flashback
The bus continued to lumber on, even though the light had turned red and we were facing traffic with a green arrow. Out of the corner of my eye I saw it happen, the driver distracted by a passenger fumbling for change to buy a bus card after the last stop, the car in the left turn lane somehow oblivious to city transit careening by him. He turned, we drove, and I closed my eyes to block out the obvious. I was in the very front, raised seat by the bus entrance, over the stairs and in front of the large plate windshield. I didn't put out my hands to flip over the roll bar, as it occurred to me to do. Instead, I thought someone will die and realized that it wouldn't be any of us, but rather the unfortunate man in the sedan who drove under the bus.

But the bus rolled on, the car turned left, and no one was the wiser except maybe me, a flustered bus driver and one mid-commute Japanese salaryman too shocked to even lay on the horn.

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I have to wait until the end of this coming month for my first paycheck from the new job. That's a big minus... but I'm basically getting paid $25 an hour to play with kids so I can't really complain. The big PLUS is that I don't feel bad touching my bank account to subsidize my living this month because I still have one regular client group each week that pays $40 per lesson AND with this once-a-month paycheck (hello, flashback to working at the UO) I'll get a huuuuuge month-and-a-half payload RIGHT BEFORE I go back to the states that I won't even have a chance to spend.

Even in financially awkward times where I'm carrying, say thirty dollars in my wallet (yeah, in the states I would have thought that a lot), is that I can still be really pleased when I buy myself a nice, ten-dollar bouquet of flowers to brighten up my room.

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If you can't tell, I don't think I'm going to write much about my trip. I'll probably get into the stories a bit more once I've finished maintenance on my computer and gotten all the photos edited down to size [almost done there]. I saw a lot of crazy stuff that some of you out there will probably find hilariously interesting, but the fact is that most of it escapes me from moment to moment, even though the superb feeling of having accomplished a dream lingers on. I'm so swept up in life right now that I've already moved past the stories and onto the next thing. So I apologize for that... but there will definitely be pictures. And the pictures tell the stories for themselves.