Joe's Back!!!

Report for December--January:

OK, beginning about where I left off last time, Christmas came and went pretty quickly for me. Japanese Christmas customs are basically: give presents, have a nice dinner, and put up a few decorations. Not many people here are Christian so the holiday isn't taken too seriously. My host family's Christmas dinner was roast beef, a couple of types of salad, little cakes made with bits of pork and yellow pepper, and red wine and champagne, with a cake at the end.

The next day I moved to my second host family, the Oritas (sometimes I call them the "Oritae"), who live in an area that's in the next Rotary district but, oddly enough, closer to my school. My host father owns a chain of women's clothing boutiques and I have two host sisters, sixteen and thirteen; the older one is going to Canada this year so I sometimes teach her English when I'm in a good mood. My host mother gets the most English lessons from me: I taught her the word "crap," which she fell in love with almost immediately. I also taught my host family Pig Latin although when it's applied to Japanese it basically sounds like gibberish.

On the 29th and 30th I went to my counselor's house to make mochi rice cakes. It sounded sort of boring but it turned out to be very fun. About twenty or thirty people came and there was a lunch of sushi and barbecued beef and vegetables and several types of alcohol that I pigged out on. Mochi cakes are made by boiling a bunch of rice in bamboo tubs stacked over wood-burning stoves, and then sticking the rice into a large stone thing that looks like a bird bath, and pounding it senselessly with a mallet until you end up with a giant blob of rice meat that you then cook up and put soy sauce on. It's really good and I had a great time screaming "DIE RICE

(whack) DIE RICE (whack)" etc.

The next day was New Year's Eve and every exchange student within fifty miles came to the Tempozan Village in Osaka Harbor to watch the last sun set over the bay. There were hundreds of Japanese photographers there as well, snapping photos of the sun as it sank. After the sun went down we split up and went off to eat dinner in small groups because we couldn't agree on what to have. I had ramen with a few of my friends in Umeda. After that we went to a club and partied like mad. By midnight the club was packed wall-to-wall and the party started to spill outside. I had a girlfriend for the night which made me quite happy, although because I'm very stupid I never got her phone number. Eventually we all ended up outside and got on an early morning train to Osaka Castle on the east side of town where we watched the sun rise, and then we split up and went home.

I slept basically the second I reached my bed; my host family dragged me out of bed at nine and we ate New Year's breakfast which I can't explain because I don't know what it was and never bothered to ask. I stumbled over breakfast for five or ten minutes before my host mother said I could go back to sleep. That night we had a very large Chinese dinner at a Sheraton in Osaka Bay that cost, I think, a little over a skillion dollars, but tasted the part.

Next day we went to a shrine in Nishinomiya a short drive away and I tossed some coins to a Shinto god and prayed-- for a good year, and that I wasn't accidentally committing blasphemy or anything. Then on the third we went to Kyoto to spend the night with my host mother's parents who run another shrine. In Kyoto we visited a large Buddhist temple and yet another shrine dedicated to the god of education, and I dropped a note to the god asking him to help me with a couple of upcoming things in school.

On the fifth I went to a Rotarian's palace on the side of a mountain north of Osaka to spend two nights with his sons, both of whom go to college in New York and had come home for the holiday. I ended up catching a cold but we had a good time and went to karaoke, something I still hadn't done after four and a half months.

On the seventh, Marcela from Brazil went home and about a thousand people came to the airport to see her off. Everyone was in tears or at the very least horribly quiet. We lifted her into the air and gave her a banzai cheer, and then she went off to catch her flight and the world seemed to stop for a second. We scammed the railway system on the way home so by the day's end we knew everything would be happy again.

The tenth was a Japanese holiday, "Coming of Age Day," when teenagers become adults. It was also the day of the Shinto Ebisu festival, so I went with my host family to Osaka's Ebisu shrine in Imamiya and witnessed the riot. Thousands of people crammed themselves inside the shrine dedicated to making the god hear them: it's an old legend that the Ebisu god is deaf, so there were giant gongs and lots of screams going on. It was very funny to me and I got some great photos.

That's it so far... I'll write again same time next month.

-joe



	*Report for December--January:* OK, beginning about where I left off last time, Christmas came and went pretty quickly for me. Japanese Christmas customs are basically: give presents, have a nice dinner, and put up a few decorations. Not many people here are Christian so the holiday isn't taken too seriously. My host family's Christmas dinner was roast beef, a couple of types of salad, little cakes made with bits of pork and yellow pepper, and red wine and champagne, with a cake at the end. The next day I moved to my second host family, the Oritas (sometimes I call them the "Oritae"), who live in an area that's in the next Rotary district but, oddly enough, closer to my school. My host father owns a chain of women's clothing boutiques and I have two host sisters, sixteen and thirteen; the older one is going to Canada this year so I sometimes teach her English when I'm in a good mood. My host mother gets the most English lessons from me: I taught her the word "crap," which she fell in love with almost immediately. I also taught my host family Pig Latin although when it's applied to Japanese it basically sounds like gibberish. On the 29th and 30th I went to my counselor's house to make mochi rice cakes. It sounded sort of boring but it turned out to be very fun. About twenty or thirty people came and there was a lunch of sushi and barbecued beef and vegetables and several types of alcohol that I pigged out on. Mochi cakes are made by boiling a bunch of rice in bamboo tubs stacked over wood-burning stoves, and then sticking the rice into a large stone thing that looks like a bird bath, and pounding it senselessly with a mallet until you end up with a giant blob of rice meat that you then cook up and put soy sauce on. It's really good and I had a great time screaming "DIE RICE *(whack) DIE RICE (whack)" etc.* The next day was New Year's Eve and every exchange student within fifty miles came to the Tempozan Village in Osaka Harbor to watch the last sun set over the bay. There were hundreds of Japanese photographers there as well, snapping photos of the sun as it sank. After the sun went down we split up and went off to eat dinner in small groups because we couldn't agree on what to have. I had ramen with a few of my friends in Umeda. After that we went to a club and partied like mad. By midnight the club was packed wall-to-wall and the party started to spill outside. I had a girlfriend for the night which made me quite happy, although because I'm very stupid I never got her phone number. Eventually we all ended up outside and got on an early morning train to Osaka Castle on the east side of town where we watched the sun rise, and then we split up and went home. I slept basically the second I reached my bed; my host family dragged me out of bed at nine and we ate New Year's breakfast which I can't explain because I don't know what it was and never bothered to ask. I stumbled over breakfast for five or ten minutes before my host mother said I could go back to sleep. That night we had a very large Chinese dinner at a Sheraton in Osaka Bay that cost, I think, a little over a skillion dollars, but tasted the part. Next day we went to a shrine in Nishinomiya a short drive away and I tossed some coins to a Shinto god and prayed-- for a good year, and that I wasn't accidentally committing blasphemy or anything. Then on the third we went to Kyoto to spend the night with my host mother's parents who run another shrine. In Kyoto we visited a large Buddhist temple and yet another shrine dedicated to the god of education, and I dropped a note to the god asking him to help me with a couple of upcoming things in school. On the fifth I went to a Rotarian's palace on the side of a mountain north of Osaka to spend two nights with his sons, both of whom go to college in New York and had come home for the holiday. I ended up catching a cold but we had a good time and went to karaoke, something I still hadn't done after four and a half months. On the seventh, Marcela from Brazil went home and about a thousand people came to the airport to see her off. Everyone was in tears or at the very least horribly quiet. We lifted her into the air and gave her a banzai cheer, and then she went off to catch her flight and the world seemed to stop for a second. We scammed the railway system on the way home so by the day's end we knew everything would be happy again. The tenth was a Japanese holiday, "Coming of Age Day," when teenagers become adults. It was also the day of the Shinto Ebisu festival, so I went with my host family to Osaka's Ebisu shrine in Imamiya and witnessed the riot. Thousands of people crammed themselves inside the shrine dedicated to making the god hear them: it's an old legend that the Ebisu god is deaf, so there were giant gongs and lots of screams going on. It was very funny to me and I got some great photos. *That's it so far... I'll write again same time next month.* *-joe*