Mt. Iwate

Here's Tyler and I, in the wind, on a bridge over the river that runs through Morioka city, with glorious Mount Iwate in the background:

Pretty majestic.

TRASH IS SO HARD

So here's a fun fact about Japan:

TRASH IS SO HARD TO THROW AWAY!

First of all, there's no trash anywhere along the streets or sidewalks or anything. Japan is SUPER clean. Which is awesome.

But what I don't get is where all the trash goes, because when you're walking around there are also hardly ever any public trash cans anywhere. Except outside convenience stores, usually, but when you're downtown that can be hard to find.

Most importantly, though, trash is super hard to throw away because it gets sorted into at least six different categories. Including your own trash at home. We have a chart to help us figure it out, which looks like this:

Of course, this helpful chart is in Japanese. But the main point of it is that everything gets sorted into a color, and that color trash gets put out and collected on a specific day of the week, or every other week, or once a month. Depending on the category.

Tyler hadn't tried taking out the trash at all before I got here. Apparently if you put out the wrong trash on the wrong day, or if your trash is incorrectly sorted, the garbagemen will bring your trash back to you and fine you. This morning we tried putting trash out for the first time. It was pink day. It's 2pm and I have yet to have anyone knock on my door bringing me garbage, so I think that means we're good! Fingers crossed.

Prefectural Museum

Our apartment is located on a hill just north of the main city of Morioka. I really like being just a little bit removed from the heart of the city, and it's super convenient because there's a bus terminal that's a 5 minute walk away. It kind of reminds me of being on Palatine Hill at Lewis & Clark, except the bus isn't free. In fact, the bus is pretty expensive. But worth it!

Anyway, turns out there's some pretty cool stuff up here on the hill. Including the Iwate Prefectural Museum!

The museum was so cool, for so many reasons! They had pretty much everything... starting with dinosaurs then moving on to early human tools and pottery, which I of course went nuts for, and got to dredge up some facts from my Japanese and Korean art history class! They had really cool displays about all kinds of inventions like iron mills, and castle construction. They had an awesome folklore and culture section. We had a little museum guidebook in English that we got from the front desk, and a few of the main exhibit signs were in English, so I could figure out what most things were about. And just when I thought it was over, the natural history continued with all kinds of modern fish and animals (mostly stuffed, but some live glowy fish that were really cool)!

I will definitely be visiting the museum again. There was a TON to take in, and I know I'll just keep getting more and more out of it. For now though, here are some highlights from my first visit. It's mostly animal stuff, because I'm pretty sure you weren't supposed to take pictures of the artifacts.

This dinosaur. What is it?? Apprently an early coastal mammal. Pretty big and really weird. Cool.

A giant shark jaw!! It was at the entrance to the modern animal area.

At the entrance of the museum, there were vending machines with little souvenirs in them. Tyler chose the scary samurai sculpture vending machine, and I chose the early cultural artifact machine. We got these two little guys on the left! They now live with our plants. And the Wolfman gets to hang out too, since we're all about the whole East-meets-West thing here.

Here's me with the giant awesome sculpture at the museum entrance. Unfortunately, I've already forgotten what this sculpture represents. There was a lot to take in! I'll be sure to check when I go back. I'm sure it won't be long until my next visit!

New Roomie

Meet Rosie, one awesome axolotl and the newest addition to our apartment! Her favorite activities include flapping her gills, floating about, and staring contests. 

Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My!

Tyler and I, along with our friends Claire and Jesse*, went to the Morioka Zoo! While we didn't see any tigers, we did see lions and bears and all kinds of other cool stuff. It was a pretty nice zoo. Some of the pens were awesomely huge and open like this one below. Others were smaller and sadder. But I like to think that all the animals got to take turns playing in the big happy pen in the middle of the zoo. When we were there, it was full of ostriches, these little deer things, and a zebra.

The zoo was quite extensive, and had pretty much everything except tigers or pandas. There were even weird things like prairie dogs in the zoo! There was a mountain lion, and regular lions,  and some really cute playful otters, and flamingos, and raptors, and gross monkeys, and a rhino, just to name a few. 

One of my favorite parts of the zoo was this handy guide of how to identify animals from their butts. Because let's be real, it's not often that zoo animals give you the perfect view like that rhino did above.

For instance, how would I know what that creature on the right was without the handy butt guide? Oh, it's an elephant!!

And here's the butt of a cool Japanese goat thing!

All in all, it was a great day at the zoo. We had originally wanted to go to the amusement park which is right next to the zoo, but it's a holiday right now so the lines were INSANELY long, and it was hot out. So we opted for the zoo instead. Tyler and I bought yearly passes, so I'm sure we'll be going back again! And we are hoping to go to the amusement park next weekend with Claire and Jesse. I'll keep you posted!

(Here's me as one eyeball of a giraffe)

*Claire and Jesse will appear often in upcoming blog posts. Claire is in the JET program with Tyler, and they live in the apartment building next to ours. They are from New Zealand.

First Impressions

I'm actually here in Japan!!!

The traveling took a long time. Once I got to Tokyo, Tyler was there to meet me. We took a bus to the train station to get on a bullet train, or shinkansen, to Morioka. Our train was delayed, but with the help of a nice Japanese lady, the station attendants, and a little patience and tenacity, we eventually just hopped on a train that was headed to Morioka after an hour or so of confusion. The bullet train apparently went really fast and covered what would have been a 7 hour bus ride in about 2 hours 45 min, but I honestly couldn't tell you whether or not that is accurate since I passed out as soon as we were on the train and had pretty much lost all sense of time at that point. I woke up at Morioka station, we got my bags, and took a taxi to our apartment, my new home!

The apartment is pretty cool. It's a Japanese style apartment with all the rooms separated by sliding papered door panels, and the bedrooms and living room have tatami grass mat floors. It's pretty spacious and on the ground floor of the apartment building, so we have a little porch and access to a grassy area behind the building.

Tyler had warned me that the appliances were confusing, since the instructions are all in Japanese. This morning it took me three tries to figure out the shower. The shower water heater is a gas heater, so you have to turn on the gas, light the burner, turn on the water, turn on the shower, and adjust the temperature. But all in all the place is great!

Yesterday Tyler surprised me by taking the day off of school, and we walked around Morioka city. There is a lot to explore that we didn't see, and we took pretty much the whole day walking around! It's definitely a city. Highlights of yesterday's journeying include: Morioka castle park, where we saw ducks, turtles, and huge carp; sushi for lunch; visiting the pet store so Tyler could convince me to get an axlatl (we don't have one yet but will soon); and all the other shops and places we went. It's a cool place!

I definitely feel like I walked all day yesterday, though. Today I moved my stuff in, cleaned the apartment, then walked to the dollar store to buy some hangers and stuff to move in. It's only 1:45pm but I feel like I've been awake forever and I think it's time for a nap. That probably shows in this blog post, since it was pretty rambling and uninformative. Thanks for making it all the way through it!

The main takeaway should be: I'm pretty much settled in and really liking it so far.

More to come soon!

I'm So Sleepy (Iggy)

I'm so sleepy
You already know
I'm on a fast plane

From LA to Tokyo!

Ok, so I'm not really on a plane from LA to Tokyo yet. But I am in the Denver airport waiting for my flight to LA, where I truly will get on a flight from LA to Tokyo! Who knew Iggy was singing about me this whole time.

It's early and I'm not going to write a whole lot now, but know that it's time for all you lovely people to start following my blog again. Lucky you! I'll post pretty pictures as I chronicle my latest adventure of moving to Morioka, Japan to teach English. Wahoo!

Good morning y'all. I'm going to go hunt down a bagel now.