I recently had the good luck to visit something I've been dying to do since coming to Japan - stay in a Love Hotel. These types of hotels are scattered all throughout Japan (even in small, seedy towns or where there's demand) and are infamously known, as the name suggests, for making love in. What makes them even more conspicuous is the ability to rent them by the hour, so you can quickly get in an get out. Prices usually go for 2000-6000 yen per hour ($20-$60), or you can stay the night (after a certain time like 11:00pm) from around 6000-15000 yen per night ($60-$150). So Love Hotels not only attract couples looking for privacy, but poor backpackers looking for cheap accommodations on par with hostels.

One of the reasons Love Hotels are so popular are because many of the rooms are themed! I'll admit, that's one of the reasons I wanted to go. You can get rooms decorated as doctors offices, subway carriages, dungeons, castles, outer space, underwater, cosplay, Hello Kitty, mirrors, glass, Egyptian, to anything in between. A lot of the rooms (depending on the price) also have things like saunas, massage chairs, rotating beds, flashing lights, jacuzzi's with built-in TV's, karaoke boxes, and flat-screen TV's. By the time I got to the Love Hotel it was already after 2:00am and a lot of the rooms were already taken, so I settled on an outdoor-themed one with wood paneling, and a ceiling with silhouettes of branches and what appeared to be a dead squirrel. Mm, romantic. Another amazing feature about Love Hotels is that, Japan being a sexually discreet country, everything is automated! You don't meet a single person the entire time you're there.

Here's a quick "How To" if you ever want to visit a Love Hotel:

- Rooms are chosen from a panel at the entrance with pictures of all the rooms. A lit panel means the room is available, and hourly and overnight stay prices are listed. All you do is press and hold the button until the light goes off.
- Enter the room but don't be alarmed when the door locks behind you. It's to keep you from buggering off without paying!
- Relax. Take a bath, watch TV, and enjoy the complementary toiletry. Don't forget to take advantage of the sex toy vending machine.

There's a panel in the wall with a clock showing you how long you've been in the room and the price listed near it. The more hours you stay, the more you have to pay, so when you're ready to leave you:
- Look for the pneumatic tube and plastic container (yep, like those ones you see in the movies!)
- Fill out the form next to the tube with your info, time you entered, and time you will leave.
- Put the form into the plastic container along with your money.
- Load the container into the tube, press the vacuum button, and off it goes!
- Wait a few minutes, they'll unlock the door, and you'll receive the container back along with any change.

Overall, a relatively painless experience. If you happen to make a mistake or don't know what to do, you can call the front desk (there is one, you just never see the person working there.. but I'm pretty sure they can see you 0.0) and hope they speak English. They'll come to your door looking down and shame-faced and will explain to you how to go about paying. Unfortunately, I didn't get any pictures because I had forgotten my camera, but hopefully next time I'll be able to provide pictures. In the meantime, go look up "Love Hotels" on Google Images to see more of Japan's quirky (yet awesome) culture.

Snow has finally hit Japan! Well, northern Japan at least. It had been carpeting the mountains for the past few weeks but it's only just recently reached the ground (without melting). We got 20cm of snow in one night with a forecast for a whole lot more. Look!

So yeah, I'm pretty excited because it means my love Yuki-chan is back and I can ride her all Winter. No you sickos, "yuki" means snow in Japanese, and yep, that means snowboarding! This year I'm especially excited because I've decided to squash the travel bug that's been nagging at me for the past year and stay in Hokkaido for Winter vacation. First, I've decided to become more financially responsible so I'm cutting down on my overseas trips. Secondly, this is possibly my last year on JET *sad face* and thus, possibly my last chance to get carve up Hokkaido's sweet, fluffy powder. So, I've booked off days for my holidays and have an unadulterated, unprecedented 24 days off for Christmas vacation! That means over 3 weeks of wandering the island in my trusty Shuttle, 24 days of traveling to whatever ski hill I fancy, and 576 hours of potential snowboarding (barring lack of sleep and ski hill hours of operation). I already have a backcountry snowshoeing trip planned, a trip to some ski hills for opening day, and a few days in a cabin in Niseko... oh man, I'm drooling just thinking about it :P* I apologize ahead of time if my blog becomes a snowboarding travel blog over the next few months.. but I don't plan on doing much else!

Happy Winter! Let's have enjoying snow!

What do you get when you combine ghosts, pirates, vampires, samurai's, street fighter characters, Jack Skellington, Bat woman, cross-dressing maids and Care Bears blended together for a few hours of all-you-can-drink at an izakaya topped with karaoke? The best Halloween ever! This year, I spent an awesome 4-day weekend with good friends under the neon lights of the Susukino district in Sapporo.

The Saturday night Halloween started out at an izakaya with a good mix of foreigners and Japanese, some experiencing their first Halloween celebrations ever. Of the 35 people there, I only knew five or six costumed faces and the rest being friends of friends with someone there, making it the perfect chance to mix, match, and meet new people. With the drinks and food flowing freely, our three-hour izakaya swiftly ended before it was time to head to the nijikai at a local bar. The night air was chilly on the way but I was comfortably padded from the cold in my Care Bear costume/pajamas, making a perfect heater for those who didn't dress in one-piece costumes (namely.. everyone). After making an obligatory showing and staying long enough to socialize, a few of us made our escape and headed for the nearest purikura booth for mandatory Halloween photos and costume-themed crane games. I didn't have any luck getting a Care Bear keychain :( We finished off the night with an hour of karaoke at a Halloween-themed karaoke bar (year-round, not just because it was Halloween) named "Thriller" and sang the spookiest songs we could think of.. like "Time Warp", "Monster Mash", and the song no Japanese Halloween karaoke is complete without... "Thriller"! There aren't that many Halloween songs, are there? It was past 3:00am when we finished, our costumes were coming half-off, and we were all tired so we said our goodbyes, went home to crash, and slept late into the afternoon.

The rest of the weekend was spent with Eliza and Saul playing in playgrounds that would never have passed safety inspections back home, going to my first maid cafe (which was surprisingly a letdown and just full of cigarette smoke and overpriced drinks) and cat cafe (which is a place you pay to go pet cats... weird, no?), the Shiroi Koibito Park (which was not unlike Willy Wonka's Chocolate factory with it's quirky miniature houses, bubble fountains, and random displays and statues), and a few hours at Leisure Sport where you pay for all-you-can-have-fun (!) playing arcade games, riding mechanical bulls, doing American Gladiators-type courses, shooting hoops, and jamming on a drum kit in the music studio. What made the weekend so great was just being able to spend time with awesome friends and hanging out in the big city for a change. It'll be a tough Halloween to top next year!

I remember when I was kid and going out trick-or-treating, trying to compete with my brothers to see who could get the most pillow case full of candy in one night. Some years we'd have a good haul and have to drop a full pillow case back home to grab an empty one, and other times my mom would drive us in the van with the side-door open so we wouldn't need to walk from house to house. Those were the good days. I wasn't so much into Halloween for the costumes or spookiness of the occasion. At that age, it was aaall about the candy. I remember one time when I was 12 and didn't have a costume so I cut two wholes out of a bed sheet and voila! Instant ghost costume. It kept slipping and wasn't very easy to wear, so taking my laziness to new heights I took off the bed sheet, bundled it in my arms and said "I'm a ghost but it won't stay on," when I was asked what I was, which was still good enough to receive the candy! I had fooled the system.

Nowadays, I can't quite go out trick-or-treating anymore but since being in Japan where Halloween is still a novelty, I can bring trick-or-treating and Halloween to Japanese children. Last year I was a mummy, but this year I decided to go with something a little different - a green Care Bear costume (which will double as a snowboarding outfit in the Winter ;). I've worn it a few times driving around in my car after I'd bought it, at the bar in Obihiro, and to teach some Halloween lessons at my schools. I also wore it yesterday for the Tokoro Kid's Halloween Party.

This year we had a small group of 20 kindergarten and elementary kids attend. For some of them, it was the first time they'd ever experienced anything as strange as Halloween. They came dressed up in their costumes, some looking like they were unsure what everything was about (like a little boy in a suit jacket and knee-socks), but was balanced out by all the other little witches, frogs, fairies, and the grim reaper with his inflatable scythe. There were events such as Halloween Twister, Halloween Bingo, a Halloween relay and... Halloween donuts-on-a-string (to substitute for Bobbin' for Apples). If the sugary donuts weren't enough to get the kids into hyper-mode, the night was topped off with a ghost pinata full of candy that they had to bust open with a baseball bat. I'm just glad we didn't have to deal with the kids after that.

After spending a few weeks teaching about Halloween, showing pictures of Halloween costumes from back home, and doing endless Halloween activities, the exposure has made me start to really enjoy this holiday. Back in Canada, I'd become indifferent to it after wearing costumes for Halloween since I learned to walk. But being in Japan and seeing it again through the eyes of an adult has shown me that it's not so much about the candy, but about dressing up and just having fun. Now I think it's fun to dress up for Halloween, and fun seeing the little kids enjoying themselves, and even funner running around in a green Care Bear costume handing out candy to random Japanese strangers on the streets! Ah, who knows, maybe I am still a kid.

Happy Halloween everyone!

Just when I thought my hiking was done for the season, I got an invite to hike another mountain with my friend Georgie a few days ago. This time of year, mid-Autumn, has already seen us with a light dusting of snow on the lofty mountain peaks so we decided to tackle a mountain slightly closer to the sea, Mt.Nikoro, at a breezy 829 meters. It was a short, brisk hike taking us three hours to reach the peak and back. Georgie's 50-year old Japanese friend, Kazumi-san, led our little group of multi-national ALT's directly up the mountain on the steepest path he could find, making it feel more like a military exercise than a relaxed hike through the forest.

The charm of Mt.Nikoro wasn't the beautiful, winding path that hugged the mountain or the gorgeous Autumn-colored trees, but the old Japanese man named Kisaku-san who has rightfully claimed the mountain as his own. His story, as told by Kazumi-san, is that he's a 75-year old man who lives near the mountain and climbs it every single day of the year, rain or shine. He also likes to take pictures of other hikers he meets on the trail and puts them on his self-made website. Kazumi-san knew of him from previously hiking the mountain so we timed our descent to run into him as he was on his way up.

When we met him, he was overjoyed at seeing such a mixed group of people. We had an Irish, an American, a British, and a Canadian.. not quite what he was expecting, I imagine. He took our picture, jotted down our names and info, thanked us profusely and then gave us his business card, told us about his website, and continued to tell us how happy he was. We definitely made his day! Check out what he had to say about us on his website (in Japanese): http://8805.teacup.com/nikoroyama2/bbs/1619.

If you ever come to humble Mt.Nikoro near Kitami in Eastern Hokkaido, look for Kisaku-san - the Old Man of Nikoroyama.

I'll be honest, I don't like zoos. They're depressing. A couple of weekends ago I paid a visit to the Asahiyama Zoo in Asahikawa. A few friends from Takikawa wanted to visit the zoo so I met them there with my friend Nikki. We walked around on an emotional low (I wasn't the only one to dislike zoos) to see the animals on exhibit in their cages, like glass displays of exotic pets. The most saddest polar bear I've ever seen was in a walled enclosure made of fiberglass rocks, like you'd see on a movie set, with a regurgitating waterfall for ambiance. To add to insult, they planted two separate trees to give a fake impression that somehow this was nature! I watched the polar bear, yellowed with age, walk back-and-forth from wall to wall with its head tilted to the left, probably waiting until next feeding time, and imagined myself living there for 15 years. A virtual jail! I'm not gonna go out and join PETA or anything, but how can you enjoy looking at owls and hawks that can't fly, or gorillas surrounded by concrete and steel, or a lone snow leopard in a giant bird cage?! I'd rather watch them on TV than see them at the zoo, thank you very much.

Sadly, by going there, I was helping to prop up this animal Guantanamo Bay. Not only did I pay to get in, but I bought a lifetime membership :P Seriously though, how do they get away with charging 800 yen for a single entrance fee and 1000 yen for a lifetime membership? Well anyways, I bought a lifetime membership... probably because I'll go back there in the winter when they let the penguins walk around, heehee, but then that's it! I'm throwing my membership in the fire.. or using it to pick the locks on the animal cages. I did like the Red Panda though, I want one (=^.^=)

In my little corner of Eastern Hokkaido, my town is being turned upside-down in a once-in-a-lifetime historical event. Gappei 2009! Today, my town has officially merged with the next town over to become the new Town of Yubetsu, complete with speeches, ribbon-cutting, and a flag-raising ceremony. With two towns of less than 6,000 people adjacent to each other, it made financial and demographical sense to become a unified town. With it, though, comes the upheaval of transferring town halls, re-electing mayors, assigning public employees to different departments, reallocating duties, changing addresses, designing a new flag and logo, and moving desks around. It's a bureaucratic fireworks show! With all the chaos going on, there are a lot of unknowns about how the two towns will deal with being one and I'm just a poor little ALT all caught up in the mix. The upside is that I currently have an awesome new desk.. but no supervisor. Luckily, my job and the schools I teach at are the same for now but come April Madness next year, that could change too.

Sayonara, Kamiyubetsu :(