yes, well... it has been a ridiculous month, and now it gets even more ridiculous with every day being the last time i will see someone i've seen every day for the past year, some of whom have really helped save a few of those days from being unbearable. so what the hell have i been doing this month...
waaaay back at the beginning of july, i went out to a nearby town called omagari to see some oft lauded magical field of lavender flowers with friends from norway, singapore and japan. it's a local tourist attraction, but for some reason, the closest we could get was about an hour walk after taking a train and a bus to get to that point. we staggered most of the way there through some crazy heat, and eventually got a lift for the last few hundred meters. when we got there, it was basically like a big parking lot with a few purple plants in it. i had a fine time, sure, but jeebus, it sure didn't look like the poster. on the long walk back to a convenience store where we could call a cab to the station, we almost got attacked by a pissy little cow drooling in a dilapidated barn.
went back out to the zoo with some folks on another hot day and engaged in some deep commune with a chimpanzee, who was sad and angry just like all the other animals there. i would knock on the glass, and then he would knock on the glass, and we did that a few times until a tennis ball or lump of crap or something seemed more interesting to him.
not too long after that was the school tanabata party. "tanabata" means "seventh night", and it refers to an old japanese folk tale that has something to do with two lovers who were banished to either side of the milky way, and can only meet once a year, on the seventh night of the seventh month. if it is cloudy on that day, they can't cross the milky way and they have to wait until the next year. so on this night in japan, people wear yukata, or summer kimono type dresses, and have parties and whatnot. a few bands played, and there were a few games i think, and then a bunch of people left early to eat and drink outside.
oh, hey, yeah, and then i climbed the biggest damn mountain in the country for some stupid reason. sounded fantastic at the time, but it was a baaaastard. a group of seven or so of us took the night bus which travels all night long from akita station to tokyo station, and gets to tokyo around 7 am, and is absolutely impossible to get any sleep on. our bus was called "kila kila hotto dogu" which means sparkling hot dog. so we got to tokyo, completely exhausted, and sat around shinjuku park for a while wondering how to spend the time until we took another bus to the mountain. we all ended up going to an internet cafe in harajuku to sleep some, which was also not all that possible. we could at least take showers there and relax a little. so eventually got on the bus which we thought would take us to the mountain, but actually brought us to the train station closest to the mountain, which was still more than thirty kilometers away. the only option was to take a few taxis, waiting there at the station like a couple of starving vultures, and pay the 4000 yen apiece. we got to the mountain around 11pm, when most people start climbing because you can see the sunrise from the top, and hauled all the hiking stuff out of our bags: warm clothes, head lamps, water, suchlike, and started climbing. my rickety old ass got exhausted pretty quickly. there are endless trails heading at a steep incline over switchbacks during the first section of the climb, and i was moving slower and stopping more often than everyone else. i finally stopped and told them i was going back down to find a place to sleep after about an hour of steady trudging, so they kept going and i sat recovering for a while. i settled myself enough to decide to keep trying for a while, and came to the second section which is basically hands and feet crawling over rocks between frequently interspersed rest huts, which of course in japan, try to sell you souvenirs while your clibing up a damned mountain. i stopped after a few hours of that, and sat at one of the rest stations talking to a guy from england about teaching english here and some of the things that we've done while we've been here. he told me it was another 3 or so hours climb to the top, and that it was extremely cold and difficult to breathe, so i figured i had enough and started heading back down very slowly. one of the old fellers working at one of the huts saw me freezing my ass off and told me i could wait in a little toolshed with some kind of warm generator deal in it until the sun came up. so watched the sun come up from halfway up mt. fuji, and bounced back down to the bottom to wait for everyone else. for the rest of the time in tokyo, we all just tried to get some sleep back at the internet cafe in harajuku, and then stank our way back to akita on another night bus. most of the time on this trip was spent feeling pretty uncomfortable and exhausted, but it was worth it to be able to burn something like this into my memory.
but we're only halfway through the month here... the next weekend i became thirty goddamn one years old. my gut expanded and a few more hairs fell out just thinking about it. thirty effing one. i'm no longer 30, i am now "in my thirties", and that is lame as hell. i had a great night, though. first, went out to dinner with a few people, and then came back here and sat in a corner of the cafeteria with 20 or so folks drinking and eating and getting weird presents like an ear pick and towels shaped like monsters or some such. we lit some fireworks and then kind of drifted into another party out by the student apartments, which was a jolly time.
what else... a few karaoke sessions, one of which lasted all night, until the first train in the morning could take us back to the local station, and a farewell party thrown by the school a few nights ago, with huge plates of food, speeches, a few performances, and people scrambling everywhere trying to get to all the people they want to see as much as possible before they have to leave.
so, a very odd month for me. it seems so unnatural to be forced to pull away from people that have shaped my life for the last year. i don't know if i can explain it beyond that, just a dragging, confusing, lethargic kind of feeling. i know i can keep in touch with everyone, though, and now i have friends i can visit in about 6 or 7 countries. of course i am also really looking forward to seeing all the people i had to leave behind when i came way the hell out here, and also frankly, i'm looking forward to that first giant ass burrito after touching down in the imperialist schweinhund motherland.
