Here is that view focused-in:
That green awning is a flower shop with nice old ladies who work at it. (Japan has a lot of old ladies, or at least, that's all I ever see on the streets, assumedly because the men are at work or the older men are dying before their female counterparts.)
The rain let out at around 6:30, so I took a walk at dusk. Everything felt really fresh, and the river was raging due to all the new influx of rain.
Here's the same picture at 3 levels of bluriness:
Regular (the cars probably thought I was crazy)
Moderate blurriness
Full blurriness
I think it's beautiful like that.
I took more pictures but apparently Blogspot only lets you put 5 pictures per post.
The ceiling of my room has glow in the dark splatter paint on it...it's amazing actually. And how weird that they would think to do that.
So, like I alluded to before, I'm bored here. Not bored necessarily on a day-to-day basis (I have books and the internet, remember,) but kind of a rooted, systematic boredom. It's due to a combination of a few factors, the biggest being:
1) I only have two other companions here with which I can do anything, and they don't seem to want to be as active as I do (which I thought odd, because I'm not off-the-charts in terms of crazy adventuring, I just want to get out of the house and do something at least once per day. They're just more...domestic?)
2) My professional responsibilities are very few.
3) The constant rain (and it won't end until July, purportedly) inhibits my desire to go out and explore alone. I'll tolerate the rain to have another's company, but alone, it's often not worth it.
4) Nagasaki is not that interesting of a city, is hilly/foresty and spread out, and public transportation is expensive
5) I can't spend much money on a day-to-day basis, which makes taking public transportation and going to touristic things tough decisions to call.
I feel comforted in knowing that above all this, I still feel blessed just to be here. My feelings of boredom don't take away from my feelings of appreciation. It's actually nice to have free time around the house; I've been studying Japanese fairly consistently (not that I have many places to apply it) and I've been reading from my Teaching-English-Abroad book hoping to pick up tips to help me be a better teacher to my students at Seido. But at the same time, I don't want to come away from this experience thinking that I didn't take advantage of my time here. That I stayed in my hobbit-hole the whole time and didn't explore my neighborhood, my city, my region, my country as best as I could given my monetary and time constrictions.
And that's where the scary part comes in. Soon it will be my 4th weekend that I'm here, one-third of my trip down, and I haven't planned a single trip outside of Nagasaki yet. Besides my initial day in Fukuoka and my bus-ride down, I haven't been outside the city once. I'm scared to plan. I'm scared to read all the websites in Japanese. I'm scared to spend money. But it needs to happen. I need to get over it. I'd also like to be seeking opportunities to make friends and practice my Japanese (even besides church) but it seems so out-of-the-box, so unrealistic. I'm a gaijin (foreigner) and will always be recognized as such, I don't have the lay of the land, my Japanese is rudimentary at best, where the heck am I supposed to do or find anything besides the bare basics of survival in the city? And this isn't JET. I'm not here for a year. I won't have the time, no matter how much I put myself out there, to be entrenched in the community or to make real friends. Still, this is no month-long study abroad adventure, like my old Conversation Partners at UCI (or like what I experienced in France.) I'd like to live the experience as legitimately as possible while I'm here, which would alleviate some of the aforementioned boredom. The question is whether adopting an active rather than passive attitude will enact any change, or if it's better to just go with the tides as the flow.
In totally unrelated news, I've been cooking like a boss. Here are just some of the things I made: stir-fry tofu, scrambled eggs, French toast, soba noodles, udon noodles, miso soup, thick toast (sort of.) I've only eaten out once that I can recall. And I'm not even jealous/yearning the way I would be in CA, because I don't know what eating out is really like here and I'm not used to it, so I don't have to be jealous of it. Which is good, because when I DID eat out I spent Y540, which is way too much. Grocery shopping is the way to go. :)
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