Retrospective Post: The Day I Came Back

So, before I go on about other things I thought I'd mention something that happened on literally the first day I came back.

I was sitting around at the table, still being slightly estranged by the fact that I was not in Japan anymore. My brother's friend came over and they felt like getting some lunch. I came along, and we decided that we'd get some Mexican food from a place called Alazane's. They've got amazing shrimp burritos there. Well, along the way we came across a truck that had, dangling off the hitch, a pair of truck nuts.

If you're not familiar with them, a quick google search will suffice, however I imagine you can figure out what they are.

In that moment I felt as though I were truly back. I had a vision of us sitting in Doc Brown's time machine, flying back in from 2015 to good ol' 1985.

In fact it would've gone a little something like this:

I apologize for the crappy photoshop job in advance

Yeah, that's pretty much exactly how it went.


In my head at least.


-J

Retrospective Post: The Day They Cut My Cord

I promised I would be back with more postings, and this will be the first of them to get it all started. It's a pretty harmless one, so it should be a nice and easy way to get back into the habit of writing things here again.

Shortly after this we went to Korea, and that took a while to write down in its entirety via my journal, so I'll have to condense those thoughts before I put it up here. I will though, it was a pretty interesting experience.

So, this is from November 1st:

I heard someone call out from the genkan, and it was a voice I hadn't heard before. I got up to check (I believe I was writing in the journal that moment) and it turned out to be a man in a blue jumped with a white hard hat on. He asked if it was okay for him to talk to me about a certain thing going on in the area, and I had no reason to say no. He then proceeded to empty an entire speech on my way about how they were cutting the defunct cables running from my house (all houses in the area for that matter) and simply wanted to let me know what they were doing and why. I replied to half of what he was saying, while nodding to the half I did not get.

This is the problem with learning a new language, all it takes is a new situation for you to feel like you're not that good at it. But the "what to do when the electric company shows up and wants to remove old cable attached to the side of your house" lessons just don't come up in a formal setting.

Anyway, I walked across the street and talked to my neighbor Jiro-san about it, who explained it in a way that made more sense to me. I got up and took some pictures while they worked away on it. I love the way they do things like this in Japan. There's really not much traffic at all running through here, but they still coned it off, put up a sandwich board sign, and had a man to direct people should they arrive and need to know what was going on.

Enjoy!

There's the sandwich board! I wasn't lying.

Why do their cones look like toys?

Later on that day I cooked some small fish in the fish broiler that we have in our stove. No actual oven, so there's a real limit on the kinds of things that you can cook. Well, just the things that require an oven really. But still!

A little too long but it was my first time using a broiler!

 Anyway, that's the short one for now. Stay tuned for more.

-J

A New Look

It's been a while.

I was supposed to start putting up some of the things that happened while I was in Japan for all that time. I haven't forgotten! I've just been a bit occupied with other stuff lately, but I'm hoping to start posting retro-posts. As a kind of deposit on that promise I've already made a new banner for the blog.

Look at that!

Now why would I just go and abandon this place if I went ahead and made that?

Older posts coming soon. Fear not.

-J

What Happened To That Guy?

Well, as the title suggests, I have a bit of explaining to do.

There has been a severe lack of updating in recent weeks (months?) and that has been due to an personal effort that I made. I suppose when a person is in a position such as my current one, that position being living abroad and receiving unprecedented amounts of new experiences, there are a few ways to handle reflecting upon such exploits, if that is even something one is inclined to do. One way is to simply let everything come at you, full speed ahead, and simply savor this exposure to the world in the confines of your own mind. Contrary to this is the more journalistic approach, carefully documenting each new event. The former makes for an easier time no doubt, as little is actually required of you beyond remembering what happened, though that becomes considerably harder as time presses on I imagine. This is the route I chose for the first time I came to Japan, and though I definitely feel that I got quite a bit out of that trip, I always wish that I had made notations about places I went, jotted something down about what exactly I did at what place, and when. Even the smallest of notes would add a huge amount of depth to the experience. If I'm allowed to go on a tangent, this circles back to one of the earliest posts that I made on this blog about discovering two hand written pages in a spiral notebook with little other than a simple date, and my own words regarding two distinct moments on that trip. Something compelled me to write on those days and had someone asked me about them the day before I rediscovered it in that notebook, I do not believe I would have been able to recall them. After reading it though, a surge of memory came rushing back to me, and suddenly I remembered the feeling of writing that. Although a lack of entries compounded that one, which would have provided it with a bit more context, I still had something not only intensely memorable, but personal as well. Nearly all the memories of that first trip remain perfectly in tact still, or so I thought. Having discovered those two entries while searching for something else points out a glaring fault in my own memory. I did not remember writing that. All of this rambling begs the question, what else could I have forgotten?

I remember after returning from Japan, I had a fear. I was terrified that all of the trip would become little but a memory and as memories do, it would fade like high noon into dusk, slowly but surely. This is something that was only partially stemmed by the over four thousand pictures I took, spanning across four SD memory cards. Naturally there were things I did not take pictures of, and certainly most things I did not later write about. If traveling is all about the experience, and if experience is just a manner of quantified/qualified knowledge, then it would appear that by forgetting even those two small entries on paper that I had somehow or in some way lost a bit of that trip as well. This is, of course, a dreadful thought.

As I mentioned before, this was just one way to recount an experience. Quite opposite of that is to write everything down, posting thoughts, pictures and videos on places like this blog. To the few people that have an interest in my affairs I'm sure this is great fun. It provides a way of maintaining a connection from person to person, while also allowing others to experience (if only marginally) that which you as the traveler has done. The downside though is that you have to spend time that you would have used doing things to instead write about what things you did manage to get done. This is time consuming and if one is as neurotic about their writing as I am, it takes a while of figuring out exactly what I'm trying to say before I say it, correct it, edit it, and put it out for others to read.

Then as with most things, there is a middle of the road option. This is where I find myself now. I swore to keep a travel journal this time around, and so far I have successfully maintained it quite well. The idea is not to write about every detail that happens, but to recap on things that I feel deserve writing about. Unfortunately, this is where the explanation for the lack of posting on this blog comes from. For a period I was both writing in my journal and posting the same exact information here. Before I knew it, this became an increasingly painful chore, which took up even more time that I wanted to use for conversing with people, studying Japanese, just experiencing things, really. Because it came down to one or the other, I chose to write in the journal, since that one required no outlets, cables or internet.

In short, I'm still taking pictures and I'm still maintaining a level of agency on this trip, while taking a few moments now and again to write a few messy thoughts, opinions, or just statements about what goes on here. The hope is that in years to come I will not stumble upon this part of my life and wonder what happened to that guy on the page.

-Joshua

Shamisen, Bunkasai, and the Power of Teru Teru Bozu

It's been a while since I've last posted and I figure that it's high time I put some updates on what's been going on over here. That being said, the bulk of this writing will likely be a hodgepodge of all the things that I've been meaning to make note of.

Perhaps the biggest thing to mention is the fact that I'm learning how to play the Shamisen. I mentioned that I would begin to be playing last time, but I've actually had two lessons since that time now. I'm really having a great time of it, as is Mitsuko. My only regret is that I don't currently have enough money to afford the entire setup which includes: the instrument itself, the case, the bachi (strumming utensil) among other things. I had initially thought that the price of the entire kit would be ¥63,000, but I later learned after the most recent lessons that this price reflects only the Shamisen itself, and the total cost of getting it fully loaded would lean more towards ¥90,000. Learning this fact basically secured the notion of owning a Shamisen into the realm of fantasy, at least for the time being. Our very excellent teacher Tamura-sensei mentioned that he could cut the price down to something about ¥70,000 after we've practiced enough and become somewhat decent at playing it. While it is extremely generous of him to even suggest that he would be willing to do that, it remains dramatically outside my price range. All this was made worse however when he said that, provided we were really intent on buying the Shamisen, we could take the instrument home from the shop, and pay for it when we were able to. Oh well. Maybe I'll run into someone who has a stack of cash that they feel is weighing them down. It's possible, right?

Irrespective of actually buying the instrument, we're still having loads of fun learning how to play it. I must admit that I have a sneaky advantage by having experience with both violin and guitar. Mitsuko did play flute for a while when she was in high school (if I'm not mistaken) but it unfortunately has little application or transference of technical ability to what we're doing now. We're still at the basic stages of going through each of the three strings and finding the most rudimentary of notes on each. There's a bit of a trick to knowing where the second note is, as the neck of the Shamisen is split into three pieces. If one moves down the neck from the top of the instrument where the tuning pegs are, distinct lines where the wood has been merged can be seen. On the first of these separations is where the "second" note is. The "first" is roughly at the top of the neck, and has much less of a visual cue, relying mostly on ear training and muscle memory to locate. I put those in quotes because the book we study from writes the notes in a rather unusual way. In a fashion similar to how guitar tablature is written, each of the three strings are assigned a number. The highest string is written as 7, the middle string as 3, and the lowest string being notated by 7•. We played many exercises that only made use of the three strings, which allowed for us to get a proper feel for the spacing and distance between each of the strings as well as how to strum properly. On the first string, 1• indicates the first note, which is played up close to the neck. 3•, on the same string, is positioned where the first break in the wood along the neck is, making it relatively easy to find.

I think I assume with a certain sense of confidence that there's a 2• in between the both of those. Then again, that just might make too much sense. And much in the way the first string works, there is a 4 and 6 (of dots) on the second string.

I'm going to hop over to some of the other things that happened for now.

On November 27th and 28th, Kofu's Junior High School had their cultural festival (Bunkasai). It was amazing to say the least. Leading up to that weekend I spent Monday through Friday with the boys once again, rehearsing the English speeches that they recited at the West Tottori Speaking Contest. We were also asked a couple days before the Bunksai to do up some decorations for the door outside the smaller gymnasium. We managed to squeeze that in between all the other stuff we had going on that week, including the Halloween kindergarten lesson, which will get its own separate post in due time. So, I made some paper cuff links, managed to sneak in a bit of Laker's purple and gold in there too (hardly Halloween colors, but who cares!) and Mitsuko cut out some Halloween type shapes, pumpkins, moon, etc. I decided to make some "ghosts" out of toilet paper and plastic string. I bundled up a ball by rolling the toilet paper around itself a fair amount of times, and tied it off with the string, leaving behind a cape like tail-end which served as the body. I topped it off with some faces of various expressions and hung them outside the door.

Turns out, when Japanese people see this, they're not thinking ghosts.

I'll throw up a picture later of a side by side comparison of mine and what something known as "Teru Teru Bozu" look like. They are in fact amulets made for the specific purpose of asking for good weather. The vice principal came up and asked us that night while we were hanging them, what they were. I mentioned that they were supposed to be ghost but by that time Mitsuko had already mentioned to me that they looked like Teru Teru Bozu. He reiterated this fact to me, but thought it was interesting that we viewed them differently. Despite thinking they were neat, he commented that everyone was probably going to assume they were Teru Teru Bozu. It was supposed to rain all weekend in Kofu, and it only ever did once -for about half an hour- during lunch on the second day. So maybe there's a bit of magic in them after all...

On the second day of the festival the boys were going to perform their speeches for the entirety of the student body, which I learned is exactly 79 students right now. That's around two and a half classrooms for junior high school back at home. Anyway, the rehearsing went well. Souhei-kun remembered his with amazing accuracy. He turned out to be perhaps the most proficient at speaking, when he at first seemed as though he would need to most work. I'm proud of him, he put in so much effort, and it still pains me that they didn't take any awards home from the contest, which leads nicely to the next point. We went home that day pretty upset and after talking with our neighbor Keiko-san for a bit, we thought it fitting to make some proper awards for the boys. So later on that day I opened up Illustrator and designed some awards. All of this I mentioned before in an older post, but what I did not write about was the reaction towards them. The teachers thought it was amazing that we would have gone to such efforts, and the fact that I made it myself seemed to impress them. Rather than giving the awards out on the humble A4 sized paper bought in bulk at a chain superstore, the English teacher here and the Vice principal thought it would be more fitting to have them laminated and for us to present them on stage to the boys after they gave their speech in front of everyone.

And this is precisely what we did.

All the teachers really liked it, and the boys seemed to really appreciate it as well. Among some of the other things we managed see during the first day of the Bunksai were: various plays put on by the students broken down into their respective classes, a couple of speeches a few select students gave, and a gameshow to top off the day. The speeches were a pretty fascinating thing to watch and I wanted to make a point of noting it here. To set it up, the three students giving speeches were sitting on the stage off to the side, with a podium in the middle. The rest of the student body was situated on the floor much in the way that I remember viewing things as an elementary school student back in America. After each of the speeches were given you would see a couple of students crouched and hurriedly running from one side of the students seated on the floor to the other. These students were part of the "staff" for this particular event, and on this occasion were passing the microphone to students who wished to comment. And to my surprise, they did have lots of things to say. It was unbelievable. I couldn't imagine something like this happening in America. Not only did the students care about what these speakers had to say, they themselves had comments and thoughts to offer back to them. The notion of it was strange at first because I'd never seen something quite like that, especially in a junior high school setting. The offered words of support, encouragement, wishes to be more like the people speaking.

Before I continue, a brief aside. "Culture Shock" to me is a buzz word. It's synonymous with the use "Closure" much like one hears on TV after the sentencing of a murderer, or the capture of a fugitive. "That family will finally have some closure" you might hear right now if you turn to the news. And just as that word is used, Culture Shock, is one of those phrases that exists in the collective conscious of our media-consumerism driven thought processes. I dislike both of them greatly because they are meant to satiate a void that is otherwise uncomfortably numb and hopelessly impossible to fill. There have been moments when I was surprised by things here, but those moments are brief and quickly subside after moving on. I think perhaps what bothers me is that it creates a gap in between groups that suggests things necessarily should be different. It further propagates a need to distinguish plainly between ourselves and others. I do not care for forced separations that we bring upon ourselves. All of which is to say I do not believe in Culture Shock. I've been surprised, amazed, and indeed impressed by the things I've seen in this country. As a species we should be excited and inquisitive of one another, not "shocked".

And likewise, in that moment watching one student after another stand up and confess his or her honest and raw feelings, I did truly feel as though I were in another world.

The last day -to speed along- was filled with performances. The choir is a confusing thing to make note of. They had various arrangements of students singing, there must have been at least 6 or 7 changes to the lineup, as one would walk on stage to perform, another group would assemble off to the sides. They always started with the same song however, which I suppose made for good comparisons about which "set up" was better or worse, but it became a bit much towards the end. They all sang well however, much better than I could, and they deserved all the applause they received. The band blew us away. Right now I just thought about how that last sentence might be interpreted as a pun... But moving on! They were amazing. They played a bunch of songs I wasn't familiar with, but it didn't matter, they sounded great. Everyone was on time, in key, just outstanding. We had a good band in my high school, they traveled around the country, won competitions, and were very highly regarded. That being said, these kids could've eaten them for breakfast, smoked them for lunch, and who knows what else for dinner. I did want to note that they played the theme song from "Pirates of the Caribbean," the Johnny Depp movie, that was fun. They also played Benny Goodman's "Sing Sing Sing" or as Mitsuko put it, "The Chips A-Hoy Song!". Everyone was clapping along and the whole place having a great time, and being amongst a group like is great no matter where you are.

There were some pretty emotional moments during this whole festival though, if I may take it down a notch. In between all that joyous celebrating were lots of terribly intimate moments where some of the students gave words out the student body. In particular a 3rd year named Yui Kawakami, if memory serves correctly, gave a brief but tear filled speech about how she enjoyed all the time she spent with everyone at that school, how she'll miss them, and how she hoped that everyone will have a good future. I had started recording earlier because I thought they were going to play another another song, with a much smaller group on stage, but forgot to stop when I realized what was going on because of how captivating the whole event was. Another moment involved a group of 3rd years, meeting on stage with a group of second years, who would soon be taking over the school. The upper class-men provided words of support and wisdom those those under them, and it was almost like literally watching the school change hands.

Sometimes it's easy to forget how deep cultural changes go, and just how fundamentally different we were raised, what differences those makes and how it reflects upon the nation itself.

We also saw a Kagura play that day, which was the first time I'd seen something like that. It was performed by visiting members of the Hino High School. I don't want to describe it too much here since I do have a video to put up soon or later. We managed to record it, and it was probably the most exciting thing we saw during the whole Bunkasai. For the one we saw, the idea is that a warrior comes out and does a bit of a flashy dance to the beat of the taiko being thunderously pounded off to the side of the stage. Dragons crawl soon after and have a bit of a flashy dance as well, making shapes and intricate patterns with their dragon bodies. After this, the warrior comes back out to feed them hoping to lull them to sleep, or perhaps more accurately: stuff them to bed. He leaves and quickly returns sword in hand, to make short work of the beasts, but it's not as simple as that, and soon engages in 1 on 5 match against them. It was amazing, I don't have many more words for it than that. It received the most applause that anything had for the entire Bunkasai. I noticed that a certain point while holding my iPhone as steady as I could to record, my mouth had dropped considerably.

But I didn't really care.


-J



(I'll try to get some pictures up soon, I still have a bunch more to talk about but hopefully this will suffice for now! PS Happy Birthday Mom!)

The Things You Can Find On A Friday

There's been plenty to talk about lately but perhaps the most interesting day to make note of, was last Friday. We went to town on a whim, and weren't expecting half of what eventually transpired.

Mitsuko had a three day weekend just recently, and initially we decided that we would spend most of it indoors this time. However, Friday after she got off work we decided to take a little jaunt out to Yonago, which as I mentioned before, is the closest "big city" to Kofu. There's a small department store called Takashimaya there that we've heard loads about it, but never visited, so we thought maybe we could go exploring that and get a bite to eat later at an Indian Curry place that we've become quite fond of lately. Rather than take the bus, we decided to go it on foot so as to get a bit of exercise in, and to see more of the city that perhaps we never noticed before. At a certain point we came across an outdoor mall type area. It had a a covered roof, but the entrance to it was open to the street, so it felt a bit like the wall Fremont Street is in Vegas right now (if you've ever been there) but with much less sparkling light.

I took a picture of picture of the top and bottom since I was too close to get the whole thing

So you can see how it's open to the street.

 The sign says above the entrance says ほれどおり, which without the kanji is harder to translate but it seems to me that it means "Charm Street". That would be nice if that were the case, right? Either way, we headed in because we've often seen this shopping arcade while on the bus to the bigger AEON, deeper in Yonago, but never had the chance to visit by virtue of always driving past it in a bus. Having stood there at the mouth of it's entrance I felt we shouldn't waste a chance even though it was not originally part of that day's agenda. I feel these days that while I'm still in Japan and relatively young, I should not let that which is unexplored remain so for too long, even if it's something as ostensibly mundane as this. Long story short, I'm really glad we did.

The very first shop we noticed on our right hand side was something of an antique store at first glance. I noticed a line of Koto (a Japanese stringed instrument) sitting up against a wall, which immediately caught my attention. I moved towards the shop some more and peered in. Lights were on, and the door was ajar about an inch or two, so it seemed as though it was open. The insides were fairly cluttered however, littered with all manner of old Japanese curios, books, ornate boxes of various widths and length, very decorative Sensu (fans), and of course the Koto lining the wall.

The outside of the shop, note the Koto against the wall

Boxes, books, and papers oh my!

There were also flutes, the name of which I do not know

I called out, "すみません。。。” (pardon me/excuse me) in what I thought was a fairly loud voice. There was no answer however. As I was about to part from the shop, my glance happened to turn to the right and that's when I noticed a row of Shamisen (a guitar-like instrument) hanging on the wall. Perhaps it was a bit rude, but I didn't care. I opened the door and walked inside. The automated alarm started ringing, greeting us with the standard PING PONG type chime, shortly followed by the digital voice saying "Welcome" in Japanese. I moved further into the shop because standing there just kept setting it off. I moved to the Shamisen and couldn't believe what a find this store was. I'd always wanted one of them but the only place that you could physically go to a see one was Little Tokyo in LA back home, and I could never be sure of the quality down there. It is also one of those things that would be more exciting to buy IN Japan. Anyway, the first thing I noticed was the price tag. Coming in at a whopping 63,000 Yen (as of this writing, exactly 800 US dollars) these weren't toys to be sure. Now obviously more expensive doesn't mean better, but I thought I could safely assume that these were more than decorative pieces. Shortly after the welcome chime stopped we heard a voice from deep in the back of the shop, where we couldn't see. A man soon appeared from the back and greeted us. We apologized for rustling him from wherever he had been, and stated that we were just looking, and hoped that it was okay. He was very kind, and asked us about what we were looking for. I pointed to the Shamisen and asked if it was in fact a Shamisen. I knew it was, but oftentimes I like to ask a question I know the answer to as a way of probing conversation in a certain direction. He nodded and said that they were indeed Shamisen. I mentioned how I had always wanted one, and I wanted to learn how to play it. He then walked towards the shelf, forcing all of us to do a dance so he could work his way around us without stepping on anything. To my surprise he began to unwrap the instrument, at which point I felt bad. I thought maybe he was thinking that I was prepared to buy it right there, perhaps I spoke incorrectly and made it seem like I'd be buying one. But no, he took it off the shelf, walked back to where we were standing and began to tune it. He asked if I'd ever seen one played before. I mentioned that we came from California and close to LA. Over there sometimes you could occasionally seen someone playing one, especially during Nisei Week, which is the annual Japanese Festival they hold there. He strummed it a bit and then paused before asking if I wanted to learn how to play. I said yes, because I thought he meant more like the future, one of those "one day" type statements. But we clarified it, and it turns out, he was willing to show me right then and there, how to play free of charge. It didn't take too much thinking on my part before I agreed, very excitedly. He said he would go grab his really quickly and for us to have a seat. We did.

He came back with his, which he said was the same model as the model I was then holding. It was the cheapest one they sell there, but still a very nice Shamisen. All I could think was "cheapest?!" when he said that, but I should've known better from being a violin and guitar player myself. Instruments, especially quality ones, cost a pretty penny. He then proceeded to tune his own, and afterwards showed me a bit of the basics, as far as how to hold it, and how to strum it properly. It was way cool to say the least and I still amazed it even happened at all. Eventually he performed a song for us, something that resembled the season, and the sounds of the insects. He showed us which parts were meant to imitate certain sounds before and after he played. It was great. He also played "Sakura," which even in America is pretty famous as a Japanese Folk song. If you don't think you know check it out on youtube. I'd love to learn that one.

So after a bit more talking, it seems that he's willing to teach us whenever we're able to go down there, for about an hour each week. If I heard him correctly, he said that if we practice and still very much like it, he'd be willing to offer a discount on the Shamisen. I think I'm clever enough to know that it's kind of a tactic to sell one of those instruments. He means no harm, let me clear that up right away! He said that there's no pressure to buy one at all, even if we practice for a while with him. But even knowing that he's trying to get us more interested in it by helping us play one, I'd still buy it. There is no gimmick at work here. If I had the extra money, I would definitely buy one.

I instantly wanted one

We exchanged contact information later on, and we'll see him again this weekend.

We did manage to go to Takashimaya by the way, and there wasn't much there that I required. There were some interesting food places in the downstairs area, which only served to make me very hungry. We left there and went searching for a Daiso (hundred yen shop) that we heard was in the area. While there we met an elementary school girl who was blown away by the fact that we could speak Japanese. We mentioned that Mitsuko was an ALT, and asked if at her school there was anyone helping teach English. She mentioned two names but they weren't anyone we or the other ALTs have heard of. In all likelihood they might not be a part of the JET program because all ALTs seem to know all ALTs. In any case, she was a very smart girl for a 6th grader, and I felt bad when she said that the people working at her school speak English too fast and she can't understand them. Boo. We chatted with her for a bit with her and gave her our address before parting. We mentioned that if she ever wanted to work on practicing English she could always write us. She was excited about that and said that she would send us a Nengajou (New Year's Card), haha.

Afterwards we walked back to the station, and towards the small AEON where the Indian Curry was. Much to our surprise, we found two ALTs that we've become friends with, Alex and Charlotte. Alex is actually not a surprise, that guy is always there. He recommended the place to me, so I must say thank you. It's pretty good, I have to admit. We had a good dinner, and a good chat.

It was a long day that had interesting surprises in it.

-J

Nightmare Fuel

I do have quite a bit of new stuff to talk about and I'll get around to posting about it in the upcoming days as things have started to wind down a bit. I want to take this opportunity however to post about something that happened last week or so. I was doing a bit of cooking (as is the norm while Mitsuko is out working) and I noticed a few baby spiders on the wall near an outlet. I'm not a fan of spiders, first and foremost, so this was ever so slightly bothersome. I squished them with some tissue paper and was about to go on my way when I noticed that another one crawled from under the frame of the outlet. I squished that one as well, and then in what felt like a scene directly out of Arachnophobia I pushed on the outlet and to my utter dismay four more spiders came crawling up scattering in various directions. I backed off quickly and traced their patterns from a distance to notice that even more were on the wall in other places. In that moment I was literally Jeff Daniels and half expected them to come down on my head, crawl in through the sink, and appear from other disturbing places that occupy the realm of nightmares. For the next few days we continually found and killed them in various rooms hanging about on the walls. I haven't seen any for a few days now, so I think we're in the clear. I'm assuming that perhaps a nest hatched inside the walls somewhere and we just had a surge of babies running amok. Somehow if that were truly the case, that would make it worse, wouldn't it?

It was just creepy watching them pour out of there