falling behind

I’m going to be honest. I haven’t written in a week. This post and the following posts through March 10 were wrote far after the fact. I lost this week, happily, to writing, beauty, and Kurt Vonnegut. All in all, I believe that these are worthwhile reasons. I just wanted to address the fact that these next posts will be more retrospective, and therefore may be a little different and confusing. I will pretend, however, that I am writing them as if it JUST happened, in order to go along with the general theme of my weblog.

Friday has been really wonderful. I cannot really remember how class went or what I did or whether or not it was important because tonight was filled with so much. We had Tai Chi tonight over at the Gosho (old Imperial Palace) so we rode our bikes over. It was a little cold, but much nicer than it has been. It started raining a little bit, but I was so focused that it only added a pleasant element to everything going on. We were taking a short break and I noticed a rainbow forming in the sky beside us…we stopped to look at it, and as we looked it grew more and more intense, one of the most beautiful rainbows I have ever seen, and as it grew in color, I began to see that it was touching the ground within my field of vision. I looked, and I could also see the other side touching the ground within a grove of trees. I had seen a rainbow before. I have even seen three rainbows at the same time. But never before have I seen where a rainbow begins and ends. Of course, it’s all relative, and there is no actual ending point to a rainbow, but it was still beautiful to see it reaching all the way down to a point in the woods beside the Imperial Palace in Kyoto. Sometimes the things that impress you the most overseas are the things you could have seen in your back yard if you’d had the right timing.

I finally got the timing right, at least as far as rainbows are concerned, and I could have stared at that sky forever, had the rainbow not disappeared into the clouds. Yet, with that, the sun began to set beautifully on the other side of the sky, so all we had to do was turn to still be confronted with the world’s natural beauty. There is nothing that gets me quite the way a beautiful sunset does. This was nothing compared to the one I saw on my way home from Williamsburg right before I left, but it was still really nice.

Afterwards, we went to liquor mountain, which, despite its name, happens to have a lot of foreign products like good, yummy cheeses and pickles. I got blue cheese, mozzarella, and cheddar. After shopping, we went to a sushi restaurant that has a conveyer belt that goes around and around and you just grab what you want and eat it. I probably spent about 10 dollars on sushi, but it was completely worth it and I left stuffed. I spent the rest of the night in my room, I think, trying to figure out what would rock my world the most. I probably decided on reading, and being completely oblivious to everything around me. That’s one of my favorite ways to spend weekends.