Fall Colors

It's December, but the weather is still very mild here, and the fall colors are as vibrant as ever. I went to the Higashiyama Botanical Gardens today to do some autumn leaf viewing, which I think is a bit of a hobby here. Fall here does not disappoint - the trees are absolutely gorgeous.

I promise I haven't edited any of these photos, the leaves are really that bright and vibrant! I'll be happy to keep the fall weather around a bit longer.

Japanese Explorations

It's officially been over a month since I came to Japan and I'm finally getting the hang of things. Japan's one of those places that the more I learn about it, the more questions I have! But teaching has been really enjoyable so far, and I've had the opportunity to do some more exploring on the weekends. Here's a bit of what I've been up to.

1. Shopping
Shopping is endlessly amusing here, especially in Osu, the shopping district of Nagoya. Osu is basically streets upon streets of shops and stalls selling everything from fried octopus to Japanese comics to fancy kimonos. I love just wandering around and trying to figure out what stuff is! My coworker went with me one Saturday and showed me all the out-of-the-way little places to buy exciting things. I especially love all the "kawaii" cute things - I could spend all my money in the little Japanese stationary shops here!

The streets of Osu

Ready for some shopping

Here's a shop for all your Kirby needs

And if you need a Koopa Shell or two, they've got that as well

2. Shrines
In Europe, if you're taking a cultural tour around the city, you visit the huge, intricate cathedrals and churches; here in Japan, the equivalent is to visit the shrines dotted all over the city. The shrines are either Buddhist or Shinto, the two main religions here. They're usually very beautiful and peaceful, except for the one in Osu, which is usually full of commotion and people feeding pigeons!

Osu Shrine

Paper 'wishes' that people write

Kosho-ji Shrine

A five-story pagoda

A Buddhist graveyard

3. Exploring downtown
There's something really exciting to me about just navigating my way around a big Japanese city and seeing the sights. Nagoya's not extravagant like Tokyo, but there's still plenty of neon lights, five-story karaoke joints, and odd architectural anomalies to keep me intrigued on a day or night out!

A ferris wheel attached to the side of a building

4. Tokugawa Gardens and Museum
There's no shortage of lovely Japanese gardens here, and on one particularly nice weekend, I visited a local garden, Tokugawa, which is also connected to a small art museum housing some ancient Japanese artworks and samurai gear. There was just about everything you could hope to find in a Japanese garden, including little waterfalls, arching wooden bridges, weeping willows, and hordes of koi fish in the pond.

Hungry hungry koi fish

Lots of pretty views

No garden is complete without a waterfall or two

There's definitely plenty to keep me busy!

Getting to Know Nagoya

I've finally gotten out to see the city this past week. Nagoya is the fourth largest city in Japan by population, but it's not particularly famous for anything, nor is it especially touristy. The main sights are located in Sakae, the most bustling neighborhood of the city, where you can find the Nagoya TV Tower - sort of like a little baby Eiffel Tower - and Oasis 21, a spaceship like facility which houses shops and restaurants. You can climb up to the top of the spaceship to take a walk around and snap some pictures by the fountain of water on top.

Nagoya's TV Tower

Oasis 21

On top of the spaceship

There are plenty of pretty parks and natural areas as well. It's still warm here, so the autumn leaves are just beginning to change, and I'm sure it will be lovely when the colors start to come out!

Nagoya also has a castle, rebuilt from the Edo period in 1615. I took a field trip out to see it and climb through the six floors of the castle to see the exhibits. They make you take your shoes off when you walk in the entrance hall, so I was wandering around the museum wearing only my (mismatched!) socks. The rooms in the traditional style are absolutely gorgeous.

There's still plenty more to see and I'm looking forward to discovering more about Nagoya!

The Unwritten Rules of Japan

My first week in Japan is officially over. I'm starting to get the hang of day to day living and working here, though honestly, it hasn't been easy given the fact that there are apparently a million unwritten rules for various parts of daily activities. For example, when you go shopping, it's apparently not polite to hand your money directly to the cashier, and you instead have to look for a little tray to place it on for the cashier to then pick up. You must take off your shoes and put on slippers any time you walk into a home or school. If you get on public transportation, you're expected to be very quiet. And you should never use your finger to point directly at anyone or anything.

The school I'm working at is pretty keen on rules as well, which has made learning the ropes for my new job trickier than expected. The first afternoon, my Japanese assistant teacher asked my to help her set up lunch for the students. It seems easy, right? You pass out the lunch and everyone eats. Well, let me tell you, there are at least twenty different steps to setting up lunch in Japanese school. First, the students must get out their lunch bags with their utensils and drink bottles. They must then put away the bags and set up their places for lunch. When they're ready, we pass out the lunches - two plastic containers containing rice and a main dish. The rice absolutely must go on the left, and the main dish on the right. The tops of the containers must immediately be taken off and placed at a right angle above the containers. The students must take out the dessert from the lunch and place it in the tray at the top, to be eaten last. The container with the main dish must be positioned a specific way so that it is facing the student. If you put the rice on the right, everyone is painfully embarrassed for you. And if you eat the dessert first, there's definitely dishonor involved somehow. No one can eat until everyone is situated to the Japanese teachers' satisfaction. They even require the two-year-olds to follow this routine when they eat, and it's amazing how well the students follow every rule to the T. In a preschool class, I'm the only one who eats lunch like a heathen.

So I am learning a little bit every day, and I'm always on a constant look-out for any new rules lurking around the corner. On the plus side, the students are so well behaved! I can already tell that teaching here will be a much different experience than I've had teaching anywhere else.

In Which a Japanese Apartment is Both Fascinating and Completely Baffling

It's time for Adventures Part 4: Japan! After about twenty-one hours of traveling, including a long layover in Seoul, I landed in Nagoya where I was promptly detained by Japanese immigration over technicalities with my visa. It took a half hour of people bowing to me and being vaguely polite about what was happening before it was finally decided that I wasn't some spy trying to sneak into Japan and was allowed to enter the country. Luckily, I had been able to communicate with my co-workers via email during this whole fiasco, so they were still patiently waiting for me at the airport when I finally emerged.

Maybe it's a teaching English thing, or maybe I am just really good at choosing jobs, but just as with my first day in Poland, my co-workers here were extremely kind and helpful as I attempted to get settled. They brought me to my apartment, helped me carry my luggage, showed me how to get to the school, took me to lunch, and then helped me shop at the nearest grocery store and deliver everything back home. I automatically feel quite secure and supported here.

And that's not to mention the fantastic apartment they've already set up for me. Recently redone, my place has new wood floors, new wallpaper, a practically new washing machine in-unit, and a plethora of cryptic buttons and switches that operate just about everything. My toilet itself has about ten different buttons on it, and at this point, it's anyone's guess what they actually do. But truly, there are buttons and remotes for everything: turning on lights at various levels of illumination, operating air and heating, cooking on a stove, rice cooker, or microwave, choosing the temperature of the water that comes out of my shower and sink, using the washing machine, and even operating this little video-camera device on my wall that lets me see who is at my door before letting someone in. My co-workers of course tried to explain some of these things to me, but it was all so quick that I managed to forget most of what did what by the time they left. So I basically spent an evening unpacking and pressing random buttons all over the place trying to figure out the cause-and-effect of things. I blame the jet lag for making it seem more exciting than it was probably supposed to be.

Welcome to the new apartment

Small but cute, and very Japanese

A little kitchen

You must never cross this step while wearing shoes

My Japanese futon

Robo-apartment doesn't have much furniture yet, but I've got all the basics. One thing I have to get used to is sleeping on the futon bed, which is basically just a mat on the floor, but apparently that's how the Japanese do it. The school's also already provided me with plenty of dishes, linens, cleaning tools, and plastic spinning things that are for drying laundry (I think). The space is about as big as my Polish apartment, so it feels just right.

Robotic toilet

A washing machine just for me!

Buttons, buttons, so many buttons!

I'll be lucky if I can heat up some water

I've got so much to get used to here already, and I haven't even started teaching yet! I think I'll manage with time and a little help. Let the exciting (and baffling) adventures in Japan begin!

Our Ferry Nice Trip to Russia

After Easter, the next holiday was Majówka, Polish labor day. We had a long weekend off of school, so my coworker and I decided it was the perfect opportunity to plan a trip to a place we had both been wanting to visit - Russia! Normally it's a bit complicated to visit any place in Russia because you must have some kind of visa to get into the country, but there is a loophole; if you take a ferry into St. Petersburg from Finland or Estonia, you can stay in the country for up to 72 hours without a visa. It was perfect for my friend and I, since we only had a short time to visit anyway, so it was off to St. Petersburg for us! We took a super cheap flight to Helsinki from Poland and had a few quick hours to pop into the main churches and grab a quick coffee before heading to the docks to get on the ferry.

For some reason, when I think of a ferry, I think of a small little boat, but the ferry to Russia was huge - there were several restaurants, bars, shops, and even a cinema on board. My friend and I got lost wandering around the labrythine corridors trying to find our cabin. Even though the cabin was small, it was actually pretty decent for one night, and we even had a bathroom and a shower to ourselves. The journey from Helsinki to St. Petersburg was about 14 hours, so my friend and I killed time by wandering around exploring, and then buying a small bottle of wine and drinking it on the deck while people-watching.

Our ferry (and a photo-bombing lobster)

Our little cabin

Seafarers

We arrived the next morning in St. Petersburg, where we were required to take a special bus into the city itself. It was pretty early in the morning, and when we got to the city center it felt eerily quiet as we walked along the streets, at least until we got to the main square where tourists were queuing up to get into the famous Hermitage Museum (our first destination). Since we were so early, the museum hadn't even opened yet, which allowed us to get our tickets in advance from the machines outside. As a result, we were among the first people to get inside the museum, so for the first half hour or so it felt like we had a private viewing of the museum and all it's beautiful art. The Hermitage is to St. Petersburg what the Vatican is to Rome - it's filled with millions of historic items and works by famous artists, including Da Vinci and Michelangelo. The rooms are palatial and we spent hours roaming around!

The Hermitage Museum

Lots to see inside

As we were leaving the museum, we ended up observing a giant procession of people heading to the main square to celebrate Orthodox Easter, which happened to fall on that exact day. Unlike when we arrived, the paths along the main streets were absolutely packed and it took us quite awhile to work our way down the street. Our next destination was the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood, the most iconic building in St. Petersburg. The incredible Russian Orthodox church was built at the end of the 19th century by Tsar Alexander III in order to commemorate the death of his father, Alexander II. It was built upon the exact spot where the tsar had been assasinated, and within the church there is an elaborate shrine dedicated to the tsar. The walls and ceilings are completely covered with amazing, intricate, religious mosaics, though some of it has since been restored due to the abuse the church suffered throughout the Russian revolution when it was used first as a morgue and then later as a storage warehouse for vegetables. Apparently during this time, people nicknamed it the 'Church of the Savior on Potatoes.' Now it's back to its original splendor for us tourists to marvel at. 

We spent the rest of the afternoon wandering the city and exploring. The other famous church in St. Petersburg is St. Isaac's Cathedral, a huge stone and gold structure in the city center. St. Petersburg itself is a very grand and pristine city. It's full of palaces, monuments, parks, and cathedrals. Everything is big and sturdy, but in a friendly way, with everything painted in a color scheme of pastel yellows and blues. Situated along the Neva river, there are many canals that run like veins throughout the city. It's really quite a lovely city, but it's also easy to get the feeling that a lot of it is especially for show, and we as tourists were getting just a very small, carefully crafted glimpse into what Russia is like.

In the evening, we headed to the Mariinsky theater to see the Russian ballet. They performed La Bayadère while we sat in seats along the balcony, feeling very cultured!

St. Isaac's Cathedral

The Mariinsky Theatre

Russian Ballerinas!

It was pretty late when the ballet finished and by the time we navigated to the area of our hostel. Although we were standing at what we thought was the correct address, we couldn't see any signs or indications that the hostel existed. I decided to just pick up my phone and call the hostel before we could start worrying. A young guy picked up the phone, and I explained the situation: "We're having trouble finding the hostel," I said, "We're on the right street at this address, but we don't know where it's located from here."
"Okay," the guy said with a slight Russian accent, "Are you standing next to a blue car?"
"Umm...yes," I said, not really sure how exact these directions were going to be.
"Okay, turn around," he directed me, and I did. "Now walk straight up the street, yeah that way." By now I was really weirded out, wondering what kind of strange Russian surveillance system we were under, until he told me to look up and I saw him waving from an upper window two doors down where he had spotted us. It turned out there had been a sign for the hostel, but we had walked too far down the street and missed it. We got in just fine, had a good laugh at the weird navigational methods employed, got our keys to our room, and settled in for the night.

We were up early the next day. We stopped at a little deli-convenience store to grab something for breakfast, but it took quite a while to buy anything since everything in the stores is behind glass and we couldn't speak any Russian. We used a hybrid language of Polish (which is slightly similar to Russian) and finger-pointing in order to get some fruit and yogurt to keep us going until lunchtime. We headed to the Russian Museum and spent our morning hours there looking at the works of mainly Russian artists.

Next we headed to the Fortress of Peter and Paul, one of the first buildings ever built in St. Petersburg. As we were wandering through, we noticed a black helicopter heading towards us and followed a big crowd of people to watch it land in the park. For a moment I thought Putin was going to pop out or something, but then I noticed a sign advertising helicopter rides and realized it was just another touristy thing. We didn't stay much longer since we had to catch the special bus back to the docks to get back on our next ferry. If we missed the bus, we missed the ferry; and if we missed the ferry we would be stuck in St. Petersburg for another few days, after our 72 hours had expired. Needless to say, it was really important to make the bus. We made it to the docks with no problems, but when we went to check in to get on the ferry we were shocked to find an enormous crowd of people queued up in tangled, winding lines to get their papers checked and go aboard. It was quite the contrast to our check-in in Helsinki which took us about ten minutes. We ended up standing in line for almost two hours waiting to check-in, stressing out that we would somehow miss the ferry and get stuck in Russia forever.

The Fortress of Peter and Paul

Mystery helicopter (time to pretend we're Canadian)

Luckily that didn't happen, and we finally made it onto the ferry. It was a bit smaller than the one we had taken before, and it was named the Anastasia. Inspired by this, my friend and I downloaded the cartoon film 'Anastasia' (which takes place in Russia) and watched it on a tablet in our cabin as we sailed off. We arrived back in Helsinki the next day, where my friend and I split up - she had a morning flight back to Poland, but I had booked a flight back the next day in order to give me some more time to explore Helsinki. And so the adventure continues!