The month of October~ Adventures abroad~

Yes, I know it has been quite some time since I have posted on my blog. Please forgive the wait, I promise all my time spent not writing this blog is done doing things which I intend to write about, in my blog. This being said, so much has happened in the past several weeks! (I have recently lost track of how many weeks I have stayed in Japan)

I will try to go chronologically, in my last entry I took you through a play by play of my September. Ending with my interesting trip to the Nagoya dome and the baseball game. Since then, many things have changed; first of all, the coffee hours I mentioned before have stopped being a weekly event. Regardless, the friends I made from going to the coffee hour parties I now meet on my own for lunch or just to help with homework and talk in English and Japanese. Sometimes we do more spontaneous things, shortly after my last entry, for instance, I went with my friend Kanako to a nearby festival in one of Nagoya's shopping districts! The district is called Osu-kannon and it used to be Nagoya's downtown now it is a huge outdoor mall-like area with tons of restaurants and clothing stores.During the festival many people were going to visit the impressively large local temple pictured below, and near the temple tons of people were watching   carnival-like street performers who wore incredible hand-made costumes!  they did not want to be photographed, but I was able to snap a shot of this amazing giant robot costume! believe it or not that  is a single person on stilts walking down the shopping districts busy street and scaring small children xD haha. While there, in typical American fashion, I checked out an award winning Italian pizzeria! The pizza was amazing and just like I had in Italy! (I know I'm getting Italian in Japan, but you know sometimes...scratch that all the time I miss good pizza :P)

Osu Kannon Temple

Osu Kannon Temple

Amazing Italian style pizza in Osu

interesting robot street performer at Osu Festival

My Friend Kanako (at the pizza shop)

the man farthest to the left was the "impaired" festival volunteer!
the other older gentleman was his friend
who was trying to stop him from spending too much money

one of the many "Dashi"
the decorative red flags identified what shrine  they were from
and some had ancient folk tales written on them
However I could not begin to understand what they meant 

Speaking of Festivals, Which Japan has an abundance of in the month of October, a few days after my last blog entry; I went the Handa-dashi festival! Handa  is a modestly large town a couple hours away from Nagoya, while Dashi are incredibly large and ornately decorated festival floats, some of which date back to the Edo period of Japan (1603-1868), and are pulled by around 30-40 male volunteers dressed in traditional festival garb (the Happi), each cart representing one of the 31  local Shinto shrines. The carts (which act as mobile shrines) are pulled through all the town’s streets and symbolically represent the purification of the town. Meanwhile, on lookers, such as myself ;D, cheer on their efforts and enjoy a splendid array of festival food. I only went one day, but the festival is an incredible 3-day spectacle which actually only occurs every 5 years and is said to be Japan’s biggest float festival with over 30 floats and 400,000 people coming from around Japan and the world to see it(Guess who got lucky! :D) The festival food, which I partook in graciously, (or excessively I’m not quite sure) ranged from delicious sweets such as my personal favorite choco-banana (now available in blue!) and fish shaped sweet red bean paste filled fried dough to savory snacks such tako-yaki (essentially octopus balls) and squid…on a stick! If the food was not enough, my friends that I went with actually got pulled into the festival by some overly rambunctious Japanese men! Afterward, while waiting for the floats to finish their trip around town, one of the festival volunteers actually came and bought my friends and I all  a bag of souvenirs, needless to say, he was slightly "impaired" but even so it was fun chatting with him all about how the American movie, Forrest Gump, moved him to tears and “tore out his heart” all in Japanese xD Once we finished talking with strangers, we began our way back through town assuming now because it was dark the festival was almost over… to our surprise; however, the festival was just beginning! Right outside the train station all 30 floats gathered around each other and were covered from top to bottom with bright candle lit paper lanterns with all the float volunteers dancing  and singing in circles round the floats! We got caught up in the frenzied fun and took pictures with  many Japanese festival participators. All in all the night took on an incredibly mystical and wondrous feeling that I won’t soon forget and I hope when the next festival rolls around I will be able to participate again!

Dashi with a good shot of the traditional festival garb worn by  festival volunteers 

the art on the side of these two Dashi are incredibly ornate and sewn into the fabric
not painted  or pressed

that huge crowd

my favorite festival food blue chocolate banana!!!

the night time dashi with tons of lanterns to light the way

On the lanterns you can see various characters :
Unfortunately my friends nor I were able to find out exactly what they were
However we speculated that because they only consist of a few characters that they were names of various  generous donors to the festival

the somewhat sweaty festival bandana that my generous Japanese  Forrest Gump loving friend gave me

my friends saying our final good byes to the beautifully lit floats and festival atmosphere

            From my entries, most of you are probably thinking that I’m consistently going to one major Japanese themed event after another. This however, is not the case; in fact, I’ve been studying quite a lot recently and have been steadily improving my ability to speak in Japanese. (Though my ability to speak English, as I’m sure you can tell from my writing, is slowly deteriorating) As far as, information on my school life, I believe I’ve adjusted well to my daily routine and as of yet have had no trouble with my classes, though the exams are quite stressful. Other than that I spend much of my time outside of class helping the exceedingly large population of English majors at my school with English conversation practice or English pronunciation practice. I even found time to join the rag-tag Japanese fencing team, though due to school projects I haven’t been able to go in the past few weeks.

tiger hat greaser because well the Japanese girls  made me...xD

The end of October brought with it a flurry of activity! While everyone in the States was putting up Halloween decorations and picking costumes, most of Japan had only a vague idea that Halloween was even coming. Thankfully, Nanzan’s many international students, Japanese English students, and of course myself were able to bring the Halloween spirit to campus organizing several Halloween themed events including a Halloween zoo party (see attached pictures) where most of the Japanese college girls went in their individual high school uniforms as a joke and I of course in honor of my American roots went as a 1950’s greaser! I also had fun joking around with one of the Japanese student-only English classes with some of my friends. The class was having their own Halloween party similar to one you might have in high school with fun themed games and lots of photographs! One of the international dorms on campus even hosted a huge Halloween party on the 31st complete with costume contest, DJ, and spooky stories ;D (see attached pictures) I went as greaser then as well, but that time I greased back my hair which was a lot harder than you’d think! In any case, I had a lot of fun dancing and taking pictures not to mention having to explain that I was not trying to be Tom Cruise (because almost no one, except the American students, knew what I was supposed to be!)  Of course, I can’t talk about Halloween with-out mentioning the wonderful package I received from my loving family back home! Thank you so much, Granny & PaPa, Mom & Dad, and Aunt Lisa & Aunt OJ! If I had not had all of that wonderful american candy you sent (Reese's in particular!) I would not have been able to experience the true spirit of Halloween...the November 1st candy induced stomach ache!

pictured left to right with me in the center- Melisa Dobbs(Texas), Daniel Deamba (France), and Claire Smith (Scotland) all four of us have become good friends from spending so much time taking strange photos like these :P

being silly at our Halloween at the zoo adventure (yes, even you can be an over-weight zoo keeper who hugs hippos)

they had an incredibly small place to take "Halloween pictures " at the zoo  we jumped at the opportunity of course :D

pictured left to right: Kanako, Mr. Magoo, Mandy Miller ,Amanda Franklyn,  Risa

the Japanese English class's Halloween party

Halloween night party-Chika naiki (the witch) and Grease lighting :D

Dancing like the Fonz ~ ^_^

this years pumpkin-its not much for creativity, but I had a jack-o-lantern in Japan and It was amazing!
(Thanks Aunt Lisa & Aunt OJ!) 

I know have not been very consistent with updating my blog. I am truly sorry to make everyone wait for news about my experiences but today is my first day off in a long while and I will start by posting this and then two more installments of my experiences of November and one more on my most recent experiences. I let time get away from me and the amount of information I wanted to blog about built up making it difficult to find the time to type about everything at once. From now on I resolve to not wait this long to up date and as of next semester (unless completely incapable I plan on a shorter update once a week more than likely posted Saturday or Sunday Rather than huge monthly installments which are probably as difficult to read as I find them to write xD)

Weeks 2-3

(1)Nagoya Castle 

(2) Nagoya Castle Tea house with friends 

Hello again, family, friends, co-workers, and possible strangers! I apologize for the late entry unfortunately (or fortunately) the past few weeks have been an exciting rush of various activity. This in  mind, try to bare with me, I will do my best to accurately retell my experiences with the help of the many pictures I have been taking.

Starting where I last left off...  I went to visit the famous Nagoya Castle! The original castle was actually burned to ashes in 1945, during World War II. However the rebuilt castle is an exact replica and is definitely an imposing sight on the Nagoya city skyline!
In the picture(1), you may be able to see at the very top of the castle two golden objects these are known as kinshachi. They are incredibly large statues of  imaginary animals resembling a dolphin or other sea creature  each statue is said to be made from Keicho era gold and according to my small pamphlet each statue is separately made up of almost 50kg of gold a piece! pretty impressive! Showing off money and power aside the statues hold a symbolic or superstitious belief as well, the decoration or  specifically the animal (hard to tell from my translation) was supposed to be protection from fire....Oh the tragic Irony of the situation....

The castle was incredibly well restored and although I took no pictures of the inside (I did but the pictures were quite dark and uninteresting :C)  my description will have to suffice. At the base of the castle tourist walk up a large stone stair case entering through a large wooden gate one inside the stone base you must continue through another set of gates leading to a path toward the main wooden castle. the stone base used presumably for protection was made up of large boulders and stones taken from all over the surrounding country side and some of the boulders (although faded with time) still display the insignia of old Japanese clans who helped build the castle. In my opinion, this was certainly the most impressive part of the castle, as it is the only original part left after the wooden castle was burned down those many years ago. The inner castle was really set up as a museum  full of very touristy displays of how the reconstruction was completed and etc. I'm sorry to say the lighting was so low no good pictures could come of it :(

In any case, I still had a wonderful time and made many new friends on the trip picture(2) was taken in front of a restored tea house right inside the castle grounds. looking at the picture, to the right of me, are my three foreign student friends, Melissa Dobbs(Texas), Amanda Franklyn (Missouri), and Claire Smith (Edinburgh, Scotland) in that order starting with Melissa in the blue shirt.

Over the past few weeks, I have made many friends from all over the United States and the world! I still can't get over how, regardless of out cultural or educational upbringing, we all have a love for Japanese language and culture in common! :D

(3) Nagoya Station party

After Nagoya Castle, Claire invited Amanda and I to spend time with her and a couple of her Japanese friends. :) we were originally supposed to go to see a movie but as we caught the train a few minutes late, we ended up going to dinner in the center of Nagoya :D  (see picture (3))
We had a lot of fun doing our best to communicate in some strange combination of English and Japanese :) not to mention trying to figure out what exactly we were eating!:P xD

(5) Coffee hour

I don't just spend time with the Foreign students of course, Nanzan University has been very good about organizing seemingly weekly events to allow study abroad students to intermingle with interested Japanese students, many of which have majors concerning Foreign Language or

(4) welcome party Coffee hour

International Relations. :) These almost weekly events, are known as Coffee Hour (although coffee is rarely served :P) and essentially involves talking with Japanese students in whatever language you prefer (or want to practice) while participating in various  team activities. I've gone almost every time and always meet many new people :D It is really quite a lot of fun :D see pictures (4) and (5)

(6) Nagoya dome

On the 26th I went to a very exciting Japanese Baseball game at the famous Nagoya dome! I went with my Host family and we rooted for the home team the Nagoya Dragons! We were facing the Baystars from another Japanese city (the name escapes me at the moment) but it was interesting to see how animated the crowd was compared to an American baseball game. Here, every time someone came up to bat a new cheer rang out from the whole crowd of that teams supporters regardless of the players record. The field itself was incredibly interesting as instead of being an outdoor stadium the entire field is contained in an enormous dome!(see picture (6) and (7)

(7) PLAY BALL!

Our team was doing so well! but in the last inning the other team pulled ahead and we lost :C a tad disappointing but the experience was definitely one to remember!



Since my last post, I have been steadily improving my Japanese and becoming more confident or trying to speak with many Japanese people. I am easily able to navigate the subway and train systems now so I haven't made any other mistakes concerning riding the train. But as a treat for everyone who takes the time to read my blog. I will end this entry with my latest "Gaijin Goof" as I have lovingly been calling my many foreigner mistakes.

About three days ago, last Thursday, I was running a tad late to class. and reading my schedule quickly I noticed I was on the 6th floor of the main building today. Running up the stairs I began thinking about how today (as is every Thursday) was the day I would be speaking with a Japanese student one on one for the entire class period about what ever topic planned for us. Making it to the 6th floor I found the room number and confidently threw the sliding door open and walked about half way in to the class, when suddenly I was greeted with frantic cries of excitement as I'd say 10-15 of the girls I met in coffee hour recognized me and shouted my name. seeing one of the girls I talked with the most I strolled over, not paying much attention to my surroundings, planning on asking her to be my speaking partner (as I was a tad late and I didn't want to cause to much of a problem)

Then I realized as I sat on the desk next to Kanako-san (the girl I was planning on being my speaking partner) that I was the only guy in classroom full of about 30 Japanese girls. who were all staring at me and speaking frantic Japanese. the teacher or class leader (it was hard to tell really she looked rather young) soon came up to me and speaking very quick Japanese asked me what I was doing. I had accidentally stumbled right into the middle of an all girls English class right in the middle of the lesson which had nothing at all to do with going to my classroom to speak with Foreign students.

Dazed and confused a showed her my schedule claiming this to be the right room and apologizing endlessly I ran from the room. Still late for class I ran down the stairs wondering how in the world this could have gone all so wrong only to notice I had misread my schedule and had read Tuesday's room assignment rather than Thursday's!  I was actually on the 3rd floor! Dashing to the third floor room assignment I threw open the door and before stepping inside once again notice the room to be filled with Japanese girls (who I didn't know) I slammed the door as quickly as I d opened it and now more confused than ever I noticed one of my fellow classmates closing a door on the opposite end of the hall and running over I made it in to class discovering the the teacher had actually decided to change rooms last minute for some unknown reasoning concerning class size.

Thankfully I was not counted as late, but the emotional trauma and embarrassment was plenty punishment enough I think! XD And NO I don't have any picture of the look on my face when I finally realized where I was :P so don't ask for any :P till next time I hope everyone is doing well and I can't wait to write my next entry! Enjoy the fall for me everyone! its going to be 81 degrees again today :C Write again soon~
Your Gaijin Friend~
Matt~

Week 1

view from my rooms balcony

Well I made it, safe and sound! So far Japan has been everything I dreamed it would be!

 My host family is very kind and understanding of my many Japanese mistakes and have been helping me understand and communicate a little more smoothly with each passing day. Over the past week I have experienced quite a lot, I've met many people from all around the world and made a few interesting new friends who I'm sure will  be experiencing many of the same things that I am as well.

The first thing that was of major interest for me was going to get my rail pass, or manaca card. Having never had to ride trains or subways before I was excited to get to try it out! So after my host mother kindly assisted me in filling out the information and spoke with the station employee running the register in rapid Japanese, I received my card and we proceeded to go and visit my university. I was amazed by the speed and ease by which the train system ran with perfect punctuality! not to mention watching the many different small towns go by was incredibly scenic and beautiful! The subway which we took next after was equally interesting and incredibly clean!  All in all, the commute to school which I will be making daily will take me about 45 to 50 mins with only one transfer to the subway line.

Gaijin story of the day: I've decided to document the most foreigner moments of my experience to help anyway who ever decides to travel to Japan. Sharing my embarrassment may help someone save a little face if they ever decide to travel. For the first Gaijin moment I look toward the first time I took the subway to school alone.

Being the first day of school I left a little early in order to ensure I made it on time in case I made any mistakes with directions. so I arrived to the subway earlier than planned and had time to wait for the next train to make its way to the stop. waiting with a few hundred other early passengers (all Japanese) I double checked the line I was about to get on and as the train pulled up and opened its doors I stepped in. after waiting a few seconds I realized no one else was getting on board (of the hundred Japanese people waiting I was the only one who got on. Frantically, I realized the train I had just stepped on was making its last stop at this station and was about to head off to a storage tunnel (or where ever they out trains when they stop running) and just before the doors shut I jumped back off onto the platform. Polite as always the Japanese people all around me said nothing, but I'm sure it was a good laugh for everyone who saw my look of surprise and embarrassment. Laughing to myself I got on the next train just fine :) 

Every night at 8 o'clock my host family (Miyako-san and Jun-san) and myself sit down for dinner. It is always something new and interesting. For instance, the other night I had deep fried ebi (shrimp) and fresh tako (octopus) it was delicious!!! :) we talk mostly in Japanese although Miyako does most of the talking and I do most of the listening it is still a lot of fun and the conversation is always interesting and great way for me to learn new things about the Japanese language.

This Sunday, my host family and I took a drive to a local book store up the street quite a ways it was huge!! and the selection of material was amazing!! after that we stopped at a chain of half price used book stores called Book Off which was even more interesting (considering I could pretty much anything I ever dreamed of for 100yen (about $1) ) I even picked up a couple of books! a children's Book telling the classic Miyazaki film Howl's Moving Castle (my favorite) and two of a reprint of the famous sci-fi graphic novel Akira (Uncle John you should be proud :p) 

Everyone here has been very kind and helpful so far and I am really looking forward to the rest of the year. I hope everyone is doing well back home, I miss you all. :) Today  I will be going to Nagoya castle with a group of students from school I will be sure to take  a lot of pictures to post in my next entry. Have a great week everyone!
Till next time じゃまた！

The preparation begins!

With the help of family, friends and inspirational teachers I have, after all these years, achieved my goal of earning a chance to study abroad in Japan. Thank you to everyone!

 As July begins, I am reminded how close I am to leaving for Nanzan and in order to keep everyone I care about and who is interested in my experience informed while I am away, I have decided to create this blog of my weekly experiences in Nagoya, Japan.

So far this summer, I have discovered how complex and difficult preparing to study abroad can be. There is seemingly endless paperwork and decisions to be made before I am even going to get close to getting on the plane. However, with the purchase of my flight for Nagoya airport secured to arrive on September 4th my dream is truly becoming a reality!

I look forward to sharing all my experiences of Japan with everyone who cares to read, and I hope that my writings, thoughts, and ideas are well received as I grow and change throughout this year from my experiences. I will begin posting regularly after the first week in September, until then all posting will concern my preparation for my trip and any exciting happenings of my summer farewell to the United States.

~“You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You're on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the one who'll decide where to go...” ~Dr. Seuss (Thanks Mom and Dad for all those years of reading the same book more than once) :)