More Beppu and Oita

So the ferry has just withdrawn from the dock at Yawatahama and the intrepid explorers are headed out to the semi-open sea. What new dangers await our fearless chickadees?

Our onsen - we also had a sand bath, literally a good moment to tell your
friends to go bury themselves, and a sauna. I was the bravest soul who sat in the
sauna for several minutes at an extremely hot temperature.
It was a little wooden shed with sulfurous rocks in one corner of
our outdoor private onsen. A truly wonderful experience.

Scary faces and angry-looking statues of other-worldly entities are everywhere in Beppu.
This makes sense because the ground actually steams and the gutters run with semi-boiling water.
There is even a tour of 8(?) hells, which I hear are mostly mud-pots.

None, really. Beppu is a bit of a tourist trap. A lot of a tourist trap, as a matter of fact. But the towering hills and modern-looking buildings around the downtown area remind me of home. The burning, sulfurous steam kind of reminds me of what home would look like if God finally had enough of us.

One of the very touristy and still fun things to do is make your own jigoku, or steam your own dinner in  a little steamer built to capture the rising mists of the boiling underground. We made a dinner of vegetables, seafood, eggs, chinese dumplings, and three kinds of rice, all by lowering a little collection of trays into a little steam-urn and waiting the appropriate amount of time.  

Beppu and Oita!

Ah, Beppu. A city between the hills and the ocean. Where the sulphuric mists of hell billow up to bathe the travel-weary body in hot springs carved out of the living earth. Where the over-worked can rest their over-wrought nerves in a bed of mud or earth-warmed sand. Where every breath in a sauna draws in a cleansing, penetrating heat and expels all the baggage we each of us carry on our life's journey.

And such a tourist trap, your wallet shivers when the ferry hits the tire-tread covered dock.

Not that I didn't love it. Because I did. All 18 hours I spent there (7 of those, asleep). Beppu is pretty far away from Tano, on a completely different island, and awkwardly accessible only by train or ferry, one of which is fast and freaking expensive, the other of which is freaking slow and quite reasonable. You guess which is which.

I'm not complaining, though. My travel crew picked our wine-soaked selves out of bed on Saturday morning, dined on french toast and good coffee (thank you Melania!) and headed off to Yawatahama by train. After pissing off an old lady in the unreserved section, we climbed on board our ferry over the Japan Sea (or whatever separates Shikoku from Kyushu) and Charon whisked us off to the land of steam and sake at a brisk 7 kilometers an hour. Probably more like 30, but still.

Week Whatever

Recently, I realized that if I only learn one grammar point a week, and I stay for only one hundred weeks (two years), I probably can master the most basic elements of Japanese grammar. Not everything and certainly not all the bloody vocabulary. Vocabulary seems insurmountable, at times, simply because it is infinite. I think of all the words I use in real life (not here where they are mostly unidentifiable as real worlds by the majority of my neighbors), many of them are not frequently utilized by many other English speakers, so the equivalent in Japanese would be rather silly. But I DO want to know the big words in Japanese. Even when they are all freaking long words. That`s what happens when you refuse to put consonants together. You get f-ing long words.

This grammar epiphany came to me this morning as I fixed a cup of tea in the office lunch room, a small room that resembles a closet with a sink. In fact, I believe that may be exactly what it is. But it also has a hot-water kettle, a coffee machine and a fridge. So things aren`t all austere and bare. I had been trying to get my head around a few difficult grammar concepts that I had review recently. This is my somewhat disorderly ordered process:

I look up a new grammar point in my handbook of Japanese Verbs (Taeko Kamiya) or the JET Programme Japanese Language Course.

I use it in an exercise or twelve on paper, slowly mouthing out the syllables so as not to annoy/distract any of my coworkers.

If it is a vocabulary point, I try to invent scenarios where I might employ it. If it is grammatical, I try to invent sentences or insert new verbs or vocabulary into the phrase as practice.

I hit up my Jr High conversation buddy (if I am at Jr High) during tea-time and try it out. It doesn`t matter what context it is. I throw it in there any old which-a-way and she laughs hard and says, "chigaimasu!" or sometimes "tadashi, kedo..." (the first meaning "wrong!" the second meaning "correct, but what are you talking about?"). If I`m headed to 小学校 for the day, I randomly employ it in conversation with my fifth graders, during a friendly game of War or over the lunch time table when I am busy teaching them the fine points of English conversation like, "when you punch someone to the floor, you yell `T.K.O!`" They love that one. That and "a little bit", especially when I say it as quickly as possible. They turn to each other and say, "alittrebitgross!" with all they`ve got. It`s hilarious. If I get my grammar point wrong, they just look at me like I`m nuts, or politely ignore it. If I get it right, they just keep going with the conversation because randomness fits when you`re ten.

Thankfully, tonight I am off to Matsuyama where I don`t have to speak much Japanese because I`m meeting up with other Eigo-hanasu-ers and we are headed to Beppu. One of our english speakers is asian, and all the Japanese people speak to her, even when it`s obvious that the only one who speaks passable Japanese is our through-and-through British chick. Stereotypes are awesome.

And then it`s one more week before I head home to crash on the couch with a cup of tea and my puppy, jet-lagged out of my mind, watching Top Gear with my fam and talking all the way through it to the annoyance of strangers and peers. Yay!

Nara part deux

Blogger: 5, Me: 3.

So to continue. The shrine is covered in lanterns. Stone lanterns, metal lanterns, copper, bronze-looking, and golden lanterns hang and stand everywhere the eye can see and the human body can go.
I imagine they would be quite pretty at night, were the all alight.

This is my favorite picture. They don't particularly look like they
 like each other, but maybe it was the strain of the day. 

After the park and the shinto shrine, we meandered over to the Buddhist temple. Equal opportunity religious people. Except the Buddhist temple dominates everything else. 

Yep, that's me. The temple is pretty far back there. And it is freaking huge.
Inside are several 40 foot tall Buddhas and other enlightened figures,
made from metal, maybe bronze or gold or something. I took some pictures,
but they did not turn out. 

You can't miss it. 

Nara

Nara is so beautiful, basically all you have to do is hold the camera upright and press click. You will always get an amazingly gorgeous, complex and layered picture of something lovely and peaceful or multi-dimensional and thought-provoking. That being said, if any of my photos totally suck, blame it on Kodak.

Nara is outside of Osaka, about an hour train ride in some direction. I forget which. It was Japan's first "permanent" capital city (around 700 A.D.) and became a sort of headquarters for Buddhist priests, or at least a gathering place for monasteries and temples. There are still tons of temples left and one very large and beautiful park where one can tour around several different huge-ass Buddhist worshipping places. (I was running out of synonyms for "temple". BTW, I am exHAUSTed right now. Forgive my flippancy. Nara is my favorite place so far in Japan, outside of my apartment.)

This is a very famous shinto shrine. There are several different terraces and stairs you can walk up or down and see different sides to the shrine. It is fully functioning - while we were there for 45 minutes two different wedding parties came through (one finished up with pictures and the next began a new ceremony). Priests come and go performing various priestly tasks.