ClimbingFuji

I haven’t written anything in a while mainly because there is nothing good to write about. I have been going to work each day and teaching English. On the weekends I just hang out with friends and drink. I also have been feeling a bit homesick lately and my Mom and Aunt were nice enough to send me some stuff to make me feel better. I also focus a lot more energy into studying Japanese since that was one of my main goals in coming here. I haven’t been learning as quickly as I want but my friends all say I am ahead of schedule compared to them. I can get a basic idea of what people are saying around me when put in context but I can in no way understand a whole conversation. Imagine being in a Peanuts cartoon where everyone is just saying whaaa whaa whaaa and occasionally you hear a word you know. Then I can respond in quick one to two word answers but sometime my pronunciation is off and they usually repeat what I say correctly. My friend Rhett said it best, "the only word you need for your first couple months here is Daijobu (OK) you can just point to everything and just say Ok?," we call it pulling the gaijin card and just acting stupid. This isn’t too far from the truth since I feel about 10 years old in this country, which I find to be so ironic since I came here to become a more independent and reliable person. I have learned a lot but I have a long way to go to become fluent. I have learned quite a bit and if I was home, I bet I could fool a lot of you into thinking I learned a lot of Japanese by ordering food with bad pronunciation and reading a Japanese menu.

So its vacation time for me. For most of you back home Obon is when we go to Mountain View to drink cheap beer and sake at the Obon festival. But here in Japan Obon is the week in August where Japanese get together with family to pay their respects to their loved ones that have died. The entire country takes vacation around the same time so prices for plane tickets and bullet train or Shinkansen rides are expensive. I wanted to go to Taiwan to visit Eric but the plane ticket was $1000 so I decided I should just wait until New Year's.

Instead my boys Rhett and Brian decided to climb Mount Fuji or Fuji-San is what they call it here! I figured it was one of those things everyone should do and sounded like a cool and relatively inexpensive thing to do on vacation. Climbing Mount Fuji is a lot like going to Vegas, everything is really fun and exciting until about the end of the trip where you’re just really tired and getting home is the longest and worst experience ever. Luckily Rhett is pretty good at Japanese and made most of the arrangements. Fuji-San is about 6-7 hours away and you have to take Shinkansen and bus to get there. We left Okayama around noon and got to Fuji at 8:30. I ran into some friends from training and we all went together. We started walking up the Mountain around 9pm from station 5 up to station 10. Stations 1 through 5 have a paved road leading to them so most people take the bus up to Station 5 and start there. Station 5 is at 2,400 meters high and Station 10 is at 3776 meters or about 8,000ft-13,000 ft.

So I heard that old people do it all the time and my student went last week and I figured a young strapping America lad like myself would have no problems walking up a mountain. But climbing Fuji-San was up there on my list of hard physically activities that I have endured. I definitely rate my Wrestling years, Black Belt test and 75 mile hike where I got burned a lot harder but this was no walk in the park. We walked for 12 hours straight and the climate changes were pretty extreme. At the bottom of the mountain I wore shorts and a t-shirt while I was sweating from the heat. At the top of the mountain it snowed and I was wearing 6 layers of clothing. Also the altitude made me dizzy and luckily Rhett brought cans of O2 which helped a lot. We watched the sunrise at the top of the mountain which was the highlight of the trip but it was so cold we just wanted to go back down right after. The way down was really tough too, maybe I’m just getting old but my knees were killing me. My days of feeling indestructible are definitely numbered. The ride home was equally as exhausting after staying up all night walking uphill. I didn’t get home until 5pm the next day so it was quite a long day. Here are the pictures of my glorious trek up Fuji-san. The local saying here is “only a fool will never climb Fuji-san and only a fool will climb Fuji-san more than once. I am no fool so check and check onto the next item on the list of things to do before I leave Japan.