No Furikake No Life

[I tried to add pictures but Wix is being weird so I'll try again later!! Sorry!!]

Hello!! I am in Japan!!! It does not feel real!! Naoni and I landed in Japan on Friday afternoon (Japanese time...early Friday morning EST). After a 1 and a half hour bus ride to Shinagawa, we were finally in Tokyo!! We spent two nights in a hotel right next to Shimbamba station. Even though I didn't have much time in Tokyo yet, we did get up to some interesting things. Naoni and I visited Yokohama after our group orientation one day and we got to see Chinatown!! I know Naoni will have a lot to say about that so I'll save that for now. But we also went out with some other people from our internship to Harajuku! It was...really crowded to the say the least and there was a lot going on. Expensive stores selling designer goods of questionable legitimacy, actual designer stores like Supreme and Louis Vuitton, lines halfway down the street just to get into the BT21 (BTS merch) store, and lots of little tea and street food joints. We grabbed some Japanese style crepes and just tried to push our way through the crowd until we got a call telling us that the group leaders who were going to Nagano (myself included) were told the wrong departure time so we had missed our shinkansen. We had to haul back to our hotel and catch the next bullet train to Nagano. It was pretty stressful to say the least, and it didn't help that we didn't know what stop we were getting off at so we nearly missed it. An employee from our program just started shouting "get off the train!" and we held up the train for at least a few minutes, which considering the notorious punctuality of Japanese Trains, probably did not endear us to the Sakudaira station staff (or anyone on the Nagano bound train) But stressful moments aside, the bullet train was amazing! The city we went to in Nagano Prefecture is about 180 km from Tokyo, and it's really beautiful. There are a lot of mountains and trees, it's really green and nice. I wish I had more pictures but I honestly haven't taken many since I can't turn off my phone camera shutter noise. Apparently in Japan, phone camera shutter sounds can't be turned off to prevent people from taking photos of others without their permission. And since I bought a Japanese Sim Card, the sound won't turn off. Naoni said the camera noise makes me seem like even more of a dad when I take photos but Caitlin says she doesn't think dads leave the camera shutter on. Leave your votes in the comment section down below 🤔 But anyway, after we made it safe and sound off the bullet train I met my host sister, Fumika, and her mother. They drove me back to her house in Ueda city and while we were driving I casually asked her about how she played viola, only to find out that her entire family is very musical. Her mom plays horn and piano, her sister sings, her brother plays trumpet, her dad is a conductor, and she plays viola and sings. I was shocked and very impressed. Later that night she and her friend performed a song from their school festival on piano and voice together and it was really sweet. Her family is all really nice too. Their grandparents live nextdoor to them and when I got home we had a barbeque with her family and her friend from her class. It was honestly the best meal I've ever had in my life, we had a lot of different meats and I tried beef tongue, squid, and scallops (her mom was like: aren't you from Boston, and you've never had scallops?) Also after dinner I had wagashi which are these little japanese cakes and drank matcha and it was so good! I'm very touched by their hospitality and honestly a little stressed since I've never really done a homestay before (the closest was staying in Clara's apartment freshman year) and I want to be helpful but I also don't want to interrupt their routines too much! Hopefully I can strike a balance and be a good guest. I also had my first day of school today which I was kind of stressed about, since it was my first time teaching like this. They split us into groups and I worked with five students. We mostly just talked about goals for the program and played a couple games of telephone but it was definitely challenging. The students I worked with were at very different skill levels and trying to figure out how to phrase something in a way that would not be confusing was something I haven't really had to do like that before. I'm hoping that this program will help me be a clearer speaker though since I trip over my words a lot (honestly all the skills that the students are supposed to be working on are also really helpful for me), and maybe by the end of this week I'll have a better sense of whether I like/am cut out for this whole teaching thing or not. To be honest, I'm kind of stressed about this program because I want to do a really good job and be a good teacher for the students, but a lot of the time in my life I just feel like I'm not a very good speaker or I can't connect easily with others. Today was hard but by the end of it I became more comfortable speaking with my group and I think they started to become more confident. At the end of the day we were supposed to write down our reflection for the day of what we did well and what we could do better and I felt really sad when I saw the girl across from me write that she couldn't speak well in the group, because honestly sometimes today I felt like that too. During the day when I would ask her a question she would try to answer, get flustered, and then kind of give up, and I think that maybe I saw myself in that a lot? If that's not too dramatic to say? During my interview for this program I said that I'm a unique leader because I "used to be shy" but I've learned how to step out of my comfort zone and gain leadership skills and be confident or whatever. But I don't really believe that. I don't think people change completely, you know? Like, I'm not as timid as I was, but that doesn't mean that I can't still easily go back to being that timid. It's like that short story that I'm going to mis-describe here about how when you're 13 you're not just 13, you're also 12 and 11 and 10 and so on. Russian nesting dolls. I'm still the same timid person. There's more of me now, surrounding that timid person, sure. But she's still whole in there. And that's not a bad thing I don't think. Because then I know how it feels, and how I wanted people to help me when I felt like that. I still know what it's like to not feel confident enough to speak, even in my native language, let alone a second one. I just hope I can be a good teacher to a student who feels like that even once during this month, then I'd feel okay I think.

Anyway I'm also really tired bc I've been waking up at 4 everyday for some reason so I'm very tired right now apologies for the long post. Also I didn't incorporate it naturally but the title comes from this student I was eating with at lunch (who plays saxophone, the legend) who was describing what furikake seasoning for rice is to me and looked down introspectively and whispered: no furikake no life.