autumn

is here for good, although it was officially autumn at the start of september - from which people (some, but not all) started wearing autumn wear (which, for certain japanese, means furry russian-esque hats and heavy duty warm boots with mini shorts - i dont get the logic) - and the autumn equinox, which was also a public holiday, was on tuesday.

being autumn, it means that it's cold when the sun is down or when it's cloudy, but baking hot still when it's sunny. it kinda sucks because it means that you have to go out prepared for cold AND hot weather, and dress accordingly too. and it means cold winds that make me freeze too.. i think i need to get more long sleeved stuff and get myself better prepared for autumn, cos i'm still wearing my summer clothes around! i actually woke up feeling cold today even though my screen door was only about a quarter open, and it was cold when i went downstairs to get to school too.

booo. it's cold but i dont see the leaves changing colour!

culture festival (文化祭）at my school!

i should have taken far more pictures than i eventually did, but well. too bad! there's no such thing as culture festival in singapore, but this is a HUGE thing for students in japanese schools. it's the highlight of the year and students and teachers put in tonnes of effort for it and practise in school till late in the evening for their class performance and the class display, and if you watch enough doramas or read lots of manga u'll definitely have heard of it.

my school's culture festival was spread over 2 days. yesterday was the actual event and was open to family and friends of students, and it was really fun as it was carnival like - think ORA carnivals but better - with food stalls, performances by individual classes, groups or music clubs, class displays etc. and today consisted of performances only, and they were basically the best from yesterday.. it was nice to have a 2nd day like that, but it could be done without i think :P haha. so i've been working on sat and sun this weekend, and i'm REALLY looking forward to my replacement holidays on tues and wed. mainly because while my school is still functioning during the weekend, life beyond school continues, bringing with it the events that occur on weekends. urgh. i think i slept only 5hours or less - each - yesterday and the nigh before.

anyway here are some pictures:

the school hall aka gymnasium

one of the class performances.. they sang SMAP's "orange" , which is one of the nice songs that SMAP has. i think they won 3rd prize in the interclass competition

you had to purchase tickets to buy the food from the stalls that were set up. they had stuff like yakitori, crepe, curry udon/soba, onigiri, milk senbei and takoyaki i think.

crowding around some of the food stalls

the curry stall..

the queue for the crepe.. it was SOOOO long! i of course didnt bother to queue..

anyway if u notice, my school looks very nice and beautiful. that's cos it's a new school - it started only this academic year (ie from April this year)!

so all the classes - except the year3s - in the senior high school had a class display and you can do anything you like. quite a few of them had games, like darts, guessing games, photo displays, optical illusion, the things where u can try on various costumes and have your picture taken, etc. the various clubs also had displays and stuff, so the science club let us make bookmarks out of recycled paper; the manga club had a manga exhibit, etc.

one of the classes had a haunted house display.. it wasnt really scary, but it was kinda fun. and u shd be able to spot The Brit in the photo below, though he wasnt meant to be looking at the camera..

this other class had a classroom full of figures that they made..

the students who're taking the "food course" where they learn cooking and so on made many gingerbread houses that look really delicious!

and ok in here u cant really see their faces so i can post it up, but these 2 kids are in one of the classes i go to, and they were fooling around posing for pictures in the silly costumes that they tried on.. haha:

the other day, the one in white was trying to get some chocolate from me, and he began by saying that he's very hungry and hasnt eaten anything since last night. OH and he did it in english (broken of course, but i got what he was trying to say perfectly), which is great cos he doesnt talk or pay much attention in class and must be applauded for trying to use english, even though it's for a reason such as this. haha. but yeah, seeing that i wasnt going to give in, he exaggerated his story and said that he's very hungry, that his father's company has gone bankrupt and his mum has heart disease, and so he's very hungry and please may he have a piece of chocolate please. then he actually kneeled down and repeated "hungry" and "choco please"! haha. so funny! i couldnt not give in of course, after he'd gone to such lengths to get one puny piece of chocolate from me. though he actually went "1? not 2?" when i was about to hand a piece to him - the audacity! - and almost didnt get any at all :P

tennoji zoo, hep5 ferris wheel

ありがとう！すごく楽しかった。また遊びに行こう！

tennoji zoo isnt a bad place for a day out at all!

baby zebra at the zoo:

leopard cat that looks exactly like a cat!

SUPER DUPER CUTE!!!!

i think both these pics taken at tennoji park are ok! doesnt look as dark as it did on the camera screen:

tsutenkaku:

nice flowers

from the ferris wheel at hep5, you can see osaka castle:

my friend's house - well, the roof of his block, rather - has a view of the castle! it's so unfair. he can see the hep5 ferris wheel as well, which is awesome.

happy :)

kyoto, tempozan ferris wheel and osaka aquarium

this was so long ago but i havent posted pictures yet! went to kyoto with my parents two weeks ago.. here's kinkakuji, the golden pavillion:

it's like one of the most famous icons of kyoto..

mega huge koi in the temple's pond

and this is the zen inspired sand garden of ginkakuji, the silver pavillion. the plan to coat the temple in silver was never fulfilled, and unfortunately the pavillion was under renovation when i went there.. so all i got is this:

you can see the construction going on above.. which totally sucks because the garden is gorgeous. here are more pics:

you can see how big the sand dune is

some of the famous things in this temple are moss.. the sign below reads "very important moss (like VIP)", which is hilarious:

nice scenery:

we also went to the tempozan ferris wheel and the osaka aquarium 2 weeks ago..

the large ferris wheel at the bay area

from above, you can see the rollercoaster in universal studios:

it was super crowded at the aquarium that day.. the queue when we joined was even longer than it is here..

the aquarium is really rather interesting and is a worthwhile place to go to if u're in osaka and have the time.. 2000yen entry, and you get 100yen discount if you purchase the ferris wheel cum aquarium joint ticket. the aquarium has many levels, and you start at the top and walk downwards so that you get to see the aquatic animals from various regions in the world, like the great barrier reef, coast of panama, murray bay etc.

you also get to see lots of cool stuff like uber big fish

'

cute octopus

mega big octopus:

cute!

sleeping shark!

look at how thick the glass is! yet it's so clear..

lovely jellyfish

 

i love singlish *

i feel the need to talk about what has happened in the past two weeks of my life.. the folks have come and returned, and they left the flat feeling empty and too quiet on sunday after they flew. i was feeling rather out of sorts that day, cos i wanted to go out and talk to people, yet didnt want to socialise at that time either. like.. i think if my friends from singapore were nearby it would have been fine, but the comforts of home in the form of friends werent available. i think that only means that i have to go out and get to know the rest of the ALTs better till i can call them friends whom i'm comfortable with, rather than people whom i'm still in the process of socialising and getting to know.

but somehow i think it's rather different.. back to the whole idea of culture and so on.. i totally understand what another JET wrote in her facebook note about how good it is to meet another californian - more specific even than another american - because you just 'get' each other.. like seriously. i think the whole lingo matters too.. after having communicated and socialised in singlish for the past 22 years, that's my native tongue and there's actually a huge difference between talking to people in english and talking to people in SINGLISH. compounded by the fact that the people whom you speak to in english come from different cultural backgrounds and different experiences from your own, the gap that has to be bridged is actually somewhat significant, and doing so takes effort, which is tiring. to be honest it only just struck me, after the fun time today and reading my friend's post on facebook. maybe i'm not adapting well enough! haha. i have to work harder and try to overcome all these stuff :P

anyway, yes my parents also left me tonnes of stuff like mooncakes, bakwa, durian cake, cornflakes (which is tmdf-ing ex in japan)**, sambal chilli, haebi hiam, wolfberry and dried longnan. yummy! i can more or less eat like a singaporean with my sambal chilli, which i will use with care and prudence.

then yesterday there was an enkai - japanese party of sorts - for the australian teachers who accompanied the students from my school's sister high school down under. it was fun, as i sat with teachers whom i hadnt had the chance to interact with before, and they couldnt really speak english so i was forced to use japanese. it actually felt good and i enjoyed myself tremendously! for some reason - maybe it's just being polite haha - they tend to comment that my japanese is good (when it's far from that) because i know enough for normal everyday life here. and i guess it's true that my current level allows me to get through life in japan without too many difficulties (which frankly isnt all that difficult since there're apparently people who've been here 16 years without speaking any japanese), but the thing is, as a language, i still feel very constrained by my lack of proficiency. like there are so many things that i'd want to say when talking to people, but because i dont know how to express myself i can only convey a fraction of what i'm feeling and thinking.. same thing when it comes to listening in on conversations going on around me. and i cant read the newspapers either! and all the advertisements and blah blah.

nothing much else has been happening actually. bringing my parents around has allowed me to orient myself around osaka station - which is a HUGE help - and i think i've definitely adapted to the place. the challenge to overcome now is the social aspect, and i think that's of course going to be more difficult. i need to really get myself going for japanese classes and hopefully yoga or dance classes soon, and i must definitely exercise. i will try to force myself to go jogging this week. yup. anyhow, back to the social aspect.. i think i've been doing so much talking about it to people over the past couple of days that i dont have to go over it again, but yes. that's definitely something i have to work on. that and the need to find some free time to sit down and think about stuff in general!

*: i apologise if the title has nothing to do with the post itself!

**: i didnt request for cornflakes, but somehow my mum decided that i needed cornflakes - bless her warped sense of logic this time - and brought me 3 boxes. frankly i'm EXTREMELY thankful for that, as it was a very pleasant surprise - i requested all the other stuff that came over! heh.

typhoon 13

so if you havent already heard, japan is, and has been for a while now, experiencing a typhoon with strong winds and really heavy rains in certain parts of the country, namely the southern coast. the typhoon has been and still is moving northwards from the west, and is hitting the coastal prefectures.

we were warned about it by one of the very nice teachers in the school, and when she heard that The Brit (i've decided to call him that, hence the capital letters) is going to shirahama beach this weekend (one of the famous beaches in this area) the other day, she freaked out and told him that it's "zettai dame!" (a definite no-no) to go there and strongly warned him against it.

so The Brit was all keyed up for a nice big storm - being from England he likes rainy weather cos it reminds him of home and gives him an opportunity to whinge, which is another favourite past time of britons, according to him - and was looking forward to it, but being inland (though osaka is next to the bay we're further north from the coastal wakayama prefecture) we hardly got anything more than some - not much at all; i think a typical thunderstorm in singapore gives you more rain than what we got today - rain and a windier day than usual.. but that was it! the storm came and went without us realising it.. hahaa.

The Brit was really miffed about that, and was whinging this afternoon - and still is, in fact; it shows on his facebook status - about what a pussy the storm was and so on. hahaa. things were - and are - more serious in other parts of japan that have gotten like really heavy rains and strong winds, flooding, landslides, infrastructural damage and so on. i suppose we're lucky, but it would have been rather cool to experience a typhoon of this magnitude as it's frankly not THAT huge a storm, and it would be an experience to undergo some really small scaled version of a 'natural disaster'.. i certainly dont want a huge disaster - or any disaster in fact; this typhoon is actually rather mild by the standards of the stuff that we read about in the news most of the time - but something stronger than crazy london winds and singapore style tropical thunderstorms would be interesting and an eye opener.

hope the weather's good back home!

the folks are in town

my parents and my aunt are here in osaka and staying with me at the moment, which is the reason why i havent had much time to blog despite having gone to quite a few places recently..

the last weekend was a long one, with monday having been the "respect for the aged day". it's rather amusing to have such a holiday, but i guess in a country with so many old folk... you wouldnt think that japan has an ageing population looking at the people on the street in the places i've been to though, because there are SO many children around! especially on weekends, everywhere i've been to has been full of young kids and babies! that's mostly because the old are all left in the countryside and outlying prefectures though, but honestly.. a visitor to osaka would never be able to imagine - i cant - just how bad the problem of the ageing population is over here.

anyway, saturday was spent in himeji, which is in hyogo prefecture (home to kobe too). it's just about 1hr away from osaka station, and is home to what's is described as one of the most beautiful castles in japan:

it's known as the "white heron" because it apparently looks like a heron in flight.. i think the imagery is a bit far fetched, but it does look really grand when seen rising above the traffic and surrounding vegetation:

i love the way the area looks:

my aunt and parents:

this fish charm is meant to ward off fire and disaster:

in the next two pictures you can see the castle walls and the surrounding town beyond.. it's quite amazing a sight!

i have such nice legs here cos i was leaning against the statue:

the tourist information office:

there's a beautiful garden just next to the castle called Kokoen (好古園）that will look even better when the autumn colours are in full glory:

we had matcha and japanese sweets..

himeji is really nice! would be great to go back again in early nov when autumn is in full swing!