Japanese Traditional Culture Day

So it's a little late but last saturday Otaru held a culture day for foreigners (not just ryuugakusei) who live in Otaru/Sapporo to come and take part in traditional japanese arts here in Japan. It was really fun because we got to take part in doing Japanese Calligraphy, Traditional Tea Ceremony, and Ikebana. The calligraphy was different from any calligraphy that we've done before at J-club. The high school's calligraphy team and their instructor do 'special calligraphy' which involves a picasso like approach to drawing the kanji. Basically the guy draws it how he THINKS that it should look. It was all very strange. I just drew a regular kanji. But the second thing that was different from usual was that the brushes were about as long as my forearm and thick. It was hard to manouver with them. But I think we all did ok. :)

The tea ceremony was interesting also but of course I have trouble sitting on my knees for long periods of time (like most westerners) and I had an elderly japanese lady practically force feed me the sweets that go before the tea in the ceremony. Apparantly I wasn't eating them fast enough for her or something because she felt the need to sit down next to me, push my hand holding the napkin up closer to my mouth and then watched me like a hawk until I ate it all. Lol. And of course Gian Carlo doesn't like the green tea ( I don't either actually) so he made this awful face when he drank his. Then we all got to try and make the tea for ourselves which is pretty cool but I couldn't get the hang of whisking it properly so mine didn't foam up enough. Gian made some and then handed it off to one of the other japanese ladies with a 'for you' and thought he was sooo smart getting out of drinking it again. But the elderly japanese lady from before made him make another cup and watched him until he drank it. Soooo funny. You don't even know.

Last of all we did Ikebana which was pretty cool. They had these diamond shaped porcelain bowls and a really sharp spiky thing that you pushed the flowers onto. Gian's apparently 'looked the most japanese' but that's only because he copied the teacher's example one as closely as he could. The rest of us tried to do it in an individual style. Then we got to take the flowers home (sans porcelain of course). Afterwards we had a chance to do an impromtu (I'm not sure of the name) paper tearing session and we got to make flowerd bookmarks which was pretty cool & they laminated them for us. Afterwards everybody headed to lunch with the sponsors of the event but Yung Eun, Arzu, and myself headed back to the dorm to drop off our stuff before seaking out coffee at starbucks in Sapporo.


While we were in Sapporo we ate McDonalds (Arzu loves them) and headed over to Oodori park which is supposed to be famous but I don't know why it is. While we were there we went up their TV Tower and got a great panoramic view of the city and the mountains behind it. I love Sapporo because it is FLAT like Michigan instead of one giant mountain like Otaru is. Seriously if we lived in Sapporo I would have a bicycle. It's too much trouble to haul that thing back up the hill every day so I don't have one here. After the tower we wandered around the park and saw the statues and the fountains. They also had cabbage (red & green) growing in their flower beds which we thought was hilarious. After that we headed over to the nearest starbucks (2 blocks away) and I had a frappuchino. Unfortunately in Japan they don't actually put the whipped cream on the mocha and plain frapps only on one's like caramal and vanilla. I mean... how am I supposed to order that? LOl. I need to learn how to order whipped cream at starbucks in Japanese.


Right before we left to come back to Otaru we went to JR Tower which is connected to Sapporo station and visited Bic Camera where I printed out a few pics of our day (30 yen each for 3x5 size), we also visited 'Jupiter' which is a tiny (and I mean tiny) shop in the basement of Bic camera that sells 'import' food which is basically western food or korean food. So I FINALLY found some soup that wasn't cream of corn. It ended up being cream of potato, tomato, and chicken broth. So I can finally use most of the slow cooker recepies. No cream of chicken though which blew. You can also pick up such exotic things like quaker oatmeal, black tea, and real pasta sauce. Still didn't find any bullion cubes though. Then we headed back to Otaru (30 minute ride) and everybody fell asleep on the way back.

Yung Eun and I ended up watching Nightmare Before Christmas with Pierre and Karolina after I went upstairs to give Pierre a pic I'd made for him at Bic. I hadn't seen that movie in like 5 years. It was sooo funny and then we got to watch an early Tim burton movie which was cool. So if I can get it to work you should be able to see it for yourself. :) Also I've added new pics to my webshots account:

http://good-times.webshots.com/album/561267908VTssFk?vhost=good-times