Live from Kikai-shima

Internet works, and I will be speaking nothing but Japanese for a year what the hell have I done. Spent the day in buses, airports, airplanes, getting myself from Shinjuku to Haneda to Kagoshima to Amami to Kikai. Turns out, when you live on an island, getting home is hard.

Heat is melting the world around me, though I've got my air conditioned panic-room up and running. 34 Celsius in the shade. There ain't no shade. I stepped of the plane in a wool suit. Remind me not to cave to peer pressure in the future. "But everyone else will be wearing their suits when they meet their supervisors!" Yes. WHO ELSE IS GOING TO AN ISLAND WHICH IS ON FIRE!? But I survived it. And I looked good doing it. As long as you didn't look too hard at the river pouring down my forehead. Eesh.

Our last night in Tokyo Eli and I went out and got ramen at this little hole-in-the-wall we discovered independent of one another, 5 months apart. What makes this particular shop so novel, is it produces perhaps the single most diabolically, cripplingly spicy food I've ever eaten. Ever. And this is Japan we're talking about. A place where spicy is a concept like snow is a concept to Jamaicans. Heard of it, maybe saw it once, wouldn't put it in their mouthes. It was bliss. I walked out and felt like I'd been drinking for hours, and my ears felt like they had a bad metal-concert worth of hearing damage. Somehow, these are all good things when they come from a bowl of noodles. Trust me.

Tokyo to Kikai was 3 planes, which shrunk as we grew closer to the new home. Jumbo liner to domestic to prop-plane. The last flight was a literal 7-minute puddle jump. My supervisor Koizumi met me in Kagoshima city after leg-one. He doesn't speak much English, but my Japanese did alright. Cept the part where he asked if I wanted a drink and my brain went "it's a little early for drinking but if that's what he's offering" only to realize after saying something to the effect of "I have much fondness for beer" that his brain was also going "it's a little early for drinking". Drank a fine glass of tea, and at the rate of island news I guess I'm an alcoholic now.

The house is super cute. Like living in a postcard, if it were in such stark focus that the charming farmhouse in the rice paddy were also full of charming cracks, etc. They really are charming, I don't mean to diminish them. There's something very lived in, and very historic about this place. Generations of JETs, marveling at their hundreds of square feet, their three bedrooms, their hot water heater, their toolshed. I like it. But I need to move in. My predecessor left a bunch of fun stuff around. Ice cream, booze, ketchup. Also the name of an EMT who just moved into town a few months ago, who is apparently a cool dude, who I should call ASAP. Thinking I might give him a ring tomorrow, or the day after. I've got a lot of work ahead of me, and the part of culture shock which I always forget about, the "every single exchange will become impossibly difficult until you readjust to the language" part, yeah, I'm there.

While driving to get groceries, we drove past a little kid, who stared, jaw agape, until we turned the corner. A little girl in the grocery store looked like she just met Santa when I walked past. The local pharmacist told me to stop by and say hi, and then she showed me where the shrimp were.

I am so tired of wearing a suit, I may burn the damn thing.

I made a short, shaky, video tour of my house with a my little digital camera. I'll go post it on youtube or something, once I unpack a bit. For now, I need tangible progress.

Chibariyo. Fight. Kikai's native language.

The adventure begins. Chibariyo.