I am leaving Japan!

Sadly, I am on my way home because for some reason I should go to school again :(

The last few days were amazing. I went to the Edo-Tokyo museum and learned some stuff. At the museum there were a bunch of kids on school trips, and kids kept coming up to me and saying "HELLO, HELLO!!!!" lol. I've heard that that is pretty common: kids get excited at the chance to practice their English when they see a foreigner.

After the museum I went to Akihabara,aka the promised land for nerds. It sure was a place! It was fun to see store after store after store selling nothing but electronics and video games and manga and action figures. There were also several crane game parlours: I won on my first try, but the coolest machines were super complicated and required several plays so that you could work this elaborate trap mechanism. There were also several maid cafes >__>  They all had maids on the street advertising for them, and the best was a comics-themed maid cafes where the girl advertising on the street was wearing a Chopper hat. By the way, One Piece is still crazy popular here.

I also visited a famous gate and shopping area in Asakusa, and visited this amazing street that only has restaurant supply stores. All of the restaurants here have fake food in the window to advertise their food, and this fake food all comes from Asakusa!

Finally, this morning I visited the shrines to Meiji, the dude who established a constitution in Japan, then walked around Harajuku, a high-fashion area. Then I made my way to the airport, and now I am waiting to board my plane to Vancouver. I have had a great time and I can't wait to see you all soon (and to share my weird candy with you)!

Back to Tokyo!

The conference is over (or rather, I left....), and I am on my way back to Tokyo for a few days before I head home!  Sapporo was really nice and I wish I would have had more time to spend there.

For people who have asked what Japan is like, here is a summary of stuff that is basically exactly like in anime / video games in my super limited experience:

- When you enter a store, the staff always stops what they are doing and calls irashaimasse (welcome). ALWAYS.
- There is a lot of bowing. If you buy something expensive the staff will chase you out of the store and continue bowing after you on the street!
- There are vending machines and convenience stores everywhere (as in, usually more than one per block on every block) and they are crazy cheap
- There is a lot of random English around but most people don't really speak it.
- The tv shows are really, really weird. I saw a reporter taking about what looked like a really serious car accident, and then he turned to his co-anchor... Who was talking to a puppet.

Finally, in terms of how stuff looks on the streets, I would say that Katamari is an excellent representation.

I am still in Japan!!!

I haven't been deported or anything!

On Sunday I met up with my professor and traveled to Sapporo for the conference. Sapporo is a really pretty city - it's comparable to Ottawa in size, whereas Tokyo is like Toronto x 1,000,000. The temperature here is also way more comfortable. Tokyo was SO HUMID! I thought Ottawa was bad but Tokyo was just insane!

So far I have eaten a lot of delicious stuff. The convenience stores sell all kinds of sushi rolls and rice balls that come in this amazing packaging; the nori and the rice are in separate compartments, but if you open them right they just automatically come together in this crazy self-wrapping way from the way that the plastic slides between them. Clearly I can't explain it well but suffice to say that the Japanese are light years ahead of Canada in the rice snack packaging department.

The green tea here tastes really different and doesn't have that weird cigarette smoke aftertaste that some tea at home does. Did I mention that I once read a paper about food authenticity that found that a lot of packaged green tea was like 80% grass (i.e. The stuff on your lawn)??? That may explain that weird flavour lol.

Yesterday I was mainly just at the conference (but I went for a walk and ate lunch in a park where there was a huge flower festival!), but today we have a conference field trip. We're going to the Sapporo brewery and to a horse park. The Sapporo beer that is sold in Canada is actually brewed in Guelph, and our student councils are always organizing tours, so I think it's a bit funny that I will go to the Sapporo brewery in Sapporo before I go to the one that is literally 15 minutes from where I live.

In conclusion, I have taken a billion pictures but I don't have a way to transfer them to my tablet, so here is a picture I took of the Rockies from the plane.

I looked really hard for sheep and / or sasquatches but there were none to be seen.

PS Japan needs daylight savings time because it is not quite 4 am and the sun is basically up.
PPS I thought I was totally not jetlagged, but it is not quite 4 am and I am wide awake lol.

I am in Japan?!

I am in Japan!!?!

So far it has been exciting, fun, and mildly terrifying, often at the same time! My flights went smoothly, but pretty much every time I go to take the train I spend at least the first 5-10 mins freaking out that I am on the wrong train... but so far, I have actually been ok so far. I got to my hotel at about 6pmish on Friday and I was super tired so I only went for a short walk around because it was already dark by the time I had unloaded all of my crap!

Yesterday I went to Nikko, a rural town about 2 hours from Tokyo which is basically infested with shrines and world heritage sites! The town itself is pretty tourist-trap-y (it reminded me a lot of Banff) but the shrines were really amazing! When I got back to Tokyo I took the loooooong way home by walking back from a distant subway station and getting distracted by toy stres and kitchen stores lol. My legs may fall off but it was fun (and humid).

So far, being in Japan has been a really interesting experience.  In terms of the language barrier, I have (I hope) stopped blurting out French when my brain short-circuits into non-English mode (that poor lady next to me on the plane was really confused when I tried to speak to her in a mishmash of three languages o__o ). I have also succesfully managed my first interaction with a train dude who did not speak any english (when I briefly thought I might be trapped in Nikko forever). My dad said that he has a collegue who does a lot of travelling, and he said that Japan was the only place he's been where he truly felt illiterate, and man, I TOTALLY get it!! I (foolishly) thought I would be at least ok with knowing katakana well and hirigana ok, but the reality is that that is liteally below a 1st grade reading level! It's a bit disorienting, but it's a really interesting experience!

Finally, I tried natto and it was totally not that gross! On a related note, convenience stores are EVERYWHERE and they are dirt cheap! I got a natto maki roll and a juice for 190¥! Also, in Japan, gas station sushi is not even sketchy!

Today I am heading to Sapporo for the conference, but I am going to try to cram in a shrine or two before I go!!

Iced coffee and natto maki: the breakfast of champions!

I am leaving soon!!!

I leave for Japan in just over a week!!! This trip has really snuck up on me. I spent so long trying not to get over-excited about it because I knew that I wouldn't be able to work or focus on anything else, and I did such a good job of not thinking about it that now I feel totally unprepared! I'm actually in ok shape: I have been trying to learn a bit of Japanese, and I'm finding that it's a good thing that I was such a mega-nerd in high school because I'm realizing that I had actually managed to teach myself a pretty decent amount back then and it's come back to me pretty easily. I'm mostly worried about not offending people by not eating 99% of the food that I will probably be offered (because there is fish. in. EVERYTHING), but oh well!!

In other news I am SO CLOSE to finishing a major knitting project and I'm really proud of myself for a) actually finishing it and b) finishing ahead of schedule!! All I have left to do is to weave in the final loose ends!! I've already started my next project, but now I'm trying to decide what the heck to bring on my trip. Apparently you can only bring plastic knitting needles on planes (.....................) so I'm trying to decide if I should just break down and buy some plastic needles (I wonder if bamboo is ok???) or if I should just bring some crocheting??? Boo for rules!

Finally, here is an awesome picture of an awesome real-life Angry Birds game that I saw at the Let's Talk Science conference I was at a few weeks ago!! The coordinators at Calgary made this and I am totally going to steal this idea because it was super fun and physics-tastic!