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Charles, Center, with buddies
To those who have not experienced Tokyo first hand I think it can be summed up with images of people and steel, harsh clashing forms cutting across one's vision scarcely before they can be comprehended. Like all cities, people congregate in swarms, great herds of man-flesh moving through these cold rain-swept streets, each one moving toward their own ends and seemingly leaving the individual with nothing but a sense of isolation to his name. When one looks up and sees the great buildings looming over you as you scuttle along some tight alleyway with two strangers at either flank dragging you along by sheer momentum and a strange sort of peer-pressure, one begins to feel alone, unimportant, like some errant cog of a great construct which moves with no care to how he is slowly ground away until such time in which he must be replaced, which he promptly is.
But if you move along the right alleys, take a proper turn at Yoyogi station, and look for green bedazzled arms reaching out to comfort you then you will find one of the most majestic places mankind has yet been graced with on this earth.
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Friends in Japan
As soon as you cross the torii (gate), the formerly cacophonous clamor of streetcars and trains dulls till it is but a murmur, a murmur which, strangely enough, does not distract but rather elevates the consciousness. It is not like a monastery located on some distant mount, trying desperately to pretend that a cold, harsh world of machines and men does not exist. Dreaming dogmas that cry out only in denial and which attempt to create a Utopia by gouging outones eyes. No… this seems far wiser. Rather than flee from the fire, it bends with it, adapts to it, like a certain type of tree that uses forest fires to thrive, letting itself be consumed so that its seeds may disperse and proliferate. So that each seed may find itself a human mind, a human soul, in which to grow and to be made all the grander then the mother tree from whence it spawned.
So you are there in this forest surrounded by trees. By lush greenery that seems to contrast so sharply with the pitiful, half-dead shrubs that struggle to grow up in pathetically small allotments of ground along sideways and bypasses. No, these actually carry a true vitality, that if not for that consciousness-elevating hum (which, if I may interject does not sound unlike on of those bowls which a Buddhist monk would tap and the move a small wooden peg around its circumference creating a deep, hum that seemed to drag the mind into the realm of thoughtfulness) would make one think that one is in the country.
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My third week of school, the whole 10th grade class did a three week long Job Shadow. I ended up going to work with my host dad, and had an absolutely wonderful time!! He never got annoyed when I asked constantly what everything meant and was called. My host dad repairs enormous drying and folding machines for dry cleaners all over Germany, and is somewhat of a specialist, so we had to travel a lot too. Most of the time we travelled an hour or an hour and a half away at the most, but we were on the Baltic Coast for a week too, and I really enjoyed seeing some other parts of Germany. All in all it was a great experience, and I now appreciate school a LOT more than I used to, and am not looking forward so much to the working world.
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When asked to write a memorandum of our trip to the wonderful town of Amboise, no one in our group knew quite what to say. There are of course the small things to mention, the fact that there are wonderful bakeries on every street corner, or that school has finally become a positive place to be. But then there are the amazing things, such as passing by a castle on your way to school every morning, or learning French… in French. There is nothing to be taken for-granted here, everything seems magical..jpg)
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