Balcony garden, sea urchins, and racist fishermen

So I've been keeping myself rather busy since the weather is finally warming up and we move towards summer here in japanland. For those unaware, I'm a little bit of an avid gardener. However, my apartment balcony happens to be on the small side, leading me to do what I'm referring to as "the balcony rain forest project"



I'm growing SOOOO many things it's freaking ridiculous. Originally, I'd wanted to stay in Japan for 3years and then move back to the states, but now investing myself in these plants (I bought a fig tree....I have problems....is there gardener's anonymous? ) i'm trying to stay 4years in Japan. August will start my 3rd year I need a recommendation which we're not quite sure of how the process works for the 4th....sooo...guess I'll know this time next year :3



I learned on tumblr that lavender, lemon balm, rosemary, and basil all keep mosquitos away, and what good luck, I'm growing all those on my balcony Multiple herbs and such but the biggest things right now are my tomato bushes (it's technically only 4 plants) and my russian mammoth sunflowers. Also got potatoes, zucchini, and lots of flowers and such.



I won't try to name everything I have. At my last count I had 33 different kinds of plants on my balcony, which means I probably have double or triple the actual number of items....Hope this building is up to code A nice neighbor lady across the street brought me up begonias a month or so back and told me she was looking forward to my sunflowers, so yay! Garden balcony


Also, so me and some friends went to this beach on the coast out here for the first time on sunday, and while the weather was nice, the experience was overall crapola D: To start, the beaches were filthy with plastic (beach season in japan is pretty much only july and august- japanese don't really go much else even though it's hotter than balls) so the beaches haven't been combed with the tractors yet. Also, frolicking in what was pleasant temp water and very very shallow to the breakers, I happened to step on what I thought was a hypodermic needle (again, due to the beach's state). But nope, it was this motherfucker.



Never having seen anything like this in our lives, we were all disgusted cuz hell, that was a scary shock (the underside was really really gross) and also it moved quicker than you'd think once we brought it up. I would also like to point out that after i'd jumped up after stepping on it and stuck my face into the water with goggles to see what had stabbed me, this mofo came up out of the sandy bottom like the freakin' toy truck in the sand box in toy story. I shit you not. Spines first.



It bled, didn't hurt too bad. Like being stabbed in the foot with a sewing needle. I am grateful there was no venom or anything and nothing broke off in me. Pure terror though lemme tell ya. You can skip this next part if you don't wanna read about the racist asshole that yelled at me and a friend.

So to add insult to injury, leaving the beach, me and my friend went back to his car packing up and getting ready to leave when this old man came up to us and started yelling at us asking where we were going (weird) and about having parked where we had (there IS pay-parking at beaches during beach season; there were ZERO signs and also loads and loads of space at this restaurant place thing) and getting all pissed and shit and yelling at us in japanese to which of course we didn't immediately respond because a) WTF do you do in that situation and b) what the hell do we even say? I thought, oh shit maybe we have to pay. I feel so bad okay let's pay for parking, but THEN he goes on to further bitch at us and tell us that if you come to japan, you should speak japanese and all this other shit. So basically it had nothing to do with parking, he was a fucking racist asshole who didn't like foreigners. That kind of bullshit, when it happens in the states with folk telling others "You're in america, speak english!" has always pissed me the fuck off, and being on the receiving end when that shit is already bullshit was awful. I just wanted him to leave so I kept apologizing and told him we understood until he went away, then we put the rest of our shit away and left.

Thing is, he wasn't crazy like you might think, coming up and picking a fight. Not mentally ill or anything. Just a fucking racist.

We come across fuckheads like this sometimes at the very least once a year within our own country prefecture, but in the bigger cities like Osaka and even Nagoya, they have big black buses spewing foreigner hate that wants to "keep japan pure for the japanese". Douchebags. Like do you even know the population is shrinking and NONE of you are "pure" japanese and everyone is mixed to hell? It's a popular concept here with the right wing nutjobs. It's especially hard to swallow when it's like, you fucking douchebag asshat, I was hired by your fucking government and imported by your fucking government to do a job deemed important especially for international economy purposes and I probably teach your grandkids english, quite being an asshole. Go choke on a dick.

But no, i took the higher road and just listened to his hate and apologized for what I don't even know.

Fucking fuck.

On the plus side, I made fresh cheese this weekend too so go me