Atarashi tomodachi

After spending a week on my own, away from the Gaijin my age-only conversing with older Japanese sensei's and younger ESL high school students, I realized how important familiarity is to me. That is not to say that I don't appreciate the difference in culture, because I adore newness and the world it presents to me. I find a strange congruency in the perspectives of the kids I've met to my own adolescence and teenhood. But I love people, and I love my culture and that is something I didnt expect to encounter.

I thought I was done with the American way, its loudness, pushiness, and nonchalance. I found my people brash and petty and unwilling to open their minds to change.

Again, allow me to preface or rather return to the point by saying that my American friends in which I choose to surround myself with-hardly fits that description. But here it is hard to choose your friends.

In this country, or rather this program, you have little selection in who surrounds you for this country is small and its gaijin, even smaller. Yet the people I have been placed beside are phenomenal. I think they are brilliant, halarious and incredibly openminded, but i'd hardly say that to their face.

When you are thrown into a tank and that's that--you learn to adapt to the food they're feeding you, the air they're giving you--and the fish you meet, eat sashimi and drink biru with at the baru just a few train stops away. And I think that's all life should be about. This photo shows us at an all-you-can-drink izakaya in Fujieda for about 3000 yen each person ~$30.00.

Group B meeting Group A and Sempai's in our little district area.