this trip was 5,000 yen for me, 20,000 for my wife since she's not a student at my school. long story short my end opinion is "it was boring as hell" but i still did SOME fun stuff. it felt more like 20, 30% fun, 50% riding in the stupid bus and trying not to fall asleep or get blinded from the sunlight, and the rest were various worries like 1. not being able to get any food to eat, 2. someone coming in the hot springs when i'm in there or something; that or boring stuff like listening to a speech in japanese (using a lot of words/terms i don't know and mentioning a lot of famous people/places/events i don't know, while pointing to things i can't see) about how to brew rice wine, and then watching other people taste various types of rice wine.

i "can" drink even though it makes me unable to sleep and i get hot immediately after drinking (i don't get nightmares, i just can't sleep) but even if we're not staying in the same hotel room, if my wife sees me take a sip or know i'm hanging out with people who're drinking, or smells alcohol on me and so on then she freaks out. So of course i can't drink any. and by the way i've already been in a rice wine museum which was a lot cooler and more detailed than this one. so then we're just standing in this cold factory watching 9 of our classmates (and some teachers) try out various kinds of rice wine while ignoring us.

similarly we went to a castle/museum where, as is usual in japanese museums, i couldn't read anything since the font was too small AND it was all boring shit anyway (3 floors of "so-and-so who fought so-and-so" in "such-and-such war"). the teachers had decided ALL the activities and restaurants and our meals without asking any of us what we wanted to do, so for example we all ended up eating at a ramen buffet where 4 out of 12 people in our group could ONLY eat white rice, carrots, oranges and grapefruit. We couldn't even get tea or coffee as that wasn't included with the buffet.

after we "ate" as much as we could there (the teachers ended up ordering us some french fries for us and after i ate 3 i felt like i had taken drugs so i couldn't eat any more) 3 of us escaped outside and started wandering around to look for a grocery store; instead we found that the restaurant literally right next to the one we were in had food we could've actually eaten.

and a bunch of stuff like the teachers saying "bring your money, you should buy food here!" except we enter and it's actually just a series of souvenir shops, no grocery stores or anything like that, so all the "food" is stuff like cookies, sauces, candy. which of course we can't eat.

the hotel was expensive so the staff were really snobby and didn't actually really listen to you when you talked. also it was really sexist (only girls get to choose what yukata they want; men have yukata too but only girls get belt-tying instructions in their rooms; girls pay less at the massage place or bar or whatever). you could theoretically do karaoke, go in a family bath or "private bath", get a massage etc but it'd cost you 2,000-3,000 for 50 minutes, it was closed from 22:00-8:00 and you needed to reserve ahead of time (in comparision, the cheap ryokan i went to in october had no karaoke or anything but the family bath was without reservation, had open hours and was free).

we did get to go to a candle festival (the festival itself was boring but we got to buy grilled sweet potato at least) and visited an "edo-style town" (completely thatch-roof houses, the shops sell various handicrafts and ramen), which was fun. but the edo town was really small and didn't seem to have anything else nearby, half the buildings at least weren't open when we went, and ex. the handicrafts weren't made by the people who actually lived there. i wanted to buy a rain hat but despite someone IN THE TOWN wearing the normal traditional style i wanted, they only sold weird styles!

in terms of japanese, i actually spoke almost entirely in swedish for the whole trip because the other 3 who had food allergies and stuff were swedes so the restaurants and hotel made us sit together all the time. the taiwanese guy who was in our hotel room doesn't talk so much and was ignoring us to watch some drama he likes, so i talked to the swedish guy instead. otherwise i was talking to my wife, stuff like that. on my wife's side of things, she got paired up with the swedish girl and estonian girl; one has anger problems and the other has "fake personality" and "can't handle it if someone isn't of the same opinion" syndrome among other things. so that went terrible and it would have been a LOT better if my wife'd been able to room with the taiwanese girls who think she's super funny and love talking to her...

by the way, one of the biggest shocks was after coming back from the onsen those guys were just watching tv: taiwanese guy on his computer and swedish guy on his smartphone. not talking to each other. apparently it was the same in the other rooms: the exchange students just all started doing "whatever it is they do when they're at home in the evenings alone". what??? HELLO?? i'm not the more socially-aware guy but i was very disturbed by this unsociable-ness... especially in the guy who claims he's super social and talks to random strangers about stuff all the time...?? this is our semester-end trip, this swedish guy isn't going to be with us for next semester for example (he's already married his japanese girlfriend and moved to another prefecture) so this is like our "last chance to talk". but i guess no one cared.

to do with japanese, two things happened:

A. a foreigner (american i think) i had never met before who's a teacher at our school and speaks really good japanese, saw me looking at a sign for dried persimmons and automatically assumed that 1. i couldn't read the kanji for persimmon, 2. i had never had one before and didn't know how dried persimmons were made, 3. i couldn't speak english. he didn't ask any of this stuff and i hadn't even said anything, he just launched into an explanation. i just said "yes, yes..." and then he didn't talk to me anymore after that. btw he never introduced himself to me either, not that i did to him.

i didn't like the vibe from him from the beginning, but by the end of the trip i understood what it was. he's the kind of guy who has a mental image of how a "professional japanese person" is supposed to act or talk and then he follows THAT, despite that the actual professional japanese people around him aren't acting that way. so his whole personality feels like it's not genuine. he was also trying to "run the show" in a few conversations later on where ex. one teacher would say "alright, thanks for today!" and then he acts like he's actually the one in charge of the whole group and HE says "thanks for today" and does a deep bow... despite that for most of the trip he was basically silent and it was definitely the other teachers running things.

that's my problem with the one swedish guy too, he acts like he's learned how you're "supposed" to act in japan, or what you're "supposed" to say, and then does that (while sounding VERY fake, although i think it's unintentional) and completely ignores that people aren't actually doing or saying that.

i mean, i understand following what you've heard from rumours in the beginning because you don't know any better - but very soon after arriving you notice, hey, people don't actually do this or they don't actually mind that, or this difference actually doesn't exist. but guys like this swedish guy DON'T notice that, so they keep running on rumours FOREVER --- which i completely don't understand, because how can your japanese be so good and yet you're so heavily influenced by like crappy misinformation you find on the internet?

in my case, i just do what i normally do and then little by little try to change to fit to japan's standards of what's acceptable. i don't usually lie about what i think or anything but i might not say what i think just because my japanese is too bad and it's a pain to try... but once it's good enough, i'll say it. it's like, i'll definitely change over time to become more "japanese", but that's not from forcing it, it's from just living here and being around natives in general since you just end up copying people around you little by little as you go along.

B. at the edo village an older lady gave us free tea and was chatting with all of us; afterwards the swedish guy (the i-know-everything-about-japan guy) came up and said "so did you understand what she was talking about?", i figured he meant if i knew the vocabulary for whatever it was the conversation was about, and said "yeah, in the beginning i wasn't listening but after that i got everything i think". he replied "see, dialects aren't so hard are they?"

what? first off, i didn't even notice she had a dialect. i noticed she said や instead of だ a lot, but that's such a tiny (and common) difference that it's not even worth mentioning; other people i overhear on the street say じゃ instead of だ all the time for example; at least one character is gonna say this in almost any series. second, i've never complained about dialects being hard, i've never said i can't learn them or something like that. i've learnt swedish dialects just fine and japanese ones are even easier than swedish ones (because, unlike swedish, there are DICTIONARIES, LESSONS and even WRITTEN MATERIAL for japanese ones!). it's him who constantly mentions to any japanese person he meets that he's "studying dialects" and etc. he's now been bragging that his mother-in-law can "only" speak in dialect and i'm like, MY mother-in-law can only speak in dialect! not only a "swedish dialect", that dialect is actually swedish mixed with finnish and sami! and by the way i myself can only speak in my native dialect, it just so happens that my native one is more or less the standard for the country.

well whatever. it's just annoying that people assume so much about my japanese when i haven't even said anything about it.

by the way, for the onsen this time they had you take your slippers off before the entrance and put them in an infra-red cleaning shelf thing, so you could see how many people were in the onsen at any given time due to the amount of slippers in the hallway. i waited until past midnight, then from 1:20 to 3:00 absolutely no one was there and i just went in by myself; i checked back at 6:00 and 2 people were there so i didn't go in again. i couldn't smell the sulphur at all though i could (eventually) feel its effects on my skin, and again the water was colder than the temperature i normally have in the bath. again the water was crystal-clear too. so there's really zero difference between a cheap onsen and an expensive one. btw i want cloudy water, not crystal-clear water... ignoring that i don't want people to look at me, crystal-clear water feels kind of inauthentic somehow.