For crying out loud...

J114 Tuesday August 14th 2007

Right. Continuing recap.

My first day back in Hitachi after my 4-day adventure felt...surreal. Half-real. It was cooler by nearly 5 degrees Celsius, which was almost shockingly cold to my heat-acclimated body. I enjoyed my air conditioner and a nice, cold shower, reveling in my ability to just not be hot or sticky for a little while.

I was messing around on the internet when Josh contacted me, quite out of the blue. Our last geek-out session was a while ago, but it ended nicely. We conversed via cell phone text messaging for a while, but soon he recommended I install Skype and we talk using that method. A few minutes later I had fished out my headset and was finishing installing the program. A quick configuration had me up and running, and soon Josh and I were talking via the power of the Internets.

We chatted as we both surfed online. Our conversation ranged from comics to games to movies. One topic, though, we came back to, again and again. Food. We were both quite hungry, having not had much in the way of food for the day. I had developed a craving for Mexican food, and communicated my plight to my friend. He claimed to be an excellent cook, his mother having instructed him in the culinary arts "so that any wife of his wouldn't do all the work". God bless her. We plotted to meet up and galavant around Hitachi and Hitachi-Naka, the nearest town, in order to accumulate the ingredients for a truly delicious dinner.

We met at Hitachi station around mid-day and took a bus down toward Hitachi-Naka. Hitachi-Naka is a town slightly smaller than Hitachi, directly to the south. Our first stop was Wonder Goo, given that the bus stop nearest to our final destination, a food shop called Yamaya, was literally in front of the media store.

We browsed the shelves of games and DVDs together, marveling at the sheer volume of pristine, yet used, media for super-low prices. I found a copy of the first Conan movie, something I'd been longing to watch for quite some time, and a copy of Nightwatch, a movie I hadn't seen in ages. Josh procured a used PS2 game and a DVD of...ill repute.

We'd spent a few hours just browsing and chatting, and felt the turning of the world. We hoofed it to Yamaya, a brisk 20 minute walk from Wonder Goo. Yamaya is a truly wonderful place, because it sells Western food. Cheap, delicious, Western food. Tortilla chips. Salsa. Pasta. All with English labels, too. So much of it was unhealthy, but then again some of it wasn't. I got a lot of stuff, including some tasty wannabe Wheat-Thins and some dried banana chips.

We purchased our consumables and exited to wait for the bus. Alas, our lack of Japanese language knowledge did not allow us to realize that this particular bus was not running that night. We caught another bus at a (relatively) near-by bus stop and rode back to the Hitachi-Naka train station. We had to wait nearly an hour for the next train, due to the lack of local service this far out in the sticks.

We finally got back to Hitachi and made our way back to my apartment. I had cleaned before I met up with Josh, resulting in a kitchen usable by someone other than me since I moved in. We set about cooking, preparing beans, cooking up a maker full of rice, cutting and cooking chicken, chopping veggies and slicing cheese. I warmed up the laptop for some entertainment. Within an hour, we sat down to a pile of home-cooked burritos.

The original plan was to watch Firefly, which Josh owned but had never seen. The original plan had to be changed, due to the lateness of our dinner's preparation. We tucked in whilst I loaded up some of my prime YouTube favorites.

After eating our fill of burrito, we lounged in Internet Media bliss for an hour or so. The time grew late, and our bellies did a good job of anchoring us to the spot. I offered my couch to Josh, given that I'd taken to using my futon once again, which he happily agreed to. We drifted off to sleep staring at the ceiling, talking softly over the hum of the air conditioner. We watched the dark surfaces of my apartment become briefly painted by silvery light by passing cars as we talked. It was, almost perfectly, like a sleepover from my childhood.