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)