Day 02 - Describe your neighborhood in Japan.
I lived in a town called Atsugi in Japan. My actual neighborhood was called Aiko Ishida, which was the name of my train station. It was on the Odakyu line, about 50 minutes from Shinjuku and 40 from Yokohama. Basically, what that means was I lived in the suburbs, but was close enough to the city to easily go in and party on the weekends. I used to sometimes describe it to fellow Texans this way: if Tokyo/Yokohama were Dallas/Fort Worth, then Atsugi was geographically Denton.
My neighborhood was small and peaceful. If I walked for maybe ten minutes past my apartment, away from the train station and toward the mountains, there were big farms. I liked that it was so close to the city, yet still pretty rural. I often found Tokyo and Yokohama very oppressive, which is funny considering I grew up in a city. You just don’t get the same sense of space there that you do at home. Here is a picture of one of the roads in my neighborhood:
People drove on that. No joke.
I was surrounded by mostly houses. This was the view from my window:
That second photo is my neighbor's excellent garden. I was always secretly tempted to go over and steal vegetables in the dead of night.
The thing that made living out there inconvenient was how isolated I was - my coworker lived one train station over, but other than that I had to travel at least forty minutes to get to people I knew well. It was exhausting, sometimes, the sheer amount of effort that socializing required. I spent even more time on the internet there than I do here, if you can believe that. At the same time, I really learned how to be by myself when I lived there. I had a hard time with the lack of social interaction, but I became a lot more firm about making decisions on my own. I always said that I was glad that I was put there when I got the job at Geos, because it was close enough to the city to be exciting, but not so close as to be stifling. I stand by that.
I will toss a little levity into this entry by closing with a sign that I passed every day for months that was in front of a construction project, and I swear, it made me giggle every day.
My neighborhood was small and peaceful. If I walked for maybe ten minutes past my apartment, away from the train station and toward the mountains, there were big farms. I liked that it was so close to the city, yet still pretty rural. I often found Tokyo and Yokohama very oppressive, which is funny considering I grew up in a city. You just don’t get the same sense of space there that you do at home. Here is a picture of one of the roads in my neighborhood:
People drove on that. No joke.
I was surrounded by mostly houses. This was the view from my window:
That second photo is my neighbor's excellent garden. I was always secretly tempted to go over and steal vegetables in the dead of night.
The thing that made living out there inconvenient was how isolated I was - my coworker lived one train station over, but other than that I had to travel at least forty minutes to get to people I knew well. It was exhausting, sometimes, the sheer amount of effort that socializing required. I spent even more time on the internet there than I do here, if you can believe that. At the same time, I really learned how to be by myself when I lived there. I had a hard time with the lack of social interaction, but I became a lot more firm about making decisions on my own. I always said that I was glad that I was put there when I got the job at Geos, because it was close enough to the city to be exciting, but not so close as to be stifling. I stand by that.
I will toss a little levity into this entry by closing with a sign that I passed every day for months that was in front of a construction project, and I swear, it made me giggle every day.