Settling Down...

... or How I Climbed Mount Everest


When we last left our valiant hero he had just surged through Kyoto and left a path of devastation and beauty in his wake. More or less the very next day he (from now on to be referred to as I) woke very, very early and packed up his far too numerous belongings; the time had come. I had received the previous day a small, innocuous little slip of paper with some (misleading, it turned out) information about my Host Family, which was simultaneously an enormous relief and the catalyst to my hesitations and doubts about meeting the people I would be living with for the next four months. The form informed me that my family consisted of a mother and father, and two brothers in their thirties, both of whom still lived at home. The form also mentioned that the mother liked piano, the father woodcarving and computers, and the sons reading and soccer, respectively. In the realm of potentially getting to know these people before meeting them, this was all about as helpful as learning about their shoe sizes, and so I started to get a bit worked up (internally, of course; on the outside I was as carefree as Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music [and I don't own the picture below, much to my chagrin]). 

So after packing up my things in a rush, I went the twenty minutes to campus and was directed to a vacant classroom where five other anxious Gaijin (foreigners) were seated in desks and vacantly staring at, for whatever reason, a live streaming of CNN (which for some reason was going through a block of rampant self-promotion, as if people tuning into CNN need to be convinced to watch CNN). It was a bit like being in a hospital waiting room, I would imagine. Luckily I didn't have to wait long, and I was lead to a table where sat my Okaasan (mother) and Otousan (Father) with their adorable barely two year old grandson (turns out one of the sons had married and moved out and had a kid for two years before the form was made..?). My biggest shock was that my Okaasan and a one Kaori Sensei of Bennington College fame have been friends for YEARS, and Kaori Sensei actually asked my current host family to be on the lookout for my application after I mentioned to her over lunch that I would be coming to Kansai Gaidai. Needless to say that made the entire process much more comfortable, and after going over some preliminary paperwork, I was whisked away to where I am currently living. It's important to mention here that every single time I talked about my potential family before meeting them the phrase "... and I really hope they have a piano..." came up arguably way too often. I suppose the ancestors were listening, because it turn out that my Okaasan is in fact a piano teacher who has a music room with TWO PIANOS IN IT. My Okaasan is seen below at the fancy piano that I am not allowed to play.

And here is a painting hanging at the opposite wall of my Okaasan in days gone by...

As I mentioned in the first post, at Seminar House $ (a.k.a. Seminar House 4) I had been sleeping on a futon resting on a tatami mat, but my room here at home is more or less exactly in the Western Style (and is shown below in its current state of general disarray). In fact, aside from the food and the removal of the shoes at the door, my existence at home has a definite western bent to it. 

Some of the more fascinating differences I was made aware of almost immediately were in regards to bathing and laundry, as boring as that may seem. In the picture above you can just make out a pile of clothes in a chair on the bottom right corner. Some of you are no doubt jumping to the conclusion that I'm simply accruing a huge amount of dirty laundry and waiting to run out of clothes before I do something about it, but it's actually the other way around. In Japan laundry is done daily unless it's raining out (good old fashioned hang drying in these parts). As a result, I've found that at least for me the only way to keep from wearing the same five shirts every day is to wait until I run out of clothes to put the clean clothes back into the drawers. Okay, maybe that is mundane, but it took me a bit to work all of that out. As for showering, the shower room is at the very back of the house and, because it's the colder part of the year and the room is covered in tile (and because they keep the window open when not in use), the room is quite literally freezing when you first walk in in your birthday suit, as it were. I try to imagine it as some kind of kung fu training as opposed to an odd form of torture where you make someone incredibly cold before they take a steaming hot shower. Below is the torture chamber. 

I do have a host brother still living here named Fumio, but because he is so busy I only ever see him at Breakfast, and to date I am pretty sure I have seen him a grand total of ten times after a month or so. From what I understand, he travels a very long way to go to school and also does a part-time job, and usually doesn't get home until midnight if he does come home at all. I also get the impression that this isn't uncommon. I would post a picture, but like I said, I never see the guy. Having said that, I get the impressive that he's a very decent person, and I feel like if I spent more than twenty minutes with him two times a week I could get to be very chummy with him. I have only met the other brother once, when he came over with wife and child to celebrate the baby's second birthday, and if nothing else I can say that his wife is a fabulous amateur pastry chef and a lovely person.  Also in the picture above of my room you can make out a robe looking thing hanging on the back of the chair near the desk. This is called a Hanten and is a padded robe with shortened sleeves designed to wear when you're cold but need to study or cook or whatever. Think of it as an ancient Japanese Snuggie.

Fashionable, right? So the very night I got there my host Father took me walking so that I would know how to get to the college the following day. The walk takes about 35 minutes if I go a determined pace, and on the way to campus is almost entirely uphill, so the first week and a half I was somehow eating even more than I had been previously, which in hindsight should be physically impossible, but there it is. That recently changed, but more about that later, I should think. My classes have all been wonderful so far, and I've learned far too many interesting things to begin to list here, but as I'm going chronologically (from memory as best I can), I suppose the next most interesting thing that happened was what my friends are calling the Kyoto Shame trip. There is an event that happened nearer the beginning of February that happened to fall on a Weekend day called Hoshi Matsuri (Fire Festival), so in the highest of spirits Tony, Ashlee (shown below), Caroline and I decided to bite the bullet and head to Kyoto to catch it... but first we ate gyouza (dumplings), as shown below.

Unfortunately, we had no idea where exactly we were supposed to go and so, acting on advice from the internet (Wikipedia, to be more specific), we managed to get decidedly lost. This is a good place to mention that having walked through several streets many times at this point I think (and I really don't mean this offensively) that I am beginning to understand what it's like to be African American in certain if not most places in the U.S., which is to say that I get stared at a lot, and usually with a look of derision or base fear. This effect is doubled when I actually have to stop and ask them for directions or help, as they are now confronted by an annoying, uncultured Gaijin... who happens to speak very passable basic Japanese. Book by it's cover, folks. Anyhoo, once we finally (accidentally) found where we were headed, the festival had just closed five minutes before (below is our picture we titled unbridled and unforgivable shame, with the hoshi matsuri signs in the background). Subsequently, everything interesting that was near the temple was also closed (including three art museums and a zoo). 

(I really don't own this picture at all whatsoever. Pretty though).

 (Shame)

In utter dejection we stopped at the first Yakitori (chicken on a stick) place we could find and drowned our sorrows in sweet chicken hearts and liver (which I did not take a picture of, in deference to any staunch vegetarians that may be reading).

In all fairness, it was very delicious... though maybe not worth the 1000 odd 円 it cost us to get there and eat it.

We look happy, though. I assure you, we weren't. On that note, I'm afraid I must call it quits for now, as I have a massive Vocab Quiz tomorrow... which I will ace no worries. Next time tune in for recollections of Speaking Partners, a delicious bread place, various organizations, and... you guessed it, more karaoke. 


ご親切にありがとうございました,
Alex -..-