#boytrouble

The next day was Friday and since it was still Golden Week, I decided to spend the day exploring Peace Park. I should mention that Golden Week in Japan is called as such because a few national holidays happen to occur during that week. The university wasn’t closed the whole week but luckily one of my teachers, an American who was in charge of all the exchange students, allowed me and several others who had plans to travel to just take the whole week off because we “should just enjoy our time and make the most of it”. He was a very relaxed individual. Peace park was a remarkable place, a symbol of hope that is also filled with melancholy. It was established in the early 1950s and is close to the hypocenter of the bomb and remnants of the concrete wall of a cathedral.  At the park's north end is the 10-meter-tall Peace Statue created by sculptor Seibo Kitamura of Nagasaki Prefecture.

“A plaque at the nearby hypocenter gives the following account and statistics of the damage caused that day.

At 11:02 A.M., August 9, 1945 an atomic bomb exploded 500 meters above this spot. The black stone monolith marks the hypocenter.

The fierce blast wind, heat rays reaching several thousand degrees and deadly radiation generated by the explosion crushed, burned, and killed everything in sight and reduced this entire area to a barren field of rubble.

About one-third of Nagasaki City was destroyed and 150,000 people killed or injured and it was said at the time that this area would be devoid of vegetation for 75 years. Now, the hypocenter remains as an international peace park and a symbol of the aspiration for world harmony.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagasaki_Peace_Park

This adds a bit of a sad tone to this blog but I do think it is necessary for people to be educated about what happened. I also think that everyone should at least watch Grave of the Fireflies once to be further educated on the history of this event. I think a lot of foreign tourists go to Nagasaki and Hiroshima while remaining ignorant of the past and just take a lot of pictures to add to their collection or add this site and the nearby museum as something on their tourist checklist but even my local friends are too horrified to go to the museum and be reminded of what happened but do visit peace park often. Junior high school students also make annual trips there to lay a dozen cranes against the statue, another symbol of peace. 

Over the next couple of weeks, I began to focus more on university and taking my language studies seriously. I decided to ditch taking the bus every day to and from university and either use an old bike that my homestay family had or walk. The bike ride would take about 45 minutes but the walk would take 2 hours. It was a big difference and I would mostly just walk when the brakes on the bike weren’t working so well, which was a lot of the time (as I said, it was old). I did this partially to save money and partially to get in shape and I honestly loved it. The university may have been far from my homestay but this allowed me to really get well acquainted with the area as well as shed a few pounds. Around mid-May, I checked out Glover Garden and the Dutch area of Nagasaki with one of my Japanese friends whom I had met in Vancouver when she was doing her exchange there. It was a very interesting place and different from the rest of the city. We explored the garden and Glover residence of a Scottish merchant who lived there hundreds of years ago and is the oldest Western-style house in Japan. Later on, we walked around the Hollander Slope which was a preferred settlement area for mainly Dutch foreigners in the mid 19th century. Upon returning home that night, my homestay mother cooked for me a non-pork version of Nagasaki Champon which was delicious. 

The next day, I joined my homestay family in supporting my homestay brother at his undokai, or sports day while having a picnic. It was a fun-filled day with lots of excitement and was much like something that I had seen in anime numerous times.

At the end of the month, I went with the rest of the exchange students on a day trip to Huis Ten Bosch which is a slightly overpriced, but still fun, Dutch theme park in Sasebo, Nagasaki. May was pretty much a chill month where I became more acquainted with my surroundings, became closer friends with my classmates; two French girls, CA and LY and an American girl, R as well as my coworker at the English school, B, who was my rock during my time there and whom I considered like an older sister (well apart from the bf who I was messaging every day during my time in Japan and becoming closer friends with. I think having him as a connection that was separate from everything happening in Japan was what really made me feel like I was never alone, I also felt like I could tell him anything so that helped.). Honestly, apart from what I am going to tell you next, it was a not too eventful time in regards to my regular life. Oh and I woke up one day at like 4 am to walk up the hill behind my apartment by myself to watch the sunrise peek behind the mountains and go for a run, it was amazing.

Boy Drama Part One:

So what good study abroad trip in a foreign land where everything is new and exciting is complete without a bit of boy drama here and there? I’m separating this into two parts because it took place around mid/end of April until mid-June and setting this aside from the rest of the story because it really needs its own part and I can’t remember when exactly everything coincided with the rest of my time there. Hold onto your horses folks.

Ok, I know I said that I had a bit of a crush on Z whom I met in Busan but I only met him for a couple of days and it wasn’t anything too serious. Before I went on my trip to Busan and began a few my classes at the university, however, I met E, a 27-year-old Japanese man who also happened to be one of my Japanese language teachers. Don’t worry guys, I was 22, it was fine. Well, that’s what I told myself anyway. To me, at the time, he was super cute and a bit shy and I found that attractive and even though everyone told me that I shouldn’t, I decided to pursue this crush. Very innocently, of course. What do you take me for? I wasn’t expecting anything serious to happen but I wanted to get to know him and see where it would go from there. I tend to be a bit forward when I crush on a guy, I mean, I am after all the one who asked out the bf but the bf turned out to be an amazing guy which I can’t really say the same for E… oops I’m getting ahead of myself! Ok, where was I? Right, I decided to pursue E so I added him on Facebook and began to message him every now and then to get to know him. In the first week or so, I think he could tell that I liked him a bit and so he reminded me that he was my teacher and nothing could happen. I completely agreed. Honest. This story may make me look a little bad but I wasn’t hoping to become his girlfriend at all, I just wanted to get to know him and maybe go for a date since I didn’t know anything about him. So I told him that, I told him that all I wanted was to be friends since there wasn’t that much of an age difference and it didn’t take him long to get over the fact that he was my teacher and start to become very responsive in our chats. We began to become a little flirty with each other in school when no one was looking and I even went as far as to cook him lunch after he had told me what his favourite food was. I was very silly, giddy and just fully embracing my girly side. It was certainly an experience to be doing something that felt like it was straight out of a shoujo manga. Over the course of the first half of May, I could tell that he was really starting to like me back which was interesting….because I was starting to lose interest in him. Ok, chill I’m getting ahead of myself again but I’m looking back on this whole experience with hindsight and really I was just pursuing him so much because everyone told me not to and the more they did that the more I wanted to. I know, very childish. Anyway, I’m pretty sure it was around mid-May when we finally went on a date.

I told him to meet me next to my homestay’s apartment at Suwa shrine and after that, we walked up to Tateyama to sit at a really nice viewing spot (same place I woke up to see the sunrise). I thought this would be a great location where we wouldn’t really be seen by anyone and where we could have some privacy since only the elderly or really young kids ever go near there but it’s mostly empty when it’s not cherry blossom viewing season. We didn’t really need to hide anything because again it was just two people innocently meeting up (I do realize now that it was inappropriate) and there was only a 5 year age gap plus he looked super young. My interest in him sparked back up a bit that day because forbidden fruit and what not and I thought it was fun and exciting to have a secret date with a teacher. Anyway, I can’t remember for how long we sat at the top of Tateyama for but it was at least a few hours and all we did was talk….well I was talking. I filled in a lot of silence because he didn’t really have anything to say, I don’t even know what I talked about but it became apparent that outside of Facebook messenger this guy wasn’t so good with talking to women. He did tell me that it had been ages since he had a girlfriend and he hadn't met with a girl alone in a really long time (a bit of a red flag there...maybe?). Finally, around dinner time, we grabbed some cheap food from a bento place and some yakitori and sat outside to eat it as it became dark. It was kinda nice, I could tell though that he was starting to like me more than I liked him. A little while later we said good night to each other and parted ways and I went back to my apartment. I was satisfied. Honestly, in my head I felt like I was good, I did not need to pursue him any longer and I had experienced my “forbidden fruit”. Nothing happened of course, literally just talking and dinner. I had satisfied my curiosity and I honestly think that after that date is when I completely lost interest in him because I did get to know him a bit. I got to know...and this might sound a bit mean but I got to know that he really wasn’t interesting at all and was actually just a bit starved of attention, which I had given him. Over the next couple of weeks, he would message me and I would reply but I was no longer instigating the messages. He would tell me how much he couldn’t wait for our next date and after a while, his messages started to become really creepy and I stopped replying as much which made him not send as many messages. Anyway, I now need to backtrack a bit for you. So E and I went on our little date around mid-May and then afterward I pretty much put him at the back of my mind, right? Actually, just a little while before is when I met another guy, maybe like a week before? Which is also what was making me lose a bit of interest in E… Welllll a lot of interest. I still went on that date with him just because I wanted to see how things would go and if there was anything actually there and I proved to myself that there wasn’t. (Of course, E did not realize that the date didn’t go that well...but more on that later). Yea, so this new guy, who we’ll call Y. Another Japanese boy and damn was he like Japanese pop star attractive. I’ll start from the beginning. I was hanging out a lot with my coworkers by this point and one day we decided to meet up at Starbucks (one of three in Nagasaki city, it’s a small city and Starbucks was THE place to meet up) which is where I thought I would study and they would complete some marking and whatnot. After a while, my friend and coworker, B had to go and I was left with the receptionist...who was a little crazy but we’ll get to her some other time. Anyway, what happened next was very simple. This barista was spending a lot of time near our table cleaning up and at first, I didn’t notice until the receptionist (oh right, we’ll call her M) pointed him out to me and damn was I instantly attracted. I chatted him up a bit and I could tell that he was everything that E wasn’t. Very charismatic, boyish good looks, tall and talkative.