Days 23 & 24

I feel better than I did before, but I still feel the same way about being rootedly bored. I don't have enough to do here and not enough people to do it with. You'd think it'd be miraculous to have such free time, and in theory it is, but in practice I'm not used to it. I'm not used to having to physically plan so much to do ALONE and not have any external pressure or motivation (no one else's expectations to meet) in order to do it. In these instances, my laziness nearly always gets the best of me. After work today it wasn't even raining too hard, just misting really, so I was thinking about going out to see all the temples near the river, but decided to take a "tiny catnap" and ended up sleeping until 7PM. Womp womp (sad trombone.) Waste of good "daylight" (more like cloudlight.)

I actually wish I could see my students more. What I'm doing with them is so fun. Today was one of the best days ever. During our 10-minute breaks in between classes, we chilled in the library with them. The first time it was the first-graders who were in there. I wish I had pictures. (I have some on my cell phone but I can't send them to the internet until I get back to the states.) RIN. RIN IS THE CUTEST THING EVER. And Miku. And they were like grabbing onto my arms and pulling me places. They think I don't know Japanese so one of them was like "she doesn't understand Japanese, let's take her to the English books" and they pulled out a Peanuts book for me. And the next time it was the 3rd graders. Tomoko pulled me over and started pointing to me the English words she knew. "mouse" "hat" "monkey" etc. And I taught her some. She called an ornament "ball" and a lamppost "light." Hehe. In our classes, we invented the game of animal charades which they go absolutely nuts over. One of them acts like an animal and they guess what animal (in English) it is. Man, the 4th and 5th graders are really good. I love the enthusiasm of the elementary schoolers. The middle schoolers are developing that "I have the ability to judge the activities and laugh at them" thing. But they're still cool. :)

I wish I could spend all day at school with them and get paid more. I totally would. It's tiring, but fulfilling and inspiring.

If it's not too rainy tomorrow I am going to go to an island called Iojima (and I don't care who goes with me!), but if it's rainy I'll save it for another day, but I definitely want to do something. I can't believe another weekend is going by without me planning anything. There's only 4 weekends left until I start traveling and evaluating the camps, and that 4th one is going to be spent in Beppu with liz. I better start planning trips around Kyushu and to Osaka, even if they are solo! I JUST HAVE TO DO IT!

Traveling alone. With no one to take pictures of and with. No one to talk to. TRUST YOUR STRUGGLE. TRUST IT. YOU ARE LEARNING WHAT YOU NEED TO BE LEARNING.

Day 21

Major fail tonight. Note to everyone: don't ever think that you can fix your sleeping schedule by getting almost no sleep and staying up the whole next day so you can crash the next night. I was fine all throughout work, thankfully, but when I went to Hamanomachi with Mai I was so tired that I couldn't even appreciate or enjoy my time. I'm glad I did it as opposed to staying home, definitely, but the quality was so compromised because I was tired. And then later I found out that she didn't even want go and only went because I wanted to go, so I felt super bad. I could have gone by myself! You didn't need to go with me!

So when I got home there was literally nothing I could do but pass out cold, and so I slept from around 5pm-10pm. -_-

I think once my sleeping schedule readjusts I will feel a lot better.
This morning (around 5-9 AM) was sunny and almost clear, but by midday it had become cloudy again. I was going to go to the Peace Park today but I decided to wait until a sunny day which I begrudgingly remembered probably isn't going to come for a month.

I wish this wasn't Mai's second term here, so she would actually want to do stuff with me. Neither her nor Carley wants to do anything. Whenever I do stuff with them I feel like I'm forcing them. They mostly just seem to want to spend outside-of-work time at home and around our neighborhood. I've been trying to be optimistic about it, and in some ways I still am, but it actually upsets me that both of them misunderstand my reasons for wanting to have company on my outings. Yes, YES, sometimes I like doing stuff alone. But most of the time I don't. I think it's lonely and not very fun. I'm one extrovert living with two introverts, I guess.


So, I'm resigning myself to the fact that I need to look into travel alone. I can meet Liz in Beppu, but that's not until the end of July, and I can meet Alex in Osaka, but I still wanted to explore more of Kyushu, and I really didn't want to go alone. I don't feel scared to take the train, etc, alone, because my Japanese is passable and Japan is such a safe country, but it's just not fun! I want to share my experiences with someone! I want to take pictures of someone and have someone take pictures of me! I mean, that's what traveling is! It seriously makes me question if I want to do it alone or just not do it at all. I don't know if my experience will be worth the money spent if I do it alone.


I really wish I could feel closer to Mai and Carley. We're all we've got for these 3 months. We're all we've got. Maybe it's because they both have boyfriends who they talk to online all the time, multiple times every day, so they don't need a network here as much. I don't know. :/


I'll feel better later, though. I'm SO beyond lucky to be in this experience to begin with, and I'm tired and have a messed-up sleep schedule right now, so I'm sure I'll feel more optimistic later.

Day 20

So apparently some people here don't go to college. The girl I met yesterday (Hanako) and the girl I tutored today (Maya) both didn't go to college. They're 22 and 24 and they've just been working since they were 19. Blows my mind. This was outside of my frameset of Japan. All of my previous experience with Japanese young people has been with college students (and ones who can afford to study abroad at that.) In America there's a sort of negative stereotype perpetuated about people who don't go to college or people who have lower-level jobs (such as a waiter or a convenience-store attendant.) What makes it worse is that it becomes correlated with race, intelligence level, income level, and ultimately SES/social "level." Here, I feel that that disparity does not exist, or at least not as strongly. If you have a job, you are lucky to have a job at all. Everyone is a good person. Everyone is hard-working. Every job is respectable, and nobody feels shame or looked-down-upon because of the job they were able to get. This may be different in the competitive post-college business world, where a college diploma asserts pressure to find a good high-paying job, but no matter where I go, I've never heard or experienced disdain for so-called "lower" professions or lower education levels. There's no classism. Even though this is a first-world country, there's still a sense of get-by-how-you-can, subside-and-be-strong. There's also still a sense of "women are for family, men are for money." It's aggravating but futile to waste thought on.

---

As is the case with all experiences in life, I'm figuring out what my entrenched expectations were, expectations I didn't even know I had, and sorting them out from how my life differs from them. Mainly, I thought I would be all creative and artsy because I'd have all this free time and no school stress, but instead, the boredom induces me into a rut. I've been sleeping too much to the point where I feel tired throughout the day. (How the heck does THAT work, biologists.) I've been not wanting to leave the house or my little neighborhood at all because of the rain. But I have been creative to an extent. I made a little "stop and smell the roses" clothesline banner for my room. (It's super cute. :D) I made little flags for the other corner of my room. I rearranged the furniture in my room and hung up my scarves in a creative way. I made paper letters and fireworks for the living room. (Thankfully our house has so much paper and art supplies!) I organized the bookshelves(Okay, that's not really creativity but whatever.) But I still feel blah. Like there's not enough to life. It also induces stress on me. Aah I'm not living life to the fullest this experience is so short and finite what if I don't do enough here my days are being wasted aah!So the new challenge is, how to stop that? Does it have to do with filling my days with excursions and activities, or just introducing a new way of thinking that doesn't put so much pressure on me being busy in order to legitimize my experience?

---

I haven't been missing people per se, not in the way that hurts, not in a homesick way, but I have been missing the presence of hanging around people I'm comfortable with. That's not to say I'm not comfortable with the other interns, because I surely am, but I mean, hanging out with my good friends from home who I'm close with and always have a good time with. And all this stuff just happened on Facebook like everyone graduating and the JSA end-of-the-year events and CDL/CKI stuff so I get a little bit missing-ish. I'm definitely a social person, as much as I try to deny my extroversion, and I need to be surrounded by people and do interesting and fun things with them in order to be fulfilled. And 3 months and two people just isn't enough substance to complete that for me. (I don't think I'll get close to the people at church just because of the language barrier. But maybe if I do social things with them outside of church, our bond will grow.)

I like listening to music, and I wonder which songs I will end up associating with this experience. Which songs will bring me back. It's impossible to know while you're immersed in the experience. I'll only know in hindsight. But every discrete experience in my life has its associated songs and smells.


P.S. "Posted at 11:11 AM": fck yeah.

Day 19

So today after church I ate the ￥150 church lunch (きつね udon, yay!) with Hanako, one of the youngish girls. She works at an insurance company. Our conversation was 97% in Japanese. I told her that I studied music in college, and she invited me to come to the church gospel choir practice later that day. So I stepped out of my comfort zone and went.

There's always those awkward times when I want to say stuff, but if I'm limiting myself to Japanese, nothing readily comes to mind, so I have to sit there and compose in my head or think of things I know how to say in my head, creating awkward gaps in the conversation. And then we talk about lame stuff: our majors, how many brothers and sisters we have, our hometowns, etc. At the gospel choir practice, everyone was nice and talked to me slowly and even in English a little bit, but I still felt way less confident today than I did at last week's lunch. I was messing up left and right, I made stupid mistakes and corrected myself, I couldn't hear anything and had to ask people to repeat so many times, and I felt like I was accidentally rude a couple times by my language choice. But they're all so nice. Genuinely nice and caring. It's just in their blood to be nice to people, to make themselves liked, save face and keep the peace. If they felt annoyed by my presence at all, it sure didn't show. Rather the opposite: they would tell me how good I was. I wanted to be like, HAHA, I hope you don't really believe that, and are just saying that, because if you think MY level is good, try hearing every single other non-Japanese person in JSA, people who've actually studied for 4 or more years unlike my 1.5 years. So I struggled to get by, and there were a couple comical misunderstandings, the funniest being when someone said "ガスペル" (gospel) and I thought she said "hospital," but overall I feel positive that I tried. And I'm more motivated to study now. :)

The actual singing part was kinda boring, not to be elitist or anything, but what made it fun was that we were all singing together, and I got to sight-read Japanese lyrics to songs. Rie-chan was super nice and wrote out all the furigana for me so I could pronounce the kanji I didn't know. To my great disappointment, there was no sheet music, only word-sheets, but I stood in the alto section and just caught on by copying the person next to me. It's actually really, really easy. Even while syllabically reading hiragana. But since it's gospel, it was very chesty and belty, and NO girl in that room (myself included) could belt, so it sounded kinda funny to try and here everyone belt. Since I'm so used to regular choir, I didn't like it, I couldn't be as loud as I wanted to because my belty chest-voice isn't very developed, and my voice was tired at the end which means I was using bad technique. Also it was boring because there were only two girl parts so there were like 6 or more people on a part, and only one tenor and one bass there haha. But overall I am so happy that I went, I love experiencing CHORAL MUSIC in a different country (one that uses fixed Do!?) and I'm excited to come back next week.


Food Miscellany--My 4th time going grocery shopping today.
-The ice cubes are really big here. It's kind of a deterrent to me chewing ice all the time.
-My cheaper-and-probably-healthier desserts: frozen banana, frozen tiny jelly cups, half a grapefruit
-Pasta sauce here is comparatively expensive, so I made my own: I bought stewed tomatoes and eggplant, and we already had basil and garlic at home. And get this: it tastes better than regular tomato sauce.
-Some things I want to try in the future: crêpes, baked pastas like lasagna, doing more things with tofu
-I want to start being more...exploratory...at the grocery store. And go to other stores besides S-mart, which is the only store I've gone to so far, but there are lots of other stores and open markets around! I just don't even know what's good/what's cheap and don't know who to ask.


Oh and BTW the rain was CUH-RAZY again today too. It was ザアザア(zaa zaa) rain which means SUPER HEAVY POUNDING RAIN. The church is literally 2 minutes from our house, but we were walking foot-deep in water the whole time and the umbrella did almost nothing, so my skirt and hair were pretty wet the whole time I was sitting in church. -_-

Day 18

Rained hard all day again too. Here is a look out my window:



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. :)

Day 17

I officially have no favorite class. After every class, I'm like "now that's my favorite class!" The first graders are so so cute though. Today I looked in and they were doing 5+3=8. HAHAHA. I CAN'T EVEN. Can you even remember a time when you didn't know arithmetic? Can you even imagine functioning without it? THANK A TEACHER DUDE. Due to differences in societal expectations, classroom management in this school (/perhaps Japan) is kinda out of control, but we'll talk about that later maybe.

Today it rained the hardest it's rained since I've been here I think. It was POURING. ポツポツ (potsu potsu) means big drops. (They have like seventy different words for different types of rain since they get so dang much of it.) I definitely didn't want to go out again after work. But I had a productive day inside. I totally re-organized Guy's giant messy books/toys/crafts/teaching tools/supplies-for-the-kids bookshelf. It looks like a freaking Crate & Barrel catalog now. Let's just say I'm pretty good at organizing and making things look pretty. Mai and I made these little triangular flags and strung them up and hung them all the way around the room and it looks like we're ON A SHIP now. It's cute ^^ I will take pictures later.

I've been ravenous lately. Even after dinner I ate two popsicles, a full bag of popcorn, a cup of tea, and a jelly cup. What the heck?! So bad. I'm seriously DONE caring about my weight (read: done until I hit 30 or some age like that and start getting wider), so it's not that, but I don't want to eat too much because then I have less for later, thereby wasting money. I cannot afford to waste money. There's no point.

ひどい天気今日が。。。風がすごく強くてドブンドブンな雨が聞こえてちょっとこわい気持ちになった。
It's a little eerie hearing the heavy rain splooshing down.

Tonight we watched ダーリンは外国人(My darling is a foreigner), a movie about...just that. A Japanese woman dates an American man and(though he is fluent in Japanese) they encounter various barriers and cultural mishaps. Haha but it was so cute, I really enjoyed it. :) I highly recommend it.

That's all until I think of more!

Day 16-Glover Garden

After school today (middle schoolers, who were great) Mai and I went to Glover Garden.



If you've ever heard of Puccini's Madama Butterfly (which is what Miss Saigon is based off of), the house/supposed story of this house in Nagasaki is the inspiration for Puccini's story. A Japanese wife patiently awaits the return of her American husband, and has a son by him, but he later remarries, leaving her alone. Thomas Glover, an American, moved to Nagasaki in the mid-1800's and married Tsuru, a Japanese woman, and they had a son together. (I don't know if he left and/or remarried or not...I don't think so.) Anyway, we toured their house, their garden and the rest of their estate. It was interesting to see one of the first Western permanent residences in Japan.




I both do and do not enjoy being a spectacle of sorts for the dozens upon dozens of 小学生(elementary schoolers) there. All complete with yellow hats. Why there are so many elementary schoolers taking field trips to every place I go, I don't know. I guess it's school trip season. (They don't get summer break until August.) Upon seeing me/eyeing me for a few minutes, quite a few of them will say "harro," "hi" or "konnichiwa" or even do head-nod bow. (It's practically against the rules in Japanese culture to randomly talk to stranger without a good reason. You can't just randomly say hi or make conversation, so they wouldn't do this with just anyone.) It's not like they've never seen a blonde/white person before, but I think it's sort of "special" for them, especially since I can and do speak Japanese to them. It's cute because I love kids, but I don't like being singled out because I happen to look different from them. I'm not special, people. I'm just another tourist to Glover Garden just like you. I'm not a celebrity; I didn't do anything. I don't like speculating about what their attitudes and impressions of American/white people are. I could say more about this but I won't right now.



The views from the garden/house area were amazing since you could see all down into the Nagasaki wharf/pier area, but since it was cloudy out visibility was limited and the sky was white.



Afterward Mai and I went back to Dejima wharf and we were gonna wait for sunset/take pics but it was getting dark so slowly and it was getting cold and it was cloudy anyway so the sunset wouldn't have been that great anyway so we just walked home.



I'm especially tired today because I got into a bad sleep cycle the past two days (sleeping late and taking naps) and so today's my "fix" day where I have to go all day on five hours of sleep with no nap. So more later. :)