In fact maybe I should make a table of contents for this post:
I. Aoyama Daigaku 青山大学
II. Nagoya 名古屋
III. Matsuri 祭り
ok, I guess it wasn’t as complicated as I thought.
Well, to hit it off I’m going to go with Aoyama. About one week ago I went to Aoyama University with my youth group from church doing a week of ministry there culminating in a big concert at the end of the week. The day that the pictures are from we went into the courtyard and sang worship music and handed out flyers for our youthgroup, then went inside and gave them snacks and conversed.
Aoyama~ a big and famous university.
The library
I have started to just use my camera phone, because the pictures are always the perfect size for posting on a blog.
woops. anyways, we kept singing ‘One Way’ by hillsong. over and over. my church friends will appreciate the significance of that.
one way! jesus!
We also did a balloon game as an illustration. They hold the balloons over the peoples heads, and when we put a lighter under them they pop. Except the balloon that has water in it, the scariest one, doesn’t pop. It illustrates that with the living water of Jesus in our lives, we can overcome difficult situations and not explode under pressure.
We did it again later (^_-)
Anyways, after that (it was on wednesday) I was busy till saturday morning, when I took an early ride on the bullet train and got to Nagoya around 11 am. Who was there to greet me but
MIHO!!! …at this moment we are in the subway, going to the Nagoya dome where the pride of Nagoya, the Nagoya Dragons (baseball) reside. And also a HUGE mall where we wanted to go shopping!
Look mom, they put the cats that we gave them up in their staircase! They also put the incense by the front door, but it wasn’t as interesting of a picture.
Dekaketekuruyo! (lit. ‘We are going to go out from the house and come back after a little while, guys!’)
The next day, we met up with my friends Inori and Izuna and we drove all the way to the beach! (about an hour) We went to a really really REALLY authentic seafood place. Like we passed our food swimming in little crates on our way in. Literally. I couldn’t BELIEVE how good raw fish tasted… I never believed it could taste better raw than cooked… but it did.
Left: Inori, Right: Izuna
LOL… big enough? I wonder how that happened… lol I even scaled it to 70%……..
I can’t describe how good it tasted… and the soy sauce was sooooo good. Even the rice tasted delicious, I don’t know how! It was the kindof rice that you have to eat in like 5 minutes or it gets ruined – all hard and cold.
Yes, there actually WAS a magical glow just like this in real life. and it WAS caused by the food. As for the fried stuff on the plate, the closest thing is a giant shrimp (ebi) and the second one is… PUFFER FISH!!! (fubu). The puffer fish had so much flavor… it was great!
Izuna is so pretty! but at that moment, all i could think about was that giant shrimp…. O.o
A great day! After eating, we went to the Japanese equivalent of the Tillamook Cheese Factory. Except this was kindof a rice cracker snack factory. But still near the beach with loads of free samples and a place where you can see them making it!
Okashi Okashi Okashi Okashi!!!! (snack.)
On the way out i grabbed a picture of the Umi (ocean)
Actual size of my cell phone’s camera’s pictures lol NANDE?!?!
We went to a bar/restaurant that night, just Miho and Izuna and me. They had really great tasting nachos there, the first mexican food i have tasted in Japan… I ALMOST felt like I was failing taylor in our Taco Bell not eat until we see each other pact, but I decided since it wasn’t taco bell and it looked SO GOOD I would have some. 
The NEXT day, Miho had work. No prob, I just hung out with her family the whole day! It was so much fun lol, me and Miho’s mom and dad went to her cousin’s house where I had the barbeque last time and picked up Miho’s Aunt, Cousin, and young neice and nephew. From there we went to a Daigakusai, which is a university festival, like the one in my previous post with Akie. This one was a bit bigger than the one at Takushoku though.
They were all really nice, and I didn’t have any problems talking with them… I think I have underestimated how much easier it is for me to understand the Nagoya accent than the Tokyo accent. When I got home to my host family after this weekend, it was like I suddenly couldn’t understand anything again, and I had to get my ears back in shape; lol. I think that it is a combination of Nagoya speakers (and Miho’s family) just talking more slowly and relaxed than my host family, and also the fact that Nagoya was the first place I went in Japan and she and her family the first people I really talked with in Japanese at all, so perhaps it is easier for me because of that. Anyways, it was a nice day because I got to talk about alot of stuff with them and they were all so impressed at my improvement since September! Quite encouraging.
This is Raikun, Miho’s nephew and that is his mommy, Ayaka, Miho’s cousin! We ate crepes, perhaps Rai ate more enthusiastically than the rest…
Miho’s neice and nephew doing the Ponyo dance… They do it EVERY time i see them. Multiple times. Lol! But they are really good at it haha.
That evening, I went with Miho and her parents AND her grandma (she may be old old, but still genki! (healthy)) We went to kind of a famous restaurant in Nagoya where there is this well known server lady who has attitude! She only talks in Nagoyaben, the kindof Nagoya dialect and she shouts at people and slaps you on the head and tells funny stories. Every time she came in she had the whole room laughing, but I could barely understand what she was saying cause it was so fast and in the Nagoya dialect… still lots of fun!
Miho’s mom and her brother on the left, who is a police officer! I asked him about the U-Turn laws in Japan cause I was curious — turns out it is the same as California. You can always make a U-Turn at standard intersections unless it is specifically marked that you can’t.
After dinner that night, they took me to Nagoya station where I bid them farewell, and boarded the OVERNIGHT BUS to TOKYO. It left at 10:50pm and arrived in Tokyo at 6:40am… The seats were designed for a Japanese person, so needless to say I was too big and didn’t get any sleep… But I took a long nap when I get home. Even though a bullet train ticket is 100 dollars, and the overnight bus is 35 dollars, i will NEVER take that bus again. NEVER. Just fyi.
After I had been home for a couple days (I brought home some rice cakes from the rice cake snack factory for my host family) my host mom and Yuka took me to a nearby festival after dinner. It was cool!
These things were a kind of decoration that you buy once a year. A shop has all sizes, from tiny to HUGE. My mom told me that your first year, you buy the smallest size, for perhaps 5 dollars. Each year after that, you have to go up one size. The last year, and the biggest size, (which was like as big as me) costs like 1000 dollars or up, i wasn’t quite sure. Also Yuka bought some buttered potatoes which they accidentally gave to her still cold, and she went back to ask for them to warm them up but we realized the guy working there was a Yakuza! (Japanese mobster) And we were kindof scared, but Yuka wanted her potatoes WARM gosh darnit! So, we got warm potatoes. 
Some shrines I saw while at the festival.
There were these musicians playing while a man dressed as some kindof lion type god did a really weird dance with a small ball of yarn. I thought I would snap a quick photo.
PHEW! Well, that pretty much concludes all the important stuff I wanted to cover! I didn’t say EVERYTHING, so if you guys have any questions or anything, just leave a comment and I will be sure to answer.
