“I think we tried really hard” -Marisa, on us trying to leave the house before 12.
Kelly is bleeding. Marisa is alternating between laughing and crying. I am numb.
This isn’t how the day started, but it’s where we are right now.
It really starts last night, when we got home from The River.
I face-planted into bed so I could wait out my turn to shower in warmth. I was drifting in that nice hazy in-between when Marisa comes in and tells me that the airbnb had definitely not been cleaned before we got there as there was a nice pile of dirty towels and the trash was full. This is marginally unsettling for regular reasons, but remember, I’m already in bed. The bed had been made. So I had been hoping for the best.
And there’s nothing that kills the hope that you didn’t lie down in a dirty bed than finding short hairs on the pillow that definitely are not yours.
It’s not that gross, initially. It’s just some hair and some skin cells, right? But then you start thinking about The Person that occupied the space previous. Because there was a whole person that went out and touched things and sat on benches and interacted with the world in perhaps a grosser way than you do.
That’s what sober me thinks. Sober me would have probably slept on the floor. But somehow, Buzzed Rachel is way more efficient than Sober Rachel because she found clean bedding, changed the sheets. She even put a new cover on the down blanket, which is something that Sober Rachel could never even hope to accomplish. (If I sound impressed by myself, good. I’m still shocked I didn’t just sleep on the floor.)
This is also the part where we figured out we were sharing the bathroom with the biggest cockroach in all of Japan.
Naturally, Buzzed Rachel is better at cockroach capture and release than Sober Rachel is. There was a brief moment of panic after I got it under the cup where I blanked and instead imagined myself in this bathroom, holding this cup to the wall for all eternity. But then I remembered the window and how it had no screen on it and yeeted that bad boy out into the night. I got first shower privileges for my efforts (it was more like I was on surprise cockroach duty but still). Also, to keep in our theme with not sleeping and talking for hours, we were up until Very Late again, which is not unusual or unwelcome.
But anyways, that was last night.
This is now.
And now is not much better.
In an attempt to get as much done in our final days as possible, we have decided to get up early.
Since then, we discovered that Marisa and I both woke up this morning to a loud noise. I was too tired to really register it as anything beyond vaguely spooky and irritating. Marisa thought the house was getting broken in to. So that’s good.
The draw of this airbnb was first that it was a traditional Japanese house with tatami mats. The second was that it had four bikes that we were free to use.
We have just recently discovered that three out of the four bikes have flat tires. Kelly’s knee and palms just discovered the asphalt, directly after she discovered the bad breaks on the one remaining bike.
There’s nothing like trying to figure out how to rig up a booby trap for who ever tries to break in next and hearing a nice, dissonant person-thud and Marisa saying “wow you fell really hard!”
So that’s how the day is going so far. We’re heading out soon so, hopefully things will get better.
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Before we continue, we should take a vote.
Who here thinks that the day got worse from here?
…
Okay, what about better?
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I think of myself as a fairly superstitious person. A lot of times, if something very small, but very specific goes wrong, I feel like its the Universe telling me to put down whatever I’m doing and just go home, get back in bed, and wait out the day.
It usually ends up being fine, but it’s that initial feeling of staring off into the distance like you’re on The Office that really gets me.
Today was not one of those days. We probably shouldn’t have even tried to go outside, but we’re already out here so.
The main goal of Day 21 was to go see the Fushimi Gates, which is basically a pathway of orange gates that lead up the mountains. And when I say orange, I mean Orange. I have never seen something so vivid and consistent. And there were so many of them, lined up right next to each other and close enough to make it feel like we were going through a tunnel.
The gates eventually got smaller and more condensed, which would have been really cool if there had been like 50% less people. I get wanting to get a nice picture of just you and the gates, but stopping the whole flow of traffic is lame.
We had the idea of hiking further up the mountain to escape the crowds, as the gates go on for a couple kilometers. This was initially a really good idea because the crowds thinned out.
But then the mosquitos descended upon the land.
I feel like my usual experience with mosquitos is that I only know that they were there because of the bites that I find later. This time there were palpable mosquitos. And while its super satisfying to notice one on you and smack it before it bites you, I only have two hands, and there were about a trillion mosquitos.
I couldn’t really tell how many times I had been bit because mine usually don’t show up until later. But Kelly got bit at least twenty times. And her’s swell immediately.
So that was fun.
We had put bug repellant on but Marisa told us later that she sprayed some directly on a mosquito and he kept moving around, so we were really doomed from the beginning.
We also ran into construction up the hill, which was really just the cherry on top, so we turned around and left.
Don’t get me wrong though, the gates are incredible. And there were statues of foxes right before the gate that looked like they could come to life, hop down, and lead you through the gates. And the walk up to the gates was filled with every kind of food vender and shops that rented out kimonos and as a result it smells phenomenal and there are scores of people wandering around in full kimonos of every color and design.
But it was still rough and a little taxing to weave between people so we went back to the house so we could take care of the bites and Kelly’s knee.
And really, the day doesn’t go a whole lot better from there. We tried to go to another temple, but we got on a bus going the wrong way, got off, found a different temple that had closed about ten minutes prior to our arrival.
But it wasn’t all bad, we got to walk through some neighborhoods. Kyoto is really peaceful. All the buildings are made out of tile and are short and skinny. It looked really cool in the pink-purple light of sunset.
And actually, now that I think about it, I think this is one of the first sunsets I’ve actually gotten to see in its entirety on our trip.
Now we’re on a train, trying to get sushi. Pray for us.
Expectation
Reality
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You are waiting for a train.
You don’t know where this train will take you.
But you hope it’s back into town because the one you just got off of was a limited stop one and it just took you about 30 minutes out into the Japanese Countryside, but it be like that today.
Before we get into that though, the food. We eventually settled on the second sushi go round place we found. I don’t think I’ll ever stop being amazed at the beauty of having food parade around in front of you. This place didn’t have a screen where you could order the sushi and it comes to you directly, but it did have a water tap right at the seat that you could make tea with, so really. And it had color coded plates for prices so you knew what the really good stuff was.
I wasn’t that adventurous this time because I’m all about the salmon and they had A Lot of Salmon. And as mentioned before, I am a slut for salmon. They did have horse meat (it also said + mane, which is a little alarming but, you know), raw ham and cheese, and ice fish. It’s kind of sad though, because it all circles around and you can tell what people don’t like because the same thing will come around 5 or 6 times, completely untouched. I don’t really blame people for not wanting horse meat, but I also felt kind of bad for it, you know?
After that we went to this store. It had an indeterminate amount of floors and lots of cool stuff that I definitely don’t need. I was strong until we got to the floor with stickers. The important part of all of this was that when we were leaving, we noticed a floor directory. Specifically the part that said there was a cat cafe on the fourth floor. So we will be returning tomorrow.
But now, the train.
We got on the wrong one. We noticed after we kept zooming through stations and not stopping until a solid twenty minutes later. We didn’t get off there, which was a mistake because we’ve been going now for like 10 minutes, so it looks like we might be living on this train from now on.
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Right now I am laying on a tatami mat. I just put the words “toshiba aw-50gg(w) english instructions” in to google because our washer sounds like it’s going to explode and I can’t read any of the words on it (google translate does a pretty good job but sometimes you get things like “bear in the journey” which sounds very powerful but is also very ominous when you’re trying to decide how to wash your clothes).
We made it back to the house, which is a blessing. Someone came by and cleaned, which is very nice, but it made all of my efforts to change the sheets last night for naught.
There’s a lot that can be said about today, but I am very tired. But I also kind of screwed myself on that one by deciding to do laundry and now having to stay awake so I can hang it up to dry. I think this was one of our worst days, but it still managed to be fun. What’s really awesome about it was that no one got mad at each other. It was like team suffer day, which sucks, but we bonded.
And I know Marisa is salty about this, but it’s a nice homage to the day where we all became Friends. We went on this snow shoeing trip with a group of very skilled, outdoorsy type people and we Suffered. I don’t think I’ve seen a group of people be so entertained and so exasperated at the same time. I think I had a theory paper due the next day that I hadn’t started, Kelly had a twisted ankle, and Marisa was the instigator. Somehow, we made it up and down that mountain in one piece. It took us about 10x longer than everyone else, we fell So Much, and we almost got hit by a mountain train. And we were friends before this, but this was like the forging fire that made us a Squad, you know?
So I don’t really mind this suffering, because it feels like we’re back on that mountain, only with tourists and mosquitos and broken bikes instead of snow, trains, and twisted ankles.
Also, an aside.
I was considering our toilet as I waited for our laundry to get done. I thought it was kind of an odd shape and definitely unstable.
So I kind of, pulled on the lid and the whole thing just sort of, detached.
After a moment of horror I realized that I didn’t hulk out and rip the whole toilet from the floor, we actually just had a squat toilet and a false seat to make it a sit down toilet. Fun stuff.
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