Typhoons, Earthquakes, and a Nuclear Leak!
Trip Start
Jun 27, 2009
1
28
47
Trip End
Jun 25, 2011
Nachikatsuura, Susami, all over,
Japan
Friday, July 20, 2007
It's going to be different when the new group JET's arrive in August, strange that they will be replacing the previous JET in their town down to their apartment, car, and bed...I'm hoping for another great group of people with an equally good dynamic! The last couple of days have been hard, saying goodbye to friends you've hung out with for the past year and gotten to know so well, all going through the same things in this crazy country we're living in
01 practicing tea ceremony with shibasaki sensei
. Recently while at the beach, we decided to have a reunion in Vegas during New Years 2008-2009, so we're telling ourselves its not goodbye, but 'see you again' as the Japanese kids always say. The last few months have involved a lot of traveling. My mom, aunt, and cousins Maggie and Will came to visit for 2 weeks. I gave them the grand tour of Southern Japan including: the one and only Nachi Katsuura (my town, which they stayed in for 6 days) and then the bigger more touristy cities of Osaka, Kyoto, Nara, Himeji, and Hiroshima. We had a great time together, they loved Japan! They thought my town was beautiful with the mountains and ocean right next to each other, and even got to visit one of my schools for the day. They were of course showered with presents and everyone made an effort to speak to them in their limited English/using charades. The 5th grade class enjoyed meeting my cousins Will because they are about the same age, they gave him traditional Japanese children's games, and a CD of Japanese music to take home. So nice!
Soon after my family left my good friend and fellow teacher at Browne Academy, Kim came to visit! We had a great time together, she got to meet all my friends and really got along well with everyone. At one point a fellow JET asked if they could trade her for me
02 walking along the coast at dusk
! haha thanks a lot Mac :) I showed her around Osaka and Kyoto and then she came down to Nachi for some goodbye parties, typhoon events and local festivals. It's always so nice to see familiar faces.In other news... We survived a typhoon! It's name was Man-Yi and we felt it's wrath for quite a while, as it brought heavy rains for DAYS. Trains stopped during the height of the storm due to high winds, and the coastal highway was crazy - the waves were HUGE. Many roads have typhoon barriers on the side to break the large waves. Needless to say driving home during the storm was a bit scary!
Unfortunately the worst part of the storm happened to fall during our towns biggest festival, a fire festival at our waterfall. It was too bad it was torrential downpour during the day, but the festival went on, and was really cool. Go Nachi! Afterwards a big group of us headed to a new oceanside hotel with great onsen and then to a local bar in town for drinks.
By the time we woke up the typhoon was gone and the skys were blue and the sun was back. We were all so excited after not having truly seen the sun for weeks (on top of the typhoon it's still Rainy Season too), we headed to the beach in my town. The rest of the weekend consisted of eating out, and having a game night at my apartment in which we played Life, Pictionary and Charades. Don't laugh, you've gotta keep yourself occupied somehow when you live in the country! We also went up north to Sara's town where there's a beautiful waterfall in which we went swimming in, despite the insanely strong current due to the extra water from the typhoon. Some Japanese guys came and did flips from the top of the waterfall
03 Aunt Mary, Maggie and Will at Nachi Shrine
! A few weeks ago we had our Wakayama JET Sayonara (Good-Bye) Party as one last get together before the JET's who are not re-contracting leave for their respective countries. Lily and I organized the party at the traditional place, a beer garden in the capital city of our prefecture-Wakayama City. The beer garden offers a 2 hours all you can eat, all you can drink, and a Baskin Robins ice cream, so it was the perfect place for a big group of rowdy foreigners to hang out. We carried on Wakayama JET traditions and presented awards (everyone voted via email) ala high school yearbook style for things such as: Mr and Mrs.Wakayama, Best Japanese, Most Likely to Never Leave Japan, Biggest Drinker and Karaoke Superstar. The evening ended with a 3 hour karaoke stint which was lots of fun as usual.
I'm sure many of you have heard about the big earthquake in Japan, thank you for those of you that e-mailed to make sure I was OK! Thankfully I live very far from it, and everything here is OK. The subsequent nuclear leak at the nuclear power plant was crazy though! Kim and I sang the Dave Matthews song, 'Don't drink the water!' haha Japan lies on the intersection of 3 large fault lines and the entire country experiences earthquakes throughout the year. So far I've only really felt one large earthquake, I think because other times they have been smaller ones and I just don't know what they feel like from having grown up on the east coast
04 Me and Mom at Nachi Waterfall
. Today Lily and I are packing up our things and headed to the northern most island of Hokkaido for Japanese school! We will be living in dorms on the Hokkaido University campus and going to intensive Japanese language immersion classes for 4 hours everyday. Hopefully my Japanese will be a lot better when I come back, I know the Board of Education is hoping it will be. Lily and I are excited to get out of the heat of Southern Japan, and just live in a city for the month. We will actually only be about 7 hours from Russia, that far North! Who knows, maybe a weekend trip?? We went to the famous snow festival in Sapporo this past Feburay and loved it, the city has a really new feel to it, and is more international than Osaka feels. We will take the train to class every day and explore Hokkaido on the weekends. I've been reading up on it and there are tons of National Parks, beautiful lakes, onsen (hot springs), and even active volcano's!
The Japanese schools just finished for the summer. Their summer vacations are only 40 days, and they receive a ton of homework to do during their time off. The craziest part is that teachers don't get a summer holiday! They have to be at work everyday of the summer to sit in teachers room and "work." They seemed very confused when I told them that in America teachers get the whole summer off.
OK that's it for me...I need to think about what to bring to Hokkaido, pay my rent and take care of some other little things before I leave.
Lots of love from Japan,
Kate
