Holidays give you too much time to think. I'm on the Japanese spring break-type thing now, and don't go back to university until April. So I've been keeping busy doing some travelling and stuff, but still it's a lot different to having university work on your mind all the time, seeing your uni friends every day (a lot of them have actually returned home now which makes me very unhappy).
I'm missing things from home now, the first time I've really felt that. I miss my family, my friends and my boyfriend. I miss British food. I miss cheese. I miss the countryside. I miss being able to go shopping and not only find clothes that fit me everywhere, but clothes that I actually
want to buy (Japan actually fails at fashion. I've had so many conversations with other foreigners here that are basically "Most Japanese girls look like they got dressed in the dark." Sorry Gwen Stefani).
And I miss my Playstation and my games :( Though I bought myself a DS and FFIV the other week. Cecil's voice actor sounds like Cloud's, it's hilarious. And Kain's deep, manly voice never fails to amuse me because it's the same guy who does Donald Duck in Japanese.
What else do I miss? I miss British TV! So so so so much, and I don't even watch that much TV back home. But I miss the programmes so much, and I can't even use the online BBC/Channel 4 services because the computer needs to be in the UK :( That is not cool.
At least Never Mind The Buzzcocks was on YouTube. Oh Simon Amstell, you kept me sane after I thought my brain would explode from an overdose of food-based-Japanese-TV, but
now where have you gone? COME BACK.
I think they need to warn people before they come out here how absolutely and utterly obsessed with food Japanese people are. Seriously. I went on a brief trip to South Korea recently, but I'm not a fan of Korean food since it's too spicy, and when a Japanese person heard this their response was "OMG but what else did you want to go out there for?"
I also had a conversation with some Japanese people in my dormitory the other day, asking them for recommendations of where to go outside of Tokyo, to which one of them recommended Nikko. And after that, the first thing one of them said, turning to another Japanese woman, was "But they don't have any special regional food there, do they?" The other woman said, "No, but in Nikko there's the oldest hotel in Japan and they do food there, you should go!"
Ah, Japan, I love you, but at the same time you scare me quite a lot.
But since I recently discovered a local karaoke place that has
mini-stages and mic-stands in some of their rooms, I think I may forgive you just about everything :D