What Kind of a Month It's Been Part 1

A lot, a lot, a lot has happened in the past few weeks. Most likely, more will happen in the coming days and if I were being smart about this, which I'm not (why start now?), I would probably wait until everything's done to write about it all, but I'm not really sure when everything will be done. Joss Whedon once wrote

"you keep waiting for the dust to settle and then you realize this is it; the dust is your life going on"

and that just struck me as very profound. So I started paraphrasing it and just letting people I'd thought of it then and there. I'm so bad.

Anyway, my sister's here to visit: she's out for a trip to a nearby town right now and I elected to stay where it is air conditioned, i.e. the hermetic bubble of my room. Moi's visit has given an unexpected but not entirely unwelcome enema to the latter half of August, i.e. The Month When I Moved to Japan. The visit was perfectly timed, really, as it has extended the honeymoon period of my upheaval and encouraged to go out and visit more parts of this new country, whereas otherwise I might have been inclined to just rest a while and get my metaphorical breath back.

But before Moi arrived, there was still some fun stuff going on, although honestly I'll probably get the order wrong and forget to tag a bunch of people cos I'm shit but oh well. I'll use headers to try and remember to write everything.

We went the the Pokémon Centre

'We' being myself, Louis and Brittany. It's a massive shop where they only sell Pokémon merchandise.

And sometimes real life Pokémon turn up. Because.

And they have a couple of Pokémon games. And I don't mean for the gameboy.

I'm mentioning this mainly to explain the sudden insertion of this guy

into my life. His name is Rorlax and you will be seeing a lot more of him.

I Went to Arcades

I've been to a lot of arcades recently: they're a big thing in Japan, you see. My current jams are Mario Kart, at which I have always sucked, and a new game called Pokken Tournament, where you get to have Pokémon battles from the point of view of a Pokémon. Sadly, you can't play as this guy

but it's still pretty cool. I vary at this game depending on whether or not the wind is blowing East. Or something. I dunno.

At an arcade in Osaka

 though, I tried something entirely different: a 4D horror simulation.
It was brilliant.
I was shown around a bunch of different crime scenes (there was some kind of backstory about a video of a girl killing herself or something- I dunno, it was in Japanese) and someone was chasing us and I had to put down orchids at the right time and pay my respects or they would kill me and at one point, I had to run through a bunch of dead bodies strung from the ceiling like cow carcasses and it was actually pretty scary. Would definitely scream again.

We Went to a Beer Garden

'We' being all the JETs in Hyogo, who met in Himeji at a beer garden- which does not mean the same thing as it does in the UK; it's a seasonal rooftop BBQ all-you-can-drink thing

(and, yes, this is way better than British beer gardens)- and I mingled and met a bunch of new people (pretty much all of whose names I have now forgotten, alack). Lovely view from the roof, though.

Afterwards, we went to karaoke then left and then we went back to karaoke and did it again. It was odd. But very enjoyable, and I got to try my hand at rapping which went as well as I think we're all imagining.

We Went to Kobe

'We' being the municipal ALTs in Hyogo. We didn't have much time there, sadly, because we had to attend this rather perfunctory talk where they told us how to do a job that we've been employed in for two and a half weeks and reiterated a bunch of stuff that was on the website when we first applied for this job, nine months ago. Time well spent.

I Went on Walks

As I'm still very often a prisoner of the sun, I've been exploring Himeji mainly by moonlight, strolling around the various neighbourhoods at night, sometimes accompanied, sometimes not. Louis and I had an illuminating conversation about imagining our lives as TV shows and Brittany and I tried our hands at herding feral cats, of which there are a tonne in Himeji.
I also found my new favourite shop in Himeji, which is called 'books and coffee' despite not selling coffee or books BUT they have this Power Rangers aisle, arranged by the year and corresponding team and it just made my heart melt.

We Went to a Water Park

'We' being the inhabitants of my building- or, at least, some of them. There is a waterpark in Himeji called...something Japanese and we went on one of the days where you could actually go outside but it was still hot enough to go to a water park, i.e. a where the sun might possibly hide behind the cloud for a couple of minutes.
We cycled there, because I haven't fallen over enough since I've come to Japan and I just want to put up my personal evidence to refute the received wisdom about the riding of bicycles and memorability thereof.
The park itself was alright: there was an extremely lazy Lazy River, see: a donut shaped pool with two, count 'em two, jets not-so-strategically placed about three meters apart. We had to flap most of the time to stay afloat, and even then we only moved at a pace akin to a caterpillar on a travellator, but it was still surprisingly fun.
The flumes, however, were amazing.
I rocketed down there like a friggin' fox whose just heard 'view halloo' and crashed out the other side like an anvil on Wile E. Coyote and then I rushed back up and did it again. It was amazing and just a little bit painful, like any experience involving pipes and wetness should be.

That's all I have time for right now and this is already a very long post, but part two, detailing places I went with Moi as well as maybe some other stuff, is coming soon.