Almost 2 months

September is almost over. The beginning of October will mark two months since I came to Japan this year. The longest amount of time I`ve previous spent in Japan is about to be doubled. And then after that, a lot more time to come.

Things are still going pretty well.

The typhoon I mentioned in my last post ended up being demoted to Severe Tropical storm, but the news still referred to it as a typhoon, so that was kind of confusing. Either way, the storm veered to the East as it was hitting Kyushu, so although the Eastern half of Kagoshima was hit -pretty- bad, the skies were pretty clear on the Western side where I am.

To tell the truth, it was kind of disappointing, because I wanted to have a fun story I could tell people about me waiting out the storm, all alone in my apartment.

But there will be other typhoons.

Last week on Tuesday, I began to have ear pain. I stopped ignoring it in favor of work on Friday and went to the hospital (regular doctor appointments take place in the hospital here) on Saturday. I thought it was an ear infection, but the Ears, Nose, and Throat Doctor I visited on Monday said it was a viral infection in my nose and throat. This made sense because my throat was bothering me as well.

The other night, I woke up in the middle of the night because my ear was really hurting, but actually that was the last I had of substantial pain from. The next day (yesterday), my ear rather felt like it was underwater. Today is just feels kind of funny.

I realized that I like going to the doctors in Japan. It`s a fun challenge to try to communicate health things in Japanese, especially since medical words are often so similar. I hope the doctors appreciated the challenge too. Maybe they wished I brought someone fluent to help translate.

For me, though, I don`t like to bring translators to places because that just means that they can talk super fast as though I am not there. And often, since I`ve gotten here, I`ve felt like my "translators" were not able to explain things much better and often they`d rather make decisions for me instead of trying to help me understand. I much prefer to put out the effort and go without a translator.

I should be getting internet in my apartment as soon as this weekend, so hopefully I can set a certain day of the week when I was post here and the posts will be more structured and thought out.