Are you even here?

The count down begins in earnest now. Only 9 more school days left until I am officially doing NOTHING AT ALL for an as yet undetermined period of time! I'm very much looking forward to not having to be at work every day, and not even having a point at which I have to return :) I'm sure in a few months time when I am broke I might feel differently about that, but how many times do you get to truly do nothing like that in a life?

This weekend I went out to Okayama on Saturday to visit the library and get a few volumes to keep me company while I am at school this week. Trouble being that I already read most of them yesterday! Oops. In the evening I had arranged to meet up with a girl whose travel books I had borrowed months ago and return them. Turns out she, and a bunch of other foreigners, were going out for dinner to celebrate someone's birthday. I tagged along to have a chat and catch up with a certain Sydney-sider. After a dinner during which I endured such scintillating conversation as "How to identify skim milk" we left to wander seemingly aimlessly for half an hour before they all decided to go to karaoke. I excused myself there because I had run into my neighbour and some more interesting people going elsewhere and wanted to catch up with them. Very relieved to be leaving the group I had dined with because they make a great spectacle of themselves wherever they go. The way these people choose to live in Japan is very different from what I know. They make no effort to learn the language and just speak English unashamedly at people, they cling to each other for no reason other than that there is no one else around. I have no interest in making friends with people based only upon the fact that they speak the same language as me. A dickhead is a dickhead in their native land, or here. If you need evidence of the fact that they simply tolerate each other so they can kid themselves into thinking they have friends, just consider how quickly the group crumbles every time there is something to be organised. There is a kind of association or some such set up by JET which is supposed to help the foreigners adjust to Japan and keep each other company, they organise such things as trips to Mt Fuji and so on. Initially I was a little bit jealous that they had such support and just something to do. But I soon revised that thought after hearing all the bitching and moaning that inevitably follows every outing.

Saturday night I just felt embarrassed to be seen in such a large group of foreigners who were doing everything they could to perpetuate the stereotypes of gaijin that I have been trying to break the whole time I've been here. No wonder the teachers at school STILL don't believe that I can read their alphabet when most of the foreigners around here actually can't. Sunday arvo I was at the travel agent paying for my ticket to Seoul (YAY!) and an American walked in and announced loudly, in English, that he wanted a ticket to the USA. He wasn't a tourist, he lives in Okayama, and yet something as basic as asking about a plane ticket, he can't manage it. To me learning the language of the country you live in is as important as following the laws of that country. Living in Japan for an entire year and being unable to say a single sentence at the end of it is simply lazy and disrespectful. If you cannot speak the language how can you even say you were living here? Anyway, the evening was just a bit of an eye-opener for me about how many foreigners really do just bring an Australia/America/Canada/England bubble with them, blow it up on the day they arrive and never step out into the real Japan.

Moving along... Sunday wasn't planning on going back in to Okayama but I received a letter from the travel agent confirming my reservation for my ticket and asking for money, since I can't get in there this week at all I decided to just get it out of the way straight away. Luckily I hadn't used my return ticket the night before because there is never anyone checking the tix when you get off the last train so I just kept it and used it again! JR is such a rip off you take whatever opportunity you can to get a free ride. I went back to the travel agent where I'd sorted my flights for Australia out to see what was going on and they STILL can't tell me how much it's going to be. It's such bullshit, it is now less than 3 weeks before I fly and they are still saying that it's too early to pay for the flight because they don't know how much it's going to be and the "taxes are still fluctuating" or some crap. How do people organise a holiday if they can't pay for it until the week before they go? It's just plain weird.

On my way back through the station I stopped at Anderson's Bakery for a little yummy roll they make and a quite peculiar thing happened. I was just sitting there minding my own business when an African bloke asked me if anyone was sitting opposite me. I said no, so he put his bags down and said he'd be back in a second. Off he went to the Jupiter (foreign food store), he came back, handed me an apple juice carton and the newspaper, sat down and we started talking. It was a very strange experience our behaviour was as though we had known each other for a while. We spoke only intermittently, I was reading the paper the whole time, and yet it wasn't uncomfortable when it was quiet. Generally I hate meeting and talking to new people because of that uncomfortable silence that inevitably creeps in after a few minute of exchanging the usually information about oneself. After 15 minutes or so we both stood up and left.