We had a lot of surprise snow last week. We'd gotten so many false predictions that I stopped paying attention to the forecast. Then it snowed off and on for about three days. It was very pretty, but the air was too warm for much accumulation. Probably that was for the best.

---

I'm really torn about what I'm going to do when I go home this summer. I've considered a number of possible jobs-- tutor, TA, copy-editing assistant-- but none of them has really caught my interest. If I'm honest with myself, the idea of settling back into a regular job and niche at home is a little depressing. I also feel like it's a little silly to leave a proven, steady source of income and step back into the uncertainty of the US job market right now.

At the same time, the part of me that sounds like my mother says that I should get started making a "real career" for myself. I'm 26 now, which is a bit too old to be acting like an indecisive college student. Maybe I should be "making connections," meeting people, building a resume that American employers would be able to relate to.

But 26 is really young, too, and I want to travel more.

I miss my family and friends, and seeing them more often is a big reason to go home. How often would I see them, though? They have their own lives. I might not even be able to get a job close to home. Then what? I'm also terrified of ending up in another stifling cycle-- barely treading water, watching my free time slip by in an exhausted daze while I struggle to put gas in my car. The year before I came to Korea was, in some ways, my most miserable ever. It was certainly the most hopeless and frustrating. I never want to return to that, and I'd do a lot to avoid it.

I've been thinking a lot about Japan in the last week or so. I'm reading Speed Tribes right now, which has renewed my interest in returning to the places I saw there this summer. Tokyo, in particular, captured my interest, and I'd love to see more of it. I'm not sure about living in Japan, though-- it's hideously expensive, and I'd just be staying afloat (if not losing money. Still, it would be an adventure, and I'm not ready to give up on those.

I do want to spend some time as a person before I go back to being an alien, though. When I went home for Christmas this year, I couldn't get over the simple miracle of being able to speak in my own language to anyone I met without coming across rude. I want to eat familiar foods, use a dryer, have a social circle of more than a handful of people. I need to spend some time reconnecting with home before I start in on a new kind of "away." I'm just having a hard time visualizing how it's going to go.

Tuesday, June 16th, 2009

I'm writing this in an internet cafe near Ueno station. It's six minutes past midnight and I really should get back to the ryokan and get some sleep, but I wanted to get at least some of my backlog of travel notes typed up before I lost my momentum. I thought, a few minutes ago, that I'd lost my travel notebook, which would have about broken my heart. It's the same one Mom and I used when she was here, and I hope to keep it forever.

---

Tuesday morning, I overslept. A lot. Checkout was at 10 o'clock, and I woke up at 11-- for some reason I'm having a hard time waking up to my phone alarm here. (Maybe I should have brought my regular alarm clock, a big musical one that might well be able to wake the dead.) Just as I was muttering "no... no, no, nooo," there was a polite tap on my door, and I was able to apologize in person to one of the ryokan staff members while pantomiming frantically that I'd been sleeping. Everyone there was quite nice about the whole thing, and they didn't charge me any extra for the late checkout. I would wholeheartedly recommend Sawanoya for anyone who's staying in Tokyo; it was a lovely experience in pretty much all respects.

Suzuki Ryokan, on the other hand, is more than a little disappointing. (Can I give it a negative review while still staying there? Is that kosher? Somehow I doubt the owners spend much time scanning the Internet for English-language reviews of their establishment... ) It is orders of magnitude less nice than Sawanoya. I will grant that it is, in fact, weirdly charming-- there's a kind of woodland theme going on, and I've even got a "tree" in my room (will post pictures when I'm able). It is also cheaper, by about 1,300 yen (around 13 bucks) per night.

I would, in a heartbeat, have spent those extra thirteen bucks a night for more time at Sawanoya. I don't regret not having made a reservation there ahead of time, because I had no way of knowing if it would be nice or not, but I wish they'd had space available for the whole week.

Unfortunately, Suzuki asks for cash up front (at Sawanoya, you pay at the end), and I paid it before I'd looked very closely at the room. The room, I discovered later, is none too clean. The shower room is downright disgusting. They do not clean every day-- or, indeed, any day, as far as I've seen. Mostly, the family that runs the place stays in the back rooms, and the guests come and go as they please. It's a weird, slightly creepy little place, and I wish now I'd shopped around more before deciding to stay there. (I was so excited that one of the places from the Lonely Planet book could accommodate me for the five days I needed that I didn't bother to look further.)

On the other hand, it's insanely convenient-- the train station is only a flight of stairs away!　The futon is more comfortable than the one at Sawanoya, too. Trade-offs. :)

(I just listened to "Camel Walk," by Southern Culture on the Skids, because it was playing on Di's playlist which I put on for background music. It is a weird, weird song. Reminds me a bit of the B-52s. Strange... yet fabulous.)

---

After a shower-- I felt like I needed one, having just lugged all my crap to the new ryokan-- I headed over to Asakusa for a look around. Sensoo-ji, the big Buddhist temple over there, was lovely (or what I could see of it was). The building was mostly covered by scaffolding when I went, unfortunately-- I guess they're doing some kind of renovations-- but I could see the temple guardians and five-story pagoda and the giant straw sandals and the big red lantern and all that good stuff. I would have liked to sit down inside for a while, because it did have a very beautiful altar, but only temple members were allowed past the outer... foyer, I guess you'd call it.

Asakusa temple, the little Shinto temple there, was almost an afterthought after Sensoo-ji. It's tucked around the corner from the Buddhist temple and is only a fraction of its size, and I imagine a lot of tourists go their merry way without ever realizing it was there.

There were pigeons everywhere. Lots of signs explained (in multiple languages) that pigeons were quite capable of feeding themselves, and that people who fed them were contributing to a minor ecological disaster and general nuisance. Some of the statues in a small garden I passed were wearing "cloaks" and "bibs" made of old clothes, apparently to protect them from the pigeon poop. It worked, to a point, but didn't do much for their heads or faces.

Passed some kids playing rock-scissors-paper (however you say that in Japanese). Another cultural similarity with Korea. :P

---

The Lonely Planet guide has a blurb on a doll shop called Yoshitoku, where they make beautiful, traditional dolls intended for collectors. I'd decided before leaving that I would go and look around, and that I might get a doll if I found one that I liked and could afford. (I always loved looking at Mom's collection of international dolls when I was a kid!) The store wasn't too hard to find (it was raining again, but I'd brought my umbrella), and they did have a lot of beautiful dolls inside. I looked at everything, and read what documentation was available in English.

(DOLL-RELATED TL;DR)

I was surprised, at first, that some of the most expensive dolls in the shop were quite tiny, and looked very simple compared to the tall kimono-clad ladies in traditional poses. I couldn't figure this out for a while-- surely a beautiful embroidered kimono was more expensive than the simple, hard, cloth-covered bodies on the little dolls I was looking at? Then I looked closer.

I just looked it up, and found that these are called kimekomi dolls, made of carved wood into the grooves of which the cloth is very carefully tucked, creating the visual effect of very elaborately folded cloth garments. The closer I looked, the more impressed I was, because I saw that the expressions and poses where much more subtle and real than the ones on the geisha dolls I'd spent the first few minutes looking at. I was surprised, and delighted, to see a tiny kimekomi girl sitting on a shelf, holding a flute, with a price tag of about 43 dollars. I immediately decided to get her.

I pointed her out to an employee, who brought her to the counter and had me sit down. He handed the doll, and the price tag, to another employee. She looked at them both, frowned, and left the room. When she came back, she said two cruel words: "Chigau puraisu."

Wrong price. The actual price on the doll I'd chosen was well over two hundred bucks, and far more than I could justify spending on a four-inch doll I knew nothing about beyond the fact that it was pretty and I liked it. My mother always jokes that she knows she has good taste, because she always gravitates towards the most expensive thing in the room without even seeing the price tags. I've obviously inherited that knack from her. -_-

(END DOLL-RELATED TL;DR)

---

Side note: It is much easier to find drip coffee in Japan than it is in Korea. Also, Mr. Donut is a superior breed of donut shop. Cream-filled, icing-dipped crullers, anyone?

---

We do seem to bring the rain, don't we? My parents used to joke that we should hire ourselves out as a rain charm to places suffering from drought: all we have to do is go on vacation somewhere, and down it pours. Tuesday got rainier and rainier as the evening progressed.

---

There's a street in the Asakusa area that specializes in restaurant areas-- plastic food, mass-produced dishes, door curtains, etc. I went looking for it, with the vague idea of picking up some plastic food for my mom (heheh), but couldn't find it. It might have been there, but just closed down already: a lot of businesses here close around five. I might try to find it again before I go.

---

After Asakusa, decided to go to Akihabara-- the big electronics district-- to see what I could see-see-see. I ended up in a massive (6-story?) electronics store called Yodabashi Camera, where I wandered up and down and picked up a USB drive and a little camera case. Afterwards, quite exhausted, stopped into a "Victorian pub" next store called "The Rose and Crown," looking for a beer and possibly some English-speakers to talk to. Akihabara is a big tourist draw, after all, and a British-themed bar seemed a likely hangout for parched foreigners looking for beer.

The bar was packed... with Japanese customers. As I should have expected.

Japan seems to understand beer much better than Korea does. It's quite a big thing-- like at home, I guess. In Korea, half the advertisements in the subways are for soju companies; in Japan, it's beer.

Half-pint done, I went outside and looked in vain for crowds of otaku. Should have looked at the guidebook: prime time for Akiba is apparently late afternoon. The rain was coming down harder and harder, but I needed to find an internet cafe-- no 'net at Suzuki-- so I slogged around for a long, long time. Finally got directions from a nice attendant at a smoker's-den-and-pay-toilet across the way from Yodobashi. Found cafe; checked mail; left, looked for dinner; realized trains were about to stop; left.

Sunday, June 14th, 2009

Sunday, June 14th, 2009

I'm not sure if I can get on the computer downstairs for a long time, and don't really want to monopolize it anyway, so I'm typing this on my laptop and will update the blog with it. I need to get a cute, quirky USB drive while I'm here. I keep trying to steal Internet, but without success: there's a DSL modem in the room, but I don't have the LAN password and have been too shy to ask for it. Silly self.

Warning: I'm writing these entries up from what I wrote in my notebook each day. There's no particular order to them, and a lot of tl;dr. Skip what you like. :P
Where were we... Sunday.

-~-

I was so tired Saturday night that I fell asleep in my clothes, and slept the night through with the lights all blazing. I'd managed to roll off my bracelet (bit chunky jadeite bangle I got in Itaewon) and had managed to fall asleep with it planted directly under the center of my back. Ouch.

Couldn't, therefore, immediately pass an objective verdict on the comfort of the futon.
The inn was very quiet, and I was feeling a little isolated, and wished I'd talked to the Australian couple I briefly met the night before. l resolved to be more sociable in the future.

First things first: I went down to the bath, which I hadn't been able to use the night before (on account of falling asleep fully clothed, etc.). Japanese traditional baths are called onsen. It was my first time using one, and it was a conversion experience.

What you do is wash off outside the tub, rinse off all the soap, and then get into the water (which is very hot, and stays heated all the time). The tub is quite deep, and when you're in all the way the water comes up to your shoulders (or your neck, I guess, if you're smaller). Then you just sit and cook until you feel like getting out (or until the flesh melts off your bones). The baths here have sliding windows that look out on a little walled garden outside. If I knew anything about Zen meditation, I would say it was very Zen. I did try to meditate.

It was a conversion experience. I got out feeling like a happy wet noodle, and started the day cheerful and relaxed. If you will believe it, I've never once gone to the saunas in the two years I've lived in Korea. At first I was too shy-- overweight foreigner, public bathing, horror stories about rude Koreans staring and poking and making comments... After that I felt so dumb for never having gone that I just... never went. I'll go now, though. It had been too long since I'd had a proper bath.

-~-

My first order of business for Sunday (after breakfast, which ended up being at a Metro Starbucks) was to find another place to stay after my time at Sawanoya Ryokan ran out. The next ryokan on my list from the guidebook was Suzuki Ryokan, a few stops away at Nippori. I had to change from the Metro to the JR (Japan Railways) Yamanote line-- the system is much more complicated here-- but got there without a problem. This new ryokan is right by the station, and was relatively easy to find. When I got there, the lady and I had a fairly upbeat conversation in broken English and very broken Japanese (I just managed to remember the days of the week), the upshot of which was that I now have a reservation from Tuesday night through Saturday night. As the guidebook describes Suzuki as "quirky" and "weirdly charming," I am hoping that this is a good thing.

-~-

I finally made it to the Imperial Palace area around noon. There are parks all around the Palace, and I spent a good hour or so walking through them before I made my way to the East Garden (my original destination). The East Garden is the only part of the Palace that's open to the public. There's a (very) small museum right near the entrance, which was displaying Japanese artwork on the theme of seasonal flowers. Only two pieces really struck me. One was a strikingly realistic painted-ceramic sculpture by Okuda Kodo. I can't remember what flowers they were, but they almost looked alive. The other was a painting, right by the entrance, whose English name was Cockscombs (or Coxcombs, maybe). The artist was listed as Higashihara Hosen. I was completely captivated by this painting. The reds are warm and liquid and suck you in, and the painting is full of details you don't notice right away-- a bug-eaten leaf, a spotted petal, etc. It was a really simple painting-- just red and yellow flowers, with no background-- but I stared at it for a long time.

The East Garden is mostly just a small botanical garden, though it does have a few old foundations and three restored guardhouses. The only flowers that were really blooming were the hydrangeas, and those were incredible. I kept trying to take pictures of them, but couldn't capture the blue. Mom would have really liked them, I think. Along with a few other buildings (one of them having something to do with mausoleum records, I think), there's a small music hall in the garden. It's octagonal, with with pretty mosaic walls, and was apparently a present for the Empress on her 50th birthday. I kept thinking how nice it would be to get to see a show there.
I finally got out of the Garden around 3:45. I didn't feel like hanging out in the area, and I knew most of the museums in the area would be closing at five anyway, so I decided to head over to Roppongi. Roppongi, as I understand it, is half sleazy drinking area and half up-and-coming urban hub. I stopped into a bookstore and bought a Japanese dictionary on the way to Roppongi Hills, which my guidebook listed as a marvel of modern urban design. (Hey, if I'm going to get into urban planning, I might as well start paying attention.) Roppongi Hills is, indeed, a cool little area-- very self-contained and space-efficient, which apparently is the idea. Aside from the high-rises (which I actually am not sure I saw at all) there's a movie theater, a bevy of high-end shops, a statue of a giant metal spider, and an art museum. The Mori Art Museum, to be precise.

-~-

ART MUSEUM TL;DR: THE MORI ART MUSEUM

It was open until ten. What was I supposed to do? It was something like 5:30 then-- that was plenty of time to look around. I balked a bit at the price, though: 1,500 yen for a combination ticket (museum, city view, and SkyDeck), which was all they had. By that time I kind of wanted to see it, anyway, so I broke down and paid it.

It was quite misty, and the 52nd-story view was not all that impressive. It's a cool city to look on, anyway. Ordered chaos, bound by streets and highways that seem to be squeezing the city like big girdles. Most of the buildlings around the Mori tower are fairly short, which I guess makes the view seem like a higher one. I could see a few roof gardens, especially around the Roppongi Hills area, which was nice. (Everyone should have one!) I didn't want to stay there two more hours, even to see the city light up, so I moved on-- but I got a little pop-out 3-d "city viewer" to show the kindies when I get back.

The museum's featured exhibit was called "Kaleidoscopic Eye," or something, and it was all supposed to be multisensory art like the "Synaesthesia" exhibit Mom and I saw in Seoul. This one was on loan from Austria or Germany or somewhere, but a lot of the artists were English or Canadian or American. My favorite installation was "Global Domes XII," by John M. Armleder. It's a room where two rows of six big disco balls each hang from the ceiling, lit from overhead by small spotlights. The balls are spinning, and the entire room is filled with whirling flecks of light, all turning in different directions. It was like watching snow fly, or cells moving in a bloodstream, or (the title "Global" reminded me) the spirits of millions of people, all going about their daily lives in different ways without taking much notice of each other. Since the balls were lit from directly overhead, their shadows were perfect circles directly beneath them, adn they seemed to be resting on columns of air. The room was quiet, and felt like a temple. It wasn't quite an optimal installation, since the ceiling was clearly panelled and there was a covered window on one wall, but I really liked it anyway. I'd love to see more of Armleder's work.

Because so many of the artists in this exhibit were from English-speaking countries, a lot of the artwork used varying degrees of written/spoken English. There was one exhibit, for example, that was called "Y": a forked tunnel made of Christmas lights spiraling around a plywood walkway, with mirrors on two sides to confuse people. Viewers were supposed to walk through the entrance and out one of the exits, and then go back and do it again if desired. The problem was that the two exits, which were clearly marked "EXIT ONLY," were marked only in English, with no translation posted anywhere I could see. The result, most of the time, was a traffic jam.
Another artist whose work used a lot of English was Janet Cardiff. Anyone heard of her? I found her pieces really unsettling and worrying. One was newspaper articles and poems on index cards; one was a table where you moved your hand over the surface and heard a sound (just like a lot of the exhibits at the Seoul MOMA, Mom!). All the speakers played spoken-word scripts, in English. I'm not sure what the people who didn't know the language were making of the whole thing.

Matthew Ritchie, a British artist, had an installation there called "The Family Farm." It was drawings, paintings, and written words, all combined. Take away the words and the piece loses half its effectiveness. (He's definitely an artist I'd like to see more of.) Another interesting British artist was Sarah Lucas, who had a piece from a set called "Bunny Gets Snookered."

It really drove home to me the importance of the English language in modern culture. It's not just direct communication; it's reading, writing, movies, art, and everything else with an international aspect to it. I've really been reminded of how lucky I was to grow up speaking the world's current lingua franca (haha), and I really want to improve my foreign-language skills so I don't feel like soem kind of global freeloader.

There was a piece by Peter Tcherkassky called "Outer Space," which was an edited film on loop in a darkened theater-like space. It was pretty creepy: the whole point of the piece, apparently, was to convey the impression that a spirit was in the room with the viewer. I don't know if I'd credit it with that level of effectiveness, but it got me thinking. Why don't artists do haunted houses? For a "multisensory" exhibit like this it would be perfect. You could make it a challenge: who can make the most effective haunted house using only senses other than sight-- changes in air pressure, soft breathing, thumps or running feet, etc. Sometimes horror is at its scariest when it's at its most subtle. Maybe someone should do a study of haunted houses as an art form.

One of my favorite pieces was a crystal fountain flowing with diluted LSD, overhung by pitcher plants (actually, the sign said they were Nepenthes, which I guess are different). The artist was Klaus Weber, and apparently the thing was a proposal he did for a public hall somewhere. It was rejected; go figure. I liked it, anyway-- the "water" in the fountain made a beautiful sound as it hit each layer, while the plants overhead made the piece very dreamlike and ominous. There were glass walls up around the fountain, which dimmed the effect a little bit.

Two other pieces I liked were Casa con piscina, by a duo called Los Carpinteros, and Astrophotography by Cerith Wyn Evans.

On the way out, I stopped by what was possibly the most expensive museum store I'd ever been inside. Bought a postcard.

No pens were allowed inside the museum, but I sneakily took a lot of notes anyway. As you can see.

END TL;DR

-~-

Side note: In several places so far, I've seen displays of books from the Wallpaper travel guide series. Many world capitols are represented. Seoul is not one of them. I wondered if that was a buying decision, or if the book just hasn't been made yet. I hope it's the latter, since it would be rude of Tokyo to blatantly exclude its neighbor.

-~-

I realized that night that I'd managed to go two days in Japan without eating any Japanese food. I had had: Coffee and a sandwich. A banana Curry and nan Two more bananas More coffee and another sandwich A matcha (green-tea-powder) latte. Okay, I guess that kind of counts.When I realized this, I was at the Roppongi Hard Rock Cafe, drinking a vanilla shake and eating steamed vegetables. (That place is expensive.) I resolved to at least have some ramen before the day was out.

-~-

I had expected Roppongi to be a bit like Itaewon in Seoul-- a one-street dive, kind of a ghetto for foreigners of various origins. It's actually quite different: much cleaner, with more restaurants and clubs, most with tuxedo-clad African men outside hustling for customers. It's also bordered by a quite up-market area-- Roppongi Hills, where I'd spent the evening, is right next door. Maybe Itaewon is just like itself.

-~-

Something funny that I've noticed: Certain Japanese and Korean foods are "evil twins" of each other. I stopped into a 24-hour diner on the way home Sunday evening (wanting something a bit more substantial than a milkshake and veggies) and ordered what looked like bulgogi and rice with sides of kimchi, soup, and salad. I thought I'd happened onto a cheap Korean chain restaurant. The rice was as expected, though there was a lot more of it, but the bulgogi was... oddly tangy. Silly Japanese people, I thought, don't you know that bulgogi is supposed to be sweeter? It took me a second to realize that I was, in fact, eating teriyaki. -_- The "kimchi' was actually Japanese pickled cabbage, which was flavored with ginger instead of pepper and surprisingly pleasant. The soup was good old miso. Two years ago, Korean food used to fake me out the same way.

Another side note: Eating rice with chopsticks is damned hard. It makes perfect sense to me, now, why the Koreans would want to use a spoon. One of the first things I started to miss, maybe.

-~-

There's a three-story grocery store in Nezu (and probably elsewhere) called Akafudado. It is made of win. I meant to take pictures, but forgot. What I really wanted to document there was the curry section: it took up both sides of a mid-sized aisle. If I want to eat "real" Japanese food, like "real" British food, I should really just eat a lot of curry.

-~-

Walking back to the hotel, I was struck by how many actual houses I saw. In Korea it's all high-rise apartment buildings, but I haven't seen that many of them here. Strange, actually, since I think the population density in Japan is a little higher. (I have no idea, actually; I need to look that up.)

-~-

I'm finding that I know and remember at least a bit more Japanese than I thought I did. I also gesture a lot. I've wondered a few times if people who gesture a lot when speaking in their native languages have an easier time communicating nonverbally with people who don't speak their language.

I do think I might be speaking Japanese with a slight Korean accent. I keep blending my vowels, instead of pronouncing them properly. I wonder if I also bow and gesture like a Korean. The don't-pass-things-one-handed thing, for example, is apparently not nearly as important here. I keep forgetting and doing it anyway, so I propbably look a bit strange and formal.

-~-

It's now 12:05 a.m. Thursday-- I keep falling asleep before I can update this. I bought a USB drive yesterday, so with luck I can finally start updating the blog (there's no internet at my new ryokan, and I am not dragging my laptop around Tokyo. My back and shoulders hurt enough now as it is!)

Stuff and Things

I spend a lot of time thinking about what I want to do next. I'm about to start a new contract, and it will be my third year of teaching here- same school, same job. I like it, but it's starting to get old.

I want to keep Having Adventures. The more I read, the more I want to see. I've thought about the Peace Corps, but I don't feel very comfortable with the whole go-where-you're-sent, do-what-you're-told thing. (I briefly considered the military, back in high school, and rejected it mostly for the same reason.) Ditto the Foreign Service, though that would be more to my taste. I'm not sure I want a full-on career working in Points Abroad, and embassy work sounds a bit boring. (There's also the exam and hiring process, if it comes to that.)

The easiest thing would be to just keep on teaching, maybe in another country. I briefly thought of going to China for a year or so, just for the experience. I feel like I'm starting to be in a rut, though, and the thought of spending years and years more teaching ESL abroad for profit is starting to feel a little suffocating.

Another option would be to try and do grad school abroad. I don't know where I'd study, but I'm still thinking about urban planning off and on (especially whenever I read something remotely environmentalist). My main concern there is the expense: from what I know, most places won't let you work on a student visa, so I'd be living abroad and pouring my savings into school with no guarantee of a job afterward.

It sounds cliche, but I do feel like I'm being pulled in two different directions. One part of me gets a little wistful whenever I see updates about friends my age getting married, moving into new apartments, having friends with other friends I haven't seen in years. Another part thinks I'm lucky to be free of all that, and wants to cut all ties and go wandering in Cambodia or something. I've tied myself down a bit with the cat, which is one weight on the "settling" side of the balance, but I don't quite want to put down permanent roots yet.

On the other hand, I miss my family. I miss my friends. I miss going to parties with people I've known since college, catching up on people's lives, being at home and making a place for myself in a neighborhood I can plan to stay in for a while. My life here is many things, but one big one is TEMPORARY. I have to avoid picking up too much stuff-- knickknacks, dishes, things to move later. My friends come and go-- one of my best friends here is leaving in a couple of weeks, and I've only known her a year. Starting over again means I'll have to pull up what roots I have put down and start the whole awkward feeling-out process again, in a new town at least, maybe a new country. It's a daunting prospect.

The obvious downside about going home, right now, is that the job market is terrible. If I go home, even for graduate school, there's no guarantee I'd be able to find a decent job, and there's the terrible risk of ending up right back where I started. The one thing I DO NOT want to do is get stuck in a retail rut all over again, even if I could start at a slightly higher level. I've gotten used to being able to afford to do the things I want to do. I like having the money to travel, eat out, buy clothes-- these are things I couldn't do, before, not with a bank account that was always veering towards the negative. I'm luxuriating in stability. The problem is that it's a false stability. No matter how many roots I put down here, this is not a place where I could stay forever.

-~-

I tried to spend yesterday making plans for Tokyo. Made lots of lists, but didn't get much concrete planning done. I've almost decided-- pending in-person inspection of the area-- to stay in Ueno, at least. I plan to find a motel first, set up camp, then read my guidebook a little and go out for a bit of sightseeing before dinner. That will probably be all I'm up for, the first day. Ueno's the area that had most of the most interesting restaurants, according to the guidebook. It's also right on the railway, and has some interesting things to see. It seems like a safe, comfortable area to base myself from. I tried to make reservations for a ryokan, but I'm not really comfortable doing that over the internet. Since travel plans always change, anyway, I'm leaving mine fluid this time. I plan to take my laptop and will try to update as possible; if nothing else, I'll try to do some kind of a write-up when I get back next week.

-~-

A story for you. I'll preface it by explaining that all the foreign teachers' apartments are leased by our school, and the school handles all the maintenance requests (largely because none of us speak much Korean).

A year ago, I came back from my end-of-contract vacation and noticed that a section of my ceiling was sagging a bit. I didn't do anything about it, because I thought it was just the wallpaper coming loose and didn't want to deal with the fuss of repairs over something so simple.

Over time, the sag got bigger, and I realized there was stuff inside the paper-- as in, the damp, crumbling contents of the ceiling. I told John, our school's man-of-all-work, and he brought in the building guard to look at the problem. The guard opened the ceiling panel, looked inside, frowned a lot and made some noises. He left, promising repairs.

A few weeks later, the ceiling started to drip. I put a pot under the leak and called in John again. He called the building guard. The building guard came up, opened the ceiling panel, looked inside, spotted the leak, and commandeered my (one and only) mixing bowl. He put the bowl up inside the ceiling to catch the drips and went away, promising repairs.

The leaking stopped for a while. John said that the problem had been a leak in the water pipes upstairs (our floors are heated with hot water), but that it had been fixed. I forgot about the problem (and the mixing bowl) and waited for the ceiling to dry out. The bulge was by now very unsightly, and the paper was starting to peel a little at the seam.

A couple of months later, the leaking started again. I called in John. John called the building guard. The building guard came in, opened the ceiling panel, took out my mixing bowl (now overflowing with water and silt), emptied it out, and stuck it back up again. Apparently the problem had not been fixed. He left, and John promised me they would fix it this time. The leak seemed to stop, the ceiling dried up it was ugly, but not unstable. I breathed a sigh of relief and went on with my life.

On Tuesday, the ceiling started to leak. Again. I touched the bulge, and found that it was wet again. The paper is now gaping about two inches at the seam, the inside of the crack is black with mold, and the whole thing looks like it's thinking about coming down. (I tried to take some pictures, but was unable to capture the full effect.) The kindergarten had its 100th Day event today, and I'd gone in for fun, so I let John know that the Problem had returned. He brought the building guard over right away. Lo and behold: My mixing bowl, still faithfully serving its new purpose, was once more overflowing, and the problem had SPREAD. Water was now pooling in other areas of the ceiling, which are now subtly beginning to sag. The guard mopped something up inside the panel, replaced the bowl again, and stuck the biggest sag with my paring knife like he was lancing a boil. Water immediately began to drip out-- and not clean water, either, but brown and rusty, enough to fill a tupperware container halfway. The guard said it would stop after about ten minutes; it was more like three hours, though it did stop.

I started crying. This is my house; this is where I live. The fact that Upstairs is having a problem with its sink (that's the latest explanation) should have no bearing on the structural soundness of my roof. The guard left. John gave me a hug and promised that someone would be in to work on the thing tomorrow-- I'm leaving him my key so he can let the guy in whenever he ends up coming, since I have an errand to run in Seoul tomorrow and we don't know when the repair guy would be coming. John also promised they would fix the problem permanently next week. We'll see.