It's Almost like Fingerpaints...

So today was our last day of pottery: giving our bowls a glaze that will result in them being colorful and shiny once they've been fired. On the second floor of the workshop there were a dozen or so barrels with different colors of slip inside:

Once you decided on your color of slip, you stirred it vigorously with your hands. Then you filled a cup with the slip and poured it into your bowl to coat the inside. Then you turned your bowl upside-down and dunked it into the slip for three seconds as far as you wanted it to be. Most people left the bases of their bowls plain, but if you wanted to dunk it all the way in you could. The various colors of slip meant that some people looked like they'd been playing at a murder scene, or as Macbeth:

I chose an olive green color for my bowl, and while the slip looks grey I've been assured that it'll turn green after it fires. The kiln will be bringing our fired bowls to PII sometime within the next week or so (obviously before we leave in two weeks...I can't believe all this time has flown by...) and I can't wait to see how it turns out!

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Enoshima: The Heavenly Maiden and the Dragon

This past Monday was a national holiday -- Mountain Day -- so, of course, Troy and I headed to the beach instead. Well, to an island near a beach since (as some of you may know) I'm not exactly the beach-going type. Plus I'd just climbed Mount Fuji, which was more than enough mountain for me. Enoshima is a small island off the coast of Kanagawa Prefecture, fairly near Kamakura. It's connected to the mainland via a bridge, so you can just stroll on over from the train station. The entire island is dedicated to Benzaitan, the goddess of everything that flows -- time, water, speech, music, and knowledge. According to the "Enoshima Engi," (a history of the shrines and temples on Enoshima) there's also a legend associated with the creation of the island involving Benzaitan and a dragon. In brief, the area around Enoshima was once wracked by violent storms and earthquakes. Eventually the tumult ended and a heavenly maiden (Benzaitan) descended from the clouds....

Homecoming

This is it. It's Friday, February 3rd and in less than 24 hours I will leave this house for Tokyo train station, which will take me to the airport, which will take me...home. Most of this week has been taken up with goodbyes: to schoolmates and teachers, and later, close friends. There were tears involved. I think the photos will do it a lot more justice than I could: Kohei, from tennis group. All the tennis people got together for dinner at an okonomiyaki (think cabbage pancake, with yummy stuff like shrimp in it) but first we went to a boardwalk which had nighttime light shows. Top: Anime Club. They threw a small party for me, where we ate lots of food and watched (what else) anime and talked. Bottom: one of my English classes. They asked me to teach them an American game for the last day, so I taught everyone how to play Heads-Up 7-Up. They were pretty good at it. The other exchange student, Nom, and my Japanese teacher. The last view of school: the walk leading u...

Reflections on Typhoon Hagibis

As some of you may have known, this past weekend Typhoon Hagibis blew through Japan, specifically the Kanto region where Tokyo is. It had the grim distinction of being the strongest/most deadly storm to hit the region since Typhoon Ida in 1958. Typhoon classification scales are confusing (and, interestingly, the only difference between a "typhoon" and a "hurricane" is the naming convention of the region in which it occurs ), but at one point Hagibis was classified as a "violent typhoon," the strongest category the Japan Meteorological Agency has, roughly the equivalent of a Category 5 hurricane. Fortunately it didn't make landfall at that strength, downgrading to a Category 3 equivalent storm. Personally, although Typhoon Hagibis (which means, appropriately, "speed" in Tagalog) was not the first typhoon I've (pardon the pun) weathered here in Japan, it was most certainly the most extreme. Most typhoons don't directly hit Kanto, inst...

Rice and Ramen

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