A Museum devoted to Sand

A while ago we adventured out into Japan and drove a couple hours or so to the Nima Sand Museum. This was super exciting to me as this museum plays a part in one of my favorite mangas, Sunadoke (which literally means hourglass.) In America, the manga is called Sand Chronicles. Anyhoo, super excited to visit. The Museum is near the beach of the Sea of Japan. It houses the world's largest hour glass, as well as a ton of other hourglasses. It's not a huge museum, but it was interesting. I got to learn all about sand, and the different kinds of sand on the beaches of Japan. I probably would have learned more if I could read more Japanese. Still, super awesome!

The Sand Museum!

Ryan, Saki, Kayla, Michael

 

Ryan and Kayla are super excited about the sunadoke. They were everywhere. All different sizes, different color sand, different materials, etc.

The worlds largest hourglass. It was pretty big. It's a full calendar year.

My ticket and brochure to the museum.

A duplicate of the hourglass so you can see it up close. It certainly was the largest hourglass I've ever seen.

Squeaking sand! One of the beaches nearby is famous for it's squeaking sand. When you walk on it, or in our cases push on it with a pestle and mortar, it makes a squeaking sound. The sand has to be dry, and unfortunately it was raining, so we didn't get to go to the beach to walk on it.

Ryan is fascinated by the squeaking sounds. Actually, I probably told him to make that face. lol.

There was a room where you could look at different kinds of sand under a microscope, or sort through sand with tweezers and a magnifying glass. Saki found a tiny itty bitty shell!

When we got a our tickets, we also got a postcard to make sand art with. They had a bunch of trays with colored sand. You pulled pieces pf your postcard to reveal the sticky postcard underneath (like a backwards sticker!) and dropped sand on it with tiny spoons. Above is Ryan working on his. He's color blind, which made figuring out which color sand to put where a little interesting for him.

My beautiful finished postcard.

This was a station where you could make a map of the different kinds of sand found on Japanese beaches.

 My beautiful sand map!

They had a display about the manga Sunadoke!

Stairs down to the gift shop. What a fun day!

Big Boys and Taiko

It's midterms at my all girls high school this week, which means Heather (the other ALT there) and myself have a lot of downtime as we have no classes to teach.  We were allowed to go out to lunch, so we adventured out to Big Boy's, for 3 reasons. 1. It's close to the school. 2. We wanted to see how it differed from it's American counterpart. 3. It has a drink bar!! Anyone who knows me, knows this is a good thing indeed.

For those who don't understand why the third reason is so great, let me enlighten you. Here in Japan, there is no such thing as free refills. I do believe America is the only country that does free refills. The other problem is cups/glasses here are so much smaller than the giant big gulp super sized drinks we can get in America. I need my 44oz of Dr. Peps, see? lol. Actually, I have yet to find any Dr. Pepper is Japan. :( There is a surplus of Fanta though. And Coca Cola. And a weird soda called Aquarius and another called Calpis. But I'm going off on a tangent here. Problem: I never feel like I have enough to drink when eating out here. Solution: Drink Bar!!!! For 1 price, it's all you can drink refills! Yay!

 I guess Big Boy statues look generally the same no matter where you are. I do like that they labeled the restaurant "Healthy & Tasty" so I could know that about it. I guess the people that can't read English won't get to know.

My delicious hambuger steak. It's like eating a hamburger without everything else. There were delicious caramelized onions under the patty. When brought out to the table, the skillet was sizzling. Also, check out my tasty piece of broccoli! Of course, it came with rice, because it's Japan. And there is my delicious refillable melon soda from the drink bar!

So the menu for Big Boy's in Japan is very different than the ones in America. Check out the menu:

That's right! The entire menu is basically steak! Heather is a vegetarian, there's not much on this menu she can eat. There is a salad bar however, so that's what she got.

After eating our food, returning to school, and getting home, I was chilling inmy apartment when Michael called and said "come play taiko drums!" or something along those lines. So I did! It was pretty challenging. I feel like my sense of rhythm is perhaps not as good as one could hope for.

But look at those mad taiko skills! You're supposed to keep your arms straight and hit at the center of the drum. Harder than it sounds. you had to concentrate on the rhythm and where to hit and how to hit. My hands started cramping up, and by the end of the 2 hours, I had trouble unwrapping them from around the drumstick. Also, when you hit it right, the other people hitting the drum made your sticks bounce up, so you had to control them. By the end of the night I could feel the vibrations of hitting the drum all the way to my toes. I do believe my arms are going to be sore tomorrow!

 Kayla, Michael, and Saki also have impressive taiko skills.

Maybe not as impressive as these guys though:

Sing like a Banana

So a couple weekends ago we went on a karaoke adventure! But I'm lazy, so you don't get to hear about it until now. There's karaoke parlours all over the place here, but we went to one called Banana Voice. What banana's have to do with singing karaoke I have no idea, but it's rather fabulous. Much more interesting than the rather popular karaoke business name of 'Karaoke Idol'. Those are everywhere. But anyway, Banana Voice!

Depending on when you go, for how long you go, and how many people there are, the prices vary. For 6 people for 2 hours on a Saturday night it worked out to be 1000yen per person, which everyone said was a good deal, and since it was my first time in a karaoke place, I'm just going to believe them.

We got our own little room with low couches and a table, a big screen to read lyrics off of, and a mini stage. When singing a song, a video played behind the lyrics, but most of the videos were really random videos of Japanese people and not related to the actual song at all. It was like random people music video stock footage. I'm wondering how they figured out what video to pair with each song, if when the made the lyrics and stuff, it got picked and bundled in, or if what played depended on certain keywords in the songs. It was very random anyway. Every once in a while we found a song that had an actual music video with it. Exciting!

 Michael and Kayla singing while Jake looks dead.

 Ryan fabulously modeling the fancy electronics we used to find music and program it in.

 Our beauty karaoke room. The diamonds on the wall are to keep score I think? I never quite figured it out.

 Saki and Ryan excel at singing in Japanese.

 I, however, sang Journey on the little stage with Kayla. Everyone loves Journey.  If you say you don't, you're just lying to yourself.

Michael has spiderman socks!

 Kayla modeling the giant beer cans this place had.

Yay, Banana Voice! In the rain... crazy typhoons.

yum yums!

I've been eating all sorts of goodness here in Japan. I keep trying to take photos of it before I eat it, but I'm horrible at remembering to do that. Usually I already ate 3/4s of it before I realize I didn't take a picture. woops. so, here's some food, I'll do my best to have more food pictures later.

So my high school had a dinner with traditional Japanese food, including Matsue specialties. Some of it was delicious, some not so much, but definitely interesting. Also, there was tons of food! It just kept coming.

 Shijimi clams. A Matsue specialty, out of the local Shinji lake. Looked terrifying but was really delicious. They actually kind of tasted like chicken, although no one else seemed to think so. I wonder if what they were cooked in made it delicious. Also, some of the clam meat was super hard to get out of the shells with chopsticks. I got it all in the end though!

 Sashimi. It was staring at me...

 Fried squid. Very popular at festivals and such here. It was super chewy but not bad. I don't think it would be my first choice though.

 More sashimi! There was more of it, but I ate it. The tuna went first. The white fish on the leaf was also good. The white squid under the chopsticks did not agree with my tastebuds.

 Ebi (shrimp) salad. They were also staring at me, saying please don't eat me!

 Heather also teaches at my girls high school. She's a vegetarian, so she got her own special menu of nabe, veggies cooked in a hot pot. She also got vegetable tempura. She had enough food to feed a family of 5. She let me eat her delicious potatoes! 

 Banana milk! Almost all the milk here is whole milk. Takes a little getting used to. But Banana milk is delicious! They also have vanilla milk, which is like drinking an ice cream cone. yum!

 Konbini bubble tea! (Konbini is a term for convenience store. like Seven-Elevens and such.) It's already made and packaged, you just take it off the shelf and pay for it. Even comes with a collapsible straw. The tapioca is not round balls, but crescents. It's not bad, but legit bubble tea is definitely better.

 Beautiful lattes at a cafe! takes me back to my barista days.

A different cafe, where we got parfaits (except Jake, he got a mocha frost, which I assume is like a mocha frappe.) Cafes are a big thing, they serve fancy drinks and desserts and some serve food. 

My beautiful yogurt parfait! It was delicious!

Cafe Satan! We didn't go because it was closed, and it's a cafe snack bar, which means you pay cover to get in as well as for your food and drinks. So we're not going to go there, but the name cracks me up. I wonder if that was the actual name they were going for...

Zippy Zoom Zoom

So there's 3 main ways to get around Matsue. Walking, Bicycle, and Car. There are buses, but I've never taken one, I don't really know the stops. I think I can count on one hand the number of times I've seen a bus here. There is a train station with trains, but it seems to be mostly for leaving/coming to Matsue, not traveling in Matsue as far as I can tell.

My favorite way to travel is by bike! You don't have to buy gas, it's exercise, and depending on the time of day, you can actually travel faster on bike than by car due to traffic. Also, it easier to find places to park your bike. Dangers include getting hit by a car, falling off the tiny sidewalks into a gaijin trap (aka drainage ditch,) biking uphill, and getting your bike stolen.

This is my bike. It's beautiful and blue.

All bikes here seem to come with a basket, a bell, and most seem to have a lock. Unlike in America where we buy bike locks and chains, bikes here have a metal ring around the back tire.

 
You insert a key and the metal ring that goes through the spokes of the back wheel to keep it from turning pulls up into itself. When you get wherever you're going, you take push the metal back through the wheel and take the keys out. now, no one can ride your bike. Technically, they can lift it and steal it. Bike theft is one of the biggest crimes in Japan. The kickstands are completely different too. Instead of a pole on the side that the bike leans on, the kickstand wraps around the back of the tire. When not in motion, you lift the back of the bike up and pull it down so the back wheel is resting on it.

 

Where all the bikes live outside of my apartment.

The other way I travel is by car. Driving has it's advantages, you can go farther, there's air conditioning so you don't get crazy sweaty, you don't have to walk your car uphill, you can jam out to music, it doesn't take as long to get some place (unless traffic sucks.) The downsides include it's freaking scary driving on the wrong side of the road, people drive insane here, there are pedestrians and cyclists everywhere just begging to be hit, there is absolutely no parking anywhere, and if there is, you have to back into the itty bitty space, the roads are crazy narrow and people go 20 km over the speed limit and tail you if you don't, the construction signs make no sense, there are very few street signs, often the roads are not logical, just like in PA, you can also fall into gaijin traps with your car, and a car is much harder to get out of a concrete ditch than a bike is.

 This was my first car. A temporary one until my real car arrived. I only drove it for 2 days, and only hit the curb twice with it. Woops.

 

This is my car! I named it Sylvia. Sylvia the suzuki. It's pretty small (I wish is was smaller!) and I got it brand spannking factory new. I still have the plastic on the seats. I have yet to hit anything! Yay!

 

Sylvia's dashboard. Turn signals on the right of the steering wheel, windshield wipers on the left. Automatic, gear shift is up on the dash under the cd player. I'm gad there's a cd player because I could only find 1 radio station, and they talk more than play music. Although driving home from work once they seemed to be having the Eric Clapton music hour... strange.

So getting around is getting easier, but I must not get too complacent or I'm going to hit someone and end up in a ditch on the wrong side of the road. >.< Wish me luck!