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Hidemi Woods 

Singer, Songwriter and Author from Kyoto, Japan.

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Blog posts : "Hidemi's Rambling"

Hidemi's Rambling No.556

As the house where I grew up was being sold, I came home in Kyoto for the last time fearfully. My parents had been constantly sullen from anxiety about money and their future since I left home. Now that they gave up their house and our ancestor’s last land, I had wondered how gloomy they were. On th…

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Hidemi's Rambling No.555

On the answering machine, there was a message from my father that said he needed to be called back immediately. I was chilled to the bone. I have never received a single phone call from him that’s not disturbing. When he calls me, he does it to vent his spleen about his daily life and about my caree…

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Hidemi's Rambling No.554

I hadn’t been to a movie theater for fifteen years. The film I saw at the theater fifteen years ago was Brad Pitt’s ‘Meet Joe Black’. It was surely a disappointing film but that wasn’t a reason why I stopped going to a theater. Back then, I lived in the States and movie theaters there were clean, mo…

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Hidemi's Rambling No.553

The frightening experience that I almost lost my precious wristwatch at LAX exhausted me but I had to wait for five hours for my flight because of the cancellations. I was allowed to use the executive lounge for the compensation and stepped in there for the first time. It was located on the second f…

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Hidemi's Rambling No.552

After I got my boarding ticket at the check-in counter in LAX, I was headed for the security gate. As a typical, old-fashioned Japanese, I strictly separate the floor on which I step with my shoes off from the one with my shoes on. Without my shoes, I wouldn’t let my feet touch the outside or public…

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Hidemi's Rambling No.551

When I left Anaheim on my latest trip, I got up 6 a.m., took ‘Uber’ again and then caught a bus to LAX. I know so well that the bus to the airport seldom comes on schedule here, which made me too nervous to have room in my mind that should feel sad to leave California. I took the bus because I had p…

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Hidemi's Rambling No.550

I tried some novelty that people call ‘Uber’ for the first time during my stay in California. I heard Japan also has it in the Tokyo metropolitan area, but it’s unavailable in the remote mountainous town where I live. Although I had some trouble signing up and using its app at first, I was thrilled …

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Hidemi's Rambling No.549

During my latest trip to U.S., I visited Disneyland Resort on Friday of the Memorial Day weekend. The reason that I chose this date was because it was the first day of Disneyland’s 60th anniversary celebration event and the parks opened for 24 hours. It was a special day that new shows and parades s…

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Hidemi's Rambling No.548

After I landed on Los Angeles, I took a bus to Anaheim from LAX. It was playing outdated rock music on the stereo and running on a patchy freeway that had eternal traffic. Out the window were rows of shabby houses along the freeway. Everything was so familiar that I felt as if I had been here last m…

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Hidemi's Rambling No.547

When I lived in California and flew from Japan to LAX regularly a long time ago, its immigration was like procedure for getting in a prison. Going through it had been tense confrontations with an arrogant authority at a dark place. The immigration at Vancouver Airport is distinctively different from…

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Hidemi's Rambling No.546

The flight to Vancouver where I stopped over on the way to Los Angeles was unexpectedly comfortable. The plane wasn’t crowded and the flight attendants were all nice and attentive. In my old days that I had traveled between Japan and U.S. back and forth every three months, I used to fly an awful air…

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Hidemi's Rambling No.545

I woke up at 5:30 a.m. on the day that I set out for my first travel to U.S. in about ten years. Some last-minute preparations before going to bed and tension granted me only a three-hour sleep. Considering the coming ten-hour flight and the time difference, my next sleep in bed would be 30 hours la…

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Hidemi's Rambling No.544

Every major holiday, my apartment building in the rural mountains is packed with families and groups from the city who want to spend some time in nature. They use this apartment as a vacation home and the regular residents, one of whom is me, call them ‘Visitors’. Most apartments in the building are…

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Hidemi's Rambling No.543

I purchased air tickets to California six months before departure when they were on a limited-time discount sale. Two months before the flight, I received an e-mail from the airline company. It said that the schedules of my flight had been changed. The changes were whopping six hours for both depart…

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Hidemi's Rambling No.542

These days, I’m busy preparing for a trip to the U.S. that I will visit for the first time in ten years. Although the destination is the same area as I used to live in, ten years is long enough to change everything dramatically and make my knowledge obsolete. Numerous new hotels have opened and thei…

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Hidemi's Rambling No.540

My grandfather and I used to go to the department store together when I was a small child. He had a pass that entitled senior citizens to a free ride of the municipal streetcar. He usually said, “Not using the free pass is waste of money,” and tried to take the streetcar as much as he could although…

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Hidemi's Rambling No.539

I was walking beside the math teacher on whom I had had a crush, on the day of a school excursion when I was a sophomore at high school. He asked me which university I was applying to. When he heard my answer, he asked me again, “Do you think you can jump across this paddy field to the other side?” …

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Hidemi's Rambling No.538

In the time of my school days, women in Japan were mostly housewives. It was considered that women quit working when they get married. One of my mother’s old female classmates stayed single and had an administrative job at IBM in Tokyo, which was so rare at that time. To me, continuing to work after…

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Hidemi's Rambling No.537

The snows reached eight feet high on the ground in a mountainous town where I live, which is customary every winter here. I began to feel suffocated and decided to get away for a few days. As I came across the bargain price for a moderate hotel adjacent to Tokyo Disney Resort, I took a trip there wi…

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Hidemi's Rambling No.536

As a two-year contract on my smartphone expires soon, I decided to switch to a low-cost plan of a new phone company and to get a new smartphone that can be used both in Japan and US. I had been looking into the market for about six months and learned that choosing a plan and a phone was really cumbe…

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