There’s no place like home.

It’s nearly 1 in the morning. I’m moving out of my apartment at 10am Sept 1st and staying with a friend until my flight on Saturday evening. This is probably the last time I’ll be on the internet before flying home, although I will try to email my beloved ones at some point later in the week to let them know I didn’t die of a panic induced heart attack.

I’ll miss my apartment, it’s old and weird looking and a sometime host to cockroaches but this was my first home all by myself. And I didn’t burn it down. LEVEL UP

X

Yo dawg I heard you like airports so I put an airport in your airport so you can airport while you airport

Hmm. Packing up an entire apartment is hard enough when you’re just moving to a nearby town. Doing it alone, to move back halfway across the world is proving harder than I thought it would. Who knew a girl could accumulate this much stuff? I’m making good friends at the JP Post Office.

My last week at work is going well, but I do feel sad. Yesterday I was given 4 bunches of flowers, and today I was given 6 bunches of flowers, SIX! That made me feel special and also kind of like a contestant on Miss World. I felt like I should have been wearing a sash and a crown. I also have a bunch of letters and photos, and today one of the mums baked me a loaf of bread?! Insanely sweet of her, I’m eating it right now and it’s a damn fine loaf. I was all nice and friendly earlier, and handed out my flowers to various people, I now have 4 bunches left, they are making my pathetic bare apartment look hospitable.

Plans for my last weekend include a baseball game and maybe a trip to the beach, once I finish work on Tuesday I will be making a last whirlwind tour of Tokyo for a couple of days. That makes my belly crunch up, is this really happening? AM I REALLY COMING HOME? Maybe I could get “lost” in the airport at Abu Dhabi.

I’m exhausted.

X

記念日おめでとう

Today is the one year anniversary of arriving in Japan. My mind has just been blown. To think that one year ago I was sitting in my hotel room in Tokyo gaping out of the window and probably weeping like a princess and wanting to hug my cat.

I still want to hug my cat, but have made up for my pet deficit by finding new, more outgoing animals to make friends with, like Cools McGee here:

Because nothing suits a Corgi more than a baseball jersey and a pair of sunglasses.

I went to Fuji Q Highlands on Sunday with Charlene, Naomi and Shu. I’ve become very attached to all of them, we met Shu last year at a sushi restaurant. Sitting opposite each other, I remember he did a comedy eyebrows shooting up thing when a girl we were eating with spat out a gross looking fish into her napkin.  Shu is gay, has a line of jewellery and is a guitarist in a ska band. I do not enjoy ska music at all, but I pretend to like to listen to it as a good friend should. Naomi travels all over the world with her company and lives alone. A Japanese woman living alone is quite rare, women usually stay with their parents until they marry. This can often make me feel uncomfortable when I’m talking to someone who is of an age when they definitely should move out and they aren’t because they are waiting for a guy to whisk them away. Most of my Japanese co-workers still live with their parents, mid 30s. I often wonder what they think of me, moved to Japan alone at 22… I don’t think it’s that unusual, but they make a big deal out it sometimes, like I’m some kind of weirdo family hater. Fuji Q was so scary, the rides were huge and fast and even the tea cups ride was vicious! I woke up today still feeling a bit nauseous.

I have one week left of teaching. This makes me happy happy happy. I’m getting very anxious about coming home, I need to see people and have actual conversations with them. NO COMPUTERS INVOLVED

X

Your mother says you’re ugly

Obon Week has ended, I had a good time. Climbed a mountain, killed some nerve endings, saw a dead dog.

I went to the Mori Art Museum to see the last exhibit there before I go home, it’s called Sensing Nature, and I want my money back. Although the simulated snow storm pictured above was incredible, the rest was only so so. Maybe it was too intellectual for me, I liked the snow storm so much I wanted to live in it and eat the fake snow.

I had a trip to Akihabara. Top tip: Never go to Electric Town when its 34 degrees and humidity levels are above 80%.  The combined smell of body odor and desperation and greasy hair made me feel sick. I made friends with a Western girl who was handing out leaflets on the street advertising a maid cafe. She was dressed like a manga character and I was so taken aback that I stopped dead and was staring at her for ages.

SCIENCE MUSEUM! I saw Hachiko, he looked so…dead. It’s kind of shattered the illusion for me, but I soon forgot about it when I went in the 360 globe thing they have there. You go inside a giant globe construction and stand on a bridge and they project a video onto the whole of the inside! The Science Museum has a lot of dead animals. Dead everything. I investigated the dead cockroaches and found my one, he was a middle sized Asian one…obviously. Anyway, there are some truly vile looking ones so I feel lucky mine wasn’t some kind of freaky beast.

Kapibarasan // Sho Sakurai postcards (I bought a set of 15…) // Origami cranes // Domo-kun // Polaroids from home

X

RUNNING UP THAT HILL

I can tell you right now, I didn’t run. It took 9 hours to climb up that sonofabitch mountain and 4 hours to come back down again, but I did it, I climbed the highest mountain in Japan.

I didn’t enjoy it, but I did it and my mum is proud and that’s enough for me.

We climbed from about half 6 in the evening so about an hour into the climb I got to sport a head torch. Head torches are fun, except mine was too loose and kept sliding down and covering my eyes, LIKE A PRO. No one told me this, but it wasn’t just a steep walk up some kind of mega hill, OH NO SONNY it was 9 hours of rock climbing, in the dark. I mean actual clinging to rocks with my hands and feet with only a head torch lighting the way. I cried several times, out of fear. It was extremely scary and fucking dangerous and I shouldn’t have done it. Because of the high altitude it’s advised you inhale oxygen to combat sickness, everyone is affected by this on different levels. I didn’t throw up but there were times when I felt extremely dizzy and at a point I remember swearing at the mountain and making up my own language to do so, I think this was 6 hours in and I had hit my wall of pain and crazy.

The sun rise was beautiful and we got to sit in a heated hut afterwards, I can remember vaguely screaming hello at the boy sitting next to me and then telling Charlene loudly that his friend was beautiful and then I had a hot chocolate. Clouds are extremely pretty and interesting from above, I think I enjoyed watching those more than the sun rise. As we were climbing up it was still dark and we saw fireworks going off down below, it gave me goosebumps.

The descent was no more fun than going up, basically a 4 hour skid down zig zagging steep paths filled with volcanic ash. I fell over multiple times and landed on my butt, and I had a moment where I somehow gained momentum and ended up running down because I couldn’t stop and a Japanese guy was waving his arms at me telling me to “STOP” and I was shouting back ” I CAN’T STOP?!! I CAN’T STOP!” and then I ran directly into him and fell down. I don’t think he liked that.

It’s now 2 days after, and my bum and feet and thighs still haven’t returned to normal, I think they are staging a protest. I’m dragging them to a museum tomorrow though whether they like it or not because I found out the most famous dog in Japan, Hachiko (he has a memorial at the Shibuya scramble crossing) is in a science museum in Tokyo. Stuffed! That’s something I genuinely want to see.

Off the subject of Japan for an instant, Facebook. I got friend requested by some boy from school, I assumed he simply wanted to lurk and declined the request. Now he’s sent me a kind of aggressive email asking why I haven’t accepted. I really want to reply back with “BECAUSE WE AREN’T FRIENDS YOU LOSER BUTT MUNCH AND THE LAST TIME YOU SPOKE TO ME YOU ALSO KNOCKED MY CHAIR OVER SO YOU COULD LOOK AT MY KNICKERS”. Because obviously I won’t actually send that, at least it’s here so I can be reminded of what I would have said if I had the balls of a young Robert De Niro.

X

Today I got sunburn on the middle of my legs, and they are currently burning like two fiery bitches. I also found out that instead of having this Monday off before Obon Week starts, I now have to go cover some fucking teacher in fucking Chiba because of fucking personal reasons. Chiba will take at least 2 hours to reach by about 7 trains. Each way. Maybe it’s the sunburn talking, but I am as hot as balls and not amused.

X

What are you doing here, honey? You’re not even old enough to know how bad life gets.

I would say this is an excuse to show off my new flannels. I don’t think I ever took flannels seriously before I came to Japan. Or even thought about them in any capacity. Japan has made me appreciate the small face towel for what it can be, a stylish sweat buster! I think this might be the start of a Vivienne Westwood flannel collection. NOW DO YOU THINK FLANNELS ARE COOL?

X

on the other side

This time in 4 weeks I’ll be home.

X

Why don’t you tell everyone I said to go fuck themselves for making my teen years a living hell?

I have finally finished making folders that I have to give to the new teachers who will be taking over my kindergartens in a months time. A MONTH.

I also paid a visit to the immigration office today and got my passport stamped with a 3 year visa, which means I can come back to live here within the next 3 years. I like that, it means I can threaten to run off to Japan again and actually be able to do it. We also made friends with a Sri Lankan guy, he’s going to Facebook us apparently. I might ignore that friend request.

Then I got hit on by a boy who sells pork dumplings, he took my hand and told me a joke and I pretended to laugh. Apparently being sweaty attracts people. I got free dumplings! NEATO

I like Skyping with Jenny.

It’s still hot, why oh why can’t I be one of those people who appreciate being perma-sweaty? Like athletic people, or, David Hasselhoff. OH ACTUALLYHESJUSTPERMASKEEZY

X

I’m Bill Murray, you’re everybody else.

I may find my friend annoying, but she sure knows how to fill my belly. We ate so much sashimi. Sachi’s family have their own way of eating this, instead of putting the nori/sticky rice/raw fish together beforehand, they had it all set out so we could make our own. Which I loved because it meant I got to add all the soy sauce and wasabi my little salty heart could ever desire.

Then we had tempura, aka FOOD OF ZEUS.

By this point I had entered into a food coma but they just kept on bringing out more food. Charlene and I kept on making sick faces at each other, it was a good sick feeling though. The same one you get after eating Nutella out of the jarWHATINEVERDOTHAT.

We bought her parents a gift, but were running quite late so ended up buying a plant from our local florist. By florist I mean stall with 4 half-dead plants on it. The guy stapled some cellophane to the plant after we told him it was a gift. I had to walk away from the stall because I was giggling too much, I just can’t act cool. We got a gift in return, a set of chopsticks/holder/mat and a fan. It made me regret the whole stapled plant debacle.

I loved her parents. They made me point out where I lived in the UK on some really old map, I couldn’t quite find Essex, so I made a vague gesture and they probably think I live somewhere in the vicinity of Surrey.

X