Hrmm, so my brother’s trip to Nigeria has been put off because of TOTAL BATSHIT INSANITY. They’ll go at the beginning of summer if it calms down any… if not, looks like a village will have to continue getting its water from a polluted source hours away. It makes you wonder if those villagers support the sort of anger and hatred and rioting that’s going on enough so that they overlook the fact that no one’s coming to drill a well anymore.

Also had to get my car fixed. Last Wednesday I was driving to a dinner party and my battery light came on, which really confused me, since I had just gotten a new battery two weeks before. I pulled into a gas station and an attendant opened the hood, reached in, and pulled out a snapped alternator belt. They couldn’t do the repairs there, it was late and the engineer was out, so it was fortunate that I was taking my friend Madoka to the dinner party at Tammy’s, as we’re from the same town. She called an acquaintance of hers, who came and got it fixed up while we ate mexican food. However, he said that there was a second belt in the car that looked like it could give way at any moment, so had to bring it in to my original shop to get a pre-emptive repair. Took them a couple days, but the worst part was the paperwork upon picking the car up today… it took hours of my life as I sat with a dictionary tryin’ to figure out what the hell the forms said, since no one spoke english and my japanese is only good enough to discuss food. At least it was cheap… the emergency repair was 5000 yen, this pre-emptive repair was 840 yen. Nice.

This week will be a return to actual lessons. The past week was all exams for the students, so I literally sat around with nothing to do, having my only two lessons of the week on Friday. Having no responsibility sapped me of my energy, it was fortunate the weather was so pleasant.

So yeah, small adventures. I still have photos from my brother’s visit (almost 2 months ago now!) that still need postin’, so I need to make a point to just get that over with.

The sun came out today, and it felt like spring. I sat outside on a chair-shaped rock in the school’s garden, studying japanese for hours, absorbing the sun.

I am chloroplastic.

The sun came out. I’m in touch with my best friend after half a year, and he’s working in line with his dreams. My girlfriend is visiting in June for a month. My brother is going to Nigeria for spring break to bring water to a village. My apartment rests at the base of a mountain.

I know things are crumbling in the rest of the world. But right now, here, my life is good.

So here I sit, safely returned from Hiroshima, with my skin completely intact and uninterrupted!

My friend Madoka’s father picked me up, then we picked up Chang Wei and Wendy from Kaseda, and drove an hour into the city. We got some food, met up with the other 6 people in our group, and hopped onto a charter bus with a ton of other japanese folk that were heading out on this ski-trip package. The bus left at 9pm, and we drove for NINE HOURS up to Hiroshima (the place where we… you know… ugh). The mountain ranges there are much older than the ones in Kagoshima, and so they’re not quite as steep, more suitable for barrelling down on bits of wood. I was fortunate and got two seats to myself, but the sleeping was still miserable, and I was tired and a bit sore before I had even hit the slopes.

We ate breakfast (dammit, I thought the egg was hard-boiled! sadly, it was cold and soft-boiled) and then got geared up. I spent about 2 hours in the little beginner bunny hill, falling on my arse over and over again, struggling to even stand up in the snow.

After a lesson with two japanese young people that spoke decent english, (and two hours of trial and error) we went up the lift and slowly worked our way down one of the slopes. After a bit more practice, I was snowboarding with relative uprightedness! Of course, there were many spills, including one wicked one where I managed to fly forward through the air for what felt like ten yards, landing squarely on my face. Had it not been extremely powdery, I would’ve probably broken my nose and teeth.

I haven’t been on many snow trips like that, but I can’t imagine the experience was all that different from skiing anywhere else in the world. Except maybe the nakey-time onsen after the day was done and the fish-and-raw-egg-on-rice breakfast. And the swarms of japanese folk. it was funny, a couple of japanese girls from Kagoshima came with us (well, they organized the trip, really), and on the second day of skiing they wore noticeably more makeup. This is probably because they saw all the other girls on the slopes wearing ridiculous amounts of makeup, tryin’ to look all hot. But maybe this is common on ski slopes everywhere in the world, I don’t know.

So yeah, excellent time, I will definitely continue snowboarding casually when I get back to the States… maybe even go once more while i’m here. I am, of course, unspeakably sore today… its ridiculous. I can hardly put my jacket on, it stretches muscles I didn’t know I had. But I didnt really feel any of it ’til I was well back from snowboarding.

Hooray for fun!

I’m going snowboarding for the first time ever.

After the weekend is over, I’ll tell you all about it. If I still have fingers.

The last day of our stay in Kanoya was limited. We slept late, then drove out to the music museum I visited a long, long time ago. The same cool little guy was there and helped us play instruments and everything. You should’ve heard the beautiful music I made with the ol’ Mongolian violin.

That night was chill, we watched a weird little movie called Factotum, about a little bohemian writer that I would have heard of if I was into the literary scene.

The next day we finally left Kanoya, and drove northeast into Miyazaki prefecture along a particularly beautiful stretch of seaside road. Clear skies, bright sun. We stopped at the recommended Udo shrine, which is like 2000 years old. It is built into a cave in the Cliffside, surrounded by bizarre rocks that looked like they were completely liquid at some point and then suddenly solidified, leaving strange bubble-like pits. The popular thing to do at this shrine is to throw little pebbles (which you have to buy. I couldn’t bring myself to pay for a basket of rocks that I would then chuck at the ocean) into this large pit at the top of one of the rocks. If your stone got in, you’d have a lucky year. If not, well, you’d have to buy more pebbles and keep trying. You can see the crowd of folks all desperately doing their best in the following pic:

Further north along this coast line we found Aoshima, a magical, tiny little island. Thousands of strange little palm trees grow on this island, but more famously, the island itself is surrounded by bizarre rock formations known as Oni-no-sentaku, or the Ogre/Devil’s Washboard.

They’re just these long straight lines of jutting rock at an angle, and indeed resemble the washboards of yesteryear.

The sun was setting as we circled this tiny island, and we found a beautiful shadowy little place to capture the moment. It was quite romantic, which is awkward for brothers. So we got into a fistfight to reassert our manliness. Then we razed the surrounding city using only our shoes and a big piece of coral I found.

From there we made the long drive into the city of Miyakounojo, to meet up with my old college buddy Troutman at his girlfriend Rie’s family’s home (sorry for all the possessives there). We were treated to a royal feast (the highlight of which were these amazing beef and pepper wraps that were slices of pepper surrounded in beef and tasted like savory peppers and delicious beef) and watched the new Zatoichi, the Blind Samurai, which was kickin’. The next day we’d hang a bit more, and head back home to Kawanabe.

After my heinous fever my bro and I, along with Chris’s friends James and Laura/en (can’t remember… crap), explored the southern end of the peninsula. Amazing. We saw monkeys. MONKEYS (well, technically macaques). It’s wilderness out here.

We then accidentally found a secret beach, hidden off the main road, that was knock-your-socks-off gorgeous.

Here’s one for the memory books:

A river/creek flowed into the beach, creating this bizarre silty riverbed behind a sand dune. The river then ran around the dune and out to sea.

You can see the silt swirled into the ever-eroding sand.

After that lovely bit of low-key sightseeing, we returned to Kanoya and I enjoyed the always-surreal chilren’s television.

I’d have written more, but it was a simple day, and my art teacher from my main school is gonna pick me up and bring me to his home for beef stew! And his little kids are gonna use me as a playground, cuz I just naturally emit playground vibes. I wonder if its a result of watching kid’s TV, or if kid’s TV is just a side effect of such a emitting such vibes.

Heylo! Thought I’d take a break from the vacation posting and write about the kickin’ Futsuka-ichi fair that is happening in my town EVEN AS WE SPEAK.

Before that, though, I just discovered two webcomics, one referred to me and the other… well… hmm, I don’t even know how I found the other. Just ran into it earlier. If you enjoy laughter and positive emotions associated with laughter, please visit: Dr. McNinja and Overcompensating.

My buddy Richard from the city shuttle bussed in, and we went up and down the main street in my town lookin’ at the food and stuff. It was pretty chilly, and I felt bad for the couple booths that sold LITTLE FIVE DOLLAR TURTLES. They were about the size of a Ritz cracker, and a beautiful green color, like emerald jade greenstones!

We went to one booth that was selling cheese balls. You got a stick with four fried cheese balls on it, with a single stripe of ketchup. Pretty tasty and junky. The weird thing is, the woman selling them seemed completely taken aback that we wanted to buy them. Like, she made the sort of face you might make if someone asked you if they could lick your shoe or something weird. She was seriously looking like, “What?! Are you serious?!” Jeezus, we just want some cheese balls, lady. We will even pay you for them the outrageous sum you request for them.

I also felt like a bit of a rock star, cuz I saw bunches of my students there. Like, at school they’re all used to me, but when they see me walkin’ around in regular clothes outside of school, they stare and wave and giggle and call me kakkoi and my self-esteem gets all boosted and then that leads to my ego becoming swollen like a hideous waterlogged corpse. But that’s still a positive feeling.

After hangin’ around the fair, we met up with a bunch of the other peninusla ALTs and went out to dinner and then a few of us hit karaoke. I like to think we country folk showed the fancy city boy a good time.

Today, I just sit around, enjoy the sunshine, and relax! Maybe nap. Yeah, a nap.

Originally this was an e-mail for Allan alone to share some funny nerdness I had found. However, in the midst of typing it, I felt something unbelievable. Read on and find out, my friends and family. Oh, and look out, I use a curse word or two, and they are NAW-TY.

—-

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/01/23

Also, just for good ol’ fashioned hilarity, check out http://www.somethingawful.com/articles.php?a=3541 and then http://www.somethingawful.com/articles.php?a=3560

HOLY SHIT I JUST FELT AN EAERTH TREMOR!

I’m not shitting you. Just as I linked the third link, my space heater started wiggling back and forth, and I felt the shaking. Fortunately I’m up against a wall next to a doorway, with nothing hanging around or over me, but it was fucking crazy.

The planet Earth just quivered beneath me. Just for a few seconds. Just mildly. But Pierre [my friend that lives in the next town] messaged me to ask if I felt it. Indeed I had. He said in his two years he’d never felt one that strong, and was really worried for a second. It was only a few moments, and nothing moved or fell, it wasn’t that strong. But it moved. The surface of the planet moved. Lordy lord.

The next morning, we thanked Nathan for his hospotalitah (waking up earlier than we ever had during Po’s visit) to meet our next host, Chris, and his two newlywed friends from England, on Sakurajima volcano. We picked a random spot on the “island” to wander around, and we walked through black ash. A little bit of smoke was coming from a crack in the volcano, but otherwise she seemed quiet.

We found a sign in English that stated everyone knew another eruption was coming in 1914 about three days in advance. Dead fish were washing up on shore, standing puddles of water were simmering, and a mighty lava god went through the streets handing out pamphlets.

We found a little park area labeled “Lava Observation Area.” Chris told me he was expecting running rivers of molten rock, which admittedly would’ve been quite excellent. There were no fiery hellstreams, but it was still a cool place, covered in big chunks of igneous rock with amazingly vibrant evergreens poking up between the cracks and contesting for space.

We also saw one of the record-holding Sakurajima radishes. It was like the size of two human heads, with a small forest coming out of the top. Sakurajima’s rich volcanic soil makes for the world’s largest radishes. No one needs that much radish, ever.

Tucked on top of an amazingly steep hill (a hill my economy car couldn’t even make it up, I was literally flooring the gas pedal at one point, my engine going mad, but my car was not moving. Had to throw ‘er in reverse and back down, defeated and humiliated) was a Dinosaur park. There were playgrounds, a 50m slide, and more dinosaurs you could shake a stick at.

The dinos were far too lifelike, especially the apatosaurus with a crawl-through fun belly, so we headed for the famous Furusato onsen. Holy crap, I did a google search to find a pic of the place, since it was super cool, and found that some other foreigners went and saw the SAME STUFF WE DID! CHECK OUT MORE PICS OF THE PLACE AND THE ADVENTURES OF SOME GUY NAMED JOHN HARVEY!

We headed back to Chris’, unloaded, had some dinner, and then headed out to a club Chris described as “chill,” a nice place to get drunk and chat and such.

We got there, and heard hard beats emanating from the place. Chris was like, what the hell? Upon entering we discovered we had arrived at the place on its single monthly hip hop night. All the tables and blue lights were moved out of the way to reveal a dance floor, where two dozen Japanese people stood around awkwardly like they were at a jr. high dance. Us foreigners consumed the spirits and essentially took over the dance floor, making asses of ourselves, yes, but also actually dancing and trying to get others to dance.

Chris was a local at this place, and when he got really hammered, he commanded an impressive charisma. At one point he just decided everyone needed to be in the picture, and managed to get almost THE ENTIRE CLUB to pose for a shot.

Utterly incredible. I didn’t see it at the time, but as I resized this picture I noticed a guy wearing a baseball cap that said only, “HATE.” You can see him in front of Po.

The next day, the fever struck. I noticed I was shivering despite wearing as many layers as I could and a blanket, while everyone else was content in a single sweater. It got worse and worse, and I laid down in a horrible state. I was glad I was among friends, if I had been alone I would’ve tried getting to a clinic, because fevers can be scary if no one’s around. I felt crummy losing any time with Po, but I also felt crummy because there were microorganisms in my body that wanted to do naughty things to my cellular structure.

The next day, though, I felt better, and we saw more cool stuff.