Vietnam Itinerary

In case anyone is wondering, here is where I think I will be for the next two weeks:
Dec 20-22 - Saigon
Dec 23-25 - Hoi An (flying in/out of Danang)
Dec 26-27 - Hanoi
Dec 28-30 - Ha Long Bay
Dec 31-Jan 3 - Sapa
Jan 4 - Saigon, fly home to Fukuoka

See you in 2009! (or 2010...)

Mid-December

My weekend was looking rather uneventful so I went for a walk downtown. I visited a few shrines, the Asian art museum, and a new Starbucks (if I could only find another place to go with comfy chairs, good coffee, and no smoking, I'd go there). I saw the last of the autumn colors as I walked up to the Atago shrine overlooking the Muromi River, Momochi neighborhood, and Hakata Bay. I ate tea and mochi cakes as I watched the sun set over Fukuoka and finally taught myself hirigana with the flashcards I bought online last spring.

Hirigana is one of the three alphabets used to write Japanese. I have a whole new sympathy for my students who are learning to read and write one or two new languages! I teach a Korean first grader how to read in English while he is simultaneously learning Japanese and how to write in Korean. It's a wonder his little head doesn't explode!

On Monday night I went to a fantastic taiko drumming performance. I'm hoping to find a local taiko group to join myself! I took videos but cannot load them on to my blog for some reason... Stay tuned?

Tonight I met my new friends, Aaron and Yoko, for a fabulous tofu feast, and the rest of my week will be full of grading student papers before the winter break. On Saturday I take off for two weeks in Vietnam! I'll be traveling around with Karinna, Michael, and Karinna's mom, Anne. I'm looking forward to the tasty food and the beautiful landscapes and learning about the culture. Two weeks won't be nearly enough time, but here is a map of all the places I'd like to see. When I return, I will update the map to see where I ended up!

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I'll be back in Fukuoka January 4th. I'm off to Nagoya for a weekend on January 9th, followed by a week of final exams and entering semester grades. Whew! Until then, I wish everyone a very happy new year! I'll greet 2009 in the mountains of northern Vietnam thinking about all the new things I've learned in Japan, all the adventures I will have in the new year, and all the friends around the world I love so much!

Buddha adventure

Ignoring the freezing cold, I went out to the hills yesterday to find a giant bronze reclining Buddha. I was thrilled to find a snowy wonderland in the hills above the statue and temple complex in Nanzoin, just a 20 minute train ride outside of downtown Fukuoka.




For the full slideshow:

Nanzoin - Buddha and Autumn Colors in the snow!

Yakushima!

I just got back from the island of Yakushima. Here are a few pictures. I'll add captions later... I'm tired!




And here's a link to the full photo album (full as soon as it finished uploading to picasa...)

Yakushima Trip November 2008

Yakushima

Here's where I'll be this weekend:

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Sumo!

Six times a year there are sumo tournaments in Japan and every November one of those events comes to Fukuoka. All the top sumo wrestlers compete against each other every day for two weeks.


We wanted to go outside to wait and meet the wrestlers but since it was too friggin' cold (it snowed today!) I figured this cardboard cut-out would have to do! After the tournament we went out for yakitori (grilled meat on sticks) in Tenjin. What a fun school night! It was a fun school day, too, by the way! I treated my 10th graders to a little party in celebration of our new unit on the Classical Period. History rocks!


Here is a typical scene on a Fukuoka subway.











I'm trying to upload videos but it's way too slow! I'll try again tomorrow, if I'm not too busy packing for Yakushima! We have a 5-day weekend so Lori and I are off on another adventure. This time we're heading to the southern tip of Kyushu for a hot "sand bath" in Ibusuki then we'll take a hydrofoil to Yakushima to frolic in the magical forest!

Karaoke!

Finally I've had opportunities to sing karaoke!  In Japan!  At last!  We went out Friday night after a staff "Thanksgiving" dinner (turkey and sushi!) and had a blast.  Tomorrow night I'm off to my first Sumo tournament.  Stay tuned...

It's the most wonderful time of November!

On November 1st, the Christmas lights came out in Japan. Shops busted out the wreaths and carols, and Starbucks introduced the holiday lattes. It's funny because less than 1% of Japan is Christian (thank goodness!) but apparently Christmas is a popular commercial holiday. Here is one festive house I pass on my bike ride along the river to/from school:

Seoul

This week I took 9 students to the Seoul Model United Nations conference. Here are my students in front of a temple on our first night downtown. Only one student speaks Korean so he and I were the tour guides. It was great to return to Seoul, where I had a great adventure last year.
Karinna accompanied students from her school in Vietnam as a chaperone at the MUN conference, too! It was so good to see her! She joined my group for our second night on the town. We braved the crowded subways to get around.
The conference was great and we all enjoyed our time in Seoul. I especially enjoyed the food and was impressed with all the student delegates. Can't wait to go back next year!

Yanagawa Festival

Last night Lori and I went back to Yanagawa for the annual nighttime lantern festival. Once a year (for 56 years now) they honor some local guy (I have no idea who, but his picture was all over town) by decorating the canals and boats with thousands of lanterns. We didn't make a reservation for a boat so we had to view the festivities from land.

Over a hundred boats full of happy and hungry festival-goers filled the canals. Next year Lori and I hope to have enough friends to fill our boat for a dinner cruise.

Along the canal route local citizens provided cultural entertainment and set off firecrackers. The best show was a women's taiko drumming group.

I wish I'd taken a longer video. They were great! See the boats going by in the background?

An older group of ladies performed on traditional Japanese stringed instruments.

In the end there was a huge fireworks display.

We took the train home and checked out a karaoke bar in my neighborhood. It was a small place with about ten people sitting
around the bar and passing the mic around. Most of the clientele were drunk old men and in the end I'm not sure if we belonged there but it was a fun night anyhow!

Fall in Fukuoka

Fall is here, and I've been busy busy busy but not that exciting lately. It's that time of year when I realize that it's been two months and I'm still in Unit 1 and I wonder why I haven't done some of the things I meant to do. I have been missing Portland quite a bit lately, as my social life here just can't compete with what I left behind. However, I'm still loving my job and getting to know my new city. I'm trying to decide where to go for a five day break a month from now. Tokyo? Kyoto? Shanghai? I might have to go to Osaka to get my visa for Vietnam. I hear they have good okonomiyaki there, and this guy I went to high school with is a big dj on the Osaka scene, or so he claims on facebook. Hmm.

Last weekend I went on the high school overnight trip to a camp in the hills. I didn't get much sleep and can't say I enjoyed the night part much, but the day was beautiful and the kids were having a great time! I did enjoy tossing a frisbee around in the field and eating hotdogs with my high school colleagues.

On Sunday I joined a group of total strangers (who I met through an ad with the local international magazine) and biked out of town into the hills for a hike. It was pretty cool to get to a view like the one above and know that I had walked and biked there from my apartment (in the distance). I am now a member of the "Fukuoka International Hiking Club" and hope to go on more hikes in the future. The hills of Fukuoka are covered in cedar trees and ferns so I almost felt like I was in Oregon. I avoided running into any wild boar which, unlike at home, is a possibility here.

If I make it through this week (quarter progress report grades are due tomorrow and I feel terribly behind in everything!) I hope to get out next weekend to the Saga Balloon Festival and the nighttime Lantern Festival in Yanagawa, the canal town I visited with Jinny. I also have to make sure my students are ready for the Model United Nations conference, which is in Seoul next week! And good news: Karinna will be there, too! I'm definitely looking forward to eating some bibimbap with Karinna in Korea!

Nagasaki, Unzen, Obama

We had a three-day weekend so Lori and I took a two-hour bus to Nagasaki. Since we'd both seen the Peace Park and Museum at Hiroshima we decided to forego the bomb epicenter in Nagasaki. The city is famous for other reasons, namely it's long history of being the gateway to Japan, which is reflected in the international influences in the food, religion, and architecture in the city.

This bridge is the oldest Chinese-style stone bridge in Japan and it was just down the river from our hostel.

We visited several Buddhist temples (with Shinto shrines nearby, of course) including a few that were built in the early 1600s by Chinese Buddhist missionaries. The temples were spared destruction in 1945 because Nagasaki's hills gave them protection from the bomb blast.

We splurged on a fancy shipoku lunch, a big spread of Japanese, Chinese, and Portueguese-influenced delicacies.

In Chinatown we snacked on steamed pork buns. Nagasaki is also famous for a Portuguese pound cake known as castella. The Portuguese were allowed to trade at the port of Nagasaki for only a few years before they were expelled for being too Catholic. The Japanese government did allow Dutch traders to take their place but only within the confines a small artificial island in the harbor.

These sage statues grace the courtyard of the Confucian Temple in Nagasaki. At the museum behind the shrine were several items on loan from the National Museum in Beijing, including a couple of the life-sized soldier statues from Xian.

After two nights in Nagasaki we headed east to the Shimabara Peninsula, dominated by the volcano of Mt. Unzen. Hot springs lovers have been travelling to the resort town of Unzen for centuries. Lori and I enjoyed hard-boiled eggs from the bubbling "hell pools" and relaxed in a public bath. After trying champon for lunch (Nagasaki's famous Chinese-style noodle soup) we took a bus down the mountain to the coastal hot springs resort town, Obama!
We were excited to pay homage to Obama in Obama. The town didn't seem to be cashing in on its name, except for one shop sign advertising Obama as the "champion we can believe in" (or was that "champon" soup?). Lori and I splurged and stayed in a hot springs ryokan (traditional inn) where we had a fantastic spread for dinner served in our room. After dinner we relaxed in the hot tub on the pool (overlooking the bay) then returned to our room to find our dinner cleared and our futons rolled out for bed!

We joined several naked Japanese ladies in the public bath on the bay. Actually, they joined us, after I took this photo of the empty pool!

I can't believe the election is less than a month away! I took my ballot to the consulate the other day where it was Fed-Exed for free to Oregon. If you want to know what I'm thinking and reading about regarding the election and the economy, check out my political blog, http://alispoliticalblog.blogspot.com/


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For more photos, check out:

Nagasaki, Unzen, and Obama 10/12/08

Weekend excursions

Since Jinny was my first visitor I was a bit nervous about choosing the best things to show her around Fukuoka.  I'm still getting to know the place myself!  The city itself seems most exciting at night, so during the day we set off to visit some of the places I'd read about that sounded cool.On Saturday we went to Futumigaura Beach, about an hour from my apartment.  It is popular with surfers and tourists who want to see the famous white shrine.  We had burgers at a beach cafe and watched the surfers.  It was the first really pleasant day I've seen here, weather-speaking.  It was sunny but not humid, perhaps a sign of the coming fall.  
On Sunday we took the train to Yanagawa, an old city famous for its canals.  We took a boat ride through the canals with our wonderful guide who sang to us along the way.  

Yanagawa was beautiful and I'm sure I will return there often.  We had steamed eel for lunch, a Yanagawa specialty, and enjoyed watching other groups go by in their boats.  I hope to go back in November for a nighttime lantern festival.  The fall and spring colors must be especially lovely.

Here is my lunch, Yanagawa-style steamed eel, rice, and eggy "noodles".  If you want to see more pictures, check them out here:

Jinny's visit