Thoughts on paint...

First and foremost, paint is obscenely expensive in Japan. Most things here are obscenely expensive, but the price of paint just boggles the mind.

For reasons discussed elsewhere, I've been feeling incredibly homesick since returning from the Snow Festival. Today I spent most of the day inside scrubbing my horribly disgusting bathtub. The former occupant of my lovely abode apparently smoked in the bathroom and never cleaned it. And he lived here for six years... I got one corner of it clean. After I don't even want to know how long, I only got one corner cleaned. Tomorrow I'm going back to the hyaku yen to get steel wool. If that doesn't work, it's off to Tokyu Hands for a $10 bottle of Comet.

I was trying to keep myself occupied for an hour before heading out to meet the fabulous F. for dinner in Shimokitazawa. Occupied in a way that did not involve me scrubbing and cursing everyone from the makers of the laughably shitty bathroom cleaner to the distributors of Comet to my employers for not taking care of said mess in the tub.

I started a painting about two weeks ago, which since then has been laying on a [quite old] Tampa Tribune Metro section [thanks Mom!] in the middle of my, for lack of a better word, living room. While sitting on the floor and painting the head, the words of someone who was once very important to me sprang to mind...

This person had, I'm sure inadvertently, hurt me terribly many, many years ago. After a very long absence, he unexpectedly popped back into my life. We were having dinner--a very uncomfortable dinner, for me--and drinking sangria that had more fruit than wine. I was trying to find someone to help me paint my bedroom. I didn't much care who. He just happened to be there. He asked why I needed help and I said that I didn't like to paint. I remember he looked at me strangely for a second and then said, "But you're a painter."

I had no response to that.

I think it's interesting that I've never thought of myself as a painter. Never. Not even briefly. I paint. Sometimes. But I'm not a painter. However, here was someone who not only remembered that I had painted, but also thought that I was very good at it, and, in fact, a "painter."

Sometimes, every now and again, I have the ability to see myself through other people's eyes, eyes that aren't as critical as my own. And sometimes I catch myself saying out loud, "But you're a painter." I don't believe it yet, but here's to hoping someday I will.

My second attempt at snow skiing...

Icicles at the rest stop on the way back from Mt. Niseko

Sometimes when traveling, one feels obligated to do things one wouldn't normally do. Case in point, we took a bus to Mt. Niseko to go skiing. This required us getting up at 6 am and shlepping it down to Sapporo station to try to find the ticket booth and catch the right bus at 7:45 with our extremely limited Japanese. Surprisingly enough, this wasn't too difficult.

The bus ride from Sapporo to Niseko was about 3 hours, I think... I fell asleep about twenty minutes into the ride and didn't wake up until we stopped for a bathroom break. When I got off the bus at the rest stop, it was snowing fairly hard and absolutely freezing.

I didn't really start getting nervous until we got to the ski place. Let it be known that I went skiing once, about fifteen years ago. And that was in a place where I spoke the language.

The man at the rental shop didn't speak any English at all. None. B. disappeared for a little while and somehow I managed to tell the man my shoe size. ["ni ju yon to go"] After saying it a couple times, it hit me that I was saying it wrong. It's not "to go" it's "ten go"... He seemed to understand nonetheless. This is where the fun began... All I could remember about the ski boots from fifteen years ago was that they were supposed to be tight on your ankles. We spent about 30 minutes with this poor man trying to figure out how much room our toes were supposed to have. This consisted of a lot of gestures while saying, "Dijobu?" Of course, I wasn't making "Dijobu" into a question... I was just making different gestures and saying, "Okay." It's no wonder it took so long.

So after getting clothes and skis and boots and all that, we headed out. This ski resort didn't have anything resembling, "bunny hills." Apparently we were supposed to learn as we went down the mountain. This is when I got scared.

We managed to get the skis on and were just standing there trying to figure out what to do when we noticed a couple people speaking English near us. Somehow one of the guys noticed the look of desperation I know B. had--and I assume I had, as well--and came over to help. He offered to show us how to ski. He said that he would take us to the top and help us. He was a smarmy guy from Nepal who had obviously been born with skis on, but he was going to show us what to do and this was all that mattered. It was at this point that B. fell down. I'm not sure if she was moving or not when she fell, but we hadn't had the skis on for more than five minutes and if she was moving it couldn't have been far... The Sherpa tried to help her in a much nicer way than I was... [My help consisted of telling her that she needs to remember her common sense... If she falls on her left side, she's got to put the damn poles in her left hand to push up.] After what seemed like 30 minutes, but was probably only 15, B. managed to get up by having the Sherpa take off her skis. After another 10 minutes, she got the skis back on... She moved maybe a foot and fell again. The Sherpa tried to help her again, and again I was giving common sense advice, while she was huddled on the ground saying, "I can't. I can't. I can't..." It was at this point that the Sherpa decided to quit wasting his time and skied off, which is when I started getting pissed.

This scenario replayed itself again and again, minus the Sherpa's help, for another hour. I would alternate between giving common sense advice and being, what I thought was, incredibly patient. Finally, B. gave up and I was left to try to ski on my own. I skied off incredibly pissed.

When I got on the lift, the terror set in. I was afraid not so much of getting down the mountain or breaking anything [I knew I would get off the mountain one way or another, and chances of me breaking something were incredibly small], but that I was going to miss a turn somewhere along the way and end up on the expert course instead of the family course... Luckily I was able to turn at the family course fork and I managed to get down the mountain in one piece, although it took about an hour. I only ran into a group of people once, and I was going very slow and "Sumimasen"-ing my way through. They laughed at me. I fell quite a few times, but only fell on my face once [and slid a little bit]. The snow was so powdery that it didn't hurt at all.

When I got to the bottom, my knees hurt like hell and my ears were cold. I decided if I went again, I probably wouldn't be able to walk the next day. That, and I might miss the bus back to Sapporo. B. was waiting outside the lodge when I got to the bottom. She saw me coming down the mountain and came outside. In the end, I felt kind of bad that she couldn't do it, but really good that I did...

Why you should take your bikes inside when you live in Sapporo

Bikes on the street in Sapporo

Being born and raised in a place where it never, ever snows, seeing something like this is a little surprising... And amazing. And makes me feel strangely giddy.

Hopefully my last visit to a Japanese doctor

I'm going to Sapporo in two days for the 50-something annual Sapporo Snow Festival.

As luck, and Murphy, would have it, my body has chosen now to get sick. As good a time as any, I suppose. Lucky for me, whenever I get sick I lose my voice. It's one of those freak occurrences that's not so freaky for me, but other people seem to think is freaky and a sign that I'm dying and therefore I get to stay home from work. It works to my advantage I think.

Normally I avoid doctors. I don't like them, I don't think many of them are very good, and I don't like leaving my house when I feel like shit. However, I'm going to be on a plane in two days, and I'm not sure if it's such a good idea to mix an unknown Japanese medicine with Robitussin, so I went to the doctor. Because I'm sick--and not in my right mind--I didn't bring a book with me to the doctor's office. I met my translator at the station and we went to the doctor's, which is located in the shopping center at my station, as it should be. I sat down while she talked to the receptionist and gave them my insurance information. She gave me a form to fill out--in English!!--describing my symptoms, which consisted of a few boxes of symptoms that I could check. I checked the following: Fever, Sore Throat, Head Ache. They didn't have boxes for Stuffy Nose, Body Aches, Cough, All Around Shitty Feeling. When I turned in the form, the receptionist gave me a thermometer. This thermometer didn't have anything covering the tip. In fact, it looked rather beat up and dirty. I looked at my translator, who told me to put it under my arm. It said 37.5, which apparently means, "Slight fever."

Then the waiting started.

Forty-five minutes later, and god knows how many games of Tetris on my [thankfully] charged cell phone, the receptionist calls my translator up and asks if it's okay if I don't see the main doctor. I can see the assistant doctor from the university quicker than the main doctor. I say that it's fine with me, that I just want to get some medicine and go back to bed. Another thirty minutes pass and I hear a faint, "Jennifah-san" coming from the back of the room. [I always forget to put my last name first.] Behind the rows of sick people is a door which opens into a tiny room where the assistant doctor works. I sit down on a stool in front of the doctor and my translator stands behind me. The doctor starts talking to my translator for some time very quickly. My translator looks down at me and says, "He wants to know if you have diarrhea." This strikes me as a very strange question and I am suddenly reminded of the words of my friend, F., from months ago...

"These people are obsessed with diarrhea! They talk about it all the time. They think it's acceptable to talk about it in class. Do you think that's okay? Me neither! It's sick!"

After I say no, he takes out a metal tongue depressor--METAL!--and looks at my throat, while I'm wondering where he got that thing and who he used it on before me and what they had and whether it's been disinfected since its last use... He then starts writing and talking. My translator tells me that my glands are swollen and I have a cold. He's going to give me some medicine and we have to wait for a little while longer. That turns into another hour, and some more Tetris, followed by twenty minutes at the pharmacy to get six different types of medicine, including two powders, a bottle of something that looks like iodine [that I have to use, "about this much of," and mix it with, "about this much," water] and some green LifeSaver things that I'm to use when my throat hurts, but no more than 6 a day! That's very important! No more than six! To which I say, "Yeah yeah. No more than six... Show me what, 'this much,' of that iodine stuff looks like again."

On the way home, I stop at the video store and pick up "Murder on the Orient Express", mostly because I have fond memories of "Death on the Nile" from childhood... I tell you, that Angela Lansbury's underrated.