achievement unlocked

I visited my friends in Hanawa, Fukushima this weekend and on my way home this afternoon I started crying happy tears.

There's a line in the movie Eat, Pray, Love where Julia Roberts' character says, "I want to marvel at something." I spent my drive home from Fukushima marveling at the mountains. Being from Ohio, any kind of landscape elevation tends to evoke awe from me. But these mountains are in Japan. I'm living, working, and driving in Japan. This is a place I never even dreamed of getting because it never seemed truly feasible.

I don't consider the rest of my life downhill from this, because there are plenty of other things I can work toward (that cute house in the country, for example, with chickens in the yard; having a pet cat or dog; publishing a book; vacationing in Hawaii; eating pasta in Italy), but I've never felt like I needed multiple incredible things to happen in my life; I've only ever needed one.

Taiwan was my catalyst. Japan is my one.

Comments

paris, part one

I left for Paris on December 21st from Taoyuan International Airport in Taoyuan, Taiwan, which is a forty minute train-ride south-west of Xinzhuang. You already know about Taoyuan from the previous post, so I won't go into it. I left on time, though, and had an easy flight to Shanghai. Once in Shanghai, I quickly learned that I could not access the internet because I didn't have an "international phone" through which to receive the password. (Coming back from Paris, I found out that all I had to do was ask about it at the front desk.) My layover was short, though, so it wasn't too big of a hassle, and I did manage to change some TWD into RMB, the Chinese currency, and buy a snack. I needn't have worried about food, though, because I was well-fed on China Eastern's flight. Oh, China Eastern. I got to know them very well in that week, seeing as I had about three separate flights with them. The planes are very nice, and I was elated to find that I had a m...

it's a quiet village

For the second morning in a row, I went for a jog along the side streets of my neighborhood. The first morning, I went in a straight line, following the road as far as it went. When I arrived at a park, and a sharp turn, I turned around and jogged back. This morning, I turned left, and at the next intersection, right again, now following a new road as far as I felt I was willing to jog. I passed more houses, more little plots of land growing rice and vegetables, and what I think might have been a Shinto shrine on a wide expanse of cleared land. Both times, although I passed people and the occasional car, I was mostly on my own along the roads. Last night I remember lying in the dark before I fell asleep and thinking, "It's so quiet." No distant din of traffic, no undertone buzz of electricity, no nearby growl of a scooter engine, no occasional shout or yell from somewhere in the streets. Last night, I fell asleep to the silence of suburbia. It's a marked differ...

learnin chinese one word at a time

The super fun thing about living in a different country with different customs, culture, language, and writing system is that getting "settled" is a daily, uphill battle for a while. Take, for example, the process of learning what parts of the body are acceptable to show. In Taiwan you can wear shorts almost up to your butt, but heaven forbid you wear a low-cut shirt or show your shoulders. (Although I think showing boob is worse than shoulders.) Skirts and shorts are really short around here, while tops tend to have very high necklines and almost always cover the shoulders. (Tank tops are usually for layering, so you'd be putting something on top of your shoulders, anyway.) Despite knowing this, I feel weird going out in shorts and heels, because in the States you'd be calling attention to yourself (particularly your butt) if you were wearing something that showed your legs and called attention to the way you were walking. Another thing that I'm going to have t...

around

Search This Blog