Christmas in Japan

I'm slowly catching up, but here we've finally arrived at Christmas! This is going to be a pretty short post, as we did not do too many things to celebrate. Right before I had gone to Nara, our dorm building held a Secret Santa exchange. I made a jellyfish for who I was assigned and in return got a Fox Luigi key charm.

Ho-ho-ho, Merry Chicken

Come Christmas Eve, a couple of us headed out to karaoke. On the way we passed the KFC, and you may remember how I talked about how fried chicken is a traditional thing to eat for Christmas in Japan. Here's just a picture of just how crowded it was, as well as the Colonel dressed up in his Santa suit.

The other tradition is eating cake, and Christmas Cakes can range from being super expensive and nice (up to fifty dollars), to a little one for about ten. We ended up going to the bakery in the station's main shop area as well as a convenience store then heading on up to sing some Christmas songs. Actually we mostly ended up singing the usual song we do, but with Jingle Bells and Last Christmas thrown in.

Christmas Day was "treat yourself to pizza day" for me, since it's usually so expensive. It still was, but thankfully they had a small sale going that almost made it worth it. In Japan pizza's are small. A medium is about the same size as an American small and about as expensive as two large pizzas. If your wondering why, you might also wonder why sushi is so expensive in America. It's because it's a foreign food and considered the same we consider sushi (which I can buy for a dollar a plate).

New Year's posts are to come!
~Zenko~

Oh Deer!

While I didn't get to spend a whole lot of time in Nara and plan on visiting again, I thought it would still be a good idea to talk about my first trip there. Living where I do, it's not difficult to get too as it's equidistant from Kobe. My roommate had also wanted to visit to see the deer that Nara is famous for, because you can pet and feed them. Because people feed them though...

Beware the deer! They'll headbutt old ladies!

Look how disappointed he is!

Well if you have food, they will CHASE YOU AND TRY TO GET IT. Luckily we didn't have any food so we mostly just had disappointed deer. It was a bit fun watching them chase around other people though. The deer never had a problem with us, in fact we actually helped one cross the road. It was so sad that it couldn't jump the fence like the others had but he was just soooo old. Before we found any of the deer, though, we made it through a couple of temples and passed by several tea gardens. I was a bit surprised at the tea gardens, because I did not think that they were that popular in Nara.

As I said before, getting there wasn't difficult, it was just a little time consuming as we were not used to the special lines out that way. We actually ended up having to change stations from Keihan to JR by walking a half mile down the road. A lot of local commuters were already doing it and ran all the way down to the JR Line to transfer for their jobs. While we did make it onto JR, we discovered that it's a long enough ride that you have to get off at a terminal station and switch trains, otherwise you'll start heading back the way you came (which is exactly what happened to us). Getting back proved a lot easier, as all the trains were heading back towards Kyobashi terminal in Osaka. If that seems backwards to you, its how most of the trains work in Japan. It's pretty confusing actually.

In the middle of no where, where highschoolers still commute

 Until next post!
~Zenko~

Ro-Ro-Roppongi Hills!

The last day on our trip I actually separated from the group to go meet one of my friends that's been studying abroad here in Japan for a while. So while my friends went to Shinjuku to check out the sites from their favorite shows, I went to meet her in Roppongi. Getting there was an adventure, as instead of taking the normal JR Line I had to take the Tokyo Subway system. Just getting there started a running joke among us that the richer an area was, the nicer their train stations would be. Ikebukuro station, for instance, had no benches or waiting area for commuters. There weren't even any water fountains. When I passed through Roppongi and Ginza, though, there were benches aplenty! It was pretty different from the Keihan stations and Kansai JR stations we were used to, where there's always someplace to sit.

While we waited to head out, I asked the subway attendendant how to reach Roppongi, and she told me...but she told me much too high a fare and forgot to include transfers! I did make it to my stop, but only after changing trains twice. It's also interesting to note that the subways were actually nicer over all then the normal Osaka subway lines I've ridden. There's a lot more put into the display at the very least.
When I reached Roppongi the first thing I noticed was....just how rich it all was. It felt like I had just entered the Japanese version of Beverly Hills, and I really had.

Believe it or not, having a Cheech and Chong's is a sign of being rich.

There were tons of foreign places which meant, apart from being a hub for foreigners, it was a place where people with money were at. Because American food is regarded in the same way Americans regard sushi, the more there is in one place, the more money there generally is. It did mean, though, that I got to have Wendy's with bacon (real bacon!) on it for the first time in months. After I met up with my friend though (and got my mom something to add to her snowman collection at the Christmas store they had set up), I headed out to meet up with my group again in Shibuya, the publishing capital of Japan.

Hachiko: The dog that waited

Shibuya is famous for two reasons apart from that: the first is that it has the Hachiko Memorial set up for the dog that waited for his master until he died (his master had died from illness and taken the train out of Shibuya every morning; if your interested in the story Hachi: A Dog's Story is wrong but has the general idea behind it). The second is the Shibuya Scramble! It's a lot easier to see at night, but even during the day you can see hundreds of people cross about ten different crosswalks at the same time in the same place. You actually have to be really careful not to hit anyone as you do it.

After Shibuya it was time to head home, so we joined rush hour traffic (that resulted in us getting separated again) and headed to Tokyo station. From there it was just a brief walk to get to the night bus station and we were off. As for the night bus...it was actually one of the nicest buses you can get on and considering we paid about $20 it was a good deal. Unfortunately because it was a night bus I still only got about an hours worth of sleep (but made it to the second half of Space Odyssey 2001 before I fell asleep this time!).

See you in the next post!
~Zenko~