1/23
Last day of school! That’s it…nothing else to report.
1/24
I just realized that I only have six more months here. It made me start to wonder what I was going to do once I got back home. Japan has become a part of me now, and I’m not sure how I’ll get use to being away from it. Also before I came to Japan, I was living with my family and now I’m in my own apartment and have some semblance of independence. Can I really go back? I don’t think moving into the dorms would help either. I suppose that I ‘ll have to wait and see. One thing that I will miss if I move out is not having to do my laundry. Speaking of which, I had to go do it today and I got scolded by the landlady in Japanese. Well, she didn’t actually scold me as much as tell me that I had a lot of laundry and that I better not overload the machine. I’m just glad that I could understand her.
1/26
This week I’m sending home some treats for my family to enjoy and I needed to make a trip to Apita to get a frog for my sister (thanks Sam for that unnecessary extra trip!). It was freezing today, about 38 degrees Fahrenheit. And for someone use to Georgia’s wet heat, it was miserable. I think I lost feeling in just about every part of my body at some point or another. But I got to eat at Baskin Robins again. After roaming Apita for about two hours, Kim headed back to Proxy and I biked to Hongo station to meet Nana to take the train into Motoyama to go see Ayako-san. She took the bus from the school to Kamiyashiro to meet me. Since I was biking ( at it is a good 20minite bike ride) I figured I wouldn’t beat her there. WRONG. So I kind of ended up getting on the train at Hongo taking it up one stop to Kamiyashiro, and getting back off to wait there. And every train that passed people would look at me like ” Aren’t you going to get on?” Oh, the famous Japanese staring-but-I’m-not-actually-staring stare, (if you can say that three times fast, I’ll give you a mental cookie), how you irk me.
Sometimes I see it, then I flash back to when I was a kid and would stare at people who had a disorder or something and my mom would tell me not to stare. So then I would do what every kid does and try to look without looking like I’m looking. It’s kind of like that now only I’m the person with the disorder. Anyway I kept alternating between avoiding eye contact, and trying to force it whenever I felt brave, until Nana got there.
Japanese people (especially young ones) tend to travel in gender packs. (We gaijin call them wolf packs). And I understand why. When I’m with other gaijin, the staring and talking doesn’t bother me as much. Weird. But the one thing I do love about being a gaijin is when people start speaking random English around us. It is so funny, high school guys like to do it a lot. They see us and immediately start saying stuff in English, mostly just random words but it is so hilarious. I have to force myself not to laugh each time it happens. Actually as Nana and I got off the train at Motoyama, there were a group of high school boys and one of them got off too. And his friend said “goodbye” and both Nana and I turned to look at him like “Do we know you?” But then the other kid waved and I realized who he was talking to. Usually when the Japanese say goodbye if they want to use English they say “byebye” like a little kid would. So it really threw us off to hear him say that.