Well, it seems that my time in Japan is drawing to a close. i've been here for a year (exactly a year, in fact, as i'm flying out on the same date i flew IN), and it's time to return home.
i've had a few days of liberty to spend on doing the things i've been putting off, things like sleeping in, climbing mountains and the like, so i'll talk about them for a little, methinks.
given there's not a great deal one can really say about sleeping in ("slept past the alarm. restful."), i'll cover the rest of the stuff. those who may have been following this journal (hi mum!) may recall that for the first half of my time here, i was sharing my apartment with a roommate. this changed a while ago when my roommate was transferred to Kokura, leaving me with the apartment to myself. now, at the time, this seemed a wonderous thing, allowing me as it did to bask in my own ideosynchrasies. however, the downside of the situation came to me when i was faced with the required cleaning of the apartment prior to my leaving. were there another person still in residence here, there would be both a fellow cleaner (reducing the workload on me) and someone to take responsibility for the large amounts of random items that have accumulated here over the past few tenancies. some of these are easily explained, such as the pile of music magazines from 2002 in the bookshelf, and others are less so. where, for example, and why, did the sombrero come from? or the set of allen keys? how did a pack of clearly labelled microwave popcorn come to exist in an apartment devoid of a microwave for the entire period of its inhabitation? these were the questions that consumed me as i vaccuumed, scrubbed, disinfected and (in some cases) decontaminated over the past few days.
then there was the packing. in the past few weeks i've sent two very large and heavy packages back to australia in the hopes of keeping the weight of my luggage in the 'sub-hernia' range. yet, when the packing was complete i found the bags to be rather less liftable than a comparable volume of lead. back to the post office i went to obtain another postage box and, a half hour and a great deal of struggling, swearing and applieg geometry (to use a winning phrase) later, my luggage was some ten kilos lighter and i was in a much more serene frame of mind.
allright, enough of the labourous aspects of the past week. let's focus on the enjoyable ones.
top of the list has to be the going away party. held at the wonderful and tastful Tropicoco Cafe, good times were had. laughs, games of pool (none of which i won however. grrr.) and many drinks. as well, the gifts that i recieved were great! a bottle of Rum (Huzzah!), a cotton-knit jacket with 'Intelligent' enbroidered on the back, two boxes of foot-long Giant pocky and some very touching cards. folks around here are very thoughtful gift givers.
this echoes the presents i got from my children students on my last day of work. very sweet hand made cards, a ziplock bag of rice, a pack of Dragonball cards, a box of pocky (i think there's a theme developing here...) and a crayon and watercolour portrait of myself (a very accurate one, as well). i've taught some very nice kids in my time here.
ok, the mountain climbing. as i've mentioned here before, i have climbed Mt. Hachimen before. however, that time was at the end of winter, and i was curious as to how diffeent it might look in Autumn. so i set off with bike, boots, bag of onsen gear and, of course, my camera.
once again, i found that the roads had either been given an increased grade of steepness since my last visit (unlikely) or that my memory had decieved me once more. leaving my bike at the peace park about a third of the way up, i continued on foot. for those of you who have not yet had the experience, mountain walking is odd. after a while you will get into a curious mental state where one's feet essentially go into autopilot, leaving the brain to it's own devices. as such, it came as a small suprise when i turned a corner and found myself at the top. waving to the paragliding group who were playing chicken with a slightly bewildered looking eagle, i looked for a good spot to capture the sight of the Middle-Earth reminiscent mountains to the south. alas, i had picked perhaps the worst time of year for long-distance photography. it seems that, after the rice harvest the habit is to burn the resulting straw for fertiliser. the end result of this being a haze of smoke thick enough that the mountains were not even an outline. alas, no middle-earth photographs for me.
it was perhaps a mistake for me to take part in such a strenuous activity the day before my final soccer game with the lads. given i was getting wobbly knees just standing up by the time i reached my bike, one can imagine i was rather less than a superstar on the soccer pitch. still, i had fun.
and now the time's here. i leave Nakatsu tomorrow and Japan on wednesday. i've packed, cleaned, had a final bowl of garlic ramen at Mr Charisma's (and i'm damn well going back there if i'm ever in Nakatsu again), delivered Nigel the immortal Houseplant to my friend's and all there is left to do is sleep tonight, do a final clean tomorrow and head off.
On the whole, i'm glad i came to Japan. there are many things i've done here that i would never have had the chance to do otherwise. i've made friends, influenced people, become a little more windswept and interesting in the process and, most importantly, eaten a lot of really good food.
that said, i'm looking foward to getting back home. the smell of gum trees, my parent's cooking, my friends, my dog.
time to head for home.
this is Marcus signing off.
good luck folks!
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