August 23, 2009: A Night to Remember in Asahikawa

I arrived in Asahikawa yesterday around 10:30am. I officially got my Japan Rail Pass ticket, good for one week that I started to use today to make a surprise trip to my host family in Hakodate. My host grandma has a sister who lives in Furano and so one day she actually stopped by with her family to the café where I was WWOOFing. I was in the back cleaning veggies and someone told me that someone from Hakodate was requesting to see me and that for now I’d be a host. I thought to myself, I don’t know anyone, who could it be? And when I saw her, my face lit up and we grabbed each others arm and shook it hello. Awkward greeting, I guess, but maybe not so much for Japanese people. She even brought a present for me, cookies that she fed me back in Hakodate that I liked. Anyway, yesterday I went to Asahikawa zoo for about 2 hours. I paid 1500 yen for a ticket on the bus (as many times I want) and admission to the zoo. The zoo is really famous for the Penguin dance in the Winter. It was crowded, but I was able to see everything. They have this capsule fetish. You walk through the capsule and penguins are swimming around. In another exhibit you see polar bears through a capsule. Another capsule allows you to see monkeys that are sitting on top of the enclosed capsule and rubbing their lips and playing around. I also saw some animals I never seen before. There was a polar fox, a red panda, Tenuki (raccoon sort of animal), and something else that looked like a hairy boar squirrel thing. I haven’t seen flamingoes for a long time, so it was nice. I also went to the Hokkaido Asahikawa museum of art and walked into an interesting gallery of sculptures. And the park around the museum was so beautiful. The colorful flowers were lined up beautifully. Last stop was the pottery village. I had no idea what to expect from this place, but I wanted to go for some reason. I’ve had the experience once before of making Japanese traditional pottery in Hakodate and so developed a small interest. I want to make another piece of art one day. So I got on the bus and got off at the pottery village stop and was a bit confused. There was nothing but houses; it looked like a residential neighborhood. Village? What village? This was what I was scared of: finding nothing. I thought, maybe I’ll just walk around and if I can’t find anything I’ll go back to the bus stop and wait an hour for the next bus. I followed some signs with some ambiguous arrows and finally made it to the village, but most of the shops were cafes and most of them were closed. Since it was about 5:30pm I was worried the pottery shop might be closed as well. All the way at the end I found the pottery shop and was so happy it closes at 6:00pm. I walked in and found nobody so I put my stuff down and took a look around. There were so many beautiful pieces of pottery and they were so expensive and I wished I could buy them. A few minutes later a man came down and I apologized for being late. He seemed very nice. I asked if he made all of the pieces himself. He said with 2 other people, they are all hand made. When I told him I was from NY he disappeared and a few minutes later his wife appeared. He served us tea and his wife and I spoke for about 15 minutes. Unfortunately I didn’t want to miss my last bus, so I left. Hurriedly she grabbed something from their store and handed it to me, saying here’s a present for you, give it to your grandmother. It was a set of 2 chopstick holders: The round things that you set your chopsticks on. I have no idea what they are called. I grabbed a business card, gave them my email and we said goodbye. I sat at the bus stop marveling at the few pictures of the pottery that I took. As I was sitting and waiting for the bus, the old couple drove by. I waved and to my surprise they told me to get in. They said they would drive me to my hostel. I was so happy. Besides having no idea where my hostel was, riding the bus would have taken 45 min to an hour and it was running late the whole day. I asked them what their town, Asahikawa, was known for. They asked if I meant food, and I said food, anything, and they responded by offering to take me out to dinner. How could I refuse? I checked in, dropped my stuff off at the hostel, and we went to a pretty fancy Italian restaurant. We had dinner for about 2.5 hours. They said we should drink some wine and during that time I drank about 3 glasses. I was pretty tipsy, but that definitely helped me with my Japanese. I don’t know how I would have been able to keep up a conversation for 2.5 hours without. They ordered about 5 different plates that we shared. I was surprised that the food tasted very Italian because the cook was Japanese. The cook apparently didn’t even go to cooking school in Italy, or cooking school at all for that matter. He learned to cook in the kitchen of his home with his mother. The solo cook was also our waiter. He had about 5 tables to serve so it took a long time for us to get our food. During our conversation I found out that the woman, Chihiro-san is 70 years old and her husband (she called him Wan-chan, but I think that’s his pet name) is 54 years old. She brags about how she got a man who is 16 years younger than her. She was his teacher, taught him the art of pottery, and one day he asked her to marry him. These people do pottery for a living. These people are definitely out of the norm. I like that. The couple was born and raised in Asahikawa. The wife never went to college, the husband went to Tokyo University. He hated the big city, so he came back to his hometown. They’ve been to America and NY a couple of times. And when they went to NYC they stayed at the most expensive hotels (Marriot) and lived it up. They passed by Columbia University and so they knew of it. After stuffing me full of food, they drove me back to my hostel. The next morning I woke up before the sun rose to catch the earliest train to Hakodate. I plan to surprise my host family in Hakodate and see them for, most likely, the last time.