The Meantime

I have not written anything for a long time, because - truth be told, I have not done anything altogether interesting (for all that time). Except:

My girlfriend and I went to the Emperor’s Palace. It turns out that they have free bike rentals thereabouts, and I’ve always wanted to try a tandem bike.
My parents told me oft and again - all through my childhood, that they went for a tandem bike ride on their 1st date. There was something about a big hill, and on or the other of them was tired. (It’s not a story/ with a beginning and an end, and meaningful conflict - It’s just something they said over and over again).
I thought it’d be neat to take a 2 person bike for a spin around the Emperor’s place and see if we could see him hanging out his laundry, or peek through a window to see what he was watching on TV, …but they got a big wall all around the place.
Still it was nice and romantic, albeit insanely hot.
That was early August, …I haven’t written anything for a LONG time.

I moved back to the concrete piles that stretch unbroken from Tokyo, and far further off.
I dislike it - for reasons I spent my 1st 3 years here detailing. But living here saves my girlfriend from having to drive 5 hours to and from Nagano every weekend to see me. And I don’t fall asleep on my feet from boredom at my old job anymore.

She thought she’d do me a favor and drive us somewhere we could see some real trees. I had never been to Hakone, and it is geographically close to where we live, so we got in her car.
She only has 2 CDs in her car; I didn’t realize it until we had been sitting stuck in traffic for 3 hours - which was half way through what should have been a 2 hour drive. (That’s 6 hours!)
Since we were stopped and stationary so very very often, she managed to find a nice Indian restaurant with a program in her phone. It took some extra time to figure out exactly where it was (as the roads in Japan usually don’t have names). The food there was really really good. They had 2 vegetarian options, so we went with one of each. + They played Indian dance music. I would have loved any music that wasn’t one of her 2 CDs at that point (Except of course for Country music - which is always truly terrible).
It was dark, the moon was nearly full, and we were (geographically) close to the shore at that point, so I suggested we stop at a beach and look over the ocean for a little while.
We couldn’t find a beach there though. It had all been covered with concrete, with a wall along the edge of the road.

Finding a place to spend the night was a little tricky too. I won’t make an episode of that - or the time it took, but we got a room at a love hotel with huge spiders. The cool electronic horse in the room would have balanced out my misgivings with the spiders (The spiders that seemed to watch from the walls around the bed, …and in the shower), but who would ever return to a cheap old hotel that had no Tea? …Granted, I brought my own, but it’s the principle…

We were up late looking for a love hotel/ cheap hotel with any vacancies, so we slept a bit late the next morning. I noticed several itchy welts (from the spiders) when we woke up.

Hours later, while sitting in traffic, waiting to get up the mountain - to the park where we intended to go hiking/ where I had hoped to paint, hours later we were sitting in her car near the top, listening to one of her 2 CDs and reading a magazine she left in her glove compartment in 2004. She was as bored as I, and asked me if I would turn into Spiderman from my Spider bites, but I figured it would have had taken affect already if it was going to happen. (We did a lot of sitting in traffic).

Much later we did manage to get a wee bit of hiking in, but it was too grey/ cloudy/ crowded to paint anything. We saw some volcanic steam vents, and a little shop which sold volcanically hard boiled eggs - black on the outside/ dark grey on the inside. They looked interesting, but I didn’t think they would have used free range eggs to serve crowds as big as those.

My girlfriend knew I was vegetarian and she likes my cooking, but she didn’t really seem to understand why people would swear off any thing as inoffensive as meat

( lots of laughing here if you’ve seen ANY of the data ( http://www.peta.org ),
I found a few videos some kind person had subtitled with Japanese - so I could show my girlfriend - foster a better understanding…
She stopped eating meat that same week, and I lost all interest in eggs and dairy products.

(It would seem that my plan had backfired,
…but we’ve both gone happily forward.)

Progress IS a wonderful thing.

It took us another 6 hours to make it back to our city.
(But we stopped at that same Indian restaurant for an hour on our way home and had the same 2 things we’d ordered the night before; We just switched bowls.  That was the best part of our whole trip.)

Since we spent nearly the entirety of that trip sitting in a car not seeing much of any nature, we tried to go someplace else a few weeks later.  There had been some famous waterfalls near where I used to live in Nagano, but my $1. road map didn’t have them or indeed, half the roads in the region marked.  We headed out that way one afternoon thinking we’d spend the night nearby and visit them in the morning.  Traffic was much better along the way there, and we would have made excellent time, if we had not stopped for an hour waiting for an Indian buffet along the road to open up for dinner.

The waterfall the next morning WAS very nice, and very packed with people who had also driven and waited in a line of cars to get there and see it.  I’d wanted to paint a picture of it but:
- It would have been hard to get a good impression of the colors with all the camera flashes     going off,
-  And there really wasn’t anyway I could set an easel up where I could see the waterfall through     all the people/ where all the people wouldn’t knock into me and my easel trying to get closer to     the waterfall,
-  And my girlfriend would have been bored waiting for me.  (It was okay on the beach in the summer, ‘cause she could sleep in the sun.)

We stopped at that Indian buffet on our way home again - because there aren’t any near where we live (and lots of Indian food/ Indian people are vegetarian).

Chinese food I very rarely ever eat, because all the Chinese places in Japan only have meat dishes/ vegetables soaked in meat goo.  The nice lady who had the Christmas party years ago, where I 1st met my girlfriend, who takes me/ us out all the time, she found a Chinese restaurant in a city very near ours, which could make an all vegan 5 course dinner.  She had wanted to take a small group of people along, but one was sick, and my girlfriend had to work, so it turned out that just 3 of us were able to go that afternoon.  I was very impressed with all of the food and the atmosphere.  She knows lot’s of good places like that, and she does often take me along.

She got to talking, and said that she had found a really nice place which, if we booked now, we could have a nice engagement party for me there in the spring.  Then she and the other lady with us carried on for a bit as to how things could be organized/ arranged for my engagement party.
I only bothered to mention that  I’m not engaged (not altogether eager to be) a few times through all of that, …as it didn‘t seem to matter too much to them.

Over the last month of summer, and the 1st of the fall my girlfriend and I kept getting red itchy bites here and there.  We knew they weren’t mosquito bites, and I knew that they weren’t flea bites (having had some experience/ experiences in that matter some time prior), but we never did find out what was causing it - before whatever it was finally stopped.
Likewise, I suddenly developed an allergy to something which made all of my arms and some of my back and chest  itch like mad.  I really wanted to know what might have caused it, but the doctor I was sent to didn’t seem to think it the slightest bit interesting/ important.  It took about 5 days to clear up, and hasn’t happened again since (quite thankfully).