Kozushima
I would have had an extra day - to ease the transition between jobs/ place of residence, but we had that day switched to get an extra day off after the following weekend. My old roomate, the lesser of the remarkable filthy pair/ a good reason why I went off to live in the wilderness years ago…, he had made plans for a group of us to stay at an island near Tokyo. The group started off as a grand concept, but wound up being him and the girl he lives with, me and my girlfriend. That worked out well, because we all fit into one rental car when we got there.It wasn’t rainy then, but it was very cloudy and looked like rain all through ’til afternoon. We walked to the nearest beach after checking into our Inn. I swam around and looked at the fish, and painted 2 pictures while the other 3 slept on a blanket. I got very sunburnt, as did my old roomate. Those paintings came out pretty well. It was a bit overcast though, so the colors came out a bit darker than I would have liked. My back/ shoulders and such were also darker/ far more painful than I would ever want them to be.
I thought we’d all stay up late drinking, being that that’s what my old roomate does every night, and indeed we’d each bought a lot of drinks beforehand for that very same purpose, but after sleeping on the beach all day, the only thing the 3 of them wanted to do was go to sleep early.
The day after that we went to a pretty bay that had a boardwalk over some of the rocks. It had a bridge high between 2 groups of rocks, where many people go to swim and jump off the bridge. My old roomate found a baby sea-urchin and threw it to me so that I could see.
I ought to have known better than to try to catch anything he threw at me; It is now a month later and I still have red spots on my hand where the spines broke off under my skin.
While swimming I dove down a bit, and was pleased that I found some adult sea-urchins deep in the water there. They look all in all spinier than the babies.
They wanted to have a barbeque near another beach, which was more vegetable based than all the other barbeques we’d had up until then; I would call it progress,
…but it might’ve had more to do with the high cost of groceries on the island.
We got the fire going quickly. A teenage girl who was part of something that looked like a church group fainted nearby. They were standing out on the beach under the noon sun setting up tents. An ambulance came, though there couldn’t have been anything larger than a clinic on that island.
We stayed in the shade and started drinking the drinks then.
When we’d finished, I went down to he other side of the beach to paint a picture of a rock archway. Rock archways have always fascinated me. This one was cool/ the 1st I’ve ever seen with my own eyes. It was just at the edge of the road though, so I had to stand pretty close to it to be able to see it without obstruction. It was the 1st time I ever painted a picture drunk, but I don’t think you can tell.
They had planned to stop in a hotspring before dinner at the Inn, but they slept on the beach too long again to manage to spend any time there. It looked like a really cool - outdoor oceanview hotspring, …but I was too sunburnt to be able to enjoy hot water - and didn’t mind not being able to go then.
After dinner we went on a boatride to see glow in the dark plankton and flying fish.
I saw 1 flying fish, and I was the lucky one.
The plankton was super cool! They call them ocean fireflies; That’s what they looked like. We also got a rare view of the stars - away from the city and suburban lights. It would have been an ideal - romantic after dinner activity, except that the boat made me slightly sea-sick, and it made my girlfriend - very.
On the last day, we went back to the beach that they had slept on for the whole 1st day. My old roomate bought a spear to try spear fishing. He impaled a baby pufferfish, and one pretty yellow fish before a lifguard came by to tell him that spearfishing wasn’t allowed on that beach; Odd that they sell the spears right next to the beach then… Anyway, he spent about a half hour trying to get the yellow fish in the cooler without it bleeding on his last few cans of beer, but changed his mind, and let it back into the sea to bleed to death in dignity. Fugu/ pufferfish is of course poisionous, so he put that guy back into the water just after shoing everyone that he was able to spear a fish.
We took a taxi to the port on the other side of the island to get the boat back to Tokyo. We got there an hour early, so my old roomate slept more, the girl that he lives with sat on the beach next to the pier, my girlfriend watched me paint some/ answered a lifguard’s questions about me + my painting.
I was able to “finish” that painting in that time, because I was working fast, and because my girlfriend was talking to the lifguard on my behalf, but I had to leave the sky cloudless to get the rest in on time.
Everyone slept on the 3 hour boat ride back to the city, and I was amazed at how much all 3 of them slept all through that weekend.
I didn’t want to go straight from a nice pretty island to the endless concrete monoliths, so I proposed we all stop for dinner in Odaiba. The other 2 just went right home, but my girlfriend and I went, watched the drinking party boats, saw the fake statue of liberty, and went to an Italian buffet that had a view of the same.