The Wall of Man and Nii-gata

I'm writing this during the teacher's meeting, something I find very interesting. Apparently the teacher's meetings are done so that teacher's can talk about various things, but the most importatn thing seems to be that it's from an old practice to allow the teacher's to practice their public speaking skills with people they are more comfortable with. Judging by the views of the majority of teachers in here (after Kasuga-sensei has been talking for about 40 minutes about several things, but mainly test scores) I can see why many places are phasing it out. Typically this is the time I run off to the english teachers room to do Japanese practice, but today I wanted to stick around and get some stuff accomplished online. :-P


So, Friday evening I made my way over to Komagane and to an Izukaya to celebrate Jessie's birthday with other ALT's. It was a great time, lots of laughter and fun. As well as getting to have lots of great food (mochi and cheese on toasted bread reminded me alot of goat cheese pizza in turkey, how i miss it :-P) I gifted Jesse a pack of my beef jerkey, no light present; I'm sure he'll enjoy it.

I left before everyone else to catch a train back to Iijima and because I had decided Friday afternoon that I was going to make it up to Nii-gata for the wall of man meet. I ended up getting home around 11:20-ish and got to bed just before midnight. I had to wake up at around 5:20am the next morning to catch the first train out from Iijima at 6:02. Ugh. Always a bad sign when you head out in the morning and you can still see stars. The mountains in the east as well as a few clouds above them left it pitch-black in Iijima. In fact, it I didn't see the sun until after 7. We still have two weeks until the shortest day yet. Crazy. I can't imagine if we actually used daylight savings time here. I had no problems making it up to Nagano city, but unfortunately, my late train in Matsumoto made me miss my train out of Nagano by just a couple of minutes. I went into the help area at Nagano to purchase my ticket to Kita-arai (where I was meeting Joe) and when I asked for help, the guy checked the book (leaves at 9:23) and then looks at the clock (9:24), looks at me, sighs and says "that's too bad, huh?" and i just chuckled and said yes. The next one was at 10:30, about when I was originally supposed to arrive, what a shame. :-P I got on the later train and got to Joe's without any trouble. It was a nice ride (good comfy train) as well as some very pretty views along the way. The last bit heading into Nagano was set up in a very rural area in the mountains and overlooking the valley far far below. The bit from Nagano to Joe's was full of rural areas that had lots of character and was through the wilderness as well. Absolutely gorgous. I met Joe and we headed out for Marshall's place, about an hour and a half away by car. The drive was also very pretty. We arrived at Marshall's town with no problems and met him and Marcus, then proceeded to snag a delicious lunch of soba noodles which his town is supposedly famous for.

afterwards we made our way over to a local store that had an international alcohol selection, which made me eccstatic. due to lack of liquer taxes in Japan, it's as cheap here for alcohol as it is in the states. We also grabbed a couple of Dr. Peppers, and I was a happy happy man later that evening as I got to drink a dr. pepper.

After that we went to a grocery store and picked up stuff to make burgers for dinner (as well as my now famous bloomin' onion, thanks again to bethany for that idea, i get requests for that almost weekly now.) After that, we retired to Marshall's place to spend the evening enjoying each others company, playing Wii games, and making dinner (which turned out splendidly.)

Although we were all ready for bed by about, oh, 7pm, we ended up staying up until about 3am with intermittent dozing going on. I woke up from my nodding off to join in with Joe and Marshall about the chances of Japanese being a unique language over the next several centuries, and if the spread of information will allow Japanese to persevere and never go extinct or if it will speed the fall as it becomes increasingly easy for a global lingua franca to be established (most likely mandarin and english).

The next morning Marcus was off by 10, and Joe and I waited around for Marshall to get back. Afterwards we went off to snag a delicous lunch at a fast food place(i had a bowl of curry rice, so good!). Sunday morning also saw tons of snow on the ground, although the warmer weather/ground was causing it to disappear quite quickly. While Joe and I made our way home (after bidding farewell to Marshall), we stopped to take some pictures of the beautiful scenery and Joe got to put his new camera to use (and boy it's a doozy.) We got back to his hometown and I checked out his apartment (and was totally jealous of his internet TV he has hooked up to his nice TV), then made my way back home. Took about 6 hours from when I left Joe's place to when i got back to my apartment (if you skip the 2 hours from Marshall's to Joe's), and the evening seemed to be gone all too fast. But in all it was totally worth the trip there. I had a fantastic time and hopefully we'll be meeting up again in the middle of January. I have to plan around Stephanie and her friends visit to Japan in later January though, but I'm so excited to see them!