![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Last few days -- aka Christmas sucks and today I saw a big mountain
Taking pictures of mountains from a train at sunset with a point-and-shoot camera is hard.
So yeah, Thursday was a holiday... and I spent it mostly just being bummed out at home.
Friday was the last day of the semester at school, the last time I'll see some of these kids. It was depressing and of course I've written it up in a friends-only entry. Despite that Christmas Eve is a night to eat fried chicken and some kind of cake with your SO here, I ended up buying a Big Mac combo from McDonald's instead. Not sure why, it just seemed as far as you could get from tradition on either side of things. Came home, and played PP to try to take my mind off school stuff, and watched a DVD of our chorus competition, too. I ran back to the station to buy a Seishun 18 pass that evening too incase I decided to go somewhere on Saturday (you have to buy it at least one day in advance).
But in the end I just stayed in Tokyo on Christmas. Mike called me in the morning and I talked to him for a while, and then I ended up going to Anrakutei for lunch, getting the 1000-yen yakiniku special deal thingy, by myself. Whatever. That was at like 3pm, and after that I did 2 hours of karaoke by myself because I had nobody to go with and besides I was feeling like doing embarrassing songs like Seiko Matsuda stuff which it's probably better not to subject anyone else to anyway. (Though I do still vaguely wonder what'd happen if I busted out something like Akai Sweet Pea in front of an actual Japanese person at karaoke. I suppose it'd be almost as bizarre as singing enka.)
Grabbed some bakery food and went home. I decided that I had this brilliant idea to use one day of my Seishun 18 pass to go ride the Minobu line on Sunday -- the weather was supposed to be clear and that line basically goes around Mt. Fuji. And since
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
laurainlimbo lives in Fuji, I thought that maybe I could time it to meet up with her, since I only know her on LJ, and she's also an ALT so we could commisserate. And it turned out that yeah, it'd work out in the evening, timewise. I had a bit of leeway for when to ride the actual Minobu line -- it goes from Kofu to Fuji, so either I could do Fuji->Kofu, or do Kofu->Fuji from 11:30-2pm or so, or from 2:30-5pm or so. I chose the latter because it'd put me in Fuji at a good time to meet up with Laura, and also, it meant I could sleep 2 hours later ;)So yeah, I rode the Chuo line out to Kofu (Akabane->Shinjuku->Takao->Kofu), getting there around 1:30pm, which gave me 45 minutes to get lunch. I also took a photo in front of this statue by the station, so now I guess I have proof I've actually stepped off a train in Yamanashi, even though all I did was the same exact thing I did last time -- wander around a little and eat lunch at McDonald's.
As it turns out, anyway -- despite that the Minobu Line essentially circles the western side of Mt. Fuji -- you can't ACTUALLY see the mountain for most of that time! The best view from that train is at Fujinomiya, which is basically like 4 stops from Fuji. Sheesh. And I hit that around 4:30, so basically at sundown. Not that the scenery was bad -- it was lovely countryside and there are other mountains in the area, so I definitely got to fulfill the aim of this trip that was "get the hell out of Tokyo and sit on a train going through the countryside and zone out and admire the scenery and try to not be sad about school". But the part that was "sit on a train looking at Mt. Fuji" didn't actually work out, which I probably should have known in advance but was lazy in my research. I'd mostly just wanted some kind of 10-12 hour train ride circle on a line I hadn't taken before, and this seemed reasonable.
Also, unlike some other 3-hour countryside lines I've ridden, which stop all the damn time at stations for 5-10 minutes so people can get out and stretch and take photos and use the bathroom or whatever, this one only had one major stop -- about 10 minutes at Kajikazawaguchi. There's very little there in particular scenery, but it's nice enough I suppose, and I got the station stamp and took a few photos too.
Here's the views of Fuji that I did have:
Near the start of the trip, near Ichikawa Daimon, you could see the top of the mountain poking its head out among the other hills.
Somewhere in the middle, after Kajikazawaguchi but before Minobu itself. (Minobu was a dead boring station actually -- I suppose that's fairly typical of a lot of these lines, the station it's named after is actually nothing special, just happened to be where a bunch of former roads/trams/whatever were united.)
I believe we were actually stopped at Fujinomiya station when I took this, or maybe it was the next station. I dunno.
So, whatever. Mountain FAIL.
At Fuji station I called Laura and she and her husband Masahiko came and picked me up (well, I went to Mister Donut to wait and had hot tea), and we went to Gusto, the random family restaurant that is everywhere, and basically sat there for like 4 hours hanging out and talking. It's kind of crazy because I don't even really know Laura beyond LJ, she's a friend of
bayareajenn's, and I know Jenn because her husband Tim was one of my best friends in college... yeah, the world has weird links sometimes. But Laura also works as an ALT, in Fuji City, and so after 4 hours of the two of us just basically talking about ALT stuff I came to the following conclusions:1) I actually was very lucky in my school situation, really (to be at the same place 5 days a week, with only 200 kids or so and 2/3 competent English teachers, plus that we split our classes into basic and advanced sections)
2) I actually had some fantastic wonderful students
3) You really do get out of it what you put into it
4) EVERY city's Board of Education has a screwed-up relationship with their ALTs and all dispatch companies are messed up in one way or the other
5) JET is just the best way to come to Japan and be an ALT. I obviously was never in JET but it was interesting hearing Laura say "well, when I was in JET" a lot of times, linked with "things are screwed up now".
So it was very therapeutic. I tend to babble a lot though and I looooove telling stories about my students, whom I already miss terribly. Laura had a lot to tell in terms of situations and stories too though, and Masahiko mostly put up with us babbling (plus they're wanting to start a small English school anyway so it probably helped him to listen to us). Mostly, it was just really nice to actually go talk to some people in real English. Have I mentioned lately how I often recently get confused what language is actually coming out of my mouth when I speak?
Anyway, I had originally figured on getting the Magic Train (my nickname for the 19:30 Shizuoka comfy 3-hour local to Tokyo) around 20:10, but we way overshot that and I was actually on one of the last trains I could take and still make it back to Akabane -- something like 21:25 Fuji->22:04 Atami, 22:08 Atami->23:whatever Shinagawa, and then 30 minutes back to Akabane from Shinagawa on the Keihin-Tohoku. I spent most of the Atami->Shinagawa leg of the trip researching Kyushu trains and have chalked up a sketch of what I'd like to do to basically circle the island over the course of 3 days and pick up all the prefectures I haven't been to, but it's kind of a tetsudou dream schedule and not the sort of thing normal people would do (so I'm not sure whether I can actually drag Benoit along with me).
And now it's 2am. Yikes. I'm going to school tomorrow and Tuesday, but it's just to clean stuff up and organize stuff more, so fortunately I don't actually have to be there at 8:10am :)
no subject
no subject
You got some pretty good pictures of Mt. Fuji after all! If you could come back again, we could take you to the lakes, where you'd get a really good view. And I wish I had more time - I'd come to Tokyo and hang out before you leave. But I will go back to work on the 6th.
stay in touch!! and again thanks for letting me know you'd be coming through. it worked out really well!