almost time to go home..
almost time to go home..
Today is our last full day in Japan.. “The adventure is beginning everyone! On this trip you’ll be given the stimulation and pleasure you have never experienced before. Why? Because it is our mission. We expect you will find great delight. So please enjoy yourselves.” - sign outside a pachinko parlor I haven’t posted in a couple days because we on Thursday we pretty much ended up staying on base. It was rainy, and Dalton had to go to a briefing about his boat shipping out, so our afternoon was a bit split up. We watched some movies in the room in the evening: Idiocracy, which didn’t impress me much, and Babel, which I couldn’t stay awake enough to watch. Thursday night was possibly the first night that I had a full night’s sleep, an experience not repeated Friday night. Insomnia is becoming quite a familiar companion, if not a welcome one. Most of the time here could be characterized as “going with the flow, whatever happens is great”. This day, in contrast, had specific places to go and things to do. I was under a certain kind of stress because, for the first time all week, we had a specific place to be at a certain time. I have this stress frequently on days when I have to get on a plane, or to go to a long-anticipated concert, etc. As with many other stresses this is, perhaps, unnecessary, but I still feel it. In addition to the drumcircle in Hachioji (which was my personal addition to our agenda), one of our misssions while here has been to go to Yokohama to visit a statue in a park. The statue is called “the little girl with the red shoes”, and was modeled by a friend of ours named Pam who lives in Utah. She actually lived on this base where we’re staying, her mother is Japanese, her father is American. Despite being the model for it, Pam had never seen this statue. Unlike our other trips, we walked to the train station, which is about a half-hour’s walk (or 5 minute by taxi). We’d passed on this route several times, but it’s different when you walk. The trip to Yokohama was long, over an hour on the trains.I figured out the “movie” option on our digital camera, so I took several short video clips on the train, looking out the window at the passing landscape, as well as some of the bay at Yokohama. The park we were looking for was several blocks walk from the train station. While we were walking, there was a van that drove by playing something out of loudspeakers, but I had no idea what they were promoting. We finally made it to the park and started looking for the statue. This part of the day felt like we were in a scavenger hunt. We knew it was out there, but not sure where. For a few moments I wondered if the statue was still there at all. The park was, as Dalton put it, “ginormous”, so we had a bit of walking to do. Michelle and Dalton found a map and found that the statue we sought was at the other end of the park. When we found the statue, there was a group of Japanese folks who were standing next to it, inspecting it carefully and talking amongst themselves. I couldn’t help thinking that they would be interested to know that we knew the person on which the statue was based, but there wasn’t any way to communicate this to them because of Dalton’s limited (and our nonexistent) language skills. After a few minutes, I was able to take a series of pictures and some video of all sides of the statue and the plaque nearby. While we were so engaged in our inspection, a man came up and offered to take our pictures next to it. We handed him the camera, he took two pics, but managed to almost completely cut Dalton out of the picture because he stood to the side rather than behind the statue. Afterwards, we stepped back to the rail near the water and watched these folks pose next to the statue. I don’t have any way to account for the amount of interest in this statue, but judging by the wear on it, many people run their hands over it. After posing the whole family near the statue, these same folks asked us to pos for a picture with them. It has been weird, being a complete outsider here, having little or no real insight to what people are saying or thinking. I think I’ve mentioned before, i have a much deeper understanding of the alienation felt by Bill Murray’s character in “Lost in Translation”. After locating the statue, we walked through the rest of the park, and decided to visit “Chinatown” a few block’s walk nearby Chinatown, wherever it appears, is odd enough being displaced from our culture, it’s twice as odd being doubly displaced to us by seeing it in Japan. The week has been marked by sticker shock because of how expensive nearly everything is. We ended up having lunch in a chinese restaurant eating a mishmash of things that we were able to figure out. (Dinner after the drumcircle ended up being much the same thing) ON the way back, we explored another park, one which involved a rather long stair climb. Walking up these stairs, I felt again the infirmity of getting older. Stairs didn’t used to be a problem, and for me they still aren’t too bad, but Michelle has been having problems with them. At the top of the stairs, we rested on a park bench, and when we walked away, I spaced my GPS. We didn’t realize it until we’d walked further up the hill. When I relaized I’d lost it, i nearly gave up on it, but we walked back and it was just where I left it. It’s been menitoned to me a few times that people here are so honest that “you could leave your wallet on a train and it would be in the same spot the next day”. While I am sure that is slightly an exaggeration (Dalton still feels compelled to lock his car nearly everywhere on base), I can’t help comparing it to similar times when I have spaced things at home, come back relatively quickly and things are gone. I spaced a Razor scooter at a a park & ride, and in the time it took me to get another bus back, it was gone. On Wednesday, we bought some local cigarettes.. we’ve been smoking pretty regularly since. The first pack I bought was a brand called “Peace”, whcih were really nasty. THe brands readily available are things like Kool, Lark, Marlboro, several brands of thin women’s “tobacco incense” cigarettes, but the only Camels available have been mostly “Nutty Menthol”. After working through the pack of “Peace” cigs, I settled on a brand called “Sakura”. The label says they are “D-spec”, but I have no idea what that means. The last few days I’ve been drinking coffee in the room, without the issues I’d experienced from drinking Mt Dew. It’s weird, has me temted to indulge in coffee more when I get home. shrug more things to explore in my personal chemistry. One of the movies we rented the other day was the movie Babel, which has one plotline which takes place in Japan. This sequence realy seems to be accurate to my observations of the kids I’ve seen out and abut. I’m amazed at how uniform the kids’ clothing is. The girls, in particular, seem to wear their school uniforms all the time, with rare exceptions. I can’t help thinking that the ones who don’t must be the onnconformits, what we might call hippies at home. On the train to and from Yokohama, I noticed a coule thigns. One was that it seems that Japanese males almost never wear shorts. I mentioned this to Dalton, and he said that he couldnt remember ever seeing them wearing shorts. Another thing that I noticed is that it seems that folks don’t wear rings much, male or female, except wedding rings. Of course, once I made this observation I noticed some rare exceptions, but i couldn’t help thinking that a similar sample of Americans would have been wearing lots of rings. I’m once again having deja vu’s again today, maybe it’s just that the last few days of any vacation are similar, a bittersweet combination of something ending but also a welcome return to the familiar. I’ts never been so extreme for me as on this trip where I have almost no commonality to the rest of the culture. Last night I had a very vivid dream that took place at home. There wre two tornadoes that came near my house but tidn’t destroy it. They left a lot of damage, however. Will was in the dream for some reason, but I don’t remember a lot of other details. Last night was another night of not much sleep, i remember still being awake after 4:00 AM. In the last day or so we discovered that internet is available in a restaurant across the parking lot, and today Michelle discovered a room of computers here in the lodge that we could have been using. It’s a bit annoying to discover resources at the end of a trip that would have made earlier parts much easier. Most of the internet access we’ve had has been by bringing our laptop to Dalton’s room and glomming on the wireless access provided by a couple of unsecured hubs. Since we discovered other resources, I’ve been reluctant to impose myself on that, despite the fact that this allowed Michelle to hang with Dalton while he plays video games (this seems to be a bonding experience that they really enjoy together) We have less than 24 hours to go before we have to begin making our way to the airport,