Sleeping Jellyfish

So, I want to make this clear. I am one of maybe 40 native English speakers here. Myself, the other 30 Americans, a few kids from Canada, and a half dozen from the UK are all there is. And the other 450 students are secondary or tertiary English speakers, so if I use more “maybe”s and other things like that it is cause I have been around the Mongolians and the guy form the Czech Rep. too much. It is great though. I like the idea of English as a common language but here it is also Japanese (obviously) and then some of us practice our spanish and german and french as well. The Koreans sometimes break off into Korean too, and other things like that. It is beautiful though. We usually meet near my flat (apartment in American) and party like we have for the last 5 nights. It is a great way to meet people and good to hear a dozen languages too. The Americans/Canadians/British speak better Japanese after a few drinks, but everyone else seems to forget their English so it usually turns into Japanglish, which everyone knows.

Real quick I’ll finish up my travels in North America.

So, I peaked up in Vancouver. It’s a hell of a city. I think I would really like it if I had more time to spend there. It is like Seattle a bit but even more diverse. On the bus to the airport there was Japanese, Chinese (Mandarin), French, Spanish and English being spoken. It was great. Sometimes (and this held true until I was in Japan) I would approach people in French, Spanish, or German and ask them if they knew English and then we would continue from there, but it was still great to have so many beautiful sounds going on.

When I got off the Amtrak I asked the customs officer for directions to the airport. He told me I could take the Skytrain. That is false, you cant take it to the Internation Airport till next year. I asked another guy, and he suggest a taxi, but it would be 30$. I am cheap and usually hungry so I went across the street to a Mediterranean restaurant, had some falafel, and got proper directions. It took a bit on the Skytrain, which is like a monorail, and then two buses, but like I said, culturally, it was great. I met a lot of nice people, was able to practice my languages, and many people were encouraged that an American (we are not held all that high overseas) was making an effort to expand their language barrier. It cost me all of $2.50 though I took out $50 in Canadian dollars to be prepared for the $30 taxi ride. $2.50 was nice, and I got to the airport in time. I got through customs and security relatively quick, though the nice Luxembourg lady nearly strip searched me. I repacked my bags in before I went through to make sure my pocket knife and my books were in my big checked bag, and my guitar made it through fine as well, though I think I was lucky with a sparsely populated flight. I heard that for musicians, it is the sparse flights that are good, because that is more overhead room for carry-ons.

On my flight I met Troy, also known on his passport as Praise-God Barebones. A very interesting guy, we made quick friends in the gaijin (foreigner) line. We kind of chose to sit next to each other on the plane and the third guy in our row loved the free drinks and the Japanese stewardesses. We stayed sober except for as much coffee as we could drink and just laughed at the guy in the aisle seat. Me and PGBB had a great time, played some of the inflight games and watched the Chronicles of Narnia and Iron Man twice each, once in English, once in Japanese. We had some great talks, again mostly politics, history, travels, and then our life stories, too. The aisle guy was left out, as he had his bouts of alcohol induced sleep and alcohol induced flirting to keep him occupied. Me and PGBB exchanged our contact info, and then he was off for his connection to Beijing, and I was onto looking for a place to stay.

When I got my luggage and walked a few laps around the lobby of the airport trying to orientate myself, finally I changed some dollars in for yen and used the internet to check my email. It was a miracle that the guy I had randomly emailed, Olivier Leroux, a Quebecer, just got back form Thailand that day and he could host me. There’s a miraculous website called couchsurfing.com that everyone should partake in. Its a social networking site but its purpose is to hook people up with free places to stay. There is a special breed of people that are on couch surfing, different than Myspace of Facebook, and from what I have heard the large majority are great people. Olivier is an English teacher in Narita, and he hosted me for two nights, Godbless him. It was very comforting to have another Anglophone there to be able to speak English and a tad of French to, though he spoke decent Japanse and great Chinese, too. I slept most of the first day because Olivier was teaching all day and it was raining, but then I learned it rains almost everyday, so on the second day I met Olivier after class and we went to Narita Temple (Otera). My batteries on my camera had died in Seattle, so no pictures, but there was great conversation and many of the temples are similar so I will post pictures later. They are built similar to native Norwegian buildings, with no nails, just expertly designed slats that fit into and on top of each other. It is amazing. I will definitely post good pics of this later.

So Narita and Oli were great, it was a good intro into Japan, and then I traveled on to Fukushima, Sendai, and Akita the next couple days. I flew out of Vancouver (YRT) at 3:15 on Tuesday and I arrived in Narita at about 6pm on Wednesday, so I traveled into the future. From MN/WI time its 14 hours ahead and from Seattle time its 16 hours. So, after being up for a good 40 hours, I think my day of sleep on Thursday was justified. The temple visit took place on Friday, and then I departed from Oli. The weekend travels will come next. The Onsen (Japanese Hot Spring) was great. It deserves its own post.