School Trip to Tokyo - Day 1&2
I forgot that I was working on this. ^^;
About 2 weeks ago, I started a blog entry in a Word document, got almost to the end, and then...I dunno. Went home or something. Today at work, I found it in my USB drive and finished it up, though, so for anyone interested in a...well, honestly, a fairly long read reminiscent of my old mega blog entries, here ya go: the tale of my trip to Tokyo on a school trip! Enjoy!
(Note: I'm just cutting and pasting this sucker.)
So I’m sitting here at work and it just so happens that I’m bored out of my MIND today, so I figured I might as well try my hand at a blog update in a wild stab at productivity. Tried already to work on getting my lessons digitized (typed up 4 before I couldn’t take the tedium anymore), then Broken World (which I haven’t touched in weeks), then on the Hafcro Navigator (which I worked on all yesterday), and then on checking my backlogged e-mails (the “I’ll reply to this if I find the time” variety). All of that took 2 hours. So here I am at 11am, desperate for something to do.
Luckily, I do actually have something to report.
Last week I finally went on a 修学旅行 (shuugakuryokou, aka “school trip”). It’s Japanese tradition for the graduating class (elem 6th graders, JH 3rd graders, hs 3rd graders) of every school to go on a trip, kind of as a bonding experience before entrance exams hit , everyone graduates, and the kids change schools and possibly living situations. For JH kids up here in the Tohoku region, it’s pretty much a given that the school trip for Junior High will take you down to Tokyo, since most kids up here have barely been across prefectural lines. I hear schools around the Kanto region (that is, around Tokyo) tend to go down to Osaka, Kyoto, Hiroshima, etc.
Anyway, when I got here 3 years ago, I saw pictures of predecessor bummin’ around Tokyo with the students, and since then, I’ve wanted to go myself-it’s one of those unique experiences you can only really get as a teacher or a student in this country, and one of the things I really wanted to do to enrich my experience on JET. But of course, my office was reluctant to let me go. I let that slide for 2 years, but when year 3 rolled around and the end of my contract started to loom up on the horizon, I decided to take the initiative and tell my teachers that I wanted to join them, and work from there (a method that has gotten me in trouble before, but I figured, “What’re they gonna do? FIRE me? Lol. Right.”). The teachers at Kanita JH were enthusiastic to have me along, and went to my office on my behalf, asking if I could be on the team of chaperones for the trip. My office used their last remaining tactic: telling me that, while all the teachers were getting a free ride, I’d have to pay for myself. I shrugged and said, “Of course.” To which they replied, “0____0…wait…wait, what?”
(I can’t wait to see their faces as they watch me take the train out of here and leave them with their new ALT. Yea, folks. I’m REALLY leaving. Good luck with that new contract-busting schedule you’re imposing on my poor successor.)
Anywho.
So the school trip was last week, and apparently I picked the right year to go. Not only did I manage to miss the popular school trip activity of watching a baseball game, but I also got to a) go to the infamous ramen museum in Yokohama, b) see Wicked on my birthday, c) finally get to Tokyo Disneyland, and d) get my Chinese visa for the eclipse trip this July (which I apparently would’ve had to go all the way down to Tokyo to get anyway). Definitely got my $900 worth (+$180 for the visa-ugh).
Day 1: Tuesday, April 14, 2009:
Woke up at 5am. This was a recurring issue on the trip. 5am and I don’t play well together, and we were thrown into each others’ paths repeatedly over those 4 days, often after I’d been out with my old buddy 12am the night before. 12am and I had a lot of catching up to do-5am was like a waspy old aunt rapping on the floor with her cane, come to spoil our fun.
But I survive.
At 6am, then, on Day 1, one of my teachers came to pick me up, and we headed on over to the school to wait for the students to convene. Incidentally, this is the first time in 3 years that I’ve been to Kanita JH in the early hours of the morning. My Tairadate days start at 7:50, Kanita usually at 9 on account of the bus. Seeing the students arrive was…odd. I kept getting this urge to ask them what they were doing there so early. ^^;
At 7:20, we had a “Let’s begin our school trip” ceremony (the first of many seemingly-unnecessary-but-in-the-Japanese-eye mini-ceremonies that were to take place over the next 4 days). At 7:25, we loaded onto the bus and counted heads (for what would also be the first of many times), and then at 7:30, we pulled out of Kanita JH and headed for the tiny, 2-gate airstrip that is Aomori airport.
That’s how the whole trip was, btw. Every student and teacher attending received a little travel booklet that laid out everything in our schedule down to the minute-and I mean everything. Down to the minute. Where an American might give, oh, 15-20 min for ambiguous “travel time” between point A and point B, the Japanese put it something like this:
8:15 - gathering at the train gate
8:20 - preparing to move through the train gate
8:22 - moving through the train gate
8:24 - ascent to the train platform
8:27 - arrival of the train
8:28 - boarding the train
8:32 - announcement that intended stop is arriving
8:34 - preparing to get off of the train
8:35 - train stops
8:36 - disembarking from the train
8:37 - assembling on the train platform and head count
8:38 - preparing to leave the train platform
And so on.
More remarkable than the staggering anal retentiveness of this breakdown, I think, is the fact that we only once managed to be late for anything, and that was by one minute loading onto a bus. We were, again once, 20 minutes early for something, and it was quite funny watching the teachers kill that time by looking back and forth together, completely unsure of what to do with themselves.
Anyway, we made it to the airport and got to our flight without incident. It was at the airport that I began to really understand how NEW most of these kids (and teachers) were to the concept of travel. When we reached the security point, one of the teachers read the sign explaining how loose articles (you know, change in your pocket, keys, maybe the camera you’re holding, etc.) must be put in a separate tray to go through the x-ray machine. Misunderstanding this, that teacher made an announcement that ANYTHING THAT MIGHT SET OFF THE MACHNE MUST BE REMOVED FROM YOUR BAG AND PUT IN A TRAY! And so all of the students proceeded to remove their cameras, keys, glasses, schedule books, wallets, and change purses from their bags and scramble for the tiny trays stacked up by the security line…while I did a facepalm a few feet away. Not until half the students had passed through the line did someone finally realize that, “Oh. No, we don’t have to do that. Ok, everything back in, kids!”
So security probably took twice as long as it had to.
It was equally funny watching the students as we took off. Most of them (maybe all but 3 or 4 out of 25) had never been in the air. Some were bouncing up and down in their seats and raving about how the sky looked like a sea from above the clouds, while others spent half of the hour-long flight gripping the armrests of their seat and borderline hyperventilating-not because it was a bumpy flight, but because they were waiting for it to be. *sigh*
I think my homemade banana bread helped some of them calm down…or maybe it was seeing me stand up and pass it out that offered proof enough that the plane wasn’t gonna go into a nosedive at any second. Either way, the atmosphere relaxed a bit after they had something to distract them. :)
So we flew into Tokyo Haneda Domestic Airport, handed off our luggage to a tiny truck that vroomed it away to our hotel, and then hopped a train to Yokohama (the city just below Tokyo). In Yokohama, we set off walking from the hotel to the ramen museum…which was glorified as both a museum and a food amusement park, but was really not at all the former and only slightly the latter. If anyone reading this has ever been to Epcot and visited the countries around the lake, that’s pretty much what it was-you walk down a flight of stairs, and there’s a little area that’s set up to look like Showa-era Japan, complete with old movie posters, painted grime, old-time city ambiance, and vintage stall food. About 8 ramen shops (each specializing in a different kind of ramen) are crammed into a space that any American would think suitable for no more than 2 restaurants at the absolute most.
I gotta be honest-the ramen was actually quite good. I just wish my teachers hadn’t abandoned me after the first bowl so that I’d gotten to eat more. :/
There were other foods and games, though, that kept the kids and me entertained for the 45.00 minutes we were there. I had myself a ramen croquette out of curiosity, and then another out of pure desire, and then won a couple kids a pack of gum from the shooting gallery carnival game. Good times.
After that, we went to China Town, which…is basically the Japanese way of experiencing something Chinese while keeping the surrounding area to Japanese standards. The whole quarter is kept immaculately clean-I’ve never been to China, and I can tell you that ain’t what the streets look like. But the obvious upside to this is that the whole area is very pretty, and the food authentic enough to be delicious, so I wasn’t complaining about the tainted ambiance.
In China town, during an allotted half hour of free time, while the male teachers sat around in one of the least appealing, food-court-like buildings in the area, I convinced the 2 female teachers to come along with me to the trick art museum, a few shops, and a mango stall that got me all excited until I realized they were selling mangos for NINE. DOLLARS. EACH.
Had to buy me some coconut bubble tea to appease the sadness that my plans for next year have made me more frugal than I was a couple months ago. :(
After China town, we all congregated at a nearby port, took a few pictures (though it was unfortunately rainy), and then loaded onto a chartered tour bus that took us all around Yokohama, then over the bay back to Tokyo and the site of our nighttime excursion.
Dinner was a Tokyo specialty called もんじゃ焼き (monja-yaki), which we ate on a covered, tatami-floored boat that took us up and down a river, passing by sites like Tokyo Tower, famous Ferris Wheels, and a mini-Statue of Liberty.
How to describe monja-yaki? It’s basically…mush. For our first one, they brought us a bowl of sauce, shredded cabbage, fish eggs, and rice cakes, which we unloaded onto a hotplate in the middle of our table, chopped up with a pair of metal spatulas, and mixed until it became edible…mush. Never really took on a solid shape. And it wasn’t bad-it was just one of those Japanese foods where you have to block out the texture while you’re chewing. Unless you like chewing mush, of course. :)
The atmosphere over this dinner was one of the best parts of the trip. It was a little boat, so our group took up most of the space. We were all sitting on the floor watching a nighttime cityscape pass by outside the lantern-lined windows. That kind of thing is one of my favorite parts of being in the city-that is, the availability of dining experiences and sightseeing viewpoints that just don’t exist up here in Aomori. (Not that there’d be a whole lot to see if they did have boats like that up here.)
After dinner, we headed back to the bus, which took us to the Pearl Hotel in Kayabacho. I think it was here that the kids got a real slap in the face with the international setting of Tokyo, because the lobby was FULL of gaijin-young people on some group tour or something. Every time they walked by (and let’s just say I made a guess that they were American by the level of their voices and their obliviousness to other people around them), my students went collectively DEAD SILENT. Once the foreigners were through the door or down the hall or similarly out of earshot, the kids would turn to me and go, “WHAT DID THEY SAY?!” For the rest of the trip, after each little bout of free time, one of the students inevitably came up to me and asked some question about whether I can tell where someone’s from just by looking at them, or what XYZ means, or whether I knew there were so many foreigners out there.
Ah, youth and ignorance.
That night, we held a “Closing of the First Day” ceremony in a little conference room in the hotel. Then the students were sent off to their rooms, with the exception of the 5 or 6 “group leaders,” who stuck around for instructions on the following day. This was a ritual we went through daily, always in the late hours of the night (11, 11:30, 12pm-ish). It was followed by those students heading off to their rooms, and then the teachers remaining to conference with each other about what had happened that day-who had been almost late and therefore deserved a good tongue lashing, weather reports for the following day, and any other concerns that might come up…
…like the attending ALT needing 2 hours off the next day to go and get her Chinese visa in the morning.
Day 2: Wednesday, April 15, 2009:
My birthday! I can’t say how happy I was to turn 25 in Tokyo and not Aomori, even if it was just by the fluke of awesomely coincidental planning. And even if it meant that, once again (and this time on my birthday), the schedule had me up at 5am.
It was at 5:05 that one of my teachers learned not to bother with a wakeup call, like I couldn’t be trusted to get up on time. But in my defense, I warned him that I wouldn’t be pleasant morning company. And I’ve kind of had it with people treating me like I’m 6 years old. The phone call went something like this:
*phone rings*
Me: *stumbles out of the bathroom and snatches up phone*
*caller ID reads teacher’s name*
Me: *answering phone* What?
Teacher: *laughs* Mel. It’s Mr. S.
Me: I know.
Teacher: It’s time to get up now.
Me: I KNOW.
Teacher: Please don’t sleep.
Me: *twitch* Do I sound asleep to you?
Teacher: …Oh. Please come out on time.
Me: Got it. *hangs up*
So up we got, and headed out (without breakfast) for a 30-minute walk from our hotel to Tsukiji Fish Market…at a pace that was entirely too fast, if you ask me, especially for 6am. My feet were about ready to fall off by the time we made it there. Luckily, breakfast made up for it.
Tsukiji Fish Market has DAMN. GOOD. FISH. And if you catch it in the early hours, that’s when it’s really fresh. My breakfast was probably alive until very shortly before it made it to my bowl. I would not, however, recommend the place to anyone who doesn’t like RAW fish. My breakfast was vinegar rice piled with salmon, tuna, squid, and yellowtail-all raw. And no, they won’t cook it for you if you ask. And no, they don’t have forks. And no, there isn’t even that one item on the menu set up to cater to foreigners. But if you like sashimi, Tsukiji is the place to go.
After Tsukiji, we marched off to Nihon Terebi (Nihon TV Station), where we were all on national TV with a famous newscaster, doing a spot on the new ride that was opening up at Disney that day. It was pretty hilarious-ten minutes on screen in a crowd of kids, and since then, I've been getting text messages from teachers (some that I hadn’t seen in quite a while) saying OMGIJUSTSAWYOUONTV!!! I gotta get a copy of that tape…
After taking a few pictures, I parted from the group and headed off to get my China visa…or actually, to turn in my application for a China visa. It was actually much less painful than I’d expected. The most annoying part of it was that they couldn’t do it in a day, and to get it “rushed” to 2 days meant I had to pay an extra $30. But I’d really expected it to be a lot worse.
I got to the embassy at 8:50 and took my place in a line of 50 people or so. They ushered us in and sent visa applicants up an elevator, charged us for copies of our documents that weren’t listed as required on the website step-by-step, and then skipped my number in line so I was actually there about a half hour longer than necessary. Funny story, though:
When I was about to leave the window, I asked the woman, in Japanese, what time they opened the next day. (Note: the way you say 9:00 in Japanese is “kuji”-I will translate the extra tidbits for the sake of my readers.)
Me: The embassy opens at kuji, right?
Woman: *shakes head* Koji.
Me: …Kuji?
Woman: No, KOJI.
Me: *knowing perfectly well that “koji” is not how you say any hour in Japanese* …Ko…ji?
Woman: *rolls eyes, grabs the paper in front of me and writes a giant 9 on it* KOJI.
Me: …K. Thanks.
Crazy government employees.
But again, all things considered, the whole process was fairly easy, since I was lucky enough to be in Tokyo in the first place. I managed to finish up in about an hour and a half, from waiting in line to walking away from the window, and met up with my group in Harajuku in time to visit the Meiji Shrine, which I had never been to.
Very cool place. I recommend it to anyone visiting the country with an interest in temples and shrines. And it’s very easy to find-right behind Harajuku station. It’s about a 10 minute walk through an old cedar forest (in the middle of Tokyo) to get to the shrine itself.
After the Meiji Shrine, we had 5 hours of free time. Again, the teachers split up by gender to go eat lunch and bum around the city. I showed the 2 women in my group a Texan/Mexican restaurant I LOVE in Ebisu-which was ever so slightly disappointing in its limited lunch menu-and then we split up. They went shopping, and I went to Tokyo Tower.
It can probably be said that anyone who goes into a big city on a fairly regular basis has one place they like to visit that just appeals to them more than it does other people. Tokyo Tower area is mine. Within a 5-minute walking radius, there’s a shrine, a temple, a graveyard, a park, and the tower itself. I could just spend hours walking around there. And have. And did. :)
After meandering through the temple and shrine, I went to sit in the park for a while under some bright green momiji trees (that I’ve missed immensely since moving to Aomori, which is 90% pine). Right now, it’s that time of year in Japan that isn’t too hot or cold, isn’t buggy, and isn’t high tourist season. The time of year when you can actually sit on a park bench for an hour and enjoy yourself while doing nothing.
When I finally made my way up to the tower, I was somewhat dismayed to see that they’d raised the price of admission. With my plans for next year looking like I’ll take in limited part-time income at best, every extra 100yen is starting to count. So I was standing there, thinking about whether I should maybe just go back to the park, when I spotted this sign that said, “Otanjoubi Omedetou!” (“Happy Birthday!”) between the price lists above the window. So when I got to the ticket window, I asked the woman if they did something special for birthdays.
Ticket Lady: Is it your birthday?
Me: Actually, yes.
Ticket Lady: Do you have some kind of ID proof?
Me: *gives her ID*
Ticket Lady: *reads ID* …HAPPY BIRTHDAY! Please continue on to the counter inside!
Me: *goes to counter inside*
Counter Lady: Hello.
Me: Um…it’s my birthday. They told me to-
Counter Lady: HAPPY BIRTHDAY! *beams* You get in for free! And you get this special birthday card! And a free piece of cake at the café upstairs!
Me: This is the bestest birthday ever! :D
They were also handing out stickers to alert the public that my favorite Japanese band had released a new single that day. Which was awesome. Even awesome enough to make it seem maybe not so bad that people in Tokyo can apparently clearly hear my Aomori accent when I speak. (The lady operating the elevator actually GUESSED where I was from. >_<)
After those few hours of free time, I headed over to the Wicked theater, where we were all set to convene that evening. Thinking it would be harder to find, I ended up getting there way early and killing some time at Starbucks.
(As an aside, you know you’ve been living out in the country too long when having Starbucks is both a treat and the icing on the cake to an already pretty awesome day.)
Dinner that night could’ve been better. It was “hamburg.” Not hamburger. Hamburg. Meatloaf, basically. Bland, processed into a cube, mixed with peas and carrots, and just generally not good. At least the handy-dandy schedule book told me what we were having beforehand, so I could prepare myself (cake at Tokyo Tower, Starbucks, etc.).
Wicked was, of course, really excellent. I wish the chick who played Elphaba was a little bit of a better actor, but her voice is pretty amazing, so I can hardly complain. And somehow the Wizard’s songs become more bearable when sung in Japanese.
The whole theater was FULL of school trip groups. I saw 2 of my other schools’ kids there (Tairadate JH sat right in front of us). There were, maybe 50 people there not wearing school uniforms, and most of them were chaperones. I bonded with a bunch of kids from Fukushima sitting behind us (they found me the next day at Disney, lol).
The bus picked us up after Wicked and shuttled us back to the hotel. Same routine-conference, meeting, Mel’s-gotta-go-pick-up-her-visa-tomorrow announcement, and then, finally, bed.
~
Here are the PICTURES to go with the school trip stories. :)