One Month In

There's been a lot that has happened since my last blog post.  I've settled in with my first host family and at school, started a sport, tried all three of Nagasaki's famous food items, participated in my school's sports festival, explored Nagasaki by myself and I managed to get a scar on my chin.  I'll do my best at recalling everything in order.

It's been a little over a month and I really enjoy living with the Mizunos.  They make sure to take me out to do things on weekends which has been really nice.  My host dad isn't around a lot because he drives truck for work so most of the time it's just my host mom and brother at home.  We live in a seventh floor apartment right inside of Nagasaki.

My host mom is on my right, my host brother is on my left and my host dad is the one kneeling.  The others are family friends.

School

There are five public high schools here and about 10 private schools according to my host brother.  I go to Nagasaki South High School (Nagasaki Minami Ko).  There are only three years of high school in Japan and I am in the second year class.  So, my classmates are 16 and 17 year olds.

I'll start with my first day; it was crazy.  To say the least, the students were really excited to have a foreign exchange student in their school.  I've never experienced anything like it before, they made me feel like a celebrity.  The reaction I got from a lot of students was only slightly less dramatic than this guy's reaction around the one minute mark of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3EA_LRuqgg

Overall I've enjoyed school so far.  Its been hard getting used to the schedule and how different it is but that was expected.  I like my classmates and they've helped me out a lot with finding my way around. Most of them know very basic English but not enough to have conversations.  I speak Japanese whenever I can but the problem is that they like to practice their English just as much as I'd like to practice my Japanese.

Here is what a typical day of school day is like: I wake up around 6:20, get ready and am out the door a little before 7:00.  I take a city bus about half an hour up the mountain to Minami Ko and school starts around 8:00.  I have seven classes every day with about a ten minute break in between each.  The only classes that I understand anything in are English, math and sometimes chemistry.  English is my favorite because I get to teach the class sometimes.  I give them daily spelling tests and help out with their pronunciation. During classes that I don't understand, I usually just study Japanese by myself.  School ends around 4:20 and then I go to club practice for about two and a half hours every day.  Afterwards, I take the city bus back home; I've been arriving around 7:30 pretty consistently. Once at home, I shower, eat dinner, visit a little while and then go to bed.

Some things that are different about high school here: We stay in the same class almost the entire day and the teachers rotate.  Everyone brings their own lunch and we eat in the classroom.  We bow in unison to each teacher before and after each class begins.  No food or drinks during class, not even water I found out.  There is a 45 minute period every day where we clean the room.  All desks are moved to one side of the room so the floor can be swept and mopped and then the desks are moved to the opposite side so we can do the same to the rest of the room.  Classes are entirely lecture based. There have been no labs or hands on work at all.

Here are some pictures of Minami Ko:

This is the view from my classroom's window; a fine excuse for being distracted.

Here is the view from the front parking lot. 

Mountaineering

I've received a few letters from various classmates and I'd like to share one of them with you all.  On the first day of school there seemed to be a somewhat of a race going on amongst the Japanese boys to see who could get the American to join their after school sport or club first.  The rugby team went above and beyond by hand writing me a letter that explained to me why I should join them.

I felt bad for not joining.  They were probably the nicest group of rugby players I'll ever meet...the type that deliver hand written notes on Winnie the Pooh paper.

The sport I did end up joining was mountain climbing.  After a few days of practice I began to realize that it wasn't what I had imagined.  I was picturing being harnessed in, climbing up rocks with belays and all that.  Instead our practices have consisted of running up mountain trails and narrow city streets while equipped with large hiking backpacks and setting up tents.  I haven't been able to ask what the competitions will be like so I've pretty much just been doing whatever everyone else does hoping it will start to make more sense.  My guess is that competitions will consist of some sort of timed race up a mountain trail to a designated area where we will also be timed setting up and possibly taking down our tent.  I'll just have to wait and see.  I have really enjoyed being able to start running again.  The team is fairly small and they're all really nice.

One day for practice we cleaned out our locker room which is actually more of a large concrete walk in closet.  Every sports team has their own room which are all housed in a larger building outside.   Towards the back of our room is a large floor shelf which we had to move in order to sweep the floor. Upon doing so, a few cockroaches started frantically trying to escape.  I just left the room after seeing that and watched from outside as some of the guys whacked at them with brooms.  One of my teammates who was also outside yelled into the room at them, "Don't worry, you are stronga!" as if there may be a time at some point in which we come across a cockroach that could overtake a 17 year old boy.  I couldn't help but start laughing at the site of all this.

Here is most of the team.

Sports Festival

High school sports festivals are held all over Japan around the beginning of the school year.  It's a little like track and field day is in America except way more intense.  When I first started school, part of every day was spent practicing the various things that would go on during the festival.  The day before the actual festival, we spent the entire day doing a run through.  This is where I cut my chin resulting in the scar I have now.

It was an incredibly hot day and I was in line waiting to run in a relay.  I was supposed to be the third to go so I was sitting on the ground watching as the first runner took off around the track.  As he was making his way toward the spot where he would hand the baton off, people started telling me to go.  I was confused but I hurriedly got up and went to grab the baton.  Before I knew it I was in a full sprint trying to catch up to the other racers who had left a little before me.  I continued sprinting all the way around the track and as I approached the finish line, I got dizzy and then fainted/tripped on my feet.  I landed flat on my chest and chin.  The entire school was watching and I was more embarrassed than I ever have been before.  In the end I ended up with a cut on my chin, a sore jaw and a small chip was taken out of one of my molars.  I've gone to the dentist twice now because of it.  

The next day was the actual sports festival.  I'll give a brief description and then let pictures tell the rest. The school was split up into three teams and each team had members from all three grades.  The goal was to get more points than the other two teams. This was done by doing well in events.  For example, I got third place in the 100 meter dash which earned my team a certain amount of points.  On top of the track and field type events, there were also dances that each team had come up with and practiced in the preceding weeks.  Points were awarded to whichever team had the best routines.  Many of the students were really into the whole thing.

Each team made their own banner.  This one was ours.

A lot of students made big cardboard costumes.

Here is where points were tallied.

At the end of the day there was a closing ceremony.  Winners were announced for the different categories of competition.  I'm not sure what the categories were but I do know that there were four total.  Our team won every one of them and this was the point that I realized how much this meant to some of the students.  I expected some excitement but I was really surprised when I saw some of the students start to cry.  Our team was awarded trophies and the sports festival was over shortly after.

Mt. Inasa  

One night, my host mom took me to see the view of Nagasaki from the top of Mount Inasa.  We rode up to the top in a gondola right around sunset.  It was by far the best view here that I've seen.  Looking off towards Nagasaki we could see the full moon over the city and in the opposite direction, the sun had just set over the ocean.

Here is the sunset looking away from the city.

There was a full moon and many other people had their cameras along with them also.

I had never seen anything like it in real life before.

Iojima

My host mom took me to the island of Iojima (not Iwo Jima).  There are hot springs that people are allowed in somewhere on this island but we didn't go to them this time.

Magome Catholic Church

Red Arrows from left to right: Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Busan

Food

Nagasaki has three different food items that it is famous for including chanpon, sara udon and castella cake.  Castella is the most popular here; there are even keychains and stuffed animals in the shape of pieces of castella.

Chanpon 

Sara Udon

Castella or Japanese sponge cake

This is the kid entrance to a gift shop.  It's in the shape of a piece of castella.  

Here are some other foods that I've had:

Baked potato, corn, shrimp and a Japanese hamburger.  They don't use buns.

This desert is called kakigori and is exactly like a snow cone is in America except here they add condensed milk which makes it creamy. 

For some reason there are an abundance of Baskin Robbins ice cream shops in Japan.

This is yakiniku.  One of my favorite things to eat so far.  The restaurant serves small slabs of meat or fish and the customer can grill it over the hot coals at every table.  Beef is my favorite.  

Janglish

I've decided to start compiling pictures of all of the "Janglish" that I see while I'm out and about in the city.  I'll have a section in each blog from now on with pictures and maybe a thought or two that went through my mind after seeing the particular piece of clothing, sign, label, etc.

Groovy love

Mmmm...

A thought that I'm sure passes through the mind of every cigarette smoker here.  

Lost the "T" stencil.  Whatever, just print it.  

This was a cupcake wrapper.  I never did find out what was supposed to come after the pause.

Nagasaki

On weekends I usually have some free time so I like to go walk around the city.  I go to different areas every time and I still have a bunch of places and things I haven't seen yet.  My method for finding new places has been to get on a city bus and ride it until I see an unfamiliar area that looks interesting.  Then, I just get off and start walking around.  If I remember the direction that I came from, I don't have trouble getting back home.  

So far, I've found four malls, a wharf with some mini shops, a couple parks, lots of cool architecture and an array of great places to eat.   I'll include some pictures from some of these days here:  

Telephone poles are really cluttered with cables just about everywhere in the inner city. 

There are usually ships like this docked in the bay during the day.

This is one of  the main streets that runs through Nagasaki on which my family lives.

There are a lot of random flower beds in Nagasaki.

This is a Chinese influenced street in Nagasaki. 

A book store I found on the edge of the city

This was taken on the Chinese lantern street pictured above.

This is the Nagasaki City Library.  I'd like to get a library card at some point if they have any books in English.  It would be nice to read during school in classes that I can't understand. 

At the top of these stairs is what I understand to be a  place for those of the Shinto religion to pray.  When I was walking down this alley a man started talking to me in Japanese and then later made a gesture towards the shrine.  I followed him up and he showed me how to pray.  I grabbed two sticks of incense, lit them and then stuck them upright in some kind of glazed clay pot.  I then took a small wooden mallet and tapped it against the side of this metal bowl which began resonating with a sound much like a bell.  Lastly I took a step back, bowed and that was that.  I thought it was pretty cool.  Especially because this shrine is right inside the city.

This alleyway was filled with mopeds.  It was kind of dark and I kept half expecting to see a rat or something scurry in front of my feet.

These were found on the Chinese street as well.

I'm only a little over a month in and I already feel like I've experienced and learned so much.  If I was able to share everything on here I would.  I'm starting to feel a lot more comfortable with life in Japan which is great.  I often still think about how crazy it is to be here doing all of this. 

Until next time,  

Takahama Beach

Sayonara!