Honey, I shrunk the...

Every September there's a wonderful long weekend which has been nicknamed "Silver Week." It's a 5-day long weekend. After having lived this, I think everyplace should have at least one 5-day weekend. That, or all weekends should only be two days. It really makes life more fun. But I digress...

During our first long weekend in Japan, Giselle, came out to visit us. She had the whole week off from work and had a week filled with travels and adventures planned in our side of the country. Her first stop was to be at Onokoro Amusement Park on Awaji Island which is in our prefecture (Japanese version of a province). Since we were dying for some travels and adventures, we decided to go with her and her friends for the day.

There are two ways to get to Awaji Island. Driving along the Akashi-Kaikyō Bridge, the longest suspension bridge in the world, or hopping on one of the Tako Ferries (tako is Japanese for octopus) for about $3. Since we didn't have a car, or any real idea about what we were heading into, we took the ferry.

Now I've taken ferries many a times during my trips to BC. They were always very nice ships that moved at a pace comfortable enough that you couldn't feel the boat move, even though you knew it was. They were also very large ships complete with any amenity one could require.

This was not the case on the tako ferry. It was a smaller ship that moved incredibly fast along the ocean, and didn't seem to be the cleanest of vessels. At least it was only $3. The ferry got us to the island in about 30 minutes. And it's a good thing it didn't take longer than that. Moving at those speeds made me a bit sea sick. So I'm also grateful for the lack of amenities. The last thing I wanted on that boat was food.

Once we got to Awaji we had some adventure trying to figure out how to get Giselle and her friends to their hotel, and then how to get to the amusement park. While Giselle's friend did a great job at planning out the trip, this part seemed a bit under planned. I won't go into the boring details, but after a bit of trouble, we made it to our destination!

The big attraction of Onokoro is that they display miniaturized versions of some of the world's greatest monuments. So it's like going around the world in only a few hours.

The Great Wall of China

Rome

The displays were very detailed and amazing to look at. Everything was in Japanese, so it made it a little difficult for us to understand what we were looking at, but we had fun looking around and coming up with interesting photo ideas.

Giselle has affectionately nicknamed this pose: The honeymoon's over.

This pose is inspired by a level of Street Fighter. Kris has plans to alter the pic in order to make it look more like a screen shot from the popular game. Personally, I'm just really impressed with how high and straight Giselle got her leg.

Onokoro also had a fairy tale land exhibit that we had a blast in. Cause you know, we're children.

Samantha giving a hand to one of the three little pigs.

Giselle mugging Hansel

This is from a popular Japanese fairy tale about a monkey king.

Oh! And I saw my very first humming bird. Because of the coloring, we thought it was a really big bee, but when it stopped moving so much, we could tell that it was a bird. There seems to tbe quite a few of them in this area. Sorry the picture sucks, but it's really hard to take a good photo of a humming bird.

After a long day of walking around and causing havoc and having a bunch of small children point to us and proclaim "gaijin, gaijin!" it was time to go home. This time, Kris and I took a bus over the bridge. It was a nice sight (ran out of batteries by this point) since they light up the bridge at night. So glad we went and we may go again. This time, we have to conquer The World Village Amusement Park. You can milk cows there.

Bowling!

During Giselle's visit, we tried to do as many fun things as possible. Seeing how Nishiwaki is incredible tiny, there aren't many choices, but we did find a few fun things to do. One of these great activities was bowling!

As you can see in this photo, Japan uses the 24 hour clock. And it makes matters more confusing, when a time goes into the next day, they keep counting the hours. So 25 o'clock would be 1am, and 26 would be 2. I think.

The next cool thing about bowling in Japan is the bowling shoes. They came out of a vending machine. They also got returned to the vending machine. Still, it was pretty neat. Also, if you take the wrong size of shoe, you can give them to the guy behind the counter who will replace them with a bigger size for you. Which is incredible necessary when you're from Canada and don't know what your show size is in Japanese sizes.

We had a brief moment of worry when we thought that Kris' feet might be too big for Japanese shoes. Turns out, they had his size, but if anyone with a shoe size bigger than a size 11 wants to bowl, its best to bring your own shoes with you. I think he said that his size was the biggest they had, which was a size 28cm. Yeah, they measure shoe sizes based on the actual size of your foot. What a crazy concept. I was a 24.5. Hopefully that means I can find other shoes that will fit me without too much difficulty.

Besides coming out of a vending machine, these shoes were nothing like their Canadian cousins. They were comfy, and scent free. They also had velcro on them instead of laces which made them much easier to deal with.

Brief language lesson: Japan has four ways of spelling things. Hiragana is a syllabic alphabet that is used for native Japanese words; like すし (sushi). Katakana is another syllabic alphabet used for foreign words; like my name コレン. They also use Chinese characters, and the roman alphabet, when it works.

Now, usually, all computers can handle these writting styles. Which is good for me cause it means I can use the computers at school to make up my English handouts. Yet, for some reason, the computers at this bowling lane, could only handle katakana. Which was easy enough for me and Giselle, since we know our names in katakana, but was a little more difficult for Kris since he is still learning. Luckily, he made up a special batch of business cards before he left Canada with his name in katakana. He just had to pull one out and copy the characters. These cards came in useful once again when I forgot how to write my last name when I was filling out a form for a karaoke place. But more on that later.

You know in Canada how the screen has little animations for when you do good? These ones do to. But they also have sound effects, which get really annoying when you're continuously doing bad. I captured this sound when Giselle threw, yet another, gutter ball. It's pretty silly.

And that was our adventure bowling. Since the games aren't too expensive, we'll probably be back again. And maybe next time Giselle will get a few strikes. :p

Sports Festival

Every September, my school, and I think every school in my area, if not all of Japan, has a sports festival. The sports festivals here are nothing like a track and field day in Canada. For starters, all studies are put on hold for a portion of everyday for a week or so before the sports festival to practice. These events that they are practicing aren’t your average long jumps or 100m dashes either.

First off, each sports festival starts off with an opening ceremony. Each grade and class (each grade has about 4 classes within it, with about 35 students in each class) marches around the field. They are lead by the student chairmen of the event, as well as some students who carry the school’s flag, the Japanese flag, and a banner that represents the theme of the sports day. During the march, the school band plays a nice marching tune the sets the mood.

Then there’s the actual events. Each race is a team event to help support the Japanese motto “it’s about the group, not the individual.” There were a bunch of different relay races and then the really cool races.

There was a really cool race called the caterpillar race. The classes were divided by their genders and raced from one end of the field to the other, and then back again. Here’s the catch, each team and one person who ran across the backs of their teammates. Once you’ve been run upon, you have to stand up, run to the end of the row, bend over and wait to get run upon once again. If the runner falls, the next person to be stepped on has to get on all fours and act as a step. It was a really interesting race to watch. Especially since I knew nothing like this would ever happen in Canada.

There was another cool race to watch. Each class was lined up in rows of four. A group of four would hold onto a giant bamboo rod, run to the other end of the field, go around two pylons, and run back. When they got back to their team they had to drag the rod under their team, who jumped over it as it came, and then bring it to the front and hand it off to the next group of four.

There were also some tug of war games and a two-legged type of race, only the whole team was tied to each other.

The other events were much larger events that took a lot more time to practice.

The grade 8 & 9 girls did two really good dances that are based on a very popular dance style in Japan called Para Para. It’s like line dancing, but it’s more for a group and focuses mostly on arm and hand movements rather then leg movements. It was very well done, but the girls weren’t smiling. A few of the female teachers and I tried to get them to smile while they danced, but they were too busy concentrating on the dance movements to think about smiling. Oh well…

The grade 7 kids performed a traditional Japanese dance. Tradition Japanese dances are always based on some sort of work. This one was based on being fishermen. Their actions represented pulling in the nets and throwing the fish into the boats. Or at least, that’s how it was explained to me. I found it really cute cause there was a lot of “e-yah”s shouted, and the grade 7 students have very high pitched voices.

The, for lack of a better term, gymnastics that the grade 8 & 9 boys did were simply amazing! They displayed such feats of strength and agility and danger that I know would never be allowed in a school function anywhere in North America. One thing they did was a simple pyramid made up of 6 students. Wanna know how they got down? They just flattened themselves and fell onto the sand below. And that field is all sand. All the way down. Another amazing feat was called the fan. It included 5 people, one in the middle holding the other four up who were leaning towards the group. My favorite was called the wave. A group of boys got on their knees, locked arms and moved as a group to simulate the movement of a wave across the horizon. Then the coup de grace was a 7 layer pyramid, with the boy on top standing and holding a banner. The banner the top boy held said something about the school celebrating its 50^th anniversary. Those boys actually climbed on top of each other to get to their spots, and then climbed back down again. Which is good, cause I think one boy went home one day with a broken rib or something from falling from one of these stances.

It’s probably a good thing we don’t try this stuff back home.

So that was the sports festival. It was so interesting to watch and learn more about Japan through this activity. And after wards I got to go to a dinner party with my co-workers and watch them make their own pyramid in the restaurant after they had one too many drinks. Yeah, I work with a crazy bunch.

PS - Sorry there's no pics, but I promised my principal that I wouldn't post them on the Internet.