Korean BBQ

This Saturday was the official one week mark for me being in Japan. And I am easily having the best time of my life here. A testament to this fact is how I haven't had the chance to blog for some time now. So many exciting and fun things have happened since I last was able to blog, so I will do my best to jam all of the important stuff into this one megalithic SUPER BLOG. So buckle up your seat belts and pop a liberal dose of anti-nausea medications, because this ones gonna be a doozie. If I'm not able to get up to date with this blog however, I might have to split it up into two parts, so stick with me! I promise all the adventures I've been having lately are definitely well worth the read.

Every day here is so much fun that it doesn't even feel like work. A lot of this has to do with the people that I work with. Obviously the Camp Adventure folks here are amazing, but I was pleasantly surprised when I met the MWR folks that we would be working with this summer (MWR stands for Morale Welfare and Recreation, these are the people that contract us out for the summer). My first real interaction with the folks from MWR was at the “ropes course” that was planned for us on Wednesday. This wasn't so much a ropes course though as it was just a session of really fun team builders led by a strange man that claimed he could talk to a small rubber fish named Puffy. Aside from fish-man's strangeness, the team builders were an absolute blast. I met two of the local lifeguards Kou-san and Toru-san, as well as some English speaking lifeguards along with the head lifeguard that I'll be working with this summer. Although it was very nice to meet the people I would be working with this summer, Kou and Toru were definitely my favorite. They were both very keen about helping me with my Japanese skills, and they also did a great job of keeping us all entertained with their wily Japanese antics, most notably the Obligatory Japanese Realization Sound. If you are unfamiliar with this sound, it goes a little something like this:

“OooooooooooooooohhhhhhhhhhhHHHHHHHHHHHHhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!”

If you can't tell by my capitalization elements, the variation in pitch seen in the common 'Obligatory Japanese Realization Sound' can be described as a common bell curve plotted on a graph with the y-axis representing vocal pitch and the x-axis representing time.

On a more serious note though, in addition to the entertainment factor that Toru-san and Kou-san provided, spending time with them and and other MWR staff during a day of team builders and fun really made me appreciate and understand how lucky I am to have been given this experience. I'm realizing that not only is it a huge privilege to be a part of Camp Adventure, but I'm also very lucky to have ended up in THIS country, on THIS particular base. I haven't gone too in depth about the privileges that we are given as students on this navy base, but there are A LOT. To name just a few, we are given FREE movies ALL SUMMER LONG at the two movie theaters on base, FREE BOWLING ALL SUMMER LONG, and access to the general mess, which is essentially a really decent, really inexpensive place to eat that even our MWR counterparts don't have access to. SORRY ABOUT THE INTERMITANT CAPITALIZATIONS, I AM JUST SO IMRPESSED ABOUT THE THINGS WE GET AND WANT TO EMPHASIZE THIS ACCORDINGLY. They people on this navy base really appreciate and respect the Camp Adventure kids. This makes me really happy, especially when random, important looking navy personnel stop us on the street to tell us personally how much they appreciate and respect the Camp Adventure kids. But what's that you say? Enough about the boring self-flattery stuff? You just want to hear more about my exciting and borderline inappropriate interactions with the wonderful Japanese economy? Well great! Because that's what I was about to dive right in to!

I realize that this is a duplicate picture... Blogspot is just sucking hard right now and doing weird things like duplicating my pictures and not letting me delete them. Woo.

One of my latest excursions into the cultural hearth of Japan involved the pinnacle of my fine cuisine experiences to date. After wandering around the Daiei mall with the low rumble of my travelmates' frustrations in my leading abilities fresh in my ear, I recognized a restaurant that I knew at once would be a big hit. When I peeked inside the windows of said restaurant, I immediately saw the jovial emotions and outbursts of Japanese restaurant-goers that could only have been the direct responses of a “cook-your-raw-meal-yourself-at-your-own-table-slash-open-grill-apparatus” type of restaurant. Having never been let down by my unconventional skill of extrapolating the quality of a restaurant by the visible behavior of its Japanese patrons, I quickly led my travel group inside. I'm going to go ahead and say right now that my travel group will never be doubting my judgment again regarding meal venues.

When we got inside, a nice waiter led us to a small corner table while being sure to speak plenty of Japanese that we didn't understand. After we were seated, we were happy to find that they had English menus for the exact occasion that a bunch of wily English speaking college students might somehow stumble inside. After we were situated, the Japanese human waiter guy gave a little Japanese schpeel, turned on our table slash open grill apparatus, and then left us to paruse the menu and accidentally burn ourselves a number of times. When we received our food, the real fun began. Essentially it was just like one of those restaurants where you get your food cooked on the big circular open grill thing, except in this case you have the privilege of cooking the food to your own liking, with the fun bonus of a 3^rd degree burn if you're really lucky.

Obviously, it's one of my goals to take a picture with someone from every restaurant I eat at.

Anyway, I'm gonna stop here for now, and then when I pick up next time I'll be able to devote an entire post to my weekend adventures. This last weekend I traveled to Yokohoma, the 2^nd largest city in Japan on Saturday, and then Zushi Beach on Sunday, so I have some sweet pictures and stories for you all. It seems like every time I log on there are more followers for my blog, and it makes me super happy to see that so many people are interested in reading my stuff. Thanks again to everyone! Its nice to have a support network when I'm traveling so far away from home. BE SURE TO TUNE IN FOR THE NEXT EXCITING INSTALLMENT OF ARISTON IN JAPAN!

Business Time

So all of the unbridled fun and excitement that took place yesterday was only an infinitesimally small quantum particle vibrating in the theoretical strings of a greater dimension when compared to the anti-fun and unexitement that took place today. As you might have remembered from my previous posting, my day today started out nice and early at 06:30 with a refreshing, brisk, and (in my case) potentially life threatening 600m in the pool. After this wonderful experience followed about ten hours of lecture based learning in a shiny, 70's themed disco type room, followed then by our first actual staff meeting with the Yukosuka Aquatics staff.

I'm kind of stretching the truth just a bit though. The day wasn't complete devoid of fun, I'm just more or less a little bitter because it was just a very, very long day. It was great to hangout with my staff and get to know them a little bit more, and then afterward I made a quick trip into the city with two of my most trusted allies. Since I am quite tired, this blog will be pretty short, and I apologize for that. I'm just gonna post some cool pictures from tonight and maybe provide some witty repartee. Also, I wanted to say thanks for everyone that is following my adventures. I have really enjoyed taking the time out of my day to sit down and blog, knowing that my close family and friends will be reading and enjoying my posts "state side.

The pet store lady's dog attacked me, and to recompense she allowed me to take this picture. The dogs name was 'Chako.' Not quite sure if that means anything.

This arcade was awesome. It was four stories, and very hard to leave. I will be returning here to spend the entire 24 hours of one of my days off. Japan has the freaking hardcorest gamers in the world I think.

For the game, you actually went INSIDE THE COMPUTER to play it. It's so simple...

HardXcore gamers. So fun to watch

Kinky pachinko, or what I have affectionately dubbed "pakinko."

This place was even better than the arcade.

JUST LOOK AT ALL THE MANGAS.

Bought this book for 400 yens. The cool thing is that even though its in Japanese, the pictures alone make it worthwhile and and enjoyable and relatively easy to follow the storyline.

First official "sushi go round" that I have frequented in Japan. Very good stuff. If you're unfamiliar with a place like this there's basically a sushi conveyor belt that moves right in front of your face, of which you are free to take small plates of sushi from at your discretion. Turns out, my discretion was not very discreet tonight. I probably spent more money than I should have.

It was good food though, so I'm not going to spend much time worrying about petty mortal concerns such as "yens." Life's too short ya know? A kind of funny story about this place though, when I asked the chef, "Sumi masen, wasabi kudosai?" {excuse me, wasabi please?}, he gave me a contemptuous look, and literally scooped up a glob of wasabi with his bare hands and threw it down onto my plate. I'm not sure if that's normally how it's done here, but it seemed a little bit excessive to me. Could be that I accidentally said something that I didn't actually mean to, but I guess we'll never know.

Well that's all for today folks. Sorry the post was short-ish, and not full of a lot of my normal humour. Like I said earlier, I am quite tired. Look forward to the next exciting installment of Ariston in Japan!

Let Jagg

Today was easily one of the most exciting days of my life. I think that my body slash mind knew what an amazing, fun, Japan filled adventure the day would turn out to be, and therefore allowed me to get up at 7:00AM feeling well rested and exuberant. Or it might have been because waking up at 7AM in Japan means really waking up at 4PM in "The States" as we like to call it here. Either way, when I got up this morning I was ready for whatever the day was to bring. Little did I know however that the day would bring me such things as awkward interactions with pachinko attendants and stimulating conversation in Japanese with a middle aged ramen bar waitress.

The day started off with some pretty trivial things like a tour of the base and a brief presentation about some Camp Adventure and other military procedures and regulations. But after walking around the military base in a large, cumbersome group and talking about why it's bad to rob stores in the bar district after drinking excessively was when the real fun began. First on my list of to-dos was to explore the NEX and Commissary on the base. The NEX is essentially a Target, Best Buy, and Dillards all rolled into one superstore with really reasonable prices. I was impressed actually. Additionally, there are some really buff, intimidating guards that line the perimeter and check your passport to make sure that you have 'clearance' to enter the superstore. And when I say buff intimidating guards, I really mean tiny Japanese girls that sit at a desk and don't speak any English. Anyway, I went to the NEX, was thoroughly impressed by their selection of what seemed to everything on the Earth that has existed, ever, and then bought a case for my ipod. After the NEX party, I checked out the Commissary, which is apparently Japanese for GROCERCY STORE. Here I bought a bunch of things in bulk like white rice, frozen boneless chicken wings, and frozen sausage patties in an attempt to save some money. I figure if I don't spend a lot of money on my solid food intake, I will have much more money for the important things like climbing Mt. Fuji, futuristic robot vending machines, and the infamous "Love Hotels" scattered all throughout this wondrous country. (That was a joke, Erin.)

I found out today as well that the military likes to come up with all sorts of fun, interesting, and also useless names for things that already have existing names. Oftentimes the new names involve very hard to remember acronyms or made up words that have nothing to do with the actual function of the thing has has been named, kind of like COMMISSARY. I also made the realization today that if Japan weren't such an alluring place, I could very much be perfectly content spending the next three months on this base and still have plenty of things to do and places to eat at. Seriously, this place is huge. Theres a bus line even (granted there are only two buses, one labeled 'clockwise' and one labelled 'counterclockwise'). Fortunately for you and me however, Japan is nuts, so I won't need to spend much time on my base aside from the required job doing and sleeping that I should probably do.

Dinnertime was the first real chance that I had to explore the homeland of my heart. I gathered some of my most trusted allies, packed up my exploration gear (camera, trident layers gum, Japanese phrasebook) and penetrated the glorious city of Yokosuka, hard. My first mistake made itself known almost instantly. In a fit of foreign explorative passion I easiy broke away from my group of friends, finding myself very much alone as well as breaking Camp Adventure's cardinal buddy rule. Quickly I realized that I should have chosen some allies with either a faster average walking speed, or a higher general level of foreign explorative passion. I amended this

situation very level-headedly using an unnecessarily loud voice coupled with words such as: hurry, the, friggin, balls, and up. Needless to say, there were no more issues with the group sticking together after this.

Our objective for this mission was to acquire edibles, but since I was in such a frenzied state I quickly exchanged this objective with one that involved the shiniest, loudest, and flashingest thing that was within view at that particular time. I imagine that this behavior annoyed my travel group, only because my travel group made a point to vocalize their annoyance with my behavior. There was even a point where I led my group up into a seven story pachinko parlor, thinking for some reason that there would be food on one of the higher levels. If you are unfamiliar with Pachinko, it is pretty much the Japanese equivalent of slot machines, except that when you're done, you bring a basket full of the small metal ball bearings that you have steadily been collecting to the desk to be weighed and cashed out. It was very, VERY loud in this building, and before we reached the fourth floor (which was closed) we were caught by a Pachinko attendant and ushered out in an extremely polite yet forceful way. On our way out, I participated in what would barely pass for a conversation with another attendant, this time female, and asked her where I could find food by repeating the only food words that I know in Japanese, such as 'oranju jisu' and 'sushi'. She said some Japanese words which I have never heard before, pointed in about nine different directions (one of which was straight up, I'm not kidding), and then we were off.

A couple minutes after our Pachinko adventure I ended up leading my gang of hungry, somewhat hateful travelers to a very decent looking ramen bar. The ramen bar ended up being a really solid find, and the good food helped everyone forget how incredibly incompetent of a travel leader I was. I would love to describe our dinner experience in a much more vividly hilarious fashion, but it's getting late and I have just been informed that I will be swimming 600 meters tomorrow morning to prove to my supervisors that I actually do know how to swim (HA IF ONLY THEY KNEW THAT I'M ONLY A MEDIOCRE SWIMMER AT BEST. I HAVE NO IDEA WHY I WAS USHERED SO STRONGLY TO BE IN THE AQUATICS PROGRAM).

Well folks, sorry to cut this blog short. Maybe tomorrow I'll continue talking about my adventures, because surprisingly, I didn't spend a lot of time talking about the actual events that happened today, but rather the useless logistical in between parts of all those events. Anyway, here are some pictures in the meantime.

This amazing woman was our server for the night. Our friendship started when she asked me what I wanted, and I responded with "What would you recommend for me?" in quite possible the worst Japanese that has ever been spoken my a 21 year old Filipino man. Our undying bond was only strengthened when I asked her to pose in a picture with me. Just take a moment to appreciate that look of pure, unadultered enjoyment upon her face in this picture.