A Late Entry

I'm sorry for my silence on the blogging front. The truth is, it's been two and a half weeks since the earthquake(/tsunami/ongoing nuclear disaster) and I haven't had a single damn idea what to write about it.

I'm pretty sure that everyone who reads this has already gotten some kind of contact from me, but just in case, to start: I'm totally, 100%, completely fine. Oita is one of the safest places in Japan when it comes to both quakes and tsunami -- we barely get the former, and we're shielded by Shikoku and Beppu Bay from the latter. We got some waves, but the highest was, I believe, about a meter. The only other thing we felt was the fear and exhaustion that, for several days, we shared with the entire country.

I really don't know what else to say about it. It's a terrible thing that happened in my adopted country. The bodies are still being found, the nuclear plants are still in crisis mode, and it's going to be a very long time before things in Tohoku are anywhere near normal again.

But, weirdly, things down here are pretty much as always. I had to cancel something I was really looking forward to, and I lost a lot of money in the process, but... seriously, if that's the worst problem I got from this whole thing, how freaking lucky am I?

Both the best and the worst thing has been, in some ways, the reaction from abroad. On the one hand, I've been seeing a lot of exploitation and fearmongering from the international and especially American news (again, Americans: I'm fine, and so are you). On the other hand, even all the way down here, I've received such an outpouring of emotional support from all over the world, including some very sweet and genuine things from people I barely--or in some cases, don't--even know.

So, to those of you who have wished me well: thank you.

To those of you who are taking advantage of things here to gain publicity or interest: screw you.

To those who are still struggling: 頑張ってください！

And to the Future JET I started writing for in the first place: Don't let this stop you from coming here. This country is still an amazing place, full of amazing people. It would be a shame for you to miss it.

And that's all I'm going to say about that.

Half-Japanniversary

So I've been here six months as of today!

I don't want to do the Big Introspection post, because I'm sure I'll have more to say in another six months and I don't want to be redundant unless I'm bitching about something funny.

So all I'll say is: I was a big mess before I came here, and I'm less of a mess now. Hopefully, I'll be even less of a mess in another six months!

Thanks, Japan! Looking forward to another Year(?) of you.

PS: Okay, I do want to talk about this, because it's awesome, even if all my Facebook friends are sick of reading about it. I've been reading Harry Potter in Japanese, which is really fun for a variety of reasons, but what's especially been fun recently is noticing how much faster I can read now than when I started.

Case in point: When I read the first chapter, I could handle maybe a page and a half a day. Back in October, I read one chapter of 18 pages in six days (really four, I think, because there was a weekend there?) and I was super, super excited.

Today, I finished another chapter of 18 pages. Which I started this morning.

One of my big goals in coming here was to become fluent in Japanese, or at least significantly closer to. Not that I don't like the JET course, although I don't, but having this kind of actual, tangible sign of progress is what's really keeping me moving forward with studying. Eighteen pages in one day! I usually don't even manage that with English books, these days.

Okay, sorry -- I really needed to brag/be excited about that, and it is Highly Uncouth to brag in this country. (Remember I was talking about stereotypes awhile back? That's another that is 1000000000% true.)

Anyway. Happy Japanniversary to my fellow first-year JETs, and many more to those of us who want them!

Sound off!

Actually, let's keep talking about the cold.

Here's the thing: when you get into this program, or another ALT program, and you're packing to come to Japan, don't be like me. Don't say, "Oh, I'm going to a warm area, I don't need super-warm clothes. I can just layer these summer tops!"

Don't be like me back in the summer (i.e., an idiot). Don't be like me then, or you will be like me now, and you will hate yourself for it.

You see, things that are true:

1) Beppu is relatively warm (compared to, say, Nagano, yes, I know.)
2) Beppu is warmer than New York (I am asked about this 20 times a day.)

Things that are also true:

1) When people say "there is no insulation or heating in Japan," they mean there is no insulation or heating in Japan.

Or, as I put it to several of my coworkers: Yes, New York is colder. But in New York, we're not cold

ALL

THE

TIME.

I'm cold on the walk to school. I'm cold when I get to school. I'm cold sitting at my giant metal desk. I'm cold when they open the windows in the middle of winter, because they do that here. I'm cold when I walk home. I'm cold when I sit in my room, even next to my tiny space heater. I'm freezing when I go into the bathroom or hallway/kitchen area. I'm sometimes so cold in the middle of the night that I wake up of cold.

In fact, basically the only times I'm not cold are when I go to night school, which turns its giant kerosene heater to levels of crazy, or when I'm standing in the shower with all the hot water on.

As I said on my Facebook: I think I have a tendency to seem kind of disaffected sometimes -- it's a New York/Jewish/ex-goth/Ivy League thing -- but anyone who doubts my commitment to Sparkle Motion staying here should have seen me half an hour ago, when I went into the bathroom to take a shower and almost started crying it was so cold.

But I have to admit, a lot of this would have been mitigated if I hadn't been an idiot in the first place and just brought some warmer freaking clothes with me. Or believed my predecessor when she told me that the fan heater was totally sufficient for winter. Of course, she was from England, and I hear people are all insane there, too.*

*Disclaimer: I love English people and the insane.

I will say one thing that is also true about Japan, though. You hear all the time about how nice Japanese people are, and sometimes that's just not true at all, but sometimes it really is. To wit: today I was at the store, stockpiling on long underwear-like items with names like "Inner Heat," when a woman came over and shoved a piece of yellow paper into my hand. I blinked at her uncomprehendingly. She jabbed at it.

"This, use this one," she said, pointing. I realized it was a coupon flier, with several of the coupons X-ed out, but several more that were still usable and totally applied to my purchase. I saved a bunch of money! She ran off before I had a chance to thank you, so thank you, random woman!

I tried to pay it forward and give the flier to someone else, but no one else seemed to be seriously shopping, and the one woman I tried already had one, so I guess the universe wants me to be a greedy bastard for now.

Anyway, that was a tangent, and none of this was actually the point of this post. Oops. What I really wanted to do was put up a straw poll and/or recommendations list for myself and interested readers.

So! My fellow Oitans/temporary Nihonjin, what are you doing to beat the hea... wait, no. Dice the ice? Cheese the freeze?

Ooh! Kill the chill!

...Anyway, for dummies like myself, let us know your favorite methods for making it through the winter.

My notoreity spreads

Hey, so for those of you on LiveJournal/who would like to read via LiveJournal, a lovely friend has made a Livejournal feed of the blog. Alternately, apparently you can use something called Atom? I really should learn how blogging, like, works, one of these days. I barely even remember that I can read stuff on Google Reader.

As a totally unrelated update, it seems to be mostly official that the  Year(?) is in fact going to be more than one, so look out for a name change in the near future.

Snoooooow! Snoooooooow in Beppu!

...Just thought you should know.

That's the view from my window now. For contrast, let's see what it looked like back in my first post:

Ah, summer.

It's actually snowed a few times -- way more than I'd expected -- but this is by far the most we've had. Come on, universe! I thought this place was supposed to be warm!*

Some advice for that future JET who comes to Oita: after December 1st, a great way to bond with your coworkers is to huddle around the kerosene heater at school, stick your hands under your arms, and mutter: "Sabii na**" over and over again. Not only will you have the shared experience of being bone-chillingly freezing, but they'll get a kick out of your attempts to speak the lingo.

*Incidentally, it turns out that not only is Kyushu not warm AT ALL during the winter, but because of the dreaded Japanese lack of insulation, I have been woken up in the middle of the night four nights this week from being so cold. With all my blankets and the heater on.

**This is real Oita-ben/Oita dialect. "Samui" is Japanese for cold. In typical slang, it's normal to hear "samii" instead. In Oita-ben, it becomes "sabii." The more you know star! I love dialects, so I have been very interested in learning Oita-ben. The teachers are very helpful because they find it hilarious.

Anyway, have a few more pictures:

 

Fun! I'm going back to bed.

I'd Like That in a Giant American, Please

I realized on my way home today that I'm finally starting to get used to the sizes here. It's a stereotype, but it really is true that everything here is just plain smaller. Or maybe, living here, I should put it the other way: small is normal.

My apartment, which in its entirety is half the size of my bedroom back home or possibly the same as a rich person's closet, is called a "mansion."

I refuse to take a picture of the trash heap it is now, so let's refer back to this picture!

Yes, that still really is the whole thing. The only thing that's bigger now is the TV.

Not just the housing -- at 5'3", I'm used to being short, but here I'm at worst normal-sized. At one of my schools, I tower over my supervisor like a Yeti. The baachan (grandmas) who pass me in the street frequently come no higher than my waist. I feel like a mediocre Gulliver.

And it's everywhere: the cars are small, the food is small (although thank God for that, with how much fried gunk there is here), etc. My kids' voice boxes are small -- some of the girls sound like whistles when they talk. My kitchen is small enough that cooking a whole chicken is an impossible feat, or would be if I could find one.

At first, despite all my experience here, I was kind of startled by the size of everything. And I was horrified by the apartment with its tiny kitchen, tiny fridge, tiny bathroom, the couch so small it has no legs. I've been talking about moving for months. But now it's growing on me, like a fungus, or Stockholm syndrome.

Now, when I walk home, I think how huge the houses along the way are, even though they're certainly not any bigger than the houses back home. Smaller by far than the house I lived in before I came here. Admittedly, that one could comfortably house five people, but so do some of these.

At this rate, when I go home, I'm going to feel like an ant. My room at home will feel like two apartments worth of space. Normal houses will look like castles and palaces. My old co-ed fraternity house, which we called The Barn, will look like a full-on working farm. And the ex-boyfriend-I-regret-dumping's mansion* will look like...

...Well, not a mansion, obviously. Because that's where I live.

Of course, if I feel like a giant, I can't imagine how people who are actually normal-sized feel. Do you think there's height-ism in this country? I haven't really seen any yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's there, lurking under the radar, beneath the xenophobia and sort of general cultural blindness.*** It would certainly be a refreshing change of pace.

I might even join in, if only because I think it would be fun to say: "No, it's okay. Some of my best friends are tall."
---

*No, seriously.**
**No, seriously.
***Not that I'm saying we're any better, as a country.

Life in a Sub-Tropical-ish Climate

Now, I'm sure this isn't unique to Beppu.

But I can safely say that this is the only place I've ever lived where I've been able to see both this:

You possibly can't tell because of the terrible photography, but this is snow on Mt. Tsurumi.

A slightly different, yet equally terrible, angle.

 And this:

Freaking palm trees!

...during the same walk to the same school on the same day.

Weird.

It's like that all over the place. Only maybe a third of the trees here are deciduous, so totally barren sticks are standing in the middle of lush, full greenery in the middle of December. It's very jarring to someone who's used to seasons that look more like seasons.

PS: Some bad stuff happened this week, so I took some crummy photos to take my mind off of it. Nothing life-altering (I hope, I should say, since it's not over yet), and I'm not going to talk about it here beyond that, but if you have a free moment, think some good thoughts at me and mi familia, okay?

Happy Chanukah!

I realize this is a few days in, but Happy Chanukah, readers!

In the absence of an actual menorah, this is what I've been doing at night:

The weird black smudges aren't dirt or anything, they're wax.

I actually feel way more Jewish than usual out here, if that's something you can say about yourself. I guess I'm used to being surrounded by people like me, and now that I'm not (there are, as far as I know, three of us in the prefecture), I'm clinging to things a little harder than I normally would.

Which is why I am incredibly excited about my upcoming Chanukah class next week. I'll let you all know how it goes.

In the meantime:



PS: Tomorrow is the Japanese Language Proficiency Test! For which I have been studying my butt off, and which I will fail spectacularly anyway. Good luck to everyone else who's suffering through it tomorrow!

Thoroughly Fukuoka'ed (Part 2)

Today, the thrilling conclusion of my weekend tale!

I realize that yesterday I said things only got worse after I wound up in Bumsville, Kyushu, and that "worse" is a subjective thing. Some people might actually say things objectively got a lot better! After all, I discovered that there was not only a hotel near the Bumsville station, but also one last train heading back to Fukuoka. It wasn't my original plan, but at least I could go back to the city, spend time with my pals, and head back in the morning. Or, I could stay in Bumsville and take the train in the morning.

And so, my world was nice for about two seconds.

After a couple of phone calls to verify A: if I should indeed go back, B: if there was still a hotel room for me in Fukuoka, and C: where the hell it was (or so I thought), I hopped on the late train and went back to the city. Before anything else, though, there was another round of problem-solving to get through. After all, I had this sweet ticket that I'd already paid for twice and hadn't even actually used. I had to make sure I could use it again to get home in the morning, nu? So I went to the counter, where the exact same guy who had stamped my ticket less than an hour ago was sitting.

"Hi, so, I sort of made a mistake and got on the wrong train," I explain. "Can I use this ticket tomorow instead?"

He stares at me blankly. I explain again. Does this sound familiar? He asks me, "So... you didn't use the ticket?"

I'm a pretty darn polite person in Japanese. It was a sign of things to come that instead of the usual smiling explanation, all I could think to do was snap, "I'm here, aren't I?" But hey, it worked.

I was kind of starving at that point, but it was after midnight and the stores were all closed. I grabbed a quick conbini snack while shopping for overnight supplies, then hopped in a taxi.
Cabs here work a little differently than what I'm used to. In New York, I can say "25th and 3rd" and expect a driver to know what I mean. Here, it's more like, "I'm looking for Tiny Hotel A, it's near Bigger Hotel B, in this vague area, do you know it?" Which is what I said to this guy, who had no idea what I was talking about. In this situation, my usual plan is to either give directions if I know them, or find a cabbie who knows where I want to go. But my buddy on Saturday night would not have it! He checked his list of area hotels (and checked it twice), and then made a great big show of going to every other cab driver and asking if they knew Hotel B. At this point, I was already obviously in a bad mood, and while I can't accurately type tone of voice, believe me when I tell you that this was all happening in as passive-aggressive a manner as possible. But, every time I tried to get out of the taxi, he would turn to me and say, "Oh, he doesn't know either."

I call my friend for more specific directions. My driver's response is to call his dispatch and ask for directions -- why he did not do this in the first damn place, you will have to ask him. I actually physically tore his head off when this was all over, but it's rolling along the streets in Fukuoka somewhere, I'm sure you can find it. The dispatch gives him exactly the same directions I did, but of course, I'm a dumbass foreigner with dumbass foreign friends who can't be expected to know anything.

(Actually, this is true, because both sets of directions turned out to be wrong, but that will come back to bite me in the ass in a moment.)

So finally, we're going along. Normally I have a nice relationship with drivers, and usually wind up chatting with them, but at this point, all I want is to get to the hotel, eat something, and go to sleep. Plus, I already despise this man, and he clearly thinks I'm an idiot.

Oh, and not only that. Because as we pull out, he says, in his very best so-you-definitely-seem-like-a-gaijin-prostitute voice, "So, like, sorry, but is this place a love hotel or something?"

At this point, I lost it. I've never yelled at anyone in Japanese before, but I'd had a long day, I was exhausted and angry, and I did not want to chitchat about my secret life trawling for sex with some passive-aggressive jerk. I sounded like an angry schoolgirl from some anime, with the few random curses I know thrown in for good measure.

At this, the guy backed off for a while, muttering, "I didn't mean it like that" (which he did). Then, he pulls up to Hotel B. "Okay, here we are." Hotel A is nowhere in sight. Huh? I point this out, and he asks me what on earth I'm talking about.  "What Hotel A?"

I run over our previous, pre-hooker conversation in my head. "I'm looking for Hotel A, it's near Hotel B," I'd said about a thousand times. Clearly, he'd forgotten the first part, but instead, he starts whining, "You never said anything about Hotel A! How was I supposed to know about Hotel A?" But he takes the are-you-freaking-kidding-me look on my face to heart and calls dispatch again.

Now, keep in mind, the entire conversation thus far has been in Japanese. The only English I've spoken at all has been on the phone with my friend. And, he knows I can hear him on the radio, because I pointed out to him that the directions they gave him were the same as mine. Undeterred by basic logic or manners, he gripes into the radio, "I don't know what's going on with her, she kept saying Hotel B over and over again, now she wants somewhere else, can you believe it?"

Nice.

At this point, I try to call my friends again, but my phone dies. I have the name of Hotel A and its general area and that's it. Cabbie snipes at me, "Boy, it would have been nice if you'd gotten the phone number, huh?"

Here, I pretty much lose it again. We're driving in circles, totally lost, and my fuse has completely checked out. So now we're driving in circles, lost, and yelling at each other. Finally, I tell him to just let me the hell off at Hotel B and I'll find the place myself. I shove the door closed, Buddy drives off, and...

...now I am alone in Fukuoka with no phone and no idea where I am.

But wait, what sound through yonder misery breaks?

At exactly this point, when I am truly about to break down and throw myself into traffic, or at least the nearest bed I can find, my friend shows up like Joan of Arc or some other awesome heroic figurina. In my memory, when this happened, horns were playing, the clouds parted, and the moonlight shone down upon her in radiant beams. I practically started crying.

"Please just tell me where this motherfucking hotel is," I say, like a perfect damsel in distress.

And that's how I finally got to sleep.

I will give my cabbie credit for two things: one, he turned the meter off when we started running around in circles; and two, any New York cabbie would have kicked me out of the car long, long ago. So good for him! The jackass.

Oh, and I will also say this. No matter how bad it was, I got a lovely reminder that it could always be worse. As we drove around Fukuoka, I saw a store with papered windows, clearly closed forever, and ironically titled Best Luck.

The next day, as my friends helped me recover, I found out that nearly everyone else had also been miserable the night before. Look, folks -- I know a lot of people like it, but I can only now help but wonder if Fukuoka is cursed.

PS: Also worse luck: Tokyo and the Ogasawara Islands got hit by a giant earthquake today! Yikes. I've heard everyone is okay, but nonetheless, let's all send good vibes towards Kanto.

Problem Solving; Or, How I Got Fukuoka'ed, Part 1

My triumphant return! ...is not so triumphant.

You see, I've realized that my greatest mode of communication is complaining about things. This is not because I'm a negative person; actually, I consider myself a great optimist, albeit a slightly cynical one. It's just that where I grew up, and with my friends, bitching is the way we bond. I met my best friend because of a mutual activity, and I like to think we would have become friends no matter what, but the truth is, we initially bonded because a bunch of ridiculous stuff happened and we griped to each other about it.

Which is all to say that I've been told I can be a little negative, and that I should probably not be negative about, say, my job, on my public blog. Fair enough! I say. Except that unfortunately, that means basically no content, because the rest of my life is fairly dull.

Except now, I've found something to complain about that has nothing to do with work, and everything to do with stupidity. Some of it is other people's. A lot of it is mine.

I apologize in advance for there being no pictures. I haven't yet become the sort of person who thinks, Wow, this is a shitty, ridiculous situation I'm in. I must photo-document it! Although it's only a matter of time, I'm sure.

This is the story of this weekend.

*****

The plan was pretty simple: go to Fukuoka on Saturday, watch the Grand Sumo Tournament, party until forever, go home on Sunday. But even before it started, things began to go wrong. I started feeling sick last week and wasn't sleeping well. I spent basically all weekend partying last weekend and was pretty much partied out. I didn't get the ticket I wanted for the sumo. Et cetera.

Then the Moaning Pigeons kicked off the mass ruination.

I promise I will explain the Moaning Pigeons in an upcoming entry, but for now all you need to know is that they live on my balcony and they absolutely suck. For some reason, I couldn't fall asleep till 4 AM on Friday night. '"It's okay," I thought. "I'll sleep till 10:30, leave at 11:30, nap on the train, and be at sumo by 2." But the Moaning Pigeons would not have this! No, they decided that a 7:30 wakeup call was far more appropriate. I tried to chase them off and go back to sleep, but when the Moaning Pigeons are determined, they'll do anything to get their own way. After an hour of effort, I gave up and went about getting dressed and so on. Then, all ready to go way too early, I sat down on my bed, yawned, put on an episode of The Office...

...and woke up at 1 PM.

Whoops.

Sumo lasts from 8:30 AM to 6 PM, so I realized that at least I would still have time to catch the last bunch of matches. Even better, the good wrestlers are all last, so even if I got there late, I'd get to see the really good ones. Cool! I got in at 4:30 and watched some high-quality sumo for an hour and a half, a sumo expert friend-of-a-friend giving me helpful running commentary the whole time.

Why, that doesn't sound bad at all! you say. But oh! there is so much more.

By the end of the tournament, I was still feeling fairly rotten, and my roommates were all talking about drinking all night and going wild. I really just wanted to lie in bed and read the internet, so I decided I'd just go to dinner and a nightcap and then catch the last train home at 11. This all worked out fine, except that A: it started to pour all over me and my nice fabric flats and my lack of umbrella, leaving me soaked; and B: I spent a little too much time on the nightcap and wound up scrambling for a taxi to the train station. "Step on it, please, I'm about to miss my train," I begged the cabbie. Apparently the one nice cabbie in Fukuoka, the guy drove like a rock star and I got there with 15 minutes to spare. Yes! I stroll in, get my ticket, and go to glance at the souvenirs for a minute before the train comes.

Somewhere between the ticket booth and the souvenir stand, I lose my ticket.

I check my pockets. I check my bag. No ticket. I check the floor. No ticket. Nothing.

Augh.

Here, we get to why I'm calling this entry "problem solving:" because as it turns out, the Fukuoka transit personnel have absolutely no ability to do it. I run back to the ticket booth and tell the guy what happened. He stares at me blankly. I tell him again and ask what I should do. He stares at me blankly, then asks if my ticket fell out of my pocket. Yes, yes, and I point out that the only train out of the city is about to leave without me and my 5000 yen ticket so can he please tell me what I should do? He makes a quiet phone call to someone. I have maybe two minutes. I make various gestures which I guess to him looked like American monkey antics. He gets off the phone.

"Um, do you think you could just buy another one?" he asks.

I do not have time to argue the point, and I just got paid last week, so I throw a surplus of money at him, grab a new ticket, and run.

I know my train is leaving at 10:52. This is what I know. I also know I have less than a minute before it arrives. I glance up at the departure board, see "DEPARTING AT 10:52" on the first track I see, and take off like a rocket. I make it just in time! The crowd cheers! I make myself comfortable in a lovely quiet car and the train takes leaves, heading off in...

...the exact opposite direction of my town.

I told you this was a story about my stupidity.

I'm not sure, at first. I recognize the name of the destination they announce, but I can't remember where that is. "That's south of here, right? They must just be taking the long way around." And then, as we start to pass towns I don't recognize: "Well, there are a few train routes through Kyushu, I'm just on a different one from what I took to get here... right?"

Nuh-uh.

Finally, just as I'm about to go find him, dread welling in my throat, the conductor comes to me. He takes one look at my ticket and says: "Uh... where are you going?"

"Beppu," I say in a small, I-know-I'm-a-freaking-moron voice.

He also stares at me blankly. Then, he very politely and Japaneseishly kicks me off the train.

"Is there even a train going back to Fukuoka this late?" I ask as we pull up to a stop in the middle of nowhere.

"I'm not sure," he admits. "Probably not."

"So... what you're saying is that I'm stuck in a random, unfamiliar town, in the middle of the night, with no idea where I am and no way of getting back."

He shrugs. Apparently, this is not as big a problem for Japanese conductors as it is for me.

And so there I am, at midnight, alone on the platform, bag in hand. The town's name is unfamiliar and it appears to be at least as inaka as my neighborhood, because there are no lights on anywhere. My phone has one bar of battery left.

And you know what's funny? It got worse from there.