Made two new videos, one a profile for the month of January, and the other a special one off about a really amazing fire festival I went to. I’m just going to let the video speak for itself. It’s worth watching trust me. People catch fire. Same place as usual. The fire one is not quite finished yet so expect that in a few days...
http://www.youtube.com/dryan5Next up is one month’s worth of homestays with various people, followed by two weeks travelling with my family around Japan, followed by a 30 or so days backpacking tour from Thailand to Laos to Vietnam to China and finally to Hong Kong when I hope to return to the UK. After one week back in the UK, my good Japanese friend is coming to Europe, where she will visit London, Winchester (where there is the possibility of her homestaying with our family, which would be a real honour to return the favour, still need to confirm this with my family though) Sheffield, Manchester, Edinburgh. From there we will travel to several Northern EU nations over two weeks (still working out the details there, can’t wait to try out my German again though) ending up with homestaying together in Poland with friends for two weeks. After which we will part ways for a few weeks. I’ll probably spend much of July re-establishing my UK life, going through reverse culture shock and seeing friends and family and spending a lot of time at home, brushing up on studies for September, maybe buying a new Xbox 360, or getting a temp job. Before meeting up together with another good Japanese friend one month later in August, and do a tour of the Southern EU nations. As a triple it should be great. I’m really looking forward to returning the enormous amount of kindness I’ve been shown here.
One of the interesting challenges ahead will be acquiring Vietnam, Laos and China visas. My tour company doesn’t do this for me. Of course if I was at home this would be much easier, I would simply travel to London on the train hand in my passport and jump through some hoops. Tadaa visa. But being a foreign resident in Japan foreign embassies (particularly China) get very bureaucratic. The Chinese want me to apply in person (Nagoya Chinese Embassy is no good for some reason, I have to go all the way to Tokyo…again), they want my passport, they want my japan visa, my japan foreigner registration card, a letter from my employer saying that I am a good volunteer, 5 days to “process” the document, and 4000Yen for the privilege. Also amusingly, the visa fee form says American citizens: 15000 Yen, All other Nations: 4000 Yen. Did I miss something or did the Cold War not actually end? I’m only going for 9 days! The Vietnamese embassy by comparison just wants my passport and a form, and they don’t even need me to apply in person. Laos visas I can get on the border. Thailand doesn’t need a visa at all. Now I can understand a nation being proactive about who goes in and out of the country, but the Chinese buraocracy seems rather over the top, especially for a country that is supposed to be an up and coming power, maybe even superpower. These guys will have a heart attack when millions of westerners suddenly start applying for Visas to go to the Olympics. Tommy said he just couldn’t be bothered with it, and in many respects I understand where he’s coming from. It’s a pain in the arse, but hopefully it will all pay off. Besides it’s experience anyway. Bloody Communists.
Interestingly I occasionally ask Japanese people what their opinions of their close neighbours are. South Korea usually gets quite a favourable response, especially about Korean food or Korean movies. Vietnam and Thailand also, often comments like “The people there are kind”. China however more often than not gets a negative reaction or an unsure reaction. China is considered very dangerous compared to Japan, and often people comment that the pollution there is really awful, a story I have heard many times is that you can wave a white flag in industrial areas of China and in 10 minutes it will turn black. (But I bet you the same could be said of Nagoya Bay or Teesside). The story you may have heard a few months ago about poisonous Chinese food in Japan, is still big news here. Sales of “Gyoza” (Chinese dumplings) have plummeted. Often early morning talk in the X-ray room is about this. People say Chinese people are untrustworthy, loud, that their culture encourages them to cover things up etc etc. What upsets me a little, is sometimes I hear these kind of things from people I really wouldn’t expect to hear from. I’m sure what is said about the Chinese must be true to a certain extent, but many people seem to refuse to believe that there must be some good will there as well. I think the main problem may be lack of communication and travel. These two enormous nations despite being as close as the UK and Poland, rarely visit each other. I have heard mandarin being spoken only once or twice since I’ve been here. And likewise many Japanese I have spoken to have never been to China. This is partly because until two years ago Even Japanese had to get a visa to visit China. Now they can visit for about 5 days without a visa. Travel broadens the mind as they say… I hope communication between these two nations continues to improve, because there will be disastrous consequences for the world at large if they ever descend into the kind of relationship they had 60 years ago again. Things would be rather more nuclear, if they happened again. To this extent, look at what free trade and open borders has done for communication in Europe, the relationships between European nations has been completely transformed. Yes there are still old rivalries, but not to the extent there used to be. What’s better about this arrangement though, is there is not a 3rd party power influencing things behind the scenes. What happens in the Europe is increasingly the EU’s business, for better for worse. And yes the UK is part of Europe, not matter what we like to think about our lovely little island (which I do love dearly).
On this topic I’m really proud of the Japanese attitude to war. Not one Japanese person I have spoken to has been in favour of increasing the armed forces strength or changing the constitution to allow Japanese forces to engage in offensive operations. If you mention the Japanese armed forces, and the topic of changing the constitution, you get the kind of look you might get from a British person if you told them you were in favour of reconquering Africa in the name of the British Empire. I think this is perhaps one of the very few truly pacifist nations. That being said, the Japanese can afford to maintain a pacifist stance in many ways because they have the protection of Pax Americana and the current status quo. The current system is not perfect, but it is keeping things peaceful. However when it changes (not “if”, because it will change) god knows what will happen. It doesn’t stop me admiring them for their values.
Another things that’s interesting is that it seems I’ll probably have to be getting a new passport a lot early than 2017 (which is the current expiry date on my passport) By the end of this trip there will be a Japan Visa, A Foreign Citizens registration document, A Laos visa, a Vietnam visa, a China Visa, Hong Kong and Thailand entry stamps and I’m starting to run out of pages. Especially as next year I want to do something like Camp America, so that’ll be a US Visa as well… Most of these things take up more than one page too, and there’s only 24 pages. It’s starting to feel like a challenge, I really want to fill up those remaining pages, and I’ve only got until 2017 to do it. So my goal is to fill my passport with so many visa’s that I have to get a new one before the expiry date. But I suppose, even if I don’t, people already say I don’t look like my passport photo, which is only a year and a half old. Maybe it’s the shoulder length hair and face tattoo? (just kidding)
Another funny question I’m often asked is “which country do you like the best?” I find this to be an impossible question. One person’s perfect country is another person’s hell. There are things about Japan I infinitely prefer to the UK (the toilets for one thing, man they are awesome) and there are things about the UK I infinitely prefer to Japan (Dammit, I wanna eat some Fish & Chips and down a proper pint soon).
I’m currently in the process of reorganising my flights. Which means I now have a pretty good idea of when I’ll be home. What’s irritating is STA won’t let me change my departure airport to Hong Kong. I would be less irritated if I hadn’t got such a crap response from them. I just got a computer generated email with “REROUTING IS NOT PERMITTED” No options for secondary back up plans, or anything. This is weird because their attitude up to now has been that you can customise and be flexible about your flights to the nth degree. So I’m going to ring them up and have a nice little chat and see if we can’t change something. I don’t care if it means completely changing the home flight schedule, I really don’t want to have to fly all the way from Hong Kong to Tokyo, go through the whole process of re-entering Japan just to go straight back out again… home. It’s an unnecessary expense. But maybe I’ll just have to suck it up and go through with it, such is the nature of travel. But it’s also partly emotional reasons. Since coming here, I firmly believe that once you decide to do something, you should go through with it to the full. Delaying doesn’t achieve anything it just makes things more difficult. So when you want to leave a place or a person, say your goodbyes, and just go. If I leave Japan and then come back again it will be so much harder, because I have such an attatchment to this country that coming back will give me just one more taste and then I’ll have to give it all up again. Leaving the UK was not so bad, because I am a resident, so I know I have a home country that will willingly take me back anytime I want to return. I have a guaranteed home. But once I leave Japan I have no idea when I can come back. It will certainly be at least a year, and probably a lot longer than that in reality. Maybe one day I will marry a Japanese girl and then I can live here with her forever… who knows… and before anyone panics, don’t worry, marriage is definitely not on my cards for at least another ten years.
So give or take a couple of days I’ll be back home between 27th of May and 6th Juneish. Which will mean a grand total of about 8 months or 274 days or 6576 hours or 394560 minutes out of the country. When you put it like that it doesn’t seem so long. I can’t believe I haven’t seen so many important people, like family and close friends in so long... I can’t believe I’ve been living without Fish & Chips, Bitter Beer, English speakers, British TV, Xbox 360, a car… I have to be serious a lot of the time here so in many ways it’ll be good to let loose a bit when I finally get home. I do wonder how the UK itself has changed in 8 months. Probably not that much. When I left Gordon Brown was really popular in polls, is that still the case? Rhianna was topping the charts with that bloody “Umbrella” Song that gave us crap weather in the summer. Most of my friends hadn’t even started University. Pavarotti was still alive, so was Benzir Bhutto…
Another thing that made me laugh recently was I got the opportunity to speak German for the first time in forever. A Japanese guy I met in Kyoto had lived in Austria and had a great level of German, so we talked in German for a while, but the weird thing was, I was regularly tempted to use Japanese words, and phrases in my German. It was really strange. I suppose there is only one part of the brain for learning languages, and having 3 floating around in there is a bit of an overload, except for those of us who are fortunate enough to be fluent in more than two languages (which will probably never be me hahaha!)
I just spent a really great four day weekend exploring various parts of Japan, it was really two trips combined into one. The first one a two day trip to Nara and Kyoto with Dr T. Which was like a lightening tour, I really enjoyed it but it was one of those kind of trips where we were rushing from one site to the next, and so in many ways although it was an excellent trip, I really wanted to take my time a bit more. But that’s the kind of person I am… I was lucky enough to see golden temple in Kyoto in the snow which does not happen so often, so I consider myself extremely lucky to have seen it, and it is a sight I will never forget. The second trip was one I’d organised together with some friends, we went to an Onsen to chill out for a couple of days. It was pretty expensive, 15000 yen each for the night (£75) but for that price, we got a boat trip to a private island where the hotel was, a personal maid (Kazuko-san) who waited on us hand and foot for the whole time we were there. A massive room, with loads of space and tatami floor, futons , great view, amazing toilet etc. A absolutely superb evening meal (meal does not do it justice, it was a feast) brought directly to our room, and laid out for us, then an amazing breakfast. A superb onsen (kind of spa) where I relaxed for over an hour in the various hot springs, enjoying many kinds of green teas etc. Oddly Japanese people at Onsen are usually quite chatty, but I tried talking to a few here, and they didn’t seem too interested which was a shame.
So what will happen to this blog? Well I have no intentions to stop updating it. I want to continue to write in it until my final trips end in August. I feel they are all connected. Between late April and early June the updates will be small and sporadic, if anything at all. As I will be travelling around a lot, and spending time in rural south Asia. Not too many net cafés and certainly no time to make long blog posts or videos. But when I return to the UK I will let everyone know how it went. This blog will not be deleted even after I stop updating it. I want to keep as a kind of online memory. Who knows, perhaps in a year or two I will have a reason to start writing in it again…………..
Well this is it, the end of my volunteer work is coming up next week, and with it the end of the most amazing six months of my entire life. I am in no way exaggerating this. As I mentioned before, doing this has created some pretty polarizing emotions in me. I have felt some extraordinary highs and some exceptional lows. But the important thing is I think I have never felt more alive, despite highs and lows, this is living.
