Gaijin Girl

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so how psyched are we about our new president?  hell yeah!  of course i would have loved for cynthia mckinney to have gotten more votes and for people to stop controlling the legality of other people’s marriages with ballots, but i am choosing to be content with what i consider to be a major major victory for us all–the 44th president of the united states, mr. barrack obama!  woo!  i can hardly believe it.

so i want to finish telling you about june.  josh and i went to the izu peninsula with a tour group called the tokyo gaijins (clever name, huh).  luckily i got a new raincoat just before the trip, because this is what our hike to see the seven waterfalls (eight, if you count the rain) looked like:

after this hike we went to an outdoor onsen, soaking in the hot water at the base of a waterfall in the freezing rain….until we got kicked out by a worker because of the dangerous rising waters.  i hear the waters are beautiful and sparkling turquoise on a sunny day.  however, we saw mostly gray, gray, and more gray.  but isn’t my rain jacket cute? 

on another positive note, some of the onsen (hot springs) were in caves, so we had some nice sheltered soaks, positioning ourselves just so to avoid the occasionally leaky roofs.  i would love to go back to this place, but i fear we won’t have time before we leave.  so i guess i’ll just have to be content with the images from the postcards i bought while we were there since my own photos just look like a mass of blurred rainyness. 

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wow, i am so tired!  halloween parties are no fun when you’re old.

so i’d like to tell you about the first week of june….the 2nd anniversary of when i met josh.  truthfully, josh and i were too damn busy to remember that that was in fact the meeting of our anniversary until a few days before, at which point we already had plans to volunteer at this place called the earth embassy for two days.  the earth embassy is in kawaguchiko near mount fuji, and we had heard stories of it being a cool place with a farm, farm school, vegan cafe, campground, and stable.  the place always needs volunteers, and we thought we might like to do a one-month internship there this winter in return for room and board.  so we e-mailed the director and decided to go out there for two days to see if we clicked with the place and the people.

well, as you might expect from such a place, it was a bit disorganized.  we ended up camping in the backyard behind the cafe where we cooked breakfast and cleaned in the mornings to earn free dinners.  we also spent 3 hours weeding a mint field the first afternoon. surprisingly, it was one of the most fun things i’ve done in japan.  for one thing, the mint field was located near the base of fuji san, and it was a beautiful day, so we spent most of the day with a great view of mount fuji, which is kinda rare.  also it was inexplicably wonderful to feel the dirt beneath my hands, encounter hilarious spitbugs, smell nothing but clean air and fresh mint leaves, and to not see any buildings.  i guess i hadn’t realized how much living in this concrete jungle has affected me.  i had completely forgotten about working with my hands and feeling connected to the land around me.  it was also really satisfying to complete a tangible task–see those weeds, pull em out, and pile em up.  then you’re done.  i could actually see the physical results of our success after only three hours, something that feels so good and that i’d apparently forgotten all about!  i love teaching; i really do.  but there is something so simply blissful about finishing a physical task and immediately seeing the successful results.  plus it was really fun to do something, just me and josh, where we were on an even playing field.  we work together to do stuff all the time, but usually we take our expected roles–i’m the planner, he’s the doer.  in the mint field, however, it was just me and him and the weeds….side by side pulling em out.  not much to plan, just doing our jobs….together.  i still can’t totally wrap my head around why i was so happy weeding a mint field on our two-year anniversary, but i totally was. 

it wasn’t all work though.  after dinner with the staff, we walked about 20 minutes in the cold to a super cool onsen, where we got a private room with a bathtub made of stones.  we soaked for about an hour and then bought locally brewed beer to sip on the front porch of the cafe before retiring to our tent for the night.

we got up early the next day to help marcel, the other volunteer cook breakfast for everyone.  he proved to be lovely company and cooked us delicous vegan pancakes and shared loaves of bread that he had made the day before.  we had planned to go on a hike after breakfast, but it was rainy, so instead we walked about 20 minutes in the rain to two caves that were formed by lava from mount fuji.  there were no english explanations on any signs, so i’m still not entirely sure exactly how everything was formed, but it was really cool anyway!

this is inside one of the caves:

then it was back to the cafe for lunch (banana garlic pizza, which was strangely totally delicious!) and then to the bus stop that would take us back to the train station to catch another bus to another train station.    the bus in that area is totally unreliable because there’s only one road and a lot of traffic, and to make matters worse, it was raining pretty hard at this point.  so we ended up standing on the side of the road in a torrential downpour for about 20 minutes before the bus arrived, and it was so worth it because the bus was decorated like thomas the train.  so cute.

so we left being not exactly sure of our decision to return to the earth embassy this winter.  for one thing there was no real farm school.  the teacher was no longer working there, so they basically needed someone to organize a whole new program–probably not something that could be completed in a one-month internship.  also the farm basically consisted of the mint patch and two goats–not exactly what we had expected.  so if we were to volunteer there in the winter, we would basically be working in the cafe and hostel, which we wouldn’t really mind–except i’m not much of a cook.  however, there are no bathing facilities on site, so any time we wanted hot water, we would need to walk 20 minutes in the snow to the onsen–and pay about $10.  we would receive no payment for working there but of course room and board.  the director told us he wasn’t sure if they would need us during the winter because business slows down a lot then but that he would let us know, and we haven’t heard from him.  to be honest i’m not so disappointed.  i’m really ready to come home, and although i loved being out there away from the city, i don’t know if i’m up for a freezing winter with no hot water right now.  if the place ends up expanding some of their children’s programs, i would totally be interested in spending a summer up there helping out sometime.

who knows?  maybe we will find ourselves back in japan someday; i would definitely answer the door if opportunity came knocking. 

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