Well after 10 months in Japan, I’m finally leaving, on the 18th. It’s hard to believe that I’m leaving already. Perhaps the most shocking part of it all is that many of my friends have already left to go home. Coming home to an empty kaikan is disturbing. The general feeling is like living on an isolated space station where all the characters around you are slowly getting killed off by some virus that’s taking over the ship, or something. Except that there’s no body parts floating around. And the virus is cleaning people’s rooms as it kills them off. No really.
Archive for August, 2004
My departure
August 15th, 2004Goodbye, Kyoko
August 13th, 2004
Tonsil this
August 11th, 2004Well yesterday, with some help from Nick, I made it to a local hospital after three days of hell. Turns out that if you can’t breathe, you have pain in your upper back and chest, a headache, feeling of fever and chills, and no appetite, it means you have tonsillitis. Or kidney problems, but the doc thwacked me in the lower back and I felt no worse than if Haesung had done so. If you’re in Japan, they give you 4 different medications for it. Crazy bastards. So now I’m on some antibiotics and something to help the nausea, and some other stuff which I have no clue what it is. Personally, I think it was heat-induced with a slight cold or something, seeing as how it’s been 35 degrees all day for the last week with ridiculous humidity. But hey, I’m no doctor.
Week in review
August 9th, 2004Sorry for the lack of updates, everyone… here’s a quick briefing on what I did the past few days:
Thursday
There was a big fireworks festival in Nishi-koen. There must have been a hundred thousand people there… I’ve never seen it so crowded before. It was a bit stressful trying to find all my friends in the park but I did pull it off. Afterwards Yuta and Christophe and I went for a stroll through Sun Mall. Everyone was wearing yukata (a kind of summer kimono). Christophe tried to pick up a couple girls until he realized that they were 16. To give him credit, it’s impossible to tell how old someone is if they’re wearing a yukata.
Friday
My lab held their farewell party for me in the evening. It started at 6:30ish, at a cozy little izakaya (pub) downtown. By the end they had given me a pair of toy swords and a topknot wig thingie and had me posing like a samurai.
Laughter abound
But he didn’t shoot no deputy
And then we went to the nijikai (second party). You remember how the hobbits are asking about “second breakfast”? Well this is the same thing, except with alcohol. I’m pretty sure they were trying to get me as drunk as possible, and they certainly succeeded. They also made me try some jellyfish salad and, believe it or not, raw horse. Which brings me to my other point: don’t ever tell a Japanese person you’re so hungry you could eat a horse, because they will take you literally.
Saturday
I started out the day with some time to kill, so I went downtown to see what the big festival fuss was about. This weekend was Sendai’s Tanabata Matsuri, one of the largest festivals in Japan, and Sendai’s most famous. Tanabata, or the “star festival”, celebrates the one time of the year when the constellations representing two lovers can meet. The traditional decorations have a paper-mache ball at the top with paper strips or strings with origami hanging down from them.
They range from reasonably simple…
…to ridiculously complex
The decorations are deliberately hung low to allow and encourage you to touch them, and this makes them that much more unique.
Afterwards there was a parade down one of the streets. Thankfully, I arrived early enough to get a seat; the sidewalks were quickly gorged with people in the hour preceding the event.
Natsu Matsuri
August 2nd, 2004Last weekend I got a flier for a natsu matsuri held downtown yesterday to commemorate the opening of the new East Gate for Sendai Station. The police had blocked off the main street running in front of the station, and people had turned out in droves to enjoy the festivities. And I’ve got photos and videos for ya.
Aside from the typical street vendors selling different kinds of foods, the main attraction was a sort of dancing parade with performers from different groups across the city.
Click the image to play the video (1.4MB, DivX 5)
It’s fun to stay at the… Y-M-C-A
Fun for all ages
I took these photos from the end of the parade line. Each group was supposed to finish up at our side of the parade grounds, and then file out the end. But something happened. One group continued to play as they left the parade grounds. And then the next group joined them. And the next. And before I knew it, the parade had spilled out of its contained area, and people just started dancing in the street.
Click the image to play the video (2.6MB, DivX 5)
The little girl gets jiggy with it
She is the dancing queen
And then the spry old lady started busting out the wicked moves. She was probably in her 70’s and she was tearing up the floor.
And then they saw the foreigner put away his camera, and a group of people pulled me into the fray and handed me a fan.
