At arrival in Kanazawa

At arrival in Kanazawa – Seishun 18 (juuhachi) kippu day 1

I’m bone tired. I’ve spent about 9 hours on stations, trains, changing trains, waiting for trains, and at the end; waiting for bus and taking the bus the final stretch (read: “hill”; roads Norwegian-style – small and winding!) up to Kanazawa YH.

I got up at 7 am, checked out from Nagoya YH a little before 8, and walked 10 min to the nearest subway station. I took the subway 1 stop to Nagoya Eki, where I took an earlier train than I’d planned – which only bought me an extra change-over before my original plan caught up to me with the 11:03 train from Maibara to Omishiotsu. I’ve been on 8 different trains today (including the subway), had 7 transfers, taken 6 trains to their “end station”, and waited about 4 hours (239 min or 3.98 hrs) in total – spread over different places.

I wish I could say I had seen a lot of the Japanese countryside, or many interesting locals travelling on their own schedules, but for some reason I wasn’t really interested today. I spent most of the time letting my mind wander and/or dozing off. Having mostly 30 minute intervals I didn’t bother to get out my mp3 player; I’d rather be sure I got the right message from the station speakers, and they are difficult enough to understand at times.

Ofuro. More later. (…)

I’m in a Western-style dormitory room, with my laptop at the small floor table in its Japanese-style “corner”. I haven’t seen any rooms like this before, combined Western and Japanese in this fashion. This must have been a Japanese style room originally, refurnished with western bunk beds to add to the YH’s accommodation capacity. Most of the YH seems to be Japanese style, and I must say I absolutely LOVED the ofuro.

There are ofuros and ofuros, not all the same. They all have the same basics, many (ok, some) variants and varying degrees of quality and cleanness. This one was big, easily adjustable shower (engelsk for kran flertall?), and the bath itself was big, nicely temperatured (meaning HOT but not scalding), and last but not least; it had a massage current (or what else you may call it) placed to hit the middle of your back if you sit directly in front of it - which I found absolutely wonderful after 9 hours on (mostly) hard seats.

Feeling refreshed and listening to western music (daft punk & smashing pumpkins at the moment) I feel a lot better. Bathing in the evening is one of the Japanese things I’ve gotten used to while travelling. Many places (Ryokans & YHs etc.) only have bathing & shower hours in the afternoon and/or evening. This turned out to suit me perfectly, while travelling at least; you can take your time washing off after travelling, and feel a lot better and a lot more relaxed when going to bed, and in the morning you can sleep half an hour longer ‘cos you don’t have to jump through the shower before trotting off sightseeing.

I’ve tried to turn my day rhythm around, and to some degree succeeding, but I’m still an obvious evening person. It’s only 21:02 now, but it feels like I’m staying up late because my elderly Japanese roommate has gone to sleep already.

Last night I stayed up to 1 am, partly because I was packing my space challenged backpack, and partly because I’d spent parts of the evening playing Chinese checkers (with Chinese rules, which turns out to be a little different, but more challenging) with my 3 roommates. We were the same 4 girls for two consecutive nights, and being curious and about the same age we slowly tried to get to know each other, communicating with our very varying levels of English and Japanese skills. Skills ranging from Maggie (native Briton) who just started learning “hajimemashite – yoroshiku onegeishimasu” (VERY basic Japanese), to me (Norwegian) who tried as best I could to translate between English and Japanese (I was in an Intermediate class last semester), to Boa (Korean) who understood only a few words in English but is almost fluent in Japanese, to Tommi who is native Japanese and understands a few words but not longer sentences. We had a lot of fun learning Chinese checkers anew, this time with language barriers and hand gestures. (Maggie! I'll send you the pictures when I get to a stable internet connection!)

I don’t have much more to add at the moment.

Dewa, mata.
-Seshirie

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Back to Kanazawa recountations:
My roomate, an elderly japanese lady, keeps calling me Neesan (big sister), which, I have come to understand, is usually used by younger people to address older (but still young) people. It sounds different when it is coming from her, more like the grandmother recognising that I am someone else’s big sister (I did tell her that my brother – who is younger than me – is coming to visit).

I find her a bit weird. She is a sweet elderly woman, chatting with me etc, but she’s a little odd too… She mumbles and talks to herself, and has a horrible cough that I don’t want to catch. She talks about random stuff too, at least to me –what she says when talking to herself I have no clue – I don’t know exactly what to make of it, it can be just random, or it can be…weird… So far I’ve decided she’s harmless, if a bit bothersome. (Edit: the weirdness of that woman started to get to me, in the end she was just majorly creepy!)