Being
outdoors, dudes! It's a thing, as I've
recently learned. You won't recall me
talking about my first camping trip here, because I so deftly skimmed over it. That was about a month ago, I guess; we went
to go see this badass taiko drum concert on Sado, an island just off the coast
beyond Niigata City, with a bunch of the other Niigata JETs. We brought our gear with us to the island;
after the concert, we set up camp on the beach, made a bonfire, checked out the
stunning night sky--I saw more shooting stars that I ever had in one night--and
generally mucked around like the college students most of us are deep
down. (Okay, maybe it's just me. What?
I've been out of school for less than a semester now.) Being sort of out in the countryside as it is,
I'm not too starved for contact with nature, but it's still nice to really bust
outta Dodge. You know, get away from the
sounds of people, breath in some really fresh air, and get your ass
woken up at six by the sunrise. I would
like to emphasize that that latter item really did happen. I was confused because it looked like broad
daylight outside, and also because I had netted myself something like three hours of sleep. It took my tent mates a few solid minutes to
fully persuade me that it was, in fact, death o'clock in the morning. After that, I stumbled into the surf--this
proved to be a good way to wake up, one I wish I could replicate at home. (Maybe if I hauled in some sand, flooded my
bathroom…wait, this sounds suspiciously familiar.)
So
there's a lot that I'm skipping over from that trip--notably, how I ran into
one of my coworkers while hefting a one-liter bottle of beer, plus hanging out
with this one guy who's been teaching English for fourteen years! --but I must
push on, lest I wind up writing about mid-October on my winter vacation. This camping trip marked our official,
prefecture-wide welcome party, the culminating event after a bunch of smaller-scale
welcome shindigs we'd attended both in Gosen and elsewhere. The venue, the ground zero of our jubilee,
was a campground a couple of hours south of us.
After a quite scenic drive, we arrived some three bajillion hours
before the festivities were to commence.
As the only three people there, Carly, Amanda, and myself began setting
up camp. Permit me one moment to
describe the place. The first of two
general parts was the actual grounds itself, a small, open area of neatly
manicured grass. Connected by a short
bridge over a small creek were the cabins and other stuff (office, bathrooms,
etc.) arranged around a paved communal area.
This bland description doesn't do much justice to the place, but suffice
it to say that it was a pretty sweet deal, quite conducive to a large social
gathering, and better kept than I would expect a campsite that's further in the
countryside to be.
We
began constructing our sweet tent, borrowed from our friend and de facto
host mother, Rumi. This was the same
tent we had used on Sado; then, we were
forced to delay setup until midnight after a solid night of, well, concert, and
so did not efficiently nor one hundred percent effectively put our tent up. (Also, sand.)
This time around, however, we had the leisure to properly erect a
veritable fortress, the envy of our fellow campers. Carly was pleased, Amanda doubly so--as I
understand it, the average Minnesotan spends thirty weeks out of the year
camping. Our frequent companion from the
town next to us, Kristyn, was amazed beyond words when she arrived later--which
is to say not literally "beyond words." Kristyn fills an important niche in my social
constellation, that of an avid purveyor of dry humor, which is, shall we say,
not as common as rice in Japan. She's an
excellent foil to my style of outrageous hyperbole and embellishment; so when I
began to expound on the great toil we had endured, she adroitly cut me off with
a terse sentiment along the lines of, "Uh huh, sure." Borderline sardonic, maybe, but it hurts good. Also we talk about beer in a scholarly
fashion, a hobby I miss much from the halcyon days of my college career. You know, like six months ago.
We went
to scope out a nearby park and shrine before the rest of the nerds began to
arrive. On this expedition, we accrued,
Katamari-like, an entourage of small children who happened to be playing while
we visited. They were very interested in
America, although we had to disabuse one of them of the notion that America and
Japan are geographically contiguous and also the same country. Another persistently inquired into the
logistics of currency exchange. "Do
they hold the money for you until you come back?" Now that would be a sweet deal, you
guys. In short, they were quite
adorable. When we left, they followed us
back to camp, which was something of a cause for concern on my part. I was rather unclear on the protocol
regarding unaccompanied minors following strangers around; I know that the
American legal code classifies that as a "party foul" worth ten years
in the pen. (In all seriousness though,
it's interesting how much autonomy they give little kids here. I haven't any facts or figures to persuade
you, but outside of school these small fries roam quite freely.) As the rest of Foreigner Squadron Alpha began
to drift in, we played tag (or as it's called here, oni gokko,
"play [at being a] devil") with the kids. I only visit my elementary schools for
half-days each, therefore I haven't had the opportunity to participate in
after-lunch tag with students. So I was
mega blown away at the energy these kids had; they were firing on all cylinders
all the time. Eventually one of their
mothers came by to pick them up, much to the relief of my exhausted body. Now, it was time to get down to the serious
business of socializing.
The
grill was fired up as we foreigners accumulated, and we congregated in the
common area by the cabins. At this point
there's not much more I can say other than we had a right old time; grilled
noms and beverages aplenty, someone's iPod blasting from somewhere, nerds
jamming out on guitar, frequent trips to pee in the woods (in spite of the
fully functional toilets), a dance party, s'mores cooked over an open
fire. What began as a duel of good old
fashioned Wizard's Staff between two friends turned into a campsite full of
wizards, culminating in an actual wizard battle (which I did not realize was
stipulated in the rules). It was just a
good time, you know? Like, pick a good
party you hit up at school. (Maybe one
year at Don't Mess with Texas, or an O-Week crawl.) The crazy thing is how immersed I find myself
in our big get-togethers. Part of it, of
course, is that during the week I don't see people or go out, on account of how
spread out we are and this crazy new schedule I'm trying out wherein I actually
manage more than six hours of sleep. But
just being around my JET friends, hanging out en masse, I experience two
things: First, I nearly forget that I'm
Japan. This is a little
ridiculous--especially because there are usually some Japanese
friends-of-friends whom I end up chatting with-- but regardless, that's the
sensation comes over me. Second, I sort
of quietly marvel at how normal it all is. Coming to Niigata, I had a hunch that it
would be an active bunch, so I guess I should've anticipated that there would
be some proper partying going on. But,
as with so many things here, it's what's similar and familiar that stands out
more than the big differences. I think
that's because, even having had some experience with Japan, I've mentally
(perhaps unconsciously) positioned myself more on a footing to anticipate and
process the differences, which of course are abundant. But that apparatus has no function to account
for the similarities I find in my lifestyle.
I don't want it to sound like I'm paralyzed by massive cognitive
dissonance every waking second, because I'm not. Rather, it's a vibe that's there in the back
of my head. When I zone out sometimes,
it hums a little louder, to the tune of, "Whoa, I'm in Japan. So much is different, but sometimes I can't
even tell because I just feel…normal."
That's something I experience in small ways, like hanging out in our
happy little threesome at the end of the day, and in bigger ways, like this rad
camping trip.
Oh,
and I nearly forgot to tell you about the first burger I had since I've been
here. Man. Okay.
Gotta back it up a little bit. We
went to the mall a little ways out to pick up gear for camping, right? I'd already been to this mall before. We weren't sure what we felt like for dinner,
so we wound up at some place in the food court that sorta had everything. Among other items on the menu were, you know,
burgers. I thought about it. I went for it. And man, it was good. I mean, the burger itself was tasty--not like
a Perigord, but better than a fast food thing--but rarely have I had a single
item of food affect me so profoundly. I
just felt good, like my whole body had just been massaged. I hadn't even realized how badly I'd wanted a
burger until I put my mouth on it; at those specific coordinates in space and
time, that was exactly what I needed.
Amanda put it well when she noted that eating a meal like that is a
completely different kind of full from the usual Japanese fare we have. And I could feel that in my stomach,
so forgotten yet so familiar, like going home over the summer and seeing your
high school friends again. Since I was
on such a roll, we went to Baskin Robbins afterwards. Did I mention it was pay day that day? We were in a mood of excessiveness that
night. The cherry on top was discovering
Paulaner hefe-wiessbier at the big grocery store downstairs, which I grabbed
for emergency use. I left the mall in a
pretty okay mood.
Okay,
now fast forward! We're at the weekend after I went camping. I woke up on Saturday morning at 2:30 in the
morning. That's right kids, this was the
day we went fishing with our boss. Our
first move was to go to the convenience store, where our boss bought us
beer. Japanese has a specific word for this
phenomenon--asazake, or "morning alcohol." Then we hopped over to the city, picking up
hooks and bait on the way, went out to the water, and, well, fished. (P.s., my boss had brought the rods and other
such gear.) I don't have a whole lot of
fishing experience under my belt, so I wasn't completely sure what was going to
happen, or whether I would grievously harm myself in what would be a hilarious
accident if it happened to someone else.
Here's how it went down. We set
up shop on a pier, not right on the sea because of the sea walls (where the
hardcore nerds were fishing from) but jutting out into a calm body of
water. Like I said, I know jack about
fishing, so this will be a laughable description, but instead of just one hook
at the end of the line, we used a string of small hooks? No clue what it's actually called. Anyway.
The strategy was simple enough:
Bait, then plunk the rod down and wait for a tug. The fish were, to my surprise, quite
plentiful, and quite dumb too. Every
time I dropped my line, these little guys would be eagerly tugging at the line
mere seconds later, as if begging me to deliver them from their boring
existences as fish. (Wow. That got dark, yo.) But we had quite a haul, maybe a few pounds
or so of fish. After napping all
afternoon, we enjoyed our catch for dinner at our boss's house. They turned out delicious; his mother (who
lives next door) had fried them up, and we munched on them. That was just a super pleasant evening; the
boss is a secretly hilarious guy. (Incidentally,
one of the best feelings in the world is getting a joke in another language,
like this morning when I asked him what to do if I see a bear [bear sightings
being common in the fall] and he told me to just play dead.) We learned that we're the first JETs they've
ever invited to their home, which was a little surprising but very satisfying.
Man. That's just the end of September. I'll hit pause for now. I'm probably missing a lot here too,
especially since I've mostly been talking about the weekends without bringing
up the Interesting Things that go on during the week. I'll throw you one such bone: Occasionally, my kids will ask me when I'm
returning to America. One such time was
when I was eating lunch with my sixth-graders; I told the kid that I had just
shown up, dude, and I wasn't planning on leaving just yet. The kid next to me chimed in that I couldn't
go back.
"Why
not?" I asked.
"You
don't have a home there."
"What
about my family's house?"
He
thought hard about this. "They
died," he decided. Pure gold.
When I
was leaving school this past Friday, as I was leaving I told another student
that I was going on a trip over the weekend.
His response? "Oh, to
America?" Yep. See you on Monday, kid.
One more: We were doing timezones one day, and, pointing at Australia, I asked them what country I had indicated. Now, I was already well-acquainted with my students' command of geography, so I wasn't surprised when they responded, "Germany! America! Africa!" It was just their fearless, almost reckless bravado, the heroic enthusiasm with which they spitballed (and so magnificently failed) that caused me to seize up with laughter; I literally had to stop teaching, and wasn't sure if I would make it through the rest of the lesson.
These
and other hilarious things are pretty much par for the course at the elementary school. Honestly, my middle school days are more laid back because I teach fewer periods a day. Teaching itself is still going pretty
well. I'm more or less on a regular
schedule now, but I'm still working on getting completely used to it,
particularly trying to balance being active and taking charge in the classroom
versus keeping to a supporting role--my title, of course, is assistant language
teacher, so you could say I'm trying to figure out when to be more
"assistant" and when to be more "teacher", all the while trying to account for cultural differences. But that'll come in time; I mean, it seems
like forever ago now, but I've only been teaching for right under two months
now. Even so, it's not as weird as it
used to be when people call me "sensei."
Quick
review: There were absolutely no dick
jokes or bad words in this post. At
least one very specific reference.
Alas and alack, I failed by my own criteria. Although I am digging this meta-writing. Maybe in some future post I'll do a roundup
of all such meta tidbits and see how well I'm doing on those, and so on
until infinity, or until you snap, fly over, and shoot me in the kneecap. Bring jerky when you do!
NEXT
TIME: A long weekend of shenanigans with
Japanese pals old and new, and my stunning debut on the court at the biannual
basketball tournament. I should just
quit my job, 'cause maybe then I would catch up on my blog.
