life these days

Well, I have two months left of work here in Japan and I can tell that things will be busy until I depart. Plans for each weekend seem to fill up quickly as most recent events have been geared toward outdoor things, as they should be in spring. About a week ago my friend Rika and I took advantage of some nice weather and hiked to the top of Shikoku's (and Western Japan's) highest point on the summit of Mt. Ishizuchisan in Ehime Prefecture. It was steeper than anything I've been to around here and I enjoyed the challenge of climbing up the metal links draped along the sides of its cliffs.



Hiking in Japan is mostly done by retired couples though it's not too rare too see college students out with their school clubs. There is a sacred importance of nature here that's well exhibited when your're out on a hike...something that's a bit hard to put into words which can compare it to hiking in places outside of Japan. The same respect that Japanese people place on things such food, bathing, and language is also shown within their view of places like Ishizuchisan.





On this day, we were out from 11:30 to 5:30, finishing just in time to bathe in a local hot spring onsen and eat some dinner. After a campfire beside the Yoshinogawa River, sleep came pretty quickly.



The whole next week was reserved for my junior high schools to prepare for their Sports Day on the weekend. I wasn't able to go to the actual event but definitely participated in more than enough of the practices. My students really liked being outside even though they were jumping rope for hours and hours on end.



On Friday I cut out of work a bit early in order to bike 80km across Tokushima and attend a friend's 25th birthday party the following evening. We all ate some great things cooked over hot coals and I drank someone else's expired sangria which tasted exactly like really sweet soy sauce. It was a beautiful night with great people and most of them ended up on a giant fort/castle/playground thing where we hung off of rope nets and looked for constellations in the sky. I don't think that too many were identified at that point in the evening.





On Sunday morning I woke up without feeling too bad, quickly remembering that I was faced with another (at least) four hour bike ride back home. I left around 2:00pm and this time I followed a path between the highway and the river and was cooled off by a bit of rain along the way. Biking back east was much easier than the opposite direction because it's mostly a downhill slope.





Though I've got only two months left here things are still feeling very normal. My neighbor Theo and I are now teaching a weekly hour and a half long 'Travel English' class (the definition of that title being completely open to our interpretation) where we finally see that there actually are some young people that live in our town. In some other current news, over a hundred swine flu cases in Japan were discovered very close to where I live and there are rumors that schools may close in order prevent its spread. Another fellow teacher and Naruto resident, Sarah, was told this morning to stockpile two weeks worth of food in her apartment just in case she is quarantined. Flu paranoia was sparked pretty quickly when news of it came about here. I'll make an assumption that it's because I'm foreign, but a lot of people are straight up asking me if '[I] have swine flu.' In reality, this is just a more prioritized question that prefaces the usual inquiries ('Do you have a girlfriend?', 'Can you eat Japanese food?', etc.). Although I can easily deal with answering one addition to the same ten questions that I'm asked over and over again, one thing that might actually put me over the edge these days is the amount of times that I have heard "YES WE CAN!!!" screamed in my direction. These three words have also become a guaranteed way to strike up laughter when delivered with a loud voice (usually by a class bully) as a response to ANY question posed by a foreign teacher. Not that people know any better, but I would not like the man that has brought about a pride in my country that I never even knew that I had to be trivialized as so many other things seem to be here. But at this point, as I always have done, I just have to make myself laugh at the ridiculousness of all of it.

So, I'll be busy planning my travels for August and September when Caitlin and I head to Beijing to ride the world's longest train route ending in Moscow (well, maybe technically speaking the Trans-Mongolian route is not actually the longest). After Moscow, it looks like we'll be flying to Poland and then making our way to the Czech Republic where we've got an ex-host family to put us up for a bit. Then we my leave things pretty open and stick around Eastern Europe, but that much has not been thought out thus far...

OK, time to watch some Flight Of The Conchords episodes.

(p.s. Happy birthday, Grandma!!)