A Midweek Post

Monday was probably the lowest I’ve felt in a few weeks. The morning was okay, but then in the afternoon I was stuck with a powerful loneliness. It wasn’t exactly homesickness, and it certainly wasn’t as bad as the first week I was here, but it was still pretty raw. I was just lonely, for anyone, someone back home, a friend here. I’ve been here seven weeks and I haven’t really made any friends. I feel like I’ve made no progress despite tons of effort. I’m going to try again this weekend by inviting this kid in my class to shoot some hoops on Sunday. We’ll see how that goes. He takes the same train as me to school, lives in Tsuchiura, and is in my homeroom. Also, he’s pretty cool, but we haven’t talked very much. I’m trying to change that.

So Monday I went for a long bike ride to try to curb my loneliness. I ended up at this beautiful park on the lake. Tsuchiura is on the second largest lake in Japan. It was a very large park with soccer fields, baseball diamonds, tennis courts, and a boardwalk through some water plants. There was also a large windmill from which you could scope out the lake and the city. It was really pretty despite being overcast. I found a huge water park that was open through the end of August, and a gym. I’m not sure if the gym is public or not, but hopefully it has basketball courts I can play on. Maybe even a local league or something. I intend to go back, because Mondays are city holidays here. Everything is open on Sunday, so all the libraries and public buildings are closed on Mondays. The best find however, was a map displaying all the hot spots in Ibaraki prefecture. I intend to hit them all, despite some of them being large distances away. The first place I’m going to go is the aquarium on the lake. It looks like a 30 or 40 minute bike ride away.

So I pedaled along the lake for a while, and thought about my goals here. I still feel unsatisfied, and the way to fix that would be to set some definite goals and set out to achieve them. So when I got home I wrote down a list, some goals on studying Japanese, where I want to be in a week, in a month, in six months. Some goals about track, making friends, just covering a wide range of subjects. We’ll see if this helps. Whew, then Tuesday my bike blew out a tire on the way to school. Erg. This is my home bike, and I have been unable to get it fixed so far. I bought a tube but no one has a tire lever, and they’re all out at the Royal Home Center. So for now I’m walking the half hour to the train station and back. Ugh. Tuesday was relatively good, I finally had that meeting with my counselor. He had some good ideas, like sending me to the library for one period every day during the useless classes. There were a bunch of specific questions that I couldn’t remember once we sat down, so I’ve written them down and I’ll ask him when we speak tomorrow.

Today was a normal day. But I thought a lot about this weekend. It’s at least a three day weekend, plus the school has testing on Tuesday and Wednesday, so I don’t know what I’m going to do. One of the questions I asked Ishi. Saturday is a track meet, I want to run under 17:45 for the 5K. Sunday I’m going to ask if Yuto wants to shoot hoops, but that leaves several days unoccupied. Maybe I’ll go into Tokyo again and try to meet up with Marianne, or go some of those places I saw on the map. Lots of possibilities. Not sure what I’m going to do yet.