Travel Journal – Monday 3/5 – 2010

Picnic, Swedes and fun…

Well, yesterday somehow became a long evening too so today wasn’t an early morning either. But that’s okay. The day in general has been amazing and I’m very satisfied. Too bad it happens now though, I think that if a day like this and occurred earlier during our trip it would have been much more fun.

Today we went to the CS picnic. A bit late but it didn’t really matter we figured. They would be there all day so we would sure be able to just drop in and have some fun when we arrived. I brought my writing block with me in case I would grow bored or it would prove to be not such a social gathering I wanted to attend to. Well, no need.

When we arrived we met Aya again. It was mostly due to her we actually were able to find the group to begin with. They had put up a map and things about where they would be. But the location had been very imprecise and it’s Golden Week in Tokyo now so the park was filled with people. It was kind of hard to know which group it would be. But we figured that we would se a really huge group of people and maybe recognize somebody, and we did.

As usual my hair always draws attention as social gatherings. That’s one of the reasons to why I wanted to go here with bigger hair this time. Last time my mother convinced me to cut it short. The only reason why I agreed then though was due to the money she offered with it. If it weren’t for that I wouldn’t had cut it. But even that small half-sized afro drew attention enough to make it easy to meet people and also to break the ice at parties and gatherings such as these.

Anyway I won’t go into a detailed description of all the people we talked to there and what we did and so on, because we were in the park for like 4 hours before we moved away and it would be just tedious to list everything. But it was fun, we talked a lot, ate some snacks we got and had brought with us. There was a lot of picture taking and swapping stories and fun exchanges of languages and experiences. I even met a Brazilian man I’d contacted before about staying at his place but he couldn’t host us at that time. I also met some Japanese girls, two or maybe three, yes three I think, that could speak some phrases Swedish and one even could converse lightly in Swedish. I think she knew about the same amount of Swedish as I know Japanese, but maybe she knew more, I’m not sure. It was fun though.

When the picnic ended and after the hundreds of group photos people just hanged around. I tried to convince some people to go eat but instead tagged along with Aya and the main group of CSers to go to a fashion street. I also met a girl, Sachi, that we’ll hopefully hang with tomorrow or on Wednesday. She unfortunately went to Shibuya to study. On our way away to this street two people walked past us and I heard them speaking in Swedish I thought so I yelled after them if they were from Sweden and tada! They were.

When I started to talk to them I found that they were like seven Swedes in their group and two of them were from Piteå. Drak though wasn’t around so we couldn’t check if they knew him. They didn’t seem to react on his name or his nickname so who knows. Well, after this I convinced the group that I definitely had to get food. It ended up with only me and Drak getting some food and a beer in some basement restaurant while the others went away. We were to call them when we were finished. But after eating I decided I wanted a bath (haven’t had a bath for a couple of days now) so when Drak got picked up by one of the others I went back home to bathe and write this post instead. It had been fun though I just don’t feel like running around all sticky and sweaty another day. It’s not comfortable, even though I doesn’t smell I don’t like it.

Well, now I’m going to take a bath and then later I’ll probably relax by the computer again trying to catch someone on the net. Tomorrow we’ll probably be heading out to buy some more stuff people want and if she had time we’ll hook up with Sachi too. But time will tell. It’s only a few more days left though so we better make the best of it. And I still have two more things I want to do before we have to go home. So much to do! So little time to do it on!

Best Regards,
Herid Fel