The wiggity-weekend

Rock on! Another weekend in Tokamachi! I'm giving myself till the end of October to have a nice weekend outside of the prefecture for the first time in aaaaages. Other than Hawaii, but that doesn't count.

Thought about going to Nikko on Saturday but decided to go the next weekend because it will be on the anniversary of the earthquake (Nikko is where I meant to go the day of the quake but ended up staying in town, only to get rocked silly). Also, I really wanted to have a night out in town on Saturday with everyone cuz I haven't seen much of people lately and haven't had much of a chance on the weekends to have a real night out.

On Saturday afternoon I went to a free concert of Mozart's Requiem, one of my favorite pieces that I've actually never seen done live. Was kind of cool that it was in my little Japanese town...wasn't with full orchestra though, just a piano, but the voices were more impressive than I expected and it was nice to hear live music that I was so familiar with...gave me a taste of that stuffy western culture that I've grown to love. Made lots of things go through my head about the nature of western music vs. eastern, performance practice and interpretation and if that's influenced by your cultural environment and the culture of those performing the piece, and blah blah blah blah blah.

Saturday night ended up a bust but Sunday was nice and mellow, Kaori and Yuko and I headed up to Tsunan for some classic katsudon and went up to some famous nature reserve/creepy misty monster swamp. We hiked around a little bit and hit up some fruit and vegetable stands and just did old-mountain-man-type things.

Spoke on the phone with my mom and then my dad this weekend which was really nice, it was the first time I've been able to talk on the phone with my mom since August and it was fun to talk to my dad again since I saw him in Hawaii.

Warning: End of post has random touchy-feely serious-type rant.


There's been a lot of serious crap on my mind lately, a lot of it having to do with missing my family and people back home, and also the reliability and nature of friendship in general.

First of all, I know it's quite a cliche, but it's an important one: Friends and family are definitely the most important things that a person could ask for. Anyway, I just want to tell all my friends who read this - no matter if you are a very close friend or not, or if you are in Japan or back home, or how long we've known each other, or if it's been a long time since we've talked because I'm bad at keeping in touch (please forgive me) - that you are awesome and that I will always appreciate you on every level because any friendship with a good respectable person is something that I cannot consider to be either dispensable or replaceable.

Anyway...