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Well I'm here again. In a place full of loud people who drive on the wrong side of the road. But the place is also getting a little full of snow, which I like. It has been a long summer for me. I have not seen snow or felt better air in a long while. I enjoy it. The changing of seasons has always been a good thing in my mind. It makes me enjoy the change while at the same time happily pine for another season, one maybe of warmth or brisk air upon red leaves.

Things went quite smoothly since our departure from Tokyo: standard 12 hour plane flight, standard bland plane food etc. It felt great to see family and friends again. Plus more and more people are slowly making their way back into the fine valley so things are shaping up to be a great winter break. Ten page paper be damned!

I am using this night as a sort of test for the true nature of my probable jet lag. Hopefully I won't be waking up bright and early around 4 in the morning but there's quite a bit of a chance that that will happen.

I plan on bringing pictures of my stay on Chi Chi Jima to my next post but I'm carefully selecting which ones to post. After that who knows? I hope I don't abandon this thing entirely but I perhaps see my posts slowing down a bit. At any rate, in the future, when I make a new post I'll just flip my AIM away message to my blog link to give a heads up.

A Dream Within a Dream

The good kind of dream. A dream of a place somewhere in some ocean full of beautiful people with hearts of contentment. Where their relaxing aura finds its way to every grain of sand on every secluded beach one finds. Where you constantly are possessed with a desire to ride around the island on the bikes happily and freely loaned to you while listening to your randomly shuffled collection of reggae. A place whose beaches have yet to be picked clean of the beautiful coral that has washed ashore. Where every morning you are invited to go to a small building off the beaten road and make pottery with a kind old man who seems to genuinely enjoy your company and enjoy helping you make your crude creations. A place where you can help save the turtles.

I went there in this dream I had. I'm having trouble thinking of words that adequately describe Chi Chi Jima. At the very bare minimum it was stunning. In truth I had originally planned to write a much longer expose on such a wonderful place but certain events have transpired that have led me to be absolutely exhausted. Most namely was the grueling forty hour extended boat ride it took to get back to tokyo. It was only supposed to take 26 hours... And if you know anything about voyages at sea you know the reason they get delayed is directly connected to how choppy the ocean becomes which, in this case, was unbelievably. However, our rocky journey home only makes the memories of this island ever the more sweet. I will post pictures soon.

At present time there are about seven hours left until our take off back to JFK and the end of our semester abroad. It has been the longest time I have ever spent from home yet at the same time it's gone the fastest. Rather than pursue my own hackneyed and weepy goodbye as I finish up such an extraordinary trip I want to expropriate a poem from perhaps Japan's most famous poet, Basho and while it is quite pompous to compare my relatively comfortable stay here with his harsh travels during 17th century I think it does a better job that I could ever do. It's a poem from "The Records of a Weather-Exposed Skeleton":

Still alive I am
At the end of a long dream
on my Journey,
fall of an Autumn Day.


we will meet again