I don't think that I'm a particularly talkative person, maybe compared to the people I normally cross paths with at home.  But since I've been here, the low levels of interaction that I normally get are missing, and the effects are surprisingly strong sometimes.
 Typically, people voluntarily take on a vow of silence, and usually see them through in special rural retreats, far away from civilization.  I am gagged in a way, being here alone like this, but I'm also surrounded by tons of people who gawk at me from a distance, probably assuming I can't communicate at all, and probably thinking it wouldn't be a very good idea to try regardless. I'm not always impatient or intolerant, but there are moments when this really drives me nuts. And having nothing really going on, there's too much time to let it get to me.  I'm disappointed that I didn't think to come up with a backup plan to ensure that I wouldn't be here with nothing to do for 4 weeks, to avoid this.
 I have nothing but free time right now, and am always restless, so I spend most of my time walking. If not running.  This means I spend too much time on the sidewalks.  Here, where they are actually separated from the street by a curb (narrow side streets just have a dotted white line on one side most of the time, if anything), they're split into a wider side and a narrower one - the wide side is often painted red and marked with signs for bikes.  Everyone rides bikes here.  Everyone carts their infants/toddlers around on bikes, while text messaging...  and all the other kids ride their own bikes.  No one wears helmets (I'm mostly thinking about the kids here), no one sticks to one side or follows any kind of rule even though there are apparently some in writing somewhere, seeing as how sidewalks are clearly separated into two different sections and someone spends all the money to make them that way.  It's a free-for-all, and I guess the only reason it works is because people don't freak out here at the drop of, well, a foot.  They get in each others' way constantly because everyone is just careening around, weaving all over the place.  Any of my friends from downtown can probably imagine how psychologically draining it is for me to even just watch this kind of a shitshow, never mind wade through it.  It's also a major reason why I'm actually afraid to get a cheap bike and ride in traffic here, in addition to the whole left-side-of-the-road thing.  It will be good to get up to Sasayama and field work next month, despite the 100-degree, 85% humidity kind of weather that's coming.