白馬働き

My lack of recent blog-related activity has been mostly important to a fairly significant development in my schedule. As part of my study abroad program, everybody does what they call a "Cultural Practicum" for a month between February and March, which is just basically something out-of-the-ordinary from regular study abroad life. It can be anything from studying zen in a temple, teaching English in middle schools, or doing recovery work in Tohoku. The practicum that I've selected involves working at an inn for skiers in Hakuba (白馬), Nagano-Prefecture (長野県).

To give a little background, the city of Hakuba is where all of the skiing events were held during the Winter Olympics were held in 1998. Naturally it's a well known place for skiers both within and outside of Japan, and is has a sparkling, luxurious ski resort with all the bells and whistles right near Happone, the main ski area.

Map of Japan, with Hakuba labeled. It's almost directly northwest of Tokyo.

But that's not where I am.

I am working at an inn near the Iwatake Snowfield (岩岳), a sort of second-hand ski slope that's about a 5 minute drive away from Happone. It's functionally in the middle of nowhere (there is only one convenience store within a 2.3 kilometer radius, by Japan standards that's nowhere), and the city of Hakuba itself is pretty small as well.

A picture of the street near my inn. One of the perks of being in the middle of nowhere is the spectacular landscape (granted, I'll take a cityscape any day, but still..)

So what am I doing at a place like this anyway? Working. The basic agreement for this particular Cultural Practicum is that you get to stay at the hotel, go skiing, and eat breakfast and dinner for free. You just have to work for it.

A lot.

On average, my schedule results in about 10 hours of work per day. Every day. No weekends or holidays, just work for each of the 28 days that I'm here. The nice thing is that every day basically follows the exact same routine, so once you get it down it's not too bad (and that that also means that after I finish this blog post you'll know exactly what I'm doing for the next few weeks!).

So here's the routine:

Every morning at sometime between 5:30 and 6:30, we wake up and go start doing breakfast preparations. Along with rooms, the inn also provides breakfast and dinner for all of the guests, so we have to get that all set up. It's not buffet style, it's everybody-eats-exactly-the-same-thing-in-the-same-portions style, so we have to set out all the plates and load them with food. At 7:00 we open up and guests start coming in to eat. Whenever they are all done we cleanup, do as much setting for dinner as possible in the morning, and then eat our own breakfast. At 10:00 we start cleaning rooms, so if we get done with breakfast before 10:00 (we usually are done around 9:00), we get NAP TIME!!! (I never take naps, but here I accept them as a gift from the gods).

10 o'clock is when we start cleaning. This is pretty straightforward: fold up all the beds and sheets and whatnot, collect all the garbage, etc. There are two buildings to the inn: the main building and the annex. I almost always am assigned to cleaning the annex, which is the less-nice of the two buildings. The fun part about that, is that a large portion of our clientele is college kids going on retreats, and of course they always ask for the cheapest rooms. For those of us who clean the annex, that basically means that we have to clean up a college party. Every day. Not fun (but someone's gotta do it).

Whenever we finish cleaning (usually 12:30), we get our big break for the day. The next time they call us in is to prepare for dinner, which usually isn't until around 5:00, so the afternoon is to be enjoyed at our leisure. What does that mean? NAP TIME!!! Alternatively, if for some strange reason you are of the misconception that you have enough energy to not need a nap, the next logical activity is to go skiing. Luckily, I've come to learn how to time it to fit in both skiing and a nap, and so have hit the slopes here a few times. While I may have referred to Iwatake as the "second-hand" ski slope, it is actually a really nice area, and the view is absolutely spectacular.

View from the top of the Iwatake Snowfield.

As mentioned above, after the break we have dinner, which is basically the exact same as breakfast, just with a bit more cleanup. With breakfast me and the other workers just eat by ourselves, but after dinner we eat with the inn owner and his wife. I really enjoy it because in a lot of ways it feels very communal, and it's fantastic Japanese practice. With all of that combined, we usually get off of dinner at some time between 9:00 and 10:00 in the evening, leaving just about enough time to take a bath, maybe hang out a little bit, and then get some sleep before the routine starts over again.

One quick thing to clear up: The "we" I keep referring to isn't the Royal We, I have two roommates with him I do all this work. I'm literally with them 24/7, unless I decide to go off and do my own thing during the break. Fortunately, they're pretty cool, and I'd be going insane if I'd probably have died at the beginning if I didn't have them to help me figure out how things work around here. They are hardcore skiers, and so for them working here gives them free lodging and food so that they are near the ski area and can practice at least a couple hours a day.

All in all it's going well. By no stretch of the imagination would I summarize my experience so far as "fun", but it's definitely had some enjoyable parts, I'm constantly being forced to use and learn Japanese, and despite the exhaustion it's the kind of challenge I signed up for.

Dipping into Kansai

This past weekend Jeric (the other K College student in Tokyo) and I headed off to Hikone, a small rural-ish city in the area near Kyoto.

Why go to a random little city on the other side of Japan you ask? Well Hikone hosts the Japan Center for Michigan Universities, and a couple of our friends are studying abroad there and will only be in Japan for a few more weeks, so we wanted to visit them while we still had the chance.

As lovely as the trains in Japan are, they are not cheap when it comes to cross-country travel. The bullet train to Kyoto can get you there in about one and a half hours (which is wicked fast), but is outside of our poor-college-student-travelling-Japan budget, so instead we took a night bus. It was fine as night buses go...except for a small little issue that came up. When they were announcing over the intercomm when the bus would be making each of its stops, we heard the bus driver say 9:30 for our stop, not 6:30 (not that in Japanese there is a one-syllable difference in saying those two times). When I ended up waking up around 7, I asked the bus driver if he thought we would be on time for our stop, only to find that we had already passed it. But, being Japan, in any given region every city is connected by trains, so we just hopped of the bus, found the closest train station and made our way to Hikone.

One of the first thing that one has to do in cities like Hikone is rent a bike. Unlike Tokyo, there aren't trains and buses going every which way, in fact there were none. So, bikes it was. That actually became one of the best parts of the trip though. I had forgotten the absolutely freedom you can have when you have a bike. It's still significantly faster than walking, but unlike trains you can literally go anywhere. The first day we spent taking care of the necessary things to do. There is a castle in Hikone that is the obvious must-see for anybody going there, and we went to see our friends' campus and just get a better feel for the city in general. As with most trips, probably best shown in pictures.

Hikone Castle. Looks nice on the outside, but is way different from European castles. The inside was very stripped down and utilitarian, mostly just bare wood creating a system of different rooms. It was likely much more decorative back in the day, but for some reason that isn't preserved.

The various people we we went to Hikone Castle with. Dan (left) was our Japanese TA freshman year, Brenda (right) is our friend studying in Hikone.

After our touristic-efficiency during the first day, Jeric and I were all out of plans. We literally did the most minimal planning possible for the trip. He booked the bus, I booked the hotel, and then we just went there and figured stuff would happen. Every day that we were there we stopped by the tourist center several times, just taking a look at what there was to see in the area. Throughout the whole process we came to know the women working there pretty well. It got to the point that when we came into the building we'd say "I'm home!", to which she'd reply "Welcome back!". It was a lot of fun, and she gave us some great ideas for what to do the next day.

The first order of business on the second day in Hikone was to figure out how to get to Tagataisha (多賀大社), a fairly well known temple in the area. I use the term "area" lightly, it ended up being about a half-hour bike ride away, but hey that's the beauty of bikes right? And the fact that the act of getting there on its own was an adventure just added to the enjoyment.

A gorgeous stream going under the bridge that leads up to the temple.

Entrance to the temple grounds. This was one of the bigger temples/shrines I have been to. It actually had several different shrines, with one main temple in the middle and paths leading off to other areas.

By the time we had gotten to the temple and back it was early in the afternoon, and our friends were still busy with various study-abroad related activities. So after a nice long bike ride what did we decide would be a good idea? Climb a mountain. Yea, let's climb a mountain.

Another temple that was at the foot of the mountain. 

Jeric hiking through a bamboo grove that was along the path to the top.

View from the top of the mountain, overlooking the city of Hikone, some other mountain in the distance, and then Lake Biwa to the right. 

Once the mountain had been conquered, we met up with our friends and just spent the rest of the day hanging out with them and biking around more of the city. By the time we got home it was around 11 at night, and we were absolutely wiped out from the most physically active day that I've had in a good long time, but it was a ton of fun, and all the exercise got me really excited to start skiing soon.

Our last day there was equivalently busy, it just involved less biking. That day I had made plans with one of our friends to get lunch with her old host family, because through a happenstance I ended up Skyping with them once and they wanted to meet me. They were really cool and very nice, and I had a great time meeting them. In many ways they were very different from my host family, but you can definitely see the same cultural background that they all share. It's definitely got both good and bad parts, but regardless it's interesting how much of a person's foundation comes from their cultural setting.

After that we met all met up and went to an event hosted by the the Japanese cultural exchange club at one of the local universities (by local I mean it was only 45 minutes away). Upon coming to Japan, we were told that Waseda is one of the top private universities in the country. Granted, it's nice to hear that, but honestly I never held that much stock in it, I mean everybody knows about it, but everybody knows about all the universities here. It wasn't until that event that I realized how true it was though. When I first mentioned to somebody that I was a study abroad student at Waseda, all of the Japanese students in the immediate vicinity let out a synchronized "WHOA!". Needless to say, for the sake of preserving social balance I began saying that I was just studying abroad in Tokyo. Apparently, going to a rural college and saying that you are a student at Waseda is roughly equivalent to saying that you are a law student at Harvard and cure cancer in your free time. With Japanese universities, it seems like it really is the name that matters most. Once I caught on though and people got over the whole Waseda thing, I had a great time meeting all of the students there and mingling.

I ended off the night by going to Kyoto to meet up with a friend who is studying there, as well as an old TA of ours. It was nice to catch up with them, and we ended up doing karaoke which is always fun, not mention the fact that I realized I can actually crank out a good amount of songs in Japanese now.

Overall it was a great little vacation to cap off the end of the semester. It was fun to see old friends, make some new ones, and see a part of Japan that I had yet to explore.