What a fabulous couple of days I just had! It began with a school-wide meeting at Kobe Kaisei College. An inauspicious beginning, one would think. I had to introduce myself twice, once at the combined meeting and again at the English Department meeting. As usual, everything but my introduction was in Japanese, leading me to believe that we (the foreign teachers) are cute little mascots for them, little more. But I met some really nice folks at the reception afterwards. One woman got her BA MA and PhD at CSU, and we had a lot of friends in common. I spoke with several others as well and set up times to meet. It's really important when you know you're only going to be somewhere for a year not to waste time in getting to know folks. It might be good practice for when I come home too.
After the reception, I received careful instructions from my friends and I boarded the train for Osaka to meet a former IEP student (Itsumi) and a former MA classmate (Beniko Mason) (from a very long time ago). Itsumi is working in Tokyo, and she had a conference near Osaka, so she invited me and Beniko to meet her there. Beniko took us to a tofu restaurant she is fond of. I wasn't that excited when I heard about it, as I don't usually fall over myself trying to get tofu. But this was an awesome restaurant! It was the old fashioned kind of Japanese restaurant with tatami mats and individual rooms with sliding paper doors and low tables with indentations for your feet. They brought us about 20 different tofu dishes in little round dishes and little square dishes, and little bowls. They had what looked like tofu popsicles, tofu pudding, tofu sushi, sweet tofu, salty tofu, tofu au gratin. When we came in there was a dish of uncooked tofu cut to look like flowers and leaves sitting in the middle of the table. It started looking weird, and I realized that it was cooking. We added a sauce and ate that too. We finished it all off with tofu ice cream, and then they came and kicked us out as we had been there for 2 hours. Our conversation was delightful as well. I loved the whole experience.
The next day was my birthday, and I had planned a geocaching hike with L'Shawn, Doug and Jon Watkins, my CSU friends. I really like to hike and don't know where to go, so the geocaching site helped a lot. We found our way to an abandoned railway along a beautiful river. There are about 6 old tunnels to go through. The cache was in the middle of the second and longest tunnel. We searched in the dark for about 30 minutes, counting railroad ties, looking for numbers written on the ties. We felt like Indiana Jones looking for the Lost Ark. Unfortunately, we came up empty. When I looked at the geocaching website, I saw that the cache hasn't been found for 3 years, so I think a muggle got it. But it got us to a really cool hike anyway. At the end of the hike, we had a beer at an outdoor restaurant overlooking the river. It really reminded me of the Poudre (a little wider, though). Then we boarded the train to Osaka where we ate at Bubba Shrimp, a most un-Japanese restaurant, replete with Japanese waiters who met us at the door with trivia questions about "Forest Gump".
Finally, Jon, who has been here for over 3 years and knows the joint well, took us to another part of Osaka which kind of looks like a cross between Times Square and Vegas. I think this is what a lot of folks think all of Japan is like. In fact, where I am it's very residential and calm, so I was a wide eyed tourist, taking in all the lights and the interesting array of people. All in all, a great weekend.
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