Wow! It has been awhile since we have posted one of these.
This was taken at the Summer Festival in Sapporo which ended up being a park filled with Beer Gardens. With all the beer that was being drunk by festival-goers, this sign was actually quite practical. No need to ask, when the sign tells you quite directly “How to get to toilet.”
As Aaron mentioned in a post about a week ago, each person in Japan is subject to an annual health check. Since he just posted about it, and I just got the results from my check, I thought now would be a good time to show you what it was all about (before we start posting about our vacation).
Well, first of all, the health check is much like he described. I opted for the cheaper, and more convenient, check performed at my school. A van (with an x-ray machine, exam rooms and other equipment) pulled up in front of the school at about noon. The employees got out and proceeded to set-up other stations inside a large classroom (scale, height station, hearing/eyesight, etc). I, along with many of my co-workers and employees from other area schools, showed up at 1:00pm and formed a single file line.
So, the blog will be pretty quiet for the next week. We are leaving tonight on a boat bound for Hokkaido and we won’t be back for a week.
We have no specific plans while we are there, so we are going to do whatever comes up and I am sure it will be a great time.
When we come back we will have plenty of stories and photos from the trip, so come and check it out then!
Later!
We saw this little alien guy on the doors of a store in Nagoya (can’t remember which one) and we couldn’t help but having a chuckle at it. And, of course, the two clear eyes in the door got the better of Aaron’s curiosity and he went over to have a look!
We always are mentioning onsen around here (in Tokyo and at Oku-Hida) and we have tried our best to explain the concept. But, it is a bit difficult for most foreigners to wrap their heads around it. You simply have to come to Japan sometime and see for yourself, the Japanese really are on to something with the whole onsen idea.
To help you understand a little bit more, we decided to sneak a few pictures when we were on our anniversary get-away. Now, don’t get too excited, there aren’t any people in any of the pictures you are about to see. We took pictures of our private onsen in order to show you how the whole onsen process goes.
-edit: okay finally we are back for real. I still have no idea what caused this problem, but for the time being it seems I have resolved it.
Sorry everyone about the downtime, we have been experiencing some major problems with how our website is being hosted. But now it should work more or less correctly. We should be able to do some updating, and behind the scenes I will continue working to correct the problem.
Things are still not working correctly, you may notice that the web address you see at the top is not the one you would expect. I am still experiencing serious problems with our installation. I am not sure what is causing these problems at this point. But it may be necessary to so quite a bit more work to get thing running as they should.
I have been surprised since coming here by the shear number of articles in foreign papers that like to focus on how weird and twisted Japan is. Often they take something that seems perfectly reasonable, given appropriate context, and blow it hugely out of proportion. Living here, people often forward to me articles about Japan. Which I really appreciate, actually. I like reading about what the rest of the world sees Japan. However, I am starting to notice a pretty disturbing trend in the way Japan, or in fact most foreign countries are displayed.
So, if you will allow me a brief rant. I will dissect the article Alycia posted in her comment to one of my sumo posts.
Following our trip to the training house we headed for the tournament itself. This is where the insider nature of our guide became apparent. Unfortunately we don’t have any pictures from this part of the day. So you will have to put up with my description.
We drove up to the front gate of the tournament, where a uniformed security guard tried to wave us off to the public parking. Instead we rolled down the window, and with a few words, we were shuttled through to the parking area reserved for wrestlers and officials. We parked in the back of the lot and walked in a back entrance to the stadium, past a handful of sumo-san in yukata smoking outside.
Just a quick sumo related factoid… We learned a bit more about the hairstyles of the Sumo wrestlers, as we were traveling with another japanese man who was a hairdresser and interested in these kinds of things. The top knot is something passed down from the samurai of the edo period, the really high level wrestlers get a different kind of knot that looks like a ginko leaf. Also their hair is held in place by a very thick and very stinky wax. Now, as for the picture. Apparently, a sumo wrestler will wash his hair if he is plagued by losses. This is supposed to wash away the bad luck and help them improve their game. Washing is no easy feat, this guy was scrubbing for almost 10 minutes. Wash, rinse, repeat. On the flip side, if they keep winning they will not wash their hair for the whole 15 days….
Last weekend we spent two days enjoying Sumo! One of the quintessential Japanese experiences we bought tickets way in advance in order to assure that we could go with a group of our pals. However, when the day of our sumo fun drew near we had a bit of a surprise.
About 6 months ago Danielle’s Vice Principal said that when Sumo came to Nagoya he wanted to take us. This Vice Principal has since retired, so we though this probably would not come to be. Not so, on Thursday he called up Danielle’s school and invited us out. We had plans for later that day, but undeterred he told us we could enjoy sumo just in the morning, early in the morning! So we met him at 7:30 that sunday for a day of sumo fun.