Twelve Drummers Drumming

In the Wayback I actually went to both a taiko festival and took a lesson.  I loved it.  In my experience, everyone does.  When Five went with me to Kyoto, she got to experience the drums at Kiyomizu Dera and was as pumped as I was.  At our school's international day we had a group of drummers that performed, and The Director, with whom I was watching, felt the same way.  In fact, taiko is so awesome that if you've been paying attention, you  may have noticed me whinging a couple of times about the fact that I haven't seen more of it.  But I made up for all that last Friday with the ultimate (in my opinion, anyways) taiko experience - Drum Tao.

In my rambles through the interwebs not so long ago, I came across an ad for their new show, Mangekyo.  It looked AMAZING.  I mean, sure, I love taiko, but I love buff guys in cool costumes even more, and when you put the two together?  Magical.  There are women in Drum Tao, too (also very buff), and actually the leader of the group is a woman (who very clearly understands her fellow Japanese women - the audience definitely had a gender bias). 

 

This was one of those times where I'd discovered something way too good to keep to myself, so I emailed Sensei and my other two favorite work friends, The (aforementioned) Director and Horn Blower, to see if they were also interested.  This is how the four of us ended up wandering around a department store in Ginza Friday night trying to find the Alternative Theater.  That's a thing here...department stores seem to have galleries and theaters more times than you would think is absolutely normal.  Eventually we figured out we had to go downstairs and ride up from the first floor, but we got there in the end.

The thing is, it wasn't just a musical performance.  I think this is the first show I've been to since I moved to Japan, so I'm not sure how it compares to other concerts, if you can call it a concert.  Hot guys drumming would have been more than enough to hold my (rapt) attention, but this was so much more.  The costumes were fantastic.  They had the look of kimono and samurai armor to them, but they still managed to be modern and chou kakouii...I imagine there's a fine line between that and cheesy, but they nailed it.  The actual staging was fairly simple - there were three or so platforms, which different performers mounted to play or dance - but they also used projectors to add a multimedia element - flowers fluttering in the breeze, or a stream in the forest. 

I wish pictures were allowed at performances here.  Maybe I should start bugging organizations to give me press access - I write a blog, after all, even if I only have six regular readers.  As it was, I was too scared of getting kicked out to try and sneak a shot or two (this isn't Mongolia, after all...the Japanese love their rules and expect them to be followed!) so for the most part you'll have to imagine it.  If that's not good enough, maybe check out their official website?

After an hour and a half it was over.  We fought our way to the elevators, and then walked back to Yurakucho station to head toward home.  The Director and I discussed which guys we preferred - she said my choice looked too much like an anime character for her, and I told her that didn't bother me in the least (yes, we are both basically 13 years old, and no, I don't care).  I could have gone back and watched it again the next day with every bit as much enthusiasm.  Maybe I will when it returns in the fall.  Til then, I'm looking for places to take lessons, because that is a kind of exercise that I would look forward to.

My Big, Fake, Greek Wedding

I've never taken a ferry in Greece before.  I've been to Santorini, but it always seemed to me like a waste of time to spend all that time on a boat when I could be there in less than an hour on a plane.  Well, I've learned my lesson.  Leaving Santorini we took Ryanair which is supposed to be a budget airline but they tack on all these fees for luggage and not doing online check-in and shit.  Ryanair sucks big donkey balls...which brings me back to Santorini.

Well, this time we took a ferry, to get from Crete to Santorini.  Bronte couldn't meet us at the port, but her friend Flora, proprietor of the Flower Pension - where we were staying - sent a driver to pick us up.  Bronte has a thing about signs and me, and wanted him to bear one inscribed similar to the one she and my Dark Lord made nine years ago.  Flora talked her down to one that read, "Slutty M_(my last name)_."

(If you are a newer reader, please understand that I am not slutty, nor is Bronte "Yellow trash," as I sometimes address her.  These are the kinds of jokes that sprout in the sweatshop environment known as hagwon teaching in Korea).

We dropped our stuff at the Pension and headed along the caldera to Bronte's apartment (which I can admit now to being very slightly worried I wouldn't be able to find.  I found it without a problem, but hey, it was 2011 the last time I was there).  Bronte and Vasilis are - let's call a spade a spade - way too cool to be my friends, and yet, they are.  They are also night owls (like I used to be before 11 years of teaching made me otherwise) which meant they'd just gotten up by the time we got over there, and we headed down to Katharos for a big, Greek feast.  It was kind of an overcast, cruddy sort of day, and Bronte was worried that it wasn't nice enough to sit outside, but the three of us have lived in Mongolia long enough that a little wind and rain ain't no thing.

After stuffing ourselves and a quick donkey drive-by (we wanted to be sure Five got that checked off her list), B and V drove us down to Ammoudi Bay.  We'd already told them how much they were looking forward to taking the hike from Oia to Fira that starts steps away from the Flower Pension, so they decided they should hike up the cliffs behind me to the windmills.  Five and Engrish were all for it (I, on the other hand, had eaten about two dozen dolmades within the hour previous and had a food baby to think of...I rode to the top with Bronte and Vasilis.  But the next time I'm in Santorini...)

I also sat out of the next day's aforementioned hike.  I've been to Fira before and Bronte and me had some catchin' up to do, sitting by the pool and eating yet more amazing Greek food.  That night, though, Flora had arranged for us all to go to The White Door, a dinner theater centered around a traditional Santorini wedding set in the 1940s.  Flora had been several times already that year, and had a blast every time.  This was a new experience for me, and even being foreigners and not that familiar with the culture we enjoyed the show.  Especially the part where we got to smash the plates.  Honestly though, the food was not as satisfying as I've come to expect from Greece, so I was happy to know that we were heading out to dinner (at the altogether reasonable hour of 9) later.

Where we met up again with B and V's friend, Kostas.  Let me be honest with you.  Kostas came to Katharos that blustery afternoon for lunch, and we all fell a little in love with him - cute, smoldering brown eyes, "the body of a Greek god!" as the mother in the White Door performance kept proclaiming.  I'm not going to try to justify the fact that all three of us were infatuated with the poor guy - I'll just say we live in Asia and leave it at that. 

I'm telling you all that as a preface to what happened next.  Five, who is the most reserved, most modest, least attention-seeking person I've ever met (I didn't nickname her "Mother Teresa" for nothing), agreed to go out dancing.  None of are exactly the busting-a-move type (although I do like a good hafla), but it was our last night in Greece and we were accompanied by the descendant of Adonis, so damned if we didn't go get our groove on, at least for a little while.  Finally Bronte and Vasilis drove us back to the Flower Pension, where we said some teary farewells (me because I love that yellow trash like my own sister, them because after weeks of me promising them how hot Greek men were, they'd finally met one and were feeling jilted that we were leaving) and extracted promises that they would come visit us in Mongolia.  Then we sat up for a while, packing and reminiscing and eating the baklava Bronte bought for me that afternoon on our joyride.

Chillin' With Chinggis

I continue to stand by my previous statement that getting there is NOT half the fun.  However, traveling with Engrish does have its charms, and in spite of the decidedly less attractive countryside, I enjoyed this trek a lot more than the one to Khuvsgul in June, largely thanks to her. 

For starters, she knows a helluva lot more Mongolian than I do, but she's even better at talking to people in English than I am.  As we left our luxury digs (that was sarcasm, there) in Baruun-Urt in search of adventure out on the town, we ran into a Peace Corps volunteer.  Pretty much every Peace Corps person I've ever met dresses pretty shabby, and I guess that goes with the territory, but I still thought Heath was just about the cutest thing I've seen all year, so when he invited himself to walk with us (apparently that's what you do when you're one of five English speakers living in a town - well, three times the size of Glenwood) we were happy to oblige him.  We did a pretty good circuit of the town, and he invited us to eat pizza with him and his four friends, but we ended up parting ways when we got back to where we met him.  At that point, a drunk Mongolian guy decided it was time to practice what little English he knew, and Heath tried to distract him as Engrish and I snuck off. 

Sadly, he was not a very good distraction, because the drunk guy kept trying to get our attention, and as a result, Engrish walked into a pole.  It made a nice "DONG!" and I would like to say I didn't laugh, but, well, I don't have an evil streak so much as an occasional good streak.

The most interesting parts of the journey I've already told you about.  After the aimag museum in Baruun-Urt there wasn't much left to do but roll over all the kilometers between us and UB.  We stayed in Khentii's capital the third night, in a ger camp that was actually closed for the season, but Enkhaa can apparently be pretty persuasive when he doesn't want me and Engrish to pay for a separate hotel room for him.  As we were driving out of town to it the sun started going down, and even my college drawing teacher, Gosnell, couldn't argue that this was "the big one."  I strong-armed Enkhaa into driving up to the ovoo on the top of the hill, with the above result.  Sometimes you get lucky and have perfect timing.

The capital used to be called Öndörkhaan, but thanks to Khentii being even more famous as the birthplace of Chinggis Khaan than it is for its bread, it was renamed Chinggis City in his honor.  Which seems like a bunch of dung (an excellent way to heat your ger in Sukhbaatar, by the way...) but it's kind of like Istanbul/Constantinople...it's nobody's business but the Turks.  Or in this case, the Mongols.  At any rate, we stopped by the Chinggis Colossus on our fourth and final day because while Engrish had been there before, after two years here I still hadn't.  If I believed in working for free, my TripAdvisor review would go something like this:

 Chinggis Colossus

Probably not worth driving two hours out of the city for, but an interesting way of breaking up the drive if you're on your way home.  7,000 tugs seems steep unless you desperately need to drop deuce and couldn't do it at the ger camp the night before due to a bird in the outhouse that just about gave you a heart attack (true story).  There's a giant boot inside made from about a billion cowhides, and you know what they say about men with big feet!

In fact, there is a large white statue of an...appendage...in the hills somewhere between the statue and Terelj park, but I'm not sure where.  As much as I would love to find it, I've embarrassed Enkhaa enough the two times I made him take us to see the small one in Kharkhorin.  One of these days I may have to rent a car and go looking.  Hopefully Engrish will be up for a wild goose chase...or perhaps I should say a wild swan chase.  As much as I love her, though, I still can't talk anime with her, so it was pointless to compare the blue skies of Mongolia to that of the Seireitei (I've moved on from Fairy Tail to Bleach).  I guess that's still what students are for.  It's nice to have a job I actually look forward to going back to tomorrow.

Harajuku Girl

As I've mentioned time and time again, I am NOT a fashionista.  I just want to put that out there so you don't get the wrong idea about me being in Harajuku.  I love the song by Gwen Stefani, and I might even have had it stuck in my head most of the day, but the actual reason I was in Harajuku was the fact that it's where the Ota Museum is, and they have one of the best collections of ukiyo-e prints in the world.  It's a small collection which constantly rotates to protect the prints, and photos aren't allowed because most people are idiots and don't realize you shouldn't use your flash in an art museum.  And it was one of my must-sees for Tokyo.

It just happened to be nestled between Omote-Sando and Harajuku, so I decided to make a day of it.  Omote-Sando is a neighborhood with a lot of cool architecture, so I decided to get off the subway one stop early and check out some of the buildings.  I don't talk about my feet a lot, but they've been in rough shape for - eesh - four years now, and pretty much every day I was in Tokyo I abused them, but what are you going to do?  At any rate, the buildings were cool, and it was a nice spring morning.

After the Ota Museum I decided to go ahead and prowl the streets of Harajuku - when in Rome, you know?  I pretty much saw exactly what I was expecting to see...

Although this little bit of sticker art caught me by surprise.  I didn't see a lot of street art in Tokyo, but finding stickered poles like this was fairly common.  It's probably easier to put a sticker on something without getting caught than it is to spray paint it.

A few years back, my friends Meen and Kate went to Tokyo from Shanghai.  They talked about how polite the Japanese were (for example, how they would wait for people to get OFF the train before getting on), and during my time there I noticed this as well (I don't think I even heard one person hawk a loogie!)  They also talked about how good looking the men were, and I can't argue with that one, either.  I am not the kind of person who notices men on the street, but hoo boy I did in Tokyo!  I've been in Asia a long time, and I've nursed a crush or two on Korean men, in spite of the fact that they're a little on the effeminate side.  I can appreciate Mongolian men, because they're tall and typically pretty well built, although they tend to be a little burly for my tastes.  I think Japanese men fit pretty well between these two categories - they're definitely pretty, but leave no doubting the fact that they are men.  I could get used to that kind of eye candy.  And just so you know, I did use this picture because it had a guy in it, but I took the picture because it had the subway sign in the background.  He isn't really typical of the kind of masculine beauty to which I am referring here, but I didn't go around taking photos of hot Japanese men because it makes me feel like a weirdo stalker.

Before leaving the area and giving my poor feet a break, I had one last place to hit - the Meiji Shrine.  This shrine is dedicated to Emperor Meiji and his wife, Empress Shoken.  Apparently this year is the 100th year of her "demise," and so there were lots of signs up telling about how wonderful she was, and how much she did for the Japanese people.  It was interesting to read about how they helped guide Japan into a more modernized mindset, and the shrine is in a beautiful park.

But the shrine itself didn't really leave much of an impression on me.  Maybe I wasn't looking at it the right way, but I just didn't think there was a lot to it.  I've been to some magical places - Fushimi-Inari-Taisha, in Kyoto, is my all-time favorite - and this just didn't hit that note with me.  Maybe it was the light, or the weather.  Or maybe it was the fact that I got told off for sitting on the ground, because the bench I was sitting on was so low that it really didn't rest my feet much, and they felt better stretched out in front of me.  Whatever the case, Meiji Jingu really didn't do it for me - I can take a walk in the woods any day I like.

Parisian Memories, Part Une

How do I tell you about Paris? How can I give you an idea of what the experience was without giving you a play-by-play, that may not be all that interesting? I'm going to try, but you may have to bear with me a bit.

I'm a wanderer. One of my great joys in life is to explore, getting to know new roads and being surprised by what I find. I look forward to getting a little turned around, seeing it that way rather than "lost." (I've actually only been lost once in my life, in Verona, but that's another story). RAK is not exactly a wonderland for wanderers. Even if it weren't too hot to bear half the year, there are not that many new and surprising things to find, so after three months being stuck up here, it was not just a pleasure but a great relief to be somewhere that I could wander. And wander. And wander. Even from the top of the Eiffel Tower you couldn't see the end of streets to wander down, and corners at which to make a choice. I find myself wishing that I'd had the forethought to bring a pedometer, because it feels like I walked 500 miles (and I would walk 500 more, btw). By the end of the second day I was going to bed with worn out feet and tired legs. Worn out and tired, but happy.

During my Friday morning wander as I was working my way from the Bastille to the Seine I found myself following the strains of a violin down a side street, and found myself in the tres jolie Places des Vosges, and the notes wafting over the air added to the ambiance of the park and the building and the statue and the rain. I've been a little deprived of live music here, as well - the little Filipino musicians in the bars sing their little hearts out, but it's just not the same, and when I snuck into the secondary assembly on the last day of school to see one of my Sunday school students play her harp, it brought tears to my eyes. I don't consider myself to be a big music fan, but I AM a music lover - re: I don't get caught up in the details of who and when, but the actual music itself has a power to derail my trains of though like little else does. For example, two accordion players got on with us at Bir Hakeim, and started playing a tune that Socrates assured me was Jewish, although I knew it from Girl Scout camp, and I almost missed our transfer. I don't think I've heard that song since I was nine years old, and yet, there it was! Now normally I have to roll my eyes at buskers...there's something a little gauche (which means "left" in French, as Socrates reminded me) about street performers. However this week I was able to appreciate the musicians - or rather, most of them. One lady got on the subway as Socrates and I were heading to Gare du Nord to see him on the Eurostar, and sang to her little music-machine-on-an-ajjumma-cart, and I was not impressed. At least the violinists, accordionists, trumpet players, and other assorted musicians that accentuated my trip with music had to work to acquire their skills. People, just because God has blessed you with perfect pitch doesn't mean you sing well. On the other hand, Thursday night I made my way up to the top of Belleville Park to a little restaurant called Le Vieux Belleville, where two men - an accordionist and an organ grinder - led us in one good old French song after another. We were having a fairly broken conversation before they got things started, and I told them that I knew one of the songs, Complainte de la Butte, so they put it into their set, and as we all sang along a young couple got up and waltzed. It was warm and magical.

Last thought for tonight deals with French men. I thought getting out of the middle east I would be free of the stares of men. Non. The first few days in Paris I was shocked by how many men randomly started conversations with me. And some of them were actually tall and good looking! Maybe I'm the type that French men go for, or maybe they are just more confident and play the numbers game. After I met up with Socrates it stopped, and wasn't sure if it was because I had a man with me, or if I just didn't look like a naive tourist anymore...I'm guessing the former, since Sunday after he left I told a man, "Pardon," on the metro, and he turned around and winked at me. If it weren't for the fact that - well-brainwashed midwestern girl as I am - strangers kind of unnerve me, it would have been a nice shot of confidence, especially paired up with Socrates' compliment that I have the potential to be quite popular with men. Too bad I don't care all that much for popularity.