#post36

[4am-sorrow]

🖤🖤🖤🖤Today is gonna be really fucking shitty. Also I hate everything🖤🖤🖤🖤

[traveladventurespart6]

I just couldn’t help myself from taking pics of the gifts from Rena, Akane, and Megu.  The chapstick is from all three of them (remember the display of them from the Tokyo Skytree???  I honestly don’t know when they managed to buy it without either of us noticing it!) and the rest is from Rena!  I love Pichu, Olaf, and towels!  <3 

*sniff* I don’t know what I ever did to deserve such awesome students.  

[psyentifically-minded]

As the world has adapted and changed so to has its geographical make-up. Scientists theorise that the world began with a single land mass known as “Columbia” or “Nuna” which would later split into larger islands called “Rodinia” before reforming as a larger land mass called “Pannotia” which eventually split to form “Pangea” (as pictured above) these large land masses are called “Supercontinents”. Over time Pangea would split into the land masses known as “Laurasia” and “Gondwana” which would eventually split further into the seven continents which make up our modern world. This is due to earthquakes, volcanic activity and the shifting of the earths techtonic plates which force land masses to clash, merge and divide. This in turn may signify a growing of the earths mass as its internal core is fed through a sub-space wormhole forcing it to widen and splitting the continents further apart. In the future more land masses will emerge and submerge from the oceans, split apart or merge together. Scientists can tell that the continents used to be one land mass by the way that each continent seems to fit together like pieces of a puzzle. Pangea had one superocean called “Panthalassa” and with the development of fish came much larger predatory precursors to sharks and other large marine predators.

[traveladventurespart6]

I was catching up on some manga on my kindle when I picked up my phone to check for messages.  I don’t remember how much time had passed since Shikabe, but I had absolutely zero signal.  At first, I thought maybe my phone was just a little unhappy and I turned airplane mode on and off.  But nope, ZERO signal.  I know Hokkaido is big, but I never would’ve imagined that there would actually be a place in Japan that doesn’t have cell service.

[traveladventurespart6]

Finally, we’re at the “gaikokujin bochi” (pics 1-2).  At the far end, there’s this poem inscribed in stone (pic 3).  Since it’s kind of hard to read, I’ll be nice and type it out here:

“Sleeping on a foreign shore, / Rest, sailor, rest! thy trial o’er; / Thy shipmates leave this token here. / That some, perchance, may drop a tear, / For one that braved so long the blast, / And served his country to the last.”

Tomo-san and Ken-chan asked me to translate.  To my credit, considering that I was immediately put on the spot, I think I did an okay job.  Yes, it was kinda broken Japanese and, because it’s a poem, it sounded even weirder.  But I made it as far as “thy shipmates leave this token here” before Tomo-san laughed, said my translation doesn’t make sense, and walked away.  To be fair, I’m sure it would’ve sounded funny even if perfectly translated and preserved in its verse format since Japanese poetry is so different from Western poetry.

When I caught up to her and Ken-chan, I told her that the reason why it sounded funny was because it was a poem written to honor the dead (pic 4).

[traveladventurespart6]

There’s a surprising amount of trash on the beach all the way down here.  I’m guessing people haven’t picked it up because it’s not exactly prime camping space.  Still, I wouldn’t have expected to see trash on a Japanese beach.  My first thought was that it was straight up litter.  But now I’m wondering if it’s been washed up on the beach instead of people tossing it off the cliffs.

[traveladventurespart6]

People are winning it big at bingo!  I haven’t met the announcer, either, and don’t understand most of what he’s saying.  But he’s a really good MC, though!

[traveladventurespart6]

Veggies and chicken as part of dinner.