I predicted that this year would be one of the craziest years of my life and the first three months have not disappointed me. I’ll come back and update on January/February but as this is the last day of March I thought I would recap what has been happening this month.
The month started with a visitor from France. We were very excited at the upcoming arrival of Helene’s father Chris. Helene had been homesick for some time and rather than going home for Christmas, this visit was the trade-off that she needed. I was looking forward to getting to know Chris a little better especially because I had homefield advantage. All of our previous meetings were in his backyard and it was always hard to know where the boundaries were especially since I didn’t know much about French/British boundaries. Besides, a lot had changed since we last met and it was neat to see his reaction to those changes.
The visit lasted a week and in that time we all had a chance to spend time with each other. I spent two days with Chris showing him the sights of Kyoto while Helene was at work. The next day the three of us went to Osaka. I always thought Osaka was a day trip: the Castle and the market pretty much takes the whole day. I spent the next few days at home working on my thesis and as my foot was in a lot of pain (more on that later) it was probably a good idea. And the last few days were filled with our favourite restaurants and the remaining bits of Kyoto. From what I gathered he had a great time.
Kyoto is such a beautiful city so it’s always great to have a chance to see the sights. When you go with people who have never been to the sights it’s like seeing them for the first time.
Within a few days of Chris leaving, we were hit by the giant earthquake and the tsunami. That pretty much consumed the next two weeks as panic and hysteria made decision-making very difficult. Overall learning to make rational decisions under pressure was a good skill to develop. I learned that balancing out all the information and misinformation from the news was very hard, especially because Helene became very overwhelmed by all the news and left me to deal with news reports while she focused on embassy websites. To put it simply, the western news thrives on bad news and makes everything sound more horrible than it actually is and tries to get people overexcited about things that don’t concern them. Bottom line - don’t watch CNN ever! It’s designed to scare you.
The last few weeks have been filled with parties. Those who didn’t go home for the winter break or run away from the nuclear meltdown threat were around to enjoy the parties. Helene’s birthday party was last weekend: we went out for Karaoke which was very hard since I think I had bronchitis. It was a great party with lots of food and people. Our friend Kate was also having her birthday party that weekend so we made it a double event. Also that week had a few graduation parties for those who finished this semester. It was sad to see some of them go. But hopefully I’ll be able to keep in touch with them.
I’m going to write about what happened to my foot as soon as I can find the plug to get the photos off my phone.
Next month school starts again and that is a whole new headache of stress just waiting to be undone.
This was a crazy month, visitors, earthquakes and hysteria, hospital visits and lots of studying and parties. I also got a chance to practice on my guitar a bit.
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