Friday, July 20, 2007

yamaguchi memories

I had a few days off work so I thought I would take the bullet train down to the last prefecture on the main island of honshu. Yamaguchi. I woke up early, and made my reservations on a vending machine in Shinjuku station. I picked up a station lunchbox (ekiben) and hopped on the nozomi bullet train (shinkansen). It takes about 5 hours on the bullet train to get to Yamaguchi, and only about 2 hours on the airplane. But somehow I like the feeling of being a rocket cutting through the countryside of Japan, nothing beats it. The plush green fields, small hamlets clustered around the train tracks, and the tree clumped mountains. Increasing in frequencey near the bottom of honshu, it was most surprizing to count the endless amount of tunnels the train would speed through. It felt like a land-based submarine, sometimes coming up for less than a minute to offer a breathtaking view of a deep country valley or something before submerging in a long tunnel again.
Hanging otu with Evan in Yamaguchi was a lot of fun. He is a very open-minded friendly guy, so he had a lot of local friends to introdue me to. Including a couple running a sushi shop, a rich widow, and an elementry school teacher from America. My second day there we rode around on a bike tour of his countryside town, warm air floating past us with a taste of rain-coming in the fragrance. And when the rain came, I poured. The welcoming dance of a typhoon on it's way towards the coast. I had to run up to Tokyo, with the typhoon chasing me. Eventually it got lost in Nagoya, and I was back in Tokyo with fairly little rain left to be thrown at me by the smashed typhoon. (Photos uploaded soon maybe?)
And speaking of natural earth things, a quick word on the earthquake that rocked this area. I was teaching when suddenly the table began to shake. I looked around at the students, everyone paused. I remembered how the current left-to-right shakes are a good sign and the not-present up-and-down shakes are a bad thing. I said something about that, and then got back to teaching. Although the tremors shook down some houses in the prefecture next to Tokyo, over here in Tokyo area we all bairly noticed enough to change what we we were doing.

Monday, July 02, 2007

summer light falling


I've been feeling like I should do something more creative than waking up and going to work and going home and repeating this cycle over and over. The creative urge. I just never seem to actually get my ideas out from inside my head and into the real world. I got to try more often.

These days, this blog always seems to be about pictures, so I might as well point out I have more than 13 new pictures and a few videos for viewing. That is all for now.
 
All original content CC 2002-2012 BY NC SA - first design from dilarangmelarang altered by neonvirus and thunderbunny.