Matsuzono Festival

My apartment is located a little ways outside of downtown Morioka, in a region called Matsuzono. I especially like this name because it makes me think of the Mat-Su Valley in Alaska, so it's the perfect place for me to call home here!

A couple of my students at OASIS also live in Matsuzono. A week or two ago they informed me that there was going to be a tiny festival in Matsuzono. They translated the schedule of events for me and everything, which was really sweet. So last Sunday, that's where I spent my day! During the day it was ungodly hot, so I took a quick look around then retreated to my apartment until evening hit and it cooled off a little. There was great fair food, and I got to see a performance of the traditional Japanese instrument the shamisen! There were tons of adorable little Japanese children running around in yougata, the summer kimonos. Tyler and I hung out drinking beer on the lawn. Then, at the end of the evening, there was a great fireworks show! Tyler pointed out that the whole thing felt like a Fourth of July celebration, which we never really got to have. It was a nice day in our neighborhood, although I didn't end up seeing any of my students there, which was too bad.

A parade of children from the local schools.

 Street of food vendors. YUM.

In the evening when we returned, lots of delightful lanterns lighted the way!

Excitedly watching fireworks!

Incidentally, here's how I celebrated the actual Fourth of July:

Life and Death

"I had an axolotl named Rosie. She died! She died!" - Lisa Simpson's poetry, adapted for my own personal use by Ithaca Sorensen

Unfortunately, young Rosie has passed. As temperatures climbed into the 30s (or 90s for you Fahrenheit users out there), the heat became too much for her little body to bear. We tried everything to cool her water, from shade and fans to ice bottles in the tank, but to no avail. She wouldn't eat and she got paler and paler. Finally, as a last resort I tried putting her in the fridge (a technique for cooling axolotls that has actually proven quite successful in many cases, despite how scary it sounds). But by that time I fear it was too late, and in the morning when I opened the refrigerator she was gone.

Tyler was away that weekend, so my neighbor Jesse was the only witness to the funeral service held in Rosie's honor. With a spoon, I dug a small hole in the yard by our apartment, under a nice little bush. I built a mound of small rocks atop her grave, and placed a nice blue flower on top. I cracked open a cold beer, and poured the first drink out for her.

RIP Rosie.

But, as always, life goes on. After Rosie's death I was consoled by health of my small garden on my porch! This morning I harvested my first (and so far only) cucumber. But look how big it is! Yum! Also, I have been munching on the many cherry tomatoes as they become ripe for the picking. My first blueberry turned blue. Only my broccoli plant remains fruitless. Oh well.

As we mourn the death of Rosie, who always had a smile on her little axolotl face and a spring in her floating step, we must remember that life goes on in many other ways. I write this post while sitting in the kitchen, watching out the window as butterflies flit cheerfully around Rosie's grave, enjoying their beautifully short lives. 

My Job Rules (because there are no rules)

Last week I officially started my job at OASIS English Private Conversation School. When I was here in May, I went to visit Tyler at his work at a public high school here in Morioka. He wears a suit to work every day and the students wear uniforms. Everyone is super polite and the students I talked to seemed kind of shy about speaking English in classes. Overall it was a very reserved environment. So that's what I was prepared for the Japanese school/workplace to be like. OASIS was a pleasant surprise.

Basically, my job is to chat with nice old ladies who are very excited to tell me all about their weekend trips to visit their grandchildren or go to nearby onsen (Japanese hot springs). I chat with people who are getting ready to go on a trip abroad, or have just come back. I hear about people's dance classes or piano lessons or their sick cats. With our younger students, I play a lot of games. Even with the adult students I sometimes play games! In one of the most advanced classes last week we played Cards Against Humanity. My job rules.

My coworkers at OASIS are awesome and friendly (although two of them are leaving to go home to the US and Croatia, hence me being hired). Instead of a school, it kind of feels like a big living room where friends drop by to hang out. And as if it wasn't great enough already, there seems to be an endless supply of candy and cookies and cakes that students bring as they return from their awesome trips. Bringing back small gifts of food for your friends when you take a trip is a big-time custom in Japan. And it's big-time delicious.

In case it's not obvious at this point, I love it there. Which is super cool considering that I got this job through Facebook and blindly agreed to it. Lucky me! 

Animals of Japan (and many many other places)

I spent a lot of time in Japan visiting zoos and aquariums, which was pretty neat. The Morioka Zoo was nice, but the Ueno Zoo in Tokyo and the aquarium in the Tokyo Skytree were awesome.

The aquarium was super neat because it was designed using principles of Japanese art, so it was kind of like an art exhibit that happened to be made of fish and jellyfish and penguins. Different sections featured different principles of design, and explained the significance for each. There was an awesome corridor of jellyfish, and a really cool dark hallway that had lighted tanks of different varieties of goldfish.

The Ueno Zoo was cool because it was built into Ueno Park, which was right outside our hotel. The pens in the zoo were very natural and big and open-air. Sometimes I wondered if there was enough keeping the animals in! It also had awesome buildings of nocturnal animals that were very very dimly lit so the nocturnal animals would be active. There were bats and aye-ayes and my favorite, a tiny mouse deer, the smallest hoofed animal of all!

Anyway, I’ve compiled a short video of my favorite animal encounters in Japan zoos and aquariums. Hopefully I’ll see some more wild wildlife once I’m there to stay!

Shrimpy Miso

So THIS is why that miso was so good.... 

Japanese food rocks.

Hello Kitty Popcorn

Tyler and I were wandering one of Morioka’s malls the other day when we made a brilliant discovery outside Toys R Us. It was pink. It was Hello Kitty. It sang and danced and…. MADE POPCORN*!!!  Seriously. A better invention there never was. Tyler was almost more excited for me than I was! He rushed to deposit 200 yen in the coin slot, and the magic began!

Voila! 80 seconds later, the popcorn emerged! Amazing! Fantastic! Phenomenal! Stupendous! Delicious! Hello Kitty Popcorn!!!


*You may notice there is a theme throughout this blog of me getting overly excited about popcorn. Just go with it.

Koiwai Farm

One sunny Saturday, Tyler and I visited Koiwai farm, a famous dairy farm on the outskirts of town. We took a 30 minute bus ride into the beautiful countryside, across rice fields and to the farm!

(It was very sunny and windy.)

I was a little confused to find that there were basically no animals in the area of the farm that was open for visitors. I guess most of the actual farm work happens nearby, but not in the visiting area. What the visiting area did have was a beautiful open field with attractions (food, gift shops, activities) around the outside edge. We started off our visit with the best soft serve ice cream I have ever tasted. It was so creamy. It was real dairy! It was like it just came out of a really cold cow that ate nothing but sugar. YUM.

Tyler and I tried our hands at some Japanese archery. We definitely need a little more practice to achieve any sort of accuracy, but it was fun. We wandered some more, checked out the gift shops, and then headed to the one big event that was advertised: something about a sheep dog and some sheep!

We went to the sheep area where there actually were pastures of sheep. Yay! Animals! I do love sheep. The show was a sheep dog herding up some sheep, then the announcer guy demonstrating sheep sheering by sheering a sheep in front of the crowd, which I thought was a little weird to watch. That poor naked and embarrassed sheep! But the weirdest part was that there was a mysterious white couple sitting on the grass in front of Tyler and I who entered with an entourage and were being video taped while they sat and watched the sheep. Very strange.

Anyway, we walked around in the sun, and ate delicious food, and got this really great picture taken as an ice cream cone and a milk jar. All in all, a day well spent!