I hate it whenever something bad happens, or when you get disappointed about something and someone says, "Well at least you have your health." I'm always all, "Yeah health is nice and all, but I still really want that pony/wish I didn't have to deal with all this junk." However, this usually changes whenever I get really sick. Like Sunday. Whenever that happens I'm always groaning, "Oh noooo, my health, where did you goooooo?"
But before I start talking about being sick and all, Let me tell you about my weekend before this grossness all started. Because, really, if it weren't for getting sick, it would have been a pretty alright weekend.
It started off with me heading off to Nagasaki to meet up with Alex, one of the other rotary exchange students. We both had school off because our schools both had testing going on which we don't really need to care about at all seeing as we are exchange students who don't understand a word of what the teachers are saying. I met him at the Nagasaki train station, and we went to an Indian restaurant nearby that I had heard of from a friend. I was pretty excited to have some Indian food because it had been months since I'd eaten any. The food itself was pretty tasty, but afterwards it felt a little like a brick in my stomach. At first I thought that this was just because it was a relatively big lunch to what I normally eat, but now I believe it to be the culprit for my illness.
Also, while we were at the station waiting for a table to open up at the restaurant, I found a Half Life 2 arcade machine and tried it out a bit. It was pretty fun. That's pretty much it about that.
After lunch, we were faced with deciding what to do. When faced with an entire city to explore, usually I would be up for anything and ready to spring to action. However, when the entire city speaks a language that I only have a small understanding of, and I've got a stomach full of toxic cement, I act a little differently. Plus we had plans to work around; apparently there was a Christmas party that Alex was invited to, so I was going as well. So we just decided to wander around the shopping streets in the area.
We found a couple of stores that were interesting, mostly shoe stores and the whole streetwear themed thing. In front of one of the stores was a bargain bin of sorts, and they had some of the worst clothing ideas I have ever seen. Most of them had these weird button-on sections that were meant to fool other people into thinking you were wearing more layers than you truly were. Like there would be a hoodie with a button-down shirt on the inside, only it wasn't truly a button-down shirt, just a collar and button section from a shirt, secured to the hoodie by more buttons. They even had fake cuffs buttoned into the sleeves.
After a while we went back to Alex's host house, which is absolutely ridiculous. First of all, it is located in an area called "Temple Town," which is pretty much just made up of a ton of Buddhist temples, so while walking around, you can see a ton of really nice looking temples. And then to top it off, he actually lives in one of them. His host family looks after the temple or something, so their house is built right onto the side of the temple. It's a pretty nice house, and the temple itself looks awesome too. However, it's not exactly what you would expect from a Buddhist temple. The Japanese don't really "do" religion the same way everyone else does, even if it's the exact same religion. So instead of having a humble temple to go and meditate at, their temple is totally decked out in gold. And instead of the monks being celibate, vegetarian, and living a spartan lifestyle, Alex's host dad is married, eats everything and pulls out two separate two-litre bottles of sake to sip on each night at dinner.
Anyway, we hung out at the temple for a little while and headed out to meet up with the Rotarian who would be taking us to the party. We were waiting for him at the station when we noticed some girls walking by in high-heels, and we got talking about how even though almost every girl in Japan wears high-heels, none of them know how to walk in them, or have this weird bow-legged thing going on that makes it just look odd. Then we starting doing impressions of the walk, the girls see us, start copying us and right as we look the weirdest, the Rotarian shows up all "Oh hey guys here are presents." (Alex got a fleece. I got a weird t-shirt)
At the party we met quite a few people who could speak some English, because it turned out to be put on by a local English school. There were some Americans there, and one really tall guy, Mark from Perth. When I say really tall, I mean really tall. He was slouching a bit, but he was still a bunch taller than I was. The party was fun enough. We talked to a bunch of people, mostly about the same stuff I always talk about here (Where I'm from, born. What am I doing here. Can I speak Japanese. How long will I be here...Also if we are eating someone will undoubtably comment on my skill with chopsticks). At the end of the party, there was a raffle and some lady won an all-expense-paid trip to Osaka. Mark from Perth was all "Man if I win this I'm slipping the ticket to you guys" which was nice but the lady next to him ended up winning instead. She was really apologetic about it though, which I found pretty funny. In the US whenever anyone wins anything they're all YEAAAAAHHHH GIMMME THAT I WON I WON I WON (maybe this is just me) but instead here they're all "oh man I'm really sorry I won and took away the chance for others to win this fabulous prize."
When the party was over, the others headed off to a Karaoke bar, but we opted out because I was feeling pretty awful by that time, and also because I kind of hate Karaoke. I've never really been one for singing things unless it is really loud, obnoxious and includes guitar solos (Guns 'n Roses - Welcome to the Jungle).
That was pretty much the end of good times fun times. The next morning I woke up with a headache and stomachache. Later on I found out that I also had a fever going on. No idea what it was when I woke up, but by the time I got home it was already around 38.5 C (101 F). I had some breakfast with Alex, and explained to him that I felt absolutely awful, so we would have to wait until a later time to do stuff. I had actually thought about going out that day when I woke up, but looking back it's a really damn good thing I decided not to. Instead we just hung around the house again for a bit, and then I had to bounce to catch the train home.
I planned on getting a 1:59 train back (dumbest time, just make it 2) so I left with enough time to quickly buy a ticket and walk on board casually. However, when I got off the streetcar, the clock read 1:55 so I hurried over to the ticket machine and put the only bill I had left in my wallet, a \5000 bill (apparently the "\" just shows up as a slash on western computers, but it's the yen symbol over here. Just uh, just pretend it is a yen symbol for me), and chose the first button I saw with the kanji for Isahaya City on it. However, I should have taken more time to examine my choices because after I noticed that the machine was taking longer than normal, I looked up a little above the button I pushed and there was a little sign that said "6回" which means "6 times". Before it really hit me how big of a mistake I made, a thick stack of tickets popped out of the machine, along with my change. The normal ticket costs about \450, so this mistake left me with around \2500 instead of the \4550 I was expecting, and I wasn't pleased. However, at this point I was already afraid the train was about to leave and the next one was an hour later, so I had to decide whether to accept that I was an idiot and keep the extra five tickets and hopefully use them one day in the future, or somehow try to return them. I decided to see what I could do with my limited Japanese in the help booth, so I ran inside and just blurted out "Excuse me. Mistake. I have six, I only want one. I don't understand kanji," which I guess was enough for the person to understand that I was just a confused foreigner, so she tallied up what the tickets were worth and handed me back the change, and I booked for the platform.
However, that wasn't even the end of it all. The train I had thought was the one heading to Isahaya turned out to be a completely different train, and so when I ran up to one of the conductors and asked him where it was heading, he responded, slowly, that this train was different, and pointed me in the direction of another train, further down the platform. I didn't really wait for him to finish whatever he was saying (not like I would have understood it anyway) and started running to the other train, and to my relief it was marked "Isahaya." What a relief.
Now this should have been the end of all the terrible stuff I had to go through while sick, but when I got to Isahaya, I noticed that my cell phone had run out of battery, and I didn't have my current host family's number written down. I had a bunch of other numbers that I tried with a pay phone but absolutely nobody picked up. My only choice to get back home was to walk. It was four kilometers and it was a big bummer. I did, however, see an Impala on the way back which was pretty cool, but not really cool enough to make up for what was going on.
When I finally did get back, my host mom took my temperature and oh noes I had a fever so she told me to rest in my bed. She also put an ice-pack type thing on my forehead which I guess is sort of like when people put towels on their head when they have a fever, only this one was disposable and smelled like a mix between Takoyaki (balls of fried octopus), windex and rubbing alcohol. Pretty much the next two days after that have just been staying at home and recovering. Now I'm doing much better and I've started going back to school again.
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Some fool on ebay is trying to sell this for 50 bucks
The rest of the day we pretty much just walked around looking at stuff, ate, and then went to karaoke. The next day I walked around with Ryan, a dude from Vancouver, and we just started wandering around, looking into stores and exploring. Eventually we ended up in an indoor snowboarding hill and we were all "Whaaaaaa? Where did this come from?" It probably wouldn't have been so surprising (I mean, they have these things elsewhere), but most everyone we had talked to had no idea about things like this, or even just an average skate park (Ryan is a big BMX dude. I uh, I didn't really care all too much).
