Peculiar Places

I can only describe my current situation as bizarre.

I woke up at 3PM on a community futon in an abandoned apartment. Now I’m in the living room trying desperately to catch unsecured wireless internet signals.
These last few weeks without work and without cash have been strange. There isn’t a lot to do around here and even less when youre broke. So we’ve been trying to make our own fun. My roommate and I have decided to go through the entire OC television series on DVD. And Ive been drawing. Not as much as Id like, but I did finish a page last night. I feel a little “blocked” or I maybe I just don’t know where to start with my comics. I keep debating things like style, medium, size, and content in my head. But I always return to my original plan. I think I need to just keep on truckin’.

And then there’s the stuff we do for fun... which I wont write on here.


So Frangah and I went to Hiroshima on Friday. We were seeing Katie off. She went back to England. It was sad. And it had been a late night on Thursday so we were all kind of “tired.” It was an interesting train ride.

The first stop on the Hiroshima tour was Starbucks. God I miss that place. I miss real coffee.


Then we went to Subway for lunch. But the real point of the trip wasnt just to indulge myself in the nostalgias of home, we were looking for Hiroshima Castle. It took a while. Mostly because Frangah had to stop every ten minutes to put his head down on the bridge. At one point we sat on a bench in the rain for an hour watching a crane that was watching a fish it killed float backwards down the river. Or something.


But we found the castle! It was really nice this time of year. We sat in front of it for a couple hours. We even thought about going inside, as the heaps of tourists who wandered by were. Eventually we got up to check out the entrance fee. 360¥! Too expensive. Frangah did have the idea of getting our speed up and running past the cashier...


Then we went to a foreign grocery store, where I bought some tortilla chips, pickles, and icing sugar. And after that we headed back to Starbucks, where I spent as much as the entry fee to the castle and then some.


Around 6PM we took the local train to Iwakuni. It was a rough ride and the cars were packed. But we had a plan. Take the 780¥ train to Iwakuni, go to Mike’s Tex-Mex restaurant for a few hours, and then take the 8PM train back to Kudamatsu. Because the Kuddah station is unattended after 9PM, so we bought tickets to the next stop after Iwakuni, and saved about 1,000¥. It’s OK, we’re gaijin, and we don’t understand the fancy train system.

So last night Frangah and I went to Antonio’s yatai. It’s pretty much guaranteed that we’ll go there and get free food and free beer. Last night was a lot more exciting than usual, though. Apparently Antonio’s drunk “dad” was paying for our drinks the first few hours. Then around 2AM a really drunk Japanese guy sat next to me. We started talking a little and Frangah and I both ended up with an extra 10,000¥ on the walk home. He felt bad we hadn’t been paid. And he was really drunk.

Other than all that, Jon is coming to visit December 7th, I move into my new apartment January 3rd, everyone I know here is moving away... and I learned how to make a really delicious chilli.