Teachers' Trip Take 2 - Travelling to Aizu

A trip to Aizu, Fukushima Prefecture ( 会津 福島県 ) towards the north of the main island.

The first teachers' trip article about the journey to Matsushima is based on a time when I couldn't speak Japanese and basically had no idea what was going on at the best of times, let alone being in a bus at 7am with a can of beer in my hand heading to a tongue restaurant. The second time around and I had a lot more experience of Japan and knew what I was letting myself in for...I'm not sure if that makes the fact that last October I once again found myself in a bus at 7am with a can of beer in my hand, heading to a German-style restaurant more stupid of me or less stupid of me, but, for better or worse, I was there.

We set off at ridiculous Oclock yet again, with a huge bag of snacks and many an alcoholic beverage. All was the same as last year...no shocks...good so far. Then, at about 10 past ridiculous, an on-bus karaoke machine was whipped out and the mic started making it's way around everyone. Not the best at such an early time, when everyone is your colleague, and you don't know them that well, you are stuck on a bus and they are all drunk in typical Japanese - smell alcohol - drunk style and you are just half asleep still. Matters were only made worse by the fact that the karaoke machine delightfully gave each person a score on a big screen so that everyone could see just how bad you were. I managed to screech out something by Queen and scrape 50% (probably most of those points scored for pronunciation rather than tune - I'm sure Freddie turned in his grave) and quickly began downing my way through as many cans as possible.

Arriving EARLY at the German restaurant (about 11!) which is ridiculous as we were supposedly late before we'd set off again and if there is a record for how many times one bus can stop for toilet breaks in 4 hours we must have weeed all over it(is that how you spell weeed?? That can't be right, but I can't be weeed to check). Anyway, we were in a rather strange set of faux-German-Alpine type buildings, about two feet from a massive motorway. The restaurant itself was FULL of random decorations with bad German on them and strange "German-style" omiyage...God knows what Japanese people must think Germany is like with shops like that...nearly everything had a picture of a beer on it! Inexplicably, but fairly predictably, the food was all Japanese, but it was very nice. All the beer was German and we had about 6 jugs of a really dark bitter beer on our table...not my fave, but, still trying to blank out my rendition of All You Need I Love (I was made to do a second karaoke following loo break 18 or so - it's a LONG song). CLEARLY nobody liked the beer much, but one particularly drunken teacher ordered three extra jugs for the table without telling everyone, meaning we had to sit there for ages and force it down. Lucky we were running early. Then, we were given AN HOUR to kill in the horrible beer/sausage/Berlin Wall/Hitler omiyage shop, a car park, and a "famous" shop that sold glass sculptures. I spent about 3 minutes in there...all very pretty, but they were 3 minutes of fear of breaking something, so I went and sat outside in the car park with most of the teachers. I thought it was fairly obvious that we didn't need any more time there, but, after an hour of sitting, we entered a discussion as to whether to do the thing that was next on the schedule, a museum about a famous scientist, or go to a "famous" cake shop for omiyage. I wasn't particularly bothered so let the long decision process unfold before me, fairly unsurprisingly, omiyage triumphed.

It was, however, upon pulling out of the vaguely Alpine layby that I realised that the museum was LITERALLY in the same carpark and that the only reason we had all been wasting time outside the glass sculpture shop was because we were officially ahead of the schedule AND, the only reason that we had chosen that J-Alpine village was because it was next to the museum. Still, a fairly average cake shop, FULL to the brim with pushy Japanese shoppers...never get in the way of a little old J-biddy and her omiyage purchase, meant that we skipped the museum altogether.

Drunk as anything, the next part of the plan was to go to a sake brewery...Once in Aizu, that's what you do, because Aizu is famous for sake. I can't remember much of it, but I did have the BIGGEST bottle of sake to show for it the next day which I had bought for my Dad as a Christmas present in the omiyage shop (turning Japanese) without any consideration for how I would get it home to England!

Arriving at the hotel, we all rushed for the onsen, which was truly the most beautiful I've been to since being in Japan. It was a perfect temperature, a few different baths, and totally surrounded by nature, overlooking a range of mountains. The only downside was that I was sitting next to my naked 50-something deputy head teacher whilst I was trying to relax in it. Then we enkaied...more karoke (this time plus stage, but plus much more alcohol, so I was slightly more willing). The following day I hung-overdly wore the wrong slipper or wrong shoe in the wrong maze of corridors and caused a bit of a teacher fuss, but apart from that, I managed to time onsen away from most of my teachers and actually enjoy without the threat of seeing a teacher's penis...sorry to be crude, I love the onsen and I don't mind the nakedness, but colleagues is just a step too far. After leaving the very posh hotel we went and made pottery cups, as you do...seems that I haven't developed a skill for that since the last time I tried it and cocked it up at the age of about 9 (I really am rubbish at everything) and wound up with a sort of half cup half bowl. I would blame not being able to understand the Japanese, but I know it would have been the same wherever I was. Anyway, it's a nice souvenir and was a good idea of the organisers, I think. We all had fun. The only problem was the wankered teacher from the day before (who kept buying the jugs of horrible beer) somehow still being drunk and constantly trying to make jokes at the instructor's expense...I think everyone liked him a little bit less after that trip, I know that I did.

Last stop was like a massive craft village thing, which had lots of pretty stuff. This one was famous for "eating soba with a long Japanese negi onion instead of with a chopstick"...I kid you not. Anywhere can be "famous" in Japan, I mean, surely a couple of restaurants just decided to start doing that for no reason other than to put it on a tourist information leaflet somewhere and to claim it was famous. Anyway...I still did it, I managed to restrain myself from buying an onion keyring as a souvenir of the experience though. There is a photo though. That is my proudest moment of the trip because it's so famous - I'd been waiting to do it for ages, it was like a pilgramage (note the sarcasm). Worst moment of the trip was coming LAST out of about 25 teachers in bingo on the way back home for the SECOND YEAR RUNNING...last year I won a tupperware and this year I won some of those paper masks you wear when you're ill. I'm sure everyone thinks I'm so stupid, because, not only do they read the numbers about 3 times each but they also flash up on a big screen...but, I'm not stupid, I'm just stupidly unlucky at things like bingo. I'll have the last laugh when I win the lottery. It's just that I don't want to win a game where the top prize is a beer out of the bus fridge that I could have just reached in and taken myself anyway.

Anyway, more successful that last year's that's for sure...more friendships built, more fun had, but most importantly, less tongue.

Teachers' Trip Take 1 - Travelling to Matsushima

The way Japanese people travel is truly astounding...sometimes a colleauge goes away for a couple of days or so and I get an omiyage from somewhere ridiculously far away like Italy on my desk. On enquiring what they could possibly have been doing in Italy for only FOUR DAYS or so, considering almost a whole day of it would be the plane journey alone, I get an account of the 18 or so cities that were visited, the pizza and spaghetti that was eaten and the one hundred and twenty five thousand photos that were taken, all featuring said teacher doing a peace sign in front of various sights and not smiling...probably didn't have time to smile.

So, with these ridiculously tightly organised and regimented travel stories in mind that I rather nervously accepted an invite to go on a trip with my teachers to Matsuthshima (松島）(left) in Miyagi prefecture　（宮城県, a city towards the North of Japan's main island (the one that Gunma is also on, in the middle somewhere), Honshu. It's just next to the city Sendai. The main aim of the trip is to bond (mainly achieved through drinking yourself silly) whilst seeing ever single thing that Miyagi has to offer, including many things on the way, soak in an onsen, eat a lovely dinner and take a million photos, all in the space of just over 24 hours. That was a CHARRENJI if ever there was one, especially as this story actually comes from over a year ago, when I still couldn't speak much Japanese. Departure was at ridiculous O'clock, on a coach from the school carpark. I was handed an enormous bag of snacks for the ride, which more than slightly scared me as to how long this coach trip could be...just how many dried squid things can one need for one journey???

Somehow, in spite of it being about 5am and in spite of us all arriving in time, within about 5 minutes of setting off, we were 'running late.' By this time, we were also already a bag of squid snacks down each (not me) and halfway through a can of alcoholic beverage (I was further due to nerves). I sat with the young teachers at the back of the bus, like the naughty kids, and we played drinking games and I chatted to many of them for the first time and it was really fun...the only annoying bit was the 15 minute interruptions to pile off of the coach, go to toilet, take a photo in front of a random tourist site and buy some omiyage that that region is 'famous' for...everywhere is supposedly famous for something in Japan, even Ita-where is famous for cucumbers, in spite of them just being normal cucumber and Ita-where not being famous full stop. Lunch was in a place that couldn't have been famous for anything more unfortunate...TONGUE. I was tucking into my tongue curry (the restaurant only did tongue dishes and it was the least tongue-y looking picture on the menu) downing more alcohol, cameras flashing all around me...I definitely felt like I was in Japan!

We continued rushing, because we were 'late' for the next couple of hours, with rushed pit stops and many sights, so remote that people literally couldn't tell me what they were. It was like a race for the omiyage shop and then back on to the coach. In the end, we arrived at the onsen hotel late-afternoon and it turned out that what were late was to get into the onsen! An onsen that is attached to our hotel and is open all night anyway!!

It's funny how sitting naked in a hot bath in the freezing cold knocking naked knees with your naked 40-year-old English teacher can sober you up. Let's say no more about onsenning with teachers.

left: one of the unknown sights

We then enkaied in a very drunken fashion (pretty enkai food to the right) and got up at the crack of dawn the next day to begin the same journey back down the motorway, but finding an incredible amount of unstopped at omiyage shops along the way. We went to a massive fish market that was really interesting, if a little scary, especially on a hangover, (amazing sushi though, BIG step up from tongue curry) a shrine (or two, or three), a history museum and went on a lovely boat trip around one of the most famous sights in Japan. It's loads of sort of mini cliffs and islands off the coast. It was very beautiful, but most of the teachers had already been, so spent the trip throwing leftover crisps from the giant snack bag to seagulls and queueing to buy omiyage at the boat's shop...I kid you not.

All in all, a fun, if a little stressful experience. Usually, a single guy going on holiday, coming back to say there was nudity and tongue would be a big success...slightly different here though! Here are some more photos....I have about 80 photos from 24 hours and I imagine that most of my teachers had at least three times that amount.

My Japanese teacher is off to Spain in a couple of weeks and is officially visiting more that one town per day, changing hotels every single night for 9 days...I feel the photo session could well be a long one!!

Japan and gift giving お土産 omiyage

Japan is nothing short of obsessed with its tradition of お土産 (omiyage). Omiyage are gifts given to just about every person you know to say thank you, to say that you've been on holiday, to say 'please do something for me', to say hello, to say goodbye, and generally any message that needs to be (or doesn't really need to be) conveyed. In fact, sometimes I wonder if I actually get more gifts a day than I do conversations...today I have received two bisctuits, one chocolate, four satsumas and five small spinning tops (?)...not bad if you ask me! Writing this article, however, has just made me realise that I have left those four satsumas in my desk over the weekend to rot...DAMN!!

In all holiday destinations there are rows of shops exclusively aimed at selling gifts to take back to friends, family, neighbours and colleagues. Many service stations along the motorway have a variety of gifts from nearby towns, presumable for people who are on their way home and have forgotten to buy for somebody or for people who don't actually want to go to the place, they just want to go halfway, buy the gifts, and go back. Particularly popular are huge boxes of fairly generic cakes or biscuits, individually wrapped (perfect for splitting between many, particuarly for laying on the desks of colleagues) with the name of the place written on the wrapper. These must be bought in their millions in Japan! A bit (exactly) like this ....

Of course, me going back to England for the Christmas holiday was something that everybody I have ever met and his wife knew about...meaning that I had to buy a gift for everyone I have ever met and all of their wives, which need to fulfill many ruthless criteria :

1. Be the appropriate size and worth to match the person you are buying for and your relationship with them.

2. Be sufficiently typically English, and by that I don't mean something that is actually typically English, but something that a Japanese person considers to be typically English.

3. Be sufficiently cheap that I can afford to buy 40 million of them.

4. Be sufficiently small and light that they will all fit in one suitcase.

5. In the case of the teachers, be edible and individually wrapped so that I can go and neatly place one on every person's desk.

Hence a LOT of trapsing around Tescos with a list of names as long as my arm and this mental check list.....Not an easy task!!

After emptying my suitcase, you can see about half of them here...

I eventually settled for 4 boxes of Christmas crackers, 5 mini Christmas puddings, 2 packets of custard mix, 3 boxes of after dinner mints, 3 packets of mini Tesco rip-off Mars bars, 2 packets of sherbert sweets, one mixed bag of sweets, 2 bags of liquorice twists, one stick of fudge, 4 Kitkats with a Santa picture moulded into them, one Turkish Delight, two boxes of 12 mini mince pies, 2 boxes of Jaffa cakes, 5 CDs, one fake paisley tie (one pound New Look! Bargain!!), one diary, 3 jars of marmalade, one packet of biscuits, one packet of strawberry bonbons, one pen with London sights on it, 3 magazines, 2 boxes of nuts, one packet of Angel Delight, 3 boxes of teas, one mini box of After 8s, 3 mini bottles of scotch, 2 Union Jack mugs and one horrible keyring with an English footballer on it.

These will now have to be painstakingly and stressfully packaged up cutely and divided between....everybody in 7 staff rooms and everybody at the Board of Education of my town, one group of lunch ladies, one man at one nursery (the only staff room who didn't get a set of gifts for themselves cos I don't like them, so only he gets one), 17 teachers at various schools who I am either sort of obliged to give special presents to or who are just really nice to me so deserve one, my hairdresser, the other hairdresser staff, two volunteers who help with English at one of the schools, my taiko group, the lady who develops my photos for me, 3 ALT friends, my Japanese teacher and his wife, my boss and her husband and 7 other Japanese friends...and I've already realised that I've forgotten someone and have to try and conjur an extra gift up. It's a lovely tradition and for every gift I give, I'm sure I receive about 10 but it's a bloody stress and between you and me, given the choice of a CD/box of mince pies/Christmas cracker or 4 satsumas/5 spinning tops, I know which side I'd be on...I am a quality gift giver.

Two recent examples, however, or amazingly lovely and completely unnecessary gifts that I have received remind me why I shouldn't be complaining at all. Firstly, in the run up to Christmas, the Itakura International Association (who knows why they have one...it has about 100 Japanese members whose average age probably exceeds the membership figure, and one foreigner...me) were running some English conversation classes. I could (and might) write a massive article about the ridiculousness that those classes entailed, but for now, let's just say that I basically went to help out 4 times, for a total of 8 hours, did very little and STILL got paid (even though I begged them not to pay me as I'd done nothing and didn't need their money, but....). Anyway, one lovely old lady was at the last class (it was the first time I'd seen her at the classes though I had met her before at another International Association meeting thing, when we spoke only in Japanese) and it turns out that she can speak almost perfect English! She did a self introduction which lasted almost as long as the whole lesson should itself! Anyway at the end, I gave them all some German style lebkuchen that I'd made (nothing like the real thing but really nice...such an easy recipe from the Beeb, stuff you Nigella and your posh ingredients, you only need flour, butter, honey and spices!) and then we made Christmas crackers with toilet rolls some snaps my parents had sent me from England. Everyone had a great time, and the local TV were there again (that is my FIFTH appearance if you don't mind). Anyway, a few days later, one of the teachers from the course contacted me...the old lady had given them this handmade card and huge posh expensive box of chocolates and biscuits for me because she was 'touched' by my lesson (bear in my that I am being paid and that all I did was explain how to selotape a cracker snap to some tissue paper and roll it round a toilet roll).

The second amazing omiyage received actually defies belief. At the end of year enkai for one of my schools we were drinking sake. There is this old man who is sort of an upper-class receptionist...I have no idea what he does except that he used to be a teacher and now he is really ill and goes to hospital a lot, so I think they might have just given him this job where he doesn't have to do much so that he still has a job. Anyway, bottom line is, I never teach with him or work with him, just talk to him occasionally on the days when I'm at his school (which is only once a week on average)...anyway, he was so impressed that I like sake, and I mentioned that my parents like it too and that I had bought some to take back to England as a Christmas present for them. Everybody was very drunk by this point, but he was very very impressed that we all like sake (very) and asked for my address so that he could send my parents some...egged on by other colleagues (who thought my address was so cool because it was written in English ???) I drunkedly gave him my address and thought nothing more of it...I thought that in his state, it would be a miracle if the address even made it out of the restaurant, let alone if he could remember the next day what it was or why he had taken it....GUESS AGAIN MARK! Came home mid-holiday to find a HUGE parcel from Japan containing FOUR, that's FOUR litre bottles of sake sent to me by that lovely drunken man (he sent it a few days later, so I am assuming that he wasn't still drunk by the way). The cost of the goods and the postage was written on it...well over a hundred quid in total!! One hundred pounds! For somebody he barely knows...and what a hassle as well! Half of me was about to burst into tears of happiness and half of me was about to burst into tears of 'What the hell am I supposed to take back to match this??' I have asked my boss for advice and she doesn't know either...the saga continues. Anyway, what with the bottle my parents received when they came to Japan as a gift, the one they got from me for Christmas and these four, my parents now have enough sake to rival a Japanese off-lisence!! Cue drunken Skype sessions from now on!