Kozushima
September 19, 2007 at 11:27 pm | In art, japan, vegetarian | 1 CommentI would have had an extra day – to ease the transition between jobs/ place of residence, but we had that day switched to get an extra day off after the following weekend. My old roomate, the lesser of the remarkable filthy pair/ a good reason why I went off to live in the wilderness years ago…, he had made plans for a group of us to stay at an island near Tokyo. The group started off as a grand concept, but wound up being him and the girl he lives with, me and my girlfriend. That worked out well, because we all fit into one rental car when we got there.It wasn’t rainy then, but it was very cloudy and looked like rain all through ’til afternoon. We walked to the nearest beach after checking into our Inn. I swam around and looked at the fish, and painted 2 pictures while the other 3 slept on a blanket. I got very sunburnt, as did my old roomate. Those paintings came out pretty well. It was a bit overcast though, so the colors came out a bit darker than I would have liked. My back/ shoulders and such were also darker/ far more painful than I would ever want them to be.
I thought we’d all stay up late drinking, being that that’s what my old roomate does every night, and indeed we’d each bought a lot of drinks beforehand for that very same purpose, but after sleeping on the beach all day, the only thing the 3 of them wanted to do was go to sleep early.
The day after that we went to a pretty bay that had a boardwalk over some of the rocks. It had a bridge high between 2 groups of rocks, where many people go to swim and jump off the bridge. My old roomate found a baby sea-urchin and threw it to me so that I could see.
I ought to have known better than to try to catch anything he threw at me; It is now a month later and I still have red spots on my hand where the spines broke off under my skin.
While swimming I dove down a bit, and was pleased that I found some adult sea-urchins deep in the water there. They look all in all spinier than the babies.
They wanted to have a barbeque near another beach, which was more vegetable based than all the other barbeques we’d had up until then; I would call it progress,
…but it might’ve had more to do with the high cost of groceries on the island.
We got the fire going quickly. A teenage girl who was part of something that looked like a church group fainted nearby. They were standing out on the beach under the noon sun setting up tents. An ambulance came, though there couldn’t have been anything larger than a clinic on that island.
We stayed in the shade and started drinking the drinks then.
When we’d finished, I went down to he other side of the beach to paint a picture of a rock archway. Rock archways have always fascinated me. This one was cool/ the 1st I’ve ever seen with my own eyes. It was just at the edge of the road though, so I had to stand pretty close to it to be able to see it without obstruction. It was the 1st time I ever painted a picture drunk, but I don’t think you can tell.
They had planned to stop in a hotspring before dinner at the Inn, but they slept on the beach too long again to manage to spend any time there. It looked like a really cool – outdoor oceanview hotspring, …but I was too sunburnt to be able to enjoy hot water – and didn’t mind not being able to go then.
After dinner we went on a boatride to see glow in the dark plankton and flying fish.
I saw 1 flying fish, and I was the lucky one.
The plankton was super cool! They call them ocean fireflies; That’s what they looked like. We also got a rare view of the stars – away from the city and suburban lights. It would have been an ideal – romantic after dinner activity, except that the boat made me slightly sea-sick, and it made my girlfriend – very.
On the last day, we went back to the beach that they had slept on for the whole 1st day. My old roomate bought a spear to try spear fishing. He impaled a baby pufferfish, and one pretty yellow fish before a lifguard came by to tell him that spearfishing wasn’t allowed on that beach; Odd that they sell the spears right next to the beach then… Anyway, he spent about a half hour trying to get the yellow fish in the cooler without it bleeding on his last few cans of beer, but changed his mind, and let it back into the sea to bleed to death in dignity. Fugu/ pufferfish is of course poisionous, so he put that guy back into the water just after shoing everyone that he was able to spear a fish.
We took a taxi to the port on the other side of the island to get the boat back to Tokyo. We got there an hour early, so my old roomate slept more, the girl that he lives with sat on the beach next to the pier, my girlfriend watched me paint some/ answered a lifguard’s questions about me + my painting.
I was able to “finish” that painting in that time, because I was working fast, and because my girlfriend was talking to the lifguard on my behalf, but I had to leave the sky cloudless to get the rest in on time.
Everyone slept on the 3 hour boat ride back to the city, and I was amazed at how much all 3 of them slept all through that weekend.
I didn’t want to go straight from a nice pretty island to the endless concrete monoliths, so I proposed we all stop for dinner in Odaiba. The other 2 just went right home, but my girlfriend and I went, watched the drinking party boats, saw the fake statue of liberty, and went to an Italian buffet that had a view of the same.
A Rainy End 3
September 13, 2007 at 12:12 am | In art, bad luck, development, japan | Leave a CommentThe next weekend/ the last weekend I took everything else from my old apartment to my friend’s old apartment, …where I live now. I went to his farewell party and came back to Nagano to drop my old company’s car off.
The place they had me living when I 1st went to Nagano has a famous double waterfall which is impossibly difficult to get to. I’d always wanted to go there and paint a picture of it/ just go there somehow, but every atttempt I’d ever made was foiled.
The only thing I had with me on my last day in Nagano was my bag of paint/ easel/ etc..
It was raining and foggy then too though, so not only could I not paint a picture of the double waterfalls, I couldn’t even see them when I did finally make it there.
They sounded nice.
I got the car back to my old company in the evening, and by some coincidence, theye happened to be in the process of moving their office across the road (for half the rent). I gave them a hand for a little while, and then it was night, and they gave me a ride to a train station where I got a ticket all the way back to my new apartment.
While I was on the train, my new company called me a few times to give me information on where + how I should get to work on my 1st day (early the next morning).
My phone battery was weak, and getting weaker, and using a cell phone on a train is generally discouraged, so I said I’d call them back when I got off the Shinkansen.
But somewhere between Shinkansen ticket gates – my shinkansen tickets disappeared, so I had to explain this and that and the color of the hair of the man who sold me the ticket to the group of JR staff nearer to my destination. They said that they were allowed to charge me triple the total fare for not having a ticket, but they only re-charged me the cost of traveling down the last few stations.
My new company called again at 10pm, when I was finally on a local train towards my new city. They didn’t have anything especially interesting to say. I told them to go home, as it was 10pm.
I had to dig around for something to wear to work the next morning, I got to sleep really late, and I had to wake up early to make it there in time. I wasn’t looking forward to doing it, but it wasn’t so bad when it was all through.
A Rainy End – part 2
September 10, 2007 at 11:47 pm | In Uncategorized | 1 Comment2 weekends to move everything important out of my most recent old apartment would have been plenty of time, but 2 weekends to move all the important stuff out and paint what scenery I could – while the scenery was still scenic…
That’s not a lot of time.
I sat in my half emptied older apartment looking up at the sky for signs of improvement; I didn’t see any.
I didn’t want to let the rain ruin my last few convenient opportunities to convene with nature, but painting in the rain always turns out between bad and terribly.
I also dislike getting my shoes wet.
I don’t know why I didn’t think to go hiking sooner. I lived at the base of a famous volcano, and even years before, I’d always wanted to climb it.
I left as soon as that thought occured to me, I brought my bag of paint/ easel/ etc., just in case the weather had a change of heart – which it didn’t.
I left my watch behind – it being Sunday/ unimportant.
I got myself to the base of the hiking trail at around 2:30 and I speed walked/ jogged most of the way up.
My old job kept me at a desk for 9 hours a day, so I must admit being ever so slightly winded by this manner of ascent. The mist and fog kept it cooler than it otherwise would have been, made it all cool and mysterious looking too.
Nearer to the top there was an orange colored river, which smelt of sulphur. It was a volcano after all.
There was also a shelter that people could hide in – in case of eruption.
The higher up I got, the thicker the fog became. There were also fewer and fewer trees, and the boulders skewn here and there became larger.
About 20 minutes from the crater there was a sign and a rope and an abrupt end to the path, which were all designed to keep a person from going any higher up.
I could hardly imagine anyone climbing up and up and up for so long, just to turn back after finding one set of “Extremely Hazardous” signs.
I don’t know for sure what time I got to the tippity top; I’d left my watch at home, and the fog obscured the view the sky – making it difficult to ascess the time of day.
All the way up, I wondered what the crater would look like, but the fog made anything more than 8 feet in any direction undiscernable. I stopped where the black rocks dropped down sharply and the white gasses rose up softly.
The limited visibility had been a concern of mine when I left the path behind to find the crater, but I made a pitiful attempt to glance around occassionally/ to remember the sillouettes of the boulders I passed and really, I had hardly any trouble getting back to the path.
But I was tired then, so I went down the path slowly.
I tried to remind myself to walk faster – because it was probably approaching 5pm, but at that point I liked walking slowly.
I sat down for a minute outside of the eruption shelter and a guy came out of the hut that was attached to it.
He told me it was 6:25 (about 40 minutes til dark).
I would have known that if I had worn my watch.
I might have walked back down through all that length of forest with my bike light, …if I hadn’t left it in my other back pack,
The only thing I could do to make it back to my car before the path became dark and invisible was to run all the way down the rest of the mountain.
I had been cycling fairly regularly for the better part of 4 years, but I’d hardly run at all over the past year. I was tired, and it was hard to see all the rocks, sticks, roots and that one little bit of mudslide that were blocking the way but I managed to do it, + find my car without feeling around for it.
I was a little late to work that Monday, as I could bearly make it down the stairs from my apartment, and I had an awful time walking for the whole week after though. A lot of people found that funny.
Running most of the way down Mt. Asama is an impressive thing to many people it seems.
Blog at WordPress.com. | Theme: Pool by Borja Fernandez.
Entries and comments feeds.
