LINDA LINDA

We've done karaoke a few times while in Japan.  It's an awesome time - you rent a room by the hour with your friends and sing your little heart out.  There's one song we ALWAYS sing.  It's one that everyone knows, no matter if they're Japanese or American.  You know it and you don't even know it yet.  The song is called "LINDA LINDA" by a Japanese punk band called The Blue Hearts.



See, even if you don't know ANY Japanese, you can sing REEENDA REEEENDAAAAA and jump around like a crazy person.



Fortunately Joanna and I got into the Blue Hearts before we left for Japan. They were featured in a music game I liked and also a really great movie called "Linda Linda Linda." It's a funny coming-of-age movie where a bunch of high school girls start a band. And of course they sing Linda Linda in it, so you gotta watch it!



LIIIINDAAAAA LIIIINDDAAAAAA!!

Asa Zoo

Last weekend we made a trip out to Asa Zoo.  Due to Japan's much less strict animal cruelty laws, the zoo wasn't as humane as, say, zoos in the U.S.  But (most) of the animals looked happy and we had a great time!  Okay, that's all for now, bye.




... Just kidding, here are some pictures:

Baboons!  There were so many of them in the enclosure and they were all beating on each other.  I was so scared for the little baby one but he always managed to get out of trouble in time.

You could play tug-of-war through the glass with a baboon.  Dude was STRONG!

Giraffe kisses are the best kisses.

Elephant action!

A penguin or two!  You could get really close to the glass.

The cutest baby bunny in the world.  And also the sneakiest - he's supposed to be BEHIND those bars!

The Japanese Serow.  Is it an antelope?  A deer?  A goat?  No one knows for sure.

Red pandas are SO difficult to photograph, which is a pain because they're so cute you wanna take a million pictures of them.  They're really camera shy.

The only picture that actually turned out well.  The majestic Yuki!

Joanna and a TORA.

This actually happened.

On the way out we drew a picture in the visitor's log.  I drew a giant salamander, Joanna drew a red panda.

Hondori and Shukkei-en Garden

Two weekends ago, Ryan and I decided to check out Hondori (literally translated as "Main Street"), the primary drag through downtown. This was a weird little courtyard we found, featuring avant garde sculture and a red lorry selling waffles.

This is Ebisu Shrine. When I first came to Japan, they were having some Ebisu Festival to honor the god of commerce, but I never knew there was a shrine associated with all those festivities. The reason? Ebisu shrine is crowded in between a grocery store and a coffee vending machine. Modernity has taken hold on all sides of it, so it's a funny little juxtaposition.

A survival horror game we found at a gaming store downtown. Michigan: The Game apparently features Great Lakes splendor, unspoiled Michigan forests, and zombies.

An army of puffer fish-hatted advertisers for a local restaurant. I still haven't worked out what this restaurant is, but they have been advertising the pants off it. I see these hats everywhere! They also had a giant puffer fish balloon.

On to Shukkei-en Garden, a famous garden in Hiroshima said to be a miniature reproduction of a garden in China. It's centered around a little lake with ten tiny islets. It was overcast that day, but the foliage in early Autumn and the flowers in Spring are supposed to be spectacular. I think it looks pretty lovely in the Winter, too.

This is called the Rainbow Bridge, and it's got a nice look. Treacherous to climb, though, as you might expect!

They wrap the trees like this in the winter...to keep them warm, I guess? Ryan and I couldn't figure it out. This one looks like a giant demon hand giving the surrounding landscape the finger.

More wrapped trees. Looks sort of otherworldly, don't it?

This river was bright orange! I'm not sure why, but it was very striking.

A traditional tea house. It's all closed off and presented as an almost-sacred historical relic, but we could hear some dude watching soap operas inside. What the heck!

Ancient meets modern. I really like the reflection of the skyscraper in the lake.

Ryan loves him some tiny islets.

Aw heck, I love me some tiny islets too!

Beauteous, even in the stark weather.

This is not in Shukkei-en, but in an area near the train station said to be largely untouched by Japan's ever-encroaching modernity. Supposedly it looks just like the Showa era back there. Not that I know what the Showa era looked like...but it was refreshingly simple and low-tech, I'll say that. This was the neighborhood shrine.

More of the Showa area. Open stall markets with handmade signs and ultra-cheap prices. Plus paper lanterns!

No, it's not Snakes on a Plane here. It's Snake Flight. The Japanese must have figured Snakes on a Plane was some American cultural reference that wasn't going to translate. Surprise: it was just an appealingly stupid title!

Round 1

Merry Christmas to our friends, family, loved ones, and casual perusers of this blog! I hope your holiday was as special as ours was non-existent. Ryan and I both had to work on Christmas Eve and Christmas -- that's what we get for living in a country where Yuletide exists only as an excuse to maybe eat cakes at some point during the day.

However, I did manage to celebrate the tail-end of my Christmas Eve by eating pizza and watching Michael Jackson: This Is It with my co-worker, Kristi. (There's an English movie on every Friday at 8:30, but we never know what it's gonna be until that night). And then on Christmas Day, Ryan and I went to Round 1 Arcade to bowl and sing Karaoke.

Speaking of Round 1, allow me to show you some pictures!

A Doraemon claw machine -- or as they call it, a UFO Catcher. You think these are big prizes, you should have seen the five-foot Baby Mickey that was in one of the machines. And yes, it's basically impossible to win these things. Good to know some things are consistent between countries.

Guess I spoke too soon! Here is the little toy kitty Ryan won me out of one of the aforementioned machines. But the enormous stuff really IS impossible to win.

An Evangelion Pachinko machine. Remind me to make a post some day about Pachinko, Japan's fantastic gambling obsession. It's basically like pinball, except one hundred times more pointless and futile.

A catcher machine filled with little ice creams. You could just buy ice cream of similar size for like 200 yen, of course, but why do that when you can pay 100 yen a try to MAYBE win ice cream someday?

The Danger of Buying Shrimp Snacks

Last week while grocery shopping I thought I'd pick up some snack-type food.  "I've been eating too healthy!" I said to myself. "Let's INDULGE."  So I bought a bag of shrimp-flavored chips.

Shrimptacular!

Don't look at me like that.  I'd had the shrimp snacks before and they were surprisingly good!  And for 86 yen (roughly 90 cents) a bag, they weren't too shabby.  But what I failed to do is actually read the package.  For you see, in the yellow letters it reads "MAYONEEZU."  That's right, I bought shrimp and mayonnaise flavored chips.  I mean, shoot, it should have been obvious.  That shrimp is totally squirting a tube of mayo all over the place!

Something you should know about Japan is that there are a million flavors of everything.  It's just how they do it here.  Some examples: during training, my fellow trainee bought a bag of fish-flavored chips.  They were weird and delicious.  The first week I was at my school one of my co-workers brought in soy sauce flavored Kit-Kat bars.  They too were weird and delicious.  My co-worker Yoko told me about celery flavored Coca Cola.  My guess?  It was probably weird and delicious.

As for the shrimp and mayo snacks?  Yep, weird and delicious.  But in spite of that I learned a valuable lesson about reading packages.

Okonomiyaki and Mitaki Shrine

Okay!  I said I'd follow up with the other half of last weekend and here it is.  Sorry for the delay.

On Monday we went out for lunch and got okonomiyaki.  What's okonomiyaki, you ask?  Only the best food ever!  And it's a Hiroshima specialty.

Here they are making it on the grill in front of us.

The finished product!  Mmmm...

As you can see, it's made of noodles, lettuce, an egg, some teriyaki sauce, and other deliciousness.  It's put in a magic pile and cooked on a grill.  If you come to visit us, we'll make you eat it!

After lunch we headed to Mitaki Station so we could walk to a shrine Joanna heard about.  It was up the side of a mountain and we were both recovering from a cold so it was kind of an effort, but it was totally worth it!  The pictures will do a better job of explaining how beautiful it was.

Look at all that NATURE!

Joanna by the pagoda.

Place was surrounded by these picturesque waterfalls.

It was all her idea!

Stairs up the mountain.

Waterfalls EVERYWHERE!

Your shrine-standard thunder god.  No big.

This tree was nuts.  How is it growing like that?!

So as you can tell it was pretty darned gorgeous.  A great afternoon trip!

Also, have some random pictures from this set:

I want this kid's jacket really bad.  It reads: "BACK TO SCHOOL.  Feel so Good.  HARDKNOK GENERATION.  THE BEAT WILL MAKE YOU MOVE."  Gotta love that wacky Engrish!

We found this prize machine at the arcade.  That's right: instead of candy or small toys, the prize is MEAT PRODUCTS.  Mini sausages, just what I always wanted!

Japanese police cars look like they're from Robocop or something.  So futuristic!

Hiroshima Dreamination Christmas Lights

You wouldn't think Japan would be so obsessed with Christmas. Er, at least I wouldn't. Christianity is pretty much non-existent here, and I always thought of Santa Claus as a distinctly European thing. But darn it, none of that seems to matter, because Japan is Christmas CRAZY.

What do they do on Christmas, you ask? From what I've been able to gather, they eat cakes. And...that might be it. More research is required.

Anyways, here's some Christmas lights coming on in downtown Hiroshima. Enjoy!

Mount Fuji from the Sky!

One of the first things I saw when we crossed over into Japanese airspace: the renowned Fuji-san from several miles up! Enjoy!

Hiroshima Castle, Peace Park, and DREAMINATION

Okay, this is gonna be a big post with a lot of pictures, but bear with me!

This weekend Joanna and I went to Hiroshima Castle.  Like Okayama Castle, it's been rebuilt, but unlike Okayama it has a good excuse - its site is about a kilometer from where the atomic bomb went off.  All of my students rag on the castle, saying "if you've seen one castle in Japan, you've seen 'em all!" but I had to remind them how cool it was to be in a country that actually HAS castles.

Anyway, this is what we saw:

Hiroshima Castle is surrounded by a HUGE moat - ain't nobody gettin' in this castle unless they can swim.

The castle itself!  6 floors of coolness.

They had this part where you could dress up like a samurai.  I got really into it.

For the ladies, you could wear a kimono!  Joanna got really into it too.

You know how I said everything has a cute mascot?  Well, even the castles do.  This is Hiroshima Castle's mascot, a samurai cat with an eyepatch.  Adorable!

After that we walked over to the Peace Park.  That's where the A-bomb Dome and the museum are.  I won't go into too much gory detail, but for those of you not in the know, the Hiroshima Memorial Museum is maybe the saddest place on Earth.  We're talking a place with a diorama of children with their skin falling off and countless examples of the actual charred clothing of those children.  To make it even better, they come with audio recordings detailing their families' grief as they died however many short days after the blast.  There's a 3-year-old's tricycle, charred and melted, and a recording of how the father buried his son in the backyard with it.  Like I said, saddest place on Earth.

Wandering the park and going through the museum had me walking out feeling awful, saying to myself "THE WORLD IS A TERRIBLE PLACE.  WHY ARE PEOPLE SO HORRIBLE."  So I guess it did its job.  (Poor Joanna - she's already been through the museum and she had to do it again with me!)  But as I thought about it and observed the bustling city around me, I felt a bit more confident in the human race as a whole.  How so much could spring up from such destruction is really inspiring.  I mean, scientists thought plants wouldn't grow for 75 YEARS after the explosion, but lo and behold, they started growing back in a few months.  The train was back in service 3 weeks after the blast.  Rebirth is an ever-present theme around Hiroshima - it'd have to be after what happened here  .

Enough waxing poetic, have a few pictures:

The A-Bomb Dome (note the bird in the window!)

Paper cranes at the Sadako Children's Memorial.

There are these funny lumpy trees all over the place.  I don't know if they come like that or if they're cut like that or what!

The Flame of Peace, which will be extinguished once all nuclear weapons on Earth are abolished.

The Cenotaph.  The Japanese inscription reads "Rest in peace, for the error will not be repeated."

Not many pictures from inside the museum, but here's a scale model of before the blast...

... and after

Actual cranes folded by Sadako!

So after that haunting experience, we needed a pick-me-up, and what better way than with the HIROSHIMA DREAMINATION?  All through December, Peace Boulevard is lit up with these enormous Christmas light displays that have nothing to do with Christmas.  Check em out!

Joanna in a giant picture frame!  Behind her is a pipe organ made of lights.

A big cool pirate ship!

In the whale's mouth!

Aladdin's palace!

There were these Christmas carriages going up and down Peace Blvd.  The handlers were wearing Santa suits.

So that was all one day of the weekend.  What about the other?  We got okonomiyaki and found a mountain shrine, but I'll save that for another post this week.  Stay tuned!  Same blog time, same blog channel!