When at the supermarket just now, I ran into the snack bar owner in my Friday beginner eikaiwa who was the only absent student this week. He looked really regretful for missing class and for forgetting to call me, and explained that he was hung over and just slept in. Poor guy.
So my goal is to have my tatami room empty except for my big chest of drawers, aircon unit, TV, and maybe TV stand, by the end of the day. I’ve been slacking off a lot, but it’s easily doable. And if I have time after that, I’ll start in on the kitchen, on spices and canned goods and occasionally-used utensils. If this weren’t the weekend of the beach party, I could be downstairs setting up shop right now…but this means I have 2 more days of internet access, since they’re only switching the phone line over on Tuesday. I also have to call Yahoo!BB to switch my service over to the new apartment–luckily, they have an English customer service line.
Well, before any of that, I need to figure out dinner first.
It hit me today that I don’t really have a lot of close guy friends here. The guys here are great, and I definitely do have some pretty good friends and “geek soulmates” among them, but it’s only on extremely rare occasions that I hang out one-on-one with them and/or talk with them at length. I can count off the guys I can have and have had these kinds of conversations with on one hand. I called Hamza back home (well, in Auburn, but still, the general southeast region) today, and it hit me that these days I only have these long conversations with guys at home (Hamza, Ethan, Moshe, Ankur occasionally, and some online friends like Andy and Philip), and not often at all here.
Coming from a university with a relatively small female population, where I actually hung out with only guys (either solo or in groups) pretty often, it’s strange to not have that so readily available here. Hanging out with Joe and Jordan on car rides to/from musical stuff was the closest I’ve come to that, and the Lord of the Rings marathon was a breath of fresh air because it was actually a more familiar male-female ratio for me. I don’t mean to say that I don’t know how to act around girls or anything like that; I had my own fair share of girls’-night-outs back in Atlanta (with like-minded, not-really-girly girls). It’s just that I’m seriously not used to hanging out with mainly girls so often, without being able to hang out with guys to balance it out a bit. I honestly hope that Hannah’s successor is a guy who’s big on hanging out, just for that.