HEY GUYS. LONG TIME NO SEE.
So I haven't updated this thing in pretty much years, which is terrible because at some point, I was counting on this being a permanent record for when my memory gave out which it already is because I cannot keep a thought in my head for longer than five minutes.
Thus, a recap of my year. Or something.
So I have an anxiety disorder which gets all tangled up in rather extreme depression which means that life does not actually happen for me most of the time since being able to get out of bed and pretend to function normally is a pipe dream. I've been in therapy for a VERY LONG TIME and also on various medications because that is what one does when one is ill and would like to get better very, very much but progress is indeed difficult.
On the plus side, I have stopped hiding in University, failing all my subjects and decided to cut my losses and run off with whatever degree they'll give me. :'D So, hurrah, I am officially graduated.
I did not do the ceremony because closure is apparently terrifying, AHAHA. :| But my diploma will at some point be mailed to me and I shall be set adrift upon the world.
This year was also the year of travelling after being stuck in the country for TWO WHOLE YEARS OMFG. I hate being stuck in one place for too long, because it gives you entirely too much time to dwell and I get vaguely suicidal. (I am not, actually, at this point in time actively suicidal which is so much of a plus point, I cannot even begin to say. SO YAY.)
First, Japan!
I went to Japan for about two and a half weeks in March because of a friend's wedding and also, because I love Japan like burning. I lived there for almost a year and did very little of the things that I should have, but Osaka is the city closest to my heart after Melbourne. It is also dirty and a little bit ugly but whatever, it is mine.
I flew into Tokyo for a week to go shopping and see the sights and pretty much spent the entire time revisiting my old haunts and going ;n; at everything that had changed. And then mainly hunting for doujinshi for people because that is why one goes to Japan, for the animated porn. I stayed with Hannah, who I dearly love, even though I speak to her once in a blue moon, and imposed shamelessly.
After about a week, I needed to make my way down to Osaka for the wedding. But there's direct routes to Osaka or the scenic route and I am a disgraceful traveller. People ask me for recommendations and I'm like, please don't; I travel like a hobo backpacker and sleep in bus shelters and sometimes in overnight McDonald's and it is a wonder that I have not actually died yet. AN ACTUAL WONDER. But this time, instead of taking the local trains for like, ten hours on a 1500y ticket, I did the night buses.
I love night buses. I understand these things are vaguely uncomfortable for people who are not five foot tall asians, but I'm perfectly fine on them. Which means I will do things like take an overnight bus from Tokyo to Hiroshima, arriving at like, 6am in the morning and then RUN FREE.
Nothing is open at 6am in the morning. Nothing. However, the Hiroshima Peace Park is an actual park, so I went and sobbed all over the statues and monuments and buildings and then went inside the museum when it opened at a sane hour.
I cried a lot. It was vaguely ridiculous. Also, when I was standing around looking at some flowers and marvelling at the resilience of life, some guy came up to me and started talking about how the flowers were pretty and how I was also pretty AND IT WAS WEIRD, OKAY. SO VERY WEIRD. Maybe I got mixed up, though, because my Japanese is super basic and for about six months of the year I spent in Japan, I believed a lot of people came up and asked about the time INSTEAD OF IF I HAD TIME, DID I WANT TO GO FOR A DRINK, HELLOOOOOO THERE ;DDDDD so better safe than sorry and I brush off most people of a certain age bracket and gender.
Then, after that, I went and trundled off to find my hostel and dropped off my tiny wheely suitcase to catch a boat. This is like, 12pm or something, catching the ferry to Miyajima and being hideously amused because Motonari from Basara and all the other ridiculous Sengoku references and a REALLY GIANT FLOATING TORI. And deer. Everywhere.
It was cherry blossom season when I went, so there were loads of people EVERYWHERE and Japanese people are sane, law abiding folk who walk on the path and I am the type of person who goes HEY, LOOK, A BEACH and merrily frolics on the sand while people stare.
I am also the type of person who climbs mountains;;; IF THERE IS A MOUNTAIN, I AM FUCKING THERE. In my bright red dress and knee high boots with absolutely no freaking tread on them. But the view was pretty.
Also, at low tide, you can walk right out to the tori! It doesn't float then, because the water is gone! HOWEVER, I WAS THERE FOR SO LONG, IT WENT FROM LOW TIDE TO HIGH TIDE.
Basara Motonari's stage is actually based in this shrine, no joke kjajkajkwhejkawwe ALSO, THERE WAS OKUNI'S THEATRE ROOM, OR SOMETHING, AND IT WAS ALL VERY WEIRD.
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Everything was pretty. Oh Japan.
I stayed the night in the hostel, then was gone the next day during A MASSIVE FREAKING FREAK TYPHOON OR SOMETHING in a bus down to Kyoto, where I wondered around for a few hours, looking at nearby temples and gardens and playing around Kyoto station, which is huge and futuristic and half of the outside decks were closed because THERE WAS A TYPHOON.
This temple was close by, so I went to gawk at it. IDEK what temple it was.
Skywalk. Shiny. Kinda like walking into a sci-fi movie.
Then I hopped on another overnight bus to Matsuyama. Again, I got there around 6am and spent a fair bit of time kinda dazed at the station and trying to get myself into some sort of semblence of order. And then took a tram that looped around most of the city and decided to visit a bathhouse. To be specific, the oldest working bathhouse in Japan, which Spirited Away was inspired by.
I think most people don't like being naked in front of strangers but it kinda helps when you'll never see them ever, and also when you're actually half blind without glasses on. You don't actually see anything and the ostrich mentality sort of applies - I DON'T SEE YOU, YOU DON'T SEE ME, EVERYONE'S HAPPY :||||
It was quite pretty and I got to wear a yukata.
After that, it was like... 10am or something, so I went around and climbed mountains and found temples and whatever, BECAUSE THAT IS WHAT ONE DOES IN JAPAN, RIGHT?
Cherry blossoms! EVERYWHERE.
And then there was a castle! To get to the castle, you sit on this... chair lift thing. Which has no safety belts or anything, you kinda just... hop onto it and clutch the bar and hope you don't fall off onto the nets which would probably save your life, ahaha.
The castle was pretty damn cool. Except it had the tiniest, steepest stairs ever to get to the top floor which were I even just a LITTLE bit fatter, I would probably not have been able to go up.
I love castles. I love samurai. ;;; EVERYTHING WAS AMAZING.
And then, shopping and wandering around for another four hours before hopping on YET ANOTHER night bus, but this time actually to Osaka. I ended up in Osaka at like, 5am, and went to find an Internet Cafe so I could catch up on my email and whatever AND SLEEP FOR SEVERAL HOURS BECAUSE THERE IS ONLY SO MUCH YOU CAN STAND SLEEPING ON BUSES. And getting into places at 6am really, really makes you want to kill everything.
In some ways, Osaka feels like coming home. These are the paths I walked every single days, the shops I used to visit, the little corner stand selling that cabbage thing, my favourite takoyaki stall, etc, etc. I love that place. I love pretty much everything about that place, including the weird and dodgy parts, which I never really noticed despite staying in and working in some of the dodgiest areas.
My hostel was this four story building which rented out mainly three-tatami private rooms with no bathroom. There were two showers for the entire building, which were terrible, and two open stalls next to each other with flimsy shower curtains. The sign on the front said that women were to inform the front desk and LOCK THE DOOR SO THAT NO ONE COULD GET INTO THE SHOWER ROOM if they wanted to use the shower, while men could just mingle freely.
(The other international guests that I met were nottttt happy about that. Most of the guys took to locking themselves in also.)
However, they had an option where you could get a voucher from reception and GO TO ANOTHER DODGY HOTEL AROUND THE CORNER and use the ofuro. Their public bath. I love baths and I can not take them in Australia because a little voice in the back of my head starts shrieking about WATER SHORTAGES and DROUGHT and YOU ARE A BAD PERSON, so I took them up on this offer and spent several hours each night in the company of naked women.
And then rolled around on the common room floor back at my hostel, since the ofuro pretty much melts your bones. I made friends. At some point, a group of us stayed up half the night talking - a Brit, an American, a Canadian and me, the Australian. It was a little bit like a bad joke. And then another night, the Hong Kong expats banded together with our varying levels of Cantonese, being from four different countries. I love hostels. You meet the funniest people in them.
Everyone else from my hostel complained about seeing drunk people everywhere, but I kinda somehow missed them even walking home at 11pm at night. But I lived in an area that was known for its homeless and being completely dodgy when I was in Osaka last, so I guess I'm good at ignoring those things. All I know is that whenever I speak to an Osakan about the places I've lived in in Osaka, they get a horrified look and tell me to run awaaaay. But the Japanese version of dangerous is vaguely laughable, so I've never minded.
I guess my highlight was Osaka Castle, which was pretty much razed to the ground in several occasions and very little of the original structure remains. HOWEVER, I STILL CLIMBED AND SAT ON THE WALLS and made ohoho noises thinking of the stupid fic I'd written set here. :'D
Also, there was a wedding. XD;
Here are photos of a completely different wedding I inadvertently crashed.
I made my way back up to Tokyo (direct! KINDA. BECAUSE I MISSED THE BUS WHEN IT WAS IN OSAKA AND HAD TO CATCH A TRAIN TO KYOTO AND THEN CATCH THE BUS FROM THERE AND IT WAS ALL VERY STRESSFUL, BUT AMUSING) and spent a bit more time shopping and packing and visiting the ramen museum.
It's like walking into an episode of Amatsuki, I swear to god. EVERYTHING IS FAKE. AND UNDERGROUND;;;
And then there are juggling hosts jkahaekjkjwe /crying.
And then off to Melbourne, with a three day stopover in Hong Kong.
I'm not close to my Hong Kong roots. I speak Cantonese at the level of a really stupid seven year old and cannot, for the life of me, pass for a Hong Kong person even though I was born there. I avoid that place like the plague, though my parents always offer to send me back for the holidays. (No. Just... No. :||| I don't care if the shopping is good, I don't like it there.)
But desperate times and all. My grandma was getting worse and my grandpa also has alzheimer's, so I wanted to go see them. My grandpa can't actually recognise me, or form new memories so even though I pretty much continually told him who I was, he didn't remember. It's pretty heartbreaking and really very scary. But I managed to go see her in the nursing home, even though she didn't really recognise or understand either.
She died later in July. That was the last time I saw her alive.
I went back to Hong Kong for the funeral in July. It takes a while for a funeral to be arranged - you need to rent out the hall and get the musicians and the master of ceremonies and Buddhist funerals are really, really complex. They're interesting, in a way, all ritual and ceremony and I don't think I quite understood what was going on for most of it. I spent a lot of time in the back room where the furnace was lit, burning stacks and stacks of paper offerings and crying.
Also, on that day, a level 10 typhoon actually struck Hong Kong. Which was vaguely terrifying because we were halfway up a mountain where the funeral hall was, and things went on until about 10pm at night. Trying to get down from the mountain was awful. Getting everyone together for the traditional dinner afterwards was hectic. Then trying to get back from the restaurant home... public transport started closing because of water damage, roads were blocked because of trees being blown everywhere, and there was a typhoon on our heads.
The car that we were in on the way home was stuck for half an hour because there was a tree down. We sat there and waited until two policemen showed up in a car and bodily dragged some of the branches out of the way, while in the pouring rain and uh. That entire night, I think, was a little bit surreal.
The next morning, we went up the mountain again to collect the body and around the mountain to get to the crematorium, and there were more rituals and ceremonies and a lunch where the things that were meant to be eaten were eaten and proper rites observed. Being asian is a little bit amazing, sometimes.
Most of Hong Kong is a blur of shopping and eating, to me. But I did go to Macau for a few days, along the casino strip, and stared at all the pretty things and drank a little too much and ate all the food in the world. And managed to see most of the touristy things, EVEN IN THE AFTERMATH OF A TYPHOOOOON, and got chatted up by an on-duty museum guard for the second time in my life.
Life is kinda a little funny at times, I guess.
If anyone wants to stay in touch, I'm on tumblr these days so drop me a message and lets be frieeeends.
Thus, a recap of my year. Or something.
So I have an anxiety disorder which gets all tangled up in rather extreme depression which means that life does not actually happen for me most of the time since being able to get out of bed and pretend to function normally is a pipe dream. I've been in therapy for a VERY LONG TIME and also on various medications because that is what one does when one is ill and would like to get better very, very much but progress is indeed difficult.
On the plus side, I have stopped hiding in University, failing all my subjects and decided to cut my losses and run off with whatever degree they'll give me. :'D So, hurrah, I am officially graduated.
I did not do the ceremony because closure is apparently terrifying, AHAHA. :| But my diploma will at some point be mailed to me and I shall be set adrift upon the world.
This year was also the year of travelling after being stuck in the country for TWO WHOLE YEARS OMFG. I hate being stuck in one place for too long, because it gives you entirely too much time to dwell and I get vaguely suicidal. (I am not, actually, at this point in time actively suicidal which is so much of a plus point, I cannot even begin to say. SO YAY.)
First, Japan!
I went to Japan for about two and a half weeks in March because of a friend's wedding and also, because I love Japan like burning. I lived there for almost a year and did very little of the things that I should have, but Osaka is the city closest to my heart after Melbourne. It is also dirty and a little bit ugly but whatever, it is mine.
I flew into Tokyo for a week to go shopping and see the sights and pretty much spent the entire time revisiting my old haunts and going ;n; at everything that had changed. And then mainly hunting for doujinshi for people because that is why one goes to Japan, for the animated porn. I stayed with Hannah, who I dearly love, even though I speak to her once in a blue moon, and imposed shamelessly.
After about a week, I needed to make my way down to Osaka for the wedding. But there's direct routes to Osaka or the scenic route and I am a disgraceful traveller. People ask me for recommendations and I'm like, please don't; I travel like a hobo backpacker and sleep in bus shelters and sometimes in overnight McDonald's and it is a wonder that I have not actually died yet. AN ACTUAL WONDER. But this time, instead of taking the local trains for like, ten hours on a 1500y ticket, I did the night buses.
I love night buses. I understand these things are vaguely uncomfortable for people who are not five foot tall asians, but I'm perfectly fine on them. Which means I will do things like take an overnight bus from Tokyo to Hiroshima, arriving at like, 6am in the morning and then RUN FREE.
Nothing is open at 6am in the morning. Nothing. However, the Hiroshima Peace Park is an actual park, so I went and sobbed all over the statues and monuments and buildings and then went inside the museum when it opened at a sane hour.
I cried a lot. It was vaguely ridiculous. Also, when I was standing around looking at some flowers and marvelling at the resilience of life, some guy came up to me and started talking about how the flowers were pretty and how I was also pretty AND IT WAS WEIRD, OKAY. SO VERY WEIRD. Maybe I got mixed up, though, because my Japanese is super basic and for about six months of the year I spent in Japan, I believed a lot of people came up and asked about the time INSTEAD OF IF I HAD TIME, DID I WANT TO GO FOR A DRINK, HELLOOOOOO THERE ;DDDDD so better safe than sorry and I brush off most people of a certain age bracket and gender.
Then, after that, I went and trundled off to find my hostel and dropped off my tiny wheely suitcase to catch a boat. This is like, 12pm or something, catching the ferry to Miyajima and being hideously amused because Motonari from Basara and all the other ridiculous Sengoku references and a REALLY GIANT FLOATING TORI. And deer. Everywhere.
It was cherry blossom season when I went, so there were loads of people EVERYWHERE and Japanese people are sane, law abiding folk who walk on the path and I am the type of person who goes HEY, LOOK, A BEACH and merrily frolics on the sand while people stare.
I am also the type of person who climbs mountains;;; IF THERE IS A MOUNTAIN, I AM FUCKING THERE. In my bright red dress and knee high boots with absolutely no freaking tread on them. But the view was pretty.
Also, at low tide, you can walk right out to the tori! It doesn't float then, because the water is gone! HOWEVER, I WAS THERE FOR SO LONG, IT WENT FROM LOW TIDE TO HIGH TIDE.
Basara Motonari's stage is actually based in this shrine, no joke kjajkajkwhejkawwe ALSO, THERE WAS OKUNI'S THEATRE ROOM, OR SOMETHING, AND IT WAS ALL VERY WEIRD.
Everything was pretty. Oh Japan.
I stayed the night in the hostel, then was gone the next day during A MASSIVE FREAKING FREAK TYPHOON OR SOMETHING in a bus down to Kyoto, where I wondered around for a few hours, looking at nearby temples and gardens and playing around Kyoto station, which is huge and futuristic and half of the outside decks were closed because THERE WAS A TYPHOON.
This temple was close by, so I went to gawk at it. IDEK what temple it was.
Skywalk. Shiny. Kinda like walking into a sci-fi movie.
Then I hopped on another overnight bus to Matsuyama. Again, I got there around 6am and spent a fair bit of time kinda dazed at the station and trying to get myself into some sort of semblence of order. And then took a tram that looped around most of the city and decided to visit a bathhouse. To be specific, the oldest working bathhouse in Japan, which Spirited Away was inspired by.
I think most people don't like being naked in front of strangers but it kinda helps when you'll never see them ever, and also when you're actually half blind without glasses on. You don't actually see anything and the ostrich mentality sort of applies - I DON'T SEE YOU, YOU DON'T SEE ME, EVERYONE'S HAPPY :||||
It was quite pretty and I got to wear a yukata.
After that, it was like... 10am or something, so I went around and climbed mountains and found temples and whatever, BECAUSE THAT IS WHAT ONE DOES IN JAPAN, RIGHT?
Cherry blossoms! EVERYWHERE.
And then there was a castle! To get to the castle, you sit on this... chair lift thing. Which has no safety belts or anything, you kinda just... hop onto it and clutch the bar and hope you don't fall off onto the nets which would probably save your life, ahaha.
The castle was pretty damn cool. Except it had the tiniest, steepest stairs ever to get to the top floor which were I even just a LITTLE bit fatter, I would probably not have been able to go up.
I love castles. I love samurai. ;;; EVERYTHING WAS AMAZING.
And then, shopping and wandering around for another four hours before hopping on YET ANOTHER night bus, but this time actually to Osaka. I ended up in Osaka at like, 5am, and went to find an Internet Cafe so I could catch up on my email and whatever AND SLEEP FOR SEVERAL HOURS BECAUSE THERE IS ONLY SO MUCH YOU CAN STAND SLEEPING ON BUSES. And getting into places at 6am really, really makes you want to kill everything.
In some ways, Osaka feels like coming home. These are the paths I walked every single days, the shops I used to visit, the little corner stand selling that cabbage thing, my favourite takoyaki stall, etc, etc. I love that place. I love pretty much everything about that place, including the weird and dodgy parts, which I never really noticed despite staying in and working in some of the dodgiest areas.
My hostel was this four story building which rented out mainly three-tatami private rooms with no bathroom. There were two showers for the entire building, which were terrible, and two open stalls next to each other with flimsy shower curtains. The sign on the front said that women were to inform the front desk and LOCK THE DOOR SO THAT NO ONE COULD GET INTO THE SHOWER ROOM if they wanted to use the shower, while men could just mingle freely.
(The other international guests that I met were nottttt happy about that. Most of the guys took to locking themselves in also.)
However, they had an option where you could get a voucher from reception and GO TO ANOTHER DODGY HOTEL AROUND THE CORNER and use the ofuro. Their public bath. I love baths and I can not take them in Australia because a little voice in the back of my head starts shrieking about WATER SHORTAGES and DROUGHT and YOU ARE A BAD PERSON, so I took them up on this offer and spent several hours each night in the company of naked women.
And then rolled around on the common room floor back at my hostel, since the ofuro pretty much melts your bones. I made friends. At some point, a group of us stayed up half the night talking - a Brit, an American, a Canadian and me, the Australian. It was a little bit like a bad joke. And then another night, the Hong Kong expats banded together with our varying levels of Cantonese, being from four different countries. I love hostels. You meet the funniest people in them.
Everyone else from my hostel complained about seeing drunk people everywhere, but I kinda somehow missed them even walking home at 11pm at night. But I lived in an area that was known for its homeless and being completely dodgy when I was in Osaka last, so I guess I'm good at ignoring those things. All I know is that whenever I speak to an Osakan about the places I've lived in in Osaka, they get a horrified look and tell me to run awaaaay. But the Japanese version of dangerous is vaguely laughable, so I've never minded.
I guess my highlight was Osaka Castle, which was pretty much razed to the ground in several occasions and very little of the original structure remains. HOWEVER, I STILL CLIMBED AND SAT ON THE WALLS and made ohoho noises thinking of the stupid fic I'd written set here. :'D
Also, there was a wedding. XD;
Here are photos of a completely different wedding I inadvertently crashed.
I made my way back up to Tokyo (direct! KINDA. BECAUSE I MISSED THE BUS WHEN IT WAS IN OSAKA AND HAD TO CATCH A TRAIN TO KYOTO AND THEN CATCH THE BUS FROM THERE AND IT WAS ALL VERY STRESSFUL, BUT AMUSING) and spent a bit more time shopping and packing and visiting the ramen museum.
It's like walking into an episode of Amatsuki, I swear to god. EVERYTHING IS FAKE. AND UNDERGROUND;;;
And then there are juggling hosts jkahaekjkjwe /crying.
And then off to Melbourne, with a three day stopover in Hong Kong.
I'm not close to my Hong Kong roots. I speak Cantonese at the level of a really stupid seven year old and cannot, for the life of me, pass for a Hong Kong person even though I was born there. I avoid that place like the plague, though my parents always offer to send me back for the holidays. (No. Just... No. :||| I don't care if the shopping is good, I don't like it there.)
But desperate times and all. My grandma was getting worse and my grandpa also has alzheimer's, so I wanted to go see them. My grandpa can't actually recognise me, or form new memories so even though I pretty much continually told him who I was, he didn't remember. It's pretty heartbreaking and really very scary. But I managed to go see her in the nursing home, even though she didn't really recognise or understand either.
She died later in July. That was the last time I saw her alive.
I went back to Hong Kong for the funeral in July. It takes a while for a funeral to be arranged - you need to rent out the hall and get the musicians and the master of ceremonies and Buddhist funerals are really, really complex. They're interesting, in a way, all ritual and ceremony and I don't think I quite understood what was going on for most of it. I spent a lot of time in the back room where the furnace was lit, burning stacks and stacks of paper offerings and crying.
Also, on that day, a level 10 typhoon actually struck Hong Kong. Which was vaguely terrifying because we were halfway up a mountain where the funeral hall was, and things went on until about 10pm at night. Trying to get down from the mountain was awful. Getting everyone together for the traditional dinner afterwards was hectic. Then trying to get back from the restaurant home... public transport started closing because of water damage, roads were blocked because of trees being blown everywhere, and there was a typhoon on our heads.
The car that we were in on the way home was stuck for half an hour because there was a tree down. We sat there and waited until two policemen showed up in a car and bodily dragged some of the branches out of the way, while in the pouring rain and uh. That entire night, I think, was a little bit surreal.
The next morning, we went up the mountain again to collect the body and around the mountain to get to the crematorium, and there were more rituals and ceremonies and a lunch where the things that were meant to be eaten were eaten and proper rites observed. Being asian is a little bit amazing, sometimes.
Most of Hong Kong is a blur of shopping and eating, to me. But I did go to Macau for a few days, along the casino strip, and stared at all the pretty things and drank a little too much and ate all the food in the world. And managed to see most of the touristy things, EVEN IN THE AFTERMATH OF A TYPHOOOOON, and got chatted up by an on-duty museum guard for the second time in my life.
Life is kinda a little funny at times, I guess.
If anyone wants to stay in touch, I'm on tumblr these days so drop me a message and lets be frieeeends.