September 30, 2007

• Somewhere Only We Know!

  So maybe you’ve checked Matt’s blog and maybe you haven’t. And maybe you know that I spent this past weekend with him and Dani that included my first visit to NUFS since leaving that most hallowed ground over 1 year ago. Seems it’s been left up to me to “update in more detail”… which was my intention all along so that’s ok with me. There’s a decent amount of photos from the NUFS trip in my photoblog and even more from the whole weekend in Matt’s photoblog, for your general interest and perusal. Ok, here we ichi, ni, san, shi, go…!!!

  

  I House! Wonderful, wonderful I House! So holy that immortals cannot do battle within it’s grounds. The whole journey, the bus from Hongo, seeing the old route to the airsoft woods and walking past Lawson (and going in for some snackage) Aoki, Kahma, et al started off kinda pulse-racey but within minutes it felt as natural as it ever did. Definitely different, knowing we weren’t there for keeps, but still pretty good. Just seeing I House, walking up the little road in front of the car dealer, it felt like coming home. Kinda like going back to an old house, a house you grew up in but moved from a year or so ago and won’t live in again… and yet you feel like it’ll always be yours and someday you’ll be going back. If only…..
  
     

  Home boyz! With a Z cos that makes it cool. Dani’s friend Richard is part of the newbie class this year. Just under the stairs you can see Matt’s room, no longer with his name above the door. It was a weird feeling… and yet it just kinda felt like the place was still ours, that we were just loaning it to the newbs who live there at present. My knuckle prints are still in the white board, an everlasting reminder of the Class of ’05-’06. My memetic legacy lives on in the Whiteboard! (What..? I’m sure some of my DNA is solidly wedged in those indentations!) Sadly we couldn’t see Goto as she has now retired and my mortal enemy, Denki Wo Keshite Ne Guy was manning the front desk. Matt’s visited before and he remembered him… wonder if he remembered me…?

  
  

  
  

  After a bit of Saizeria we went our respective ways, Dani and Richard headed back to Toki and Matt and I stayed behind at NUFS to continue our journey of natsukashisa. We called in at Kahma and found not just 1 bike way cooler than the one I mentioned in my last post but 2. They are virtually exactly the same kinda bike, but with subtle character differences. Seeing something highly appropriate about this happy coincidence Matt and I bought them! Our new bikes rule! Screw you Coke-promo-Chevy!

  So, on to NUFS! The campus was suitably quiet. A few students were preparing for the upcoming School Festival but the whole place had this kinda suspended-in-time feeling about it. The whole trip did.

  

  

  

  It was… awesome. Just being there again, it was like we never left. Of course, it wasn’t like it used to be. It wasn’t home. But, in a way, it was… and always will be.

  We may not have been able to see Goto-San during our trip but we did manage to see, at least to the Gym Crew, one of the awesomest NUFS staff peeps; Takagi-San, better known as “Gym Guy!”

  

  He rules! We had a pretty long talk with him, promising to return each time we visited and bring more people with us. We proceeded to do a ridiculously difficult set of 10 pull ups on the bars for old time’s sake. So wish we could work out there every day like we used to.

  Matt and I spent a good few hours on campus just being girly and talking about our feelings and junk. Just like old times. Come late afternoon we rode our kick-ass new bikes to Irigaike Koen and stayed til dark doing yet more tough, manly activities such as more feelings-talk, cartwheels, playing on the roller-slide, complimenting each other’s hair, hugging and me telling Matt over and over he doesn’t look fat in that shirt. 1 of these is a lie. Try guessing which.

  

  As dusk fell we headed to Fujigaoka on our best-bikes-ever for authentic Pizza Hut pizza. It was goodly. (That was very Mario of me…?) As I said earlier the whole day seemed to be kinda outside of reality, like we were walking through this out-of-time piece of our memories forever preserved in our very souls. We’re both looking forward to repeating the trip many times with the returned or returning NUFS kids. It has to be done. On my own I feel like it would be somewhat torturous but in company it was… beautiful.

  
  Our Bikes of Awesomeness carried us to Hongo where we took the sacred Line of the Eastern Mountain back to Nagoya then onwards to Toki. We were met with some resistance when we tried to board the JR train to Toki in Nagoya by an annoyingly, Japanese bureaucrat-y train bod insisting it was dame. Now, it would be ok if we covered the bikes in a bag of some sort (despite the fact they were brand new and spotless) but as it was they were dame! In a bizarre personality reversal I started fretting over our helplessness under the weight of the ridiculously anal and unreasonable Nihon no ru-ru and Matt decided “screw it!” We’d get on that train regardless and he could just try to stop us. In the end we managed to acquire the assistance of another train-type-guy who gave us some twine to bind our bikes with. How this helped I have no clue but we barged through the stiles and onto the platform regardless and weren’t met with resistance so when all was said and done, mission complete!

  Infuriatingly inflexible train-Nazis aside, everything was great. Back in Toki and reunited with Richard and Dani we wound up the day with my first karaoke in over a year. Can’t say I was that into it, truth be told. I may always have sucked but after a 14 month gap I was painfully aware of how bad I was, not to mention the fact that Matt and Dani both possess actual, proper singing ability. Richard, not a fan of the karaoke, sat out for most of it leaving me feeling painfully, uncomfortably inadequate/just plain bad next to the Lotts.

  The rest of the weekend (a 3 day weekend I might add) was spent just chillin’. Unfortunately when I woke up in my lonely apartment on Tuesday morning the joy of the weekend was replaced by a horrible, empty loneliness. Living with friends, albeit for a short time, gave me something to compare my hitorigurashii to and it wasn’t a favourable comparison. The fact that it had been my first chance at quality time with Matt in over a year added to that. We were more or less room-mates at NUFS (and would have been for real if we’d got to the double room ahead of Kellie and Krystal… or those damn Chinese girls who hogged the 2nd double room both semesters!) Before I House living alone didn’t bother me, now I find myself missing the company of friends so much it hurts. Living at Kate and Balex’s in every way but sleeping there last year is testement to that. In just 3 days Matt and I recaptured the relationship we built over 10 months at NUFS… and I experienced all the pain of leaving again the following day.

  Re-experiencing the pain of loss still can’t change the fact it was a truly awesome weekend. The NUFS trip, Matt and I agreed, turned out better than we had ever dreamt of. It was, for want of a better word, perfect. There’ll be more to come too, I hope…
  

  
  

  Just a quick newsflash from this weekend: I got hit by a car whilst taking a ride on Saturday. Luckily my tre-cool bike was unharmed! That woulda been seriously sucky…!

  Take care ya’lls. Catch ya later. “Everything I know about breaking hearts, I learned from you…”

  • 8:37 am
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