Presents and the Post Office

I know what i wanted to write about!!!!
I wanted to write about the present I got from my friend Dan. You see, Dan is fab, we went to Amsterdam together and got high as kites and ate at a Chinese restaurant crispy duck every day. Yay yay! Very fab Dan.
Anyway, sometime recently I spoke to Dan on MSN messenger and at that moment he was being in London spending his 2000-won-in-a-casino-pounds-fortune. He already bought an Armani suit, yahaaa (wanna see wanna see) and then he said that he just found the perfect present for me. Yippeeeeee. Love presents!!!! And so I gave him the address and the present came and it was a Badger Badger T-shirt and it was perfect.
Only my boss then, after I`ve shown all the present staff what the badgers actually are, with a small curious smile pointed to the address on the envelope which said, `Veronika Ciernikova, Fukuchiyama, Kyoto-hu, Japan`. No street, no house number, nothing. And the present came anyway!!!!
I was left there standing with a grin of disbelief, turning my head in wonder and confused amusement. With all the lost-letters-and-not-coming packages-inquiries from me the Fukuchiyama Post Office must obviously be already well acquainted with Miss Ciernikova who`s address her closest friends and closest family fail to remember.
Which reminds me, indeed, my favourite Tonysan, too, on the last letter wrote the old address followed respectibly by the new address (this was after already tracking his previous letter down a month or so before and a consequential re-update of the current state of affairs ) and it managed to arrive at my house only by the miraculous knowledge of the Post Office staff of my Fukuchiyama whereabouts.
V. impressed.

Can you Japanes(z)e?

It is a Saturday.
And I am being tested.
Or...more like...you try to look for accommodation in Japan!! Do you really need to pay thousands of moneyz for internationally recognized proficiency tests? I have come to believe that once you manage to do all this, you know, the job, the house, the moving, all by yourself you should be eligible to pass at least the, I don`t know, Japanese survival proficiency test? Not there yet, not there just as yet...humphr for now.
So as it goes, somehow so far, I have managed to understand that I am supposed to meet the guy at one of the estate agencies at whenever on Sunday next week, in Chikusa-ku, opposite Mr Doughnut (a good opportunity to show my healthy-skin-and-intestines-and-general-
lifestyle diet the finger) and that if I want to live in a tall red マンション (mansion) I have to call at the beginning of August. And, yes, the other guy who just threw all this Japanese at me and expected me to understand. What`s that all about? However, he does have my name and my phone number and has just called to say that if I want to move into that room as well as paying my 41000 Yen for rent I would have to pay another 70000 Yen upfront so they can repair the room for me (???). The final sum was 150000 Yen or so, why it has become this amount I failed to understand however I managed not to get myself tricked by a wicked salesman of today`s tricky capitalistic world and thus I guess something must be working.
Nevertheless, at times like this, I would be willing to pay as much as 1000 yen for a Babel fish.

Not hurting.

I had something on my mind, something I wanted to write about, something funny, other than feeling that the best way to live a sane life and remain emotionally stable for the moment is to hang in the vaccuum and not move. The funny thing about this anekdote is that I can actually see the vaccuum right above me, and whenever there is a possibility that my mind would slip into the well-known sad loneliness mode, the mode that in this situation is way too dangerous to slip into (have you ever tried teaching and crying at the smae time?), my eyes become blank as I quickly imagine the vaccuum and how comfy it is to be there, hang there and refuse to know or understand anything.
Meetings are being held, hearts are being twisted and turned that way and the other, they are kneaded hard in attempt to squeeze all the needed amounts of love so something can survive. We can survive. Hide and I. Or perhaps the love we have is being pulled out of the parts of the hearts that don`t seem to have been used too much, or pushed around to find the hidden little hooks it could hold onto...in order to save something so dear, the warmth and comfort, the kindness of the hearts deep... The love, poor thing, shoved around this way and that, mostly over the phone lines, the virtual tracks of emails, the trains and shabby train stations, the hurrying halls of subway. The love that up until now has lived it`s stable life within external instability, has been given a chance to finally blossom and grow...and is put in the vaccuum to float around together with me until the good winds come. Or any winds. So that it can go...the destination has not been decided just as yet. Waiting for the winds...to listen to their whisper and go...

I guess I really did forget what I wanted to write in the first place, didn`t I?

Becoming nuts and the fire flies.

Anyway! All i wanted to do was write a blog about becoming nuts with the kids and seeing fire flies. Where I am now is still in the office, without a cash card, hungry and it`s already 20:23.
Yesterday the main afternoon activity was `rythmic`. It ususally consists of listening to one sensei play the piano and the rest of us moving accordingly to the rythm given.
And so it was yesterday. We were hopping around like rabbits, walking like horses (possibly kicking surrounding English language teachers in the nose while making the usual horse noise `eeeeahahaha`), flying like butterflies, jumping like frogs, gliding like dragonflies and eventually we were to become a どんぐり [donguri]. Since none of us had an idea what a どんぐり could possibly be in English (and they let us teach??!!! and pay us for it too!!!!!), and since we knew it kind of resembled a nut of some sort, we were, in the end of the lesson, all becoming nuts. It was rather charming. We were rolling on the floor from one side to the other under the supervision of Emiko sensei who showed us how to become nuts, we were all rolling having the best time of it and with Lionel sensei we were rolling and laughing rather maniacally, shouting `We are nuts and we are happy!`
I enjoyed yesterday`s class very much.

In the evening Lionel and I went for a nice walk in the fields that we`ve only discovered last week, really close to our house, in fact just across the road and over a small hill, and decided to make it a sort of weekly routine. The walk.
And as we walked and as the evening was slowly falling upon us, as it became darker and darker and as we finally could see nothing except for a bright blue light blicking somewhere in a distanced field in front of us, suddenly we could see a bright yellow light blicking somewhere in not so distanced front of us. A small one. And again, no more than one. I at first thought it was a cat, an either frantically moving one, so you could see only her one eye and only at certain times, or a half blind cat twisting her head from right to left or...well, I didn`t get further in my deductive analysis before I found out that it was a thing moving in the air, speedily moving towards us to pass us with no interest at all, blicking a bright yellow light all this time.
It was a fire fly!!! A Japanese fire fly! The European ones, once it gets dark they just shine. Pepetually (if you`re not sure how many `l`s you are supposed to write in a word if the word doesn`t look good with one but neither with two, is it okay to write three? Perpetuallly.) And they shine and shine and shine until it gets light again and you can`t see how they shine anymore.
But the Japanese ones, very closely reminding me of the Japanese energetic system, seem to work on a power saving mode and instead of just shining constantly they blick. And also, they seem bigger. But again, I have only seen two of them yet, so I can not press this matter further and present the results of mere observation as true and valid facts without any evidence, really, can I?
Fire flies, fire flies, their bum shines!
(they have a candle in their ars!)(a little more expressive artistic expression I would address it).

Anyway, the reason why I am without a cash card is because I first have to apply for an account before I can actually open it. So that`s what I did. And the reason I am hungry is because I haven`t had any dinner yet.
And I`m not going to say the reason why I am still in this office for I believe it to be rather obvious.

PS: And if anyone thinks I am going crazy, I am not, it`s just that I`ve been reading The Hitch Hiker`s Guide to the Galaxy, full five parts of the trilogy, for the last week and a half and it seems to have a sort of mind-wandering effect on me.
And if you think that now it is when I am crazy, just wait, you haven`t heard my next travel itinerary yet!