Out of the silent country

54 days into Japan, and the weather has seemed to been on a trajectory towards spring. But for the odd dirty iceberg left beached in the ricefields, most of the local snow has melted, exuming the pale, translucent bodies of hibernating vegetables. That said, today the air is once again mad with flurries.

It has been a rather hectic few months: we feel as though there has been a nearly unbroken stream of stress and busyness beginning with the wedding and travel planning, flight, jetlag, new job, setting up a home. It has been good. We are happy; just, a little tired.

So far, we have:

-been on one Japanese tour bus full of little old ladies
-frequented the hot springs
-visited an established school and hippie commune of Japanese craft-workers
-been nearly attacked by enraged monkeys in the forest (note Danny's photo to your left)
-been pursued by security guards after tripping the alarm at the Kyoto National Palace (Danny may or may not have been pretending to be a ninja at the time ...)
-been proseletyzed by Buddhist comic books
-eaten a leviathan's share of raw and eyeballed sea-creatures
-circled a smouldering volcano
-toured a temple with a local Buddhist pastor and his family
-sung the complete "Mamma Mia" soundtrack in lieu of an English lesson.
-been big-game hunting for Geisha in Gion

Danny's brother and sister-in-law came for a visit, and the four of us took a trip to Kyoto. A beautiful city, the former capital of Japan, and home to over 1600 temples and shrines. We spent most of the time happily lost, enjoying the southern weather and antiquity. We traveled by bullet train, stayed in a traditional Japanese inn, visited an antique sale, caught the emergence of the years first plum blossoms and lamented such a short trip.

Yet "the earth," insists Heidegger, "must once again be made a space in which to play".

With that in mind, we have both begun a drop-in pottery class. Saturday mornings, a potter whose English is only slighty more intelligible than our Japanese, lets us come use her studio and facilities. We can do or make whatever we want there, and she gestures and mimes whatever sort of teaching and instruction she can to help us. After a week of grammer and language lessons, there is something refreshingly primodial, prelingual about it.

Our leisure time, these days, is highly covetted, and we squeeze in what recreation we can: exploring the town, catching up on the reading we were unable to do during university and, before the snow this week, gardening. Despite having a wonderful school and relaxing work environment, supportive staff and ample resources, our schedules are rather heavy. Somedays, we are at school from 10 in the morning until 9 at night.

Some of these classes are borderline babysitting; however, some of our advanced and adult classes are profoundly interesting. We get the opportunity to discuss cultural differences, politics, art, linguistics, family values, and are priviliged to often very candid insights into Japan. Our students, also, have been most hospitable, taking us out for meals, baking us traditional desserts, buying us sake, taking us on outings.

So, an attempt to begin to reciprocate. Our dinner guests tonight (two of Natasha's students and their children, as well as another teacher from Edmonton and his girlfriend) were to be treated to middle eastern cuisine. Alas, there was not a lentil nor chickpea to be found in the city, so we have had to slightly shift the geography of our meal. And so it goes. Outiside, the snow has stopped and I can see a smudge of blue above the clouds.