Another Harry's Bar
[8/20]
Fortunately, the orientation in Kobe today was not very exciting. So I will not write much about it. (Fortunately because I’ve been posting too much anyway...heh.) The drive actually only took about three hours from my house, which isn’t bad. And Mizuta-san drives slow. And it was weird, even after only three weeks or whatever, to be in a city again. It’s just so different. But that’s not a very deep observation, is it?
The best part of the trip was the sunset on the way back; there were scattered dark clouds with the sun peeking out from behind them and making huge rays of light and halos around the clouds, all over layers of shadowy mountains. I kept trying to take pictures with my phone but it was hard from the car.
Here’s the random musings I wanted to write about tonight: yesterday, hanging out with Jarryd and Tania (not the one whose house I stayed at but the other one, whose name I am arbitrarily spelling with an i to distinguish her), both of whom have been here for years and years, they were talking about how often they went home (not very – Jarryd hasn’t been home yet in his five years here!), and they were sort of shrugging and saying “well, what is there to go home for?” And it just made me think how different this all would feel if I didn’t feel so tied to my life back at home. If I were, in some way, looking to really center my life here. I mean, I want to love it here, I want to bond with this place, I want to meet people I care about, I want to feel like I belong here...but I guess, right now, I can’t picture wanting to root myself here. I feel like I have too many roots already back at home. I guess it hadn’t explicitly occurred to me that some percentage of the people who come to Japan in this program don’t particularly feel like they have strong ties at home. I’m lucky enough to have a family that I’m really close to, as well as a handful of friends who are really important to me. It just must feel really different to come here thinking that you want to really set up your life here. (I’m not trying to make it sound like my situation is somehow better – I think it’s pretty cool to come to a foreign country and stay here for four or five or ten years and really live here. Just that for me, right now, I find that thought kind of scary. Because I’d be leaving so much.)
And everyone says “you have to stay at least two years; you don’t really get into the swing of things until your second year.” That sort of scares me too. I wasn’t planning to stay for more than a year. I have things to return to that I don’t want to give up. But being surrounded by all these people whose whole lives seem to center in Tajima, I feel almost...guilty, or something, saying I was only planning to stay for a year. And I already know it will be hard for me to leave if all the people I know are staying. But right now, I can’t imagine not wanting to go back home after a year.
After all, if my friends are still here, then I’ll always have a place to crash if I want to come back and visit. ^_^
In other news, we were talking about the local dialect, or Kansai-ben I guess, the other day, and Jarryd was saying one of the main things that’s different is that they use ~hen instead of ~nai for a negative ending a lot of the time. So today I was watching out for that in Mizuta-san’s speech, and he does it all the time! It made him significantly easier to understand, knowing that that meant ~nai. Heh.
And now, while I feel there was something else I meant to write about, I can’t remember it, and I got up at 7:30 this morning, so I think I’ll try to sleep now. My plans to do math yesterday kept being thwarted (by, for example, people ordering me to play video games instead – I mean, there’s only so much you can insist on reading a math textbook instead of playing video games before people think you’re really weird...), so tomorrow I’ve got a lot to do before Jarryd and Alisa get here at five. がんばります！
Oh oh, in (or near) Kobe I saw a bar called Harry’s Bar! It was exciting. So here are some lyrics from Another Harry’s Bar:
God’s tears on the sidewalk; it’s the mother of all rain.
But in the thick blue haze of Harry’s you will feel no pain.
And you will feel no soft hand slipping on your knee;
You don’t have to pay for memories, they will all come free.
It’s another Harry’s Bar,
Or that’s the tale they tell.
But Harry’s long gone now,
And the customers as well.
Yeah me and the dog and the ghost of Harry will make this world turn right,
It’ll all turn right...
Fortunately, the orientation in Kobe today was not very exciting. So I will not write much about it. (Fortunately because I’ve been posting too much anyway...heh.) The drive actually only took about three hours from my house, which isn’t bad. And Mizuta-san drives slow. And it was weird, even after only three weeks or whatever, to be in a city again. It’s just so different. But that’s not a very deep observation, is it?
The best part of the trip was the sunset on the way back; there were scattered dark clouds with the sun peeking out from behind them and making huge rays of light and halos around the clouds, all over layers of shadowy mountains. I kept trying to take pictures with my phone but it was hard from the car.
Here’s the random musings I wanted to write about tonight: yesterday, hanging out with Jarryd and Tania (not the one whose house I stayed at but the other one, whose name I am arbitrarily spelling with an i to distinguish her), both of whom have been here for years and years, they were talking about how often they went home (not very – Jarryd hasn’t been home yet in his five years here!), and they were sort of shrugging and saying “well, what is there to go home for?” And it just made me think how different this all would feel if I didn’t feel so tied to my life back at home. If I were, in some way, looking to really center my life here. I mean, I want to love it here, I want to bond with this place, I want to meet people I care about, I want to feel like I belong here...but I guess, right now, I can’t picture wanting to root myself here. I feel like I have too many roots already back at home. I guess it hadn’t explicitly occurred to me that some percentage of the people who come to Japan in this program don’t particularly feel like they have strong ties at home. I’m lucky enough to have a family that I’m really close to, as well as a handful of friends who are really important to me. It just must feel really different to come here thinking that you want to really set up your life here. (I’m not trying to make it sound like my situation is somehow better – I think it’s pretty cool to come to a foreign country and stay here for four or five or ten years and really live here. Just that for me, right now, I find that thought kind of scary. Because I’d be leaving so much.)
And everyone says “you have to stay at least two years; you don’t really get into the swing of things until your second year.” That sort of scares me too. I wasn’t planning to stay for more than a year. I have things to return to that I don’t want to give up. But being surrounded by all these people whose whole lives seem to center in Tajima, I feel almost...guilty, or something, saying I was only planning to stay for a year. And I already know it will be hard for me to leave if all the people I know are staying. But right now, I can’t imagine not wanting to go back home after a year.
After all, if my friends are still here, then I’ll always have a place to crash if I want to come back and visit. ^_^
In other news, we were talking about the local dialect, or Kansai-ben I guess, the other day, and Jarryd was saying one of the main things that’s different is that they use ~hen instead of ~nai for a negative ending a lot of the time. So today I was watching out for that in Mizuta-san’s speech, and he does it all the time! It made him significantly easier to understand, knowing that that meant ~nai. Heh.
And now, while I feel there was something else I meant to write about, I can’t remember it, and I got up at 7:30 this morning, so I think I’ll try to sleep now. My plans to do math yesterday kept being thwarted (by, for example, people ordering me to play video games instead – I mean, there’s only so much you can insist on reading a math textbook instead of playing video games before people think you’re really weird...), so tomorrow I’ve got a lot to do before Jarryd and Alisa get here at five. がんばります！
Oh oh, in (or near) Kobe I saw a bar called Harry’s Bar! It was exciting. So here are some lyrics from Another Harry’s Bar:
But in the thick blue haze of Harry’s you will feel no pain.
And you will feel no soft hand slipping on your knee;
You don’t have to pay for memories, they will all come free.
It’s another Harry’s Bar,
Or that’s the tale they tell.
But Harry’s long gone now,
And the customers as well.
Yeah me and the dog and the ghost of Harry will make this world turn right,
It’ll all turn right...
posted by Ashila at 12:54 PM
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