Building Family

Well, I had some crappy pictures I took from the festival yesterday, but I can’t figure out how to download them from my phone, hence, I’ll start carrying my camera with me. Either way, pictures never compare to the real thing (hence why I’ve never been snappy happy), but I’ll get some up soon.

Yesterday (and Saturday) was アリラン祭 (Ariran-sai). Essentially, it’s a festival that is sort of a reenactment of when Koreans were traveling to Edo (present day Tokyo) back in the day for trade/political purposes. Tsushima has always been important for relations with Korea and Japan. What’s cool about that is that I’m living in a place that is pretty bicultural and there are quite a few people who are at least bilingual, I hear some Korean every day, and many of the signs are also in Korean. Guess I’ll start studying it : ) Made a new friend called Moon, she’s very cool, very loud, and very happy. She says she misses Jesse, but that she likes me too, ha ha ha. She’ll try to teach me Korean if I help her with her English, so we’ll see how that goes. She’s a mutual friend of everyone, so I’ll be seeing a lot of her and she’s pretty cool company.

Oh yes, no pictures but, I saw the best fireworks show I have ever seen in my life yesterday! I usually don’t like fireworks, and find them to be quite lame because of the whole 4th of July every year forever thing I grew up with, but this display was AWESOME! Like fireworks shooting out of the water, you think it’s the finale but it’s just really just well done, holy shit is this for real kind of fireworks! I was very impressed.

Melissa stayed over because she wanted to see the fireworks so I offered my place so she didn’t have to go kill deer driving on her way home. We stayed up late talking ‘til who knows when. It felt like when I was a little kid and would stay up with my cousins talking about dreams, about nothing, about everything all at once. It was a nice conversation, and I’m really liking that I can talk to all the JETs here, i.e. I can be myself. It’s a very close community feel, and I seem to be fitting in really well. I’m glad, because I’m letting more folks into my inner circle, I’m beginning to trust people more and develop a family kind of feel, I’m developing a family here. And that’s something I never completely had in many of my overseas experiences (well, maybe Costa Rica). It looks like I’ll be doing some great work here, that I’m gonna develop some strong ass emotional ties to many folks here, I expect nothing less than to do my best, ha ha ha. Okay, that’s enough writing for the day : )

Here's a pic for you folks: From that bridge whose name escapes me at the moment...