Presence

Two weeks ago, J hosted a couple from Switzerland who are six months or so in to their trip around the world. They had volunteered for a month on a farm in Hokkaido gathering and washing potatoes and pumpkins before hitchhiking their way down to lil' ol' Yamagata.
Despite the dreary, rainy weather, I like to think they had a good time while they were here. Over the weekend we took them to a local onsen, introduced them to a vast amount of our friends quite spontaneously, and braved the gloom to tour around local museums and shrines for an afternoon. The priest at the shrine we went to was so excited to see foreigners--especially French-speaking ones as his family was going to be hosting a girl from Lahore soon through a school exchange program--that he gave us a free tour of the small museum there. He even unlocked one of the displays and let us hold a two-hundred year old rifle.

Getting High and Back Again

Getting High

"I'm gonna die. I'm gonna freaking die."

I shuddered in the sharp breeze, scrunching up against the metal ladder and trying my hardest not to look to the vertical drop to my right. The ladder was reliable enough, bolted solidly to the mountain face, and hundreds of trekkers before me had gone up and down it without incident, but its overt slant towards the edge of the cliff we were currently hiking along filled me with green vertigo. It drew my gaze and held my hands and feet still in an inner Mexican standoff.

Learning to See

              Eight years ago, at the age of fifteen, my computer science teacher planted me firmly on the path to my destiny.

              “You know, I have a girl friend who taught English in Japan for a couple of years,” she said. We had been chatting about my love of (read: obsession with) Japanese anime. “She did this thing called the JET Programme. She travelled all over South East Asia while she was there and came back and bought a house with the money she saved.”

              The way I remember my reaction is something along the lines of a scene out of one of the myriad anime I so adored: my wide eyes turned to glossy stars, my body swayed like a snake whose charmer was playing Flight of the Bumblebees, and I emitted a fangirlish squeal that ruptured the eardrums of everyone within a half-mile radius.

              In reality, I think I managed to contain the explosive excitement of being able to work and live and travel in my dream country down to something like, “Really? I would freaking love to do that!”

              My teacher smiled and wandered off to help one of my classmates write a few lines of script to make a pixilated robot turn left.