Celebrations

Richard has gotten back blogging, so I thought I'd contribute some photos. We've had some great celebrations over the last few months. The pics today are from two of the biggest. The first was the 15th anniversary of our samba escola G.R.E.S. Sol Nascente. (Escola literally means "school" in Portuguese. In the case of samba, it means more like group or club.) Sol Nascente means "rising sun" in Portuguese. For our 15th anniversary party, the group rented a restaurant with a small stage in Kobe and proceeded to make music, drink, eat and be merry for an evening. There were lots of small performances by affiliated music groups, as well as a samba performance by another escola in Kobe. Finally, this year's members topped it off with a performance ourselves. I've posted some pics on facebook, but here are some of my favorites from the evening.

Dark beer and a guitar. 

The venue of our party. You can kind of see the small stage at the end of the room.

Wearing our bateria shirts, which show that we're musicians with the group.

The dancer in purple and the guy in the white shirt are our leaders and the founders of the school. The three girls in front are in bear costumes with LED sunglasses...It's an inside joke, don't ask.

After the official party, many people stayed around for a "pagode," basically an informal jam session of relaxed samba music.

The other big party we went to recently was the wedding reception of a samba friend.

The first plate of food at the reception, which was Chinese style. You can see lobster salad, fried chicken, pickled cucumbers, fried fish, rolls of various kinds and tons more that I can't remember. 

The bride and groom cutting the cake. Most of the cake was a wooden/plastic form, with a small piece of actual cake/whipped cream for them to cut into for pictures.

Remnants of several courses of food on our table. Still left are some amazing candied sweet potatoes and sesame mochi balls with sweet red beans inside. It's proof of how stuffed we were that there were still some on the table.

Our table of samba friends.

So there's an old Japanese joke about how businessmen put their ties on their heads when really drunk and letting loose. Our friend here isn't so drunk, but the atmosphere was ripe for a little joke about ties on heads.

Me with the bride in her 3rd costume of the event, a Korean hanbok. (Her husband's family is Korean-Japanese.)

Richard showing off his new bow tie.

Here we're at the second party, which was held at a restaurant not too far from the reception hall. The reception had tons of family and was more formal, this party is for the bridge and groom and their friends. 

The bride singing samba at the second party.

Richard making friends.

Oh, and we both won jerky in the raffle. Other prizes included gift certificates to restaurants and various food prizes.  

So, you can see it's been a fun month! In July we have another performance with our samba group and then my parents and brother will be visiting from the states, so it should be another interesting month!

These are some cool postcards, Or, "Holy tourists, Batman!"

Yesterday we did another hike in our Fuji preparation campaign (or キャンペーン, if you prefer). With few exceptions, if you want to go hiking here, you also end up walking through temple complexes. Most of the time this is awesome, and as a result we've seen a lot of little temples that I would have never expected to be there - especially the strings of smaller temples on the now-secondary paths between the towns in the valley and the bigger temple on the top of a peak. From what I understand many of these have specific functions and were usually originally funded by wealthy individuals. In between are numerous smaller shrines that either commemorate singular acts of devotion/religious contemplation or that are set up by individuals in connection with a family member or local spirit. So, these backwoods trails are quite nice and we basically have the trail to ourselves with the exception of the occasional local retiree who walks the trail with apparent regularity. 

In the city, however, things are a little different. Because the terrain around here is so thoroughly composed of a regular alternation of plains and hills, most cities butt right up to the edge, with their important temples just up the hill in the woods. Anyway, to get to the point, yesterday we went to Kyoto on an "eco trail" that takes you through all the famous sites in the city without using any motorized vehicles. It makes things more interesting than most tourists trails by taking you up through the hills and the quiet residential streets instead of just directly from temple to temple along routes lined with gift shops and fancy small restaurants with overpriced lunches. So, the parts in the mountains were awesome and a good workout, but when we got to our stopping point, things got a little out of control. That is, we were confronted with a mass of tourists making their rounds. 

As the summer progresses this experience seems to become more and more common. We go somewhere for any number of reasons, do whatever we have to do, and then on the way back home or through to another activity, we have to wade through a flood of tourists. I don't know particularly why I am bringing this up except that their presence keeps taking us by surprise. Which actually has given me pause to think that we actually have very little contact with other foreigners here. This is in contrast to the majority of Americans here for work, who seem to live in the same buildings/neighborhoods, work together, hang out together, etc. I'm not trying to say that we have somehow assimilated (indeed, I am constantly reminded how big the cultural knowledge gap is for me) but the last few weeks of running unexpectedly into tourists has underlined the fact that we really don't interact with other foreigners. 

Side note: the TV is on while I'm writing this and we are watching the local cable company channel, which mostly features programs looking at shops and attractions in the Osaka area. The segment that just finished involved them sending and a personality to an unknown location to explore. This time it was a children's water park. Therefore the segment consisted of him trying out all the rides while the kids looked on in slightly confused amazement. As always, Japanese TV is kinda bizarre. 

Long time

I just realized it's been a month and a little bit since there was last any blogging up here. Which is not terribly surprising since we've been busy. Lots of samba stuff couple with an uptick in general activities. In addition to music and language activities, it seems like we've had lots of little paperwork related activities to deal with (or at least Rachel has). For myself I've been writing quite a bit for the dissertation - I tried to set myself a general goal of getting a good draft of two of my chapters done by the time we return to the US. In any event, it seems like we are just too distractable or just plain mentally tired when the blogging part of the day arrives. (I've tried to blog a few times, but I ended up deciding I was being too pretentious and caught up in the my own words...)

We also took a small trip up to Tokyo at the beginning of June, which was pretty cool. We ende up at the National Diet Library for a large block of time on each of two days. Rachel had the most to do there, of course, but I also managed to find some good material on French theater.

Anyway, I'll try to run down the basics of the last month.

梅雨（tsuyu= rainy season)
This year's rainy season actually started with a week or so of annoyingly humid and hot weather as a typhoon passed to the south of Japan. It actually reminded me of some summers in Madison, where for some reason the rains often pass to either the north or south but drag through all the moist air in their wake. The last couple of weeks have been nice and cool and rainy, so we've had a few extra days of wearing spring clothing and not hurting when we go outside.

Training (=more heat)
So in a little over a month we will be climbing Mt. Fuji. We may not make it to the summit, but we will be on it. We've been trying to train over the last few months with bigger hikes throughout the area and have made some progress, but now we really have to focus on keeping moving everyday in some way. Essentially, we want to make sure we are "in shape" and have some endurance, because climbing Fuji is more about endurance and only partly about the actual hiking.
We have, however, run into an interesting experience during this training. We've been trying to get down to the pool a few times a week, which is pretty awesome, but it is damn hot in there. At first I thought it was just psychological, but then I looked at the wall and they liste the temperature of the air and the water, which average 33ºC and 31ºC, respectively. I understand that we don't want to keep the water too cold, especially with the pool largely filled with retired and elderly swimmers, many of whom are actually learning to swim and therefore aren't generating much of their own heat. But seriously.

NHK
I almost forgot about this. We (might) be on TV. A local camera crew from NHK came to film our most recent samba rehearsal. Once Japan made it into next year's world cup (which, in cased you haven't seen any of the crazy news coming out of there, is in Brazil) and so everyone is obsessed with Brazilian things. Anyway, they didn't interview us specifically, but there was a big shot of the group doing a cheer, so we might be in that.

So I guess that's all for now - I was gonna write the other day some stuff about language and my continuing/evolving sense of Japanese and how that has influenced my social interactions. I still might write it, but I won't make any promises.