To start off 2009, I headed back to Yodo from Lorna’s apartment. It was a cold and quiet morning in Japan. I could tell it was the new year because the ads on the train had changed. The first advertisement of 2009 was for a shopping center who had chosen to display their wares with a Japanese model wearing a cow hat.
I got back to the Hisa clan’s house in Yodo around 11 AM. The house was still except for Kenta, who was past his gate at the door. Everyone was still asleep from the previous night. Rickie was the first one to wake up, which told me I had definitely missed a strange night. As it turned out, everyone had gone to the temple before midnight and come home around 2 AM. Will and Rickie then went back into Kyoto for some parties. Rickie had gotten home at 7 AM. As the rest of the country began to wake up in it’s post-celebratory haze, I heard a few stories during everyone’s recovery. Hisa and Isamu were up sometime around noon, instantly snapping back into their normal roles.
I passed the day with little excitement. Unfortunately the next day was quite similar. Lorna and her mother set off for Tokyo on the 2nd, and Will arrived in Yodo to prepare for their trip to Hokkaido. 2009 was shaping up to be a very quiet year.
On the 3rd, I woke up alone in the house. Everyone had left for Hokkaido and it was just Kenta and I. My task for the day was to find something to do for my four days of solitude. I spent time on the internet and then headed to the Kaikan dorm to hang out with Bob, Kyle, and Daniel (Will’s neighbor). Kyle jailbroke my iphone and showed me a lot of the new applications I could download while we all watched movies and played Mario on the Wii virtual console. The evening ended a little before midnight with me taking the long walk back to Yodo.
The next morning I found myself in a similar position as the day before. It was cold, I was alone, and I needed something to do to keep me from having long conversations with Kenta. I headed back out to the Kaikan again, but this time with the plan of dinner and drink.
We all went to a small noodle restaurant near the dorm. Bob and I had a beer with dinner then we all grabbed a few more at a convenience store on the way back. There’s something about being in college that takes the edge off of drinking like a hobo. Or it could just be that drinking at a bar is prohibitively expensive in Japan. Around 11:50 PM I had a small buzz but wasn’t really interested in returning to Yodo. I convinced Bob to let me stay on his floor and made another trip to the quickie mart on the corner for some Kirin Strong 7.
After midnight, I ended up discussing American politics in the Middle East with Hasan. Hasan is a Moroccan student who’s been in Japan for several years. Between some slurring and the language barriers in both English and Japanese, I’m not sure he understood my point. We both settled that we didn’t think what Israel was doing was right. Hasan said he didn’t care that it was a Jewish-Muslim conflict, he just didn’t want to see anyone dying. I couldn’t agree more. An hour or two later, Kyle had disappeared and Bob and I realized we were the last ones awake. I slept on the blankets from Bob’s kotatsu (heated table) in unexpected comfort.
In the morning I got up and made the trip to Yodo. It was cold and I was not feeling great. Kirin Strong 7 is not really a beer. It’s a beer flavored 7% alcohol drink. This feature had given it a particularly disgusting hangover effect. Kenta was beside himself with loneliness when I got back, practically backflipping with joy to see me.
Recovering from my hangover, I spent the day on the internet and sitting at the kotatsu. Feeling the inertia to remain lazy, I did the same thing the next day. I watched Jurassic Park on youtube, cleaned up some photos I’d taken, and whiled away the hours. In the late evening, Hisa, Isamu, Rickie, and Will returned from their ski trip in Hokkaido. Hisa made sure to make fun of the instant ramen containers I’d thrown away. I don’t care, they were delicious and cheap.
After two and a half days of nothing, I finally had something to do on Wednesday. Lorna and her mother had returned late the night before. She had a half day in the morning and I was headed out to meet up with her for lunch. We ate and caught up on her trip while her mother was out seeing some of her Kyoto friends. Though I’d seen her when she got back to Japan, the weekend had felt very long. When her mother returned we went for dinner at Cafe Independents near Shijo. Lorna and I had tried to go there before, finding it closed for a private party. It was worth the return trip in both food and atmosphere. It was getting late and very cold so I decided to stay with Lorna and her mother, rather than risk the weather on the long walk in Yodo.
