My Thanksgiving Week Recipe...this year

Start Sunday with an old fashioned American stomach busting Thanksgiving dinner including stuffing, mashed potatoes, bread, (very) wild rice, cranberry sauce, green beans, and turkey gravy. Replace turkey with giant square of tasty tofu. Invite loads of Japanese friends who cannot come. Eat it all with two Americans after thanking the low table and tall flowers and mini pumpkins for friends, family, and fun. Finish it off with Love Pie (complete with homemade cinnamon nutmeg whipping cream atop warm pumpkin filling) and movie.



Go to work. Teach. Talk to young and old and everyone in between in a variety of languages. Connect. Brush. Make mistakes. Make improvements. Make your way through the wondrous business of people.

Take a walk through the park Thursday morning. Jump on the monorail and then the plane and then the bus. Walk the last twenty minutes. Find lunch and books in English. Get lost at port. Get unlost at port. Take first ever ride on Toppy ferry, skimming the water's surface. Arrive in Yakushima around sunset. Enjoy a casual evening with friends in a happy little traditional Japanese home replete with sliding rice paper doors, tatami mats, and foot warming kotatsu.

Wake up at 4 am Friday. Drive up mountain to begin day-long hike. Be forced to take bus up mountain instead due to fallen rock. About an hour of windy bus mountain rides and somewhat nauseous stomachs. Disembark as the sky takes on hues of dawn. Start walking. Walk until lunch through ancient forests logged eighty years ago if not earlier. Giant house-sized life-filled stumps speak of yestercentury. Trudge up thousands of rocks. Lug over endlessly entangled exposed roots. Hike. Walk. Hike. Trees tower. Baby trees tower. Arrive at Jomon-sugi before lunch time, four or five hours later. Giant naked cedar high in the mountains. Altitude: 1300 meters. Height: 25.3 meters. Trunk circumference: 16.4 meters. Age: between 2710-7200 years old. Take pictures. Begin hike back down. Loping down old wooden causeways, slick rock steps, slithering root systems. Have favorite picnic-in-Japanese-mountain-forest ever. PBJ and Nihon tangerine. Water. Smiles. Stand up. Remain standing and moving for another four or so hours. Clouds move in over the ridges, begin to drool their cool mountain spit on us just as the final leg of the trip concludes. Bus. Windy road. Car. Drop hiking gear (water, heavy shoes) at home. Accidently also drop bodies and eyelids for a bit. Dark out again. Legs so sore. Make way to town onsen (bath house). Get naked. Shower off the days well-earned grime. Step into sulfuric hot tub with soft rock bottom in dim light surrounded by the normal nudity of every woman's evening bath. Grandma and kindergartner wash and soak beside each other. Drag tired body out into the moonlit night. Pile into car with friends. Everyone's hair is still wet with subtle sulfur scents. Head to nearby town's Euro-Japanese-riverside restaurant for great meal, warm music, finish with ice cream. Get home. Roll out futon on floor. Pile on blankets. Sleep the sleepy sleep of broken old trees.



Eat Saturday morning's french toast. Make way to waterfall. Sit and listen. Wind along oceanside roads. Macaques rest in packs across the road, listlessly grooming and being groomed. Arrive at beach. Walk barefoot upon the big grained sand and into the cool ocean waves. Sit. Listen. Watch. Talk with friends. Walk with friends. Feel the broken bits of earth and life press every surface that rhythmically pounds the general direction of the road and the little manual Suzuki with steering wheel on right, parts of thanksgiving dinner in back, and sweet sunglass, owner unknown, resting on the back seat. Make it to Stewart's house mid afternoon. Britt and Mary enjoy the big kitchen, painted living room walls, and nice conversation provided by Stewart. Grace and Paul take off up the mountain toward Shiratani Unsuikyo Forest in Susie Suzuki. Grace brushes up her nonexistent manual driving skills around steep hairpin turns, meeting more than one looming tourist bus coming down and around the one lane road quickly and carefully right for the little red compact car. Japan. Mountain. One lane. Stick shift. Buses and cars and construction. Mom, don't worry :). Paul provides superb support from the passenger seat. Numerous stalls and startups. We, Paul and Grace, arrive alive and no worse for the ware, having completed adventure number 1 (ichi ban) out of 3 for the day. Part 2, explore the bowels of the mossy magical moving magnificent mountain did i say mossy stony rooty green tree-y forest. Across suspension bridge. Over rivers and giant boulders. Slither through green and furry intestines. Trees, stumps, rocks, lichens, mosses, decay, sprout, young lonely gregarious hungry dear fawn reign. The sun set early with on fall's watch. We make it up to the ridge and Tujitoge Pass in the area known as Princess Mononoke Forest 2500 meters up and into the heart of the beast. The sun is just rolling down the other side of the mountain, shooting hot yellow good-evening fingers up the far side of the ridge at us, showering the trees with gold before we all turn around for the night. Slip, slide, sache all the way back. A few late fellow hikers with big packs. Nods and smiles exchanged. Cross the footbridge with just enough light left to see the path and the moon rise in the purple and pink milk of sky that the sun, now behind us and the mountain, had left as part of the usual passing of the torch. Stare, slack jawed, at the sight of it. Sit rears upon quiet, dusky bridge to continue to soak it up through our wide-open, moon sparkled eyes. Hop back down the last jaunt of trail, step, and path in near-dark to parking lot where Susie Suzuki and the final installment of this day's adventures await. Put her in first and roll out of now empty parking lot onto happy black windy mountain road. The moon is bright and round. Glowing white in the dark blue sky as we put her into neutral and ride the ribboning rode back down the mountain to Stewart's house. Whip garlic butter cream cheese potatoes with fork. Share chicken, brocolli, cheesy gravy, corn, mashed potato, rice pudding, warm roll meal with Okinawan coworkers Mary and Paul, Yakushima ALTs Brittany and Stewart, and Stewart's coworker, a young Japanese teacher, Noriko (face warm, cheesecake delicious). Return back to Britt's after a few more hours of lazy socializing.



Awake at 5:45 am. Pile into Britt's lovely little red car and the quiet dark ride back to the port. Hugs goodbye. The moon has made an arching journey and is now on its way brightly behind the mountains. Banana bread for breakfast made the night before in the rice cooker provided in heavy wedges. The sun begins to rise, peaking over the slick sharp line between ocean and sky, and continues its roll up the the blue as we speed over the Pacific waters back to Kagoshima. Back onto Bus. Back onto plane. Back onto monorail. Walk back through the park, where groups of laughing elderly people play some sort of croquet golf. Goquet. Kids swing on monkey bars. Silly little city trees, rare to my neighborhood, encircle the long narrow sliver of place to play. All shapes and sizes, these things, trees. Walk a couple more miles. Past the cemetery. Up the hill. Into the apartment. Tenth floor. Tired and happy. Happy and thankful.

Visuals from the weekend.



Thank you family and friends. Thank you chance and opportunity. Thank you America and Japan. Thank you earth, water, sky. Thank you legs. Thank you airplane pilot. Thank you student on corner. Thank you Spring, Summer, Winter, Fall and Spring Again. Thank you Minnesota. Thank you trees. Thank you breath. Thank you big things. Thank you small things. Things I know and don't know. Things I will know. Things I'll never know.

Sakamoto-sensei, a teacher in the Junior high school math department and mother of three grown yet childless boys, brought her adoptive American daughters up north this weekend. I've been hearing about up north since I arrived. Okinawa is a very small island/prefecture, smaller than the state of Rhode Island. Anyway, in all of my byciclitic travels, south has been the popular direction. But north has been the land of dreams. I heard it was green there and open spaces. I heard I should go and that was enough incentive for me. On our way to Onnasan (the final destination), we stopped by Yomitan, a town where many artists from the Tsuboya pottery district in Naha City moved when the old street became too crowded.

Yomiton pottery village rests in the rolling hills of west-central Okinawa. Large studios stretch like mouths, open-wide and always chewing, working. There couldn't have been too many more studios on these many hundred acres than there were on the cramped street in the city. Most had multiple buildings with wide open doors and windows through which one can easily see busy, clay-splattered potters and shelves upon shelves of many hundreds/thousands of in-process pieces, barrels of glaze, kilns, and so on. There was even an impressive and enormous noborigama (climbing kiln) humbly commanding the top of a good-sized hill. Another interesting note is the presence of a famous/rogue glassblower, by the name of Ican't Remember who has been making is works out of recycled glass bottles for decades now and is beginning to experiment with clay as an additional element. There are pictures of all of these things and more when you follow the "my photos" link to the right.



When we finally arrived in Onnason, we turned right after a strangely spiral shaped cafe (which I might tell you about someday) and continued up a hill to our penshion/minshuki (cheap place to stay, guest house, bed-and-breakfast style). After a spot of tea, we were quickly shown our tatami (traditional Japanese straw mat) room upstairs, which was one of four small rooms above the first floor. It looked over trees and off to the East, to the China Sea. We opted to have dinner out this evening, but before walking into town, we toured the small farm plots further up the hill. There were pleasant, but it was growing dark and I was growing hungry. Dinner, walk, shower, roll out our futons on the tatami, read, sleep. I awoke to early morning light and eventually made my way downstairs, through the dining room, to the porch. It was chilly. There was a small boy playing with my fellow travelers a game of sea shell and coniferous needle. Things started to feel familiar. I pulled on my long sleeve shirt to welcome the cool breeze that seemed to come straight from the Midwest.

We were served homemade bread, tea or coffee, and homemade soup. They call it 'slow food' here. The opposite of fast food and relatively rare. It was rounded off with a fresh salad grown just up the hill. Things seemed right. A husband and wife (mother and father of the little boy who played on the porch and disliked wearing pants) maintained the pension, maybe made the bread, and did some of the farming. They were pleasant, interested, and unbusied. The wife, Hiro, retained some English from when she sheep-farmed in New Zealand during a mid-college break, and she and I discussed organic growing for a bit.

After breakfast, we rolled up our futons on the second floor, put them back in the closet, and took a walk up the hill where many things flourished. We found some wonderful plants, many of which we consumed parts. The sister (Ms. Misako) of the owner of the hill (including cafe, penshion, and farm, who was a friend of Sakamoto-sensei's and never appeared) arrived and showed us how she spun the cotton that she grew. And then we headed out to clean up the beach (something we'd been aching to do) with a gaggle of young children and their mothers. A handful of men were heading out on a kayaking expedition, a couple more were fishing aimlessly off the shore, and we ran around all of them with big bags and giant-tweezer-things, grabbing every glass coffee bottle and aluminum beer can in sight. I even found two toothbrushes, a large computer keyboard in perfect condition, and three popped balloons. Then we all headed back through town and up the hill, a party of about twenty or so, to medium-sized, garage-type building that sat amidst the small fields. And here we made one of the best meals ever.

We peeled and cut sato imo (country, as opposed to city, potatoes), ninjin (carrots), tamanegi (big green onions), and nagai gobo (long Japanese root-vegetable-thing-maybe-related-to-radish). Tofu, miso, pork, koniaku (a jelly-type substance made from potatoes), and water were added, in addition to a touch of cooking sake. This was all cooked in a giant metal bowl nestled amidst the brick of a traditional wood-fired kamado (Japanese stove) just outside the meeting quarters (garage-like-building). It was a multi-hour, many womanned event, but lunch was ready just after noon. Tea, soup, and gohan (rice) were served on long tables surrounded half by toddlers, nearly other half by mothers, and two young assistant English teachers. Later, nine Koreans took part in the meal as well. There was plenty of food for everyone and it was great. With our best (poor) Japanese, we made Ms. Misako and Hiro aware that we would be back again.



And then we left, walked through the sea at low tide to an island, swam back, and concluded our weekend up north we sea cucumbers, sea urchins, and one large blue starfish.



Okay, we didn't swim, we waded. But it was really windy and there was all sorts of liquid resistance on our calves.

The smell of the fire wafting from the stove, the rows of growing edibles, the running young, and tender old, it all reminded me of different parts, kinds, and times of home. Which is a little bit here now, too.

Teaching & Learning.

Last week, after trimming the few pots I was allowed time to throw the week before, Mary and I stood around a sturdy wooden table (the same light, glowing color as the rest of the studio), loaded down with large, plastic covered logs of soft red clay, trying to communicate with the guys that hang out at the studio with us. Well, someone needs to supervise the Americans and they had about five hundred tiny vessels to throw before the end of the month and we're strange if not entertaining. Shouhei made iced Jasmine tea and brought over some little snacks in a bowl his father threw or his mother painted or someone related to him processed in some way. The flavor of the dark colored, airy cookies reminded me of hotcakes and then maple syrup and then trees and mud and boots and those parts of woods in Minnesota I came to know over years of sloshing around with fifteen to thirty sap fingered seven year olds waddling behind and around me. But this was brown sugar and sugar cane, Masashi indicated with his just-short-of-comprehensive and well-paced English. While communicating, we used our hands a lot (which I might do anyway) and Shouhei has kindly learned to supply me with paper and pen to take notes of Japanese words I would otherwise forget the moment they're spoken. Over the last few weeks Shouhei's English has improved immensely (from nothing our first visit to broken but understandable exchanges yesterday). Mary and I, however, have remained relatively stagnant with our choice phrases and confused faces. After our first cookie and before our second, Mary “let it slip” that I studied Japanese for more years than I care to mention here (mostly because all evening I had been subtly goading her to reveal her crush on a certain handsome twentysomething Japanese man sooner than later). I studied the language slowly in high school, but the program died by my senior year. A few rickety semesters at the beginning of my college career were as quickly forgotten as those of secondary school. The boys found this news both fascinating and hilarious, seeing as I had up till now said as much in Japanese, if not less, than my blond haired American friend, who had only studied for four months while abroad in Tokyo. But after discussing my reasons for long ago unusual studies and current country visits deeper than before, they lightened my embarrassment with one fact that held more meaning than intended: “It's okay. You know, we all have to study it for six years before we graduate high school and many of us as adults don't know any English.”



I'm doing my best to learn Japanese. The Vice President's wife has recently offered a weekly tutoring session that will certainly aid the process I had otherwise decided would happen through personal study and experience.

I'm doing my best to teach English, which has more to do with conveying the joys of crazy people (like me and my love of pockets and trees, which everyone learns during introductions), understanding the difficulties of teenagedom, correcting insightful extra-curricular essays, discussing cultural differences, pronouncing sentences translated into English from Japanese (which always retain a few beautifully foreign sentiments) slowly and carefully, and being the non-boring/friendly moment of the day (I'm not great at this yet, but I'm working on making the fool in me as public in school as it is outside of school. For example, they got a kick out of my ninja moves last Wednesday. One student helped complete my Halloween outfit with a throwing star (shuriken=“hand hidden blade”) origamied out of his homework paper, for which I repaid him (and the rest of the class) with a glimpse of my quick and stealthy/probably shameful skills.). Many of these kids work really hard. Many don't. Some of them will use English later on, but for those whose lives it trickles away from, as Japanese did from mine until now, I want to make sure they get something out of my part in their day.

Teaching and learning is about communicating, however it's accomplished. Especially for those new to the field(s).

A little boy and his mother stood beside me while we waited for our turn at the crosswalk as I was riding my bike through the city the other night. The boy liked the flashing light attached to my handlebars. A smile from me spurred his mother's inquiry. Between our broken uses of each-other's languages, it was made known that one could buy it at a bike shop and it is slightly expensive.

I met a junior high student named Hallelujah at the English Society Halloween party last week. He is very sociable and speaks better English than I do with a better American accent. His face is round and kind. Halloween is not a big deal around here, but it is a bit of American culture some people like learning about.

I visited a renovated Ryukyu Kingdom castle on Saturday (please see 'my photos' in the links section for visuals), located in Shurijo Castle Park. It is within biking distance, at the top of a hill, looking down at Naha City. On my way there I was stopped by a colorful parade. After making my way to the castle and walking around the complex (it was the royal and administrative center for many hundred years—starting around the fourteenth century—then it was nearly decimated during the second world war, and finally, reconstruction began exactly fifteen years prior to the day of my visit) for a few hours, I hopped back on my bike, excited for the smooth ride down the long hill. There was still music and dancing in the streets. I recognized a teacher from school, but I couldn't quite place him as I guided my bike around the crowd, so he initiated a wave and we smiled and continued on our separate but intersecting journeys. (We gave each other nods of acknowledgment at this morning's teacher's meeting. It was him afterall.) On the way home, I stopped by the Tsuboya district where they were celebrating a few hundred years of pottery business on the same cobbled street. There was also traditional music and dancing there and I exchanged some busied salutations with friends. Later that night, I could see fireworks emerging from behind some faraway tall concrete buildings out my apartment window. There was more drumming the following morning.





It's been great to hear from ya'll. Please keep me updated on your one wild and precious life.