but I'm supposed to be heading off to a volcano and a castle this weekend, so we'll see how that goes.

Saturday, October 20, 2007

Bunkasei

Today was the culture festival of my high school over here. It took up pretty much the entire week in preparation, just like the sports festival. Each class transformed their classroom into some sort of exhibition of Japanese culture. Or at least, that's what the school intended. Instead, each class just sort of did stuff they thought was cool and went on from there. My class' theme was "time travel" and "illusions & trick images". But uh, the time travel was really just HEY LOOK AT OLD THINGS and the illusions were mostly MC Escher paintings and woodcuts.

Other classes had a bunch of signs up telling people to check out their rooms. One poster said "Let's Balloon House!" and I thought to myself, "yeah, that sounds like a good idea. We should balloon house." It was actually a pretty rad setup. There were nets on the doors to the room, and a ton of balloons filling up the room. There was such a ridiculous amount in there, they came up to about my chest. I asked someone how many balloons they put into the room; six thousand. SIX THOUSAND.

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Sunday, October 14, 2007

KENDOOOOOO

Kendo pretty much took over this weekend. I started my weekend on Saturday with Kendo practice at the high school early in the morning. They were preparing for the match on Sunday and practice was mostly just packing for the next day. After that, I went to a Kendo demonstration set up by the Rotary clubs of Isahaya City for the exchange students at Nagasaki Wesleyan University.

They had one of the top 100 Kendo fighters in the entire nation there helping out with the demonstration, as well as three guys trained in actual swordfighting. They set up a wooden post with a bundle of tightly packed straw strapped to the top, and this is what one of the dudes did to it.

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Friday, October 12, 2007

Uh just a quick question here
you guys wanna scrap a few bucks together and get this?
I think we could make it into a pretty rad pad.
Link

MONgoro

Have you ever had to bite your tounge to stop laughing because you're afraid it might be rude?

I did today, and to tell the truth, what I was laughing at really wasn't all that funny. In fact, I think the fact that I was laughing at it probably makes me a douchebag.

Today we had to give some speeches in class on national festivals back at home (I didn't because I am so NEEWWWWWWWWW) and uh, some Mongolians went up to talk. Now I would like everyone to understand that I have absolutely nothing against Mongolians; I think they're fine people. However, the way they say "Mongolian" in Japanese along with their accent just made me fall apart in class. Pretty much all they were doing was saying "MONgoro" (with a swoop up to the "n", and a slide back down on "goro") to describe their national festival, and every time it was mentioned, I cracked up.

After the first dude went down, I thought I was safe. I had made it through his speech without bursting out loudly, but I was teetering on the brink the entire time. But then the second Mongolian went up after him AND HE DID THE EXACT SAME THING. By the end of his speech, I was biting my toungue and crying from laughter. I never cried from laughing before. I figured it would be from laughing at something ridiculously hilarious, but apparently for me it happens for the dumbest reasons ever.

When class was over, I felt like a big douche for laughing at how they talked. Hopefully they won't get angry and team up on me because there's like five of them in the class. And if they didn't realize I was laughing at their speeches this time, hopefully they won't give any more speeches about their home country's customs, because I dunno if I could make it through another speech.

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

DELISH DELISH DELISH DELISH DELISH

DELICIOUS FOODS
That is what Japan is full of.
All of you probably know about sushi and sashimi and all that stuff, and all of it is delicious. But I'm gonna tell you about something that you might not know of (I certainly didn't), and it is DELISH.

It's called かつおのたたき and oh man it is so good. It's lightly roasted bonito (fish) that only gets cooked a little of the way in. The rest is raw like normal sashimi. It's sort of like eating sashimi, only that the flavor is much stronger because it's been cooked a little. You dip it in soy sauce just like sashimi and sushi.

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Monday, October 8, 2007

Nagasaki Kunchi

Yesterday I went to Nagasaki to see the Nagasaki Kunchi festival with the other exchange students. It was HOT and HUMID out. Like, really damn hot. We had a couple of hours before we had to be at the performance so we walked around the city and saw some of the sights and pretty much right at the first place we went to I was already sweaty and all I wanted was to go back to the hotel and take a shower. We mostly saw stuff that I had already seen because I had been into Nagasaki before, but many a couple of the other students don't stay in the Nagasaki area, so we went again. We saw Dejima, the only port in Japan that was open to foreigners during the isolation, the memorial to the 26 martyrs, the first 26 Christians who were massacred when Japan began its isolation, and a bridge that's famous for looking like eyeglasses.



They also had these real big "umbrellas." I guess they started off as umbrellas, but after a while just developed into what they are now because people just kept piling tons of shit on top of them. These things were really damn heavy too; over 100 kilos each. Pretty much the theme of Nagasaki Kunchi should just be GUYS CHECK OUT THIS THING IT IS HUGE. All they did with these was having a single person lift it by themselves and run around, stop, spin and repeat.


My favorite boat was the Dragon Boat. The dragon head was absolutely ridiculous. Not only did it have horns EVERYWHERE, teeth that could not possibly fit in its mouth and bloodshot eyes, it also breathed fire. It was most definitely the raddest boat.







At the end came the most impressive display of the entire festival. A ton of big dudes ran out carrying a big wooden carriage thing and ran around a bit which was all MEH ALRIGHT YEAH OKAY BRING BACK THE DRAGON. But then they threw the whole thing up into the air and caught it with only one arm. Knowing the Kunchi, it was probably pretty heavy. And you can't see it in the video, but in the carriage are three kids plaing drums, even as they're tossed up into the air.



Then afterwards we had din din and went to bed. Today we went around to more places I been already like the A-Bomb museum and Chinatown, but we saw this pig so it was all worth it.

I really don't have anything else to say, but I want to put these pictures up so HERE I GO. Hopefully most of them will speak for themselves.

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Thursday, October 4, 2007

Stay Classy

SO I was looking through FACE magazine (a free magazine that's distributed in many different cities here on Kyushu, each with their own edition) and I saw that there was a photo section on the Isahaya Nonoko, a festival celebrating something or other where they sold a bunch of fried chicken (or at least that was my experience with it). A lot of the photos were pretty much the same formula; either a dude in a tee jus' lookin' tough or two or three girls flashing the peace sign. Then I came across this picture:

I find myself saying that almost everyday over here. I'm really glad it was in this book, or I'd be struggling with my pocket dictionary all the time. However, the book is a little strange with the topics it brings up at times, especially with the way it presents them. One moment you're talking about buying a camera and your new pad, and the next you're talking divorce. Does this seem a little abrupt to anyone else? I mean, you were just talking about moving to Kamakura together. Aren't you guys gonna try and work it out? (this came up at least twice in the book. I got no idea why they seem so fixated on the subject)

But probably the best part of the book is the pictures it uses for the lessons. I'll post a few favorites. And by "a few" I mean three. Because I am lazy and it's not worth going through the book again to find good examples. First up is their depiction of foreigners in the book. Notice the Japanese man is always pretty normal looking; his eyes are composed of an iris and pupil with the whites surrounding it, and his face is in a pretty normal position. The white foreigners, however, always seem to have trouble with their hair when they arrive in Japan, and their irises seem to turn all sprially in their eyes. Also I guess they got less oxygen over in Japan because the foreigners who are unused to the environment are constantly gasping for breath.

This picture here almost made me laugh out loud in the middle of class. LOOK AT HIS FACE. LOOK.
Oh yeah and uh I started classes at the college. It's better than spending my whole day either reading things from Fark in the library or doing nothing in classes I can't understand. I met some english-speaking people in my class too which is good because basically for the past two months all my converstations have just been WHERE ARE YOU FROM DO YOU LIKE JAPANESE FOOD DO YOU LIKE JAPAN HOW ABOUT DEM JAPANESE GIRLS HUH HOW TALL ARE YOU DO YOU LIKE GREEN DAY WOW YOU HAVE SOME BIG FEET HEY LET'S ARM WRESTLE CAN YOU SPEAK JAPANESE DO YOU LIKE PUDDING. And before any of you are all "oh ho ho, how humorous, Jeremy" I would like to say that I have actually been asked all of those questions, including the pudding.

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