I wore a kimono!
Trip Start
Jun 27, 2009
1
23
47
Trip End
Jun 25, 2011
Nachikatsuura,
Japan
Thursday, March 22, 2007
It's the end of the school year in Japan so classes are wrapping up, and I have a 2 week break from teaching (yay!). The last month I've been traveling locally, trips to Osaka, and around Wakayama - saving up for the big trip to Hong Kong this Saturday!!
Lily and I had a special day at tea ceremony a few weeks ago and our teacher let us wear her old kimono's! It was really exciting, because I haven't had an opportunity to wear a kimono yet, much less practice tea ceremony in one! 2 people helped both Lily and I get dressed in the kimono's which, as I could only have assumed, was difficult to do alone. There were tons of layers of silk robes, ties, and corset like things which made breathing difficult once dressed
01 the entrance to our tea teachers home
. I asked if most Japanese people own a kimono and our sensei said yes, probably one, as they are expensive. Junior high students studying English in another room of her house came in to oooo and ahhh at us while we were getting dressed. So wearing a kimono is a big deal, even for Japanese people! We practiced tea ceremony (as our teacher took tons of pictures of us in different poses) and then learned how to fold them and put them away. Now Lily and I can't wait to buy kimono's :)
On March 3 we had a holiday- Hina Matsuri (Doll Festival or Girl's Day)-In our kimono pictures you can see the large platforms with a red cloth, which is used to display a set of very expensive (sometimes up to $10,000!) ornamental dolls representing the Emperor, Empress, attendants, and musicians in traditional court dress of the Heian period. Formerly, people believed the dolls possessed the power to contain bad spirits, and would protect the owner.
The origin of Hina Matsuri began with an ancient Japanese custom called Hina-nagashi, lierally doll floating, in which paper dolls are put into a boat and sent down a river to the sea, supposedly taking troubles or bad spirits with them. Today there are large festivals in big cities, and people come from all over Japan and bring dolls to load onto boats that are then set out to sea. However now a days due to environmental restrictions the boat is retrieved so that the dolls aren't discarded into the ocean. Since the dolls can't remain in the ocean they are burned in a large fire afterwards
02 Lily and I wearing kimono's!
. Also on this same day I had a minor mishap with my hair. Most of you know that I get my hair highlited, but since coming to Japan that has obviously stopped due to a large language barrier/japanese people's lack of knowledge of western style hair (texture/color). So in an effort to stop highliting my hair and return back to the natural color, something came over me and while grocery shopping I decided to pick up a box of hair color to do at home. I KNOW - what was I thinking! My stylist at home would've been so ashamed :( I read the latin letters on the box, which said "Mocha Latte," sounded to me like it would be a nice light brown color, closer to my goal of my natural hair color.
Well we get home and Lily dyes my hair, I wait the necessary 20 minutes and then shower, and rinse. As I am drying my hair I have a feeling something went wrong so I stopped and ran to a mirror-oh yes something was definitely wrong, MY HAIR WAS PURPLE!!! I ran upstairs to Lily who insisted it "looked cool." I was so mad at myself for trying to dye my hair at home, AND in a foreign country where I can't read anything!
So I make sent some emergency emails on my cell phone to my friends down South, and attched a picture of my hair just, so they knew how bad it was, and Wynne (who speaks fluent Japanese) called a local hair salon and made an appointment for me for the next day
03 me infront of the scroll, flower, incense
. I didn't care what it took, I HAD to get rid of the purple hair. I looked like an old lady! Don't worry I did see the humor in the situation, and thought the whole situation was hilarious, of course this would happen to me....just wanted my hair back to "normal"! Lily, Katherine, Wynne and I spent the afternoon at a small hair salon in Katherine's town, explaining the situation to salon people, and matching more hair colors to my 'natural color' (which was hard to find through all the purple). The stylist read the box of color I had used and she said it actually read "ASH" I dyed my hair the color of ash! So actually a lot of it was purple, but lots of grey too. What a mess. Wynne was nice enough to translate between the stylist and me, explained that what she would have to do wouldn't last and wouldn't be good for my hair either, but I didn't care!! Just fix it!! So almost 4 hours later I had brown/reddish hair and a trim which I was happy with - definitely learned my lesson there - don't dye your hair from a box in a foreign country.
The next weekend Lily and I went to my supervisor Shima-san's baseball game! He plays on a team of men made up of guys from the fire department, Board of Ed. and the city hall. It was so funny to see him all dressed up in a baseball uniform! The Katsuura team was actually decent, but compared to the other teams anyone would look good! But the men are out there having fun, despite numerous cigarette breaks between innings. After that we spotted some cows on a small dairy farm nearby and went to secretly visit them and feed them plants. They were so cute!!
St.Patrick's Day weekend 4 other people (Melissa, Tristan, Sara, Katherine and I) and I drove to Osaka for a weekend in the city
04 Shibasaki-sensei
. We arrived Friday night, met up with some other JET's for Mexican food. After dinner we all crashed back at the hotel, a 4 1/2 hour drive will do that to you. Saturday morning was a beautiful day and we walked around Osaka ducking in and out of shops in the shopping districts and also had 2 delicious lunches at a bagel place (yes, actual BAGELS!! you don't know how exciting that is) then at a Hawaiin Burger place (which had the best tuna and avacado sandwich I've had, ever). We went back to the hotel to change and put on our green for the evening then headed out. Stopped by a club called PURE for a few hours, for all you can drink/pizza then made our way over to Murphy's (claims to be the first Irish bar in Japan, haha) and met up with lots of other JET's. It was a fun night, met some cool people, stayed out late, drank delicious Irish cider, and walked home in the snow after a snack of ramen noodles at 6am.
We woke up the next morning and after a 2nd visit to the Hawaiin burger place, the girls and I headed to Spa World. When I think of Spa World I think of an American spa, with massages, facials, etc...this spa world has all of that, but that's not the main attraction. For the equivalent of $10 you have access to 6 floors of fun inside a huge building - the 3rd floor was only for women and entitled "Europe Floor", and had 9 or 10 different onsen (hot spring/hot tub/jacuzzi like things) each with a different theme. When we first arrived we put our clothes in a locker and started to explore, the funniest thing was that every single person on the floor-and there were TONS-was naked! That's just the way it is when you go to an onsen.
We bathed in what we called the Trevi Fountain onsen, looked just like Rome, a golden onsen, (plated in actual gold), an herbal onsen with a huge tea-bag of lavender floating in it, an onsen with real sharks literally swimming underneath us, an outdoor onsen on the roof with a huge waterfall, and one in a grotto/cave type thing
05 me pouring the hot water into the tea bowl
. As if that wasn't enough we ate at the naked restaurant also on the same floor, and then hit up the mud room and salt room. We also saw a room called "Dr.Fish" where you soak your feet in a small fish tank thing and the fish eat bacteria, god knows what, off your feet!!! Crazy! All day we kept saying, 'Only in Japan..' It was a really relaxing day that just made me want to take a nap, not drive home - overall a great weekend!Lily and I also joined a gym! It's nice to exercise again, especially have someone to go to the gym with, too. There'a nice pool, work-out room, 9 large hot springs to soak in after your workout, and 2 steam rooms. We love going because the bathing facilities are so nice, that means we don't have to shower at our apartments anymore!
Wednesday holiday and day off from work, I drove up and spent it in Shirahama...A little under 2 hour drive to visit Tristan in his town...Katherine and Lucas came to hang out too, we had a great night, watched the sunset on the beach, stumbled upon some live blues music at an Italian restaurant, drank some wine and had great homemade food, sang Karoke and watched movies at Tristans. The next day we got up and went sightseeing around town...there's lots of cool rock formations along the coast in Shirahama, it was a beautiful day outside, but for some reason being outside made me SO tired! driving home was a bit rough, i almost fell alseep at the wheel! hehe
Went to one of my elementary school's garduations today which was interesting/really boring. Thankfully there were only 9 kids graduating so it didn't take as long as it could have if the class was bigger
06 stirring the tea that lily will drink
. I was told to wear a black suit today because I would be sitting on the teacher panel, and graduation is a sad day since the 6th graders are leaivng the school. I honestly thought more parents/family members would be there (since the Japanese are so big on ceremonies) but there were only 9 mothers there, each with a video camera in hand to record this momentous occaision. They can't believe we don't have large graduation ceremonies for elementary schoolers! I told them highschool/college graduations are the biggest. They think the cap and gown we were are funny also. The ceremony consisted of lots of bowing, song singing and speech giving. BOOORING. Almost all of the female teachers and mothers were crying during the ceremony, they are so dramatic here - nobody's dying people! This is a happy day! All the other students in the school say a memory they have about each 6th grader, however small...one boy said "I liked watching Yuki play soccer, he is very good." The teachers were nice and invited me out to lunch after the ceremony which was fun/really awkward since none of them speak English.OK time to make some calls home :)
Will write when I get back from Hong Kong!
