Aaron Ackerson's Blog

The week before last was what is called Golden Week in Japan. From May 3rd to May 5th are three consecutive national holidays, giving us a 5-day weekend. The highlights of my Golden Week were on Wednesday and Friday.

On Wednesday I went to an event in Osaka called Intex Fair 2006 with Tomo and our friend Aodun (a girl from Inner Mongolia whose name is pronounced something like "ohd-tuhn".) There were several different things at the fair, including a large food court with venders serving many kinds of ethnic food. There was also a flea market where I bought an Engrish T-shirt, and an exposition with vendors selling various goods from many different countries. One of the booths was a Costco booth, which was giving out free passes to shop there once without a membership. This brings us to...

Friday. Tomo and took them up on the offer and made the trek out to Costco in Amagasaki. Being in that town was kind of surreal. In addition to Costco, there was also an almost American-style shopping mall and some other atypically-for-Japan large store in the same vicinity. Going into Costco especially made me feel like I wasn't in Japan anymore. I've never been to a Costco in the U.S., but my family does have a membership at Sam's Club, which is almost the same thing. Even though this store was in Japan, it was just like walking into Sam's Club in Matteson, Illinois, except there were a lot of Japanese people and some of the brands were Japanese. Everything was big, from the size of the store to the jumbo sized packages of food to the shopping carts to the tall shelves. There were many American brands too.

Even though the store was spacious, there were so many people (all pushing huge shopping carts) that the store was actually kind of crowded. It was probably because it was Golden Week and because its the only store of its kind for miles around.

At first we were only planning to buy as much as we could carry home by ourselves, but when we found out that they could ship stuff to us for a relatively low fee, we went nuts buying everything that caught our eyes. Among the things we got were dinner rolls, cranberry juice, lemon ice tea mix, Indian curry, nan (an Indian kind of bread which goes well with curry), and a lot of junk food, including cookies, a large pie, brownies, kettle corn, sweet and salty peanuts, and a case of root beer.

We didn't become members that day, but we discussed it, and we plan to go again some time and become members. Next time we'll probably be going with Tomo's friend Adams, who has a car.

Another thing I've done lately is made flight reservations to go to Chicago for summer vacation again. This time I'll be staying for all six weeks of summer vacation. Unfortunately, Tomo won't be able to go with me this time, but I'm still looking forward to being back home and catching up with my family and friends.

This year has gone really fast, and I have the feeling that next year will go even faster. And once it's over, I'm still not sure what I'm going to do next, whether I'm going to find other work in Japan or whether I'll move back to the U.S. Either way, I want to make sure that I make the most of my last year of JET.

Tomorrow, I'll be going with Tomo and Hunter to see two movies (V for Vendetta and The Da Vinci Code) in Osaka. We're also planning to have lunch at Kobe Ninnikuya.

Talk to you later.