it's not life that matters but the journey...

yes, it is officially the rainy season and its been falling non stop for over 24 hours!  so much for getting out for a walk - I could, but I might just break my umbrella again.

for exercise, I guess its the yoga tape and my pilates routine.

a while back I wrote about the wonderful sounds of Japan, the announcements on loudspeakers, the sirens, the loud trucks and cars with their stereos blasting, the looped recording of a high pitched, terribly annoying advertisement played at an electronics store, which kept repeating and repeating so that two months after going there, its still stuck in my head!!

well today I will write about the wonderful smells in our part of Japan. Luckily we live a few miles above the main part of Fuji and Yoshiwara, because both areas have paper mills that emit an ever-so-nauseating smell, reminiscent of baby diapers.  anyone who has visited either Eureka, CA or Port Townsend, WA knows the smell.  but here its worse, because the air is not so fresh to begin with.  and for some reason, the water smells funny (especially when I take a shower or run hot water in the sink) and leaves a kind of moldy smell on the towels afterwards.  I guess if you live here all your life, you get used to it - I remember smelling it when I lived here before.  the water is very soft here, and makes my hair really soft and curly (the opposite of the hard water, that turned my hair course, in Chicago). 

of course there are good smells - across the street from our house is a ramen shop, and we can smell garlic and other great smells coming from there at night.  I like the smell of rain on a cool day, like today and yesterday have been.  but I smelled something this morning that I didn't like.  Masahiko's mother had the timer set for the rice cooker to begin at around 5 a.m., and when I woke to feed my cat (yes, he does wake me somewhere between 3 and 6 a.m. every morning!) I could smell the rice cooking, and it almost made me feel sick..  I don't know why the smell was so strong today, or how it got all the way up three flights of stairs from the kitchen to our bedroom, but maybe its due to the humidity in the air.  I love rice, but it smells terrible when its cooking.  and last night, I smelled something burning, and Masahiko said his father was burning beans.  I suppose it was for eating, but it smelled - well, like burned beans!

anyway, in my last posting I made a comment about my hope of getting emails from friends and family.  I have to say that I DO have some great friends who keep in touch with me regularly  -thanks!