Japan trip 4: Final day in Japan – training, thoughts and reflections.
This is my last Japan blog!
Wednesday September 30th I woke up around 4 AM….normal for me! That means my jet-lag was almost fixed. lol The day before I had to go back to Vegas. I ate, read my book “The Wayfarer Redemption.”
My friends read this book in high school and I liked the cover. I thought the woman was a strong warrior woman, so I made her face my blog user icon for a while. Turns out Faraday is NOT a warrior. LOL Little did I know! HAHA
I had been into DragonLance so I never started this series, and then started The Wheel of Time which took me EIGHT YEARS TO READ ALL THE BOOKS. Then I read Robert J. Sawyer books here and there, but this book has been on my list of things to read for years. It’s pretty good….I dunno. I might keep going with Dragon Lance, though, after this one. I like Axis.
I went for a walk/sprints, stretched/did yoga in my hotel room, and then went to 10:30 sparring at Lion Takeshi’s “Rising Sun” gym. Only Lion and Sarumaru and Kone-san went. I got a good work-out, though. Whenever I spar with a man for the first time, they never want to hit me. I get it. They don’t know how strong or good I am. The first time I sparred with Sarumaru-san, he barely touched me until I tried to clinch up, and then he nearly threw me on my butt with Judo moves. The second time we sparred he punched me REALLY hard in the nose and and kneed me in the face.
LOL ^^;;; Oh well, that’s why I wear headgear and a mouth guard! I think he’s fighting soon, and he’s a super cool guy so I wish him the best of luck.
Afterwards, I ate ODEN at a convenience store. YAY. Somehow I managed to eat ALL the food I’d been missing and wanting to eat without really planning how.
I think I pretty much relaxed… I think I got a shoulder massage, one of the two times I got it in this trip. It’s like $15 for 15 minutes. My body had been killing me since I didn’t have my usual recovery supplements, ice baths, hot yoga, and Chiropractor Jake, so my back, shoulders, neck, and knee were acting up. I was a mess. “No wonder I was toying with the idea of retirement before I moved away from Japan,” I thought. Not seriously, but I was wondering, because I could barely move after training for a day!!!!!
Yay America. ;_;
And I had jammed my middle finger on the first day I trained last week, so every day it was swelling and I couldn’t make a total first. Annoying! Good thing I brought my refillable ice pack.
but I still played Taiko no Tatsujin!!! They had the Attack on Titan theme song! That cracked me up. XD I beat it.
So the afternoon was free-ish…I think I ate a lot of random stuff, and then I met my former English-student-turned-good friend Mami in Shinyurigaoka, another place I had wanted to visit! I think the only thing I didn’t get to do that I wanted to was visit Atsugi. But it would have been just to walk past my old apartment and visit a sembei shop and bakery. I skipped it because it takes an hour to get there.
I had fun with Mami! 🙂 We promised to chat everyday in English and Japanese to keep our language skills up. We ate at this delicious Kyoto? style restaurant. Thanks for treating me!
Thursday, I hadn’t planned to do much, but then Kunioku-san was like, “So your flight is in the evening so you’re training in the morning, right?”
Oh yeah. So I went to Groundslam morning sparring and didn’t overtrain since my body wanted to die. Kunioku-san ended up not being able to make it. :/ Thank goodness there were lockers at the Yokohama station so I didn’t have to drag my super heavy suitcase all the way to Groundslam.
Katsumura-san showed me, rather ‘retaught me’ the ninja choke from two positions. I better practice that and the Bri choke now so I don’t forget like I did last year. ~_~;
So after showering, I walked back to Yokohama, which is conveniently a bus stop, and took a highway express bus to Narita Airport. I caught my 5 PM flight to Las Angeles and then connected to my Vegas flight. I managed to sleep a bit here and there.
My teammate said, “Roxanne, Japan is also your home.” I feel that way, too. I feel that I will always be connected to Japan and it will always be here. The time I moved and last year when I visited, I felt an overwhelming sadness when leaving. I think it was the “finality” of it that upset me. But now, I feel like it’s not so final. As long as I have the money, I can just come back. My friends will be there (baring some horrible tragedy, of course). I looked forward to getting back to Vegas and my beloved team Syndicate. I was a little sad but not too much. 🙂
Even when living in American, I feel a bit of my heart is still Japanese. And that’s okay. It’s not a “lost piece,” which is how I used to feel. It’s something that makes up who I am and influences how I live my life wherever I am. I felt comfortable in certain ways in Japan MORE than American, but vice versa.
At the end of the day, I don’t regret any of my decisions in life and I’m on a big adventure in life! As they said in “Once Upon a Time,” “Home is a place that, when you leave it, you miss it.”…