Golden Week

So here in Japan, there's this thing called Golden Week when a couple of holidays fall really close together and pretty much all of Japan decides to travel at the same time. This year, it started on April 29th (Friday), and we had the 3rd-5th of May off in addition to that Friday.

This meant that technically, we all had work on Monday and Friday.

What the heeeeeeeeeeeeeeck Japan.

Lots of people took those two days off and went places, but my original plans - volunteering up in Tohoku - fell through because they actually had a huge amount of people who wanted to volunteer and our logistics were giving us a little bit of a problem. Plus none of us had camping gear (cause seriously, who brings that with them over here at first? I mean, I haven't been like, CAMPING camping either like... ever.) and because (more importantly perhaps) none of us had cars. Transporting tents, sleeping bags, food, water, and clothing (the basics) was proving to be difficult, especially since I don't have one of those backpacking/hiking backpacks.

So instead, I had a pretty chill Golden Week. Didn't travel anywhere, unless in to Okayama counts. Mostly, I did UFO machines, karaoke, and hung out with friends. We watched j-dramas (YEAH MEI-CHAN NO SHITSUJI~) together, what few of us were left, ate out together, spent the night at friend's places, ate taco salad (YEA-YUUUUUUUH), improved on said taco salad during round 2 (different day, but I decided to buy a cheap hamburger steak that was mostly hamburger and added that to the taco salad to make it Really Freaking Awesome), had lots of quesadillas (for Cinco de Mayo) and spent (or wasted, depending on how you look at it) a lot of money on UFO claw machines (I even won things though), racing games (woo I have an Initial D card and Mario Kart Card now), and pelicula. Oh man. I love photo booths over here. They're SO MUCH FUN. X3 And they're cheap too.

Though, while we were in Joypolis, the huge Sega arcade in Okayama, we came to the realization that the silver coins we were putting into the machines were not quarters, actually, but they were 100 yen coins, which was like sticking a dollar coin into a machine each time. And to think that I used to believe 75 cents for a game was expensive. Ha. Ha ha ha.

I did, however, get out of the local area for a couple days. On tuesday, a bunch of other ALTs and I went to a beach on this island close by called Shiraishi and camped out, drank, and generally relaxed. Met some pretty chill people. Oh, I got to kayak too! I got this amazingly painful sunburn from that. My shoulders hurt so much right now. No joke. They hurt way more a couple days ago; wearing clothing was physically painful and very very uncomfortable, but now it's just kind of itchy. Sigh. Not looking forward to that part of being sunburnt. I have nobody to blame but myself though, as I stupidly did not put on sunblock.

Kayaking made me remember how much I miss kayaking as a form of workout. We kayaked to a nearby island and wooow my arms hurt so much after. The water was gorgeous though. I wanted to go for a swim but I kept seeing small jellyfish floating in the water and thought that those were best avoided. On the island too, while everyone went on a short hike around the island, I went over and talked to this Japanese family from Okayama city who were fishing off the rocks. They were super nice. I learned a couple of words too - あさい　ふくい which mean shallow and deep haha. Also the names of fish. This one fish they had caught was called kisu (which sounded like kiss to me). It was really nice to just relax and casually talk to them in broken English/Japanese. :D Makes me motivated to continue my studies in Japanese more! (Speaking of, I did buy a couple of books for studying Japanese for the JLPT - the Japanese language proficiency test - we'll see how that goes)

Stupid me though, I have no pictures from this holiday excursion. Sigh. I need to get better at that, especially since I saw this really cool looking starfish that was black with a splash of red at the center. It was so cool! X3 There were also a bunch of sea anemones, a couple sea urchins, and even a couple fish that we saw while over there. We managed to get low tide and walked out to the little island. It was super awesome. X3 I totally want to go again. The people on the island are really friendly, and there are two foreigners who own this bar on the beach called Moo Bar (it's cow themed!) and they're super chill and really nice. :D The drinks are tasty too, but man, I've gotten really bad at remembering to drink water/non-alcoholic liquids when I drink here. >_< Working on that though.

Yeah though, today was nice. Yesterday I went into Okayama City (again) and spent the night at Jessi's place (again). We went to Joypolis (I sank 1,000 yen into a pokemon UFO claw machine trying to get audino/tabunne but ended up winning two other pokemon, one which I gave to Jessi cause I'm not a bug type fan and the other to Gemma since she asked). So I suppose it's not that bad? >_> I made up for it by buying books to study with. Sigh.

It's finally starting to get warmer though, so I'm kind of like uuuuuuuuuuughhhhhhhhhh spring is rapidly turning into summer where it's muggy and I want to just live in water. >_<

I am totally not a warm weather person.

I am also totally not a bug person.

It's getting muggy and hot. It's supposed to be up in the 80s.

Warm weather basically means that the bugs return. I've already heard the cicadas, gotten smacked in the face/cheeks/eye by at least five bugs on the ride back home, found two spiders in my house and one giant moth on my bike basket, and my continuous war with the small spiders over the handlebars of my bike has begun anew. Sigh.

Hooray for spring indeed.

Let's NIHONGO~