Bob left yesterday.

Waved bye to him at the entrance to Immigration around 11am. I turned away from there and felt a great weight lifted. (I have been busy this month preparing for, caring for, and cleaning up after visitors; not to mention my own obligations.) I wandered around the airport for awhile, stopping at information booths to look at brochures and checking airport bus schedules to see if any of the buses pass by anywhere near my house. None do, so I worked my way far underground to the subway. I called Dave from the platform but he was too busy to talk, so I just got on the train.

I sat down in an empty car and just shut down. I pulled out an old Phil Collins CD that reminds me of darkness, quiet: tranquillity. I let the train carry me away to wherever without even looking up to see which stops were passing by. It didn’t matter. My eyes stayed open, but I don’t remember seeing: I just remember the music and the peace.

I was supposed to go to class at Ewha, but I decided instead that I just needed not to be around people, not to have any obligations to be anywhere, and for that matter, not to be anywhere at all.

The mess greeted me when I finally got home. Earlier I thought I would start in on the cleaning right away, but not surprisingly I decided to eat and catch up on journal reading instead. I’d stopped at the grocery store on the way home to pick up a small amount of supplies - enough to sustain us for two days. I picked up a long loaf of bread for me that I carved into a sandwich whose crumbs found rest between the keys on the board. It felt so good to give to me that I kept eating, finishing off the pasta that was in small container in the fridge and then I indulged in one single HEAD.

An order from Amazon was waiting at the guard box when I walked into the apartment complex. The guard waved me over, wearing a big smile on his face. One of the books in the order was mine, Twilight in the Forbidden City by Reginald F. Johnston. I'm excited to read it and so I spent quite a bit of time thumbing through it, examining the fuzzy photographs placed occasionally among the text.

Eventually I tired of reading things and finally got around to cleaning, which occupied me the rest of the day and evening. Lots of linens and towels to wash. So many dishes had accumulated over the last several days, the residue coating them had hardened and defied my scrubber sponge. The bathroom too was coated in a stubborn residue. I put on the Gipsy Kings, turning up the volume high enough to muffle the sound of running water.

When that was done I cut up all the vegetables and measured all the sauce proportions for fried rice so that it would be ready to fry when Dave walked through the door. I’m surprised how good my fried rice is: all that ginger, garlic, and just the right amount of walnuts give it the best flavor. (We ate it all, washing it down with Coke.)

When that was done, I left Gipsy Kings playing out in the big room even while I came back into the office to untangle the finances. What a mess. I’d been writing down everything I spent on scraps of paper so that I could enter it all into the budget and Quicken when things settled down. It takes time to account for everything and then convert it to dollars. I had to do a lot of shuffling to accommodate the unexpected cost of the Power Bars while still preserving what we’ve saved for our trip to Japan.

We leave the house tomorrow morning for Kyoto. Even though I’m looking forward to it, I am wishing I had a little time to regroup before having something else to worry over. I’m not exactly comfortable traveling internationally, despite living in a foreign country. "Living" is about routine, which becomes comfortable; traveling requires attentiveness, especially in a country where we can’t speak nor read the local language. I am not too worried because I expect Japan to be well-organized. However, I am stressed about the plane ride, because flying freaks me out, and about securing transportation from Kansai airport to Kyoto. Seems this weekend is a super-busy travel weekend in Japan and things might be crowded. We have accommodations already booked but we still need to get space on the train or on an airport limousine. I’m sure it won’t be a big deal, but like I said, I would just like to not have to be on my toes for awhile.

Back next week.