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On with the fun...
Hey there! As usual, I'm having entirely too much fun. There's got to be a catch somewhere... but until it turns up, I plan to keep enjoying class, Kanazawa, Japan in general, and LIFE.
My birthday party was good; eleven of us in total went to Seikourou, a Chinese restaurant in the Meitetsu M'za building. Yummmm. It was a very multicultural group, too: three Australians, counting myself - Melissa's from Canberra as well, but Yen is from Adelaide; Seiji is Japanese; Arto is Finnish; Marie-Claire is French; Christoph is German; Seong and Jyoung are Korean; and Jackie and Nathan are American. (Or if you want to get picky, like one man Jackie spoke to, they're 'from the United States'.) Much good food was eaten... and the next time I go there, I plan to get the scallops again. Those things were HUGE, and delicious! Just one word of warning, though; if you're ever in Japan, and decide to order Peking Duck at a Chinese restaurant, be aware that they don't quite do it the same way as in other countries. The usual thing with Peking Duck is that first you get the skin, wrapped up into tasty little pancake thingies with some vegetables, then you get the meat, and as a third course you get soup made with the rest of the bird. In Japan, you just get the skin pancakes. They will be very yummy duck-skin pancakes, if they're anything like the ones at Seikourou, but we were expecting something a bit more substantial. Probably somebody else got the rest of our duck as soup.
Class rolls on, and I have... lessee... four exams and three final reports to write in the next couple of weeks. Errrgh. Ah well, I'll survive. The 'Experiences in Japanese Culture' paper will probably be kind of fun to write, and if I can find the right books to comment on for the 'Psychology and the Ways of Thinking of the Japanese' class, that'll be interesting too...
Speaking of 'Experiences in Japanese Culture' class, we glazed our bowls last Thursday. (There's almost no point in saying that it was fun. That class is ALWAYS fun!) Ohi-sensei provided us with a couple of buckets of watery white goop, and showed us how to first swirl it around in our bowls, then hold them by the bottom and dunk them in. Apparently at least one person drops their bowl in, every year, and this year he was sure it was going to be me. Ha! I foiled his expectations and kept my grip. A couple of bowls did take the plunge, though, and had to have the glaze cleaned off their bottoms; it melts when they're fired, and if there's glaze on the bottom surface it'll fix them permanently onto the kiln shelves. My mutant vase didn't have anything on the bottom for me to hold onto, of course, so it had to be dunked in with tongs and then cleaned up with a sponge. I'm really wondering what it'll look like!
The next day, lots of people took off on a ski trip. I was going to apply for it too, even though I can't ski - I would have been given lessons - but the application forms were supposed to be handed in last month, around the time I was panicking about my house possibly burning down. I kind of forgot. Well, it meant that there were only five people at Budo that day, which was good, because we got lots of personal attention from Bittmann-sensei and his assistant, Okamura-san. It also meant that they had a good chance of looking right at me any time I did something wrong, but they're never nasty about it, so it was OK. I nearly dropped my jo twice in a row on one move, with Bittmann-sensei RIGHT in front of me, but he just laughed and said not to worry, because it's something that happens to everyone; he'd seen a 7th-dan master do exactly the same thing at a demonstration event. We started to learn a new move, too; we're going to have to be careful with that one, since it involves whacking your opponent in the temple. We aren't supposed to REALLY whack them, of course, but given the trouble we beginners sometimes have controlling exactly where the end of the jo is supposed to stop during a strike, this could get painful for a few people before we get the hang of it!
(Anemone just told me not to partner with her when we do that move, next class. When I go up against her, she ALWAYS hits me at least once!)
At the end of the class, Bittmann-sensei gave us an 'exam' - five minutes of demonstrating that we all remembered what we were supposed to do for each move - and declared that we'd passed. Yaaaay! The rest of the class will get the exam in the last class of term, next week (no class this week, because there won't be any classes held this coming Friday, Monday or Tuesday), and I'll get to watch from the sidelines and take photos. :)
Another update in a week at most! I'll let you know how my first exam went!
My birthday party was good; eleven of us in total went to Seikourou, a Chinese restaurant in the Meitetsu M'za building. Yummmm. It was a very multicultural group, too: three Australians, counting myself - Melissa's from Canberra as well, but Yen is from Adelaide; Seiji is Japanese; Arto is Finnish; Marie-Claire is French; Christoph is German; Seong and Jyoung are Korean; and Jackie and Nathan are American. (Or if you want to get picky, like one man Jackie spoke to, they're 'from the United States'.) Much good food was eaten... and the next time I go there, I plan to get the scallops again. Those things were HUGE, and delicious! Just one word of warning, though; if you're ever in Japan, and decide to order Peking Duck at a Chinese restaurant, be aware that they don't quite do it the same way as in other countries. The usual thing with Peking Duck is that first you get the skin, wrapped up into tasty little pancake thingies with some vegetables, then you get the meat, and as a third course you get soup made with the rest of the bird. In Japan, you just get the skin pancakes. They will be very yummy duck-skin pancakes, if they're anything like the ones at Seikourou, but we were expecting something a bit more substantial. Probably somebody else got the rest of our duck as soup.
Class rolls on, and I have... lessee... four exams and three final reports to write in the next couple of weeks. Errrgh. Ah well, I'll survive. The 'Experiences in Japanese Culture' paper will probably be kind of fun to write, and if I can find the right books to comment on for the 'Psychology and the Ways of Thinking of the Japanese' class, that'll be interesting too...
Speaking of 'Experiences in Japanese Culture' class, we glazed our bowls last Thursday. (There's almost no point in saying that it was fun. That class is ALWAYS fun!) Ohi-sensei provided us with a couple of buckets of watery white goop, and showed us how to first swirl it around in our bowls, then hold them by the bottom and dunk them in. Apparently at least one person drops their bowl in, every year, and this year he was sure it was going to be me. Ha! I foiled his expectations and kept my grip. A couple of bowls did take the plunge, though, and had to have the glaze cleaned off their bottoms; it melts when they're fired, and if there's glaze on the bottom surface it'll fix them permanently onto the kiln shelves. My mutant vase didn't have anything on the bottom for me to hold onto, of course, so it had to be dunked in with tongs and then cleaned up with a sponge. I'm really wondering what it'll look like!
The next day, lots of people took off on a ski trip. I was going to apply for it too, even though I can't ski - I would have been given lessons - but the application forms were supposed to be handed in last month, around the time I was panicking about my house possibly burning down. I kind of forgot. Well, it meant that there were only five people at Budo that day, which was good, because we got lots of personal attention from Bittmann-sensei and his assistant, Okamura-san. It also meant that they had a good chance of looking right at me any time I did something wrong, but they're never nasty about it, so it was OK. I nearly dropped my jo twice in a row on one move, with Bittmann-sensei RIGHT in front of me, but he just laughed and said not to worry, because it's something that happens to everyone; he'd seen a 7th-dan master do exactly the same thing at a demonstration event. We started to learn a new move, too; we're going to have to be careful with that one, since it involves whacking your opponent in the temple. We aren't supposed to REALLY whack them, of course, but given the trouble we beginners sometimes have controlling exactly where the end of the jo is supposed to stop during a strike, this could get painful for a few people before we get the hang of it!
(Anemone just told me not to partner with her when we do that move, next class. When I go up against her, she ALWAYS hits me at least once!)
At the end of the class, Bittmann-sensei gave us an 'exam' - five minutes of demonstrating that we all remembered what we were supposed to do for each move - and declared that we'd passed. Yaaaay! The rest of the class will get the exam in the last class of term, next week (no class this week, because there won't be any classes held this coming Friday, Monday or Tuesday), and I'll get to watch from the sidelines and take photos. :)
Another update in a week at most! I'll let you know how my first exam went!