Well, I'm about to hit the four-month mark here in Japan and the short answer to the question of whether I enjoy it here is yes, yes I do. I'm learning to speak/read/write the language and I could see myself living here longer than my initial year. Whether I'll stay with my current job or if I can live that long with my curiously disgusting obsessive compulsive and probably slightly autistic flatmate from California are entirely different matters. I recently moved with my two previous flatmates into a new apartment that's about $200 cheaper but I'm currently lacking furniture (and funds for furniture) so I've been using taped up cardboard boxes for a table and chairs.
Things I miss:
- my dog
- snow
- turkey (and bacon to a lesser extent)
- Food Network
- American comic books
- knowing what's going on in the film world
- not living half a day in the future and not having everyone back home being fast asleep while I'm wide awake
- giving backrubs and combing my fingers through short feathery hair while drinking wine and watching Woody Allen movies
Things have been tight recently but I dipped into my Christmas money to buy myself an awesome granny bike with baskets both on the front and the back. If it weren't so chilly I'd be cruising that mother all over town. I also saw Iron & Wine in concert, which opened for Calexico. Good times were had by me, by myself, as the lone white guy in a not-so-crowded bar-like establishment. After the show, because the venue was so small and also a place where nobody spoke English, the musicians were putting their instruments away casually in front of the stage. I approached Sam Beam, the hairily disheveled singer of Iron & Wine, and shook his hand and had a very brief and very contrived conversation with him. rock on. to the max. Shows here are WAY too expensive, though. A show that'd normally cost thirty dollars in the states is about sixty dollars, and there's no such thing as cheap local gigs. However, there are plenty enough of Japanese guys playing guitars on the street.
Although there are still a few more places left to experience in this city (dance club[s], S&M bar, onsen), I feel like I've done everything and that I need to venture off to other places. I doubt I'll be going anywhere else soon, but I hope to make it other places in the next couple months, namely, and unsurprisingly, Kyoto, Osaka, Kyoto, and Hiroshima.
If anyone visits Nagoya, you have to make sure that you visit The Site of Reversible Destiny, the world's most kickass Existential theme park. That's right, a fuckin Existential theme park. It's one of the most bizarre and hilariously pretentious places I've ever been to and it's awesome. You can take a stroll through places like the Imaging Navel and two good things to keep in mind when visiting the House of Critical Resemblance, according to the site's pamphlet, are "if thrown off-balance when entering the house, call out your name or, if you prefer, someone else's" and "strive to find a marked resemblance between yourself and the house. If by chance you fail to do so, proceed even so as though the house were your identical twin."
Other suggestions include...
"Within the Zone of the Clearest Confusion, always try to be more body and less person."
"Try to draw the sky down into the bowl of the field."
"Associate each of the extreme forms your body is forced to assume in traversing the field with both a nearby and distant form."
Things I miss:
- my dog
- snow
- turkey (and bacon to a lesser extent)
- Food Network
- American comic books
- knowing what's going on in the film world
- not living half a day in the future and not having everyone back home being fast asleep while I'm wide awake
- giving backrubs and combing my fingers through short feathery hair while drinking wine and watching Woody Allen movies
Things have been tight recently but I dipped into my Christmas money to buy myself an awesome granny bike with baskets both on the front and the back. If it weren't so chilly I'd be cruising that mother all over town. I also saw Iron & Wine in concert, which opened for Calexico. Good times were had by me, by myself, as the lone white guy in a not-so-crowded bar-like establishment. After the show, because the venue was so small and also a place where nobody spoke English, the musicians were putting their instruments away casually in front of the stage. I approached Sam Beam, the hairily disheveled singer of Iron & Wine, and shook his hand and had a very brief and very contrived conversation with him. rock on. to the max. Shows here are WAY too expensive, though. A show that'd normally cost thirty dollars in the states is about sixty dollars, and there's no such thing as cheap local gigs. However, there are plenty enough of Japanese guys playing guitars on the street.
Although there are still a few more places left to experience in this city (dance club[s], S&M bar, onsen), I feel like I've done everything and that I need to venture off to other places. I doubt I'll be going anywhere else soon, but I hope to make it other places in the next couple months, namely, and unsurprisingly, Kyoto, Osaka, Kyoto, and Hiroshima.
If anyone visits Nagoya, you have to make sure that you visit The Site of Reversible Destiny, the world's most kickass Existential theme park. That's right, a fuckin Existential theme park. It's one of the most bizarre and hilariously pretentious places I've ever been to and it's awesome. You can take a stroll through places like the Imaging Navel and two good things to keep in mind when visiting the House of Critical Resemblance, according to the site's pamphlet, are "if thrown off-balance when entering the house, call out your name or, if you prefer, someone else's" and "strive to find a marked resemblance between yourself and the house. If by chance you fail to do so, proceed even so as though the house were your identical twin."
Other suggestions include...
"Within the Zone of the Clearest Confusion, always try to be more body and less person."
"Try to draw the sky down into the bowl of the field."
"Associate each of the extreme forms your body is forced to assume in traversing the field with both a nearby and distant form."
VIEW 8 of 8 COMMENTS
I haven't taken a trip to Missouri and don't really plan on it. we're really quite broke so the longest road trip we can take right now would be, like, one night in western Wisconsin. spring break, yeah!
they have bacon in Japan, don't they? bacon and rice? I swear I read this in someone's journal sometime on OD, she was at a breakfast buffet and she just had a big bowl of bacon and rice.