Well, no. Not really.
Sometimes?
My time in Japan is winding down. I don’t know when exactly I’m going to leave, but that cool fall crisp in the air is more than just physical. It’s the autumnal chill on this weird partnership between me and Tokyo; any day now I’ll wake up and there’ll be six feet of snow blocking the door.
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There are now green tea-flavored kit kats on the candy racks.
Forget tech, Japan’s junk food is the best thing in the Floating Kingdom. Yummy…
I can’t get over how brilliant the Aussie slang, “chuck a sickie” is. Genius, brevity with zing, visual in a visceral way, a non-sexual double entendre that leaves you wanting more.
So I told Nova to go take a flying leap today – I think I actually said I had a severe case of explosive diarrhea – and went with Skye up to Nikko. Only my second time to Nikko, we were hoping to get some hiking in and catch some momiji – Japanese maple leaves – in all their dying splendor.
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My Uechi-ryu karate dojo held a rank test last night.
Before I talk about it though, a word of caution: there is a tendency in martial arts to compare.
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At what point do cultural biases and judgments end, and humanistic ones begin?
Sorry, this isn’t a blog about whiney personal issues, but then again, living in a foreign country is all about personal issues. Deal with it.
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These days, life has become an adventure of an unexpected sort.
I don’t talk much about my love life here, because that’s what God (or Al Gore) invented Literotica for. But this bog is about my life in Japan, not Al Gore’s, and so it would be stupid to not mention, at least at some point, the strange, wondeful and sometimes nausea-inducing rollercoaster my love life has been since I got here.
But I’ve started a relationship with a lovely Aussie lass, and it’s not bad. Not by half. It’s actually quite good, without going into the gory details.
Good thing this came up just as I’ve begun to make my final push at escaping from the Floating Kingdom.
Of the things that bother me immensely about Japan, the widespread ignorance of the nation’s history in the modern era is a constant source of frustration. Two articles, coincidentally both published yesterday, help to illustrate the point.
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