Home Sweet Homeish

Wow, what an adventure. So I'm back from Japan! Totally sweet and wicked. Way better than the trip in September. I guess the stress of trying to function without being able to speak the language or communicate directly is becoming more and more apparent to me, and I guess I'm learning about being the linguistic minority (weird for an English speaker, but I must say a life lesson in patience). It's an interesting position though, working on different ways to communicate. Through infinitive verbs and gestures. Writing things down, carrying maps all these secondary communicative tools become primary. Then learning to speak in a simplified English. Shorter sentences, simpler tenses, basic adjectives, slow down, emulate Japanese pronunciation.

Anyway. Here's a sense of where i was, in a quiet mountain town. It snowed like a bastard. about 45 cm my second day there. And how do they handle the snow...not with salt, as that would damage the rice fields, nope...they use water. Even though it snows like a bastard, the temperatures rarely go below 0 C. So they have sprinklers basically, that run water to melt the snow and wash it away.

But i went to visit Nate's host family. The father is a 5th generation vinegar maker. Amazing! The factory is attached to the house (although now he has a second factory for the fermenting and bottling processes). Really amazing tour. Then great temaki...i had temaki twice, and maki three times...now I'm super sad to be in Korea where sushi is usually with kimchi and not fish :(

Also listened to some killer jazz. Built a tobogganing hill, even though the village is surrounded by mountains on all sides, the mountains don't really have any good sled runs.
Even the lack of heating in the houses was a small trifle, it was cold...don't get me wrong, but somehow a pleasant cold. I know i couldn't stand it back in Canada, but i suppose that is the difference when temperatures don't go below 0, or maybe at night get down to -5. Anyway, anyone traveling in Japan, a strongly suggest you forgo the big cities, for little Fukui prefecture. It's just a lovely little hideaway in what I had always thought of as a country of metropolitan cities stretching across the expanses.