濡れる

My 21st birthday was fairly laid back, since it holds little meaning in a country where legal drinking age is 20 and even then rarely enforced. Friday night, my last night of 20, I went out to the same bar from last weekend (I guess I'm a regular now, from the number of the regulars I now know). Wasn't going that big for myself but when other patrons heard it was about to be my birthday, they kept on buying me drinks. I tried to refuse but Bar Master Chano-san insisted that you can't really do that, so I just begged him to make them increasingly weak as the night went on. I tried to leave at midnight so I could catch the last train home but the insistence on drinking more detained me; instead another customer who lived in the same direction offered to share a cab when we finally finished around 2 am. The birthday itself was low key, at least partly due to the headache- made some calls home to friends and loved ones, then went sightseeing to Osaka castle. Finished the night when a bunch of the group went to a bar to see Will sing with his guitar at an open mike night.


Osaka Castle

We just entered the rainy season. This means all rain, all the time. The forecast predicts a full week of nonstop rain to follow The Great Wettening of June 13th 2010. I was the only without the foresight to do all my laundry on Saturday so I'm basically sockless for the next week.

So I'm supposedly living in a double apartment, but from how little my Japanese roommate is around, and how we draw out the worst of the quiet introvert in each other, I might as well be by myself. The rain has dampened my ability to go out and explore freely, so the rest of the weekend has been cooped up by myself to do homework. Sure, during the school year I'm a beast at depriving myself of things I want to do in favor of doing the workload that Yale demands, but with summer the drive to be the academically self-deprecating Yalie weakens a lot. Even so, the result of that upbringing kinda leaves me at a loss when left to my own devices. So this summer is perhaps trying to make me learn how to deal with with boredom, with loneliness, with free time, and with myself when I'm alone in a foreign country with limited access to the outside world and limited opportunities to get outside in this country.

I'm actually a little terrified of how much time I have up in the air once the program ends in late July. I have a full two weeks after the end of the academic term before my flight home, and currently no real plans. While this has the possibility to be a chance for freedom and exploration and all those awesome things, the flip side is that I might be very bored and lonely to have no companions for two weeks.

The prospect of independent travel is exciting, but my preliminary research and stab at itinerary making have been discouraging. I didn't manage to get a Japan Rail Pass (unlimited use of the bullet train for a week!) before leaving the states and assumed it'd be fine to have my family buy one there and mail it over, but looks like it might be harder than that. I was considering couch surfing as a way to create a snaking route of stopping points, but there's really not many hosts outside of Tokyo. It doesn't particularly look like my travel dates and plans line up with anyone else on the program. WWOOF usually expects more than a week or two, but I've got a membership pending with their Japan branch. So we'll see.

For now, it's back to the mountain of homework.