Atlas (shrug).

There were many themes Thanksgiving weekend. Many catch phrases, trends, and punchlines.

I think the most overwhelming theme was the water. I saw water in ways I haven't seen in a while. I saw the Pacific Ocean for the second time in my life, I saw a downpour that lasted 48 hours, there was plenty of hydro-planing and puddle jumping.

We were soaked the majority of the time.

It was great!

I left school at around noon on Friday, to make the 5 hour trip to Shikoku to meet up with 4 ALTs from the greater Matsue/Shinji region. Luke, Kris, Marie and Marie had all taken advantage of the holiday weekend and had been in Kochi City since Thursday. I had to work on Friday, so opted to go later.

The drive itself was a breeze, even with no music. I have had some lovely conversations with myself and with La Mer (my car), the three of us are becoming very close. The expressways are expensive, and the exits are sometimes unclear, so I made another U-turn like the one I took with Dad on our way to Hiroshima.
We spent the evening in Kochi City, clicking our heels out of an Irish pub where we met a British lawyer. He bought us drinks and was brief but good company. From the pub we went to a zip line the group had discovered earlier in the day. Zip lines should be mandatory in urban areas.

On Saturday we piled into La Mer and headed to breakfast in a mall that felt sickeningly American. Complete with this store: "SarahLane, Casual wear for people who love dogs." Marie Muldoon and Marie McGill (hence forth to be refered to using their family names, how Japanese!) and I discovered a store called, "Bamboo Grass" that sold sweaters. We liked them. We bought some. They matched. If I say more, you will have to be killed.

I should back up a bit. When I say we, "piled" ourselves into La Mer...I mean, "stuffed". Kris took the passenger side, McGill and Muldoon the "backseat", and Luke had the trunk, in a nest of luggage. After breakfast and sweater shopping, the three ladies dropped Luke and Kris off at the train station so they could meet us further south, as being stuffed in the car for that long did not appeal to us.

I took a 3 hour trip with Muldoon and McGill. We bought snacks at a country store where a very old woman walked by, stopped to look at us, laughed, and walked on. We also found the Pacific and jumped around its craggy rocks for a little while.
Living so close to these large bodies of water has had an interesting effect on me. Seeing the beach and the long horizon extending outward is always a pleasure. But I have found that it is the SOUND of the ocean hitting the beach that makes me feel so at home. After listening for a while, I am so refreshed, like I have finally inhaled after holding my breath for a long time.

So I played on a rocky beach with two irish women. We climbed boulders in our matching sweaters and took too many movies with our digital cameras. Sometimes it really is summer camp over here. Are you starting to get that impression too?
Realizing that we still had to pick the boys up from a train station that was still an hour away, we left on a high note and got back into La Mer and her snacks and illusive bag of jellybeans.

It was on this little trip with the Maries that we discovered that my atlas had no towns listed, and had only the names of a few roads that were marked in red, they were supposedly the bigger roads. So my trusty navigator, McGill, kept looking for signs for mountains and rivers to make sure we were on the correct path.

Our schedule was to be as follows: pick up Luke and Kris at the train station in Narukama (or Narakuma, I can't remember), drive down the coast to Ashizuri Cape and see a light house. The trip should have taken about an hour and a half, but a combination of the darkness, confusion, my shoddy atlas, a fogged car and the pouring rain...it took us about 3 hours. When I say pouring rain, that's exactly what I mean. At one point we stopped at a port of some kind and ran around in it. We all needed to get out of the car and get our bearings. I just needed to take a deep breath. I love being with people who aren't squeamish about rain. It was gushing buckets. And it didn't stop for another day and a half. The ride was long but filled with music from our lips and Kris' laptop.

The way to Ashizuri Cape was a very twisty-turny, foggy road. My passengers, cramped and pretzled felt every last lurch. Poor Luke suffered from nausea of the sitting-backwards-in-the-trunk kind. Finally we arrived in Ashizuri and decided to find food and a place to crash. How to begin this search...? We were kicked out of the first restaurant we stepped into. It was warm and dry and just out of our reach. Part of the team decided to hike up a hill to find food and lo and behold, as the Japanese tend to do, a man with a big car stopped by and forced them into his car to bring them to dry safety and food. We in La Mer soon followed.

This is something that I have witnessed in Gotsu too. Before I had a car, I was often walking in the rain to get groceries or other sundries and cars would slow and offer me a ride. I refused a few times, but there is no doubt in my mind that every one of those offers was genuine and safe. Even if my apartment was really out of their way.

Out of the rain we ate steaming bowls of Miso, and katsu-udon. katsu-udon is battered pork, fried with egg and served over rice. I always thought it was served over udon noodles, but apparently not. As we sucked the warmth from our full bowls, we caught some of a dancing competition on the terebi (TV), and Luke got us rooms at a youth hostel in town. The awkward conversations over the phone between broken Japanese and broken English, are pretty hysterical to witness. Lots of, "Uhh, hai hai hai. Ummm, now? Yes, err I mean, hai. Five people. Uhh...hai?"

Luke grabbed a pen and paper and asked the woman who served us and who owned the restaurant with her husband, if they could draw us a map to the youth hostel. Yet again, I am so impressed with the way the Japanese host us gaijin...her husband volunteered to drive us there.
Once in the hostel, Luke and McGill went out for some beer. Muldoon and I saw a huge spider and watched as the host (a small older woman with a very large pink swatter) slaughtered the bastard in the bathroom.

Japanese mushii (bugs) are like the engorged forms of North American insects. Dragonflies the size of my face, centipedes like dragons, spiders the size of Texas and so on. It's as if mutagen (the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie looks great, eh?) lined the rivers and streams and created these monsters to freak me out rather than foil crime.

Luke and Marie returned with beer...from a vending machine a few blocks away. That's right. It's dark, it's late, it's rainy, you are kilometers away from a store, and the unholy blue haze of an alcoholic vending machine lights your way home. We played games, cards and Marie began a masterpiece on Luke's leg with black ink. Later in the evening, McGill and I wanted to go for a walk in the rain. This time, the road was flooded in deep puddles, and remaining true to summer camp, we jumped and splashed. What a great time! It was in this splashing, showering frivolity that we found the very large shrine next to the hostel. We bowed in profuse apology for our disturbance and walked down to the alcoholic vending machine. Such is play in Japan.

The next morning was subdued and quiet. The wind was still whipping the pouring rain at the windows of the hostel and we wondered if the lighthouse was really worth it. We took a vote and decided to go because the drive to the cape needed to reach it's worth, as anticlimactic as it promised to be.

However, it was actually pretty nice. Rain stung our faces, but the view was still wonderful. The waves were big because of the storm and smashed against the rocks below us. The path from the big viewpoint to the lighthouse was overwhelmed by tropical looking plants and flowering trees (not flowering then, of course). Luke was sick (with what has now been determined by a medical professional to be an intestinal flu of some kind...I just thought the man was hungover and in the trunk for too long) so he hovered around the bathrooms near the lighthouse while we walked around. It was a short visit, but completed the trip quite nicely in my oppinion.

We sausaged into the car again and made our way back through the twisty-turny drive to Narakuma where Kris and Luke got on a train to go home. McGill and Muldoon stayed with me to keep me company, as I had another 8 hours in a car without a stereo. They are nice to me. Before I go on, I'd like to share with you part of the drive from Ashizuri to Narakuma. The Lewis and Clark hat behind McGuill's head, is a very sick Luke. Enjoy.



Nice and quiet, eh?

After dropping the guys off, we decided to try and take another route home. In my atlas, most of the little yellow roads were not marked. We had been travelling on the roads that were drawn in red. These roads had been two lane, and went through pretty populated areas. When we looked at the atlas, there were also squiggly red roads leading northwest, and crossed the inland sea to Hiroshima prefecture in a much more convenient spot than the way I had come down from Okayama. At least, that is how it was represented. When I had asked my Japanese co-workers and friends about the best way to get to Shikoku, they had told me that the only way was from Okayama. For half a day, I thought they had lied to me.

The Maries and I headed north with McGill working as a DJ, using her MP3 player and singing to us. When we finally reached rte 439 and began our journey northwest, we noticed a change in our surroundings. 439 was not at all like the roads we had been on all weekend. It was the width of my car and a half, overlooked cliffs without gaurdrails, and twisted and wound at sharper corners than the road to Ashizuri. The rain was still coming down hard and was loosening the rocks on the side of the mountain, so I was dodging boulders as we went along. It wasn't long after a rousing rendition of Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" that I thought we might not hit civilization for a while and I was out of gas. Let me defend my next decision with this: I am from America, we have yet to embrace fuel efficiency, so when the gauge says empty, I am on a mountain road miles from anyone and in the pouring rain, I get worried. I voiced my concern and the next time we saw houses, we pulled over just in case someone had hidden a little gas station in the bushes. We parked next to a line of houses, and decided to venture forth in search of directions or a generous gas can.

This is when the "Deliverance" banjo began to twang in my head. All was quiet. Not one cricket chirped, no lights glowed from any windows, no movement could be heard, but there were cars parked around. McGill found a stall marked with a bathroom symbol and discovered it was a hole in the ground, so many traveling stories reminisce about that particular moment. As I rounded a corner next to the last house, there was another vending machine. In the middle of nowhere, at the end of a dead-end road, someone stocks a beer vending machine. I knocked on the door and a flustered young woman, closing her pajama top with her hand (it was 2pm) opened the door. I think I squeaked, "Kuruma-no...uhh gasoline...uhhh, gasoline-wa doko desuka?" ("My car's...uhh gasoline...uhhh, where is the gasoline?") She spoke to us in Japanese for a while and we stared back, she retrieved a man also in his comfy clothes who escorted us back to my car. He spoke to us in Japanese and we stared back. We were so used to Japanese strangers saving our asses on this trip that we assumed he would just reach into his pocket and present us with a full tank. He went back to his house and had us follow him into "town". When we arrived, there was another man with syphoning materials in hand. He took one look at my gauge and said, "Daijobu!" ("Okay!") He instructed us to go back the 50km we had come and get gas there. Apparently I had enough gas to drive back to civilization, and the whole town came out to help for nothing. We also travelled about 2hours out of our way, because we turned back, and decided that it would take a lifetime if we took that route to Hiroshima.

I drove the girls 3 hours to Kochi where we began the adventure and they caught a train home. The train saved them 2 hours of travel if they came with me in my car.

Cold, wet, smelly, quiet car. 5 hours to Gotsu. I was proud to say that I drove from the most Southern point of Shikoku to my apartment in one piece. I visited several rest stops for coffee and Japanese sweets and smelly bathrooms. I passed my first exit by mistake and made another of my famous U-turns. I am still waiting for the Japanese gov't to issue a statement about the girl who needs attendants to stop traffic at every exit so she can turn around. Maybe they will revoke my International Driving Permit.

Wow, that was a longer post than I expected to make. In the words of McGill continuously this weekend, "...but that's okay."