Missing Home

For this first time today I got a couple pangs of actual homesickness, as opposed to my ever-present desire to eat cheese and play ITG.  Although I'm sure that making the adjustment back to America will be difficult by the time I leave for home, there hasn't been a time yet when I haven't wanted to go back.  Perhaps I'm overstating that a bit, but my desire to return home is like a canvas on which my enjoyment of studying Japanese and of all the things I enjoy here are painted.  It is what it is, and I doubt that will ever change.

 I'm pretty sure this homesickness thing was spawned at a place called Genki Nikoniko Mart.

It was on a day a couple of weeks ago.  Since at this point I'm pretty sure my food entry is never making it on here, I won't pull any details about it.  Genki is the cheapest food place we've gone to since coming to Japan on virtually all fronts.  It was around the time that we really started making food at home, dramatically reducing our food costs.  We're still battling food prices (occasionally losing, but doing our best), and Genki has been our greatest ally. It was there that I bought a bag of state fair carrots...

I can barely get my hand around it...


...as well as a large bag of onions that has been serving us well, and more recently enough snacks to choke a horse.  Oh, and 300g of pickled ginger for a DOLLAR.

There was more before, but I eated it.

Anyhow, I'm way off topic, so back to what I was saying...

Tina and I were walking south, a direction we hadn't been before, mostly because the valley narrows and there's only really one place to walk, so north always seemed like a more exciting option.  We were having a pretty bad time I'll admit, and walking was what we were doing to avoid sobbing into pillows and sleeping all day, you know, the usual temptations that depression and culture shock bring.  I needed to go to the bathroom really badly, so I excused myself into a super market with a giant smiling Sun on the front.  I'll never be the same again.

After using the bathroom I went into the store to find Tina and immediately noticed the store's most distinguishing characteristic: its music.  Every minute of every hour that Genki Nikoniko Mart is open it is playing, on loop, the most energetic, cheerful big band music I can possibly imagine.  Before we knew it the prices, sheer quantity of tasty looking food and the atmosphere the music created, which was almost tangible, like we were wading through happiness juice, had won us over and raised our spirits.  We've been going back ever since.

So how does this relate to my homesickness?  It was the music.  It reminded me so strongly of the part of Final Fantasy VII in which the upper part of Junon celebrates Shinra's new president (after the old one was killed by Sephiroth), that since then I've had two bouts of extreme desire to play FF7, so extreme in fact, that it triggered homesickness the like of which I have never had before.  I can see the scene's play out in front of me, and I start to hear the music, as clear as if it were playing via headphones strait into my head, and all at once I'm hit by the weight of the countless hours I've sat in front of that game, and all the emotion and attachment that I've formed to those experiences.  This summer I think I'll be putting in some hours on the FF7 replay front.  With Albert.  And he has no choice in the matter.

This lusting after video game nostalgia played upon my existing desires to see my friends and here I am writing this blog entry to distract myself.  While I'm at it, why don't I tell you about my trip to Tokyo two days ago?

First off, it didn't go quite as well as either of us had hoped.  The trip was planned and orchestrated by our tutors, moreso by the younger two who, despite their good intentions, were having a hard time finding a balance between herding us around and leaving us to our own devices.  This led to a little bit of exasperation on both of our parts, eventually Tina and I decided to go home, and another one of our tutors, Machiko, was forced to come with us because of an earlier mistake she made in essentially buying my train ticket and hers in one so that we had to stay together.  I don't know whether or not she would have gone home at that time or not had she not been forced to, but either way she didn't seem to mind, and this turned out to be somewhat of a windfall for us.  She offered to take us to the Pokemon Center in Tokyo, and as a result did not immediately go home, but instead spent a few more hours in Tokyo at a far more leisurely pace.  That was really nice.

Having given that short, complainy summary, I will proceed to make a slightly more complete version of events.  Since this is getting rather long, why don't I split this entry?  Click the next entry when you've had some time to breathe and drink some cocoa if necessary.