Around Town...

Sorry for the severe lack of posting over the last week. I've been very busy with work and I'm still getting settled in (lots of paper work :-( and lots of shopping :-D). I've also, unfortunately, been pretty terrible about taking pictures (who knew??), so I still don't have any pics of my workplace or of my coworkers, but I figure I'll wait till school actually starts before I begin snapping. The kids here are on summer vacation now, although strangely enough many of them still go to school. Its really confusing, and I'll admit I don't entirely understand what's going on. I asked the Kyoto-Sensei (vice principal) at one of my middle schools, and she explained it as such: the kids have all of August as summer vacation, but they go to school in the morning for certain clubs (which are required) and in the afternoon they can choose to go to prep classes for the coming semester. A surprising number of students stay for the prep classes, too. All this week I helped teach English classes at Kamihayashi Chugakko (middle school), and we pretty consistently had at least 20 kids in each class. So, kids in Japan basically don't have summer vacation, and they seem to like coming to school. Weird. Teachers and students alike are always shocked to hear that Americans get 3 months off in the summer. I'm sure this is correlated with the fact that kids in America are over 2 years behind kids in other industrialized countries in math ability. Hmmmm...

Anyways, I've had a bit of time to wander and explore in my fair town of Murakami, and so far I like what I see. I've really only seen the south side of the town, although I plan to buy a bike on Tuesday so the north side should be much more accessible. Let me tell you about a few of the gems I found on the south side:

This is the first sweet place I found, a used record store called Beatnik. The awesome Jimi Hendrix poster immediately caught my attention, and I knew I had to see what was going on inside.

This is Natsu, the owner of Beatnik. He spoke a little bit of English, so between my broken Japanese and his crappy English we pretty much had things covered. The record selection in the store was stellar, and the records were all in beautiful condition and perfectly packaged (each one neatly stuffed into a plastic sleeve and labeled, all in alphabetical order and organized by genre). Natsu DJs in Niigata City on weekends, and he had some turntables set up in the store. We had a nice conversation about music, and I told him I really like reggae. Notice the sweet dub record he's spinning and the excellent pose he struck for me when I asked to take his picture...

A little further down the street I hear more reggae music blaring. As I get closer to the source, what I discover is:

SOUL. What I found inside was an awesome dude named Junichi (the owner) and a whole lot of Rasta stuff and day-glo art. Needless to say, I immediately fell in love with the place. The art was amazing, and upon talking to him I found out it was all done by friends of his. He called one of them to get a price, and the artist is apparently willing to sell for about 5000 yen (about 45 bucks). When I get paid, I'm definitely going back and buying some stuff to add to my collection. :-) Interestingly, later that very night I went to a party in Niigata city with a few other JETs from Murakami, and the bar the party was held at was also covered in the exact same artist's day-glo work!!

Continuing past SOUL I wandered into what is called "Old Town" and found some truly beautiful places. Like this pretty road:

And a Shinto Torii that marks this place as sacred:

An entrance to a Buddhist temple:

And ancient refurbished Samurai houses:

I continued walking through Old Town for a bit, and soon found myself in a little shopping district full of various tiny shops. I was looking for a birthday gift for my mom, and knowing she likes dishes, I decided to look through a few tea shops. The very first one I stepped into I was warmly greeted by the cutest obaasan (old lady) who immediately sat me down and poured me some delicious tea. She was very interested in me, wanting to know where I was from and what I was doing in Japan (and especially why I was in the inaka town of Murakami). Her granddaughter spoke a little bit of English, so she called her and her two friends out to help translate.


The people in this town are crazy nice -- it reminds me of the south. Which is why, at least so far, I haven't felt a bit lonely or scared. Sure, I get pangs of sadness when I think about the people and the places I miss, but this experience is showing me that wonderful people worth having in your life are all over the planet.