Finished courses and unfinished business II

Once again another quarter of a year is over, as are the two courses I took for the time.

I did not get the work ready now either, but this time I can at least say for my own defense, that I was the fastest of the class at least when it came to the 'Raden' course, the mother-of-pearl inlay.

For that course we had to use two different techniques.

Of Deer Meat, Realism and a Not-So-Red Kyoto

(Just noticed this one got really long... sorry!)

Time for another blog! In my last one I was just about to leave for Nara with my class and the trip turned out great! They are great people and we had a lot of fun, though at a point I overreacted a bit to certain things... I think they have forgiven me until now though, but let's start from the beginning!

The main reason we went to Nara in the first place was because of the yearly Shousou-in exhibition that is held only once a year every autumn for two weeks to show some of Japans most important cultural heritage.

Celebrating Creativity

There it came and there it went: Soukisai, Takaoka Campus' school festival. And with it the visit of three friends from Finland, who are at the moment as exchange students in Tokyo. With it also my last dance. The thing that maybe shocks me most is that it seems just such a short time ago that I saw TNC dancing on the school yard in my second week here and decided to join. Now it's been almost seven months and only three left. I catch myself at counting 'last times'

Bliss in Red and Gold

Oh the Japanese autumn... the last weeks have been brilliant! I would even go as far as to say this might turn out to be the happiest time for me here in Japan. Right after the Jazz Street weekend in Kanazawa - which was great, by the way; lot's of great music and a short trip to the city's old Geisha quarter as well – a taifun from the south touched on Toyama-prefecture as well, and after that the heat of summer finally broke for good. In the last three weeks

Finished courses and unfinished business, Part II

Courses starting from June until end of August,

Finished courses and unfinished business, Part I

Before I tell about my travels with my mum、 I need to update something I should have done a long time ago but somehow always pushed off. Now that the second semester of school is already about to start, I think it really is about time to tell you what I've done in school until now:

First the courses until June,

Happy on Holidays

The week after Yosakoi Toyama I was pretty much out of energy for anything but still went to school trying to get some more urushi stuff done but, as expected, not much came out of it. Tuesday night was the big yosakoi 'It's Over!' party from our team which I spent observing the mysterious Japanese as they went absolutely crazy. It's pretty funny actually. I can't believe they really are so weak against alcohol that they would start making such a rucus after one only lightly alcoholic cocktail. I rather think after being under so many rules most of the time in their life, at the slightest chance of letting go a bit, they do just that, as effectively as I've hardly seen anybody let go before. The noise level was amazing!

High on Dance (part II)

continued from High on Dance (part I)

Well, having made that decision still left Yosakoi Toyama right in front of me. With a schedule that made me wonder whom I might be able to kill for planning it out. On Saturday we would be dancing 8 times. Three times of those would be loop-parades with 3 continous dances each, which made alltogether 14 times dancing the full choreography in a time frame of 8 hours. The most 'interesting' part of that was that we would be dancing basic parade/loop parade/basic parade/loop parade directly in a row with only about 10 to 15 minutes break after each dance. Our song is about 4 minutes 20 seconds, therefore 3 times loop makes about 13 minutes of continuous dancing (and that times two, plus two more single parade... ARGH!). Nice eh?

I was a bit scared.

High on Dance (part I)

written on 14.08.2011

(this one's really long, so there's two parts!)

It is Sunday evening, exactly one week after Yosakoi Toyama, the biggest Yosakoi event around here and the biggest Yosakoi event every year for TNC, our school's group. For 3 weekends before that there had been a festival we were dancing at every single weekend, and weekly 7 more hours of training. That, together with the last weeks of school for this term before the summer holidays should be a pretty understandable reason I was seriously waiting for it to come and be over.

Since even before the first of these four festivals I had started to have problems with my knees, too – just basically overworked them after having done no sports whatsoever for years before – so, it wasn't easy.

I was getting better at it,

Fireflies and other beautiful things

And here the follow-up to ”The Kawaii complex and other nuisances” (it's better to read that one first, in case you haven't yet)

So at the end of that week of being very, very annoyed, I happened to run out of food on Saturday evening. I should have taken a short trip to the supermarket, drive home, make food and get back to studying Japanese, and writing my research and planning some other works and, and, and. Instead I thought 'Fuck it all' and decided to take a slow evening walk through the ricefields to the convenient store. That probably was the best idea I had had all week.

It was just cool enough to be comfortable,

The Kawaii-complex and other nuisances

About two weeks ago I was really annoyed. There was a whole list of things I wanted to complain about, but between school work and dancing, simply didn't have the time to. Then, the following week, when I would have had the time to write, it suddenly felt as if there actually wasn't really that much to complain about, or rather, that maybe those things weren't so bad after all. And still I didn't write. Now it is, if I remember right, three weeks since my last entry. Three weeks after I said that I would finally have time to write more, and instead wrote less than ever.

Well, this basically means: I am fine.

But, just for the record, let me recapture:

Picture book: Notoyosakoi

It is pretty hard to describe my feelings when finally the time had arrived that I had been waiting for so long and had been prepairing for, together with about 50 others, with so much energy and time. Last weekend was Notoyosakoi and it really was amazing. Really being there and watching the teams dance, and - of course and maybe most important - dancing oneself is one of the coolest things I've done. I'm not able to describe it well enough anyways, so maybe a few pictures will at least give a tiny insight into what I experienced last weekend.

Time is running...

... and it's running fast, as if something not so nice was behind it. God thanks there seem to be mostly good things behind, around and before myself. So the time that runs for me right now is mostly exciting, fun, and interesting, though once in a while mixed with moments of tiredness when I wish for a few more quiet minutes.

But I think that after this next weekend,

Sunny Dark Day

First off, my excuse for taking so long to write still hasn't changed. I'm still extremely busy, and with Notoyosakoi, the great dancing event and our first big performance this year coming nearer and nearer it seems things are only getting worse.

And to top it all off, on Saturday I had my first really bad spell of homesickness.

I'm not really sure what set it off,

Golden Kyoto

Ahh how I love that city!
Golden Week - the Japanese accumulation of important national holidays that usually bestows them with about one completely free week - is over and so is my trip to Kyoto with flatmate and friend and fellow Japan exchange student Meiju (http://lone-finn-lost.blogspot.com/).

It was, simply, great.

ARGH * scratch scratch *

Yep. I got it. Damn. And this soon... and without even remembering touching any! There must have been some trace of it on a table or something.

What the hell I'm talking about?

Urushi allergy!

Courses and Projects

After two weeks of school it's about time I started proving I'm actually doing something here, right?

So here we go:

Yosakoi Video!

Ahhhhhh I found one after all, by using the Japanese Google!

I am 95% sure that this actually is the Yosakoi group of Takaoka Campus!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFBOvI3Btlw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZ_HZ5IEiHs

A minute to breathe, thank you?

Wow, I don't even know where to start... It has been a week since my last 'real' entry – meaning not only pictures, but an actual report – and that week has been packed. One of the most important things happening was definitely the fact that I can finally use the internet at school with my own laptop. Already the week before, when I finally (after one and a half week of waiting) got my own username and password to use the school's computers, the people from the office told me that, sure, you can also use the Wifi, the 'cable free internet', with your own computer now. Wrong.

Picture book: Hanami

Ahhh Hanami! The time of the cherry blossoms! A myriad of blossoms, a myriad of Japanese sitting under them, eating and drinking, and a myriad of pictures! Here some of them!

First off pictures from the trees around Senshinen and at the school!

Picture book: Genuinely Japanese

Here a few more pictures which I missed to post before. All are from the 10th of April last weekend, which I spend with Kana Earashi. A click on the pictures should open them a little bigger.

Senshinen (or: the curse of Japanese air conditioning)

The place I live at right now belongs to the Takaoka campus and is usually used to house teachers that have come to this school for only a short time. Or then, as in my case, exchange students. It is a place with a community kitchen and different western and Japanese style rooms. At the start I wanted to take a traditional room but then it turned out that those will be used soon for some kind of exhibition or meeting or something, so I took the cheapest room there is, the western single.

It's very small, but I don't think that's a bad thing.

Listening, Learning, Laughing (and bowing, of course)

When thinking about it now, there is surprisingly little to tell about these first two real school days. In a way I think the Friday with its 'cooking game' was more intensive than Monday and Tuesday, which doesn't mean that they were bad or boring, quite the opposite. But they went very nicely, smoothly, apart maybe from the fact that I still haven't gotten my password for the school computers.

It's little things that I now remember

Genuinely Japanese

(concerning the weekend of April 09. and 10.)

When I first got in contact with my school here in Takaoka, the person I wrote to was a woman named Kana Earashi. But about a week before I set out for Japan she told me that she won't be working at Takaoka campus anymore when I would be arriving here. I was a bit sad about that, since she seemed like a very nice person, so last Friday I wrote her a short mail just asking if I might be able to meet her because I also had brought a small souvenir for her from Finland. On Saturday she called me and invited me to visit her and her family at their home. This was to be my first contact with a genuine Japanese household and I could hardly believe my luck to have this chance already now, barely a few days into my exchange.

Kana picked me up from Senshinen

A smile and a bow

Ok, so first the frustrating news and the reason why I have to get a second entry done today.

I still have no password for the school computers/ the wlan. Which means I cannot use the computers on the weekend, because now I'm only using them through my tutors account and logically she won't be here on weekend. It's so frustrating! They have to send the request for a password to the main university in Toyama! What the fuck? I mean seriously, one single tiny little computer password for an exchange student – what can be so hard about that? In Lahti at my home university this could me made in a matter of hours or longest a day. I don't get it... and those were the first news I got in the morning, after I had met with Ai around noon.

The next thing was that I was supposed to

Phones and sugar

(happenings on April 7th)

Ahh, today was a much better day already. I didn't really get that much sleep but was still way better rested than on Wednesday. Today was for the most part more organisational stuff: student card, library card, general introduction to the school and its facilities, as well as getting a schedule of all available courses so I can have a look at them and test them out freely next week before deciding which I want to take. All well with that. Both of the teachers that have been kind of 'assigned' to me seem very nice, especially Taro Ogawa. He's a bit younger and very friendly, in a boyish kind of way. He seems a little bit more open than the other teachers in general, but that is probably only because his English is a bit better.

I really need to work on my Japanese,

Hello Japan

Flying for 9 hours was much less fun alone than it was the first time in 2009 when I had friends by my side with whom to share the view and the weirdness of it all. As is turned dark yesterday we were asked by the stewardesses to keep the shutters down and over 'Tron' and 'Black Swan' from the onboard entertainment system, the night fast-forwarded. With us flying east and then south-east into the morning, the sun, when it rose, shone directly into the window, which made looking out pretty much impossible while still over the Asian continent. I was rewarded in another way though.

Flying over Japan the first time it had been hidden from view by a thick blanket of clouds, but this time the sky was clear.

Goodbyes and boxes

The first time I went on exchange I was 16 years old. I went to Finland for a year, for the first time alone away from home. Now, nine years later, I will leave again from a place that has become home.

That sounds all sappy and sentimental,

ENTER Japan

The decision is made.

I will be flying to Japan next Tuesday.

Enter/Exit: Japan

And I had so looked forward to it.

At the end of February, when most of the ”What the hell am I doing” had changed to ”Hell yes! I'm doing this”, I decided that I would spend the 4 weeks left until my departure to Japan in elatedness.

You see, the plan is/was a one year exchange to Toyama University, Takaoka campus, Toyama prefecture, Japan. Quite a mouthful.

The 4 weeks would be perfect to calmly organize all the things that still had to be done, all the while looking forward to something I had been planning to do for many years. On the 7^th of march I went to pick up my visa from the Japanese embassy in Helsinki. It was great. To have the words ”Have a nice trip!” directed at me has probably never felt quite as wonderful.

Then, the 11^th came along...