One perfect moment

Where can I even begin to start. 

I have had some of the happiest moments of my life on the trip, the most content, the most at peace with the world, and with myself. I would move here, I really would. 

To call it a holiday would be doing it such a disservice. I used to reject the word because holidays are meant to be fun and when I traveled I wasn't having fun, usually I was tackling meltdown after meltdown and learning. It would be like calling school a holiday. Yet still, holiday doesn't fit, how can you reduce the greatest lessons and learning curves of your life down to a holiday, the greatest self growth to one silly little word that means to take a break from things. This isn't the break, this is the living! The bits in between this are the breaks, where life slows down and becomes monotonous and restrictive, I'm sorry but it's just not for me. 

Yesterday I woke up at 4am, jet lag has been rearing it's ugly head. Instead of spending the next few hours tossing and turning, I just got up and watched the sun rise over the city as I spoke to mum. I had made the wonderful mistake of checking my phone at 4am - Jope Otts mentioned you in a comment - we all know how it goes. And I looked, and I played a scenario out in my head where rather than saying 'ah that looks amazing' and moving on to something else, I really looked. What mum had tagged me in was one of these photos gone viral articles about Japanese sculptures, it was filled with nonsense and misinformation, copied from other people who had copied the information from someone else, a chinese whispers article, what does it matter anyway, Japan is a million miles away, people will like and share and say ooooh and ahhhh but that's all. I didn't, I just saw an opportunity to see something really amazing, something that (as it turns out) very few people have seen and most never heard of. It was called Wara Arts festival or わらアート if I'm correct and it was somewhere around Niigata city, the other side of the country, so I did some digging and managed to find the name of the park that these sculptures were being displayed in, and then with nothing else to go on, I set off, making my own route. I took the metro to Ueno, the Shinkansen (bullet train) to Niigato on the opposite coast from Tokyo, then a local train down the country until I reached a tiny town called Nishikawa. It was beautiful and I instantly fell in love, it was small and bleak and a little bit in disrepair. Rust adorned the railings and weeds grew through the tracks and fields stretched on for miles before reaching the mountains. The town was deathly quiet, there was the evidence of life but no life itself. As I walked along the street, cars started passing me and I felt a sense of awe that this tiny little place in the middle of nowhere had always existed but it had taken a rather impromptu and impulsive train ride looking for something I had no real evidence even existed before I ever knew it was here. The park would be about 5km away but I hadn't been able to find any information on how to get there or whether the sculptures were even there for sure, but I had hoped and decided I would enjoy the journey no matter the destination. 

That was when I stopped at the post office. I can't really say what happened, I can't put into words the language-less exchange but as I spoke to them and they spoke to me in two tongues that couldn't be more different, actions spoke louder than words, their enthusiasm for my enthusiasm and love of their country and their town came through in their warmth and great kindness towards me. They gifted me a post office edition Hello Kitty piggy bank and after all the staff had decided what to do with the little lost foreigner, the woman who had been serving me took me down the street to the local taxi company. When I decided to walk (I didn't really want to pay for a taxi) they helped me map my route and with the utmost kindness set me on my way. The woman told me she wanted to talk, but she couldn't, I said the same to her, both limited by our words. I told her I loved her country and her people were the kindest people, I think this was enough.

10 minutes into the walk, the taxi driver caught up with me and told me he would take me to the park for free. The overwhelming kindness and of this gesture is still hard for me to believe, it was not a cheap trip, about £14 but he chose to drive me there for nothing because he was a kind man. 

Kindness, I keep saying it because as usual, Japan has showed it's worth in it's actions and there's no other word for it. At the park I found the sculptures, huge animals created from the straw from the rice harvest, but their scale seemed small beside the awe that I felt for the people I had met. Talk about restoring faith in mankind. 

I took photos and sat on a bench and it would not be an exaggeration to say it was the happiest moment of my life. There, in the middle of nowhere, I felt more content and more alive than I ever have before. I walked back and it was long and by the time I was back on the train to Tokyo I was shattered, somewhere along the way the fatigue and hunger (I had forgotten to eat in all of this) and huge amounts of emotion and adrenaline overwhelmed me and by the time I had navigated all the rail lines in rush hour, found my station locker, retrieved my luggage and carried it to my accommodation in the pouring rain I was just too overwrought to cope, I sat in my bunk and cried. I wanted to be anywhere but there, I felt the huge crash that comes with such happiness and it was like a wave, knocking the breath out of me. Today none of it feels real, those experiences sound like someone else's and I can only write them like a story, because that was how they happened. I feel like my descriptions are over embellished and dramatic but that was what I experienced, I can't write it any other way. 

I am in love.