July, Rediscovering I'm an idiot

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So its been a long time. I would like to sit here and tell you that the reason I haven't written is because I've been having so many crazy awesome adventures and I just honestly coulcn't fit you guys in but that would be a lie. Not that I haven't been having crazy awesome adventurous but really... think about how many crazy awesome adventures I'd have to be having all the time just to not be able to take 1 or 2 hours to write my blog (I'm not a slow typer but I have to upload pics to, its really quite a hassle). Needless I would like to say I'm that amazing but I'm not. So in the end I've just been lazy.

You'll be happy to know that I've devised a wicked plan to re-coop all my lost adventures for you. Every week from now I will write a previous months blog (I will now be blogging in months, this blog will consist of July). Unfortunately I devised this plan two months ago.. .and well its taken me two months to write the first one... so I would count on me pulling through on this.

As you may or may not have guessed at this point, July was not a rather exciting month hence why I gathered the motivation to start blogging again! hurray! No but seriously, I think the only record of what I did last month or the previous months is through my finances. In case you didn't know I'm rather a paranoid money tracker. I keep most of my receipts so I know where I'm spending my money. So I am now in the process of tracking what I did last month through my receipt. You're wondering, I do keep all my receipts, even 50 yen purchases at the corner store (equivalent to about 50 cents and yes I did this back in Canada). So this blog may turn into a listing of what I bought rather than what I've done. Sorry. Again, I would like to say that I have all this built up enthusiasm that I'm going to put into my writing but I believe that the Japanese culture has slowly beaten that out of me and I may be reduced to simply listing off purchases.

Why yes, why yes... July 1st 1649 yen... my Canada day dinner and beers. As Canada day fell on a Tuesday I was in rather quite the dilemma, do I plan a party for the great county of Canada on the weekend before or the weekend after Canada Day. Well lets be honest, you can't celebrate something before it happens... its just lame... cause when people ask you about it.. .you have to tell them, oh yeah its next Tuesday... Then you just look like an idiot... The only time you can celebrate something before hand is a surprise b-day. And I am well aware that I have an inflated ego but I don't put myself even in the same league of party planning as to try and pull off a surprise party for a country let along the great country of Canada, so I decided that it would have to be next weekend... then I realize that July 4th ( the next friday) was American independence day. As I am the only Canadian I know and most of the gaijin ( Foreigners) are American I knew my party would turn into a "hail oh great America" party. So I opted for the third option... buy dinner at the local convenience store, drink beers and play NHL 2007 with my American friend. It was great and I won.

Just to let you know, Japan does not have a Japan day. Its really weird.. when I asked my friends about it, they just said that Japan was so old that they didn't need one... well thats stupid... I think every country should have a day where their citizens are given a reason to get drunk in the name of the country.

Besides studying Japanese, crying at home because I'm lonely and well.. no that pretty much what I do when I'm not having crazy adventures... I wish I would say I email my friends back home.. but as I'm sure you're all aware of, I haven't blogged, emailed or facebooked since around January... so I can't really say that I do. The only other exciting thing for me this month was heading to the Beach for the weekend.

Or in fact as I remember it, 600 yen for Yakisoba (some sort of Japanese noodles) at the beach. This was just pretty much a wicked experience. I went to the beach the night before, stayed in a hotel got an amazing dinner! I got to eat abalone which I got to see fry in front of me while it was alive. I was torn... do I feel bad that I'm seeing this shellfish burn alive or happy that I get to see it do this dance as its dying from the heat. I'm afraid that if I say I enjoyed it... it might make me a bad person... but we all know that I enjoyed it and that I'm a bad person so I might as well just write about it as well.. Anyways... I did enjoy it and I didn't take a video cause I'm an idiot but I should have and if you get the chance to eat abalone if you come to Japan, do it... It taste alright but the death dance was just amazing, so at first and then more frantic as it got hotter, and you could poke it as well and that was cool.

So then after dinner we headed down to the beach and set off fireworks... see this is the thing about Japan, you can do fireworks whenever and where ever you want... so when we got to the beach there where five other groups of people around setting off fireworks as well. It was crazy cool. Or least it was until our lighter stopped wanting to be my friend and burnt me... I was not impressed. After that we pretty much just chilled on the beach and watched other people's fireworks... it was so wicked. The next day was a scorcher. But me being me, I wanted to get a tan... so I didn't put on sunscreen at first... So after swimming and tanning for a bit.. maybe an hour or an hour and a half... I put on some sunscreen and proceeded to tan and swim. The beach was amazing. White sand, blue clear water... so beautiful and it was in a bay so there were sand rock banks almost enclosing the whole area.

So for lunch they didn't have any good beach food.. or I guess they had Japanese beach food which is lame.. its basically all hot noodles and shit like that.. so I was not impressed, they were good but I was not impressed. So anyways, by the end of this amazing day my skin was starting to feel a little hot and by a little I mean a lot more than it should if I'd had sunscreen on the whole time... so I end up checking the bottle and we found out that the sunscreen we were using wasn't water proof which means that it all washed off when we went into the water and that we all had crazy bad burns... Needless to say we tanned for another hour, packed our things and headed in. Yeah so that was about 2 weekends ago and my skin no longer hurts but I'm still peeling... I'm an idiot. The worst part was that when I went to work... my kids made fun of me.. I cried a little.

The only other major thing that happened that I've been debating about writing about is how I performed minor surgery on myself. Now I know most of you already know that I have tendencies to think I can do things that I really shouldn't do... which some of you may think makes me an idiot, but as most of you already know I'm an idiot and its the title of this months blog, I feel there will be no harm done to my personal image but I'm rather reconfirming to you guys that Japan really hasn't changed me that much. Anyways, I got a rather large wart on the sole of my foot and it was a growing to the point that it was bothering me a little.. not really that much, which is why I really feel like an idiot.

I've removed warts before and the trick is getting deep enough to cut them out. So I preped my skin and cutting instruments (a pair of nail cutting scissors) and went to work. I'll save you the gore and rough reality and just let you know it hurt a lot and there was a lot of blood and I mean a lot of blood (theres part of me that really wishes I'd video taped it just to show you guys but that would have made me really sick)... I ended up wrapping my foot in gauss and the blood almost soaked through the whole thing... but the bleeding stopped and at this point I was a little worried about infection so I decided to call my dad and find out what I could do to prevent bacteria from growing... There was a small part of me that thought that maybe my dad would see past the stupidity of my actions and maybe appreciate my interest in biology and surgery and maybe even give me a little praise, but that was not the cause, in fact I think my dad is beginning to accept and expect these things from me, as he didn't call me an idiot per say but explained to me that if there is a scar on the bottom of my foot it could permanently cause pain me for the rest of my life... and that he hopes that doesn't happen... sooo you be the judge, have I changed or am I still the normal idiot I usually am. Anyways my foot has healed and it seems to be ok... I went for a run on it yesterday and all was good. That pretty much brings me to the end of the month and I'm just waiting on life now. As I know I won't be in Kofu next weekend don't expect a blog there but maybe the week after... who knows.

I hope this was enjoyable

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Photos

The Beach
My new friend!

The Beach
My camera sucks but it was clearer and more sunny

The Beach
The Beach!

The Beach
The Beach!

The Beach
The walkway out to this underwater observatory, it was cool

The Beach
Not the Beach! But yet part of the beach

The Beach
The Beach from the observatory

The Beach
WATER! I miss the ocean

Comments

[Andrea farrell]

yay!
Glad u are back ot ur blogging geoff...for a while i though u dissapeared off the face of earth! how much longer are u in japan for? Im now in thailand...and i too have a blog on this site:) take care! xx