The End Is Near

I will be departing from Korea on Nov. 21st. I haven't quite come to terms with this, and people keep asking me if I'm excited. Why do I feel guilty saying no. Yea, Thanksgiving and Christmas will be great. It'll be great to see some family and friends whom I haven't seen in over a year. But, I know the actual day to day grit is going to be as boring as hell. Everyone will be working and I don't even know who will be around in my hometown to see. Maybe I'm crazy, but I can't go more than a week without work (or something) before I start going absolutely nuts. Or maybe the problem is that I don't go nuts, I just spend hours upon hours glued to my computer doing absolutely NOTHING. I think I gained 5 pounds in a less than month period between my last job and this one in Korea.

Anyway, these are my goals for while I'm home:

1) Find a job for Christmas time, either at Macy's or Border's.

2) Wallpaper and redecorate my room and turn it into a TV room for my mom when I'm not around (which tends to be most of the time).

3)Figure out something for my bank account situation. I like my bank, but it doesn't accept international transfers, which is more than slightly inconvenient, as I live abroad. Either a) get a new checking account, b) get my name on my mom's account so it doesn't look like she's the king of some South Korean money laundering business every time I transfer my money into her account to pay my bills or, c) some other solution... like a Swiss bank account..

4) Figure out a better way of investing money. I have a 6 month CD which makes 0.9% interest. What's the point?? Maybe I'll roll it into a 3 year or something... or start thinking Mutual Funds... but I'm scared of the stock market...

5) Go to Ecuador. For a month. And just chill and do some reforestation.

6) Go through the wonderful visa process again...

7) Find a cheap ticket back to Korea, seeing as how it doesn't look like I'm gonna get much money in that department...

8) Study Korean. Every day. (nice thought...)


As for my remaining 2 weeks (less, really) I need to get a lot of stuff done....

1) Go to the pension office and get that crap cleared away.

2) Go to the dentist and get a cleaning.

3) Give a way a crap load of clothes that I've incidentally acquired while being here...

4) Eat all the food in my house.

5) Spend quality time with the Boyfriend

6) Spend quality time with my friends

7) Clean.

8) Pack. Strategically.

9) Secure my next job.

10) Figure out if it's better to exchange money in Itaewon, rather than at a bank.. and if so, where...

11) Make sure everything is set for my extended stop-over in San Fransisco.

12) Catch swine flu while I still have health insurance and can afford Tamiflu.

13) Probably boat loads of other stuff, but I can't think what...

Anyway, dear blog readers, not to fear, I hope to be back in the ROK by late February. In the mean time, you can enjoy stories from San Francisco, home, and possibly even Ecuador if things go according to plan...

Odaiba

Our last stop in Tokyo was Odaiba. I guess there is a lot to do here, but as it was a little late (after 7:00), and raining when we got here, we didn't enjoy it as much as we'd hoped... It was still nice though, I guess...

Rainbow Bridge. We were wondering where the name came from, since we saw no rainbows... but evidently there is a light show of sorts every hour. We missed it though. Of course.

Battling the winds and rain to get one lousy picture.


Strange, I didn't think I had left Asia, not sure where this one came from....


That famous Ferris wheel... Probably should have ridden it.. huh?

Escaping from the rain.....

Meiji Shrine

Sunday morning we walked to the Meiji Shrine from Omote-sando station. We walked through a very high class neighborhood filled with stores like Burburry, Calvin Klein, Bvlgari... etc. Finally we found our way to the Meiji Shrine. The shrine is located in the middle of a large park, so you need to take a nice forest walk to get to the shrine. We finally arrived, and it was not quite as big as I'd expected, although it seemed as though parts were closed off for some sort of ceremony going on.

I had looked up some info on the Meiji Shrine on their official web page before going and found that they often had various cultural events. I found on Sunday there was to be a performance of some Japanese traditional dance called Hogaku and Hobu. We made it just in time to see the beginning of the performance.



We saw two different performances. The first was a male dancer with a fan.


Then after this dance, what I thought was a female geisha came out to the stage...
Turns out it was actually a man... I don't know much about Japanese dance, but I guess it's tradition for the man to dress like a woman and perform?

Best part about the Meiji shrine was all the Kimonos! They are sooo cool looking! And the kimonos were out in full force on Sunday!

Studio Ghibli Museum

As soon as I learned about the Studio Ghibli Museum some months ago, I decided that whenever I went to Japan, that was going to be my first stop. Studio Ghibli and Hayao Miazaki are responsible for animations like Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, Howl's Moving Castle, Ponyo, not to mention a slew of older movies.

The museum is in Mitaka, which is a bit outside of Tokyo proper, but only a few stops down on the JR Chuo Line from Nakano, not hard to get to at all. Tickets to the museum must be purchased either at a Lawson's in Japan, or at a designated travel agent outside the country. We bought our tickets through a travel agent here in Korea without problem.


You can't take photos inside the museum, which makes this post a little boring. There was one room that explained animation without words. They had various samples of how you can make things appear to be moving or appear to have depth when in fact there is no depth or movement. That part was fairly interesting. They also had an original animation (no dialogue, so it can be understood by anyone) that can only be seen at the museum. I think they periodically rotate the movie to encourage guests to come back again. The rest of the museum seems to be dedicated to showing sketches from various movies, show sample animator's desks, and showing copies of the storyboards for various movies.

It was interesting, but I feel a little let down. All signage was in Japanese, so I couldn't read any of the explanations for any of the exhibits. Though I was surprised at just how few foreigners were there on a Saturday. It was teaming with Japanese visitors though. Much more crowded than I expected since you have to reserve a time to come in. Anyway, if you're a Hayao Miazaki fan, and you have time, the museum might be worth it. If you're pressed for time, it might not be a priority for you. Perhaps going on a weekday might be better since the crowds should be smaller.

Sensoji- Asauksa Kannon

Late Saturday evening we wandered over to Sensoji in Asakusa, which is Tokyo's largest Buddhist temple. It was only about 10 minutes from our ryokan. We walked around while it was still light out, and it was quite nice.



I had seen some night photos from here, so we decided to stick around until the sun went down. Fortunately, nowadays, the sun is down by 5pm, so we didn't have to wait long...

Night time has to be the most spectacular time to go here, as nice as the daytime is. I highly recommend Sensoji in Asakusa.

My brush with fame

Otherwise known as: "I was on Japanese TV and all I got was this lousy pen"

We were informed last week that the Japanese broadcasting company NHK (equivalent of KBS here in Korea) was coming to our Korean class to film a show about Korean language classes. They instructed my class and some other advanced students to come to school an hour early and film the show. We were also told that the Korean drama star Yoon Sang Hyun would be coming too for the filming. We didn't know who Yoon Sang Hyun was, but evidently he's a fairly big deal in Korea and has been in several dramas.

They made a mock classroom of six desks in two neat rows with men and women evenly separated. Normally it's just three of us ladies with desks strewn about the place wherever we feel like sitting.
Next they filmed us for an hour and 20 minutes... saying the same lines over and over again

What classes do you offer?
We have a 2 week class, a one month class and so on.
How much is the two week class?
The 2 week class is 100,000 won.

By the end of this, 1 hour and 20 minutes later we were so sick of these phrases that we never wanted to hear them again. The filming crew shot from various angles. The best was when Yoon Sang Hyun finally came into the classroom for his spotlight. They filmed him close up with us in the background saying Wow! They speak Korean so well! It's amazing! I still haven't figured out what the point of that was...

My poor teacher who had to teach this "class" on film.. plus one of the Japanese filming crew on the left.

After they finished with our class, the evidently moved on to the front desk where Yoon Sang Hyun tried interviewing the our young secretary. She seemed so nervous that she couldn't follow the script and kept jumbling her words. We all went to spy on them during our class break...

Finally at the end they interrupted our class to announce that Yoon Sang Hyun would take a photo with all of us. Of course, he's a star and couldn't be bothered to let everyone take a photo with their own cameras, so though someone out there has a photo of me with him and my classmates, I've been unable to track this anonymous someone down for a copy. I'll have to settle with this photo of some of our teachers with the curly-haired effeminate Yoon Sang Hyun

Yoon Sang Hyun is second from the right.

After all was said and done and Yoon Sang Hyun had bid farewell, the NHK crew presented us each with a wrapped gift. I thought maybe it would be something really special for all my hard work, aka actually doing my make-up and straightening my hair and coming in over an hour early when I'm usually 20 mins late... and I opened it to find a cheap plastic pen. Oh well, at least now I can say I've been on a crazy Japanese program... even if I'll never see it... I guess it won't air til next season, sometime in Feb. or March... in Japan.

A signature from Yoon Sang Hyun that my classmate chased him down for... in her Korean notebook...

Tsukiji Fish Market

*Warning: this post is not for people with weak constitutions...

Our first stop in Tokyo was the Tsukiji Fish Market since we got in so early in the morning. It took us a while to get ourselves orientated with the subway and find our way there, but after getting some help from the woman working at the train station at the airport, we made our way there with no problem. We arrived around 7:00 am. The first thing we encountered were all the little restaurants. The price seemed really steep, even for Japan. 3,000 yen for one plate of sushi? No way were we going to pay that. We wandered around and accidentally wandered out of the market on the other side, but serendipitously, we found a very nice, uncrowded (unlike the restaurants in the market) sushi restaurant. We were able to walk in with no line and get served immediately. We ordered one breakfast set for about 1,600 yen plus we got some extra hand rolls for about 300 yen each or so. It might have been a little pricey, but considerably better than the prices inside the market.

After breakfast we made our way into the real market. I guess it wasn't tooo different from a Korean market, but it was huge and went on forever, besides, I just never get sick of seeing weird things in markets...

Tuna!