Ducks (January 30, 2008)

Today it was finally something approaching a comfortable temperature. It's amazing how much that does to make me feel good. I forgot that it's possible to walk around without freezing, grey weather keeping me from having any interest in it. I decided to look for water, so I took the train to Aratama-bashi because it's the only stop covered by my student card that has anything referring to water in its name ("bashi" refers to a bridge). I was successful in finding water - there was a small river, and there were even some ducks!











The light was very strange, but it made for an interesting walk. I found a drugstore and spent forever trying to figure out the difference between two type of makeup remover pads, and finally just went with the pink one. On the way back to the train I sat on the corner for a little while and drew the objects of interest on the opposite street - a tree, some powerlines and a slightly atypical lamppost. There was one group of high school boys on bikes who waited through five or ten lights on that corner, but other than that no one seemed to take any notice.

It's pretty typical, really. I would expect people walking past to notice someone drawing, or the girl at the hyaku-en store to say hi to me when I come there three days in a row at the same time, but in general the Japanese try not to make a scene or interfere with anyone else's personal space.

It's probably tied up with the way that they take extra notice of facial expressions and reactions in general. My host family laughs at me a lot, not because of mistakes I make but because of ways I react to things. Today they said I sounded like their little dog because I squeaked a little as I failed at eating sushi.

As I was walking home a group of guys biked past me. I didn't realize that they were foreigners until I noticed one of them looking at me funny. The only people that stare at me here, where I'm the anomaly, are foreigners who look like me. It makes sense, but it just made me laugh.