Okinawan Festival (Osaka Trip, part 1)

-Austin

Last weekend on Sunday (9/15/2015) Elijah and I went to Osaka.

The purpose of this trip was to attend a festival that celebrated Okinawan culture. It was INCREDIBLY hot that day, partly due to the lack of shade.  That being said, the food was good and there were performers near the stage. Sorry, not many captions. If you have questions feel free to leave a comment question :)

Chicken and a Bratwurst. The chicken was amazing. 

I did record a bit of their dancing along with the music they were playing but.. my phone's mic isn't super great, so the audio quality is LOUD and not great quality.  Turn down your speakers before watching the video.

We only stayed for a few hours due to the heat. Part 2 of our trip coming soon™.

My Homestay Home

-Austin

Sorry about the lack of posts. Classes have finally started so we haven't been doing anything really blog worthy.

That being said, when I showed pictures of my homestay room I said that I would show more of my home at a later date. This is that date.

My home is a 2 story house with a garage built under it that can hold 3 (small) cars. Incredibly compact, but every bit of space is efficiently used.  If there is one thing I've learned since I've been here it is how efficient the Japanese strive to be.

Front of the House. This is actually 2 pictures, I've just combined them so that you can see the front better.. If you look closely, you can see where the division between the 2 pictures is.

The front door, looking at it from the stairs

The stairs that lead to the front door.

This is the side room that Mama-san uses to tutor her home students. It is right beside the stairs. I took this picture standing right in front of the front door.  This room is actually connected to mine.

Next, we go in through the front door. When entering a Japanese home or dorm, you always take off your shoes. This is even true of  schools, specifically the Elementary through Highschools (not college). In a home, this area is called the Gekan. It is usually a tile floor that is lower than the rest of the house's floor.  As you take off your shoes, you step up into the house, being sure not to let your sock clad feet touch the floor of the Gekan because it is dirty. People also usually wear slippers inside of the home that are only used inside the home, never outside.

The tile area is the Gekan. The white floor part actually extends about 2 inches over the tile to help you take off your shoes. You can walk up backwards to it and use the extended part to pull your shoe off.

This is my room. I have already posted about it here: My Homestay Room 

This is the crossroads of the house. In front is the living room, to the left are the stairs. Also on the left, closer to the brown door is a toilet. To the right is a hidden door into a sink/laundry room. 

In the living room you may notice an INCREDIBLE amount of picture frames. These are pictures of all of their past students. They've been taking on homestay students since Yuuki (their son) was little. He is 31 now.  They have had roughly 50 students stay with them throughout the years. A few have returned to stay again before.

This is the Living Room. Not much to say that you can't see.

This is where we eat. Quaint little table directly connected to the kitchen.

The kitchen. It is tiny, but Mama-san makes REALLY good food here, so she obviously for her :)

Different angle of the kitchen. From this angle you can see the hidden sink/laundry room behind that door I mentioned.

So, if we go into the kitchen, into the hidden sink room, and open that hidden door, we will be looking at the stairs.

These stairs are incredibly tall. Much taller than the stairs you're used to most likely. They lead to the second floor which contains the Shower and the bedrooms used by the rest of the family.

This is the entrance to the shower / bath. Inside of there is a little room where you would undress. (Yes there is also a door to close off that little room, not just the curtain.) 

This is the sliding door that leads into the Shower.  Picture taken standing in the undressing room.

The shower and sitting stool.

The bathtub.

Japanese people DO NOT use the bathtub to clean themselves.  The shower is used to fully clean the body. The bath is used to soak and warm up, especially during the winter.  Japanese baths have a special function that recirculates the water, heating it back up. An entire family would usually use the same bath without draining the water because you've just cleaned yourself so the water stays clean.

Some families even have water saving mechanisms installed in the house that will recycle the bath water after use. When the tub is drained, the water would be stored in a tank for later use in the washing machine.  Keep in mind that this bath water is completely clean, which is why it is okay to recycle it.

That is pretty much it for the home tour. Everything besides the toilet and my families' bedrooms.

A note: This house is EXTREMELY western style. Not all Japanese homes look like this.

The Active and the Lazy. Two sides of the same coin.

So this is our first real "weekend" since being here.  Sure, we've had a weekend since being here, but it was basically just extended vacation.  Now that classes have started and we've settled into our homes a bit, it finally feels like a weekend.

On saturday, we decided to get together for a bit and go have fun.  We met up at the lounge of the Center for International Study (CIE). Well, I would say we met up, but someone took forever (coughcoughNygelcoughcough).  Our group ended up being Elijah, myself, Nygel and Nobu, our recent japanese native friend.  We were all starved due to a lack of breakfast, so we decided to go get lunch.

We went to Hirakatashi Station by bus and went to a Ramen shop.  Let me tell you, this was GOOD ramen. Very very good ramen. I took a few pictures. My ramen is the one on the bottom left.

Yes, those ARE french fries. 

These foreigners are takin' our jobs ramen!

Delicious (minus the bean sprouts)

Without Nobu there to help order with us, it would have been a train wreck haha. 

 So after we finished eating we decided to go to a book / movie / music / manga / anime store.  While I have a bus pass that lets me ride the bus for free, Elijah, Nygel and Nobu don't, so we decided to walk. Along the way we passed by a police station and a canal. The canal was very pretty and green.  It continually feels weird to see so much foliage so close to the city.

We also passed by, what Nobu called, a Three Dimensional Parking Lot. It looks really interesting, not quite sure how it works though.

   

After quite a long walk, we arrive at the store. The store we went to is called Tsutaya. It is a very dangerous store...for your wallet. It took amazing amounts of willpower for us to not spend all our money in this store.

One of the games at Tsutaya. Very good story.

After Tsutaya we decided to walk to an arcade that was nearby... if you use nearby in the loosest definition of the word. The arcade we went to is called Sega World. 

Yes, that is Nygel's head on the left.

In that back corner of the arcade is the rhythm game section. A rhythm game is a game where you press button or tap the screen in sync with the rhythm of a song.  The easiest example would be Guitar Hero.  Anyways, we are all huge fans of rhythm games, so this is where we spent our entire time. Sadly, I didn't take many pictures inside the arcade. My phone camera takes wide shots, so I would have needed to stand far away to get a good picture of the machines.  Here is the one picture I did take.

Yes, that IS Project Diva: Arcade on the Left. It is HARD.

This is just 2 of the rhythm games. There were quite a few there, all incredibly fun. 

This arcade is close by so we will be going back for sure.

After that we walked back towards campus where I grabbed a bus and headed home. It was loads of fun.  That was the active day.

Now that it is sunday, I proceeded to sleep until 10:30. Call me lazy but man it felt great.

Active and Lazy. Two sides of the same coin.

We walked a minimum of 4.2KM or 2.6 Miles. If you want to see the exact route we took, here it is:

Our Walking Route

So I Heard You Liked Trains

So Japan put trains on its trains! So now you can look at your favorite trains while you ride on trains.  But seriously though, there are a few trains that run around the Hirakata area that have Thomas the Train and friends painted all over them. I believe there are a bunch of custom painted trains that run throughout Japan.

 I remember watching Thomas the Train as a kid. I had the wooden trains and I would watch the movies ALL the time. Come to think of it, I watched Barney, the purple dinosaur, as a kid as well. I hope there aren't any trains with Barney on them.

O.o

Opening Ceremony Visual Aid

I meant to upload this the day of the Opening Ceremony.. but then I got lazy. Specifically because there are videos involved and I didn't know how I wanted to deal with them.

That being said, the opening ceremony was really interesting to see. The food was also really good. The banquet was a combination of foods from around the world. There were the typical Japanese foods likes Curry Rice but there was also Italian Pizza and American Cheese Burgers. 

The pictures are of the Street Performance preformed at the Opening Ceremony. It is called Nankin Tamasudare, a traditional Japanese performance using lightly woven bamboo sticks to make shapes.

Torii Gates

Suspension Bridge

Arch

So many arches you'd think you were in ancient Rome!

A School of fish

Up close and Fishy

Fishing rods, gotta catch that school of fish!

Mount Fuji

Just look at that mount range!

The performers after the ceremony was over.

I also took a short video of the actual performance.

NOTE: The audio is loud and... not very good. So I would turn down your speakers before playing.

A small example of what went on to make each shape.

This was them leaving after the performance was over.

Also, I got a single picture of the food before all the hungry college students decimated the table. It was a brutal fight for food, only the strongest survived.

Not pictured here were the other 3 tables exactly like this one plus the other food stands.

It was delicious.

The Opening Ceremony

Today we had the famous Japanese Opening Ceremony. I made the minor mistake of forgetting to dress up so I guess plaid shorts and a Dr. Who t-shirt was good enough for me. The first part was the introduction of the important people in attendance, such as the head of the school, a guy from the US Embassy, a girl from the Australian Embassy, and of course all the deans and teachers. After a choir came in and lead us in the singing of the College Song. Next up speeches from more important people that y'all don't care about, but either way they all gave really good speeches and some really good advice about life in Japan and whatnot. Now the fun part, street performers. That's right they brought in a group of street performers to put on a show for us. They this mat like thing made out of sticks tied together with string that they could reshape into different shapes all while singing in Japanese. Some of the most memorable shapes they made were an extending bridge, flags, wings, fish, and Mt. Fuji. After the performance there were closing remarks and then it was off to the luncheon. At the luncheon there was an abundance of food we're talking sushi, curry and rice, steak, veggies, cake, pizza, hamburgers, sausage, ice cream, and more. It was a pretty fantastic free lunch if you ask me. After lunch was over we made our way down to Hirakata-shi station to get to the bank and exchange what USD we had over into Yen which was much less painless than I personally thought it was going to be. After we got that settled we headed back towards the school by way of bus and decided that we would go to Edon(pronounced E-D-on as we've decided or secretly eden of the northeast), which is a grocery store with an electronics/appliance store on top of it. On the way we passed a store with some awesome anime drawings on the door so naturally we stopped to get a picture when out of the blue a random guy passing asked if we wanted him to take a picture for us. Turns out he's a local Kansai Gaidai student and he ended up hanging out with us all the way to and through Edon and just like that we made a new Japanese friend.

Into each life, some rain must fall..

BUT MAN IT WONT STOP.

It has rained about 75% of the days I've been here. I really like the rain, so this isn't that big of a problem, but being wet all the time can get...annoying.  better buy an umbrella!

That being said, it does give us pretty scenes like this one.

This is right by my homestay home by the way.  Pretty neighborhood

Also, the title is a reference to the song "Into Each Life, Some Rain Must Fall" by The Ink Spots.
It is a great old song. If you have some time, give it a listen.