(no subject)
For once the jetlag is working in my favor: I'm making it to work at reasonable times for the first time all summer!
No blow-by-blow (though if you want that you can ask) but here are some highlights from the trip:
No blow-by-blow (though if you want that you can ask) but here are some highlights from the trip:
- We saw the Gion Festival in Kyoto, pretty much the largest festival in all of Japan. It takes place over many days, but the main highlight is the parade. On the pre-parade night, they close down a large part of downtown and the shrines display their floats for everyone to see. Food vendors selling festival food (octopus balls are the ones most people recognize, though it turns out there's a lot more weirder stuff, like kimchee crepes on a stick (and some not-so-weird stuff like shaved ice)) line the streets as far as you can see, and half the city comes to pack the streets, wandering around wearing yukata (extremely common for the girls, about 1/3 to 1/2 of the guys). No exaggeration, there must have been hundreds of thousands of people out.
- I boned up on my fashion sense and did a bunch of clothes shopping in Fukuoka. It was the ideal place for me because I like the people there (they seem more laid back and welcoming of foreigners), I like their fashion sense, and I know the city well enough to know where all the good shopping is.
- I blew a lot of money on DS games. Mostly rhythm games which I was either able to find for a good price, or which aren't available in the US. A few other goodies as well.
- We stayed at a high-end hot springs resort again (same one I'd been to before). I was expecting that we'd have to eat dinner separately (it's normally served in your room, and we were split into 3 rooms) but they ended up giving us one of the large private dining rooms so we could all eat together. I don't know if that's SOP or if we were given special treatment. Also, as they finished filling our trays with food, the president of the inn came to greet us. (I'm not sure how to take that. On the one hand, it's part of Japanese culture to honor us that way because we're cultural/social outsiders, and so it should be kind of expected for him to do that. On the other hand, I did feel honored by it.) He welcomed us, and explained about the meal, which currently featured a local breed of cattle from the same breed as Kobe beef which had been brought to the region a few years ago. (Although we had an English-speaking staff member there, I did the translating myself. It made us not look like a bunch of stupid foreigners, I felt. Unfortunately, the president would say three or four sentences at a time, and I would only fully understand the first one. I didn't have the heart to admit that to him, especially since half the problem was vocab, so slowing him down wouldn't have helped. The staff translator didn't correct me, though (but did I really expect him to?).)
- I got to see Yokohama. I wasn't surprised to find that I liked it much more than Tokyo. It's a small[ish], friendly city, with a nifty harbor area (called Harbor Future 21 (what a great Japanese name!)). It also has Japan's most famous Chinatown, where we stopped for lunch to fill up on dumplings.