Back in Ehime!

Well I finished my contract in Kawasaki last week and I'm now back in Ehime (the area of Japan I lived in before)! After a crazy stressful time trying to get here I managed to make it in one piece.

It started with me, after much effort, managing to order the overnight bus ticket from a website which was all in Japanese. The bus was from Shinjuku to Takamatsu, Kagawa(the prefecture next to Ehime). I checked the map on the website of where around Shinjuku Station the bus stop I wanted was. Since I couldn't print out the map due to lack of a printer, I jotted down the names of some buildings which it was close to. I wrote down the name of the building that the bus stop appeared to be in front of. The map was in Japanese and the building name was written in katakana (the Japanese phonetic characters commonly used for writing foreign (mostly English) words). Since katakana words usually come from English, I tried to sound out the building name slowly to try to figure out what it would be in English. In katakana it was the 'rosubaru' building. Hmm, rosu, rosu, . . . ah, rose! baru, baru, . . . ball? The roseball building? What's that?

So, anyway, when I got to Shinjuku station, I exited and went up to someone and asked "Do you know where the 'rosubaru' building is?" and he said, "You mean the 'subauru' building?" and I said, "No, the 'rosubaru' building." To which he directed my attention to the huge Subaru logo on the building across the street! I had mistakenly added an extra katakana character to what I'd jotted down>.<

The next problem was that I wasn't sure if the bus stop was directly in front of the subaru building or just in that vicinity and there were several bus stops in and around that vicinity. To make a long story short, after wandering around in circles, some, make that much panic that I wouldn't find it, and a mishap of almost leaving some of my luggage with my laptop and return ticket to Canada in it, I found the bus shortly before it was scheduled to depart. After the 12 hour overnight busride and another 5 hours on a local train, I finally made it to Ehime for a 1/4 of the cost it would've been for a plane ride.

For the most part, I stayed with Melanie in Matsuyama but also stayed with friends in other parts of Ehime. Did lots of natsukashii (nostalgic) stuff like dress up in yukata and go to a summer festival, go to the the Kamioka's up in the mountains of Hirota village for nagashi somen (flowing noodles), and go to karaoke.