China

China went really smoothly and I wish that I'd had more time to trek around. That being said, I couldn't agree more with the phrase "traveling in China is no vacation" and it's also great to be back home.

Beijing
The Forbidden City


an enthusiastic tour group gearing up to get their photo taken on a hazy day in Tiananmen Square


There is a ton of work being done all over the city to prepare for the 2008 Olympics.


The Great Wall



Shanghai


Although they are tearing down many of the old neighborhoods, there are still areas which demonstrate the huge contradiction between "Old China" and "Super-Power China."
An old canal village outside of Shanghai



Beijing Opera in Shanghai


Xi'an

The Muslim Quarter




The Terracotta Warrior Museum where at least 8,000 life-size warriors and horses were constructed and arranged because a 14 year old emperor dreamed of immortality and protection in his after-life. Not surprisingly, this was one of my highlights.


I found a few people at my hostel who conveniently spoke Chinese and we negotiated with a taxi to take us several hours away to escape the city and do some hiking. It was again very hazy, but we were able to see a few views.





Back in Beijing, I went through the intensive process of visiting Mao's Mausoleum (pictured below). After checking all of my stuff across the street and waiting in line with the thousands of other people, I think I viewed the waxy replacement of Mao, rather than the Chairman himself.

Through a friend from Japan, I was able to meet and go out with a group of really fun Chinese for two extravagant Beijing meals. Both nights I went home with a stomach ache, not from the strange foods that they insisted I sample (including all parts of the ox and goose and a strange solidification of horse and duck blood), but because I was laughing so hard. They were really fun and seemed to know just about every line of Friends and most movies made in the last twenty years.

Mata ne

I’ve been saying good-byes for a month now, not really with hugs but with gifts and people opening up their homes (a rare treat) and inviting me out for extravagant meals. The gifts have been thoughtful and beautiful and some of the nicest have been from the people I know the least. I’ve cried at the expected and unexpected times in that not only have I cried during last lessons and good-byes, but I even found myself tearing up the other day when the old man in my neighborhood who normally just laughs when he sees me actually said hello. The process has been long and drawn out so while I’m sad to be leaving, I’m also exhausted and just about ready to say my final farewell.

While I’ve had closure with many of the important people here, there are also those that I wasn’t able to tell how much I’ve appreciated their help in making my life here less stressful. In fact, I don’t even their names. They are the people that help me on a day-to-day basis, not because they necessarily speak English but because they are the ones willing to deal with me. In fact, there have been more than a handful of times when I’ve approached a shop and seen the shop’s workers literally rearrange themselves so that “my” regular person would be front and center and would most-likely already know what it is that I'm going to do or get that day. So to these people—the tall woman at the post-office, the young handsome man at the travel agency, the girl at the bank, the old man at the photo developing shop, the coffee shop man who always goes to the back to find me fruit or flowers, and the gas-station man who has fixed my tires on many occasions—thank you for everything.

I don’t think that the actual significance of my year in Japan will hit me for weeks, months, or even years to come; right now I’m not exactly sure how to conclude, only that it has been an incredible experience. Everyday has been challenging and rewarding but more than anything, I will walk away from this year after meeting and hopefully keeping in touch with some of the most kind and generous people that I’ll ever encounter.

Tomorrow morning I take the bullet train to Tokyo and have exactly three weeks of travel before I return to Colorado. The first half will be spent in Northern Honshu where I will go with two wild friends—Welsh and American—for 24 hours of the Fuji Rock Festival (Red Hot Chili Peppers, Scissor Sisters, String Cheese Incident, and many more). We will then spend two nights staying in a tree house (literally) on an organic farm at the base of Mt. Fuji to recover from the concert and to prepare to climb Mt. Fuji on the third night starting at 10pm and hopefully summating around 4am just before sunrise. We will then have one more night in Tokyo before they return home and I will stay with relatives for two nights and with a JET friend from studying in Australia for two nights. On the 7th of August, I will head to China for 11 days of solo travel. I have three nights booked in Beijing and the rest is up in the air because I can’t make my train and flight plans until I get there. I'm hoping to also get to Shanghai and Xi’an. The unknown becomes even more fuzzy after that when I return to the U.S. without any sort of plan except to move back on home with the ‘rents (get excited) and to find a fun job and hopefully depart for South America within the next six months or so. This is the first time in my life when I haven’t known exactly what I'll do next; it’s kind of scary.

Thank you for checking in on me during my year. It has been wonderful but I also look forward to seeing family and friends back home. I will update the last pictures after I get back in August. Take care and I hope that you’re enjoying whatever it is that you are doing.

“Sayonara” has a lot of finality and since I hope to come back here or at least to see everyone again, I’ve been saying “mata ne” — “see you later.”

Final Weeks

I co-taught an English class for adults. As we waited for the french fries to cook during this cooking class, we reviewed the previous week's lesson where I taught the Electric Slide and the Chicken Dance and my co-teachers (aka the other foreigners of the city pictured above) did arm wrestling and obstacle courses. They were pretty good at the line dancing but it was difficult to explain why we were learning the words, "I don't want to be a chicken, I just want to be a duck, waddle, waddle, waddle, waddle..."



For the 4th of July, I had a city event where a friend translated an American trivia game and we made giant hotdogs and apple pie. It went well and some of the answers to the multiple choice questions really surprised people, such as:
- 23% of Americans own guns, most people thought it was 74%
- The average American woman is 164 cm, I think I am a bad example as most thought it was 175cm
- The most common dog's name is Max
- The White House has 132 rooms





the last day of book club

final going away parties

At this party, we filled our bowls with vegetables and sauce and tried to catch the noodles -somen- as they floated down the tube that had a hose running through it. I guess this sort of party was traditionally done with bamboo. The host mixed things up by occasionally throwing in pieces of cheese, tomatoes, and even candy. This would have been excellent for parties during college.

Spring festival
In the spirit of fireworks and leaving, I finally tried chicken sashimi, which is completely raw chicken and a pretty popular dish around these parts. If you knew how particular I used to be about meat being really well cooked, you'd know that this was a huge step for me. The texture was the same as fish sashimi so I just pretended it was fish and ended up eating quite a lot of it.

final camping trip

final lessons and days at school

last class: telephone races where the students whisper a word down the line and write it on the board as fast as possible
last school lunch: eel and rice ball soup
last cleaning time
last club activities

I'm smiling in the last picture but it was taken at the end of my last and very emotional day at my mountain school. I sobbed through every class and barely got through my lunch-time speech. The students and teachers usually can't understand my Japanese very well and so they really couldn't understand my blubbering and crying Japanese. I don't think that this sort of big display of emotion happens very often in Japan and so everyone quietly dispersed without a word after the banquet. The students then treated me like some sort of time-bomb for the rest of the day and literally stepped away when they saw me coming. At least they got really good at practicing the phrase, "don't cry." Talk about embarrassing; I'm not sure what "basket-case" is in Japanese but I'm pretty sure that's how (if anything) I'll always be remembered.