Last night it snowed, and apparently it didn't ever stop snowing. Recently it's snowed at night but nothing has come of it. This time it stuck. We have about 50cm (about 20 inches) on the ground, and it's still snowing. It's a very small and powdery snow. Hopefully it is also like this in Nagano, since I'll be going there this weekend to go snowboarding. A bunch of us are taking a trip there this weekend. It looks to be quite fun, but a little expensive, at around $200 for a two day trip. One night in the hotel is quite expensive at about $80 per person in double rooms. It does include breakfast and dinner though. We're renting a van for two days, plus we have highway tolls to pay for. I'm worried the roads are not going to be very fun to drive on this weekend. Hopefully the van will have snow tires.

A rather strange thing happened the other day. One of the students decide to bite one of his friends on the head. I don't think there was any bleeding, but there was a big fuss over it. Apparently the guys are friends and one of the boys was just being really stupid. They still seem to be friends now. I don't envy the teacher who got to call their parents and explain the situation.

So I have finally started writing about my trip. If I wait much longer, I'll probably forget everything.

DEC 21: I hopped on a train to Osaka early on Saturday morning, and transfered without problem to the Osaka airport train. Nothing too exciting with the trains. However, I arrived at Kansai airport about 4 hours before my flight due to a scheduling mistake when making the train reservation. I knew this would be the case before I left however. Kansai is an interesting airport, because it is built on an island (maybe an artificial one), and the airport is the only thing on the island. I didn't know this beforehand, and all of a sudden the airport train left Osaka and was going over the water for a long time. It was a bit shocking. I fantasized about the train going all the way to Singapore across the ocean. That would be pretty neat.

In the airport I wandered around for awhile and got some food to go eat in the terminal. Paul wasn't supposed to arrive for nearly two hours, so I had plenty of time to look at stores and the like. I found an English edition of Doraemon, a famous Japanese comic strip. The creator of Doraemon came from Toyama. The English book was very expensive though, around 20 dollars. I thought it was too much, so I passed on it.

After I got some food I went to the international terminal on the 4th floor and ran across a JET that I knew. Kristy also left from Washington D.C. like me. We sat near each other on the cross-Pacific flight and talked some. She is from Fukui prefecture, which is between Toyama and Osaka. A bunch of her friends from Fukui were with her. They drove down together, and were all taking the same flight back to San Francisco. Then they were taking different flights to their homes. We talked for awhile and I ate my lunch. Eventually they had to leave for their flight, so I said goodbye. I read for awhile, up until the time Paul was supposed to arrive around. I got up to go to the bathroom and ran into him on the way, so that was convenient. We checked in without problem, but not until I ran into two JETs from Toyama, Clint and Smijlka. They are Aussies who went to Thailand for the vacation. Many Toyama JETs were headed to Thailand for winter vacation.

Once we checked in, we found Paul some food and checked our email one last time. Boarding the plane was a breeze, and the flight was fairly uneventful. We got to see the movie "Signs," but neither of us was particularly thrilled with it. I didn't really get the point of the movie, if there was supposed to be one besides beating up aliens. We landed around 10:45 PM or so in Singapore. Paul and I heard lots of warnings about not bringing drugs into Singapore, because the punishment is the death penalty. However, once we got there, customs had the loosest security I've ever seen. There was no one there at all in the customs area. Even if you wanted to declare something, there was no one there to take your declaration. So we just breezed right through and figured out about money. We found an ATM and both got a little cash out. I brought about $350 in Japanese yen, but I wanted to convert that in Malaysia because the currency rate is better for the yen than for the dollar (it's fixed to the dollar). So I saved my yen and just got money from the cash machine. There is a subway system in Singapore that is very good, but it closed around 11:30, so we didn't want to try to fool around with it on our first night. Instead we tried to get an airport shuttle, which mostly seems to be a small taxi van, but they were all booked up since they stopped at midnight. We ended up waiting in a long (but quick-moving) line for taxis.

Our taxi driver was one of the fastest taxi drivers I've ever seen. He floored it the whole way to our hotel. It took a little under 15 minutes, but it was 15 minutes of speeding, passing, and tailgating. He made sure to let everyone know how much he didn't appreciate them being in his way by almost ramming them. It was a little scary and a bit strange, since he was rather quiet, and didn't appear to be filled with an unstoppable rage. Luckily, he got us to the hotel safe and sound. We had made an internet reservation at a place called the Broadway Hotel. It is located in Little India, and it cost about $35 or so per night for a double with air-con, tv, and a bathroom. We had a reservation for two nights. It wasn't too bad, but there were some cockroaches, and the bathroom floor needed cleaning (cigarette ashes in the corner). The reception wasn't too friendly until after we had paid. I think the first thing the hotel clerk said to us was, "You can't use the phones in our rooms." in a demanding tone of voice.

In Singapore everyone speaks English. In fact, I think it is the official language. However, their English is often a little bit strange. The accent is sometimes hard to understand, and they throw in new words. We had a lot of trouble understanding our hotel clerk, even though he spoke English. One phrase that always stunned me was, "Having here or away?" instead of "For here or to go?" in fast food restaurants. To say it properly, you must slur all the words into one big one that isn't really English at all. We figured it out after awhile, but even McDonald's says it in Malaysia and Singapore. We pretty much passed out once we got in the hotel room.

DEC 22: We didn't really have a plan for this day, except to figure out how to leave Singapore. So we began the day by walking. We walked all around the city, in fact. We had breakfast at a cafe called Mr. Bean's cafe. They had a fairly cheap English breakfast with eggs and sausages, so we had that. You can't really get that in Japan unless you make it yourself. Also, sausage means "hot dog" in Japan. They don't have any good sausages at all. We walked to Fort Cornwallis park (built on a hill), where we hoped to get a good view of the city, but that didn't really happen. There are lots of trees in the park, so it is difficult to see out of the park. There is a lookout tower somewhere according to the park maps, but we never made it there.

Next we walked down Orchard Street, which is a big shopping district. We went into several shopping complexes and Paul ended up buying a 128Mb Compact Flash memory card for his new digital camera (which is really cool). Hopefully I'll get some pictures from him sometime. We found lots of Swensen's in Singapore. If you don't know, Swensen's is a California-based ice cream parlor chain. They serve burgers and other stuff too. We used to go to one in Raleigh when we were growing up, but then it closed down. It's not common to see them for me, so it was cool to see they are popular in Singapore. I had root beer float #1 there. It was not that good though. Their soft drinks all had extra sugar in them, and tasted too sweet.

We walked for awhile down the street, then turned around and made our way to Clarke Quay area. It is another dining/shopping area on the river. Singapore's river is mostly just used for tourism. It has really low bridges, so I can't imagine they use it for much else. There are 101 riverboat tour companies on the river, but we didn't really want to go. It didn't look that great to be honest. We walked down towards the historic city center next, and saw lots of old buildings, etc. One cool thing we saw was across the river. There were older buildings with stores and restaurants right next to towering skyscrapers from the financial district. It was quite a juxtaposition.

The merlion was quite close at this point, so we figured we'd see the famous Singapore landmark. It was rath'er small actually. It wasn't tiny, but I thought it would be more impressive. We took a picture of a Japanese family and the man took our picture. Right after we took the pictures, it started pouring. It rained for twenty minutes or so. We hid under a nearby bridge with many other people. Once the rain died down we started out again, following the historic route towards the Supreme Court building and city hall. Once we were in an area with very little shelter, the rain decided to start throwing itself at the earth again, this time with vengeance. We huddled with another group of people at a bus stop, much to the dismay of the bus drivers who kept stopping and no one ever got on. After awhile, it cleared up temporarily again, and we decided to make our way to the Raffles Hotel and then head back home for a bit. We entered an underground road crossing area and somehow got turned around. We crossed the street going East instead of to the North. However, we didn't realize our mistake at the time. I thought it looked strange, but we just kept going. Soon we were not where we thought we were. We ended up in a different shopping complex and wandered through a bunch of malls. Finally we figured out where we were, and it was not too far from the world's largest fountain or something like that. So we decided to go see this fountain ourselves (it wasn't very impressive, since it was barely running). We managed to make our way a couple kilometers just going through malls and underground links between malls. You can cover great distances underground in Singapore once you figure out what to do. In one of the stores we bought umbrellas which we kept the rest of the trip. They came in quite useful. If we carried them, then it didn't rain. If we forgot them, then it always rained. They were really just rain-warding sticks.

Eventually we made our way to an MRT (subway / lightrail) and took that out to a bus station of sorts. The station was all outdoors, and mostly consisted of ticket vendors. We bought some tickets to Kuala Lumpur the next morning, but the bus actually left from a different place, so we had to figure out how to get there too. Our ticket was about $10 for a 5 hour bus ride. Not too bad, but way more expensive than in Malaysia.

We made it back to our hotel after weaving in and out of Little India. After a bit of rest, we went out to dinner at the restaurant adjacent to the hotel. It was mostly filled with other tourists. I think this is because there are cheaper places locals tend to go to. Sunday night is THE BIG NIGHT in Little India. Every person of Indian descent in Singapore was there. The crowd of thousands of people chatting in the streets was centered around our hotel. Surprisingly, they weren't too loud by the time we finally went to sleep. It was quite a sight to see. Everyone seemed to be getting along too.

We wanted to go to the Night Safari, a night-time zoo in Singapore, but it was raining off and on, and we were a little worried it would rain while we were there. We asked the night clerk what time they closed (it was about 8pm at the time), and he said it was way too late to go to the Night Safari, because it takes an hour to get there and they close at 10pm (not true actually. They close at midnight). He suggested we see the Christmas lights on Orchard Rd. So we decided to walk back to Orchard Rd. and we saw lots of lights and Xmas decorations. It was quite interesting to see some Christmas spirit, since Christmas is not big in Japan. We stopped at an A&W stand and bought root beer float #2 (#1 for Paul). It was about $2 and tasted pretty good. We wanted to find an Internet cafe to send our parents an email, but we didn't find one that was convenient. I told Paul we would find one in Kuala Lumpur instead. We stumbled across a grocery store and bought some food for the next day's breakfast. Our bus left at 9am, so we wanted to have some food to eat in the morning. The grocery store was interesting, because it had many different types of food, both Asian and Western. The night ended with us collapsing again, though we may have watched a strange and somewhat edited Chinese movie about a man falsely accused of attacking a woman. It was interesting, and a little funny. I don't remember which night we watched it.

New pictures are finally up. A story is in the making too, I promise. I'll probably put some more pictures from the trip up later also.

Also, Happy Birthday Dad!

I found out something interesting last night. Apparently I'm getting married.

I eat a lot at a Nepalese restaurant (once every couple weeks), and I know the staff there pretty well. The main waiter speaks English very well, and he tends to ask me lots of questions about English, or different things I say. Saturday night I went in to get some curry and he was there. He asked me when I was getting married. I said, "Excuse me?" He repeated the question, phrasing it a little differently. I thought maybe he was confused about Malaysia ('l's and 'r's sound the same to Japanese people). However, he said he wasn't confused, so I asked him why he thought I was getting married. He said that Victoria's parents had come all the way from England to meet me. (Note: Victoria took her parents to this restaurant during their visit, but without me). Anyway, I clarified that it didn't mean we were getting married, just that her parents came to visit for Christmas. I said that Christmas in many Western countries was a good time to be with your family, and that they just wanted to visit her. He looked pretty embarrassed, but obviously understood.

It kind of has me wondering if meeting someone's parents is the last step before getting married in Japan. So I found it a little strange, but I am curious to find out more about this.

A strange thing happened last week in Toyama. Someone found death threats against Toyama students on the internet. Someone posted somewhere that they were going to kill 10-15 elementary students soon. This caused a lot of fear at the schools, especially since nothing like this ever happens in Japan.

My school canceled after school activities for the rest of the week (Thursday and Friday), but that was the biggest change. However, I got a call on Thursday from the elementary school I was supposed to visit on Friday saying they weren't going to have English class. At the time I didn't understand why since I hadn't heard about the situation, but later that day Victoria told me about the threats. I don't know if they didn't want people going in and out of school (Victoria's theory), or if they thought I was the killer (my theory), but I guess they didn't want me to come. They also might have let out school a little early too. Many parents are still walking their elementary kids to and from school this week, just to be safe. I don't know if they ever caught the person who did it, since almost all the news is in Japanese here.

On another subject, I gave a short talk with lots of pictures about my trip to Singapore and Malaysia, and the kids were just fascinated by it. I thought they would like it, but they just thought it was the best.

I'm back. I made it home safe and sound. Tonight I also got the wireless router working well, so I now have internet at my apartment too! It's pretty darn fast, especially compared to the slow connection at school. Hopefully this will mean a faster posting of pictures and information about trips. Yay!

I had a blast on the trip, and I hope that everyone had a merry christmas and happy new year!