Gaijin Desu Ne

(or, I suppose, Uniformity Part 2)

The exotic appeal of foreigners in Japan is at such a level as to be ridiculous by western standards. Over here my hair isn’t “blonde,” it’s “Golden.” I’ve had students ask me if I died my eyebrows to make them blonde. I’ve had a gaggle of school girls squeel “kakui!” at me when I took off my sunglasses and they saw my blue eyes. I’ve even had a woman marvel at my blonde arm hair and tell me that she wanted to shave my arm just so she could have the hair. All of these physical traits that are so quotidian in western society are aberrant here—are exotic here. At your first brushes with the reactions they elicit, you have to try hard to keep the reactions from swelling your head and making you feel like some kind of golden demi-god.

The reality is that these reactions are indicators of just how racially homogeneous—how uniform—Japanese society truly is. I’ve noticed this most when the on-the-street style reporters on Japanese news programs would ask average people for their opinions.

Every last one of the people interviewed was Japanese.

Back in Canada, you’d see a news spot like this, and the reporter would be getting opinions from all kinds of folks: from white folks, and black folks, and Middle Eastern folks, and asian folks. In Japan, all you’ve got is Japanese folks.

And that’s not just on the news. Wherever you go in this country, all you see is Japanese people. Racial diversity and multiculturalism are such alien ideas over here that when I try to talk about them, all I get in terms of a reaction are blank stares. Even when conversing with the few Japanese people I know who are, essentially, fluent in English, I get the furrowed-brow-head-tilt when I bring up the word “multiculturalism.”

It could be that I am keenly sensitive to this because I come from Toronto, and I am told that it is one of the most culturally diverse places on the north american continent (if not one of the most multicultural places on the planet). I was born and raised in Toronto, so maybe, to some degree, the normality of diversity was bred into me and I walk around with rainbow-coloured glasses on.

Regardless of whether I’m over sensitive when it comes to multiculturalism, it is a fact that Japanese society is pretty damn culturally homogenous. And it is from these seeds of cultural homogeneity that the apparent worship of the alien and the exotic grows. But It’s best not to let that veneration go to your head as the Japanese venerate the differences of the foreigner just as much as we north americans might venerate the differences of a lion when we have it behind plexiglass and steel mesh in a zoo. The exotic in Japan—that which deviates from the centuries-reinforced uniform—is a curiosity. It will always be held at arms length, no matter how interested the Japanese may seem in it. They will ask you all manner of questions to learn more about your exoticism, but the answers won’t endear you to them or provide some measure of understanding; they will only serve as further hallmarks of your oddness, and your answers will only satisfy a certain zoological interest in the asker.

Take, for example, the following interaction I had with some students:

“Pubic hair. Gold?”

“Sorry?”

Pointing to my head “Hair. Gold. Pubic hair: gold?”
Tracing a circle around his body with his index finger, making sure to include the nether regions, “Hair. All gold?”

And all I could do was shake my head. I thought about, jokingly, teaching them “do the drapes match the carpet?” but thought better of it, recalling how hideously wrong things went when my students tried to ask me about masturbation, and I tried to diffuse the situation by teaching them the English expression “what’s shaking?”

This was a specific instance, but it’s been repeated in slightly different iterations throughout my time here. Sure, these are kids, and they’re bound to be a little more gutter-minded and inquisitive than your average adult Japanese, but their questions are still evidence of the zoological impulse that seems to be suffused throughout Japanese society. It’s the thing that makes students squeal at blue eyes, and it’s the thing that makes women want to make dolls out of blonde hair.

It is the way the Japanese deal with departures from uniformity: the novelty intrigues them enough to investigate, but the difference creeps them out enough to keep the exotic at a distance.

And, least that seem like some kind of indictment of the Japanese as racists, I should make it clear that that is not my intent. What I took from all these brushes with the homogeneity—the uniformity of Japanese society is a glimpse of just how monocultural the society is. Part of our mandate here as JET/ALTs is to promote the cultures of our own countries in an attempt to “internationalize” the people in our towns.

As ALTs, we become the token, and—in a way—the proprietary foreigners for our towns/schools. The Boards of Education bring us over to teach their students English, but they also hope that we can teach the students a bit more about the world outside of Japan. And, witnessing the uniformity of Japanese society first hand, I can understand how very much in need of a little internationalization the people are. I hope that programs like JET are working on the whole and slowly wearing down the wariness that the Japanese seem to feel around foreigners/English-speakers. It’s clear that this society, founded on centuries of isolationism, has to want and accept the internationalization it seeks.

Without that broad acceptance and motivation to open its doors to the outside it won’t matter how many young foreigners you throw at Japan, it will remain a cultural island off the coast of the globalizing, multicultural Pangaea of the world.

Where They Left it Wild

Listening to Hawksley Workman’s brand new Great Canadian Songquest contribution on the way to work this morning, I forgot I was in Japan for a minute.

The Songquest was a CBC Radio 2 initiative to have 13 Canadian artists from the 13 different provinces and territories write songs to immortalize 13 salient places in Canada. The full list can be found HERE, you can find the podcast of the show HERE (and if it's not up now, it should be soon), and you can download the tracks from iTunes HERE. There was some great stuff in there, but, being a rabid Hawksley fan, I was most excited to hear his contribution, doubly so as the place he’d been paired with was Algonquin Park.

So I was listening to the live stream this morning (your yesterday afternoon), through the wonders of the internet, and I liked Hawksley’s tune so much that I went ahead and downloaded it from iTunes. It starts out as a haunting number, with a vaguely aboriginal beat, and it climaxes in an odd cheery bit with the vivid image of

the moose and the deer come to the side of the road
to eat the salt from the winter
get away from the blackflies
that will kill you come June

before receding to a single, unrepeated statement:

and you realize quickly that its easy just to die
when you don’t got much inside of you that’s wild…

And at that moment, I was no longer in Japan.

I was in Algonquin or Huntville or Mary Lake, or any and all of the cottages I’ve ever been to. I was thinking about the lakes and trees and granite of Ontario, and I had to will myself to remember Japan—and I was almost disoriented when I did. Now, sitting in the Board of Education office with Japanese being spoken around me, I still feel detached. One thing is echoing through my mind: the ghostly refrain from Hawksley’s tune:

It’s where they left it wild.

The experience has left me in a fugue state, my mind wandering and evaluating its identities: me the half-assed pagan environmental crusader, as I expressed in my Sacrifice of Nines bit about the Golden Spruce. Me the City Boy realizing that the City also needs the Wild, as Sarfaraz expressed well in his bit last week about the Bruce Peninsula and Canadian conservation. Me as a boy positively dreading trips up to my father’s cottage off Georgian Bay, where there was no TV and no toilet and no sandy beach and if the mosquitoes didn’t carry you away then the rattlers surely would. Me with my lingering guilt about never loving that cottage as much as Dad and Craig and Alton and Curt and Jill and Eric and Evan and Stephanie did.

It would seem that I’m finally coming around, though. Over the last little while, something in me changed, and I went from loving the city and wanting to spend my holidays in it to loving the city but needing to escape it whenever the opportunity presented itself. Maybe it was Amy and all her outdoor hickery, or maybe it was Lindsay and her house in the woods. Maybe it was a realization come of cottaging with my friends: that you didn’t need comforts as long as you had company and beer and a nice long-drop. Or maybe it was a part of my genes, a legacy from my father the woodsman that had lain latent all these years as I lived in the City, slowly waking and driving me further and further into the woods until my strongest escape fantasies while working a 9-to-5 job took the form of jumping in my car and blazing up the 400 and the 11 and 60—not stopping until I hit the West Gate of Algonquin.

And here, in Japan—with all of its other-worldly wonder of natural hotspings and mountainous volcanoes and aquamarine-blue seas—some of my keenest bits of homesickness come from memories of the lakes of Ontario. Me, the city boy, on some big Japanese adventure, pinning for the very woods that I couldn’t get far enough away from as a child. In my spare time, I find myself idly daydreaming about tours to Haida Gwaii or cross-Canada roadtrips with my brother, wherein Lake of the Woods is as much a destination as Vancouver is.

I’ve still got a long way to go before I wind up a woodsy hermit, squatting in one of the few remaining cottages in Algonquin. But the possibility seems to be more appealing with each passing day, and it’s little ditties like Hawksley’s that remind me of the fact that—like Saff touched on—I need the wild (and maybe the greater We of Canadians need it too).

And I “realize quickly that its easy just to die when you don’t got much inside of you that’s wild…”

Here are the lyrics to the Hawksley tune, if you’re interested. The Ragged reference made me, of course, think of Amy Thede as I wouldn’t know what Ragged Falls was were it not for her. If Simon Ze German is reading this, he should note that Ragged was the frozen waterfall we stood on in our snowshoes, in the dead of February, in snowy Algonquin.

Where They Left it Wild by Hawksley Workman

And on the highway 60 in the middle of the night
on the sides of the roads are the following eyes
and you listen for the calls of the owl and the wolves
and you hang back silent as they fall against the moon

(and you tell yourself)
It’s where they left it wild
It’s where they left it wild
It’s where they left it wild

and then I called to the moose and I called to the deer
and we married in a swamp as the night became clear
and Centennial Ridges tell a story by the lake
and the loon cries hard to the lover that escaped

(and you tell yourself)
It’s where they left it wild
It’s where they left it wild
It’s where they left it wild

and Ragged Falls pour as we tumble in our sleep
and we dream of the beavers who are clogging up the creek
and Tea Lake ripples to the softness from the shore
and you kneel at its beauty and you worship it alone

(and you tell yourself)
It’s where they left it wild
It’s where they left it wild
It’s where they left it wild

And the moose and the deer come to the side of the road
to eat the salt from the winter
get away from the blackflies
that will kill you come June
that will kill you come June
they will change you to a skeleton in the bold wind of June

And the moose and the deer come to the side of the road
to eat the salt from the winter
get away from the blackflies
that will kill you come June
that will kill you come June
they will change you to a skeleton in the bold wind of June

they will kill you come June
they will kill you come June
they will change you to a skeleton in the bold wind of June

and there’s no service here for your mobile phone
and we feel so close here, so far away from home…home…
and you realize quickly that its easy just to die
when you don’t got much inside of you that’s wild…wild…

ITADAKIMASU!

In Japanese elementary and junior high schools, students receive a free prepared lunch every day, delivered to their classroom and served up by their peers. The teachers at the schools benefit from the same system, though they have to pay for their lunches. Regardless, not having to worry about packing a lunch is a fantastic experience. And, what’s more, the stuff that they serve up at the schools is often above par when compared to the cafeterias of Canadian schools. I mean, it could well be the Japanese equivalent of cafeteria crap in the eyes of native Japanese. However, if that’s the case, we thankfully set our bar far lower in Canada when it comes to deciding what’s fit to serve our young, growing, academic minds.

The culinary abominations of my own high school cafeteria have left me feeling like Japanese school lunches are meals fit for a king. They all tend to be at least “alright,” and at times they even nudge into “good” territory. The fact that I don’t have to make them myself and don’t have to pay for them up front also does wonders for the flavour. And, at the elementary school, the school lunch is further improved by the fact that I get to eat it in one of the classrooms with the actual students.

And when you sit and eat with the students, you can really catch glimpses of their growth. The younger grades at the elementary hardly ever clamour for seconds, electing instead to feed them to big fat gaijin sensei (that would be me). Up around grade 4, the students start developing an appetite, and by grade 6 they are screaming for the left over scraps and fighting furious janken¹ wars for half a tempura shrimp. By the time the kids reach junior high, their bottomless teenage stomachs have them banging down the door of the teacher’s room on days when lunch is particularly good, looking for any scraps we happen to leave behind.

There's also the whole ceremony around lunch here. When you're eating in the classrooms with the kids, one of them will be assigned to the role of class leader for the day. This person usually prompts the rest of the class for greetings (every Japanese school period starts with students greeting their teacher, and every Japanese school period ends with students saying goodbye to their teacher), and I'm pretty sure this leader can be taken to task when the rest of the class is acting up.

When it comes to lunch, this leader is responsible for beginning and ending the meal. It begins with a raucous "ITADAKIMASU!", which is thunderously echoed by the rest of the students. It roughly translates to "thank you for this meal," but it is far more symbolic than that, referencing buddhist worship and the idea that an animal dying to feed you is one of the greatest sacrifices it could make. When you hear it every day, it starts to lose its meaning and becomes a bit of a joke as students bellow it at the top of their lungs, but as soon as you make the mistake of starting to eat before it has been said, you quickly realize how important this ceremonial element is (and that realization makes you feel like a big, stupid gaijin pretty quickly!). And, once the final student is done eating, the same class leader will clap their hands and yell "gochisosamadeshita!", which loosely translates to "it was a real feast!" and serves as the formal ending to the meal.

Just like with ever other pedestrian event in Japanese society, you've always gotta have an opening and closing ceremony.

In addition to sometimes being rather tasty, the lunches provide a degree of entertainment. Take today, for example, when I was served with a riddle, battered in a crunchy mystery coating, seasoned with some tasty enigma sauce. We got a 8-10” hotdog bun, a plate full of fried noodles, some of the awesome-fire-engine-red pickled ginger, and the meagerest scrap of Japanese bacon-cut pork you’ve ever seen. That last one, as we painfully discovered one hungover Sunday morning, is a clever ninja ploy that looks just like western bacon but tastes like a really skinny piece of pork. Yeah, it doesn’t sound so bad until you put it in your mouth expecting bacon, and you find out that it’s not.

That was my lunch, and just as I was about to set into it with the provided fork, I noticed the teacher across from me cramming the piece of faux bacon, ginger, and noodles into the big hotdog bun. I suspected this might be some clever ploy to make me look like the foolish gaijin barbarian everyone suspected me of being, but I looked around and saw everyone else was doing it. Apparently the carb-tastic meal was called yaki soba pan, which directly translates to “fried noodle bun” (duh). Why you’d eat fried noodles in a bun is beyond me, but that was the way of it.

¹Janken is the Japanese version of rock-paper-scissors. But, when compared to the intensity and form of janken, rock-paper-scissors resembles a series of aimless, spasmodic flailings.

Logofusion

One of the things that landed me in Japan—a thing that has sustained me through some of the harder stuff I'd had to adapt to over here—is my love of language.

Phrased like that, it sounds airy and fairy and very much like something a scholar would say. But that ain't me. I love language as a user and not as an academic. I get high on the communication. I see the words as valuable tools that slot into an overarching problem solving mechanism.

I love language when it allows for exchanges like the ones I had this weekend at the international festival that was hosted in Lindsay's town of Ishikari (just outside Sapporo).

Though Lindsay and Mark landed in the Canadian booth, my proposal for an Estonian booth was turned down as too eccentric, and I was assigned to the France booth. Apparently my fetal visit to the country and my French fluency qualified me. And according to Akemi, the festival organizer, my blonde hair and blue eyes make me the spitting image of a frenchman. So I threw on the closest thing I had to a beret and tried to class up my attire in a suitably Parisian way. To complete the package, I busted out my terrible French accent (terrible as it is accurate in a TERRIBLY creepy kind of way) and rolled my R's to Lyon and back for the perplexed Japonais. That had to be the best part as a potent, guttural, rolled R is pretty much the most linguistically foreign thing to the Japanese (with their R's coming out as a kind of limp fusion of an L and an R).

When I wasn't verbally terrorizing the Japanese, I delighted in conversing with some visiting scientists and researchers from a number of African nations. Their group had been invited to the festival through the same zoological impulse that inspires the Japanese to parade us whities around on stages and call it internationalization. But, when you start dealing in Gaijin (foreigner) currency, I'm pretty sure that the Japanese assign a little more exotic value to blacks than to whites (racist but true). Having a whole gaggle of African professionals show up, most of them sporting their traditional garb, must have felt like winning the internationalization lottery to the festival organizers.

For me, they were just an excellent opportunity to get back to using some of my French, which had started to wither somewhat over here in J-land. Though I was fortunate to have started studying a second language in kindergarten, when my mind was still young, supple, and a sponge for language (thanks mom and dad), I sometimes feel that I've only got so much storage space in my language-enabled mind. When I got over here and started using Japanese 24/7, my Estonian was the first to atrophy. I would boast about knowing Estonian to my students, only to have them ask me to speak some for them. I'd reach into the language-y parts of my mind, I'd try to switch tracks (the change from one language to another feeling almost that physical), and when I again opened my mouth I would utter linguistic abominations like "ma raagin nihongo keel."

Japanese had started to colonize the Estonian centres in my brain. When I tried to recover from these slips, I got a real sense of logofusion about it—feeling lost in the spaghetti of languages and words in my head. To get anything out in Estonian, I'd have to prefab the sentences in my head and deliver them carefully, assuring I didn't stray from my intended grammatical geography.

I worried that, given enough time, my French would start slipping away in a similar fashion: a casualty of my increasing Japanimation.

But, as I opened my mouth and spoke to these Africans, I just fell into the French. It was natural like swimming—instinctive like breathing. And, before I knew it, I was using words I'd thought I'd forgotten and phrasing sentences I didn't remember knowing. The change didn't seem laboured or physical at all as the kernel in my mind that allows me to dream in French just took charge. I fell so deep into the rhythm of it that when a particular man from Senegal couldn't speak English to the Japanese woman beside me, I had to consciously remind myself that I was speaking French, and I had to make a near-physical switch back to English.

Now, I don't know what that is, but there's a kind of power in it. Call it bilingualism or fluency, but the non-theoretical reality of it is understanding and communication. Such a cardinal thing was so powerful when fully realized at Babel that God would rather sunder the tower than allow man to achieve the further evolution beyond the barrier of language.

Ok, so maybe that's just me chasing down the myths that move me, but the tangible in it is the power of language. When you make a child bilingual, or trilingual, or quadrilingual, you only make it better. You give it a greater opportunity to problem solve and translate. You broaden its horizons and open up new worlds to it. When you give a child language, you change it's brain, and you make it powerful. I believe that because I have lived it. I will never be able to thank my mother and father enough for it.

And, should you ever be blessed with children, you should empower them with language, too. If you're in Canada, make it a priority to put them in French immersion. It doesn't matter if they have to take an hour-long bus to get to it. It doesn't matter if you can't French your way out of a paper bag (for all their touching effort, my parents couldn't!). It doesn't matter if they hate it and you have to force them to complete it. I guarantee you that, one day, they will thank you for it; thank you for the doors it opened for them—even if those doors are only in their minds.

Hope from the Future

If you worry about the coming Friday the 13^th, take heart. For, you see, I have already lived it, and I bring tidings of the future!

The day will be clear, sunny, and cold. You will delight in the company of children. No matter how you worry and fuss over the lessons you are to teach them, they will love you unconditionally. You will sup with second graders, and your heart will swell as they react explosively to the bizarre ways in which you can contort your face.

You will flow through the day like quicksilver, and the day will take you down unexplored paths. To the oubliette at the head of a staircase you’d never fully climbed, where its dusty windows will paint a perfect portrait of forest. Through the seemingly pointless door behind the stage and into halls of memory.

Into that long-lost kindergarten that you thought permanently bricked up. You’ll climb through piles of surplus and cast-offs, shoaled up where the waning currents of the still-active school dropped them: Rusted and dusted tricycles. A decade’s worth of stage props. Old bathrooms with pastel rainbow rows of tiny urinals, their drains fallen to the homes of spiders. And out past them, you’ll discover classrooms empty save for installation-art-like collections of dried driftwood on blue tarps, so bone-like that you have to look twice. And out past these almost empty rooms, you’ll move into those that truly yawn like voids, where not a crayon remains of the long-passed kindergarteners.

You’ll wander further still down these halls, seemingly back through time, until the stuff starts to shoal up again from the other direction, the detritus of the distant past. Artifacts heaped like museum stacks in a distant wing of the school. Huge rusting anchors, leering ceramic masks, and wood so old it’s gone to a cracked and dusty grey. And, at the end of this ancient wing, in a building that—from the outside—seemed only half this size, you’ll find yet another door. You won’t open it, though, electing to head back rather than chancing a fall further down this rabbit hole in time.

On your return, as you pass through that first door behind the stage—out of memory and back into the waking world, you’ll be picked up by students with the simplest of “nikorasu: come”s. You won’t know where they’re going, but you’ll know it’s somewhere you want to be as they’ll be carrying graduated cylinders straight out of science fiction. In their class, they’ll present you dried stalks of rice, and they’ll show you how to strip the grains from the grass and into your waiting hand. It will seem a profoundly ritualistic practice. It will be the kind of thing you don’t want to rush least you should spoil the beauty of it. Stalk after stalk, the roughness of the grains will build a callus on your index finger, and as you cup the kernels in your palm, their fine, hard filaments will prick like thorns.

Your pile of harvested grains will grow before you on the newsprint, silver-brown, and you’ll think of that art exhibit where the world’s population was represented in grains of rice. From the vantage point of this painstaking labour, where every grain is birthed from its stalk by your fingers, that metaphor won’t seem so far fetched. And when you take that small pile into your cupped hands and pour it away into the graduated cylinder—a beggar going backwards—they’ll slide like liquid and tinkle like rain on the clear plastic walls.

This will be your Friday, just as surely as it was already mine. But it’s getting closer to Saturday here now, so I’ll get back to working while you sleep, and I’ll continue sending you the sun.

For the Birds

There's a lot of weird wildlife going on in my town: from swarms of moths to massive murders of crows. This one's for Emily as it's about the birds...or maybe it's about Emily and it's for the birds.

Near the Furubira harbour, the ravens and the seagulls square off like rival gangs.

The seagulls lay claim to the sea and the port area, where the fishing vessels dock. Every day, what fishermen are left in this dwindling town set out onto the sea of Japan from west Furubira in their artfully weathered vessels. And they go with an aerial escort. Long wings of seagulls follow the boats out and perform winged wargames overhead as they compete for the right to the unwanted leftovers of the fishermen.

The ravens haunt the land-bound stretches of Furubira town, seeming to use the town graveyard as their capital. The image is so appropriate as to almost be cliché: the dark silhouettes of the ravens darting between the monolith stones of the haka, picking apart the offerings left for departed ancestors as if embittered about being denied the actual corpses.

However, beyond the town limits and up the flat valley that extends away from the sea, neither species dares to go. Here, wild, trilling cries decree the farmers’ fields to be property of the eagles.

Still, where land meets water—in that narrow strip of flat between the sloping, treed hills and the rolling swell of the sea—the gulls and the ravens overlap and vie for the marine scraps of this fishing village.

And they do well, the birds. Both the ravens and the seagulls in Furubira are someof the largest I’ve ever seen. PREHISTORIC big, they are, and there have been a fair few times that they’ve given me the heebie jeebies.

I can’t wait until this simmering avian cold war erupts. I’m expecting some all-out, bird-gang warfare: a birdy Battle of Britain in the skies over Furubira.

An Ode to the Chatti

As the cost of a car in Japan began to seem more and more prohibitively expensive, I started contemplating getting a bike. I wanted to get something reliable and hardy like a road bike in the hopes that, with some practice, I might be able to get into Yoichi (the bigger town down the road) with it for grocery shopping and the like. However, once I had decided that I wanted to get a real bike, I realized that I would have to go into Sapporo to get it as it seemed the only bikes that they sold in Yoichi and Otaru were Mama Chatties.

When a friend first warned me about the Chatti culture in Japan, I didn’t believe him. I assumed that only Obachans would ride around on those things. Worst case scenario, maybe some elementary and junior high school girls could be seen riding around on them. However, there was no way in hell that any self-respecting Japanese man would be caught dead on one of the things.

Then, very soon after I had arrived in Furubira, I was stopped in the street by one of the younger guys from the town office. He looked like some smooth operator straight out of an anime, with his styled spiky hair and slick black suit. He even whipped out a space-aged Japanese keitai so chunky and uber-masculine that you’d think the thing doubled as a lethal weapon when he wasn’t making calls on it. He was the very image of a virile Japanese male…

…except he was riding a Chatti.

I mean, it wasn’t as bad as some of them. It didn’t have the front basket or the mudguards on both the wheels. But the frame was most definitely powder blue, and everything metal on the bike definitely gleamed like chrome.

Initially, I tried to rationalize all the Chatties I came across as very old hand-me-downs used by people too lazy or too frugal to upgrade to something more modern. Then I came across my first Chatti shop in Yoichi. As I stared at row upon row of befendered, bebasketted two wheelers, I realized that the Chatti might as well be the official bike of Japan.

I still don’t get it, though. Is this another bit of Japanese Modernization Hipocrisy—like how the Japanese bank machines have in-built money counters for deposits that will even accept coins, but you’re out of luck if you want to find one that has the technology to stay open past 6 pm. This is Japan: the land that fixed the automobile and is currently working on replacing us all with robots. However, as far as the Japanese are concerned, the Bicycle was perfected in the 1950’s.

Japan: WTF?!

In related news, I did wind up picking up a road bike in Sapporo. I likely won’t be riding it for very much longer this year before the snow flies (Thus does my love affair with seasonal forms of exercise continue), but it has treated me nicely thus far and allowed me to explore a little more of the area around my town.

Most interestingly, I've used it to get up the valley that runs away from Furubira, up into the mountains to the south. Since Amy asked me what there is to see up the valley, I figured I'd take my camera with me.