Thursday, October 23, 2008

A crazy week

This week was bomb. Expensive, exhausting emotionally and physically, but bomb. There’s a quote I kind of enjoy that may or may not come from a web comic and it goes something like ‘events are really shy- they only travel in packs.’ That is how I feel about this week and the coming week. My schedule for this week was on Tuesday I went to a elementary school with all of the JSP’s, on Wednesday I went to my hero Hiyao Miyazaki’s crazy museum, on Thursday I went to Disneyland, and on Friday I’m going out to dinner and then maybe to a Halloween party. Next week I am going on my school ‘Kansai’ trip – which means visiting Kyoto, Hiroshima, and maybe Nara. In five days. So while everything is fun and exciting, pretty much all of my gift shopping is happening in this week and next, plus all of my expensive traveling. Thank god for scholarships.
Now a breakdown of the week.
Tuesday
So all of the JSP Japanese classes went on a school field trip on Tuesday to visit a local elementary school. We did the usual file in and say our names and home-towns and such in Japanese. Which I inevitably screwed up- because my ability to speak understandable Japanese decreases rapidly as I get more flustered or nervous. Since I have always found kids kind of intimidating (I find a lot of people intimidating) I got pretty flustered. After the meet and greet the whole school sang us a song and then we were split up into groups of three and sent off to individual classes. I went to a fourth grade class with two JSP kids in much more advanced Japanese classes. My listening comprehension with strangers is kind of terrible so whenever the teacher would tell me to do something (because they had us participate in the kanji lesson) I felt myself go bright red and didn’t understand anything. I kind of tried to figure it out but who knows how I actually did. When Japanese people tell me I am speaking well I am sure they are lying out of kindness. Because I do the same thing when any Japanese person tries to speak English.






But the class was pretty adorable, all the kids made us signs with our names on them. After all the kids introduced themselves in English saying things like “My name is Ayako. I like soccer. Nice to meet you” they broke out the recorders and played us a song. And then all the kids took out these totally bizarre piano/flute instruments (which is really obscure in America) and played us another song. Then me and Emily (my friend who is really good at Japanese) played clapping games and thumb-wrestling with the kids for a bit. The whole thing was finished off with the rather humiliating Japanese lesson.
Wednesday











My love for Miyazaki at this point should be notorious, and so ever since I heard there was a Museum made by Miyazaki’s company I have wanted to go. Which was about four years ago. Getting in is actually kind of tricky because you have to buy tickets at a convini in advance and that is the only way, and then you have to go at your specified ticket time. All of us JSP’s got tickets for noon but the groups kind of split off upon arrival. I wasn’t allowed to take pictures inside the museum, which was sad, but I did get a picture of the giant cat bus room from My Neighbor Totoro. And you could take pictures of the outside building and the rooftop. The whole thing was exactly as I thought it would be –like walking into a weird overlap of all of Miyazaki’s movies combined. The outside is covered in grasses and plants because Miyazaki “looks forward to the time when grass covers the earth again.” Inside looks like the train station from spirited away. A lot of high ceilings , spiral staircases, wood, earth tones and stained glass. There were three floors but two staircases (one an enclosed iron spiral) and an elevator. The museum has a traveling exhibit and a new exclusive Studio Ghibli short you can watch, which makes returns to the museum understandable. A girl in our group had been three times already. The traveling exhibit this time was called ‘le petit Louvre’ which was a bunch of classic Louvre pieces much smaller than their originals. Since I love small things and art history I enjoyed the exhibit. The short was about a bunch of preschool kids whose block fishing boat they had made turns into a real boat, and they try and catch a whale but he ends up saving the kids and returning them to school. It was pretty adorable. I bought a lot of things and got to take a picture with the robot from Castle in the Sky, so the day was definitely a success. We headed home from that kind of early because we still had to go to Disneyland.
Thursday
Today’s adventure- and a total blast. I haven’t been to Disneyland since I was seven, but the last time I went to Disney world I was twelve. So it has been a while since my last Disney adventure and I have never been with a group of kids my age without parents. Unlike Euro-Disney Japanese people love Disney land. There were a lot of girls there decked out in full Disney regalia and a lot of them wore Disney specialty hats at least. There were a lot of tiny girls in princess outfits – which I took pictures of. Tokyo Disney had the same rides as Disney Land but a lot of them had been updated to new Disney creations. For example the Pirates of the Caribbean ride now features an animatronics Jack Sparrow and movie treasure, and the Haunted Mansion ride is now centered on Nightmare before Christmas. For Disney land October is Halloween month and Tokyo Disney does a lot with the Halloween theme – parades, pumpkins, specialty rides. I feel like there is kind of some overlap between the ideas behind Christmas and Halloween in Japan and Nightmare Before Christmas did not help things. Both of these holidays in Japan feature novelty lighting, Styrofoam decorations, and parties. Space and thunder mountain were still the same old rides and a lot of fun – despite the fact that it started to rain at three and didn’t stop for the rest of the night. I like Disney Land, and I like being able to take a train there and a train home and not have to mess with driving a car at all. I also loved the Japanese boy’s sparkly novelty hats that they wore unabashed.






On a side note – the line between masculine and feminine for the Japanese male is almost nonexistent. Outside of not wearing skirts (just long kimono) boys pretty much follow all the same trends as Japanese girls. Tight stylish pants, boots, man-purses, layered clothing, scarves. Also Japanese guys are much more touchy-feely with their male friends. I don’t really know why that is. But I enjoy it.
Also, I think the woman who placed us JSP kids with our host families is a genius. I just found out the other day that my host mom went to an arts high school and then she majored in Japanese art in college. She told me she might take me out to do some traditional art hopefully in November. Which would be awesome. But now I am worn out and must sleep.
Love you all, as usual.

1 comment:

Genevieve said...

Oh my god the cat bus!!! I am so jealous.

I've been reading on the news websites about this banana diet craze that's taken Japan by storm. Have you experienced any of this banana insanity?

I miss you sooo much!