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Published: December 18th 2006
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This is the piece of driftwood I found. I thought it looked nice on the stormy beach backdrop. Not too much has been happening recently. It's gotten pretty cold here lately, so I think most people are just trying to keep warm inside their houses. Even though this area doesn't get as cold as what I'm used to back in West Virginia, it feels just as cold because of the lack of heating. There's no such thing as central heating here (at least not on this island), so everyone uses these small gas stoves that are placed in the middle of the room. They have to be lit with a match, and seem a little out-dated in such a high-tech country. Most of the time it seems that the things Americans don't bother updating are the things that Japanese people make high-tech, like toilets for example. On the other hand, certain modern conveniences that I have always taken for granted in America are the things that are surprisingly outdated here, like heating for example.
The other day I was sitting in my office at the BOE. I share this office with the two head people of the board of education. They had left the office for a while, probably to visit their offices on the other islands, but
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testing out my creative camera functions. before they left, they had lit the gas stove heater. I was typing away on my computer and enjoying the heat for an hour or more before someone finally came in the office. It was my supervisor and he immediately ran to open the windows. "Jennie this room is full of smoke!" I didn't even realize that I was sitting in the middle of a big cloud of smoke and that the stove had turned black from the residue.
Since then I've been terrified of these heaters. I have the same kind of gas heater in my apartment, but refuse to use it no matter how cold it is. Not only do I fear the smoke hazard, but the one time I did try to use it, my whole apartment started smelling like gas, which didn't seem like a very good thing either. On top of the heating problem, buildings in Japan tend to not be insulated so well. So, whatever temperature it is outside, usually is about the same inside.
Thankfully, my beloved kotatsu has come to the rescue, being the only source of heat I have in my apartment. Maybe I explained it before, but I
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It was a really windy day, and it actually started raining on me on my way back home. So, wherever I tried to prop up the piece of wood, the wind would blow it over. It was tricky taking pictures in between gusts of wind. can't remember. A kotatsu is a low, coffee-type table with an electric heater underneath. The top part of the table lifts off so that a blanket can be put over the table, and then the top part placed on top of the blanket. People sit underneath the blanketed table with the heater on to keep warm. It’s ingenious! So lately, basically ever night has been spent under the kotatsu. Once you get under it, there's no escaping. It also has the magical power of putting you to sleep which doesn't work out so well when I'm working on my lessons.
Well, I could write a lot more about heating in Japan, but I can't think of a better way to bore all of my readers, so I'll spare you further details.
Other than being cold, I had a performance with my mandolin group last weekend. The small mandolin group on Yuge, with only four members other than me, is called “Mando Mundo.” “Mando” is just a shortening of “mandolin,” and “Mundo” is “world” in Spanish. They said the group was named this by a previous English teacher. On Iwagi, a nearby island, there is a bigger mandolin group.
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The sun shining through the stormy skies. So, we combined forces and volunteered to play at an old people's home (probably the only people who could stand listening to us) about a half hour away from here. We had about an hour's worth of music prepared, but a few days before the performance someone from the group said that there was a request for me to play a solo piece (with guitar accompaniment) on my fiddle. Ah! Thanks for the advanced notice! The song wasn't very difficult, and was really pretty. It was a traditional Japanese song that supposedly all the older people would know.
I practiced as much as time allowed before the performance, but as usual, I got quite nervous. I wasn't even able to practice with my guitar accompaniment until about an hour before the performance. When it was time for us to practice, the guitarist told me that we should just play the first half of the piece, because playing the whole piece was a little too much (even though I had been practicing the whole piece). My favorite part of the song was in the second half, so I told him I thought we should play the whole piece, and that
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Some of the group's mandolins lined up before our performance. We play the classical-style mandolin which has a pear shape, as opposed to the flat-back mandolins. I didn't think it was too much. Still, he insisted that we only play the first half, and that we could do the whole piece some other time. So I said "okay."
The performance went fine even though my E-string was a little flat and the guitarist sped up quite a bit at the end of the song. After we were finished, some of the ladies in my group asked if I was nervous. "Of course," I said, "I always get nervous when I have to play solos." They seemed surprised and said, "Well, did you see the guitarist? He was even more nervous. He looked terrified and played through the ending really fast. The reason he didn't want to play the whole piece was because he was too nervous!" It made me feel a lot better to know that someone else was nervous about it too. But everyone seemed to enjoy the show and I received lots of compliments and "arigatoos" from the audience.
After we drove back to Yuge, my Yuge mom, Misayo-san, who is also a member of the mandolin group, invited me over for dinner. We made some delicious tempura and watched the figure skating
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The Yamashita-sans under their kotatsu watching figure skating. Grandpre finals with her husband under the kotatsu.
The next day, Sunday, was cleaning day for me, but I start to go crazy if I'm inside my apartment all day, so I took a bike ride to my favorite beach. I found an interesting piece of driftwood there, so I took several pictures of it. It looked like a tiny red door with a little window in it. I wonder what it was used for. Well, now it's going to be used for decoration on my plant shelf back home.
Enjoy the few pictures!
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