another day, another challenge

Even though today's my day off, it's super busy. (It started at 5:30am by yet another person calling who has trouble with the 15 hour time difference...but I don't mind; people can call anytime they want.) I just got back from going out with some friends for lunch and boy am I stuffed. In typical Japanese style we each got a whole big tray of food with about 7 different dishes; my one friend even got a mini wall on her tray with two different levels. Maybe it didn't help that we baked both a blueberry upside down cake and banana bread and ate some of each before we went. So I baked and ate at my house, then I went to a restaurant and ate, and now I'm sick of eating.
Tonight will be intersting though. One of my friends teaches hip hop dance, so starting tonight I'm her newest student. haha. I cannot picture it in my mind or know what to expect, so I just have no idea how to prepare myself mentally for that one...it'll be...an experience. But maybe by the time I come home I'll be cool and be able to dance haha.
The leaves have been changing color here, and kind of like the cherry blossoms in the spring, people get really excited about it. Yesterday morning I took a gondola up Moriyoshi Mountain with some friends, and then hiked the two hours or so to the top and back down; apparently you could see 100km away - it was absolutely beautiful. But maybe I would've appreciated it more if my legs hadn't been hurting so much. I do nothing for excercise (I can only say that for a couple more hours until my first hip hop lesson haha...) so it was a little humbling climbing the steep part of a mountain and realizing how un-strong I am now. But there's nothing like eating your lunch outside on a mountain; it makes it taste so much better I think.
Just a side note: I had gone up that same mountain (just not to the peak) in the winter when there was tons of snow. Yesterday when we were there, we went into this little two level warm up/information shack; last time we were there there was so much snow that we went in the door on the second level...I didn't even know there was a door on the bottom level because it was covered with snow. (I can't wait for that snow to come again...)
But I'm off...I need to start on my Hawiian Quilting potholder. I am obligated to make it because one of my students owns a Hawiian business and gave it to me to make...and I teach her tomorrow... so today is the day I begin yet another challenge.
Wish me luck, so I don't lose too much blood from the holes poked in my hands or break a leg while I'm trying to find my rhythm. :)

My Thanksgiving Resolution

So today is Thanksgiving...I'm not gonna lie I had totally forgotten about that holiday; I only remembered it was this weekend because some Japanese friends were asking me exactly what it was. I did not have a feast of turkey, I did not glutton on pumpkin pie, I did not sit around and digest an overly full stomache with friends and family, but strangely enough, it was a good holiday for me.
My Thanksgiving Day consisted of driving out to Hachimantai (a Japanese-sized mountain about two hours away) and walking around; it's at a higher level than Takanosu so the leaves had started changing already; it was quite beautiful. There were natural hot springs there, but like the ones that if you go in you get boiled to death (accurately named Hell). And sure enough they did boil eggs at that place. I got one and ate it, discovering to my chagrin that it was probably only in the boiling water for about 30 seconds; the white wasn't even completely cooked yet. But I didn't die. And on we went to the top of the mountain (which was quite disappointing because it was basically flat and just covered with trees) and back down again. (Note to all you hikers out there: don't try to eat large bits of chocolate while hiking - you might accidently inhale all the extra saliva you've generated from eating and start to choke.) Then we went home and had our chestnut rice, I guess om English you would call it.
Yesterday we spent our afternoon climbing random chestnut trees in the forest, shaking them, trying to avoid all of the fist-sized porcupine balls that were falling on our heads, and searching for the nuts that had exploded all over the forest floor. It was quite an adventure. (And I picked a good day to wear white shoes and a while jacket, traipsing around in the forest like that...) Chestnuts are a lot of work to eat; the next time you get a chestnut craving, if at all possible, buy them in the store so you don't have to go hunting for them. After collecting a bag full of forest grace, we went back to the house where another two hours of work began. We had to shell each one by hand, and then shave them with a knife to get another layer of nut shell remains off.
And today we consumed our hand-picked goodness after a full and satisfying day out in nature.
So this year's Thanksgiving wasn't your typical Candian Thanksgiving, but it's a day, or weekend, I am thankful for non-the-less. In all honesty, it didn't feel different than any other day. But shouldn't that be the way Thanksgiving is? Shouldn't we be thankful everyday, no matter what's written on the calender? Thankfulness is a thing I think we often overlook and something we seldom do. (I'm becoming much more aware of being thankful after 7 months of immersion in this culture where you say thanks for weeks after somebody's done even just a small thing for you; I notice it's not so much in Canadian culture to be thankful all the time.) Shouldn't our thankfulness to others be something that's just so engrained by us, driven out of our thankfulness for God's unending mercy?
We have a lot to be thankful for, and I think we would all be better off doing what God tells us to do in the bible and make it a habit of being thankful.

A T-shirt

Yesterday I went out for lunch at the new French restaurant in town. It was like being in...not Japan...except for all the Japanese people. But I'm not going to lie, I wasn't feeling so adventurous so I didn't order the cow stomache (and no one else in there ordered it either while we were there...). It was weird to have rice that wasn't sticky, and I've discovered that I can no longer use a fork; I had to switch back to chopsticks.

They are renovating some of the stairs on the platform at the train station in Takanosu. I go there every Friday morning at the same time, so I guess the workers have figured out my schedule. Today they all poked up over the tall fence/wall they were working behind and just waved so happily at me. (I know they were waving at me because I was the only one on the platform at that point, and they said a cheerful "good morning!") What a priviledge to stick out so much...

One of my friends took me to rent some movies this afternoon. I ended up with an English movie and a Japanese cartoon of Anne of Green Gables, at my friend's request. People over here just love Anne of Green Gables, and they think that because I'm Canadian I must love it too. In all honesty I've never seen the movie, read the book, or even been all that interested in doing either. But as of right now, from a couple of different Japanese friends, I have both the book and the movie just waiting to suck me into Anne-world at my apartment. How exciting. I think I'm learning how to be Canadian while I'm here in Japan.

The weather is changing drastically. It feels really cold now, and it's 13 degrees, definitely not quite weather temperature...I'm going to die. It's so hard to believe that just a few weeks ago I was wearing shorts and t-shirts and sweating, a few weeks before that unable to wear much of anything and sweating, and today I wore two short sleeved shirts, a long sleeve sweater and my down vest, pants, socks and slippers and I was still cold. It should be illegal for the temperature to fluctuate so much so fast.

Today I solved a Japanese riddle. Actually I totally just made that out to sound better than it actually is. My friend's son and his friend had this riddle book, and they were reading them to us. Really they're just grade three level problems but still...I'll share the riddle with you in English: What has only one entrance but three exits?

Home from Hokkaido

It's been three days since I got home from my adventure and I think I'm fully recovered now. I went to Hakodate in Hokkaido (the northern Japanese island) with two of my students early Friday morning and we got back Saturday night. It's rather embarrassing how exhausted I became considering their ages...69 and 75. I blame it on a combination of lack of sleep leading up to getting up before 6am two days in a row, and living my entire life in Japanese for two days and a night.
We took the early train from Takanosu up to Aomori (a harbor town on the top of the main island, Honshu) and from Aomori took the train up to Hakodate...which is quite a trick considering it's a seperate island. Japanese and their engineering feats...the train went under the ground at the bottom of the ocean, so as of Friday, I've been under the ocean in a train. (But they should get rid of all the mountains before that tunnel because everybody in the train thought we were under the ocean like 3 times; by the time we were in the right tunnel under the ocean it was quite anticlimatical.)
We got to Hakodate and went straight to Onuma (a lake with a bunch of little islands in it created by the volcano spewing things into the river and blocking it off 300 years ago...so beautiful), Goryokaku (a 'Western Style' fortress/castle in the shape of a star from a couple hundred years ago...it's really only the moat and the park left, but we took the elevator up like a small CN Tower and could look at the star shaped castle grounds and the whole city), the Trapestine Convent (I never thought I would ever go to a nunnery in Japan...), stopped at the airport to go to the bathroom, went up Hakodate Mountain to watch the sunset and the city lights when it got dark (this night view is the third best in the world according to our taxi driver, next to Hong Kong and Naples, Italy...I personally thought the sunset was much better than city lights...). Then we rushed back to our hotel (which was on the ocean) for our buffet reservation. They dressed me in a yukata and we went and feasted on many things Japanese. (I think it's funny how they call a buffet a 'viking' in Japanese...all you Scandinavians can share my joy at that one...) I then had a bath and went to bed on my futon on the tatami floor.
Then next morning I woke up and had a bath again, had another feast, and left in the pouring rain for the day. We went to a famous brick shopping place on the harbor that used to be old warehouses, and then we went to board the ferry. By this time the weather had turned absolutely gorgeous for the four hour ride across the ocean from one island to another.
The whole weekend was supposed to be rainy; on the Tuesday before we left they were telling me about these dolls you hang outside to bring good weather - I told them I didn't need them because I have God and I can just ask him to bring us good weather...so I did. And we had beautiful weather. Then Saturday morning they asked me to pray for good weather again because it wasn't looking so good...so I did. And it turned absolutely beautiful. Maybe this was the biggest witness I could give this weekend, just the fact that I pray for seemingly trivial things like having good weather and God would care about me to answer, that we can pray about anything and it won't be stupid.
So we took the ferry home; they slept and I wandered around the ship, mostly outside, looking at the amazing scenery of mountains and ocean and cloud splattered sky.
I can only hope that anything that they possibly learned about Jesus in those two days will stick and grow in their hearts to a faith that will change the world around them.