Ramen Museum

I finally did it. I went to see the oh-so-famous Ramen Museum. If you ever try to google Yokohama, Japan one of the most popular results (for reasons I still don't understand) is this Museum. Wednesday (February 4) was another day off school. Due to the tests I explained in an earlier post. I made plans with my friend Rinna to go there. She thought it was funny that I wanted to go. It seems like everyone here knows about the museum, but nobody has actually gone to it...

In front of the "Shin Yokohama Raumen Museum"

Anyway, I met Rinna at Shin-Yokohama station, which I discovered has bullet trains! I'll get to ride one some day. It was my first time to this station. We set off to find the museum. She had brought with her a really cool little book of maps of different sections of the city with lots of details. (I liked it so much I asked her where she got it, and was planning on going to get myself one. The next day she brought it to school and gave it to me! Rinna is so nice!) The museum was, I'll be honest, slightly disappointing. When you walk in you see the gift shop and hidden behind that is the short history of instant ramen. That was fun to look at. The main attraction is downstairs. It is a replication of a section of Tokyo in 1958. The life size replication goes around the outside of the room, and then down in the middle area is the "ramen restaurant mall." There are 9 different ramen shops in this little area.

Probably the best part of the museum... :) I'm not sure what it is there for...

1958 Tokyo looked just like this!

When you have 9 ramen shops in an enclosed area that has poor ventelation (because it is in the basement) the smell is pretty overpowering. Each shop is of a different region's ramen, so they are all different flavors. We ate Fukuchan Ramen. It was good, but not the best ramen I've ever had. On the way out, we decided to do the ramen purikura. It was fun.

The middle area with all the ramen shops.

So, the museum itself wasn't that great, but it was tons of fun to go with Rinna. After that, we decided to go to the Nogeyama Daibutsuen (Zoo). It is a free zoo! I didn't even know about it until Rinna told me about it. We looked at all the different animals and had a good time talking. I'm pretty sure that my favorite part of the zoo were the cute trees shaped like different animals at the entrance. I know there's a word for that, but I can't remember it... Topiary! (I had to google it. haha)

Topiary!

This was the petting zoo. It was really icky... just mice, chickens, and chicks. The chicks were cute.

This was really cool! Rinna noticed that there was a female peacock near, and when it walked away this poor guy's feathers all sank down and then wandered after her. It was kind of funny...

After the zoo we went home to have dinner with our families. I had a really nice day with Rinna. It was so fun to get to know her more and talk with her one on one. Sometimes I feel like even though I have lots of friends at school, I don't really them that well. That's probably because I don't. Everyone is really nice, but its hard to make really close friends when you can't communicate fully with them. I hope it will get better now though. :)

Setsubun

What the heck is a Setsubun, you ask? That's a good question. Let me go google it... haha

Okay, for real I didn't understand what the holiday was for. Communicating specifics is still rather difficult, so sometimes I don't ask. All I knew is that we were going to throw beans and then I was going to eat 16 of them (because I'm 16 this year).

Fukumame!

As I just learned from the wikipedia article, setsubun is like a celebration of the change of seasons, and although it technically refers to the change of all four seasons, it usually refers to the spring because that is the only time it is really celebrated. Today is the last day of winter, or the eve of spring.

With the going away of winter you also throw out bad luck or things that have happened in the last year. This is why we threw the beans. The beans are dried fukumame. I'm not sure what fuku is, but mame is bean. And these are lucky beans or something. Lucky in the asian sense of things being lucky. Which I think is a little different than the western sense of luck, but it doesn't translate to anything closer.

Toru, Mie, and Wataru trowing their beans!

Me throwing fukumame.

Anyway, Then you eat the fukumame. (Different fukumame, not the same ones you just threw off your 5th floor balcony.) You eat as many fukumame as you are years old. I'm 16 so I ate 16. My host dad turned 40 today (Happy Birthday to him. I might stay up till he gets home to wish him it. It's already 11pm, so I hope he gets home soon.) so he will eat 40 of them.

Toru and Wataru

It was a fun little tradition they have. :) Wataru (7) asked if we had setsubun in America and didn't understand why not. haha. Then my host mom told him about how parents hide easter eggs with money inside on easter in america. I had told her about it before. I had to remind her that it wasn't the parents! It's the Easter Bunny! haha He asked, rather hopefully, if they did that in Japan too. My host mom just laughed. What kid wouldn't like the idea of finding money-filled eggs in the house?

We did all this after dinner. Which was sushi! :)

So, today I had off of school, but not because of setsubun. I have today and tomorrow off because they are having entrance exams for my high school. So, even though the high schoolers aren't taking exams (grade/middle schoolers are taking exams to get into this high school) we get off school. Sounds good to me!

However, because it wasn't a holiday that people get off school for, it was only my school. All my school friends had already made plans with other people or their cram schools so I had nothing to do. But, I had decided that I was at least going to get out of the house for a bit in the afternoon so my host mom could get any errands that she wanted to do done without feeling bad for leaving me alone in the house.

In the morning I got to talk on Skype with Dad, Michael, Caroline, Benjamin, Christy, and Ryan. And I got to witness Calvin's first real crawling. All thank to the magic of the internet! :) It was really nice to talk with everyone. Ryan says some of the funiest things I've ever heard. And some of the saddest:

Ryan- "Abbey, why don't you live here anymore?"
Dad- "Because she is visiting in Japan for a while."
Ryan- "Oh. I remember when you used to be here." short pause and now in the saddest little Ryan voice you can imagine, "I just want you to come home, Abbey."

aww! I'll be home in a few months. :)

After I got off the computer with them, I found my host mom just starting to make an Apple Pie! This doesn't happen very much here. Or ever since I got here. We had gotten this huge box of apples and manderine oranges from my host mom's mom the other day, and I think she wanted to use some of the apples. This was real apple pie too! From a recipe book of American recipes in Japanese. Written by an American woman. So, I helped my host mom make apple pie as we had a nice chat. I really love my host mom. I'll miss her when I change host families. When she asked what to do with the extra pie crust dough, I showed her how to make rolly pollies! She liked them a lot! And the pie was dang good too! That's funny because I didn't even like apple pie when before I came here...

While the pie was baking, we made Yakisoba for lunch. I love that stuff. After lunch I decided (with a little encouragement from dad in the morning) to go on an adventure! I decided that I wanted to go to Chinatown and have a wander around. I've been there a couple times, but I'd never really stopped in any of the shops before and I figured that would be more fun to do by myself than anything else on my new "to do/see around Yokohama and Tokyo" list. So I set off.

I knew from looking at a little map on the internet before I left the names of the closest station, and the next closest one. I was planning to go to the closest station, but it turns out that that's on the subway, not on the train line I took. So I just decided to get off at the next closest one and see if I could find it. (For those of you who don't know, this is coming from possibly the world's most directionally challenged person. And I wish I was kidding.) I get off at the station, wander through the Motomachi shopping district for a bit and then find Chinatown! Yay! So then I wandered through Chinatown for a while and took some pictures. And I looked around the different shops.

Motomachi Street. It's a pretty famous shopping district of Yokohama.


Chinatown!

A couple hours later, I was on the train home. I didn't get lost or even temporarily confused at where I was. haha. I feel so proud of myself. It was nice to get out and just walk around and see a little of the city. I plan to do it more often now. Honestly, if I do get lost it's not really a huge deal. Even with my poor Japanese skills I can ask for directions to the closest station, and from there it's easy. haha. Maybe I won't always be so directionally challenged after all. :)

Rotary Dinner

Last Friday night (January 30th) I went to a dinner party for rotary. They have these dinners every 5th Friday of the month, if it has one. It's just to socialize and, because this was the first one of the new year, this one was kind of a new year's party.

That means they did a few extra things to make it more fun or something. First of all, they had some kendo people come and do a demonstration.



Then they had a band. It was made up of a few of the rotarians and one rotarian's brother on lead guitar. It turns out that he is a famous Japanese idol. Or was in the 80's at least. He was lead guitarist for the band "Hound Dog." It has a wikipedia site, but it's in Japanese. :) My host dad was pretty excited when he found out who it was... he was really really famous for that generation. My host dad went over and shook his hand later in the evening. haha. I didn't actually meet the guitar player, but he was really good at guitar! It was very cool.

A rotarian and his younger brother (the rock star).

After we had this amazing performance by this super-star guitar player, it was my turn! haha. I'm not kidding...

They had a karaoke machine and a few people from the different clubs were selected to sing. And guess what?! They picked my host dad and I... to sing Dancing Queen... in front of 120 rotarians. bahahahah!

I had a good time with it, actually. It was fun. I'm not saying I sounded good. Far from it really, but I had fun. Here's the video. :) I'm so glad other people in this world are more talented than me when it comes to singing...

Well, I was going to put up the video, but it was too big. It was 132 mb and the limit is 100. And I don't have any software to edit it on this computer. Sorry guys. I'll get it up on Michael's site eventually.

Hashimoto-san and me. She was nice enough to take that video for me.

Bikes and Scooters!

This one's for Daddy! :D These are some pictures of the bike-parking-place near my station. A lot of people ride those scooter things, and even more people ride bikes. You see every kind of person riding bikes. Old men, mothers with a 4-year-old in a basket thing on the back and a 2-year-old in another seat on the handle bars, women wearing skirts, business men in suits, and students in uniform. So, I think it's safe to assume that they have places like this at pretty much every station.

And a note about the scooters. Even though I am pretty sure it's not legal, they always go in between or along the side of the cars on busy streets. Especially at stoplights or in heavy traffic. And occasionally you see people zip up onto the side walk and then back onto the street to avoid waiting for a red light. What is it with these scooter people?! They just think the rules don't apply to them or something!

And yes, I go past here every day in the bus. Every time I pass it I think, "I should take a picture of this for Dad. He likes to see these kinds of things." It only took me 5 months to finally walk back the 2 minutes and take some pictures. Mostly because I am usually in a hurry to get to the station and because you look rather stupid taking pictures of all the bikes. haha



The first half or so is bikes, and the back half is scooters. What an awful place to forget where you parked.

I love you, Daddy!

Kakezome

Japanese people have a lot of traditions around the new year. A lot of the cultural, special, or in some aspects of their culture, "sacred" things they do are extra special when they do it for the first time in the new year. Calligraphy is no exception to that. The first calligraphic writing of the year is called a kakezome. Usually it is done on the first of January, but I did mine at school. My first day back from winter break, we all did calligraphy for 2 hours and then went home. (I wasn't expecting that either. I thought we were going to have classes after calligraphy!)

This is my kakezome!


They were all submitted to a Judge (and the high-school's principal gave the one he deemed best a special award). It's possible that the principal was the judge, but I have no clue. Anyway, Last week one of my teacher's was like. "Oh! Good job on your kakezome! I was so surprised when I saw the name! It's really good!"

I was very surprised to find out that it was put in our school's art display in Queen's Square. Queen's Square is a big shopping plaza place very close to landmark tower. It is absolutely ginormous and mostly underground. The school's art was on display there for about a week so the public could come and see it. I ended up going to see it with my friend Katja (from Finland) on the 24th. The other art was amazing! There were drawings, paintings, ceramics, miniature models, and other things in addition to calligraphy. Honestly, my school has a huge amount of artistic talent. I couldn't believe these were done by middle and high school girls. Some of them looked very professional. I should have taken some pictures of the other stuff too.

Me and Katja- most, if not all, of the other kakezomes there were better than mine. I wonder if they just put it in there because I'm the exchange student.... hmm...


After the display was taken down from Queen's Square the kakezomes were put up in the entrance hall at school. I was once again surprised, and pleased to find out that I had gotten a bronze prize for it! This is the first time I've ever won an award for something artistic. Which might have something to do with the face that my drawing abilities haven't improved much since third grade. Yeah, stick people (and animals!) are about all I can do. I'm not sure how the prizes work. There was one special award from the principal, maybe a couple golds, a few silvers, and probably 10 or so bronzes. I'm so proud of myself! :D

Okay, this is not a good picture of me at all, but you can see the prize on the side of my kakezome.

These kanji together don't exactly make a sentence, but rather give the viewer an image. If they understand the kanji, that is. From top to bottom, the kanji have the following meanings: remainder, leftover, balance; snow; brightness, light; tall, high, expensive; summit, peak. The last two together mean "high mountain" or "lofty peak".

*note. These are the old kanji. Today, they are written a little differently.

The image that I came up with, which was actually very similar to my host mom's, is a high mountain peak from a little distance, with the snow glittering in the sunlight of a spring day, maybe at dawn.

My host dad gets the image of almost the same thing, but he thinks it is at night with the mountains silhouetted againts a moon-lit sky. And you can see the snow on the mountain peaks in the moonlight.

I think eveyone's image is slightly different. It's pretty likely that this is a line in an old chinese poem and if you read the whole poem, you'd get a more accurate view of what image the writer was trying to describe.

5 Months

I know it's been a while since I've posted again, but I was waiting for something to write about. And time to write. :D

First the big news. I have officially been living in Japan for 5 months! Woo hoo! It seems like every month goes faster than the last. I remember the first month felt like an eternity. But this last month was so fast!

Next news... I have officially found out my day for changing host families. :D On February 21st, I will have lunch with this host family, and then move on to my next one. So one more month. I do really like this host family, but I am ready to change. To be honest, I am most excited to live closer to my school. Right now I have an hour and 15 minute commute to school each day. My next family lives about a 20 minute walk from the school. I will get to sleep till like 6:30 or 7 each morning! I am also excited to see how another family lives here. I'm sure they will do some things differently than this family. I will write about that once I actually change though.

Other things that have happened since I last posted. I had lunch with Iliana at Subway! My first Subway in like 5 months. Crazy! I've gotta say it's better in America. A little different somehow. And the 6 inch subs here are definitely not 6 inches.

I also went to the new James Bond movie. 007 Quantum of Solace. Yes, it just came out here. It's new to me, okay? I went with a few of my friends. Sakura, her friend named Ayo (a girl from the Netherlands), and David (from Czech). It was really fun. We went to the movie and then dinner at a random japanese restaurant. The movie was okay. LOTS of good action. The plot was okay. They managed to fit a car, boat, AND airplane chase into one movie. Can't get much better than that...

Oh! Monday in school I had manner's class. It was pretty interesting, actually. I learned how to bow, sit, stand, and give someone something (like a book) in the proper Japanese way. And then I got to have my turn demonstrating how to give someone a book in front of the whole class while another teacher took pictures. I'm sure I looked slightly confused, because I was. But everyone was really nice about it. They didn't even laugh at me too much when I totally didn't understand that "ippo" ment take another step forward! haha. I knew it was one something... I just couldn't figure out what. I thought the teacher was going to be really strict, but she was nice.

Today in school was a special all-day presentation to our grade level by a priest. It was actually pretty good. Almost like a really long catholic fireside in Japanese. :D We drew pictures of scenery, which then told us about ourselves. He named something and then we drew it on the paper however and whereever we wanted. For example, if you drew lots of mountains it means you have lots of goals. If they are in the distance it means that your goals are very long-term and maybe difficult goals... etc. Then we played some small group game with no talking. Then he talked and read us an Ampan Man book. (I understood from the story that Ampan (anko bread man) went to save someone who was hungry, so he had them eat his face. Then a whole bunch of people (?) came and ate lots of him. Then, a big sea monster ate him!... the part I missed was how the sea monster didn't like sweet food (ampan is sweet) so he spit him back out. I was a little confused at why the hero died in a children's book.) Then we had mass. So, today was different. That is always nice though. The same old schedule in school gets a little old and boring after a while. Especially when the classes all seem the same. (blah blah blah YAY! I UNDERSTOOD THAT WORD blah blah blah blah)

So, that's about it for now. Sorry it's not a very good post. I just figured I should put something up for you guys to read. :D Now it's time for bed.

Okinawa sounds like a fun place....

So yesterday was my monthly Rotary Orientation meeting. All the exchange students (inbounds, outbounds, and rebounds) are there so its always a fun time to catch up with people. In between the long speeches the rotarians give to us, that is. And I know they are talking to the inbounds sometimes. I really hope they know that we don't understand more than like 5 percent of what they say to us. Well, if I try really hard I can understand about half (maybe) of what people say. But I loose focus after a few minutes. I'm sure someone will tell me what I need to know later. :D

My speech went well. I did it in all Japanese again. No more romaji for me! That is the worst thing in the world for anyone studying Japanese. Never get into the habit of using romaji. Just learn how to read Japanese right away. That's the one thing I should have done differently. And maybe started studying kanji sooner.

After the meeting was over I got to talk with the girl that is outbound to America. She doesn't have her placement yet, but she is in the Central States Region! That's the same as me! Maybe she'll be close enough to visit once when she comes. She's really nice. I can remember waiting for my placement. It was horrible! Mostly because I was pretty much the last person to receive my guarantee papers in our whole outbound group.

Then my rotarian, Mr. Fuyukawa, came to pick Iliana and I up for dinner. We went to shabu-shabu with him, my host dad, and 4 other rotarians. It was good. This was how part of our dinner conversation went:

Iliana: You should all come to Mexico! You can stay at my house by the ocean! It's beautiful!
Mr. Fuyukawa: Does Mexico have scuba diving? My daughter loves scuba diving at different places. She took lessons in Okinawa one year.
Me: Oh, cool! I would love to go to Okinawa! (in just a conversational way)
Mr. Fuyukawa: Abbey, you want to go to Okinawa?
Me: Yeah!
Mr. Fuyukawa: My family goes to Okinawa every August. Well, you'll be gone by then, wont you?
Me: Yeah, I leave in July.
Mr. Fuyukawa: How about May? During spring break? Do you want to go to Okinawa in May?
Me: Really?! I would love that!
Mr. Fuyukawa: Yes, Iliana can come too. Oh, but she leaves at the beginning of May. Maybe before that then.

:D So maybe, just maybe, I'll be going to Okinawa in May. I do have my doubts on this one though. It just sounds too good to be true. And he was drinking at the time. So you never know. But it's possible... What did I ever do to deserve such a nice host club?