The Eye of Patrick / 2006 / September

The first few days in Shimokawa, Hokkaido

24-Sep-06

In the days to follow my arrival I spent lots of my time getting to know people. This meant having to give a small introduction of myself to my co-workers and being introduced to numerous people. Most of their names I forget within minutes of meeting them. It was probably the result of the heat and stress of a new situation.

Before I continue I should say that Hokkaido is normally cold or cooler, but for some reason this year’s summer was filled with a lot more heat then usual. This made my first few days tough as I had no cell phone, internet or car and I only had a bike to get around. Plus my house does not have air conditioner as the weather is not hot long enough to warrant one? I thought I could tough it out for a few days and see how the weather developed. When it was not getting any cooler I went and bought a fan, I think it was one of the best purchases I had made during my time here as it meant I could survive in my house.

It was a struggle at first, as the euphoria of arriving in a new place started to wear off and I was caught in the reality that I was going to be here for a long time and there was no one around that I really knew or could speak with I got lonely. But I thought to myself that once I got more settled I would like the place more. An also the people that I lived around were very nice, so it was not like I was living around people who were mean.

Also my predecessor told me about a restaurant in town that served Italian food and spoke English. I think I went there on my 2^nd or 3^rd day and found my new second home in my town. It is a family restaurant run by a couple, who has two children. They are so kind and inviting. I felt like they were my Japanese family within the first few minutes of getting there. It is hard to put into words, but they just felt welcoming. I think I spent 2-3 hours there the first day talking to them and other customers that would come in. An at the end when I was going to leave the wife gave me a peach and said see you again, I felt happy and realized my stay in Japan wouldn’t be that bad.

During the first weekend in Shimokawa there was a small festival that my co-worker invited me to. It was fun to finally start getting to meeting people. My boss would introduce me to one person and from that person I would be introduced to more people. I think I got offers of free accommodations in Sapporo and free hair cut offers. Plus the usual free food that people seem to like buying me. One of them was cute, as she did not speak English well and my Japanese was not well, so she worried we could not be friends because of our lack of language ability. I told her of course we could be friends and not to worry about the language ability.

While at the festival I met one of my students, and he speak fairly good English so with the help of my dictionary we were able to have a conversation. I learnt that he was from Nagano and he was a ski jumper. He had come to my town to train for skiing jumping and he lived in a dorm. I thought that was pretty amazing thing to do at such a young age. When most people in Japan seem to leave home after they get married. This was a student who wanted to improve something he was good at, so at the young age of 16 he moved away from home. But I think it is good he did it turn high school, as he can then meet people easily. I told him, that if he made the Olympics in 2010 (Vancouver) that I could help to give him a tour. I really hope to see him there, as I have never cheered for someone that I knew on TV.

I included some photos of the festivals and my first few weeks in Japan.

From Tokyo to Shimokawa: A Journey to my new home

13-Sep-06

Today is the 11th of September and I will be updating about my arrival in Shimokawa, Hokkaido, Japan.

After the orientation in Tokyo, the group of Jets that were heading to Hokkaido hopped on a bus and road to Haneda Airport. Haneda airport is the second airport that is associated with Tokyo and from what I gather it is actually located in Tokyo. It is an airport that is mostly used for flights within Japan. I have heard the flight between Osaka and Tokyo is one of the busiest flights in the world.

The thing about the day that we got to the airport was that a hurricane or typhoon as they are called in the Pacific Ocean was coming Tokyo’s way. This means that some flights where canceled. Flights that were heading to southern Japan, like Kyushu and such may be canceled. But we were kind of lucky because we were heading north and we could probably just miss the typhoon.

So the flight starts to take off and we head into a large amount of cloud cover, as the hurricane had caused the weather to change in Tokyo from hot and humid to cool and rainy. I have flown many times in my life, but I found this flight to be the most turbulent and most scary. I do not know, I think it might just be the knowledge of a typhoon was coming that scared me the most. Also another passenger on the flight had a bad experience previous flying and was getting very nervous, like shaking and sobbing and that freaked me out a little too.

Though all that turbulence ended when we got to Hokkaido. When you fly from Tokyo to Hokkaido you notice the cities becoming less common. Hokkaido is one of the largest prefectures in Japan, but it has a fairly small population for its size.

This meant that there was a lot of green. After we picked up our luggage and moved on to meeting our supervisor or the person that our board of education had sent us. They had them all in one room and we entered one at a time and met them. Some people ended up with people who spoke English and others ended up with people like mine who spoke a little English. At first I was nervous to talk to him as this was Japan and I worried I had to be formal. But he was a very kind and welcoming person and we started to talk. I tried to speak the Japanese I knew and he tried to speak the English he knew and those both combined helped to make the trip from Sapporo to Shimokawa pass quicker then I thought it would be.

When we arrived in Shimokawa it was late evening and I was introduced to my apartment and went to the board of education and met up with some people from the office and introduced my self. Then it was off to my apartment, it was strange walking into my apartment as I had seen photos of it for a long time. But now I was going to live in it. My first impressions were that it looked smaller then I imagined. But then I enjoyed the fact it was all mine, no more sharing my room with people. I could go to my house and be alone. For someone who has been sharing his place of living with others since he was born this was a welcoming experience.

The weather at the time was very hot, so I was wondering what I had gotten myself into. It was later in the evening that I met up with two of my bosses and the sections (education) accounting for some dinner. I had mentioned that I like Yakiniku a lot and they kindly brought me to the local yakiniku shop and we had some yakiniku. I love that stuff so I ate it up like their was no tomorrow.

The conversation at time would end in laughter as we both tired to communicate. I had at that time not spoken Japanese in a long time so it was kind of rough, but with the help of a dictionary that someone brought and the Japanese lady from our section we got through.

After the main party is the second party and that was karaoke and snacks. This was not a normal karaoke room where you had rooms for each party. This was a bar that had karaoke machine and TV screen. So I had to sing in front of a large audience then I am used to. I sang horrible as I had grown up in Canada where Karaoke is not a big then and people don’t really sing. So my voice was fairly bad and the Japanese in my party were good because they had grown up doing it and if you watch Japanese TV and the music videos will always have the lyrics running across the bottom for you to practice at home.

We did some songs and left because I was tired from moving to my town and all the events that happened. From this point on I am in Shimokawa and all my stories will originate from here, I look forward to sharing my experiences with you all and look forward to meeting new friends in my posts.

Take care, Patrick

My Journey in Japan has begun

03-Sep-06

Hello everyone,

It has been ages since I posted and I am sorry for that. Since my last post I did a bit of traveling. I went to Brazil to visit my family and we went skiing in Chile and on our return to Brazil my laptop monitor stopped working. So I have been forced to connect my monitor to other monitors to view stuff. This troublesome behavior made it difficult to update my posts and as a result I have ordered a brand new 24 inch lcd from dell (should get it next or the following week). But in the mean time my laptop monitor is working, why I don’t know and for how long, no idea. But for the limited time it is working I will try to use it.

I will go back and post later about my travels to Montreal, Brazil and Chile, while at the moment trying to cover what has happened to me since I arrived in Japan on August 6^th at 3:10 pm.

Going back to August 6^th now…..

The flight to Tokyo Narita Japan was on August the 5^th at 1 pm and had a total flight duration time of 10 hours and 30 minutes, but do to the time difference when we landed in Japan it was August 5^th at 3:10 pm.

The flight over was pretty much uneventful, the movies I had already seen on my flights to South America and as a result was not too interested in watching “failure to launch” or Ice Age 2 for the 3^rd or 4^th time. So I tried to get some sleep and was able to sleep for about 2 or 3 hours and killed some of the flight. The other time was mostly spent playing on my Nintendo DS which I had bought for this exact trip and a device that lets me play downloaded games. I also thought of how I was actually on my way to Japan, I had spent the whole last year planning and applying and preparing for this moment to get to Japan, that when it was happening it was hard to believe. I was going back to Japan, I kept on saying that in my head.

Even when we landed at Narita Airport (For those who don’t know when you fly to Tokyo, you actually fly to Narita which is kind of a suburb of Tokyo and then make your way into Tokyo by Train, bus, car or other means) I could not believe I was in Japan. At that moment I was full of lots of energy, but then as I opened my eyes and saw the lines of people waiting to clear immigration, I realized I was going to be here for a while, which was true as I think I spent over an hour there. It was while in the lines that I noticed a fun game being played. The immigration area had a few small air conditioner vents located around the queue that were able to only give off enough cool air for the person under it and not anyone else. So people would try to maximize the time that they could spend under the vent, this meant that the line would progress in surges. People who were waiting under the air condition until they could move on to the next one or were simply forced to move forward due to the grumbling of people behind them.

This would ebb and flow for about an hour until I was able to make my way to the front of the line and the chance to finally get into Japan. The immigration person looked at my passport and then looked at me and he stamped my passport, finally I was in Japan.

Or I thought, I still had to pick up my luggage and clear customs. I got one of my first suitcases and thought I was in the clear. But ah it failed and I had to wait a few minutes for my second suitcase to finally appear. This was a relief, except to realize I could not find my passport. I had this thought running through my head, that something would go wrong and for those frantic few minutes I thought it had happened. But through the graces of god I was able to find my passport and I finally made my way through customs and onto the JET line. The JET line was numerous current ALT and JET officials in blue shirts holding signs guiding us through the airport and onto the bus.

It was on the bus ride to the Keio Plaza hotel in Shinjuku that the jet lag finally caught up to me and I felt exhausted for the first time. I was talking to someone, and I just think the conversation curtailed until I was asleep and woke up to realize the conversation had ended it. It was as if we both had subconscious concluded to each other that it was best to head to sleep then to continue the conversation. But when I was awake the conversations were mostly filled with the discussions of where one was going and how big or small it was. This was amusing and interesting, but at the same time it was difficult to remember who was who and where they were going, so many questions would go on being repeated. The combination of jet lag and the large number of people being met in a short time resulted in the above condition I think.

The bus would arrive at the hotel at roughly 6:30 to 6:45 pm and from the bus we were put into more lines. Some of the lines were to collect information and the last one was to collect the room key and our luggage. It was at this stage I was finally able to rest. But I had to get ready for 7:30 pm when I had agreed to meet my Japanese friends who I had met at my university in Canada. It was the first time I had met some of them in Japan.

I went down to the bottom of the Keio Plaza hotel and waited for them. When I noticed two of my friends, they had looked at me and walked by. I think they had forgotten how I looked. But it was nice to see them.

We then set out to find a place to eat, one of my friends suggested a restaurant that was associated with the one her brother worked at. It was a izikaya or Japanese bar that served yakitori. It was a very chilled and relaxing atmosphere. The place felt was very Japanese, but with a mixture of new and old.

It was good to gather with a group of old friends, friends I had known from my own country now showing me there own country. I was in a foreign land where a language I barely spoke was around me. But because I was with my friends it was like I was back at university at someone’s house sitting around to enjoy a good meal and conversation in the hope to escape the pressures of study. Also getting together with a group of friends was useful to prevent me from falling to asleep, as I knew if I had stayed in my room I would get bored and lay on my bed and fall asleep. This would not have done good to help me get over my jet lag.

But with all good things, they had to come to an end and this was the same. I think around 10 or so we left, after eating wonderful delightful food. It was a bunch of yakitori dishes, different parts of pig, cow and chicken. Some of them that I would not normally eat, but because I was in Japan I wanted to give them a try. I hope that I am able to meet up with those friends again. I think I am lucky to be in Hokkaido as people may visit me, so that they can go see Yuki matsuri (snow Festival) in Sapporo.

The Eye of Patrick

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