Japan pt. one: 1.5 day of 5.
The first day in Japan I got off the ship before everyone else because I was one of the lucky few to get a homestay. Originally I hadn’t planned to do much of anything in Japan but Allie told me about the Japanese Homestay offered in Sale 2 and I figured it sounded cool enough; little did I know what a coveted item that ticket was until later. Whenever I told people I was doing a homestay they would positively lash out. Honestly, it seemed as though every other person I knew signed up for it and were bumped – which is weird because a bunch of kids ended up doing their homestay solo.
A night or two before we docked in Kobe I talked to Steph and a bunch of the other dirty dozen smoker kids and found out they were all planning to go to Nagoya with Amy. Amy’d been telling me since the beginning of the trip she’d wanted to get to Nagoya to see the city her Grandmother came from and that she wanted me there and I figured it’d be cool to travel with all of them since I hadn’t seen them in-port since South Africa really. Steph googled a bunch of big hotels and came up with the Marriott Associa – we agreed to meet there anywhere from 8-9pm the second night after my homestay. I was trying to stay optimistic about it all working out but I was a little worried since they aren’t really all that known for planning, but more about that later.
So back to the homestay – we all sat in the port terminal waiting for our families for a good hour or so until everybody arrived and then we found our families according to the signs they were holding with our names on them. My fam. consisted of Mom, mystery dad who works all the time, Rie (pronounced Ree-ah), Yukki, and Haruna (under occupation mom had written “baby” which I found absolutely hilarious.) The sign they had made for me was really adorable, with a little anime character of what they thought I might look like, mushrooms, and cats. My other SAS homestay partner was Kiersten. Kiersten looked like what they must have thought all Americans looked like – gorgeous, blonde, and blue-eyed. She’s so, so, so, funny and we got along really well. We all did a bunch of weird ice breakers with the rest of the hippo family club homestay people – one of the games was essentially rock paper scissors, but if you lost you had to hold on to the person who won; then you’d play another person and if they one the both of you would attach to the back of the new winner. So we made these crazy snake chains all over the port terminal – half in English/frantic hand motions, and half in Japanese.
We also played such classics like London bridge and introduced ourselves. Mom spoke okay English I guess – maybe - but the kids knew no English at all it seemed. It was a struggle to be sure since I feel like it was miscommunication all around and mom was really busy with the eight year old twins and an infant. So that first day we finally get out of the crazy hippo family club bedlam that was meeting our families and being awkwardly friendly, and we headed to the family minivan. We drove to downtown Kobe and had lunch with another family and their two SAS kids – Phil and Tyler I think. Phil’s in my shipboard family so I kind of knew him before but we’d never really talked. Lunch was pretty funny – I ate Hamburg, which was not at all a hamburger like I was lead to believe (thankfully since I’m not a huge burger fan.) It was a beef patty mixed with some kind of starch like mashed potatoes, grilled and sautéed in a soy ginger sauce with pickled radishes on top. There was also white rice and miso that was super good. However, between all of us we made all kinds of faux pas. Firstly Phil and I poured our soy sauce directly on our rice bowls to which the whole table gasped, the kids tried to mimic us, and both moms looked like they might cry. We said goodbye to the other fam. and wandered to Chinatown, which I found absolutely hilarious since we’d just come from China. We tried some weird hashbrown-like stuff that was more like really sweet mash potatoes fried on the outside with tiny bits of famous kobe beef on the inside.
Just to interject here – kobe beef is serious. Serious enough that I will never be able to afford it. Serious enough to charge high hundreds for a small steak. Serious enough that these cows live on waterbeds and you can go to college to learn how to properly massage them. It’s insane. And for good reason because the tiny bits I had that were nothing were outstanding.
We then stopped by a water thing where an old Chinese man rubbed his calloused hands against the two bars coming out of the basin and it made the whole thing vibrate and splash water upwards with a weird rhythm. It was cool but none of us – except mom – could do it right. We stopped by a shop for $4 gelato (Japan is INSANE it’s so expensive. Everything here is nuts.) where I got the Sakura – or cherry blossom flavor. It was Spring, and thus cherry blossom season here in Japan, and people went absolutely apeshit over it. Yukki and Rie would chase little petals down as they came off of trees, you could buy sakura flavored all kinds of stuff, and they were featured in every artwork I think I saw the whole time in Japan. It’s strange I guess, living outside of D.C. where the cheryblossoms are such a big deal, to trace them back to where ours originally came from and see how special they are in the motherland as well. More so even.
On the way from Kobe to Osaka where our family lived (like an hour and 15 min. drive) we stopped at a desert place where they served us the afternoon specialty everyone seemed to be getting. A big glass bowl filled with green milky pudding like stuff, candied red beans, glutinous rice balls, and shredded ice all over it. It was so, so, so, sweet and really good. The girls brought us tea – it seems in Osaka and Kobe at least that you always have the option of two free teas, either green (often powdery and mixed in hot water with a tiny metal spatula/knife thing and bland tasting) or the brownish yellow rice tea (tastes strongly like roasted rice black tea. I bought lots of this in Japan but never found another white person who liked it.) Outside of the teahouse/dessert stop there was a little garden aside the restaurant with a koi pond full of ENORMOUS fish, a series of little pagodas and spirit houses on top of rocks, and a tanuki in the corner, and he’s the best part, with a little tanuki wife! Oh Osaka, how delightful you are. Another faux-pas to note here though: I suggested putting sugar in the green tea and she looked like she might flip the table over on me she was so offended.
We worked it out though, since once we all arrived home mom showed us around the house some. As soon as we stepped inside they gave us each “inside shoes” to wear around the house as we were to leave our regular shoes beside the door (they were incredibly strict about this one; later I heard Phil went two feet inside the house to grab his forgotten cell phone and his mom started screaming at him.) They even have bathroom shoes, big plastic blue galoshes that one wears whenever walking around in a bathroom. So then we got to move all the traditional sliding doors and mats and extremely low foldable dinner tables that were extremely uncomfortable for me to sit in for more than 30 minutes at. They laid us out bedrolls and set up a bunch of heaters – including a Burberry footwarmer, hahaha. Another funny thing about that house were the toilets. Toilets are really interesting all over Japan. Heated seats and bedei action come standard, but some had light and fountain shows, sinks on top of them, and even t.v.s on the back of the door at eyelevel when you’re sitting down. It was very weird. No one should want to watch t.v. and take a nap on my toilet.
Mom told us she was throwing us a big hippo family club party and that lots of people were coming so we helped out a bit. I helped Rie chop up octopus tentacle with a huge cleaver for the takoyaki (sp) or fried octopus balls. They diced up spring onion and added fish crackers, pancake batter, octopus, and dried whole shrimps. It was really good, and even more so when dipped in a crazy sweet soy-sauce like stuff that came next to it. The best part was that they were fried in a griddle-type thing with curves cut out so that to cook one side and then rotate it to the other all the kids would take long toothpicks and as quick as lightning would flip them over and over so none were burnt.
So we’re all there and the boys have made it their mission to get wasted. Which is awkward and embarrassing. They went into the grocery store and bought a huge bottle of wine and a bunch of tall beers, and when their home stay mom saw it she laughed and said “Oooh, American size!” which was kind of hilarious, I must admit. They never got more than tipsy, thankfully, but they were definitely trying. Even so much so that they were talking about shotgunning beers outside. That’s awful. We’re invited into a family home for a family party with kids running around everywhere, and you want to get falling-down drunk? The thing that kills me is I would say they were just stupid kids, but they weren’t. Phil spoke fluent Mandarin and is an international business major who makes straight A’s, and Tyler goes to an Ivy league school and is studying PR. So strange…
Speaking of Phil’s fluency with Chinese, it was so cool – for every language we might know between all of us they knew it, English, Japanese, and often a language or two more. My homestay mom spoke Chinese with Phil, while Naru, another woman from the hippo family club, spoke French with me (even though she’s an English teacher in a Japanese high school) and other guy spoke Spanish. On the way back to the ship later I noticed they were playing HFC language immersion c.d.s the whole time.
So dinner that night was great – and included sushi from the local grocery store (which was really, really, surprisingly good!) Takoyaki, steamed rice triangles covered in seaweed, spareribs, and a stew our mom made with chicken, eggs, veggies, and strange alien looking triangles of mystery grey matter. When I asked our mom later what it was she said it was some root/vegetable they pound into mush and then shape into triangles with black specks inside. She said it tasted like potatoes but it was gelatinous looking and I was way to freaked out to try it. There was lots of beer – and Japanese women were drinking along with us, which was fairly unusual for most our travels – mostly Asahi beer which tastes like butt. Though later in the trip I did try Asahi clear which tasted like moderately more washed butt, and a beer called “straight” which tasted, as Allie W. so tastefully noted, “like cat piss.”
We never saw much of our homestay dad – he’s a gas pipe architect/designer who left at 7am and came home at 9:30. We saw him that night right before we went to bed, they wanted to stay up but we were way too tired and both Kierstin and I crashed (though we couldn’t for the lives of us figure out those heaters and felt like we were in the lowest circle of hell midway through the night.)
We woke up the next morning to a breakfast of strawberries that they ate with a squeeze tube of sweetened condensed milk mixed with sugar - I bought a tube before getting back on the boat later I liked it so much on fruit. There was also miso soup and lots of steamed rice with a rotten looking “sour and salty old plum” (surprisingly good) and miso paste that was delicious. There was also sticky soy threads that were really unappetizing and banana bread that I think was made with us in mind. Oh, and leftovers of that stew from the night before that was good cold with rice.
We didn’t have a lot of time since I had to be back on the boat by 4 to get my shit together before the bullet train to Nagoya. The night before I had a short-lived moment of panic when I thought to myself, “what the hell am I doing traveling across Japan by myself hoping to randomly meet up with people I know rarely have their shit together? Isn’t this what SAS tells us exactly not to do?” But then I came to my senses and figured I wanted adventure this semester and I needed to stop worrying – I’d figure it out if they weren’t there and stay in a hostel and see Nagoya, Tokyo, and Yokohama on my own. I’d done it before in a lot less safe countries.
So the last morning with our homestay family we all have breakfast and then it’s a fun-filled hour or so of trying on our homestay mom’s kimono. Let me preface this story with I am inherently ill-suited to wear a kimono. And my mom had zero qualms with telling me so multiple times. In Japan, the beauty ideal is long and lean; two things I am a lot unlike. Buildings, clothing, gardens, all of it, are designed with lines in mind. Long lines are gorgeous there, and despite putting a band of cloth around my waist to get rid of it and a tight underwear thin kimono that pressed my breasts down, I still wasn’t full of lines. So much to the disappointment of my homestay mom, with a little frown on her face she put about a billion layers of belts and ties and what felt like 40 lbs of fabric all over me and eventually whispered, “Nooo. No right. Not beautiful in Japan.” She put my hair up in a funny clip thing that made me think of a lunch line and I took a bunch of pictures. Haha.
Then we went to Osaka castle where there was some kind of local festival. There was all kinds of crazy stuff going on, including a goldfish game that Rie and Yukki played where you have a bowl and a small fan made of rice paper and for three dollars you can very, very, gently scoop each goldfish into the bowl. For three dollars. And you don’t keep the goldfish. I didn’t get it at all but it seemed very Japanese to me – it was like paying for learning how to be patient. Actually, it seemed all of Japan itself was a test of my patience. In every way possible.
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