inside the wonderful world of vee

Bah, relationships. Usually when I’m feeling bad, temporarily bad, I write a lot. But in this current case, words come to me, but not words about every day. If that makes sense.

Writing journals recalling the day seems tough. Writing journals about conjecture about writing about journals (such as this) seem fine……………… they require no brain. They’re like listening to music. They’re second nature. They’re unfiltered thoughts. They’re simple.

But everyday life is not so simple. ~__~ There is a want but no solution………… I don’t want a relationship but the comfort, the companionship… it’s just so weird without it. I feel like I’m stuck in a rut. Hell, it hasn’t been very long at all, though. I just haven’t done anything the past few days. :/ And I feel alone.

Somehow, it just dawned on me that I am thoroughly unhappy at the moment. Since the break-up, I’ve been occupying myself with… things… and it hasn’t seemed all that bad. Particularly in the daytime. But it is pretty godamn bad! And I feel bad. ~__~ The first sign would be my sudden heavy reliance on music, which generally goes hand in hand with my WORST moods. And then there is the amount of time spent in front of the computer, doing pretty much absolutely nothing at all but anything possible to just waste a little bit of time (this entry right here would fall under that distinction). Blah. And then I’m thinking, “Oh goody, I’ll be gone for a month, and I’ll get over all this…” but then it feels like I’m just running away, and like it’s a cowardly way out, and like I’m not really solving anything at all. And that feeling, coupled with so many unknowns about money, and jobs, and futures… just makes things feel so, so blah. And despite all the company, I feel alone. Yet at the same time, I kind of WANT to be alone, to sulk. Waddahell. It is completely draining. And this sleep at 4AM, wake up at 2PM schedule is NO GOOD!!!

Hojo apparently knows some guy who not only cuts hair, but develops a haircut for you after taking you out for a drink and talking to you for a couple of hours.

Hojo is going to get his hair cut by said dude soon. For like $40.

If it goes well, I too plan to get my hair cut by said man. Cause that just sounds fucking awesome, doesn’t it?????????????

Hmm. So since I’m taking off again in a week and have been gone for a month, I’ve been meeting up with people and hanging out more than I usually do. It just dawned on me that my relationships with some humans are quite interesting. I don’t have that many friends that I see that often, but when I see the ones I don’t see that often, it essentially feels the same and conversations are deep. It’s almost as though the time apart gives much opportunity for skipping past the bullshit and skipping past the silence. No necessity for small talk, just deep talk. I don’t know. It’s interesting. Maybe all people are like that. I don’t know? It just seems like I have a lot of relationships like that… where people will do me favors or we seem to have a close relationship for whatever the hell reason, even though I don’t necessarily talk to them all that much.

I also discovered today that I haven’t really spoken English in so long that expressing myself in verbal form has become slightly difficult. Haha.

WOW! They ain’t kidding. Spiderman 3 really does SUCK. How do they always manage to so royally screw up the last one so bad?!! It’s unreal. It’s like they know it’s the last one and they just want to go all out retarded… WTF. Anyway. More substantial posts to come later. Perhaps.

It is quite very difficult spending three + years of your life with someone, sharing your life with him, and no longer having it in that capacity with him. It’s terrifying in many ways. It feels as though you could never move on without him… as though you’ve lost a part of yourself… even though you obviously can move on and obviously will, as people always do. But three years in a relationship you at times enjoy and at times loathe will bring sentiments of nostalgia no matter what, and sadness is completely unavoidable. It’s easy to supress during the daytime, when conversation, sunlight, and the presences of other human beings abound. But late at night, when alone and left only to musical devices, breakups are a whole different world to cope with.

When it was your first taste at love, your first real opening up to another human being… it makes the breakup that much more difficult. In this case, though, it’d become perfectly clear that friendship will be the best route for both parties involved, and that both will move on to better significant others more suitable for themselves.

And while missing the little things is easy… the tender feel of skin, the cherished morning wakeup routine, and the crude inappropriate jokes… when it comes down to it, one can obsess over the beauty in details forever. But if a relationship’s not the best route, one has to let go. For the best of both parties. And hopefully at one moment it will click, and they will both be able to move without incident… with friendship in their hearts and memories of the good times as a reminder of potentially better moments in the future.

But easy as it is to string together philosophical meanderings, coping in reality is not that easy, and time will be the greatest friend and enemy.

:[

So, we stayed the night in Hiroshima at the same hostel and then checked out in the morning to head back to Tokyo. YAY! Not much time in Tokyo, so we had to make the most of it.

The shinkasen trip back was like 3 and a half hours or something. We prepared by getting a lunchbox in Kyoto, since we had to go there to pick up our luggage anyway.

SushiMonster scared of shinkasen!! Seriously, though, the first time I rode the shinkansen it definitely felt uncomfortable. The feeling went away after riding it for the second or third time, though.

My lunchbox! Lunchboxes are definitely the way to go as far as variety goes. MMM! Too much of it was sweet, though. I was a little disappointed by that.

Lenny’s lunchbox!

SushiMonster likes this fake tamago thing!

The Tokyo portion of our trip was no doubt the BEST portion simply because there was so much going on, with so much of it going on by CHANCE.

We just went to Akihabara right away and walked around. Went to an arcade where some dude was playing this CRAZY game where there’s like a million things on the screen at once and you pretty much just have to dodge the flying shit. He totally must play that game a lot, because he could maneuver past every little bead and only died once. Tons of people were entranced by him.

I also came to conclude it must suck to be a woman in Japan, because in the arcade, there was ONE other woman, and she was there with her boyfriend. It is absolutely not culturally acceptable for a woman to really play video games, other than maybe some music games (the playful kind with taiko drums or something, not even like guitar hero) or those stupid ridiculous UFO games which I STILL don’t understand the allure of. They are a trip, those UFO machines. They seem so completely and utterly pointless and have such stupid prizes you think that there couldn’t possibly be anyone stupid enough to pay money over and over again to play. But there are people who do. TONS OF THEM! WTH.

We also checked out an old videogame store, which had an old console we used to have at our house. Hollar!

There were also penguins in this window… :/

This waffle covered chocolate ice cream bar Lenny bought from one of the ice cream vending machines. DELICIOUS!!

We spent FOREVER in Don Quixote. At least Don Quixote always results in some interesting photos, even if it’s boring after floor 3.

Takoyaki hat, courtesy of Don Quixote. Actually, I think they spell it Don Quijote.

Hitler Halloween costume. I shit you not.

I also suggested we eat at Yoshinoya since Lenny hadn’t had it before and I needed to show off the cheapness that is yakiniku in Japan. I was the only woman in there, again. I also suspect that’s not fully acceptable, either. WHATEVER. They were all lonely singular men, in there by themselves. Pretty pathetic.

Then we went back to our hostel in Asakusabashi. There was this totally sketchy playground with like two of those springy horse rides or whatever and a bathroom that was open. I totally saw an old dude pissing… like TWICE. He was pissing twice, in full view of anyone passing by because that’s how the bathroom was designed. It was pretty fucking sick, I must tell you. Sick in a bad way.

Anyway, at the hostel, there was an amusing lady manning the front table when we first checked in earlier in the afternoon. Hehe. She had a funny voice. Lenny liked to impersonate her. I can’t describe what it was like, though, cept really high pitched, friendly, and scratchy. Haha.

The next morning, we got up, and it was SUNDAY!! Sunday meant the day that supposedly, one could rent bikes to bike around the Imperial Palace with. Free bikes? SIGN US UP! Turns out it wasn’t as exciting as one might think, though, and the bikes were limited to a ‘track’ that was set aside for people. The Imperial Palace is also kind of a lame place that is completely not worth going to. You can’t even go in!!!

Before we got there, though, there was this antique garage sale in Ginza we passed when we were walking along. Weird. Didn’t know Japanese people were into antiques. Yeah, yeah, I like to generalize.

Bikes for rent! Guess we totally shoulda tried a tandem bike. DAMN!

“Booya. I need a haircut.”

After riding around the lame Imperial Palace and realizing there wasn’t much to do, we went to the Global Festa, which was this festival with some foods from represented countries (mostly African), and a lot of non-profit organizations. Cute event. Very cute.

See kid in orange on the right? Kid in orange was terribly scared of man and/or woman in robot suit. How can one be scared of that? Who knows!

Well, we didn’t really know what was going on at the event since mostly everything was in Japanese and pretty much everyone was trying to promote some non-profit cause like stopping world hunger and helping education in third world countries and blahblahblah. I settled on some food from I-forget-what-African-country. It was like this beef, potato, and carrot or something stew with couscous. Pretty delicious. Lenny got some samosas from Ghana. Mmm, food. He also got some beer which he thought was disgusting but felt obligated to finish anyway since he paid $5 USD for it. It was also expired. Haha!

After that, we headed on over to Harajuku, for the most interesting part of our entire trip!! We had only planned on going to see the dressed up women, but there turned out to be SO MUCH going on in Harajuku that day that we were extremely, extremely amused.

First up, at the Shibuya stop: weird man dancing with flag. YAY!

Then as we were walking down from the train station stop to the Hibiya Park where all the stuff in Harajuku goes down, we passed a SEAFOOD festival. Needless to say, Lenny was in lorv. There was a crab grilling area but the line was super long, so we didn’t try to go there… we would go back, we said.

Then there was some kinda taichi conference or something…

And across the street from the taichi conference, we heard the bustle of music. What is it? What was it?! ROCK MUSIC? OUTDOOR CONCERTS? SIGN US UP!!

The first thing we saw… greasers!!! TOKYO ROCKABILLY CLUB? WHAT THE FUCK?!!

There they had their boomboxes and they were dancing up a fucking storm. Poses, limber moves… some of these guys were fucking old, too! But one thing’s for sure: ALL OF THEM HAD FUCKING FABULOUS HAIR.

SUPERSTAR!

SUPERSTAR!

What else? Rice Riot was an AWESOME electro pop band.

These girls um, played these drums? It was pretty… but not that entertaining.

I forget the name of this band at the moment… Primal something… will update with their name later… but they had these fucking girls in the palm of their hands!!!

“We are robots!”

Headbanging women? YES!

White girl in maid outfit? YES!!!

Have to look up the name of this band too, but their guitarists were REALLY good… very reminiscent of old Incubus like during “Hilikus!” But the vocalist was just okay, unfortunately.

TERRIBLE TERRIBLE TERRIBLE girl band with a vocalist who wasn’t even REALLY singing. I mean, check it out. They have no amps. Their guitars are not plugged in. I FELT like something was amiss when we first walked by, and I said that, but when we walked by again, it became obvious. They weren’t REALLY playing their instruments at all. PATHETIC. I mean, REALLY pathetic.

When we finally finished looking at all the music, we finally headed over to check out the famous Harajuku girls. We were met by THREE!! OR MAYBE FOUR?!! BUT LAMENESS!! There was only one that was actually posing.

Went shopping for a bit. I bought a cool scarf and a cool pair of pantyhose. Lenny bought two fitted shirts and a tie! Good shopping, but lots of people!! And it started raining a little bit.

We then decided to go back to the seafood festival, but poopingly enough, most of the booths had closed and the crab Lenny wanted to eat was gone, gone, gone :[

We decided to go back to check out some more bands. Very good band, Stereo Lynch!! The drummer was AWESOME. Reminded Lenny of Lingo, I guess.

R&B group from America. Los Angeles area, to be exact. They were just OK.

Think we went home right after that… maybe ate some meals along the way. Twas a long day, twas.

—

The next morning, we thought about getting up at 4:30am to go see the Tsukiji Fish Market fish auctions, but then got lazy. That’s way too early. We woke up at like 8:00am instead and bummed around Tsukiji. It took a while to get there. It always does. More tuna than one could ever REALLY want to see…

Tank full of FUGU!!

They don’t REALLY take that kindly to tourists. Whatever, though.

I was slightly in love with these trays of blood and guts. Call me a sicko!

Check out that grain!

This guy was carving up the head of the tuna, and we saw him pick off a piece and eat it as he was cutting it. Haha!

Mmmm, bin of miscellaneous tuna parts. I’m fascinated.

More. Seriously, is there something wrong with me?

Let’s not forget that we had to try one of the dozens of sushi restaurants along the outskirts of the Tsukiji Fish Market. We didn’t want to wait, so we picked a small bar type restaurant with three old people working. It was a very small menu selection, and very very expensive for being so basic. I had wanted to take Lenny to a place like we went to last year, where there was HELLA selection, but this place catered only to tourists and ONLY had the basics. :/ Above is what I ordered… crab, scallop, and cucumber rolls.

Lenny ordered two very delicious toro, ama ebi, and salmon. Evidently the toro and ama ebi were amazing but the salmon was just okay, since that’s a Pacific Northwest thing anyway.

Knives on sale!

After that, we went back to the hostel to check out because it was still like 10:00am or something absurd. And then we were deciding between going to Asakusa to look at temples or to the Science Museum on Odaiba that I thought Lenny would REALLY like. Unfortunately, Odaiba is ass far from everything. So it took a while to get over there. It was worth it, though, and it cost only $5 to get in (it actually cost more than that to actually physically get there because we had to take the subway and then a new line that only services Odaiba).

Just some pretty ceiling decorations.

ASIMO, the famous Honda robot, happened to be there that day!

Giant cool glowing globe thing, plus walkway!

“A working model of the internet.” Kinda interesting.

Virtual videogame horseriding?!

Cool motion sensor thing, where the fish would be able to detect the pillows and would bounce offa them. COOOL.

Just another view of the globe.

An astronaut’s bedchamber.

An astronaut’s toilet.

Evidently all the components that make up the human body.

Toy that let people try performing surgery on their own. :0

Regular cup of noodle styrofoam cup versus styrofoam cup of noodle cup that has been brought into a submarine!!

Cool ass exhibit. Through the mirror, a face would appear in that blue circular thing, but when you just turned around and looked at the blue circular thing on its own, there was no face… just water. A total trip. AMAZING.

And this post is not done yet, but I’ll finish it later. Must go to bed now.

Lots to say about catching the flight back to Seattle, and about the crazy ass Chinese people on the plane. This photo is a partial note of what’s to come as far as crazy Chinese peoples go.

This guy was to Lenny’s right, and he seriously had his feet propped up on the TABLE while he was sleeping. How crazily unsanitary, man!!! And that is seriously only the beginning. CHINESE PEOPLE. THEY ARE INSANE!!!

After visiting the main Hiroshima sights, we took a ferry to Miyajima Island. First, we took the bus to get to the area where we should take the ferry. Then we decided to eat at some ghetto little cheap restaurant before we went on the ferry. Then we went on the ferry, where there was a baby with like the most hair EVER. He had such a huge head of hair. Or was it a she? We never could figure that out…

Well, Miyajima Island was only, like, a ten minute ferry ride away. We docked at the tourist station and then proceeded to walk around. Lenny figured out a route for us to go up (with some suggestion by me) and then we were immediately met with deer. MOO!

The deer wants Lenny! MOO!

Poor poor antlerless deer.

These deer will eat everything! There are notes EVERYWHERE telling people to watch their passports and tickets because the deer will eat them! I thought it was a joke… it certainly sounds like one… but one deer definitely ran off with one of Lenny’s flyers, and one can only imagine that it is really NOT a joke, and that it seriously happens ALL THE TIME!!!

The deer was totally facing Lenny til right before I took this photo.

“GIMMEE SOME!”

So we headed to the park first. Sorry, forget names of places here.

I scared of the scary horsey.

Dragonfly! Pretty cool when zoomed in. Unfortunately, this is NOT zoomed in.

Tree root!

One can take the gondola type thing up or hike up. We chose to hike up. Unfortunately, Lenny is much more in shape than I. He got kinda bored of waiting for me at times, I think, but shit, I needed to rest sometimes godamnit! I’m a weakling!

Cool flower I’ve not much seen before!

The view from halfway up. I have to admit, it’s pretty godamn nice.

Mt. Misen is the top. Supposedly, there were monkeys up here. I SAW NO GODAMN MONKEYS. Seriously disappointing. Seriously.

So there’s this guy with beads… but check out the little guys with beads!!!

One lone crane, in a thing of rock.

Not sure what this is for, but it looks freaking sweet!

I’m trying to look sexy. What?! This isn’t sexy at all.

His sexy pose is a little better.

His sexy pose is the best yet.

Again, the deer was looking at Lenny right before this photo was snapped!! REALLY!

A view from the top.

This raven was just chillin for a while.

Descending the mountain. It was getting late. Unfortunately, one of the shrines Lenny wanted to check out was closed ~__~

But at least we got to see the Floating Tori Gate at sunset, which was quite very gorgeous.

It also happened to be low tide, which means we could actually walk out to it. It was a helluva task getting photos where there were no humans around.

Sky and water blend into one.

Giant SPOON!

So on our ferry back, this younger hip-hop dressed type dude was sitting next to me. As it was time to get off, there was a bag next to me. Thought it was his, so Lenny ran after him and tried to return it. The guy ended up explaining that it was, “For you,” even though he seemed surprised by it at first and said, “Thank you.” So… I’m not sure if he intended to leave it there or if it was someone else’s, but we got a whole lot of momijis!! Which are these little cakes filled with different things. Flavors we got included the regular red bean, the green tea, and CHEESE! (Which we thought was cream cheese, but later found out was like… regular cheese… and it was hard whereas the other flavors were like, paste, so it was a little… odd.) I must say I was slightly scared of eating it initially and joked about it being poisoned! But hell, what’s the worst that could happen! Parents tell you not to accept candy from strangers?! We’re living proof that it’s perfectly OK!!!

That night, we ate at a sushi restaurant in Hiroshima, and next to us was this Chinese family. I decided to make conversation with them and ask them where they were from. They were from Northern California, of course. The wife was friendly but the husband pretty much like ignored my ass. The mom asked me if I was on post-graduation vacation, though, and I strangely (because I was nervous, I guess) answered YES. The answer was quite very much… NO. So, WTF.

We leave from Himeji and get to Hiroshima relatively late in the evening. It’s okay. People tell us there’s not that much to do in Hiroshima anyhow. We pretty much just get to the hostel and chill the first night. The hostel is within walking distance from the train station, so we walk. The map we have is a little shifty, but we make it without problems. It is K’s Backpacker Hostel. The front desk guy is so so so friendly, almost in a ditzy kinda way. Lenny lurvs him a lot. He’s Lenny’s favorite person on the whole Japan trip — tied with Shoji MAYBE. We originally have booked two nights at this place, but we’ve since decided to stay a night on Miyajima Island and decide to cancel one night at the Hiroshima hostel.

So we get our room, which is shared with two other people. They turn out to be two people from England, and they’re on a one year world trip. Just like everyone else, except for Americans. We head to the kitchen… just us and our food we got from a supermarket in Himeji! Yay! We had a whole smorgasbord of random foods to eat. Yay! Clean kitchen, and FREE LAUNDRY SERVICES! This place is crazay!

Bed bed.

Food food.

Left to right… Lenny, potato salad, crab legs (dammit, they turned out to be imitation! No wonder they were so cheap!!), croquette, and my autumn vegetable platter, which was delicious!!

Damn, that’s some real-looking imitation crab!

After eating, we decide we want to stay in Hiroshima after all, since ferries coming back from Miyajima Island run late. No need to stay on the island. So we get our second hostel day added back on… yay!

The next morning, we head out to explore Hiroshima. We start off by taking their local bus/rail thing. It’s $1.50 anywhere you go in the city center area.

We stop by the A-Bomb Dome first. It’s funny because the bus or whatever has all these stops, and all of them are only described in Japanese, except for this one, which is clearly a place only tourists go to… that stop is described in English and Japanese. Haha.

For some reason, birds seriously LOOOOOVED this godamn thing. I mean, like all kinds of birds. Cranes, pigeons, ravens, etc. ALL OF THEM WERE ALL OVER THIS SHIT.

There is a whole peace park in Hiroshima. For obvious reasons. This statue is based off that famous story of the girl who folded 1,000 cranes (yet still died).

Evidently this was also the week for remembering victims who died from the Atom Bomb. It was the anniversary of the bomb dropping.

There were all these colorful booths, filled with cranes from individuals in schools around the world. While we were there, there was a group of I think Australians who sang a song and then placed their string of cranes inside one of the open glass booths.

Monument with a perfect view to the A-Bomb Dome… planned, I’m sure!

We decided to go into the Hiroshima Museum because it only cost 50 CENTS. Which is like, the cheapest thing ever in Japan. They were really clever to make it so cheap, because that was pretty much the only reason we went in, and I’m sure that’s the case with many passerbyers. I didn’t think that the museum could possibly be all that interesting, but man. It affected me pretty deeply. It was definitely an amazing museum. Well put together, lots of useful information, etc.

Model of Hiroshima BEFORE the bomb. Japanese people fucking LOOOVE these godamn models.

Model of Hiroshima AFTER the bomb.

Well, there were a lot of disturbing things in the museum, and it made me feel really weird, frankly. The most interesting things in the museum were…

1) Letters written by the mayors? of Hiroshima to every country who ever runs a nuclear arms test or thinks about running a nuclear arms test, telling them that they should not.

2) The fact that they planned to drop three bombs but later whittled it down to two, and that Kyoto was on the list of places to possibly bomb. Lucky Kyoto and lucky Japan that it was not, but who knows just how many culturally rich places just like Kyoto were destroyed because of the bombings :/ Kyoto was also largely unscathed because all cities which they THOUGHT of A-Bombing were not regularly bombed, because they wanted to study the full effects of the A-Bomb.

3) The fingernails and stories of one boy who got bombed and then tried to suck the pus out of his own fingertips / fingernails because he was dying of thirst. Fucking. Worst. Imagery. Ever. ~__~

An image from a war or something protest in Germany.

Happy chair!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The previous night, the Indian dude at Shoji’s house told us that we should go to Himeji, since it was on the way to Hiroshima. We decided to go. It was just a simple train stop! And Indian dude told us… FREE BIKES!! SIGN US UP!! WE’RE SOLD! The bikes are available at the Info Center of the train station… you simply have to ask and then they give you a key. You exchange the key at the bike place, four blocks down the road at this bike parking lot area. We just had to go downstairs.

BIKES!! ALL FOR US!!

So we paid however much money and went into Himeji Castle, which is like… one of the best castles in Japan, I guess. Go here and you don’t really have to go to any other ones again, because they’re all the same really!

Geometric fancy wall!

Inside the palace All wood.

The view from inside Himeji.

Apparently, they had guns then! Fancy ones. I forget when this shite was built. But I guess it was pretty late. Actually, it was also burned down at some point, so it was rebuilt. Cheaters!

Low ceilings. High Lennys.

Yet another view! MMM!

Himeji Castle!

VICTORIOUS!

This wall’s special, cause it’s made out of a lot of stones lifted from other places, including from gravestones! YAY!

Supposedly, a woman lives in that well. Or a ghost used to haunt it. Or something.

So after going to the castle, we decide to go back to return the bike. The bike needs to be back at like 5:00pm or something, but Lenny thinks it’s 4:30pm. We get to the bike place and I say it’s still early, so we decide to ride back around the ring around the castle. It’ll be fast, we say! Unfortunately, we get a little lost and make a wrong turn, so we have to furiously ride back the way we came. We had like 8 minutes to get back and we actually MADE IT. Man, bikes are CRAZY! IT’S LIKE TELEPORTATION! INSTANT RETURN!!!! MEEEEEP!

On the way around the castle.

Yet another

And so we furiously ride back, return the bikes, and head off again… train station! Hiroshima, here we come!

The train station. BEAUTIFUL!

Goodbye, Himeji!

WE LOOK LIKE WE’RE 12!!!!