This was placed before me last Friday at the farewell party for a fellow sensei. "Douzo Joy-su!" My co-workers exclaimed. "How about Okinawa pig foot?" How about it indeed. chotto....
The absolute biggest occasion of the year for teachers in Japan is the End of the Year Party, occurring in late December just before the break between second and third semester begins. Community is important in Japan, as you know, and the work place is one of the most important in-groups to which people must conform. Therefore, you would have to be dead or dying to not show up at the End of the Year Party. And you would have to be very clever indeed to escape the social pressure to get utterly trashed and make a fool of yourself while at the party. Ginowan High is no exception to the rules. I had the good fortune of a good excuse for not drinking myself silly: a plane trip to Vietnam the next day. And from a sober perspective, the party was all the more entertaining. Above you see us all looking very stately (who knew what was in store?!) And below you can see bits of the glorious feast that was laid out for our dinner.
I had been asked earlier in the year if I was interested in participating in the dance performance at this party, but I had envisioned something like folk dance, or ball room dance, or I don't know what... so I had graciously turned them down. What a surprise it was, then, when several teachers disappeared in their suits and ties and returned to loud blaring pop music wearing these outfits:
WOAH! Super Mario, the Terminator, a drag queen, 3 santas, and... a man in pink plastic with socks stuffed in his drawers. I immediately regretted my decision not to be involved.Who knows what they would have dressed me as?
The curtain rolled aside, and a large cardboard box began to inch itself across the stage. I furrowed my brow and risked a quick glance from side to side at my fellow viewers. Everyone was sipping away on wine, perfectly at ease in their official suits and fancy dresses as the creepy notes of the Terminator theme song began. And the Japanese version of Arnold Schwarzenegger (by this I mean that he is wearing fluorescent pink panties... Japanese people can't have any kind of festival without putting the men in drag) emerges. It's actually quite funny that this particular teacher performed this piece, because he is the Discipline Teacher. That's right, we have a teacher whose only job is to discipline bad kids. He shakes them in the teachers' room, yells at them in the courtyard, walks the corridors menacingly during class and enters any and everyone's room in order to bop a sleeping student upside the head, shoot dagger-eyes at paper-airplane throwers, or generally speaking scare the bejesus out of Wrong Doers. I myself was quite frightened of him before the party. Now I just have to call up the image of the fluorescent pink panties.
Here, you see a member of yet another dance performance. This is a kendo (sword fighting)/PE teacher dressed as one of Ginowan High's female students. Those white bunchy socks he's wearing went out of style on mainland Japan like 5 years ago, but unfortunately still seem to be in full-swing at my school.
The Perfume River, Hue
One of the stops on our moto-tour was the most famous tomb in Hue: emperor Tu Duc (above). Tu Duc is not actually buried here. When he died, they buried him and all his treasure in a top-secret place. It was so secret that all 206 slaves who buried him here were BEHEADED. No one ever found Tu Duc's real tomb, because everyone who knew where it was died. Bad planning.
Above, a lake temple at Tu Duc's, and the mandarins that guard his tomb.
Here is a lotus flower floating on a pond outside a pagoda.
We stopped at a conical hat and incense making village on the way home. I talked to the woman making the hat in this photo about her work. She said it takes her an entire day to make one hat. But she makes 2,000 sticks of incense a day as well. One of these hats costs $1.
So, that's it for Vietnam! If you want to see more photos, just let me know and I can send you the link for my online album.
My Son (according to the Lonely Planet) was the most important Cham intellectual and religious center in the ancient Kingdom of Champa. My Son is the smaller counterpart to other famous Indian-influenced civilizations in Asia, like Angkor in Cambodia and Bagan in Myanmar. Champa was a kingdom that existed in the middle region of what is today Vietnam, and which warred with the Vietnamese to the north and the Khmer to the south, if memory serves me. My Son was occupied from the 4
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
#4: Mui Ne
12.27 - 12.29
After the Delta, we got on an open-bus and headed 5 hours north east, to Mui Ne. Mui Ne is a pretty quiet beach/resort area with a lot of interesting natural phenomena to visit nearby. These have come about due to Mui Ne`s unique micro climate. Mui Ne has only half as much rain as surrounding areas, and it is home to giant sand dune fields that work some kind of climate control. Mui Ne is surrounded by fishing villages (above is a shot of traditional Vietnamese boats. I saw people fishing in them, carrying vegetable loads, etc. Seem to be multi-purpose boats). In Mui Ne, we spent our days doing several important activities:1. Eating
As you may have guessed, much of our entire vacation was spent eating. But I feel we did remarkably well for ourselves in Mui Ne and Hue especially. We tucked in like there was no tomorrow. Mui Ne is also where we first really began to discover the joys of Vietnam
ese coffee. Coffee in VN is made through a tiny metal filter that sits atop your cup. The cup has about half an inch of sweetened condensed milk spooned into the bottom before the coffee starts brewing. Then, the very strong espresso drips out on top of the milk. The whole concoction is too strong for most westerners (or too sweet, if you make the mistake of stirring vigorously) so many westerners request a glass of hot water on the side, to dilute it. So delicious.2. ChillinThough we had one day of hardcore tourism in Mui Ne, mostly we were just chillin'. There were beaches, there were palm trees, there were motorbikes for some (Christina), and ice cream for others (Jenny). I got a midnight motorbike lesson from Chrissy but most of my bike riding occurred in Hue. I probably would have killed myself there if it hadnt been for this sole midnight lesson. The VN guy`s teaching method was `ok now get on! here is brake, here is gas, GO!` not much discussion of gear shifting or other important driving skills. Hm.
As I mentioned before, Mui Ne hosts some amazing giant dunes. There are two groups: the white dunes and the yellow dunes. We hired a private jeep and driver for a day, and got picked up at the unfortunate hour of 5.30am in order to arrive at the dunes to see the sunrise. 
A little kid from the house nearby climbed the dunes with us, carrying some plastic sheets that would serve as our sand sleds. Sweeeeet, sand sledding on giant dunes. This was my favorite activity on the whole trip. The dunes were very steep and very high, and if you threw yourself down right, you could build up tremendous velocity flying down to crash in a puff of sand at the bottom. If you had good balance (as the little kid did) you could dune-surf, but this was above and beyond my abilities. 
I wish we could have sledded more! Though walking back up the giant dunes wasnt anything that anyone would describe as fun.
After that, we hiked a bit in the Red Canyon (it is very red, as you can see in the photo). The cow picture I took out the side of the jeep. We kept getting stopped by herds of cattle moseying down the highway. Our driver, Ty, does not look impressed in the glimpse you can catch of him in the side mirror. After the canyon we were supposed to hike to see a waterfall. The only way to get to the waterfall was by walking upstream in a shallow river for about 20 minutes through an interesting white/red rock terrain. The falls were thoroughly unimpressive, but the river-hike was neat. 
Last but not least, we drove up to the peak of the peninsula to visit the fishing villages (above). Hundreds of boats dotted the water and shore. It was nice to get away from the touristy resort area and see how the VN people lived their day to day lives. Below are some more shots of the fishing village.
Woman carrying coconuts on Unicorn Island, Mekong Delta
I just spend 2 weeks in Vietnam during the winter break with my ALT buddies Christina, Amy, and Jenny (block #1 represent!) It was a great experience. I feel like we were there for about a month, and am completely muddled back here in Japan. I had the urge to haggle with the cab driver last night over the price of our ride home from the airport. I forgot how my cell phone works. Oh yeah, and I definitely forgot Japanese. But this is not the kind of stuff you are interested in…. onward with the interesting! Vietnam. I think the easiest way for me to give you the low down will be in installments. I'll just write about the different parts of the trip when ever I have time over the course of the next few days, and stick em up here with a few photos.
After Cao Dai, we spent 2 days in the Mekong Delta. Thats the southeastern portion of Vietnam, incase youre fuzzy on geography. The Mekong area is one of the leading rice producing regions in the world, having very fertile land. Many villages in the area are accessible only by boat. The delta area is also quite poor. Most of our time in the delta was spent on boats (motor or row) and islands. We went to a place called Unicorn island, where we got to hang with ginormous snakes (I wasnt as happy about it as I look in the photo), visit an outdoor coconut candy making operation, a bee farm, and a banana wine making place, all run by local people. After wandering around the island, we hopped into Vietnamese canoe-style boats to row back up the canals to our motorboat. Here are some shots taken from the canoe. This boat ride was one of my favorite parts of the whole trip. The little canals were covered with huge palm-ferny things, giving me the feeling that a dinosaur was going to pounce out of the bushes at any moment.
That night, we slept in the city of Can Tho. We were supposed to go to this one hotel, but they didnt have room, so we were sent to 3 different ones before we ended up in an old dirty shack of a hotel about 10 times less comfy than the one we had reservations at... but oh so much cooler. In the course of hotel hopping, we had been pushed off the normal tourist track, and found ourselves getting a real taste of the Mekong. We were the only foreigners at this hotel, the front room of which was a family run restaurant. 
When I say we got a real taste of the Mekong I meant it: we ate stir-fried snake at this restaurant. I found it to be quite tasty, though not everyone agreed with me there. The next morning we set out early to the famous Can Tho floating markets. They had already slowed down considerably by the time we got there (being full-bustle around 6am I believe) but it was still a lot of fun. People on little boats selling wares would grab the sides of our boat and pull themselves alongside, waving pineapples and such in your face. If you wanted a pineapple, theyd peel it right 
there in front of you in 2 seconds, in a pretty spiral pattern and hand it to you upsidedown so that you could use the stem as a lollypop stick of sorts to munch your fruit from. An entire stick o pineapple would put you back 12 cents. Was that an inflated tourist price?
Before you visit the tunnels, you are herded into a room by a soldier, and under a portrait of Ho Chi Minh, showed a video of real war footage from Cu Chi. As bombs fall in waves, villagers run for cover and Viet Cong shoot back on screen, the narrators voice speaks:
Trap doors leading to the tunnels are hidden under leaves, with separate mechanic opening mechanisms a a few yards away. In the worlds of Wiki, 
Viet Cong and villagers had to learn by heart. Though widened for tourists, the original tunnels were tiny holes, through which the smaller Vietnamese could crawl. Western tourists would never even fit into the holes, and even entering the widened holes was a horribly claustrophobic experience. I didn't make it to the 2nd or 3rd levels, I had to leave.
