Enhanced Invigoration

My apologies for the lack of updates! My camera is currently broken, which means my supply of pictures is limited, and a post without pictures is a post without joy. Here's a post about January, however, for your reading pleasure.

For the bulk of January, my schools were on break - this is the break between the second and third trimesters of school, and lasts about a month. Hokkaido is filled with snow, mountains, and cows; during this break I decided to exploit two of these three resources and learn to snowboard (and I could always have a hamburger afterwards),

Snowboarding, like do-it-yourself piercing and teaching English abroad, requires a special kind of idiocy to attempt, a brand of gleeful obliviousness to consequences. It was in this spirit that I traveled with friends to Kamui, a mountain a few hours away. In the grand scheme of things, Kamui isn't that big; to somebody from Minnesota, it's a monster. With a great sense of foreboding, I got on the gondola and ascended into the fog... and ascended... and continued ascending. I estimate when we finally got out, we must have been at approximately the cruising height of a commercial jet, or possibly a weather balloon.

The next step is to grunt and struggle like a beached whale while you attempt to strap your feet to a (borrowed) plank of wood, or fiberglass, or whatever those things are made out of. Then you just flop around until you end up with the board end down, and fall down the hill. Easy!

My first day snowboarding was a disaster. I am told that this is a common experience. Since that day, midway through January, I've been out a little over a dozen times. Monbetsu has a ski hill in town; while it isn't quite on the same sub-orbital level as Kamui, it gets the job down and provides a good place to practice.

Here's me and Adam at the top of our local hill:



You can see the ocean behind us! Here's me a bit farther down, looking about as cool as I ever do:



Beautiful!

Meari Kurisumasu!

Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, and a Krazy Kwanzaa to friends and family around the world. I hope everyone had a good one, and enjoyed New Year as much as I did (I'll write another blog update about New Years later; this one's about Christmas). In this update I'll give a little overview of Christmas in Japan, as well as my own Christmas celebration.
Like many things imported from the West, Christmas in Japan resembles the Christmas most of us know in many ways, but it is unlikely to ever be mistaken for the "original" article. For one thing, opinions here differ as to the actual date of the holiday; many of my students have politely informed me that Christmas is on the 24th of December, rather than the 25th. My theory regarding discrepancy is that, since Christmas day in the West is often largely idle, and many big Christmas events take place on Christmas Eve, many Japanese got the impression that the 24th was the actual holiday. Remember that for many people here, impressions of the West are often based largely based largely on TV and movies, and in any case Christmas here is a fairly minor novelty holiday more akin to something like Valentines Day back home. Nobody expects to get Christmas off of work, for instance.
Back to the holiday itself. Christmas in Japan is first and foremost associated with one person, that patriarch of holiday cheer without whom Christmas could not exist: Colonel Sanders. Yes, nothing says Christmas in Japan like KFC, or "Kentucky" as it is known here. Lining up around the block to enjoy Kentucky is often the main event of Christmas (and is usually done on Christmas Eve, contributing to the confusion about the date). If you weren't aware, KFC is far more popular in Japan than it ever was at home, probably because Popeye's doesn't exist here.
Another indispensable ingredient of Christmas in Japan is, of course, the traditional Christmas Cake. This is a completely normal cake, usually with strawberries, adorned with a Santa figure to signify that it is, in fact, a Christmas cake, and not a birthday or wedding cake. The closest parallel I can draw to this is the unique Western holiday fruitcakes that have been politely gnawed at during family Christmas gatherings since time immemorial.
Santa does exist here, but he climbs into houses through the window and and is pulled by a single reindeer(unnamed, has a red nose). Also, as is fitting for Japan, Santa is a much slimmed-down version of his Western self. Must be all that fish.
As for my own Christmas, I celebrated with a relatively low-key day with friends. In the run-up to Christmas, my plans all fell through and I was in danger of spending the holiday alone in my apartment with a bottle of champagne; probably not something I'd want to blog about. At the 11th hour, however, I was invited to a turkey dinner on the other side of the island, and thus saved from my lonely fate.
After Christmas, I hit the mall before heading home. My mission was to buy keychain figures of Marimokkori:



He's a ball of moss with an erection. He exists because of a bad Japanese pun. He is very popular with children. If I had to choose one thing to represent Japan, I might choose Marimokkori.
We also had dinner in the mall, at an okonomiyaki restaurant. Okonomiyaki is a sort of Japanese pancake or pizza, filled with various toppings and grilled at the table. This night I tried Monjayaki, a variation which was introduced to me via the description, "It looks like cat vomit and foreigners never like it". Of course, it was delicious.