van Marley

Lost in a Forest
At last, a quiet moment to collect my thoughts and put pen to paper, so to speak. I’m currently in Shimizu-Cho, a remote little village tucked away among the hills about 4 hours south of Osaka. There’s only a few hundred people here and the resemblance to my home in Belgium when I lived in the Ardennes is uncanny. Just cut the roads and cars in 1/2, and you’d be hard pressed to tell the difference. It’s incredibly green here, and the forests are so dense with pine, bamboo and shrubs that they are for the most part impenetrable.

I’m staying with my buddy Jason Haldeman who survived Japanese 1 and 2 with me at Santa Monica College. He just arrived to begin his three year stint teaching English with the JET program. We literally lived 10 blocks away from each other in LA, but I’ve hung out with him more here than I did there. Funny how life works like that.

Anyway, I’ll be here for the next five days catching up on some much needed sleep, allow my credit card to cool, and hopefully improve my Japanese before the week’s end. Each day is pretty fun as I see significant improvement in learning the language. I can ask the HELL out of directions. So good, in fact, people respond to me as if I was fluent. This is a problem. I still understand close to nothing they tell me, and usually rely on which direction they’re pointing to as my clue as to where I should go next. I’d say it works 60-40.

Sake Bombed
I was already running on fumes after sweating 10 lbs. of water walking around Wakayama City earlier today on my train ride down here, so I was probably not in the best condition for drinking. We hit a local restaurant and of course quickly struck up conversations with the other patrons. The owner came over later on with some bottles of soju and sake and sat down with us. Well, one must live in the moment, and the moment required I share drinks with him - who am I to be rude and refuse? Some people call it Irish bulimia, others a drinking problem, I just call it having a good time. But after the third time throwing up I finally gave in and switched to water. (update: sake is a clean burning fuel - no hangover!!!)

Ever the scholar, I improved my vocabulary and learned the Japanese word for drunk is yopporai. How interesting.