Memoirs of a Gaijin

-v35- Get Lost!

2010-04-18T20:47:00.000-07:00

I've often thought about why I loved backpacking through Europe so much - the standard cliche answers are the easiest, but not necessarily the most accurate. Things like learning new language, culture, meeting people, seeing amazing things, sure, they're exciting, but now I understand don't really accurately reflect what I was feeling.

Recently, I have had to think about leaving Japan and that thought, a few years ago, would have absolutely scared the life out of me! But for some reason, lately I'm a little excited about having to choose a city to live in, a new career, a new group of people to potentially make friends with.

In Yaizu, I've really enjoyed riding my bike around aimlessly most weekends when I had nothing to do. Yaizu roads are shitty McShitterson, so I'd always get lost. However, being lost was the best thing that could happen.
Of course at first, I was so scared of not knowing where I was, and the feeling that I may never find my way back to where I was before, and having to do this all alone without companionship was initially Fu-REAKY, but when I stopped trying to use the $2 compass that always said the direction of my iPod was north, and started looking up at what was around me, I started enjoying myself a lot more.
There isn't really much in the way of Melbourne-style entertainment or excitement, but Yaizu really has shown me a different kind of beautiful, creative, and wonderful history and life.

Ugly old buildings, when you look closer, are actually amazing testaments to varied stages of the country's economic development, the long long bridges that span seemingly pointless gravel and dirt old river beds show how the country's landscape has changed due to changes in farming development. Even the mess of mosquito-breeding bamboo sings of the country's changing loyalties - the townsfolk being told to plant cedar one year by the government because it was to be the new boom export, the next year cutting all of it down to make way for bamboo, the next direction in agricultural forecasting.

The point is, sure it has been daunting, HELL daunting, being lost, when I looked up from the mess I had made of my directions and planned route, I actually experienced more around me, I enjoyed where I was even though I didn't know where that actually was, and more importantly, I didn't mind that I didn't know where I was going.

In August, all I know is that I will leave Japan, so right now, I can enjoy being lost, knowing that there are so many roads I can take, and even more new opportunities and people to meet along the way.

Until then, またね！
ロブ

-34- There's no place like home

2010-03-15T20:21:00.000-07:00

Waking up this morning to find half a house on my balcony, I was, to be
honest not entirely surprised.
It was already turning out to be one of those weeks.

As I looked for a little girl and a dog amongst the rubble, I saw that
across from my apartment there is an old house that is being torn down to
make way for the new road. Obviously the debris had not been adequately
secured in preparation for last night's freak typhoon and hence here I am
this morning throwing it over the railing into the rice field below.
Checking out the front of the apartment, I go to see if Little Grey is ok.
She seems to have survived the night with her friends, laying quite
comfortably under a couple of other locals I see. Since having her little
circumcision last week, she seems to have become more popular with the
natives because now she, like them, has no basket.

She's found her home.

"Home is where the heart is"
*confused*
My home is not in my chest, it's in a tiny, thin-walled apartment surrounded
by loud Chinese girls that like to wake up early in a little fishing village
in the middle of freaking nowhere.
Or is it?

Last weekend, my friend and I celebrated his return to the face of the
earth, after having fallen off it for a couple of months due to busy work
and poor social skills, and went to Atami and Izu.
I've been to Atami before and know that it's not the most exciting but
pretty city on the beach, so imagine my surprise when getting off the train
to see swarms of people dressed in peculiar costumes with numbers on them,
eating soup and doing stretches.
The Japanesers love a marathon. I don't understand it. They don't have to be
raising money for anything in particular, or even have a specific theme -
they just have an excuse to wear costumes and run a bloody long way. We saw
groups from various schools, clubs, and groups of friends dressed as
monkeys, Winnie the Pooh, geishas, or old ladies with rollers in their hair.
It seems that there are only very few times where they publicly get their
fun on, and it involves either extreme endurance activities or alcohol.

We walked up the hill to the supermarket to buy some yummy bits and bobs
(it's not often I get to use phrases like that here, so please indulge me),
the plan being to eat a bento lunch on the beach in the sun. It has been a
cold, wet, lonely winter, so it was a good plan I thought.
After an endurance test of our own to get up the hill, then to buy the food
and back down to the beach, we opened the plastic covers, unsheathed the
chopsticks, and said "itadakimasu" to the food, which literally means "I'm
going to take you now", and snapped the chopsticks apart, ready to partake.
And the wind suddenly blew a gale of sand.
Later that day, I was still grinding sand between my teeth. Insert joke
about shitting bricks.

In fact, the weekend can be awarded a general FAIL in the food department.
When searching the internet for a place to go for the weekend, we saw a lot
of hype about a town called "Usami" and so we decided to step off the train
on Sunday morning for a poke around, and maybe some long-awaited breakfast.
I know I haven't painted the best view of Japanese transport in general, but
that's only because I only write about the rare times when things go wrong.
Who wants to hear about when I go somewhere and nothing of note occurs?
However, on the Izu Peninsula, the trains only come about once every hour
because there is only one track, so stepping off the train is somewhat of a
commitment to a town. You know me, I don't like to commit - I stand between
the doors, scared to get on or off completely so eventually the guard has to
blow the whistle and hydraulically force me to choose one side of the heavy
metal.
Usami - let me paint a picture. Train station that is so "local" that it
doesn't even have ticket machines or wickets. A "main" street (read:
"only"), porn vending machines, yes, a pleasant surprise for weary
travellers, and a convenience store.
Breakfast was a "macaroni dog" from the konbini - I'm still not sure what
that was, and a hot can of coffee.
We sat on the beach, trying to do this again.
I was halfway through my "dog" when my friend yelled, his chocolate-melon
bread flying onto the sand in front of us, and feeling the wind from the
flapping wings of a huge bird.
He'd been swooped by a hawk. His bleeding thumb testament to this town's
general FAIL.
A group of them were now circling above us, and so I held my dog close to my
chest and we walked briskly back to the train station to wait for the "Black
Ship" to arrive.
The Black Ship is a train that is, of course, made to look like a big black
ship. The train line goes from Atami all the way down along the coast, so I
was quite impressed at the way they had engineered this beast with the seats
facing the large windows to give passengers beautiful views of the coastline
as they make their journey along the peninsular.

On the way back to the train station, we saw a man hanging out lots of
umbrellas from a tree. They weren't wet, no, no, they were just umbrellas.
Otherwise, he looked quite sane.

Disembarking the black ship in another quiet town, we set about finding our
ryokan (Japanese olden-days hotel). Walking down the hill from the station
to the beach and back up, I convinced my friend to call and ask directions.
We were actually standing right in front of it. See, the thing about this
language, is that even Japanese people still can't read a lot of different
kanji which means a lot of the time you are trying to match the email on
your phone with these hieroglyphic symbols on the signs in the street around
you. Once we were inside and checked in, however, it was time to relax and
forget all the ridiculous experiences of the day. Down the long hallway,
across the bridge, up the stairs, around the corner and down yet another
slightly freaky dark hallway, we were safe inside our room.
Japanese ryokans all have that really old, still air, the paper sliding
doors, and other secret doors that haven't been opened for 50 years -
everything that you mentally associate with Japanese horror films. So when
traversing the halls at night, you want to get into your room as soon as
possible.
A quick peruse of the "services" book, a peek in the fridge, and changing
into the yukatas (men's kimono), I realised I had to pee. I opened one of
the sliding doors - oh, that's a wardrobe. And there's another bed in there.
I opened another scary door, oh, that's a cupboard. In other news, I found a
belt.
I realised that the toilet was outside the room, back down the hallway and
around the freaky corner. Perfect. Just call me Sadakosan.

Needless to say, I didn't want to go anywhere by myself.
Izu is all about the natural hot springs and so everywhere has an onsen. We
went into the private onsen room in the hotel, dipped into the boiling hot
water and then sat on the edge for a while, trying to recover. I think the
Japanese interpretation of "private" differs from the western idea, in that,
in Australia, for example, there is no way that you would be able to pee at
a urinal, and see out the front door sideways. In Japan, however, this is
quite normal. Public toilets are not really, if any, sheltered from passing
vehicular and pedestrian traffic. Even in onsens the female cleaning staff
just wander through the sea of naked wet men, all going about their
business, and neither party even seems to be displaced by the other's
presence.
So why was I surprised when "private onsen" actually meant that people
crossing the bridge above could see right down into the pool? I also love,
that in my own predictable style, I only realised this while walking across
the bridge myself, after having already used the onsen.

We walked around the quiet little town looking for somewhere to eat dinner
and found a nice Nepalese restaurant. Random. We were the only people in
there on a Saturday night, but enjoyed the private booth and mini TV with
remote.

As much as I've observed Japanese people and their lives for the past year,
I still don't understand. It's still really hard to make friends - I only
have a couple of close friends, and they live relatively far away. We still
seem to have very different priorities in life. Every day, although feeling
more and more comfortable with the language, the social customs, and finding
my way around geographically, I still feel like an outsider. I still get
stared at on the train by teenagers who whisper and giggle, I still have
trouble converting any interaction from "No, I'm not a vegetarian, I just
don't eat seafood" to "what's your phone number?", and I still don't really
know why I came here or why I still want to stay.

The good news is that now I'm on the home stretch. I've got 5 months left to
find my next gig and be out of here. I've enjoyed the experiences, and I've
really loved learning the language, but I will be happy to go to a place
where I'm not alone every night wishing I was at least sharing a pot of tea
with someone I trusted to tell me what they really think about things.

Although the curry was delicious, the haunted hallways at night were not as
fun. 4am, get up, put your yukata on, gingerly open the door, half expecting
some crazy person with a knife to be on the other side, and run down the
hall to the toilet. Running due to a mixture of fear, and Nepalese curry.

In other news, I'm putting together a list of things I want to do in my last
months here, so I can feel like I have achieved at least something when I
leave:
1) Go to Hokkaido and see where they grow cabbages under the snow
2) Enter a marathon, dressed as a big prawn
3) Actually finish my assignment (ok, this one's not serious)

There's no place like home.

またね
ロブ
Lobu

v32 - a belated quickie

2010-02-28T19:33:00.001-08:00

"Sex?"
"No thanks, but do you have karaoke?"

A typical conversation you'll have with the spruikers while walking around the streets of Tokyo takes balls, and haggling power to get the best Karaoke deal. ¥1500 each for 2 hours of Karaoke and all-you-can-drink, thanks.

But I was never the one who could cut a deal like that - if I don't think I'll win at something, I'll simply not enter the competition.

I have enjoyed teaching kids, to my surprise, and have learnt a lot about how they think. They're like little adults without the social filter. If my breath smells, they'll flat out tell me. If they don't like what i'm wearing, they'll tell me. If their parents do strange things, they'll tell me.

If they don't like the game we're playing, they'll tell me, but if they realise that they won't win, they'll just stop trying. They will completely remove themselves from the game because they're scared of losing.

Just like us.

Things that made me want to smoke or eat cake this past week:
- my friend was 3 hours late for lunch on Saturday
- new expensive underwear that doesn't hold what it should
- being in social situations and realising that I have almost completely forgotten what to do and so sitting awkwardly in a darkened corner watching

Things that gave me a nice warm fuzzy feeling this week:
- finally seeing the late friend
- unexpected warm, dry, spring-like days
- seeing a Kabuki play and having the translated version whispered into my ear
- receiving valentines chocolates from a couple of my students. It's irrelevant that they are 6 and 8 years old
- starting to read "A Thousand Splendid Suns"

v33- "Anniversary" is just a nice word for "cycle"

2010-02-28T19:29:00.000-08:00

Holding my laptop over my balcony like Michael Jackson and one of his creepily named children, a surprising quantity of orange juice kept dripping out like the blood of a beloved. I carried the lifeless child into the bathroom for resuscitation. It was at this moment that I was glad I sometimes indulged in drunken grocery shopping and was in the possession of a $15 “You’ll Love Coles” hairdryer.
I held my breath, not sure if she was going to make it. She rattled a little, made a grinding noise, and then spoke to me. I saw light, I heard speech. She was alive! I loved my macbook pro, like a daughter.
Unfortunately, it was 8 months later that she spoke her last word and went to sleep forever. When I receive the letter from the coroner, I was immobilised sick from the guilt. It stated clearly: “Cause of death – ORANGE JUICE”.
It was all an odd chain of events – I don’t usually drink orange juice. I don’t like how it makes me feel, I don’t like that first nervous sip where you don’t know if it’s going to be too sour and make your facial muscles look like they’re trying to escape, and I don’t like that feeling in your stomach when the hit of raw sugar attacks your insulin balance and you suddenly realise how much curry was too much.
I had successfully avoided orange juice until this week, partly because of the pre-existing paranoia about what it does to my body, but also because I had blamed it for the loss of my first love.
This week, my friend had come to stay with me in the little fishing village, and he, as it turns out, quite likes orange juice.
Maybe it’s easier the second time around, but I feel a little less upset this time, as I’m looking at replacement keyboards on the internet. I can’t promise that I won’t do it a third, maybe even fourth time. It seems that no matter where I am in the world, the same cycles repeat themselves. Life is too much like shampoo - "Lather, rinse, repeat".

When it’s raining, sometimes it’s difficult to go to work. The rain is bucketing down, usually as a nice surprise outside the confines of the gaijin palace, half way through the day, just as I’m showering before work. As the gaijin palace actually has no windows, it’s usually difficult to foretell when my crystal ball is in the shop. Ignorantly, I open the front door and instinctively squint as my pupils routinely dilate at the sight of the bright, outside farming world that surrounds, and I get a nice surprise as it is not as bright as I expected. Not such a nice surprise, however, when I have to go back inside, take my shoes off again, get an umbrella, assuming it hasn’t been stolen again, put my shoes back on, and then walk to work. Sometimes I even attempt to ride the little grey demonic-basket-powered bicycle with the wobbly wheel while holding the umbrella in one hand, trying to stay upright, change gears and steer with the other. I swear all of the Japanese winds enter via Yaizu - but not just anywhere in the city of Yaizu - I’m meteorologically certain that every breeze, gust, gale, and typhoon takes my street on its way from the butterfly’s wings to the destination where it causes its effect.
The result, is a slapstick journey of inside-out umbrella, now simply a mess of twisted metal and punctured plastic, countless near-misses with poles, cars, and rice paddies, and the stroke-victim basket of which half hangs lifeless down over the wheel. When I go over a bump, the basket touches the wheel and is thrown forward, then springs back up and back down to make another visit with the wheel.
I do my work, and repeat the cycle again.

It was exactly 1 year today that I first met my boss at a train station, unaware of what was to come next. This morning, as I again met my boss at a train station, I this time stood before her, a year older, weighing less, a bit balder, a bit more experienced in my current field but nonetheless still shitting my pants. I knew that today's seminar at least would be a relatively painless affair, aside from forced awkward ice-breakers, group activities and fake laughing at dad-style jokes by the presenters. The truth is that today, a year later, I'm back to the start of the cycle again - I have no idea what I'm doing next and it scares the sushi out of me.
I hate the research, decision-making, and preparation process. When it comes down to it, I am a creature of habit and just want to be comfortably into my next cycle. Rinsing, repeating.
Even with my orange juice friend this week, together, we were quite comfortable in the daily cycle. It was nice to come home to dinner and a clean house. I think I want to get married after all. I'll post an add for myself:
"One large size gaijin. Once used, small stain, sold as is without box."

In other news, I think I have recently met my emotional double - absolutely dismissive, abrasive and opinionated. I can't get enough. I'm almost magnetically drawn to the bright mirror image of my own self-destruction. It's uncanny. Except he's taller with better hair.

Still, dinner with my Japanese twin was a nice way to end an otherwise frustrating afternoon:

The plan was to leave the seminar at 4pm to catch the 3 hours of trains back to the fishing village, with plenty of time to spare for the last bus back to the gaijin palace at 8pm.
I left the seminar about 5 minutes late, which is no big deal, I just had to catch the next set of trains and be home a little later than expected.
The problem was that after the first of 3 legs of the journey, there was a Tsunami.

No no, really, there was a HUGE 30cm tsunami today, and hence some parts of the Japan Rail™ network came to a grinding halt for 2 hours for safety reasons. This was frustrating, not just because for once there had actually NOT been an earthquake in Japan this weekend, but because with only 30cm there was, in my opinion, certainly no danger of getting your feet wet.
The result was that the local trains had stopped running, but the exorbitantly over-priced Shinkansen was still flying around the elevated tracks, of course, for a premium price tag. I was determined this weekend not to turn what was essentially, a self-funded work trip, into a huge financial burden so decided to take the most minimal route possible over the "tsunami zone" by Shinkansen and then join pleb rail at Hamamatsu. I had decided there was still enough time in the changeover to have a quick drink with my friend. After waiting around for the train and lining up for "disaster relief ticketing", the Shinkansen journey took only 20 minutes so I was well back on track to make my bus home.

There is one problem I find with regional Japanese train stations, and sometimes it can be completely disarming and unconquerably disorientating - some stations look EXACTLY the same. Having been built/refurbed at the same time, by the same government-allocated contractor, sometimes I just can't remember where I am. Having had a nice beer with a friend, and being totally engrossed in my book (I finished and loved "A Thousand Splendid Suns" and wanted to go back to the first one "The Kite Runner" which I also can't put down), I got on the train ready for my last leg to Yaizu. Without thinking though, I had just fallen back into my usual cycle and got off at the third station.

Unfortunately, I was still 40minutes from my home station. Running back towards the train as the doors were closing, I saw the confused looks of the other passengers as I shouted "NOOOOOOO".
This was more confusing than amusing for them I suppose as I had just gotten off that train, and I was yelling in a foreign language at a big metal tube that was already moving away from me.

This, is when the second tsunami warning was issued. The rail network again grinds to a halt. Rinse, repeat. But this time there is no way I'm going to get that bus.
I waited at a station, the name of which I'm still not actually sure of, for almost another hour before deciding to just throw myself on the tracks. Lucky for me, there pulled up another metal tube to take me and my book to Shizuoka.

You'd think I would have had enough for one day, right?
So, when my friend and I try to order dinner at a restaurant tonight, they announce that they have run out of rice.
Are you, like freaking kidding? Am I in Japan, or did I get on the wrong train and end up in Sudan?

I'm going to change my add:
"One tired and well-travelled gaijin, does NOT like long walks on the beach, or any other kind of unplanned lengthy travel experience."

I'm going to cycle everywhere from now on - at least it's predictable.

またね
ロブ

v31- Things just come apart sometimes

2010-02-01T01:34:00.000-08:00

Sometimes it's better to have loved and to have lost, than to have never loved at all.

Piss off.

Losing things hurts like hell sometimes. Even if it's just the possibility of having something that you lose, you still feel grief for it and you just want to eat a big hamburger.

However, on Saturday, we didn't grieve for the steam engine. We laughed. And laughed. And took pictures.

It was a beautiful sunny Japanese winter Saturday morning and my friend and I were up early, ready for the day's adventures. The plan was simple: drive to the train station, catch the old-school steam locomotive north into the mountains to a nice onsen, have a soak, some lunch, take in some crisp mountain air, and then steam train back south again.
We got in the car and were both ashamed to admit that we wanted McDonalds for breakfast, but it eventuated nicely. I enjoyed a McSalad muffin and we were set.
In true Japanese style, we paid the man for the car park first and separately, in cash out the window, were directed to a specific spot, told when to reverse, when to stop, when to straighten, and when to stop again; went inside the station to the big customer service and ticketing counter where we were told to get the train tickets from the other counter, inside the other building, and got one-way tickets because we are only able to buy the return tickets from the counter at the other end of the line, up in the mountains. At first, this kind of thing was endearing, but after being here for a year now, it just frustrates me and gets me in a bad mood very quickly. It's like this, because Japanese people are generally too polite to complain, so it's not seen as inconvenient, and so it stays like this. Forever.
All general day-to-day processes are like this - from the "express self service" checkout which still requires the staff member to come over and verify your purchases, put branded sticky tape on your items because you didn't use the plastic shopping bag (and got a ¥2 discount for not doing so), before you go over to the packing table and just take a plastic shopping bag; to the complex and distressing government processes for doing anything, such as the health insurance incident, of which I no longer wish to speak because it still upsets me. Let's just say, after 3 weeks, I was going around in circles and just gave up. Sometimes Japan is just like a phone call to Telstra on a distressingly larger scale.

Now with one-way tickets secured, we excitedly charge past the man with the old-fashioned ticket crimper to walk across the train tracks to the platform and wait for the steamer to arrive. We were very excited to hop aboard the piece of engineering achievement, and marvelled that it was so old yet structurally sound, despite being mostly wooden.

We chugged away from the station and it was all very exciting - the interior was beautiful, and the view out the window was even better - loads of green tea fields, vibrantly green in the sunlight. Even the acceleration was slow and nostalgic.

As we left the station, there was an announcement over the loudspeaker - although not as old as the structure itself, the PA system was definitely built in the age where the term "HI FI" applied to Deep Purple's new vinyl LP. I could understand a lot of the announcement and it seemed to be mostly greetings, the plan for the journey, what we would see on both left and right sides of the train, what was for sale…. and then we heard music. Not Deep Purple as I was expecting, but more Japanese almost world war 2 sounding gramophone classic, you know. To the other passengers this just seemed normal and expected, but to my friend and I, this was a bit random. This wasn't a recording - it was the announcement lady singing the Japanese Train Song for us over the PA system! A lot of words in Japanese are onomatopoeic, that is, they are just sound words - like choo choo train, woof woof, meow, cluck cluck, grumble, squeak etc. So I wasn't surprised that the chorus of the song was "Shoo shoo po po shoo shoo po po" - of course that's the sound a steam train makes, right?
(See facebook video for this song or )

You may remember from a previous blog, number 19, that there is an onsen that I have been to before where twice a day, a steam train passes over the bridge nearby and all the naked men stand up and wave over the VERY low fence to the passengers on the train. This is in fact, a standard attraction in itself - the train timetable posted next to one of the baths.

So after the song, the 30 minute announcement was finally over and we were enjoying the relaxed scenic views, and then came the view on the right. We were on that steam train.
Although laughing hysterically at the bunch of naked men standing and waving over a VERY short fence at us only about 100 meters away was definitely not the highlight of this trip: the best was soon to come.

Not too far after that bridge, there was a bit of a jolt, and we came to a screeching stop. Being Japan, and in the mountains, we thought there was just an old lady wheeling her barrow of green tea across the tracks or a tree fallen (and nobody was around to hear it, so of course it didn't make a sound). We went to the end of the carriage opened the door to poke out heads out and just saw a hundred Japanese heads poking out the windows, looking back at us. When we saw the driver running back down along the tracks we twigged something wasn't quite right.

We sat back down for a little while, trying to avoid the constant stream of kids wanting to talk to the gaijin - I mean sure one is cute, but after 25 minutes of "Hello how are you, I like oranges" or other completely inane and uselessly isolated English phrases, which is what they are taught at school (of course that's only going to be useful if their one life ambition is to work in a carnival kissing booth, or as a professional grocery shopper), it gets a little dry.

I tried to escape by going up to the front end of the train to see what the deal was, pushing past these kids which, by now, had become more a swarm for which I should have worn protective clothing, and wasn't surprised to see the adults had also swarmed at the front window, looking forward at the 50meters of track ahead of us.

Wait, where had the steam engine gone?

We were in the front of the first of five carriages and could now see the steam engine stopped, some distance ahead of us. Hysterically laughing, we went back to our seats for about another hour with only the camera, the children and 2 bottles of green tea to entertain us. (See facebook pics)

Eventually they decided that there was no reattaching the engine to the carriages, and we all jumped off the train, in the middle of the tea fields, and walked down the hill to wait for a bus that would either take us up the mountains to the end of the line, or back from whence we came. We had decided to go back to the first station and drive back to the onsen and maybe wave at the train when it was fixed.

I know I've spoken about onsens a lot before, but I wish to review the concept for you, because for me, it has just become quite normal, but to friends that have visited me in Japan, it seems a little strange to them.
The idea is simple - you relax in a hot bath.
The details however, are the bits that make this both amazing and quirky all at the same time. The idea comes from the olden days when, to wash, you would go down to your local community hot spring, or man-made bath house and share the experience with the rest of the town. Over time it became quite a social outing where you could relax and talk to people etc. With the age of commercialisation, now you can also buy souvenirs, have a meal, or play arcade games. The thing is, sure, it's fun to be social, but it's hard to be social when you're naked. I mean, it's generally NOT ok to start a conversation at a urinal, so why is it ok to start talking about life, love and other mysteries when you're the under 30 meat in the old pale man sandwich? It also surprises me how many younger boys are hanging out with their mates, naked, just splashing around and having a chat. I mean, in Australia, if you overheard this conversation while on a train, what would you say?

"Yeah Macka, it's me. Saw you last night with that chick… yeah I know, totes… hey watcha doin tonight? You can tell me all about her while we're naked in the bath together."

At least the old men are friendly sure, but it's uncomfortable. It's also uncomfortable with the children running around, splashing you, and sometimes slipping and landing on you. You just don't know where to look sometimes. I suppose that's when it's handy to have a steam train to focus your eyes on.

Something I have also gotten used to is being stared at. And not just at the Onsen, but when I'm clothed too - at the supermarket, on the street, while standing in the middle of the road doing rag-time dancing…
Yesterday I was in Shizuoka meeting a friend for lunch and one girl behind me was telling her boyfriend to look at my shoes, and they were both staring. I was in a foul mood, actually I don't think it's accurate to call it a mood when it has been since December, but I was unhappy with constantly being a tourist attraction. Maybe I was still annoyed at the children the day before wanting to tell me they were into fruit and vegetables while I was just trying to relax and enjoy the shoo shoo po po of the little engine that couldn't, as it turned out, but out of my mouth came words that I didn't even know that I knew. I told them they made me feel bad, which, to Japanese people, is quite insulting because of their cultural need to please everyone. It's like telling someone they're being rude and insulting.

Although sometimes it's completely ok to stare, I understand that I'm not the regular Japanese day to day sight - taller than most people in my little fishing village, a damn sight cleaner, and usually doing something worth peeking at. I've been here a year to date and have not once seen a gaijin riding a little grey girl's bicycle with a basket on the front and a wobbly wheel. Recently, she's been a bit sick. Her rusty basket has broken in half and the left half sags well below the usable standard. When I ride around, it bounces up and down, catches the front wheel and is thrown forward where then the metal of the basket bounces it back up, and then down onto the wheel.
Add to this, the fact that I need to ride her to get my groceries, so I usually have a backpack full of rice, a plastic bag hanging off each handle bar, and a bag that I'm not actually able to now put IN the basket, so I have to place it gently on the stable right side of the basket and affix the plastic handles around the bell, and gear levers.
I do understand people staring at a bicycle that looks like it is being powered by a demonic basket and constantly changes its own gears.

They could at least help me out, right?
There was a time when I loved everything about this crazy country, and could laugh at everything that happened, and I also can identify exactly when that changed. It was the day my umbrella was stolen. You may remember this story from almost a year ago.
So, I refuse to buy another good umbrella so I've been using a piece of rubbish mess of twisted metal and punctured plastic. Well, that's what it is now after walking to work in the wind and rain today.

Rainy days and Mondays always got Karen Carpenter down, and today was the same for me. Except I actually ate. At least I had a reason to be sad today.
My announcement, which I was hoping to make this week, will now be retracted, but here is the gossip: I was offered what looked like an awesome job in England, and was preparing to leave within 6 weeks, but that is no longer going to happen.

A beautiful old steam train, a rusty basket, a cheap umbrella, or what was perceived as an awesome job opportunity - sometimes things just come apart. You have to adapt, but you still grieve, even just a little.

I'm going to eat a hamburger tonight to make myself feel better. I hope it doesn't also come apart.

This one's for you Karen.

Still in Japan,

ロブ
Lobu

-v30- I want to be a western country when I grow up.

2010-01-15T23:28:00.000-08:00

What do you want to be when you grow up?

Fireman? Doctor? Actor? Artist? Vet? Builder? Centrelink-dependent-abusive-alcoholic? Bert Newton's set dresser?

I used to hate this question when I was younger. I had absolutely no idea. Even when I finished school, and later moved down to the big smoke, I still hadn't heard of any particular profession that appealed to me in a way that seemed worth studying and working so hard towards it.

Your parents always used to say you could do anything, you could be anything you wanted to.
Mine had the foresight to add "…except be a professional sports star". Back then, the world hadn't heard of Tiger Woods.

The older I got, the more I thought it was ok not to have a clue what to be when I grew up.
I'd never been very good at making decisions.

One time when I was very young, I was out shopping with my grandmother. She asked me if I wanted chips, or a donut. I said chips, so she bought me chips. I changed my mind and wanted a donut. She bought me a donut.
I changed my mind again and said I didn't want either of them.
She ate them both in front of me.

Enter stage right - Japan, the country that doesn't know what it wants to be when it grows up.

For so long, Japan had been a country closed to trade with other countries - not just with tangible commodities, but intangible like culture and language. Japan was the geeky polite, sheltered smart kid, that studied so hard at school, didn't really have any friends, and didn't know what was going on out in the playground. Now, Japan has grown up, earned some real money, and started playing with the popular kids. Everywhere you go, you can see a stark contrast between the old cultural foundations (bowing, polite language, polite dress for certain occupations etc) and the new western culture (big fuck-off advertising, flashing lights, English-language fashion, food, etc). Japanese students have to study at least 6 years of English, but are not required to use the language in anyway. Buildings are beautifully old and with hand-carved sculptures etc, but right next to big-arse glass skyscrapers.

It doesn't know if it wants the chips or the donut.

East or West, Japan? What's it to be?

Last week I was in the 100yen shop (too bloody right!) and on the PA system they were playing Lilly Alan - "Fuck you, fuck you very very much…". The shoppers were perusing the products on offer, having a little personal bop to the fun music, obviously having no idea what the words were.
I guess it's the same as those idiots who get Chinese or Japanese characters tattooed on themselves without really checking what they mean.

Maybe that's a job idea for this lost little boy? Professional Tattoo Checker, at your service.

But for now, what the hell am I doing? I'm cold, alone, and getting further and further into debt.
For every day I spend here, I'm losing valuable work skills from my previous job, and still finishing a diploma in something that I don't actually plan to continue when I go back to Australia as it was only ever meant to be just a time-out.

I've done my navel-gazing alone at the top of the mountain, so now it's time to start thinking about how I'm going to get down.

Now I finally have worked out the answer, at least.

What do you want to be when you grow up?

Wiser.

ロブ
(Lobu)

Yeah this is the post-modern folklore you come here for.
Follow me: (not in a stalker way, thanks)
http://robu-gaijin.blogspot.com/

v29- A short and curly tail, just like the little piggy I ate for Christmas.

2010-01-05T18:26:00.000-08:00

The most brilliant part of the fireworks was when one exploded prematurely on the ground and lit up the whole city behind the huge ferris wheel. Yokohama is a pretty place to spend New Years, even if you are a firework technician now sporting only one arm and limited hearing.

Ice skating, riding a roller coaster, singing the Power Rangers theme song at karaoke, drinking tequila chai from the most charismatic of street vendors and us three boys riding in a pedal-powered rickshaw are certainly the highlights of my most recent expedition. Following closely are a hair-pin bend bus ride of death down a snowy mountainside, snow ball fights, and gorging myself on all things yuba (delicious tofu skin).

Lowlights include (but are not limited to) sharing beds with twitchers, paying to see the tomb of a cat, lining up in 4 degree conditions for 45 minutes, and Clint's suitcase handle breaking only 20 minutes into a week of dragging it around Tokyo.

Fun was had by all.

In Nikko, a beautiful little town high in the mountainside, where we saw snow, ice, cold people, and Ainu (Japanese northern indigenous peoples), there is a huge, very famous temple and shrine built by emperor blah blah. Inside this mammoth, almost theme-park-like traditional offering, there is the world-famous wooden carved monkeys - hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil. To me, this is an obvious statement about how small-town Japan lives. I've written a lot on this subject previously, so no need to revisit now, in this, festive recollection, right?

At home with a friend for Christmas, then Kawagoe, Nikko, Tokyo, Yokohama, and back to Yaizu.
I had a wonderful time, ate a lot of new foods, met some crazy new people, DID NOT SMOKE ONE CIGARETTE, ice skated, roller-coastered, shared a hostel room with a crazy grunting fat bloke, navigated Tokyo's intricate rail network successfully, and came home all in one piece.

Just to be beaten up by my first class on Monday.

It's great to be back.

Peace, love, and looking for work for later this year in Melbourne,

ロブ　(Rob)

Pics here:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=134572&id=642203440&l=e4aee9440a and
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=134580&id=642203440&l=c3300d92a1

Memoirs of a Gaijin - v28- Life's a beach, and then you read your emails.

2009-12-14T18:49:00.000-08:00

Trust me, it's Paradise - this is where the hungry come to feed.
For mine is a generation that circles the globe, in search of something we haven't tried before.
So never refuse an invitation, never resist the unfamiliar, never fail to be polite, and never outstay your welcome.
Just keep your mind open and suck in the experience - and if it hurts, you know what... it's probably worth it.
You hope, and you dream, but you never believe that something is going to happen for you - not like it does in the movies.
When it actually does, you expect it to feel different - more visceral, more real. I was waiting for it to hit me.

I still believe in paradise, but now at least I know it's not some place you can look for - 'cause it's not where you go, it's how you feel for a moment in your life.

And if you find that moment it lasts forever.

Well, that's what Leonardo DiCaprio said after leaving the island, not too long after that other stupid girl with the heavy necklace let him freeze in the ocean (a selfish act of titanic proportions). I'm sure he could have been caught, even when forging all those cheques.

I only ever watched "The Beach" once, and was scared to do it again.
Throughout the whole movie I was a crazy, sick-to-the-stomach-anxious mix of unexplainable emotion, and never could really work out why.
It was when I saw the last scene, in which DiCaprio checks his email and has one from his mother titled "Where are you?" that I broke and started sobbing uncontrollably. It was at that moment, that I craved travel. Anywhere, everywhere, yet nowhere, because I was too scared to start, knowing I'd never want to come back and lead a regular daily life.

I would have been about 22 years old, living in Melbourne for only a couple of years, away from all of my family and old friends in the small country town where I'd spent my formative years. I don't regret anything - was one of the best things I had done in my life - but at 22 years old, there were only pretty slim pickings for that title. Having said that, I don't doubt Kanye would have taken the microphone off me to shout about someone else's achievement.

On the weekend, I was shopping in Shizuoka city by myself. I had wandered the shops for hours, up and down streets, in an out of various department stores and up and down more escalators than i care to remember.
I completely felt like an alien. Not just that my hair, skin and eyes starkly contrasted the locals', but as I passed a mirror, I realised that my clothes were also of a completely different style, colour, shape and of course, size. It was intimidating to go into some shops not just simply because the offerings were poles apart from what I have in my wardrobe, but because they all wanted to tell me things that I couldn't understand. I have never in my whole life, while surrounded by masses of people, felt so alone.

Or had I?
I walked further down the street and one of the songs from "The Beach" started playing on my iPod (lyrics above).
Those same feelings came back- but they made sense this time.
I had felt that feeling before! In fact every day in Melbourne - every time I went shopping on Chapel Street, or met new people who seemed to quite comfortably live beyond my own means, understand/afford fashion, or fit in with some kind of crowd. Every time I left my apartment I had felt like a stranger in my own beloved city. I felt like I didn't understand anyone, that they didn't understand me, that I didn't belong anywhere. Even at my favourite bars, cafes, friend's houses, or the beach, I felt out of place.
Upon reflection, maybe that made it easier to leave, and even now, makes it so much easier not to run back.

I got on the bus to come home yesterday afternoon and realised I couldn't go anywhere because I didn't have change.

You don't always need change, but it certainly helps.

"For mine is a generation that circles the globe, in search of something we haven't tried before… I still believe in paradise, but now at least I know it's not some place you can look for."

Obtuse, navel-gazing drivel is what you come here for.
http://robu-gaijin.blogspot.com/

v27 - 50 cent Haircuts

2009-12-07T18:51:00.000-08:00

Memoirs of a Gaijin - v27- 50 cent haircuts.

As I sit at my desk at 10AM, eating a packet of chips for breakfast and trying not to think about smoking, I'm thinking about facebook and 50 cent.

On facebook I have almost 500 friends. That's almost 500 different connections. Almost 500 people with not a lot in common, all writing different information on their profiles, living in a variety of cities, and more importantly, living different lives.
So why then, does facebook keep suggesting I be friends with random people, who I have no friends, interests, or past associations in common with, or that I become a fan of 50 cent?
When have I ever decided that I would, in fact, have a baby by him and be a millionaire?

That's not altogether a bad thought though, then I could pay to import my own sausages. You know how hard it is to make a simple Aussie bangers and mash, when you can't actually buy sausages in this country?? I mean, they have little disappointing twiggies, but no real big chunky, juicy long and thick sausages. I drool at the thought.

So then, what am I to cook for my Christmas eve dinner? I have a friend coming to join me for Christmas and all I can think of so far is ham, salads, and some really dirty punch with a can of mixed fruit thrown in.
What else did we have for traditional Christmas lunch in Australia, apart from conversations about politics, religion, yelling at the kids not to slam the door, get your nanna some ice for her cough please, dad stop taking your teeth out, go play outside, but not near number 43 because he's on a national list…
God, the horror.

I'm glad that as an adult away from everything, I get to do Christmas my way.

2 minute noodles and a few beers in front of a season of Scrubs.

At least I will have pretty hair for it.

The Australian hair cut is a simple process - you go into a salon and endure the surly girl at the front desk, sit on a chair while you wait for another chair to be "ready", where then the girl or really old camp man asks you the same questions they did last time. They then move you to another chair to blow water in your ears and pull your hair out with a towel as they talk to each other and not watch as they stick the towel in your mouth, directing you back to a previously warmed char that they will pump up and down with their foot, making you wish you'd gone for a wee beforehand. It is then they will ask you more questions about your life, that they already know the answers to from last time, cut one side shorter than the other and play catch-up for another 20 minutes leaving you looking like a shawn sheep, charging you 2 cherries for the privilege. (Do people still refer to Australian money as fruit?)

Baaaaaa.

(Alternatively, you can try Kaotic Hair and Beauty in Prahran for a better experience).

As much as I love the Parevski sisters at Kaotic, partly because they're friends of mine, but mostly because that name sounds like a piano accordion duet, they're still not a patch on the Japanese hairdresser experience:

You enter the large, open and bright salon to be greeted simultaneously by ALL of the staff, bowing and saying "Irasshaimasse" - which means, welcome, come in etc. The front desk is a cafe table at which they bring you a hot towel and a cup of green tea, various magazines, and a "menu", which is bad Japanese for price list.
Your "personal stylist" comes and discusses your requirements, meaning they ask you to point to a picture in the magazine that they will replicate. Your personal belongings are then taken away, and anything you wish to keep (e.g. wallet, mobile phone etc) is brought back to you in a plastic, hair-proof zipped case.
You are directed to your chair in centre stage which they rotate for ease of entry, apply a lap-blanket, neck-towel, and something I've never seen in Australia before - a plastic coat with arm holes so you can continue to read the beauty/fashion/sport/car/manga material provided.
Your hair is assessed, cut with amazing swift precision, and you don't even feel a thing!
Next stop is the automatic hair washing machine. Your chair electronically lowers you back into the sink, a piece of cotton cloth is put over your face to help you relax, and the glass lid is closed on your forehead. Then you experience what can only be described as little spa fairies massaging your head, and leaking down your neck.
After you emerge from the machine, you are seated back in your chair, with your nanna blanket, your assortment of reading material, and your plastic purse of sacred belongings and you get a massage. That's right, the woman or confusingly effeminate man with the scissors also then hits you a bit, and it's the best feeling ever.

Your hair is scrupulously dried and styled, according to your chosen manga character, and then your blanket is removed, all for considerably less than the Australian massacre.

I love everything about this country!
Actually, that's a lie - I hate the ignorance and blind faith in the government which still to this day, produces propaganda and teaches children in school that there were never wars, twists statistics and quashes sex education so people think there's no such thing as HIV or other STIs, and that only having sex with a gaijin or a pig is dangerous, for fear of contracting yet another new type of influenza.

But enough about that, and back to the Japanese service. (Um…. err… ok)

Last weekend was wonderful. Yukata (boys kimono), sake (hiccup), outside onsen (get naked with your friends outside, in public, and that's totally normal), and trying various types of wasabi alcohol at 9:30AM (hiccup again). The ryokan (traditional Japanese hotel) was SOOOO amazing, and so huge that a car had to drive us up to our room. Facebook has some pics which should give you just some idea of how amazing this place was, and also suggest you be friends with some random person you've never met before.

Only one small hiccup amongst the other more pleasant hiccups, was that I had travelled for a while by train to get closer to spa country, and as soon as I got into a taxi at the train station, my jeans ripped completely from the crotch to the outside of my thigh. This means that you could completely see my (blue? no, black? no..) bright freaking yellow underwear, and my goose-bumped shivering upper thigh and inside leg underneath. It's only winter, afterall.
So, a quick mercy dash into Uniqlo to buy some pants and we were back on our holiday!

The next stop was inside the "S-Pulse Dream Plaza" - a shopping centre full of amusement and restaurants.
We found a virtual reality roller-coaster and threw some yen in the slot, settling into our seats, facing the open plan shopping centre, with only a pair of virtual reality goggles pulled down from the top to hide my big gaijin eyes. After a few minutes on the roller coaster, which was at times quite thrilling and scary, the game stopped and we removed the goggles to be reminded that we were actually still in the middle of a shopping centre, laughing and screaming as entertainment for the other shoppers. It was time to discreetly dismount.

Seeing autumn leaves with such vibrant colour, Mt Fuji all covered with snow which makes it look just like a nice big ice-cream, and having a really nice foot spa atop a beautiful mountain accessed by only cable car when it's only 10 degrees celsius - I know I'm in Japan.

I complain, and sometimes I get bored, but I would never want to be the millionaire mother of 50 cent's child instead.

I'm quite happy where I am, with only 50 yen, thanks.

またね
ロブ

( Feel like you've missed a little something? You can read it all and/or subscribe here: http://robu-gaijin.blogspot.com/ )

v26- If life were a movie…

2009-11-15T21:43:00.000-08:00

It would be easy to stop smoking.

It’s been a month. A long, gruelling month. There is still not enough sweet food in the world to compensate for not smoking.
Having said that, I am amazed at how quickly I get things done both around the apartment and at work. It’s also much more convenient to travel a little bit lighter. Although I do miss looking like a 70’s bogan with a deck up the sleeve of my chesty bonds.
Who am I kidding, I never did that.
I sometimes get so frustrated sometimes that I’m living in a foreign country – a once in a life time opportunity, that most people don’t actually do – and I feel like I’m not really achieving anything.

I’d just need a montage to get things done.

I mean, sure, I’m learning another language, and trying it out every day on poor local shop-staff and those students of mine who are too polite to decline a coffee invitation after a class. Sure, I’ve learnt to cook a completely different kind of food, live in a different style of accommodation where my bed, bathroom, kitchen and balcony are within a 3 meter radius of my television, and entertain myself without needing people around me all the time.
But... I’m still finishing an assignment that I started 3 months ago, I haven’t finished a document I promised someone a long time ago, and let’s face it, I wouldn’t be studying Japanese if I didn’t keep getting harassing emails from my Japanese teacher. Meanwhile, I have a folder in my email just for her... current count – 36 unread items.

I’d have a fire, snow would be pretty, and I’d wear a knitted jumper.

“What are you doing for Christmas?” I heard this question a lot this time of year in Australia, but as Christmas is not celebrated here at all (not even a holiday), I haven’t really given too much thought to what I’d be doing.
For the past however many years I would just assume that I would be working Christmas day, as that’s just what we did in that place, so this year, I’m a little scared of being alone, but at the same time really looking forward to having my own chance to ignore it.

Maybe I should just go on an all-day-train-station-tour to hear the different peppy little jingles at each station. What? You didn’t know? Yes, each station has its own cute little song they play before the train leaves.
(For further study, see YouTube)
I just hope by Christmas I can actually HEAR the jingles!

I’d be wearing restraints, have my Achilles tendon severed and be screaming for help.

I went back to the nazi ear doctor on Friday and she charged me another shed load of money just to tell my boss, who was translating for me, that my hearing will be ok in a few weeks. The most memorable parts of my little excursion to see her again involve her telling me I had a small head (um, thanks), and aggressively moving my head around so she can look in each ear repeatedly. The excitement reminded me of the time I was sitting in a chair in the dental hospital in Melbourne with a crazy Russian lady with a huge pair of long-nose pliers trying to pull out a tooth, but only managing to painfully drag my head around in circles, and side to side. I can just imagine that I would have been wearing restraints, and she would have paid a lot of money in an eastern European country to perform this procedure on an unwitting backpacker. (Further study – any of the Hostel movies)

I’d have a meet-cute with Scarlett Johansson.

Every day little things just really surprise me about how strange and different this place really is.
On Saturday I went to a lolly shop. I was surprised at the completely alien assortment of chocolate covered bread, kid-sized brie portions, “Moroccan Yoghurt” (fake cream in a pot), candy in pop-out drug foil trays, cured meat, coke-flavoured poo, and teriyaki flavoured corn logs.

The most annoying character would get killed off first.

Last week I watched Friday 13th (the newer version) and was really happy that they had preserved the original cheese, bad acting, and poor effects. I also love that in movies of this genre, bad house guests always get killed off before any of the lovable characters. In fact, the most lovable ones always beat the monster, killer, whatever, and survive for the sequel. Life just isn’t like that though, the annoying ones hang around and you have to deal with them every day at work, in class, or just next door. On the flipside, the lovable ones move away, or get boy/girlfriends and you seem to lose touch. Either way, nobody likes a bad house guest who totally disrespects your home, is unappreciative and leaves a mess - and sometimes you just wish that a sick half-monster, half serial killer would show up and start scooping out their brains with a spoon, right? Or maybe that’s just me.
In my movie, sure I get angry, but I don’t kill anyone and in fact look forward to seeing them again, for some reason.

The school performance would have problems, but nobody notices.

I was stressed for the last couple of months writing, teaching, practising and making props for my children’s school performance. Yesterday was a really long day, and not everything went to plan, in fact, I teach about 70 kids, and only around 20 actually attended THEIR OWN PERFORMANCE. Don’t misunderstand this – that was the saving grace, because it was only the good ones who actually care came, so it was much better than I expected and maybe I’ll sleep at night now.

There would be a happy ending.

…But I’m glad life isn’t like a movie. I’m much happier with things the way they are.
Living, loving, learning and eating coke-flavoured poo.

またね
ロブ

v25- You’re so boring you made my ears bleed.

2009-11-01T21:25:00.000-08:00

Memoirs of a deaf Gaijin –v25- You’re so boring you made my ears bleed.

As this is my 25th blog, I’d like to take a moment to thank you all for reading, and do a clip-show, or montage, or something equally as sit-com. However, I can’t. So I will inflict another ridiculous string of incoherent events upon you.

So, well into week 2 of being almost completely deaf, I’m a bit bored. I can’t really listen to music, and it’s pretty difficult to watch TV or movies. Having said that, I did, (against wise advice) watch a Japanese Celebrity Karaoke competition on “Terebi” (TV) the other evening. For the uninitiated (as most of the contestants seemed to be), this is a 5 hour marathon where the D-list celebrities are duelled against each other with a panel of C-list judges handing out polite and completely insincere congratulations.

I’m kind of glad I couldn’t hear much of it – the visuals of overacted karaoke love were enough to send me to sleep on the futon.

On Saturday, I was invited to judge a Halloween English speech contest. Yes, you heard me right, I’m the deaf one, not you- a Halloween English Speech contest.
This little gem was a favour to one of my students, who works at an English school. Their school, every year, has a “Speech Contest”, which is code for 4 hours of your life that you’ll never get back, disguised with cute little Halloween costumes and each child giving a 1 minute presentation that was written by one of the English teachers in a ridiculously inappropriate “English accent”. I’m not saying that the “fashion parade” where I saw 50 little girls dressed up as princesses, 20 as witches, and 3 Pokemon boys wasn’t a good day out, just that I would rather have indulged in such token Gaijin jobs when I could hear what’s going on.

On Sunday morning, I woke up with a bleeding eardrum. I’m not certain whether it was the karaoke, or the Halloween speeches, but the next couple of hours were spent attending a Sunday-only ear clinic that charged me 7000 yen to stick a bit of cotton wool in my ear, and then a mercy dash to McDonalds for a sample of everything on their menu to cheer me up. It’s not that blood upsets me, in fact I quite enjoy watching the needles go in (such a smacko waiting to happen hey), it’s that I’ve paid around 70,000 yen so far, still feel rubbish, and can’t even hear the television.

Actually, from the look of most Japanese daytime TV shows, you wouldn’t want to hear them either. They’re usually the same bunch of people on different timeslots all doing much the same thing, just with different sets. Sounds like Australian Channel 9 right.

I do wonder if the comical situations I encounter every day here are a result of the Japanese television standard, although I’m yet to find a TV show to explain what happened recently with my boss’ mother:

It was last last week when Brett was visiting, and we decided to go to see my school. I wanted to convince Brett how much of a crazy hippie community place I worked in so we rode over to check it out. The school is on land that is also shared by my boss’ house, and his parent’s and brother’s houses, so it’s quite a common occurrence that I’ll see the family around each day as I’m moving between classrooms, or smoking, as I used to do (17 days and counting).
Brett and I went into the classrooms, looked at the teacher’s area and the bio-toilet (vomit) before venturing into the yard of my boss to check out the chickens. Not a euphemism. My boss Hiro’s mother came out and said hello and asked if I was a friend of Hiro’s. This is the woman that has seen me on that property almost every day for the past 8 months, and at regular intervals given me potatoes, jam, and other organic delights as harvested - she’s asking if I’m a friend of her son. I didn’t really know how to respond in Japanese “you crazy old lady you know who I am”, so I just stood there in stunned silence. She then told me that they were currently in Australia, to which I kind looked at her in giggling disbelief. I realised at this stage that Brett was beside me, completely unaware of what was going on, only able to understand the words “HIro” and “Australia”. I said thank you, bowed a little, and we set off on the bicycles, me explaining what (I could not yet believe) had just happened.

I was only telling a friend about this experience over skype the other night as my doorbell rang. It’s unusual for me to ever have visitors (unless they’re uninvited stalkers, but that’s a whole other blog) so I just thought it was the postman (yes, at night, the service is amazing here) or my neighbour wanting to borrow a cup of seafood or something. The crazy old lady who the previous week didn’t know who I was, had now presented me with a humidifier to help with the pneumonia.

WTF

Just one more thing to share before I go back to watching TV with the sound down on my second last day off work – if you’re a long time listener then you’ll know what a quiet little country fishing village this Yaizu place really is. So then you’ll also know what a strange idea it was to organise a gay Halloween dance party in this little fishing village. I was interested to see if anyone would attend, and if so, to check out the baby seats in the cars outside, so I went for a quick night-time ride.

Needless to say, dance party fail - I’m still the only one in the village.

v24 – What? Sorry? Please say that again? Huh?

2009-10-27T02:06:00.000-07:00

It was the best of weeks, it was the worst of weeks.

It was really nice to see a friend and travel to some very scenic and traditional places, eat some different food and spend more than my month’s salary on train travel, and it was so nice to do it all with Pneumonia.

I had been looking forward to last week for a long time. The plan was simple – my friend would leave Narita and tell me his train details, and I would try and get a seat near him and share the journey to Kyoto together. We would spend a few days in Kyoto, a day in Osaka, and then come back to enjoy the wonders of Yaizu for a couple of days before going nuts in Tokyo.

What I hadn’t planned on, however, was being awake most of the nights with a horrible fever, coughing so much the walls would rattle just like my lungs, and walking around during the days aching more than my mother when she realised I wouldn’t give her grandchildren.

Having said that, we soldiered on. As a teacher, I don’t often get the chance to holiday during a non-peak time and I wasn’t going to waste this opportunity!

A short summary of our holiday would be as such – soy, maps, and soy. In fact I’m completely surprised we didn’t have a soy map.

I knew that the Japanese were pretty clever with the bean, but I didn’t know that they had so many uses for it. In one meal alone, we had Yuba (although the description “tofu skin” doesn’t really sound so yummy, this is absolutely delicious), soy cream, sweet soy sauce, soy sauce, miso (fermented soy, again, a lot more delicious than it sounds), and tofu. This is still only about half of the things they use soy for, and they were all delicious.

Kyoto is “famous” for yuba – that is, Japanese food can be quite provincial – Japanese people travel to a certain area of the country just to try a different type of food. It makes me realise how spoilt I was in Melbourne for excellent food and selection. If I wanted something different, I merely had to travel further up the street.

Our whole trip was full of culinary delights. Well, maybe except the night we met a strange little man who took us out into the burbs to a chicken pub, that is, a little izakaya that specialied in all kinds of greasy chicken varieties. I’m not sure if I actually still had a fever that night, or whether the spirits of the chicken were haunting me from within, eager to escape.

And escape they did promptly.

Having an Australian friend here again was encouraging in that this time it was all my responsibility to read menus, directions and other information, speak to all of the necessary staff, waiters, and strangers to ask directions etc, all in Japanese. It was nice to be reminded that I’m getting more out of being here than bacterial respiratory infections, and that I will have learnt something useful by the time I move on.

We thoroughly enjoyed Kyoto and moved on to Osaka. Maybe we should have done them in the other order - I think the kanji for ‘Osaka’ means “dead and dirty”.

Coming home to Yaizu for a rest was quite pleasant, but it was on this day that my ears blocked. A week later, I still cannot hear very much in either of my ears. Not entirely a bad thing in this country, as Brett had learnt because everything beeps and talks, from escalators, to vending machines when you walk past them.

A quick half day tour was all that was needed to show the sights of Yaizu – the beach, my favourite ramen shop, Jusco, Karaoke, and the dead shopping mall.

On Thursday morning we were back on the train to Tokyo for a few days. Tokyo was agreed as my part of the trip to plan, navigate, and totally bluff my way through – and it worked!
Thursday saw some nice buildings, markets, a temple and then dinner with a friend of mine at an Okonamiyaki place where you cook it yourself on the table. Someone once asked why you pay more to cook your own meal, but I can’t remember what movie that’s from. I’m sure they didn’t try yuba.

On Thursday night, we stayed at a backpackers hostel in Tokyo and it was this night that I was reminded how much I hate tourists and am sometimes embarrassed to be one. We are so loud, culturally ignorant and rude. Although, given, not as rude as the French business men who yelled at the hotel staff in Osaka.

On the Friday we went up into Tokyo Tower, although this was our 3rd tower for the week so we were, to be honest, a little over looking out into cities we didn’t quite understand. I’ve been thinking since that day that I would love to go back to Melbourne and do the Rialto and Eureka decks again – it’s so much more interesting in a city that you know, where you can point out things and know what you’re looking at.

Maybe the experience just wasn’t as thrilling because we couldn’t read the Braille information in the observatory?

Friday night was another exciting stay at the capsule hotel. This was my third time in one of these little delights and I can tell you that the novelty never wears off. There’s just something exciting about it. In fact I’m investigating tipping my washing machine on its side and ramming a futon in there to get the same excitement at home.

There’s something NOT so odorously exciting, however, about an establishment where hundreds of men take of their shoes in the same place and walk down the same hall at all hours of the night.
Saturday was another big day for Tokyo sight-seeing – battling the crowds in Harajuku, and discovering that the Roppongi hills are actually not hills, but that it’s just the name of the big building.

Sunday was a nice relaxing day, spending a week’s salary at the hospital (FINALLY!) and then a train home to collapse in bed, for another wet fever night. How exciting my life is!

Although I was given drugs on Sunday, my ears are still blocked, and so now I’ve spent a whole week walking around in this peaceful, surreal little world of my own. I’ve actually quite enjoyed the different view of the world, without sound. Although, classes have been a disaster so far – I can only sit and stare at my students with this dumb little grin on my face, pretending I can understand what they’re saying.

Actually, not much has changed.

It’s times like this I miss my friends. But don’t call me. I can’t hear you.

Matane
Lobu

-v23- Don't travel with a diseased chicken.

2009-10-05T19:16:00.000-07:00

I'm stressed.
I have achieved a reasonable amount of things in my short life so far, I would think; commandeering my own spacecraft and being partner in a successful Boston law firm. Oh wait, maybe that was WIlliam Shatner.
Anyway, one thing is really weighing on my mind at the moment.

In a month, 5 of my children's classes have to give performances for friends and family. The theory is that end of year reports are boring, and will, most likely, have to be translated for the parents anyway, so we should show off what the kids have learnt throughout the year.
What have my kids learnt? Nothing the parents would want to see, I'm sure!
How to scribble on the floorboards, play with their genitals during classes, to round-house kick me to the ground leaving quite a hefty graze on my knees and run into the glass doors aren't really, I don't think, good items for performance.
Or are they?

The performance has started me thinking about what they're actually learning, in their time with me.
Last week, one of my classes was horrified to learn that "chicken" is the name of the animal, and not just the food. We have chickens in the yard next to the classroom and I demonstrated that the animal makes a wonderful stir-fry. They were also horrified to learn that the boiled egg they have for breakfast comes out of that animal and sits in the mud for a few hours before it ends up in the kitchen.

It makes me wonder, even more, if their parents are teaching them anything worth knowing about life and if that is actually my job at all.
What am I talking about - these are the same parents that can't even make sure their 6 year-old goes to the toilet before coming into the classroom, meaning that every lesson is interrupted by an inevitable circle of children looking pale and playing with their genitals, waiting for the previous student to return before they can go outside to the bio-dirt-pit.

I remember my father taking to our pet chickens in the backyard with an axe, blood everywhere, as they (almost comically) still ran around the yard, not able to see where they were going. Well, that actually should go without saying - their eyes were in their heads, laying on the ground next to the tree stump used to separate the edible from the landfill - of course they couldn't see where they were going!
At the time, I was about 6 or 7 years old, and of course was mortified that we were eating our pets, but, it had to be done.

Because I'm not one to shy away from things like this, I also asked my older class if they liked beef and pork, as we were learning about other farm animals.

Why can't we live in David McGahan's world, where everything is hilarious and simple - religion was invented by a porcelain doll, cholera is funny, and you should never travel with a diseased chicken.

Maybe parents should just show David McGahan's videos to their children.

The performances should be reflective of what the children are doing in class, so maybe it should just be a line of students waiting to go to the toilet.

In typical David McGahan style, I should just end now with a random clip of some yaks.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jv8IktHDiWU

じゃね
ロブ

v22 - Happy to learn the hard way

2009-09-29T17:52:00.000-07:00

[Private blog published only on Facebook for friends]

v21- Erosion is a slow and boring process

2009-08-25T05:59:00.000-07:00

"A change is as good as a holiday"

Whoever said that, is a dick.

A holiday is a nice break from your life; you run away for just a little while, forget the stress of work, relationships, even money, and you just enjoy something completely different.
When a holiday comes to an end, you're refreshed, but sad that you have to go back to it all. Your friends ask how it was, you give a summarised account of it all, put some pictures on facebook and you're back to exactly the same way everything was before you left. Work is still there, the same old relationship problems are still there, you still react the same way in the same old situations, and nothing has changed. You haven't grown. You haven't learnt anything, except maybe not to trust "taxis" with no meter in countries where you can't speak the language.

A change, however, is more permanent, and takes a freaking long time. Anything good is worth working on, right?

"No pain, no gain."

Yeah, he was a dick too. Not because he was wrong - he was oh so right - but because Australians don't like being told the obvious. We're strong-willed, stubborn, and don't like to be told what to do. Or is that just me?
We hate those people that come along when we're under the steaming hood of a car and say "Oh, got a problem with your car eh?". They're dicks.
Or "Oh it's hot today hey!"
No kidding.
Dick.

The hardest part about real, long, slow, change, is feeling like you're moving on a different path to everyone else. Not better, not worse, just in a completely different direction.

The MOST difficult part about being here for instance, is seeing or hearing about my old life moving on without me. Sometimes I wonder if some people even miss me. I know the important ones do, because I hear from them often. Unlike a holiday, things will be completely different when I go back to my beloved Melbourne, my home. People will have changed, the city would have changed, hopefully the public transport would have changed, but that's a different blog.

This week I heard that someone so very far away, but yet still so very close to my heart, is moving on.
It broke my heart.
Of course I expected that it would happen, and I'm really happy for them, but quite upset at the same time. I want the people I love to be happy, but despite what well-educated health professionals with fancy letters after their names say, the head and the heart are not really connected.

When I was preparing to leave Melbourne, I overheard someone say that I was running away.
Also a dick.

A real change takes balls. A change takes a lot of pain in learning and growing. But it's MUCH FUCKING BETTER THAN A HOLIDAY.

Some days it's hard, but I wouldn't have it any other way.

Dick.

v20- I felt the earth move

2009-08-18T20:18:00.000-07:00

"When we first met on Dandenong Road that day, did you ever think that 6 months later you'd be in Tokyo, wearing purple pants and eating raw horse meat with Sarah Palin?"

Sitting on a Tokyo train at 10 o'clock on a Sunday night, headed back to a small but pleasant hotel after having been shopping in Harajuku, visiting a ghost-town amusement park where he turned on the switches himself, and still sore in the legs from climbing Mt Fuji, my friend and I realised how random our lives had become.

We laughed hysterically, partly from being completely sleep deprived, and partly because we realised I had allowed him to buy purple pants from a rude mute with a cool belt.

Little did we know, back in Yaizu, there was yet another earthquake. It seems Colin's visit had upset the earth's crust in some way.

Grab yourself a bowl of miso and bolt everything down, this is going to be a long and shaky one.

*Tuesday, 11 Aug, 5:03AM*
I was awakened suddenly by what can only be described as a violent shaking of the bed. If I didn't know any better, I would have thought I was back on the scary overnight train between Eastern-European countries grinding to a halt to avoid hitting another cow on the tracks before the men with machine guns boarded to take our passports.
Or turbulence - the kind that throws you onto the ceiling of the aircraft, and burns your lap with half a pot of dirty coffee.
I was completely unsure of what to do. I just knew to try and avoid the lightshade as it hit the ground and splintered sharp pieces over the carpet.

I stood up in the bed, not knowing the correct procedure for these events. I wish I had studied the disaster prevention map that had only been on my wall for 5 months.
I was tough, I am a grown man, and I've accomplished some amazing things in my life, jumped off tall buildings and mountains, and taken a few other big risks and always been glad to have the experience. I am strong. I am brave.

I hid back under the blanket for a while.

When the bed stopped shaking, I ventured out onto the balcony. Yes, smoke time, of course. When it's that early and you don't really know what's happening, your basic instincts kick in. I changed my mind and went out the front of the apartment block to stand out in the carpark instead, thankfully remembering to wear underwear for once.
Standing in the carpark in a pair of ill-fitting briefs, I exchanged horrified glances with my cute deaf neighbour.... who was on the telephone.
But I didn't have time to question that at that moment, because the next earthquake had started and I was watching the apartment block wobble like jelly. Now, I like Aeroplane Jelly (I'll give you a moment to finish the song....), but It's not the kind of structure I would pay rent for, right?

You know that feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when you are suddenly even more afraid and you think something horrendous is about to happen?
The town PA system announced something that I couldn't quite make out, but I did understand the word "tsunami".
I live far enough away from the beach for it to be a pleasant bicycle journey to the seaside, but I wasn't completely sure if that was far enough. As at the time of printing, there has not yet been a cause for concern.

After cleaning up the smashy-smashies from the kitchen floor, trying to remove particles of lightshade from my feet, and taking a couple of calls from concerned friends, I thought maybe I would try going back to sleep.
By this time, the next couple of tremors were just annoying - they were preventing me from getting a good rest - and I don't like ANYTHING getting in the way of my sleep. I remember one night almost 2 years ago, someone called me crying saying he'd just been beaten up. I told him to call the police and hung up. Naturally the next morning I was mortified and called around to all of the local hospitals, but in my sleep, I just don't like to be interrupted.

I'm not very good when I'm asleep. I also remember one morning calling the police to report my car as stolen. It was only then that I vaguely remembered agreeing to lend it to my mother for that day. She always knew the best time to ask me for things was when I was sleeping.

But that's not the point here, is it?

Tuesday was the day that my friend from Australia was to arrive in Tokyo and take a train to Shizuoka where I would meet him at 11am.

2pm, and my friend is still sitting on a stationary train between stops, waiting for something to be fixed. Apparently there was quite a bit of damage to infrastructure from these earthquakes, but you'll learn more about the missing highway later in this edition. Even more frustrating because I had a hire car wasting away in an hourly-charging parking lot while I'm standing around the station, only 20mins away from the stopped train, tapping my foot, looking at my watch and trying to ask the station staff in Japanese what the hell was happening.

After minimal sleep and an unpleasant first half day in Japan, Colin and I decided it was time to just drive back to my house. The traffic was enough to finally bring me to tears.
And then the earth shook again.

So, what better way to make everything right again, and welcome someone to Japan than to have 3 hours of Karaoke and nomi-houdai (all you can drink)!
After bopping to some classic Lauper, the very fitting "I feel the earth move", some random Japanese songs I still don't understand, enjoying the freely available percussion instruments, and coercing one of the staff to join me for part of a Blur song, we piled into one of my students' cars for a ride home.
It was still 27 degrees, pouring rain.

Bed felt pretty good.

As I was waking up on Wednesday to take out the combustibles, there was another earthquake.

Hire car, beautiful sunny day, half of the freeway collapsed, hmn, let's go for a drive to Hamamatsu!
We met my friend for a coffee, and he brought a new playmate for us as well. The four of us played happy road trip family to some caves. That was pretty fun actually. Above ground it's 32 degrees and sunny, but below ground it was 21 and slippery.
The day ended with delicious sushi train, and very long drive home.
The drive home should only have been an hour, but our friendly GPS kept telling us to get onto the freeway, which had collapsed under the ground, so we drove along back streets beside it for a few hours.
At one point, we saw people getting onto the freeway, so we thought that part would be open, and ventured through the ticket point. It was after this that we realised that they were all going the opposite direction, so we had to backtrack for 20 mins and get back to the ticket window at the point where the man had previously told us that we couldn't get on this very freeway.
At this point, Colin had also lost the ticket, so, yes, we are tearing the car apart to find a tollway ticket that we shouldn't even have, because we shouldn't even be ON this road, and paying to go in the OPPOSITE direction!
Was a fun day, a couple more earthquakes, of course along the way.

Thursday was planned as an easy day, because in the evening, we were to climb Mt Fuji (said in a big booming voice).
We reviewed the militant plan that one of our students had put together and set off to meet them at the strictly specified time. I had packed warm clothes, some water, and a camera. That's all you should need right?
Colin just packed a camera.
It was a very hot afternoon and we were squashed in the back of the car wishing we knew how to ask for them to turn on the air-con in Japanese as we didn't want to try in English as it may distract the driver who was already clearly having trouble operating the car in a safe, smooth fashion.
The view was absolutely amazing, even at night. The moon came up beside us, and we were above the clouds, just like the view from an airplane. We even saw a glacier right beside the path, covered in slippery, brittle volcanic rock.
To cut this story short, it was a bloody long night, paying ¥200 every time we needed to pee, falling asleep on rocks, freezing, and being even more annoyed by the whiney Americans that made a big deal out of every gradient. I knew it would be difficult, but I didn't know that I would feel so sick by the time we got to the 9th station that I'd just want to crawl up inside the shelter and pass out for a little while.
But we made it, right to the top. It was cold and very misty. Colin, still not having any warm clothes, opted to keep moving about and taking pictures around the volcano crater. We saw the sun rise through the mist and decided it was time to start heading back down. This was the fun part- over-tired, lacking in reasonable judgement, and seeing each lower station below us, we ran, slipped, slid, and tumbled down the rocks. Bruised, battered, half asleep, but with a feeling of some kind of accomplishment, we got the bus back to the car and headed off home.

Needless to say, Friday was a quiet day. We watched the fireworks at night from a cafe next to the beach, ate kakigori and had the traditional Friday night ramen.
The earth still moved.

Saturday, we had decided to venture away from the epicenter and spend the weekend in frisky Tokyo. We had arranged to meet my friend at Tokyo station at an obscenely early hour in order to enjoy as much as we could in the time that we had. A brilliant but tiring day - shopping, temples (where I received a great fortune, and Colin received a very bad one, warning him of fire), photos, walking around in the relentless heat, lunch at a cook-your-own-okonomiyaki place, a posh high tea at the Shangri-Lah (just because it's ridiculous), and then off to find our hotel for the night in Shinjuku.

In one of my class textbooks, there's a listening exercise on "Capsule Hotels". I thought it sounded like a very novel idea.
Let me describe this concept for you: You don't get a room, you get a capsule with a bed, TV, radio, alarm and light. They're very cheap, for men only, have an onsen inside, and I'm always up for trying something new. I double checked that none of us had tattoos, because in Japan, that's a sign of mafia and you're not allowed into a lot of places and we were off.

We arrived at "Green Plaza" and immediately took off our shoes to put them in the shoe lockers at the entrance. We took our shoe-locker keys to wait in line for reception. it seems that Saturday afternoons are very popular for the capsule crowd.
We checked in and exchanged our shoe-locker keys for our regular locker keys, and were also provided with a pair of one-size-fits-all shorts and a yukatta in the fashion colours of beige and beige.
All of our personal belongings, we were advised, needed to be put into our lockers and we were directed to the locker room adjoining the reception area. The bright pink lockers weren't enough to take my attention away from the smell of a million men's sweaty summer feet having followed this path before me. So, wearing nothing but the beige ensemble and a mobile phone, we decided it was time for re-con.
2 floors up some equally pungent stairs, we found our floor where our capsule should be. Down the end of the loooooong corridor, and around the last corner we found what looks like a cluster of stacked MRI machines with our matching locker-key numbers on the name plates. This is cool, we thought, kinda novel, very clean, and hey, we're only going to be sleeping here after a big night out anyway.
We climbed up into our torpedo launch tubes and set about to close our doors....... what doors? We were a little confused by the fact that not only had we been stripped of our personal belongings and clothing (don't make me tell you where we had to hide our mobile phones), but also our privacy. There was simply a considerably transparent curtain that we could pull down, hiding neither the corridor lights nor our personal shame.

(If you're interested in the idea of the capsule hotel, check out these pics -
http://www.vincentsantangelo.com/travel/japan/075_tokyo.jpg
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/67/161649017_0e531f5dc0.jpg?v=0 )

We headed down 4 floors to the onsen to try and have some rest before our planned big night out in Tokyo town. At a normal onsen, you arrive and they give you a locker to put your clothes in, but we'd already gone through that process upon checking in, so here, we just had to take off our beige on beige selection and place it on a shelf. You see, the problem with everyone wearing the same clothes and putting them in the same place, is that we will never be sure if we got our own back afterwards....

A nice relaxing spa, a 10 minute nap and then it was time to shower. Because it was an onsen-style affair, the showers were also the same concept - you sit on a plastic stool (where you share arse-bacteria with who knows how many others before you), and use the hand-held shower to try and rinse off the generic cleansing products from the bulk-sized pump packs. Mind you, in fitting with the existing idea of the capsule hotel, this process does not happen in private, but rather within the select community of the 40-50 other men also using the facilities around you. Then the walk back to the area where you can pick up a dry towel, use it, and then walk back to the beige shelf and you're supposed to be feeling much more refreshed. The only redeeming quality of this particular establishment, at this point, was the noticeable difference in clientele from an onsen back in my home town. In Yaizu, I am generally the only alien at an onsen, so it's an uncomfortable experience for both the locals and my self as they stare, and I try to blend in, even being 1 foot taller, having a generally bigger frame and much whiter skin with a bogan singlet tan line. In Tokyo, at least, there are a better mix of foreigners and locals.

Swapping our stucco pyjamas for our party dresses, we finally converged back in the lobby and set off on our evening's adventures.
No evening, no matter where in the world you are, can commence without pre-drinks so we headed to the kombini to get some chu-hi (think pre-mix without the tax) and consume in the park. The drinks were good, the company was great, and the conversation was enjoyable. We realised we'd spent way too long in the park and should actually go to a club or something.
Our first stop was strategic - you go to this bar earlier, get in for free and they give you a stamp which allows you to get into a better place around the corner later in the night which would normally charge you ¥2000. Smart, right?
Even after having our fortunes told earlier in the day, we still didn't foresee that for one of us, this first stop would also be his last.

I've always believed that a good night out is 70% company, 10% crowd, 10% venue and 10% luck. We had the good company, decent music, no crowd and my fortune was certainly contributing. Colin was just happy there were lots of people to take photos with. Tsukasa was happy there were cheap drinks. I was happy there was a seat for my Mt Fuji legs.

We stayed for a couple of hours, drank, danced, took more photos, had random conversations with other people - exactly my kind of night out.
Hang on, where is Tsukasa? I haven't seen him in a while. I went to check in the toilets, and there was one locked door. I took the chance and used my fingernail to unlock the door and found him asleep on the floor, head against the seat. I woke him up and obliged his request to give him a minute and went back out, locked the door again with my fingernail, and waited back on the dance floor. When minutes later he still did not appear, I went and unlocked the door again with my nail and found him vomiting into the bowl. Nice one brova, nice one.
I thought I should tell Colin where I was, so I went out, locked the door again, and went to find him. He simply said "That's ok, I'm taking photos of black people in Japan" and kept dancing with his new friends.
Confused, I headed back to the toilet. Dragging spew-face out of the toilet, politely through the crowd that had no gathered, and outside into a taxi, I had hoped that I would be allowed back into the establishment afterwards.
I told the taxi driver where to take him and wished him a safe and upright journey back to the industrial front-loading washing machine hotel.

1 down, 2 gaijins to go.

More clubs, more dancing, more meeting random and crazy people, trying to convince a girl that she was not a lesbian, just because she was in love with her female friend, and more photos with people who I do not remember, and I was on the water. Colin, on the other hand, was nearly on the floor, so it was time to head back to the submarine sleeping quarters.

I do know that I was having a conversation in Japanese with the taxi driver. I also know, for a fact, that my Japanese is much better when I'm drunk. I don't, however, know what we were talking about. I also did not know where our hotel was. Neither did he.

Finally arriving back at the stacked-palace, we attempted to put our shoes back in the lockers. Because I had worn different shoes out that night, I already had a pair of shoes in a locker, and so I just put my shoes in with Colin's. At the reception desk, the man was very confused, he said it was not allowed for us to only have one shoe locker, so I went over to an empty locker and just took the key for the friendly man. He took our keys and came back a second later exaplining that I now had "2 shoes". I giggled and said that was because I had "2 feet".
Why is it, that now that I'm sober, I can't even remember the word for feet in Japanese?
Navigating back to our personal medical testing machine was just as much fun as the rest of the night out, rounding corners with our "guns" in front of us like FBI, giggling at the fact that we were sleeping in washing machines with no doors, then trying NOT to giggle as we passed people trying to sleep, not to mention tickling some feet that were sticking out of random chambers along the way.

9AM. Head hurts. Can't be that time already can it? Sat bolt upright in bed. Where the hell am I? Am I being checked for brain tumours? Why am I wearing all my clothes?
The walk of shame to the lockers to exchange my stinky evening wear for the beige prisoner of war uniforms was considerably unpleasant. All those stairs.
Enough time for another petri-dish-stool shower and sharing the locker room with everyone for the pre-checek-out rush, and then we were on our way for another day in frisky Tokyo.

We moved a little slower on Sunday, wore sunglasses, and drank more water.

Harajuku, some more shopping, Colin buying these awesome purple pants that I dare him to wear back in Melbourne, some sun in the park, lots of photos, a sign in a shop that read "No Photos, Fuck Off", etc, you know how it is.

In the afternoon, we wanted to head towards our hotel to check in for Sunday night. We found the station, and emerged at ground level to a surprisingly DEAD area of the city. Not a person in sight, no shops open, no cars, and I swear I saw tumble weed. Ghost town much? We followed the map on the street to the hotel and I presented my gaijin card and said in Japanese, that we had a reservation. They said thank you in English and asked me to wait. Ok, so I won't bother wasting my Japanese on you then. 20 minutes later and they still couldn't find the booking.
I'm not the most customer-minded person in the world, but I've certainly learnt a thing or 2 from the amazing way that Japan does things, so if I had 3 hotels with the same name in a 3 block radius, I'm pretty sure I would check the other hotels if I couldn't find a booking in this hotel, right? Wouldn't you?
Absolutely frustrating. This was my first real experience of retarded Japanese customer service. After 6 months, that's pretty impressive though, right? In Melbourne you should get this within 6 minutes.

So, around the block to the correct hotel, of the exact same name, and we're checked in, finally, and sitting on the bed of an awesome, cheap but clean and fashionable business room.
Enough time for showers and changing clothes before we get back on the train to check out Tokyo tower.
Tokyo Tower is nothing special for me, I've done it before, and I'm incredibly scared of heights. So please don't jump on the glass viewing platform when we're like, 400M above the ground, ok?

Watching the sun go down over the city was actually pretty amazing, every minute something looked different. Was certainly worth the trek. Another coffee, and it was time to find somewhere for dinner. After finding a great traditional place that would have been perfect, and finding it was closed, we literally stumbled into a perfect traditional upstairs place with sliding paper doors, a gorgeous old waitress with Sarah Palin big hair and glasses, and traditional foods. Perfect perfect perfect. Inexpensive, and a perfect cultural experience for Colin's last night with us as a group. We enjoyed all kinds of deep fried delights, raw horse meat, sake, etc.

We said "Aligator" and goodbye to our new mate Sarah and headed back to the hotel on the train. By this stage we were so tired and staring around blankly like smack-heads.
I giggled to myself, nudged Colin and asked "When we first met on Dandenong Road that day, did you ever think that 6 months later you'd be in Tokyo, wearing purple pants and eating raw horse meat with Sarah Palin?"

And the earth shook again, ending the week the same way as it had started.

v19- Hired Help, Steamy Train, Steak

2009-08-02T05:58:00.000-07:00

On my way home last Wednesday from the Shizuoka City Immigration Office having learnt that I am not currently eligible for a working visa, I decided that I was going to enjoy my remaining time here and achieve as much as I could. I decided to study the language harder, travel more, and experience as much random Japan as I could.

So yesterday morning, I woke up early and decided to make the most of the day. The original plan was to ride my bike to Okabe and then hike up Mt Takakusa (roughly translated means green tea, sore shins and no toilet), however the weather forecast predicted thunder storms. As much as I love Japan, mountains, and nature, I didn't want to be struck by lightening on top of the mountain like some old testament character.

So instead I went to the car hire place near my apartment and attempted to hire a car. I was very nervous, because I wasn't sure if the man would speak Japanese or Spanish, as hinted by the sign out the front. Lucky for me, he spoke Portuguese - a language I CAN'T fake.

So in broken Japanese and a random word in English here and there (I mean, who knows the English word "regularly" but doesn't know "today"??), I was off, and driving in Japan again. YAY!
My first stop was to pick up a friend at the train station (no no, an existing one, not just a random new one hanging around the station), and get some food for our road trip to Kawane - mountain spa country.
Some bottled drinks, some delicious pain (see Memoirs archives) and then it was time to figure out how to use the GPS. After sitting in the supermarket carpark for quite some time, we realised it wasn't broken, but it just DIDN'T have a touchscreen. We found the remote in the cup-holder (of course, der) and then found that wasn't having any effect either. We then decided that the batteries must be flat. A short detour via my house to pick up some batteries out of my television remote control, because really, who pays for new batteries for the remote control of a hire car GPS unit, right, and I also had a quick shower. It's 27-30 degrees and 90% humidity here every day, so you take any opportunity to shower when you can.

Back in the car, reversing out of someone else's car-spot, because I never wanted to pay extra for my own, and my friend is still trying to work out the GPS. The good thing was that it showed us where we were, but we couldn't determine how to make it tell us where to go. By this stage I was telling it where to go.

We went via the mountain that I wished to hike in my earlier plan. The weather was great, mind you, as we drove along with the roof open.

I haven't driven a lot in the past 5 months, so I was excited, but very cautious - different country, new roads, someone else's car etc. My friend, on the other hand, was more interested in the assortment of bread products we'd packed for the journey than reading the signs (which I am not always able to do) and directing me. A few lucky swerves, some polite people who let us cross multiple lanes, and then we were on our way up the mountain.

It was a really beautiful drive, lots of trees, warm sun, narrow winding roads up assumedly illegal gradients etc. As we climbed into the clouds, it reminded me of the roads around where I grew up, without the bogans.

We stopped at one place along a rushing river and decided to go for a swim. The water was quite cold, but so fresh and clean. I took a mouthful and then had a sudden blast of reality - I wasn't some jungle man, and this was a polluted, relatively environmentally unaware country and that mouthful could land me on the toilet for 3 days. I mean, I can't even think about eating too much pork or I'll be forced into a diet of dry toast for a day.

We also stopped at a cute little random shrine somewhere further up the mountain, unlocked and in very good repair, next to a little fire station. There was nobody up there, so we took some pictures and enjoyed the clean mountain air of the gods.
And had a cigarette.

We made our way back down the mountain a little way to go to the natural hot spring onsen I had been looking forward to.
I know that I've shared the onsen experience with you already, but here's a quick recap, for those of you playing at home:
You walk into the entrance hall, buy a ticket from the vending machine and then take your shoes off, just like everywhere else here. You then put your shoes in a little locker and take the key to the front counter. You then give half of your ticket and your shoe-locker key to the front desk, and they give you a token. You walk, in your sox, or dirty moss-covered feet along the long polished wooden floor to the big blue sign, giving your token to the lady at the next desk before making your way into the change rooms. It's here that you are greeted by the surprised old Japanese men, who don't often see a westerner, and remove all of your clothes. You replace these only with a towel about as big as my arse cheeks, which, given, a few months ago would be enough to chamois your car, but these days that size comparison doesn't leave much to anyone's imagination. Having said that though, the onsen is no place to be shy. You walk outside into the open air and are greeted by fleeting glances from the old naked men, just lazing around casually. There are usually about 4-6 different hot spas that you can lounge around in, naked, wearing a wet towel on your head. Yes, I agree, it sounds quite strange at first, but you really relax and can appreciate the naturally dense and salty healing qualities of the 43 degree water while sitting on a usually uncomfortable rock surface.
The Japanese culture of sitting around naked and talking goes back a very long time, where various leaders would do so, as they would be obviously bare, unarmed and on neutral, um... footing?
I agree, there's a certain sacred yet reassuring feeling about being exposed with nobody around you seeming to even notice, as they go about their own relaxation and cleansing routine.
The baths all look out onto the river and forest, but the special part of the Kawane Onsen is that there is a famous steam train that goes past on a regular timetable. You know when it's going to come soon when there is a stirring amongst the old men, take that as you will, and they all go over to the fence to secure their place for the most interesting 14 seconds of their day.
This fence, is built for the modesty for those of regular Japanese-height. Needless to say, I had to crouch a little as the train passed and the children were waving out the windows. The other men were waving back with their towels, like they were at a rock concert or something. (Does it mean that I'm getting old when I start using the words "Rock Concert"?)

I finished my bathing time in the sun, had a wash inside, and then stepped onto the scales. I won't advertise the exact number, but it was the first time I'd seen this number since... well, I don't think I had scales when I was 15 years old!

One thing that never ceases to entertain me here is how other people react when they see me. Last night, I had a guy riding a bike staring so much he almost got run over by a car, and usually in the shopping centre the children give me that open-mouthed stare before walking into a toilet paper display. Yesterday, after the onsen, we decided to have a soft-serve for the trip back. We bought our little tickets at the vending machine and I took mine to the counter. She looked at me, nervously and hesitated to ask what kind I wanted. She walked over to the machine and demonstrated pulling each handle, obviously to try and communicate that she wanted to know which flavour I wanted. She was even more surprised when I told her in Japanese what I wanted.

To be honest, I was just as surprised as her. Sometimes these things come out of my mouth and I realise that I know more than I thought.
Getting back into the car and feeling all language-confident again, I picked up the GPS remote. I noticed the switch on the side of the remote control - "テレビ　ー　ナ-ビ" - "Television - NAVI".
I flicked that little gem and we set our next destination with ease, setting off back down the mountain.
To be honest, I was more excited that the car had a TV.

So much is completely different here - like our dinner, for instance; in Australia, when we say "steak", we are talking about a chunk of cow sitting on the plate, usually accompanied by a token serving size of salad and some kind of potato delights, be they fries, hand cut fat chips or wedges.
In Japan, "steak" means a hamburger patty, in a pool of tomato sauce with vegetables.
The steak is much like most of my life here - completely different, not what I expected, but enjoyable all the same.

Until next time, またね
ロブ

v18- And I blame you

2009-07-28T04:29:00.000-07:00

It's your fault.

If I didn't spend so many hours writing updates and trying to integrate random tales of love, life, and Little Grey then maybe I would have actually been working on my assignments and have completed my diploma, right?

Actually, to tell the truth, I would have found other, more exciting ways to procrastinate, like washing the dishes, learning Kanji or chatting up the senile old woman that takes a dump in the park every morning. She's got a lot going for her.

I mean, I had assumed she was senile, but it may actually be a cultural thing. There was also a very regular-looking, well-dressed man the other day that arrived in a nice car with a friend and went around the back of the toilet block to lay a nice big brown one against a tree. He stood up, pulled his pants up and walked back to his friend, who was setting up to play baseball with him.
This confused me, for a couple of obvious reasons.

I also wondered how it would be when he sat back in his car.

The Japanese culture never ceases to amaze me, especially now that I'm learning more about the language. Language and culture are so intertwined, and reveal so much about each other. For instance, what do you learn about a culture, where the native language uses the same word for "wrong" and "different"? Reminds me of someone I know.
Having the same word for "key" and "lock" could just be amusing when talking to a locksmith.

Is this what I'm paying to learn? I think I'm wasting my money. I took a class last week that taught me to say "yesterday I ate a particularly delicious banana".
At least my friends teach me more useful language - I have a friend that messages me every morning and tells me what day it is in Japanese, I have another friend that only speaks to me in Japlish, and another person who calls me at random and abuses me in Japanese. Well ok, he's not a friend, but you'd be surprised how useful that language is to understand what my students are saying about me to each other.

That's an extreme though, the general Japanese public are quite delightful, and I am reminded of this every time I need to call a company back in Australia.
This morning's excitement was trying to help a bank understand that I am not able to "conveniently pop in to a branch" to complete the paperwork. What part of "I LIVE IN JAPAN" don't they understand?
If I was speaking to an "Australian" in Mumbai then I might understand, but "Chris" was generally dull, disinterested, and had a lazier accent than any central Queensland native.
It's the little differences in my daily life that make me never want to come home.

Well, I must admit, the kids help balance that out. Within a 50 minute lesson you can easily and quickly swing from the 2 extremes of "you're adorable, I want my own children just like you" to "SATAN SPAWN BE GONE IN THE NAME OF GEEBUS"!

Today marks my 5th month in Japan, and my 5th month of teaching children on a daily basis. To all the people who said when I left home that I couldn't do it, that I don't have enough patience for children, and that I would scream and yell at them, I would like to take this opportunity to blow a raspberry at you, fall backwards off my cushion, throw the flashcards back in your face and then run into the glass door amusingly.

Children can teach you a lot.
Sometimes, too much. Especially about their home life. Take for example, the following conversations I've had with 6-12 year olds:

"What do you put on toast?"
"Sugar"

"Where does daddy go every day?"
"Izakiah" (the pub)

"Do you have any pets?"
"I have 1 dogs and 1 sister"

The adults are no different:

"What do you wish?"
"I wish I had married a better man."

"What do you like most about babies?"
"They have nice skin and they are helpless."

It's my fault for asking stupid questions, right?

At least I don't ask the kind stupid questions that are in my assignments:
"When is the use of physical punishment acceptable in the classroom?"

Tuesdays.

I'd best go and do some more of that assignment really. No wait! I can't right now! My laptop needs charging!
Because the power here is half the voltage of back in Australia, everything takes twice as long to charge. It takes a good 3 hours to charge my laptop, and another 3 to charge my mobile phone. I remember my old Nokia could go for days on a 30 minute affair with the powerpoint.

Yes, the power difference here makes it harder to do my homework. That's totally my story now.

Actually, I'll stick to my original argument -

It's your fault.

v17- The taste of that lucky chapstick

2009-07-23T21:29:00.000-07:00

I suddenly had that feeling in the pit of my stomach, you know the one you had in year 10 when they were drawing out the name of the next person to give their speech. I was scared again.
I kept searching around in my pocket, my bag, and around my desk and then realised that it was indeed true - I had lost my lucky chapstick. [frowny face]

This may seem a little trivial to most people, but to me, it was a day of grief.

My friend moved to London to live and work for a year, and I missed her a lot. We had only become close before she left, and so we had kept in touch while she was away, calling each other at ridiculous hours of the day and night and emailing frequently throughout each day. I even went to London to see her, and we shared my first European adventure together. We visited some random places like Russia, Belarus, and got absolutely drunk in almost every country. Good times.
So, when she overstayed her visa, I was a little annoyed that it would be a little longer until we met again.
When the day finally came to meet her on Chapel Street to welcome her back to Aus, she had brought gifts. Gifts?? I love gifts!!
The bottle of Pims, unfortunately, did not last very long. But the cherry chapsticks, however, became a surprisingly important part of my life over the next couple of years.
I wore the chapstick through the dry Melbourne winters and summers, always in my left pocket with my mobile phone - because as you would know, I'm a little OCD like that. Her name was Cherry.
Cherry comforted me through a really long and painful breakup with someone who was really special to me, but turned out to also be quite special to one of my closest friends at the time. Cherry was also always there when work at my previous company became stressful, with a manager that was more interested in his own opportunities than his workgroup or basic job requirements, or when it was bluntly explained to me that as an outsourcer, you perform two or three full-time roles simultaneously, and how dare you even question that, let alone ask for assistance or more resources.
Cherry also accompanied me throughout my travels - around Australia, including Darwin, Sydney, Brisbane, Perth, country Victoria, and overseas - places such as Fiji, Hong Kong, The UK, around both western and eastern Europe, New Zealand, Malaysia and here, to Japan. I remember around Europe, she became quite the communal possession, being shared amongst the 3 of us while traversing the winding Italian countryside.
I also have very fond memories of dancing with people in their swimwear, (and much less) in Ibiza with my trusty Cherry in my left pocket, next to my mobile phone, or having a guard with a machine gun demanding my passport while on a train between Serbia and Romania with Cherry gleaming back at him.
Cherry also enjoyed such activities such as paragliding in Switzerland, parasailing in Fiji, and fun school holiday treats in Melbourne such as the Eureka Sky Deck (including that wretched glass box, of which I still have the occasional nightmare), the zoo, aquarium, and of course the Docklands Observation Wheel. Pft, what a mess that was.

Ah.... *reflects* Good times.

Cherry has been quite the traveller, and so it was only fitting, that after a night out on the chu-hi (Japanese Alcopops), she was strewn across the side table of a cheap hotel in Shinjuku, Tokyo, and never seen again.

I hope that maybe the cleaning staff, or next guest found her and wear her proud.

Actually, no, that's disgusting. I just have trouble saying goodbye.

Bye.

(Ps - yes, I just wrote a whole blog about a bloody cherry chapstick.)

v16 - Less is more

2009-07-16T22:13:00.000-07:00

I was scared, so scared that I made myself sick.

I wondered what it was that I did so wrong, that I should receive a very official-looking letter in the mail, complete with red stamp. All I could read was that I had until next Wednesday to do something about it, that it required a signature, or booking an appointment.
I barely slept, thinking about my friend who had just been fined for speeding and it cost her ¥80,000, and that I had hired a car a few weeks ago. I also pondered my waning dedication to the correct sorting of my combustibles and non-combustibles, on which Japanese councils are so bureaucratically strict.
My attention then turned to the way in which I stumbled out of bed early on the morning of the specified collection days, wearing nothing but my underwear, to take the correct council-approved plastic bags down the street to the roadside collection cage before the ridiculous specified time. Maybe I'd offended someone with my gaijin shape, hairy stomach, or thighs that don't squeeze into any clothes made for Japanese men.
No, it couldn't possibly be that?
What else could I have done wrong?
Maybe it could be about my visa application? Oh no, that can't be it; my visa expires at the end of August.
Holy .... WHAT? I have only a month left in Japan?

By that stage I had forgotten about the scary letter and was thinking about what I would do if my new visa application was not processed swiftly enough and I would have to leave the country for a little while. How would I survive?

What would I do for work? What would I do for money? WHAT IF I PUT WEIGHT ON AGAIN?
I wasn't ready to start all over again - less is more in this culture.

I took the letter into work yesterday to have my boss interpret for me.
"Hmn", he groaned seriously. "That's no good is it".
By this stage I needed to sit down. I was getting flushed in the face, and nauseous in the stomach.
It didn't matter what he was going to say next, I knew it couldn't be good news.
"Someone has made a mistake" he said, with a serious face.
"What is it? What's happened? Should I stop eating carbs now?" I asked, almost wetting my pants with anxiety.

My boss looked back at me, confused by my concern and said "This letter is for someone else and says they need to pick up a package."

Holy hell, such a cigarette I had right then.

If you've ever called me on Skype and heard my voicemail message, you'll know that my Japanese is pretty ordinary. So you may understand that it scares me when I receive mail. I don't know what it is, and I hate having to ask other people to read it to me.

But that doesn't stop me from applying to become a Marriage Celebrant in Japan.

One of my friends does it, and I thought, why couldn't I?
More on that next time, in the interests of keeping this blog installment Japanese-sized.

The Japanese are experts on small things. They make everything shorter, more compact, and truncated; computers, roads, clothes, cars and especially the language - everything is reduced in size for convenience and efficiency.
For example, why build two-lane roads, when you can get by with a narrow one-lane thoroughfare, expecting that, in the rare situation you actually meet a car coming the opposite direction in this village, you utilise the nearest driveway to enable duel passage.

What about the language? Less is more in Japanese!
I've wasted a lot of yen so far to attend Japanese classes to learn, what I've only now realised, is the long way to say anything. People don't really talk like that.

The Japanese are masters at saying what they want in such a short, concise manner.
"Oh please don't do that, it hurts", in everyday Japanese has become "pain!"
"What time is your class today?" = "Time from"
"I'm sleepy, I might go to bed soon" = "sleep"
"Oh this is heavy, can you please help me move this table" = "Help!"
"Oh I've made a mistake with this question, can I please borrow someone's eraser?" = "Eraser!"
And my favourite - "Oh my god you really scared me just now when you jumped out from behind the door" = "Surprise!"

When roughly translated, it's like having a conversation with a Simpson, but to the Nippons, it's completely acceptable and informative. I've also realised that this is why sometimes when learning English, they can seem short (no pun intended) and a little rude. I'm considering if this is something that I can get away with. In fact I'm going to practice now.

Miss good music. Internet Triple J listen.

Milk drank. Stomach hurt.

Hot. Body smell.

Time is not. Now work must go.

It's surprising how little communication you need to actually get by in life - and after the amount of people I offended with my last blog, I think less is more in this forum also.

("I hope to see you soon, and if not, I hope to hear from you soon.") =
Matane ("Again right?")

ロブ (Lobu)

v15 - The Gaijin's theory of relativity.

2009-07-09T23:37:00.000-07:00

[Warning - the following blog may contain themes of an adult, sexual and Japanese nature, a broken tyre, and some serious opinionated drivel. Immature readers are advised not to continue.]

Forgive me, as it has been too long since my last confession - but that's nothing compared to the amount of time that people have to wait for a bus in Yaizu.

It has become so clear to me here in Japan, that everything is relative.
Sometimes, things can seem so important, urgent, or distressing, but there will always be something even more important, urgent, or distressing.

Take, for example, something absolutely horrendous that happened to me a few weeks ago. It made me so angry, and I lost trust in the entire human race. Walking down the street, I scowled at every person I saw, wondering if they were to blame. The world was so much darker and I questioned my being in Japan, my life, all just because of this one event.

Someone stole my umbrella.

Sure, it's funny now - and I can't believe how upset I was over a black ¥600 child-size umbrella for god's sake. But at the time, I was mortified. Everything I had experienced and learnt about the culture in which I was living seemed to be untrue. I've started locking the door to my apartment when I leave for work each day now. I now also use the lock on my little grey girl's bicycle with the basket on the front, the wobbly wheel and the new tyre when I park her at the supermarket. I also zip up my bag when I'm at school (although to be fair, that's to stop the kids stealing my cigarettes).

How is Little Grey, you ask?
It was a beautiful sunny Tuesday morning and I had cleaned the apartment, washed the dishes, and made a shopping list. I went outside, paused for a moment to take in the ridiculous humidity, descended the stairs, gave a cheeky smile to the hot deaf neighbour and wheeled the trusty grey beast out of her cage. I was distracted by the little green frog that had taken up residence in the basket, proving the humidity wasn't just all in my head, and mounted her with that familiar instant sore arse cheek feeling that you get from needing a new seat. You know the feeling, when the springs have come through the padding into your special places that are usually only reserved for rich doctors or drunken mistakes.
Still having a moment with myself about the frog, I only realised only half way down the street that I was not able to steer in a relatively straight direction. Although this feeling is quite normal for Little Grey, this day it was noticeably worse. Distracted again by a spiderweb arched across the street (yes, that's the kind of busy and happening place I live in), I only realised after turning back onto the main road that there were more shreds of tyre winding around the mudguard than were contacting with the road.
I had a flat, and I was, understandably excited about walking the bicycle for the 30 minutes to Jusco to have the tyre repaired. To add to the excitement, you may also recall that last time I got a new tyre from Jusco, I had to take the poor girl back a week later to have it blown up again.

In order to keep a comparatively inane story moving, I will just say that it was when I got to Jusco, and finally had one of my first successful and constructive Japanese conversations with the bicycle man, that I was filled with pride.
I have lived in Japan for 4 months, and I don't like to wait for anything. I wanted to learn the language instantly, I didn't want to have to work at it. So at last I had felt like I was finally coming to grips with this strange code of confusing verb conjugations and excruciatingly variable levels of politeness.
I felt like all my hard work was paying off, and I could accomplish anything at that moment.

So I decided it was time to battle the hairdresser.

I had avoided getting my hair cut since I came to Japan, for fear of what could happen. Not only the language barrier scared me, but also my perception that Japanese fishing village hairdressers would not have enough exposure to blonde, rapidly thinning gaijin hair and would make me look like some Japanese game show host. Or worse - a member of a boyband.

That day, however, I felt I could chance it, and could tell them exactly what I wanted done.
All I can say now, is back to the study. I guess that too, is relative - you use different language when requesting a new front, to a shorter back, right?

Speaking of speaking, I am learning so much about English, from learning another language formally. I am also realising how little I understood of English. English really is crazy. You try and explain to students why you get IN a car, but ON a bus, how you eat FRUIT (singular, or uncountable), but eat VEGETABLES (plural), or why when you use the word WISH, you use WERE with all pronouns (eg, I wish I WERE smarter). It's not as easy as I expected.
But I'm enjoying it - apparently I came to Japan to learn English.

Last weekend, however, I went to Tokyo to eat yumcha. Yes, it's chinese, yes it's a lot of seafood, but yes, it was delicious and I enjoyed it.
On the Saturday night, we also went to the gay club area.
I can tell you quite honestly, that wherever in the world I go, they are the same and I was a little disappointed. There is usually a dancefloor full of mediocre-looking men with their shirts off loving the lights, the music, but mostly themselves, there are the older men leaning against the bar keeping an intimidatingly watchful eye for new meat, there are a couple of travelers against the walls, too intimidated to talk to anyone, and then there's me - usually too indignant at everyone pushing past and spilling drinks all over me that I don't have as much fun as I should. But just like at home, it's what you make of it, your attitude, and the company, so it wasn't so bad after all.

Not only did I come here to learn English, eat Chinese yumcha and get bad haircuts, I also wanted to come and learn about Japanese culture. It has always intrigued me. From such an early age they are brought up to believe that you get married, have children, and keep living with your parents, so you can look after them. While this works sometimes, I am seeing more and more how it doesn't work for some people. I have a close friend, for instance, who I am absolutely proud of - she left her husband because she was becoming increasingly upset by the way his parents treated her, and how they demanded she raise her daughter. It's not often I come across a Japanese woman that has the balls to do this, and I applaud her for making a better life for her daughter.

What happens to gay women? I've seen only 2 lesbians in 4 months and I haven't really spoken to them.
What about gay men? They feel such shame for upsetting their parents by not being married with children by 25 years old, they have decreasing contact with their families, but don't have a strong support network, because nobody talks about things like this here.
In fact in Japan, nobody talks about anything unpleasant. You know your husband is out at the hostess bar, chatting up some 17 year old filipino girl, but you stay at home, and don't say anything in order to avoid confrontation.
What rubbish - was my first response, but having seen it more and more I'm trying to decide what's worse. Would you rather have an Australian-style divorce rate? What does that say to your children? But can they see that you're unhappy? Of course they can, children are so perceptive. Well, except some of my students that still call me by their old teacher's name, but that's a different problem - change is not common in general culture here.
Back to gay men - a phrase I've not used for way too long now.
So the gay men are all on the internet searching for each other, no face pictures, no real names, and no real information. They just want to meet people, but not in person of course. It makes me sad, for these people to be so suppressed, not by their culture, but by their OWN doing. I've always believed that the more YOU make something an issue, the more other people are going to think it's an issue.
It's their own doing that Japanese adults are so lonely - the young men and women who are taught that you are not complete without your own family, the housewives that pretend not to know where their husbands are and so spend money, the husbands that look for fulfillment elsewhere, the gay men who look for impossible fulfillment on the internet and advertise that they want life partners and appear so desperate that they scare each other off.....
It's relieving to see that they are not any different to any other country, right?

Lastly I will say that I think I offended someone when I said that I wasn't interested in having a relationship with anyone who just wanted a relationship - how is that supposed to make a person feel special? What I mean is, if someone is just looking for the next "acceptable" subject for their affection, they will take anyone that vaguely fits a profile, won't they. They won't like you for you, just for your timing. Desperation is not attractive.
The worst part is when there are so many who are just looking for western boyfriends. It's overwhelmingly flattering for a split second, but you remember that it has everything to do with the colour of your eyes and that you speak English, but nothing to do with you personally at all.
You become what you study - and I have to keep remembering that; as much as I'm ashamed of the reputation English teachers have in Japan, I have to try so hard not to become that stereotype.

It's all relative- maybe I'm so arrogantly opinionated because I somehow deep inside want it that way.
But quite possibly not.

(Disclaimer - the above points are quite obviously generic observations and may not accurately reflect every single person that I have met in Japan. Realistically, I hope that I'm disastrously off course in my opinions and await enough examples to the contrary.)

Anyway, that's not what you came to read, right? Back to the frivolity of unprotected text.

What else has been happening?
Nothing earth-shattering. Oh, well actually, a few weeks ago, we had an earthquake. Actually, I rephrase that, there are earthquakes in Japan all the time - like once a week. But a few weeks ago was the first one that I felt for real.
I was teaching a Junior High class the difference between "was" and "did" when the entire log house felt like it moved about a foot to the left. Well, my left, that is.
I "WAS" scared, and I "DID" actually shit myself.
I was unable to move for a minute. My students looked at me with that look that you can only get from snarly 14 year olds as if to say "um... what's your problem". To them, that was just normal. To me, I was wondering when the earth was opening to swallow the townsfolk. Again, it's all relative, but PS, I will never watch "Horton Hears a Who" the same way again.

I will also never again watch Japanese TV for fear that they will again dedicate a whole week to Michael Jackson. MJ certainly contributed an amazing influence to pop music all around the world, and he will be admired forever by a lot of people. I do think, however, more-so by the Japanese. It was a crazy week. All my students could talk about was how he was so amazing, such a great dancer, and how cute he was when he was still black.
It's all relative though - I asked them how they felt about Farrah Fawcett.

"Who?"

またね (Matane - see you later)
ロブ
(Lobu)

NB - Thank you to Simon for creating a Facebook group demanding that I write something. To those that joined, I can't wait until you return the favour and write me a nice long email telling me what you've been up to recently, right? To be honest, I'd settle with some people just responding to emails and SMS that I've sent over the past few months. I miss people and would like to hear back from them every now and then.

"The Sound of Gaijin" [Interlude]

2009-05-24T06:42:00.000-07:00

Pimples on sunburn and stolen umbrellas
Bad karaoke and short little fellas
Mosquito repellents and broken shoes
This is a taste of my Japanese news

Gloomy wet sundays and meeting my neighbours
Not understanding each other's strange tales
Or why they dry fish on their balcony
I guess it's just how the chinese will be

When the air smells, when the ground's wet, when I'm feeling sad,
I simply remember that I'm in Japan, and that I'm no looooooooonger fat.

v14 - I Think I Have a Girlfriend

2009-05-17T00:12:00.000-07:00

"We thought you were gay" said my boss after a few drinks.
"Me? Whatever made you think that?" I asked as I crossed my legs, sipped my gin+tonic and sang another WHAM song.

It was Friday night, my boss, the other teacher and I had been at karaoke for just over an hour enjoying the "all you can drink" and the conversation was getting weird.
They had asked how my new "friend" was going, you know the one, she sleeps when her cafe is closed from 3-5pm. I was blushing, because, to be honest, I think I have a girlfriend.
Or was it the 6 cocktails I had tried in my first hour?

So today I've been to have a coffee at that cafe, ridden my little grey girl's bicycle with the basket on the front, the wobbly wheel, the new tyre and the wet seat (on account of the rain) to the Brazilian import shop in search of some decent peanut butter, and made a mess in my kitchen trying to make a chorizo risotto (on account of the chorizo being on special at the Brazilian import shop).
Got all of that? There'll be a quiz later.

Yesterday, however, I wasn't as productive. 3 hours of Karaoke + all you can drink + and a VERY wobbly bicycle ride home via a very unaccommodating McDonald's drive-thru [sic], and a quick stop at the ¥99 shop (conveniently across the road from the ¥100 shop) = yet another Japanese hangover.
For those of you playing at home, you may have lost count now.
Me too.

"All you can drink" can be a good or bad thing, depending on whether you're a "glass is half full" or "the glass is empty by the time the waitress has turned around" kind of person.

I was only thinking the other day as I sipped a hot cup of Japanese tea on the balcony watching the old people play crocket in the park opposite the Gaijin Palace, how easy it is to slip into old habits.
At the time I was thinking more about why I had come to Japan, and what I wanted to change and work with.
Did I come here TO change, or just FOR a change?
Do we send people to gaol AS punishment, or FOR punishment? I've never been able to work out the answer to that one. It seems more the latter. And please, no dropped soap jokes today.

{*"jail" for the americaniZed bogans}

Some things, however, can change very quickly.
In Melbourne there's no way I would leave the house without doing my hair, my socks, shoes and belt matching, and my face free of snot.
Here, it seems I've taken a more Brunswick Street approach to life. The kids don't care if your hair is done, or even if your shirt is tucked in. Shoes? What's the point? I only wear them when I'm commuting for 3 mins on the little grey girls' bicycle with the basket on the front, the wobbly wheel, the new tyre, and normally the dry seat.
Who do I need to impress? It's only the parents who care if my fly is done up, my eyes are somewhat open, and I don't smell of alcohol. I can't remember the last time I wore deodorant.
It also may be time to get a haircut, as I found a spider had set up house there a couple of days back.

I'm a mess, and I enjoy it. How on earth did I attract the gorgeous, Japanese English speaking goddess who floor naps?

Must have been my big nose.

Miss you most of all,

ロブ
Rob

v13 - I love a quickie on the train

2009-05-07T07:32:00.000-07:00

We apologise that "Rove" will not be seen tonight, and instead bring you this alternative piece of self-indulgent drivel.

I'll keep it short tonight, as I'm waiting for the moonshine in the bath to decanter.

Actually, I've drunk worse - I finished a bottle of "sports water" on the train last week and then read the back of the bottle. The only English on it, said "deep sea water enrich [sic] with mineral and fruit flavour". Nom noms kiddies.

I was on my way to Nagoya along the unfortunately short-sightedly named "New Special Line" (there has been another line built since that one), and as well as the water, I ate what was described on the package as "Delicious Pain"

I also realised that Karaoke places are cheaper than "love hotels" by the hour. So, why wouldn't someone just get themselves a quiet little Karaoke room and hope their wife hasn't gotten a second job cleaning or serving the beer?

What can I say, it was a long train ride.

3 hours, in fact, and still I didn't nod off. Japanese people will had a quick snooze at any opportunity, like while waiting for traffic lights to change. My new "girlfriend" (more on her next blog) sleeps on the floor of the cafe while they're closed from 3-5pm every day, for instance. So yes, they definitely do that cute little mouth open nod back and forth between stops on the train. In Australia we dare not even consider being vulnerable on public transport for fear of unintentionally donating to charity.

it has been Golden Week in Japan. That means they banged a heap of public holidays together and gave everyone a week off. I was fine with that.

So, I went to Nagoya Aquarium. You may have read enough of my rubbish to know that I can go on all night about stuff like this, so I'll try and summarise:

The Aquarium with no fish. At least the pub with no beer didn't swindle you out of ¥1500

So after a delicious "Nagoya Style" hotpot (read: chili, chili, chili, and some vegetables, and chili), I had a really pleasant chill in a local onsen (a place where straight men get naked together and talk about .. actually, I can never understand them- it could be cars, women, or a Karaoke booth with "Delicious Pain" for all I know).

Also in Nagoya, I discovered that I love learning about Japanese superstitions, because they're kind of crazy to us. Think about it from the Nippon's perspective though, they think we're a little strange for not walking under ladders or opening umbrellas inside, etc.
But I'm white and superior, so everyone else is wrong, right?
I've been chatting with Americans too much.

Japanese superstitions 101:
* Don't whistle at night, or a) the ghosts will come out and b) you will be burgled
* Don't clip your nails at night - you will die before your parents
* Don't stick your chopsticks upright in your bowl of rice - that's only how dead people do it
* Don't lay down after eating - you will turn into a cow

(They're my favourites.)

To quickly wind this up, I will lastly say that Day, you are right. Japanese Brazilians look Japanese. So when they parade through the city singing some of my favourite Beth Carvalho classics, I get very confused, take a lot of pictures, and cry a little. Who knows why.
I cry when I watch Border Security for christ's sake.

That, my friends, is Delicious Pain.

v12 - Little Grey, Big Noses, and Groans of Relief

2009-04-26T06:59:00.000-07:00

(Warning: Memoirs of a Gaijin recommends reading only by immature audiences)

Ladies and Jellybeans, this evening I would like to formally introduce you to someone very special to me, who makes every day in Japan worth living, who helps me get around and who provides hours of entertainment. Some of you may already know her, while some of you may only have heard her reputation.

Her name is Little Grey. You may know her as the little grey girl's bicycle with the basket on the front and the wobbly wheel, and *new and improved!* the new back tyre. She now has her very own Facebook page, so please, introduce yourself, be friends, go bowling, and you won't miss out when I upload some pictures of the little beauty later this coming week.

While riding my little grey girl's bicycle with the basket on the front, the wobbly wheel and now the new back tyre, together we've learned a lot about the Japanese people and culture. One thing that we've noticed, is that Japanese people don't need designated parking spaces, because they have hazard lights. Small skinny one lane road? No trouble, i'll just put on my hazard lights- it doesn't matter that there are other cars on the road and they can't get around me without driving down the ditch and through the rice paddy field. Middle of a major highway? That's ok, my hazards are on, so I'll just pop out and deliver this basket of green-tea-flavoured whatever to this house here, have a 20min chat and then be on my merry way.
Anywhere's a park when you have your hazards. *cheesy commercial grin and nod*

One thing I'm very glad that Little Grey has not been privy to, is the goings-on inside my classroom some days.
If you've been playing at home this week, you'll know that a child was doing something that was quite distracting to the class, and rendered me unable to teach for a few mins from the shock. Now I certainly don't begrudge a 9 year-old for getting to know himself, quite intimately, but please, not during my lesson yeah?
I've said it before and I'll say it again, maybe he just thought my lesson plan was a bit of a wank.

Speaking of a wank, I've taken to flower photography recently, and well, I'm actually a little bit embarrassed by it. I mean, they're pretty and all... but..... *coughs*
Fag.
Anyway, have a look on FB if you're into that kind of thing. Not that there's anything wrong with that, some of my best friends are photographers. It's not abnormal, it's becoming a lot more common these days, and just because they like to take pictures, it doesn't mean they will try it with you. Sometimes you just grow up knowing that you like to take pictures. Other people don't really realise that they are of that persuasion until much later in life. Everyone's different. But good for them I say.

My boss, is a very well-educated and intelligent woman, speaks 3 languages, and is learning a 4th, manages to run a school, look after me, 2 children of her own, as well as plan and teach many lessons each week.
Yet, she did not know the word "segue", and swore that I was making it up.
Meanwhile, one of the mothers waiting downstairs is a midwife and was telling all the other mothers some pretty graphic stories. Needless to say, this was another moment where I'm glad my Japanese is still pretty woeful. Regardless, I did teach my boss' husband the English word "crowning". That was a conversation that we were both glad not to continue.

On the surface, most people think that Japanese people are generally a very polite, reserved, and respectful society.
The Japanese people, at least. Not so much the Brazilians, or other foreigners here, such as myself.
But there is always one thing, no matter what the culture or background, that makes everyone bond and have ridiculous conversations about soccer, penis length and cabbage, dance like the B-52s, and smoke too much, and that, my friends is ALCOHOL.
The Japanese absolutely change personality when they get a couple of shochus down their necks, and it gets wild.
The major cultural contrast, however, is right now - the next day.
While westerners have a headache, an empty wallet and chunks of the evening missing from their memory, what's the first thing we do? We phone a friend. We "see how they are", which is really an excuse to go over the finer hilarious points of the evening, ensuring that neither party forgets their own embarrassing karaoke selection, who's idea it was to have hotdogs for breakfast, or who subsequently vomited in their own handbag. (K.Jarvis and C.Visalli)
The Japanese, however, are silent. Nothing is spoken about, and work, family, and school life resumes as if none of the above transpired.

This is why I've been a bit confused this week, to hear the story of a Japanese singer and TV celebrity who was drunk in a park, took off all his clothes and sat on the path. Now that in itself is not surprising - Japanese alcohol is a bit crazy to the point that sometimes I'm scared to light a cigarette in case I breath out into the flame and scorch my hosts - but that the media had made such a BIG deal about it. Actually to be honest it's also a little surprising that he's famous from a boy-band called SMAP, but that's not the point of this lesson tonight kids.
He's a man, he was drunk, he did something funny. In Australia, we would applaud. In Japan, the minister for communications, publicly scorned him for being an embarrassment blah blah blah, and many of his major sponsors pulled their deals.
(You can read more about that here, if you like: http://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyleMolt/idUSTRE53M20B20090423?feedType=RSS&feedName=lifestyleMolt
or http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/8017268.stm )

I'm not Japanese, and so I need to tell you about my weekend. :-)

I like Hamamatsu, it's an hour away from my house by train, but it's worth the trip. In "Hama", you'll find some great shopping, a lot of younger people around, great nightlife, and some decent friends.
I just don't like taking the first train home at 0530AM while trying not to pass out from the exhaustion of singing karaoke from 0200-0400 and drinking about ¥10,000 worth of mixed Japanese drinks over the period of 10 hours.

So, I met my friend at the station at 7PM, and we went to have a drink at a "western" bar. When I say western here, I don't mean tall, white with big...........noses.
I mean wild wild west, walking into the saloon through the half-size springy gable-gates, nodding at the other cowboys chewing on their toothpicks and getting itchy trigger finger. The barman was only about 80 years young, and was terribly deaf. Sorry? Sorry?
Our next stop was a new underground Korean restaurant playing Brazillian jazz and serving deliciously small portions of like a miso fondue, a lettuce and potato-chip salad, some random green tofu stuff with pickled flower, and a delicious Japanese citrus drink - none of which I could tell you the names of.

After dinner, it's always time for more drinks, so this time to a livelier and more packed out little bar, where we were seated awkwardly close to the assortment of other patrons.

Seated to my right, may I introduce you to the US Marine who is out on a "date" with a Rose Hancock look-alike for an undisclosed hourly rate. Over the course of our relationship I learned that it gets lonely on the base, he's never really travelled around Japan despite having lived there for 4 years, and at the time he actually thought he was in a completely different city, in a different prefecture. He's originally from Canada, had a horrible acne problem when he was a child, and when his mother married a priest, the priest made him stop selling marijuana. He was friendly enough, but I wasn't the one he was paying to listen to all of this, so, my attention turned back to the interesting chaps on the left.

The louder one on the left, is a perfect example of Japan's health system providing corrective dental care rather than preventative care, works in a coffee shop yet doesn't like coffee, plays soccer, lived in Argentina for 2 months when he was 15, and has an oddly-smelling stomach. My friend will never wash his finger again.
His quieter friend, over 2 hours kept his backpack on like he was ready to go somewhere, even while ordering more drinks.
These two were wonderful entertainment, teaching us a lot of bad words in Japanese, insulting each other, and telling my friend and I that we were very handsome because we had big noses, and therefore we would also have big............ tissues. It's funny that Japanese men don't really mind talking about things like that, in fact, they're always the ones that bring it up. I've been stared at in urinals a lot, but good for the ego, nonetheless.
The louder one, who ironically is the one who SHOULDN'T be opening his mouth too wide for fear of visual offense, was telling us that his friend "can't make girlfriend" because he is not handsome. That shouldn't really be a worry, hang on, I'll get a business card from the couple on my right.

Closing time means Karaoke time!
Entering the Karaoke place, it was evident that Japanese establishments don't really care too much if you're drunk and passed out somewhere. There was a guy on the stairs, just having a rest. For a long time. There was another near the toilets, and a couple sleeping in one of the Karaoke booths.
Japanese Karaoke is crazy and uber different, for those who might not have seen it before. You and your friends hire a little room for however many hours you think you can handle, choose your own songs on the little touch screen remote, and you dance around this small room, on the couch, lay on the floor etc. A lot of fun.
Out came the 80s dancing.
I enjoyed thrashing out the smooth styles of WHAM (back when Georgie-boy looked a bit like Princess Diana), Living End (back when they had hair), a nice Kenny and Dolly duet, some Ting Tings, and a bit of Mariah - I mean, you've got to sing "All I want for Christmas is you", don't you?

Two hours of Karaoke and it was time for another bar. This was 420am now. Another 2 drinks and then a run to Macdonalds. Yes, it's time for a "McHotDog" and a "Mega Muffin" for breakfast.
Again a fine example of Japanese and Brazillian youth, asleep at the tables, out on the street, and almost one at the counter.

(Memoirs of a Gaijin apologises for the delay in getting to the end of the story and thanks you for your patience.)

Maccas time means home time for me, always has, and nothing has changed. So I went to the station to see what time the first train departed. I was glad to see that the train was about to come, so I quickly bought a ticket, ran up the stairs and onto the train through the closing doors. Phew, I thought, and sat down. As soon as I sat down, I remembered how badly I needed to go to the toilet, but was sidetracked.
An hour later, I finally arrived at Yaizu station, where I flew off the train, down the 3 flights of stairs, and outside past the bus station to the toilets. Man that was well-deserved. My bus had departed while I was standing at the urinal, half falling asleep and groaning with relief and a possible forthcoming urinary tract infection.

So having missed the bus, I walked over to the cab station. This is now around 640AM, and the sun is shining and it's going to be a beautiful day, but I'm still in my hoodie, jacket and with my umbrella, backpack and bag of shopping from the day before. I'm all class.

I get into a taxi, using flawless Japanese to say good morning, tell him my address and ask if he takes card (as all of my cash is somewhere under a karaoke couch, no doubt).
The taxi turns back around the corner and he lets me out because he didn't take card.
I got all of my belongings and got into the next taxi. The first taxi driver came over to the window and told the new driver that I didn't have any money so I was thrown out of that taxi too.

I waited at the bus stop for what felt like an eternity, trying not to pass out.
Finally getting home and into bed is the best feeling ever.

I wonder if the 7/11 sells cranberry juice?

Always raffing out roud,

Lob
ロブ

v11 - the one with the students, the bowling and Mr Sausage-Hands

2009-04-21T04:47:00.000-07:00

I've been reviewing my blogs for some quality control, and apart from the use of a lot of colloquial language, being irrevocably yet unintentionally irreverent to Japanese culture, and talking about my students like they're entirely another species, I've mentioned being hungover in two sequential blogs. So no, this week, I'm not hungover, and proud of it.

As for my students being entirely another species, this belief holds true yet again from the past week's exciting adventures.
To start the adult classes, we usually share something from our week and call it "news".
A couple of weeks ago a student told a full adult class (8 people) that he still wasn't feeling well, and that he'd been to hospital. I was genuinely concerned and probed for more information, not noticing the awkward look on the other students' faces. He didn't really say much, just that he couldn't sleep, and hadn't been to work in a little while.
The next week he wasn't in class.
I saw him over the weekend and asked how he was, you know, just "hi how are you" style. He then volunteered that he'd had a nervous breakdown.
So with my foot in my mouth, I said that it was good he was out and about, you know, being with people helps keep you balanced etc.
I very awkwardly then continued on my way.
The whole situation reminds me of that lady on the Catherine Tate show...
(for the uninitiated, try this on for size: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11kKI_pbn9g )

I must say though, that class is my favourite - their English is very good and they have a sense of humour. It's more sharing a pot of tea with friends than teaching. One of the other students in that class is Brazillian, and has a lovely little Japanese girlfriend, also in that class.
For news, he was sharing that he had finally found boots in Japan. Now there's something I can identify with - he had been searching for 6 months to find boots that would fit his huge feet. In Japan, they classify shoes in centimetres. This makes much more sense yeah?
I'm a comparitively large 28cm, so imagine my jaw drop when he announced that he is 31cm.
For the rest of the lesson, I was completely sidetracked, staring at his MASSIVE hands - each finger the approximate length and girth of an Australian thin BBQ sausage. I think I lost about 20mins somewhere.

Overall, teaching is going quite well, although I had a class of really naughty 8 year old boys, I seem to be slowly winning them over. Of course I wouldn't mind a quiet word with their lazy parents but it's not really in anyone's best interests is it...

Teaching pays quite average money so i've been investigating ways to earn supplementary income. One idea that i've stumbled across is to register as a marriage celebrant. Apparently the Nipponjins pay top yen to be married by tall white people. Those are attributes I just happen to posses!

Even more surprising, however, is the absolute contrast in how I am treated by other foreigners. The Japanese people in my small little town all smile, and stare at my hair.
When I go to the larger cities, the other foreigners either stare at me with contempt, or pretend like they didn't see me.

They must just assume I'm American.

I understand.

So back at home, where only I stare at me, and only when I walk past the mirror, I often wonder who designed my kitchen.
That person is a dick.
My "kitchen" consists of a 1 metre wide aluminium moulding which houses both the sink and 2-burner stove. It doesn't take a risk-management conference with name tags, smug banter and morning tea provided to realise that's just a bloody short-sighted and simply DUMB idea.

I can happily report that after a night without power, and a few difficult phone calls kindly translated by my friend who lives in another city, I have a new stove. I am also happy that's it's about 2cm further away from the sink than it used to be. This one might last me more than a month.

The Japanese have a very strong sense of work, commitment to their employers and respect for hierarchy. An odd concept for any Australian, I'm sure.
I went into one such company last week to start a fortnightly English class with all of their mid-to higher level employees. I had planned the first lesson to be a basic refresher of greetings, questions and small-talk.
Imagine their surprise when I asked their president how hold she was. Being Japanese, she was polite enough to not be offended and respect that I had asked, and told us anyway.
It was amazing how much the students really opened up and started having a little more fun once the president had taken a phone call and left the class.
I can't imagine working in an environment like that.

For example, my boss asked me to go bowling with them on Sunday. Um, YES! Of course I was going.
So we got our shoes out of the shoe vending machine and set to task.
The polite Japanese thing to do would be to make sure she won.
I am neither Japanese, nor polite.
The SoyJoy bar may have given her enough sustenance to spare and subsequently strike the last frames, but still not enough to beat me, with my oversized ball (I had to get the heaviest ball so my fingers would fit in the damn asian-finger-sized-holes) and my strong arm. Yes, strong arm. I've been living alone for almost 2 months now remember.

Actually I retract that - I have become a lot more polite. I mean, how couldn't you in a society that says "sorry" to each other as they pass on the street.
I'm used to giving way to cars and pedestrians on the unbelievably skinny "roads" of this little seafood village while I'm riding my little grey girls' bike with the basket on the front and the wobbly wheel. (Yes - I had to put that one in there, as it seems to have become almost as popular as "listen very carefully I shall say this only once".)
Each time you pass, you bow, they bow, you bow, they bow, and you try and get away before you hurt your neck. My boss taught me, if ever in doubt, bow. And she was right. It's worked quite well for me so far.
I think I am fitting in quite well, I mean, I was coming around a corner and was startled by something coming around the other corner and so I moved over and bowed.
I don't think the dog cared.

Vagina.
(I'm just seeing if anyone still reads this after the first few gags and reference to my strong right arm.)

I'd better start to wrap this up, the rain is stopping and I would like to take my new tyre for a spin. As it turns out, the only thing really wrong with the grey little girls' bicycle with the basket on the front and the wobbly wheel, was in fact, the back tyre. The wheel itself isn't so wobbly as the badly worn tyre was actually rubbing on the mudguard. So, $50 later, I have what feels like a brand new little girls' bicycle with a basket on the front and a brand new back tyre!

I think i'd like to have a few shots and try and say that 10 times fast.
Speaking of reasons to drink, when's Eurovision? I wonder if they show it on TV here?

I'm feeling hungover just thinking about it.
Oops, I said it again.

Raff out roud,
Lob
ロブ

The "birthday incident"

2009-04-13T20:11:00.000-07:00

This past weekend can only be summarised by a series of Facebook status updates, so, here they are, as they would have looked on my profile, if I had been updating:

Rob is awaiting a KRudd stimulation to spend on this weekend's birthday celebrations

Rob is waiting for his friend, who is 3 hours late

Rob has decided to give up waiting and is getting ready for bed

Rob's friend has arrived

Rob is now 28 years young, knowing that these are the best years of his life

Rob didn't sleep enough due to wine, practicing Japanese, Spanish and self-control

Rob is very excited at the arrival of his Australian care package

Rob doesn't have time to look at the entire contents of the package, but there's always time for a cherry ripe and a quick flip through DNA

Rob is riding to his bosses house to be taken to the bird sanctuary

Rob's boss has hit the side mirror on a fence, and taken another wrong turn. This is not unusual.

Rob is surprised the kids are being very well behaved, and the bird sanctuary isn't daggy at all!!

Rob has stepped in something

Rob has an awesome photo feeding birds with a very scared look on his face

Rob has been chased by a spoon-bill, harmless, but scary

Rob's boss is still laughing

Rob's not laughing

Rob is wondering why one of the children doesn't have any shoes on

Rob is cleaning that child's feet

Rob is watching a falcon and hunting owl show

Rob has a sore neck from carrying the shoe-less child on his shoulders

Rob is wondering why he hasn't heard from his family at all today

Rob is eating green-tea ice-cream

Rob is buying owl chopsticks because they're cute

Rob realises how much those chopsticks cost

Rob almost left the chopsticks in the shop

Rob stops in at a Brazillian import shop and discovers all kinds of latin delights, and some great food too ;-)

Rob was surprised to see two Brazillians hugging and kissing as he had almost forgotten what affection looked like since coming to Japan

Rob is on his way home for a nap, but had a very nice morning with the birds, and the company was lovely, thank you

Rob is going to lay down to recharge for 15 mins

Rob wonders where the last 2 hours went

Rob walks back to his bosses house to collect the little grey girls' bicycle with the basket on the front and the wobbly wheel

Rob rides to the kombini (7/11) to pick up some bacon, cigarettes and bread

Rob is still half-asleep and almost rides into a ditch

Rob is still laughing about the ditch and misses the turn to his gaijin-palace

Rob does another block

Rob starts to cook his own birthday dinner of Japanese salad, then gnocchi with bacon, onion, garlic, sun dried tomato, and pepper, and cream cookie for desert.

Rob realises that only one hot-plate can be on at a time otherwise the safety switch trips, and this tests his coordination and planning skills.

Rob manages an artful and seamless swap of pot and pan every few minutes to maintain the heat, and is secretly quite smug

Rob is wondering how late his friend will be

Rob's friend is almost 2 hours late, but that's ok, he brings wine so all is forgiven

Rob gives up on the plastic cups ("produced by lube sheep" - see earlier blog) and drinks the wine from the bottle

Rob is a little bit tipsy, and this is evident in his choice of outfit

Rob leaves the gaijin-palace wearing a Kewpie Mayonaise t-shirt and no jacket, even though it's quite fresh outside

Rob has now forgotten that he hadn't heard from any of his family or some close friends for his birthday and is ready for another drink

Rob and friend arrive at latin bar after 30 mins of walking through Yaizu windy narrow back-streets

Rob and friend are the only people at a latin bar at 10pm on a Saturday night, besides the barman

Rob and friend order tequila to start, as that's ALWAYS a great idea yeah?

Rob and friend get to know the barman a little more - he's married, has a son, and has been in Japan for 17 years after moving from Peru

Rob spies on the barman in the back room, looking at gay personals site on the internet

Rob and friend giggle, order some more drinks, smoke another half packet of cigarettes and keep talking

Rob and friend decide, after doing a home-made raisin liqueur shot, that it's a good idea to salsa dance.

Rob is not very good at salsa

Rob's friend just dances with the barman instead

Rob doesn't feel too well, but orders another drink, because that always fixes that

Rob and friend decide to leave the bar just after midnight, but feel a little bad that they were still the only people in the bar, the whole night.

Rob's friend has sore feet so is walking home in just socks. Rob also thinks this is a great idea. Rob claps his shoes together in his hands, all the way home.

Rob needs to throw away a pair of socks but will wait until after he can stand up off the toilet floor first

Rob is asleep with head resting on the toilet seat

Rob just needed a bit of a hurl, and is now fine to go to bed

Rob is angry at the alarm clock. It's very loud.

Rob is angry at his friend. He's very loud.

Rob is angry at the birds. They're very loud.

Rob is angry at the toilet. It's very loud.

Rob wishes he had learnt the Japanese word for asprin

Rob looks in his wallet and can't wait for his KRudd stimulation

Memoirs of a Gaijin v9 - please keep it down, I have a headache

2009-04-06T07:37:00.000-07:00

shhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Japan. Crazy Japan. Every day makes me laugh. Every day makes me cry. It's an amazing adventure, separating your rubbish.

Something that I've gotten used to is how everything beeps, chimes, and has recorded announcements. You can't throw your rubbish in a bin at the train station without a voice thanking you for your consideration of the combustible items; all escalators thank you very politely for using them; the heaters play Vivaldi's Four Seasons when the kerosine is running low; the train station beeps every time the display changes for Japanese to English (around 4 times a minute); and there are people employed to yell at you (politely) in every shop you go into.
So why then, do you have to put your phone on silent everywhere you go? I wouldn't think anyone could hear it over the constant announcements, chimes and specials on seafood-flavoured tea.

In Yaizu (and I don't really know if it's like this in every city here), we have a town PA system - not just in the city, but all around the suburbs as well. Every morning at 0730, the pleasantly polite "morning chime" tells me it's time to get out of bed. I would think it more polite if it took into consideration that the alien in the Leopalace works at night, yeah?
At 1630 each day, the afternoon chime plays and an announcement reminds you that "all of your children should now be home from school".
My favourite, however, is the announcement they make when someone has called and reported a missing person.
That's right, some old biddy has wandered away from her rice paddy and her family can't find her, so they make an announcement over the whole city to get her to come home. This confuses me, as much as it would confuse the poor old love who already can't find her way back, to be told by the town PA system that she needs to oil up the zimmer frame and get a wriggle on. It's not as if there are streets signs to be reading with her bifocals now are there.

From my balcony, I can see a lighthouse. Right now, I think it's hilarious that a dog is barking at each revolution of the light.
Ask me how I feel at bedtime.

That reminds me, I asked a student last week "What's your favourite food?"
He replied "Dog". One of the other students said he must have been Chinese.
I think he meant hotdog?

I am amazed that the Japanese people can be quite racist about Koreans and Chinese - the Koreans I can understand, you may have heard that they're planning to send a missile our way, but the Chinese seem quite fine to me.

On Saturday, I went hiking with a group of Chinese girls that learn Japanese at our school. I'm not sure of the name of the mountain, but there are a few pics on FB for your viewing pleasure. The girls made us a lovely (spicy) lunch, and I've been thinking about it for a couple of days now... I also need to buy more toilet paper now. It was very tasty though, and a beautiful day out. It was also good to reinforce for me that we didn't need to even share a common language to communicate, laugh and have a good day out together.

Backing up a little, on Friday, it was really sunny and warm and so I decided to go for a ride (wait for it...) on my grey little girl's bike with the basket on the front and the wobbly wheel to take some pictures of the cherry blossoms - knowing that they would only be around for a few more days before the sakura snowed down and the trees grew leaves.

I remembered to take a bottle of water, a hat, my compass and a map.... but forgot my camera.
Now I have a phone full of beautiful pictures and a video, with no way to get them onto the computer. ARGH! Japanese technology. Bless.

I also stopped by 3 shoe shops on the way, in order to find runners that would fit my western feet, and made a stop at UNIQLO.
Now if you've just tuned in, UNIQLO is a great cheap Japanese fashion shop, comparable to cotton on, but much quicker fashion turnover and better quality, if you know what I mean. It also only sells Japanese sizes.
Last time I visited UNIQLO, I left with only a pair of XL tracksuit pants, crying, and craving another potato sandwich.
But, THIS time, I stayed strong, found the biggest size jeans they had (32) and bought 2 matching shirts, so now I REALLY look like a tall, blonde, fat Japanese person! Kinda.

I wore one of my new shirts to work that afternoon as it was still quite warm. I had a good set of classes and left feeling great about finally having some clothes, and took the shirt off when I got home.
I realised there was a sticker still on my collar.
It's hard to tell if my Japanese students were too polite to tell me, or too interested in modeling the new vocabulary to even notice.

On Saturday night, I had been invited to have drinks in Shizuoka City with one of the other teachers, and was actually really excited about going to some real Japanese places, with someone who had lived there for 7 years. It was also really nice to have a few drinks.
I didn't realise that "have a couple of drinks" meant "per minute".
You know you're in for a good night when you enter an establishment, the lovely Japanese bar lady shuffles over and screams out your colleague's name, and you commence with a whiskey shot and a sake chaser.
Rinse and repeat.
I asked for a round of water when I had almost fallen off my stool about the 4th round, or so (almost an hour in).

Needless to say, after a couple of hours of this, my friend hit his head on the pavement outside, and I had lot of trouble trying to help him stand up. Luckily for me, a balding fat man on a bicycle who could speak no English, but was surprisingly good with the Australian national anthem, took task to helping us try and get him into a taxi.
The taxi driver naturally didn't want to take him, even after I gave the drive my friend's Gaijin card and wallet. I promised the taxi driver that my friend would not vomit, but I don't think he understood what I was saying. Hell, I'd had so much to drink that I could have been saying "your taxi would look good in the Oigawa river" for all I know, let alone my existing "Officer Crabtree" command of the Japanese language.

No taxi, ok, fair enough, I'm a trooper, and don't give up on anything too easily. Our new "friend" who was up to the second verse - a much better effort than most Australians, directed me to the corner, where there was a little Police Box. The police took a copy of my Gaijin card and I was getting a little worried at this point. I mean, had I done anything wrong? Just ask my mate Arthur Tunstall here who was still singing my national anthem. Oh no, wait, where did he run off to?
I thought he was being sneaky, but he'd actually gone to the 7/11 to buy my colleague a bottle of water, and a can of coffee. Considering we only met this man because we nearly knocked him off his bike, he did alright for us. That's Japanese hospitality right there.

So, my colleague (who is remaining nameless, for those of you playing at home), was now being driven away by the police, and I was a little concerned. I mean, they had my Gaijin card..... ;-)

So I met another friend who had been calling for the past hour wondering where I was, and I decided it was time for a McTeriyaki. As if you wouldn't believe that of me by now. My friend didn't speak English, so we tried a bastardised Japanese/Spanish/English which actually worked quite well.

After a couple more drinks, and sleeping on the floor of a typical Japanese apartment, I awoke, got on the bus back to the station, and tried to forget my head was throbbing like I was having a stroke (mmm.. does anyone else smell toast?).

Nothing was going to stop me from going to Nagoya yesterday, as I had been looking forward to all week.
I took a Shinkansen (very fast train, but smells like dog) to Nagoya, and arrived only about 4 hours late. Not too bad eh?
All the while, I'm still a bit worried about my colleague's whereabouts, and if he ever did make it home safely...

It's getting late now and I have to get up early to separate my rubbish and take it around the corner to the collection cage by 8am, so I will quickly make my last few points:

* Nagoya - very big city, lots of people, good nightlife
* Stayed in a hotel that offered a "Morning Service". I didn't even notice at first that this was a little bit funny because I am getting used to things like that, even though most of my friends (who's names mostly begin with the letter C) would giggle like schoolgirls.
* Watched a little bit of a band play on the street - see my FB videos for that tasty morsel of JPop
* Bought some wine and can't wait to also now buy a bottle-opener
* Still can't write a Haiku poem
* Bought another little book that will help me remember more Katakana and Hiragana characters
* Haven't watched an episode of "Allo Allo" in days, and neither have I worn deodorant. I don't think anyone's noticed.
* Felt quite awkward when a 14 year old student was unashamedly flirting with me during the class. But didn't hate it. A man's gotta take what he can get when he's in Japan right?

WRONG.

I'm not American, and this isn't Thailand.

Lob
(Still awaiting my Kanji name, PS)

Memoirs of a Gaijin v8 - Maps, Mops, Maccas and MNP

2009-03-31T04:16:00.000-07:00

Last night, I was sitting in bed eating a potato sandwich wondering why I am still losing weight.
You may also wish to grab yourself a sandwich kids, this may be a long one.

Firstly, for those who have just tuned in, I live in Japan. I've only been here a month and it's crazy. I love it, I hate rice, I love the people, I regret nothing. Gaijin means "alien". Yes, I'm an alien.

I've been feeling lonely on and off for the past week or so, not drastically, but enough to make me a little sad for a few minutes at a time. This is why it's a good thing to have A.D.D. I say.
So you also understand why it takes me a week or 2 to write an update - I simply have better things to procrastinate with. It's only when writing an update BECOMES the procrastination tool for something else, do I bang out something worth reading.
Tonight, I am supposed to be completing lesson plans, learning Japanese, and finishing my diploma. So welcome to Memoirs v8.

Japanese - they love the gift-giving. Happy birthday, here's a gift, oh, you had a baby, here's a gift, oh your child started school, here's a gift, oh you aren't feeling too well, here's a gift, oh you gave me a gift, here's a gift, oh you gave me a gift for my gift, here's another gift.... and so on. No joke.
I can tell you now that I will never again use real-life examples when demonstrating new vocabulary to adults. Gifts, gifts, gifts.

For example, "Where can I buy a vacuum cleaner?" is translated in Japanese to "please somebody buy me a suite of cleaning items for my home", "I don't get to cook a lot for myself at the moment" means "Does anyone have a daughter going spare that they can awkwardly and continually push on me?" just as "Where on this map can I find a nice cafe?" is actually heard by a Nihonjin as "please spend hours of your own time to create and translate a mammoth map of the whole city indicating no less than 60 interesting points of reference, including but not limited to fresh fruit and veg, coffee, natural springs, cheap electrical shops, bicycle shops, McDonalds (Makudonu), bush-walking tracks, the best sakura (cherry blossom) viewing areas, bakeries, butchers, galleries, restaurants, and Karaoke bars. Thank you."

I now have a 140cm x 100cm map on the wall of my "gaijin palace amongst the rice paddys" with more than 60 movable sticky notes in English and Japanese. If any of my neighbours were tricky individuals, they would come in and move all of the notes to random other places on the map. Not even my $1.60 compass could save me from riding around in the wrong direction on my little silver girls' bike with the basket on the front and the wobbly wheel then!
But that's me. Japanese people aren't that mean. That's why I like them.

I should mention in class one day that it's "difficult to get around to all of these wonderful new places on my map without a car....."

Friday night was possibly the worst night I've had since I've been here - as in I felt the most alone, disconnected from anything familiar, and simply observing this place rather than being a part of it and living here. It was horrible and hit me as hard as a red-headed step child.
I had planned to go to Shizuoka city, straight after work. I'd researched a gaijin bar on the internet, and thought it would be a nice place to chill out, meet some other aliens and hopefully feel a little more at home with where I lived, the language, the culture and the people - none of which I remotely understand.
I was so excited as I left for work on Friday afternoon, taught 5 LONG classes, and kept looking at the clock waiting for 9pm. The plan was that I would take the train to Shizuoka, stay in a hotel which I had booked on the internet that morning, and just see what was about town.
What I hadn't accounted for, was how I was going to get to the train station. The last bus was at 9pm, I couldn't call a taxi for myself, and my only Japanese-speaking friend in Japan wasn't answering his phone.
So, I walked home, ate noodles, curry and rice, biscuits, and a LOT of other bread items. It's easy to be a comfort eater in Japan I've found - you still lose weight. Horrible night, so let's never speak of it again.

HOWEVER, anyone who knows me would wonder why I gave up there. I mean, please, some of the ways we got around in Europe... man..... (Brett - I still laugh about that night in Russia, getting in that random car, offering him 10 euros to drive us back to the hotel and then realising how drunk he was and that he didn't know which side of the road to drive on, and Cath, the 40 euro fee for cleaning the vomit off the side of the taxi before being hoisted onto the golf-buggy in Rome...)
In my own true style, I wasn't going to be defeated by one lousy flaw in my plan..... or was I?
I slept on it.

Saturday morning I got up early, took a bus to the train station, a train to Shizuoka, and went shopping. It wasn't what I had first planned, but it was healthy just to get out and do something after being so defeated the night before. I went to a bookstore and bought a new text for learning Japanese, which I was very excited about, and then popped into a nice-looking import food store. It was a really humbling experience to see things that I thought were common household products being sold as "speciarty impolts" such as a box of 20 lady grey tea bags (roughly $9), tortellini ($11) and a 250g bag of ground Lavazza (almost $25). I smiled, bowed and left.

I then took a train to meet my friend in Hamamatsu, about an hour from my place, and famous for Unagi (eel) - Hamamatsu, not my friend. Um, yuk. As if I don't b!tch about seafood enough in this blog and on facebook enough.

It was so nice to be in Hamamatsu for a few reasons: it was really nice to be with a friend who spoke Japanese and could play guide; it was nice to have a few drinks; it was REALLY nice to meet some more people.

I have mentioned the sakura a few times before, but I really can't express enough how absolutely amazing they are. A dry, lifeless, grey street can overnight transform into this explosion of colour and life when the cherry blossoms... um... bloom. I have put only a couple of pics on facebook taken just before my camera batteries went flat. Bad timing right.
It's only only the sakura themselves, it's what they do to people. Everyone was out having late night picnics under the trees at night, dancing around on the grass, talking a million miles an hour (as they tend to do), and laughing. That's right, for those of you playing at home - LAUGHING. I've not really heard a lot of laughter in Japan. There's shy smiling, and a hell lot of bowing, but not a lot of laughter.
The sakura changes everything.

It's a shame they're only out for about a week before they turn into leaves. But i'll let you know how people react to leaves. A scientific experiment, shall we say. Except no science is actually involved, like most of my research.

We also went to see the castle on the hill (pics also on FB), and had a lovely dinner at an italian restaurant, which now also owns a bag of my shopping. I drank too much and forgot it.
It was extra lovely because we had cheese, wine, and really nice pizza and pasta - all things you don't really get a lot of around here, but think about the import shop prices and now cook it and serve it. I'm glad my friend paid. Maybe they gave him a discount because he was flirting with the waitress all night?

We went to a bar to have another glass of wine and was reading a local tourist rag (yes - they have enough tourists to warrant an English magazine - I was amazed), and saw an advertisement for an Australian bar close to where we were. I can't describe my excitement!
So we went to meet "Marty" from the Sunshine Coast (QLD) who had lived in Japan for 17 years, didn't know who Naomi Robson was, and loved to surf, and had a couple of beers, and then headed to another bar called..... actually who am I kidding, I never ask names.

I'm not sure if it was because I hadn't had a drink in a long time, because we were playing with little remote-controlled cars on the bar or because I simply speak better Japanese when I'm drunk, but I had so much fun there.

No matter where in the world Carmen Sandiago was, I can guarantee that she always ended a big bender with a Maccas run yeah?
I'll have 2 McTeriyakis thanks... nom nom nom.....

I stayed in a little "business hotel" near the train station on Saturday night after burping up beer and an unknown meat smothered in sweet sauce. Business Hotels here, mean tiny, cheap single beds with a plastic moulded wet-room for showering and a choice of rice balls, or crab salad for breakfast. I don't understand it, but I ate it.
I think my body must be getting used to all the seafood and MSG in the food here, as only tonight did I finish consuming a vegetarian bento box containing fish, crab, bacon and some unidentifiable sweet and salty sauce WITHOUT my throat feeling like it was closing over. "Impressive", I hear you say. Wait until you see my map.

It was on Sunday that my friend talked me into getting a mobile phone. By "talked me into" I mean agreed that I needed a way to more efficiently communicate with the rest of the world. So, $60 later, I have a Japanese mobile phone. It only took me a month.
You may remember me from such blogs such as "my bank won't talk to your bank" right? Well mobile phones are another awesome example of Japanese engineering and invention - some amazing little things are thought of, like electronic and automatic bidets on most home toilets, but not major things like building a house that will stand more than 20 years, or having ATMs that let you take money out of any other bank.
From my basic cheap little mobile phone, I can send and receive emails, take great pics with the 1.3mp camera, record calls while I'm on the phone, or record messages like an answering machine on the handset, rather than paying to subscribe to the network's voicemail. Neat, right?

Predictive text - FAIL
Being able to send SMS to other networks - FAIL
Being able to respond to an SMS from overseas - FAIL
The ability to send those cool pictures somewhere else, or communicate with my laptop via bluetooth - FAIL.

I am surprised that Japan supports Mobile Number Portability, but not inter-carrier SMS. Ridiculous!

I got paid today. I'm tossing up between either getting the wobbly wheel fixed on my little grey girls' bike with the basket on the front and the wobbly wheel (of which I will NOT post pictures, thank you, it's embarrassing enough), buying a new bike (but then what would I write about???), or buying a scooter. Not an electric or petrol one, but one that the kids zoom around town on, you know, that you kick along the ground, wearing down your shoes? I don't mind, I don't wear shoes enough in Japan during the day to get my money's worth anyway.

This weekend I am going bushwalking with the Chinese students from my school. Should be interesting.

I had better finish up here as I've had the heater on for a while and my map is starting to droop. It's not often enough these days that I get to say things like that, so take it all.

*giggles*

To my loved ones down south, I hope you aren't too sad to say goodbye to daylight saving this weekend.

Matane,

Lob
ロブ

Memoirs of a Gaijin - v7 - Comparing sizes, Languages, and Vinyl

2009-03-21T19:55:00.000-07:00

I really should be careful to ensure my kimono is firmly secured before venturing onto my balcony for my morning cigarette. I live across from a playground, and well, the kids don't really need to see that do they.
A quick side note here - my apartment here is much smaller than our previous Windsor Palace, yet my balcony is much bigger and has enough room for more than 2 people at a time. I just can't wait until I have more than 1 friend to test that theory.

Friday was a public holiday in Japan (Happy Spring Day, or something), and so a friend and I set off for a walk to the beach. We checked the GoogleMap and worked out it should be about 30 mins walk from my apartment. It was a lovely walk along the stream, lined with cherry blossoms waiting for the sun before they bloom, fish-flake factories, and other unpleasantly odorous industry.
And then.... I could hear waves.
I can't actually describe how excited I was when I realised that we were near the beach. I've always lived relatively close to the beach, and it's important to know where the water is from my place at any time, so as not to feel too claustrophobic.

Even though the "beach" was a mess of black pebbles, tetra-brick break-walls and an ice-cream shop, it was still beach to me.
As we walked along the waterline I could point out out over the water in various directions the approximate location of other countries. I'd never really been able to do this in Melbourne - Tasmania doesn't count.

Hawaii, the USA, South America, The Philippines, some little places in the South Pacific like Fiji, Vanuatu and New Caledonia - this was a new thing for me.
I would have pointed out Australia if PNG wasn't in the way!
I got a little emotional as I realised that the people in my life were so close, yet so far away.

So I had lunch.

The food may be different, but the comfort of a full stomach is always the same.

Speaking of food, I'm getting really annoyed at how much food I have to throw out because EVERYTHING has seafood in it in this town. I suppose you get that with a sea-side fishing village, but I didn't expect vegetable noodles to also have the strange taste of fish sauce and seafood-extender. Grrr. It's a good thing I keep an emergency supply of 2-minute noodles in my kitchen for such occasions.

When I had made the decision to come to Japan, I knew that I would feel lonely about a month in, and that's ok, I was prepared: I had the internet, books, and a zeal to explore my new surroundings to ignore the desire to just go out for coffee at Dino's in Windsor. Not just people, but certain other comforts of home I really miss. I eagerly await my care packages... :-D

So yesterday, having pondered my imminent loneliness, I decided to go for a long ride and explore some more new territory - you know, ignore it and it doesn't exist kind of thing.... much the same as my packing last month right Colin?
I GoogleMapped my way to Fujieda, which is the next city over from Yaizu where I live. I took a wrong turn, as usual (but you can't blame me - none of the roads here have names, and they are narrow and windy - think Malta for anyone who's been there), and it took me considerably longer to get there.
No problem; I had a lot of time to waste this long weekend anyway.

I found a great shopping centre, a bookshop which didn't sell any books on learning Japanese, which is a shame because that's all I really wanted to buy yesterday, and a food court.

Japanese people can be really funny. In the bookshop, for instance, I had 3 girls running around to try and help me find what I was after, even though my description in Japanese was quite poor, one of them phoned a friend to translate etc, they were really lovely and helpful. Not so in the food court, where I was refused service from one place because I couldn't say the name of what I wanted and was pointing and saying "this please" in Japanese.
McDonalds, on the other hand, was glad to assist me with a McTeriyaki. I'm so glad I don't live near a Maccas - that would be very dangerous.

After awarding myself a FAIL (C.Jones 2008) on the book-hunt, an INVALID (I don't know who started that actually) on the food choice, but a smile for finding an Italian cafe which actually serves espresso (rare), I decided to take a nice long ride home. It's a good thing I'd purchased a compass, yes? I'm sick of getting lost.
You may be thinking "God this kid's a whinger", and yes, well, I know I am, but in my defense, the little grey girls' bike with the basket on the front has never been the same since I knocked it over, along with a long line of other bikes like dominos in the carpark at Jusco when my hands were too full of groceries. It's all fun and games when you're riding around, not knowing where you're going, but it's unpleasant to have to go further than necessary when every 2 metres the back wheel wobbles and you are thrown to the left. I have a rather sore bruise on my inner right thigh from the protruding front part of the seat. :-(

On the ride back, I checked the map and compass obsessively, as let's face it, something had to replace my mobile phone addiction. I have been without a mobile for over 3 weeks now, and still I feel my pocket vibrate at random throughout the day.

I stopped into a roadside Brazilian bar because it looked a bit fun. Inside the walls were covered in 70s and 80s vinyl covers, lots of plants, hand-made cakes and desserts on a table in the middle, and Japanese and South American children playing. This was so bizarre for me, in the middle of Japan.

I spoke at length in Spanish with the Peruvian owner, who had lived in Sao Paulo (Brazil), Barcelona, Sydney, and Tokyo for many years each, while he also entertained the Japanese soccer mums, offering them more and more free cakes and desserts.

So far in Japan, I am teaching English, I listen to English music, I speak English with the other teachers at work, I speak English with all of my friends at home, I learn Italian once a week, I seem to speak more Spanish than Japanese to people that I meet.

I think the only Japanese I will learn is "Do you speak Spanish?" and "how much to fix the wheel on this little girl's bike with the basket on the front?"

Confused.

Matane,

Lob.

ロブ

NB1 of course you can RSS feed this blog - go to http://robu-gaijin.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default
NB2 you can also call me on my Melbourne number (03) 9015 4772 if I'm at the computer

Memoirs of a Gaijin - v6 - Those who work in Log Cabins should not throw Garbage Parties

2009-03-17T00:57:00.000-07:00

It has been a while since I've written an update, simply because I've been lazy, but let me start with 3 things that are obviously very important here:
1) 27
2) No
3) Some

Due to popular demand, I will tell you a little bit about my work - so mostly a serious update today, for those of you playing at home.

Firstly, and quite obviously the most interesting thing about my school is that it is all made of cedar. Yes, it's a log house. Take a look.

There are about 120 students of all ages, and almost all of them live in the local area - more about my area later.
I work usually from about 3-9pm each weeknight, and teach around 20 lessons a week, from 40 mins to 1 hour each. I teach 50% childrens' classes of varying ages (from 4 to 17 years old) and 50% adults. Each class has between 1-8 students.

The children are quite well behaved in class, but not as well behaved while the doors are open, or annoyingly so, when my boss is looking through the window.
They are quite intelligent, and love learning new language. We have a set teaching structure for content and target language, but very flexible with how the language is taught. For example, I may have to teach a group of 8 years olds to say things like "I can kick a soccer ball", and It's my choice how I go about doing that.

No, they do not use Avanti! ("Dario es sempre in retardo" or "Je suis desole")

The adults are a little harder to prepare for, because they expect you to know everything and run everything. They pay for you to force them to do things, but when you do, they um and ah about everything while they process and translate the request (e-to...). It's frustrating, but they're very polite and very lovely people. They teach me a lot of patience. They love bringing gifts as well. I have so far received pickled wasabi flowers, a calendar with all of the Japanese holidays, and curry.

Usually when I finish work, I can't be bothered cooking, so I visit the great little place on the way home that does the best gyoza. You have to go to the machine, press the "gyoza" button, put in your money, then take your little docket to the counter for the old lady to make them. Works for me, less talking Japanese.

After my gyoza, I walk for another 5 mins through rice paddy fields - no joke - to my Leopalace which stands out like a, well, a gaijin Leopalace!

Last weekend, I went to Shizuoka (the capital city of my prefecture) and did some shopping, sang a few songs at Karaoke, visited a wine bar (because Japan doesn't have a lot of wine, you have to go to specific wine bars - and most of the wine there is French and Australian), and then took a train home. Was all very pleasant.

The weather is warming up now so very soon the sakura (cherry blossoms) will be lining the rive, just near my apartment so I can't wait to see that. I have been told by my boss I may wish to consider having a sakura party where everyone brings food and drink and celebrates the sakura's beauty, and the warmer weather approaching. I said it was a wonderful idea, but who would I invite??

Plus, if I had a party, I would be faced with the embarrassing hassle of having a lot of garbage.
Garbage separation, bagging and collection is extremely strict in Japan.
I have to separate my garbage into combustible, non-combustible, and PET bottles.

I have to put the combustible garbage in specifically designed bags that you buy at the supermarket, and then take them down the street to the collection cage not before 6am, and not after 8am on the collection day each week.
Non-combustible garbage also needs to be put in a specifically designed bag, purchased from your local supermarket, and taken to the collection cage down a different street, on a different morning, between 6am and 8am on the specified collection days. No earlier, no later.

PET bottles can be left at yet another different collection cage at any time you like. How nice.

Some weeks, the collection days are changed, and the council posts a handy update on the front of our building. It's a shame I can't read them.

I'm sure you understand why I don't want to have a party.

One of the things that confuses me though, is the way Japan packages things considering their garbage laws.
For example, 10 years ago when Australia really started getting serious about recycling, you slowly noticed packaging also changing to match the new standards of garbage separation, collection, and environmental awareness.

Not in Japan. I'm currently eating a pellet of gum that was individually wrapped in paper, plastic, then the foil packet, which was also covered in plastic. This is not unusual for anything here.
Even a 6 pack of Asahi cans was plastic wrapped, cardboard frame, and then of course, the individual cans.
Tea bags - all individually plastic wrapped over the paper covers.
Absolutely ridiculous.

I can now hear the 4.30pm music coming from the town centre (not really sure why, they just play music at 4.30 each afternoon), so It's time for me to go back to work for another class.

You can also now RSS feed this blog from blogspot if you're interested:
http://robu-gaijin.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

Memoirs of a Gaijin - v5 - 7 March 2009

2009-03-16T23:59:00.000-07:00

Until I go back to the city ward office and pick up my Gaijin card, I've decided I can't officially call myself a Gaijin, so Geezer it is for now.

Today (Saturday) was my first official day off, with no commitments, so I had planned to go into Yaizu city. I was really happy when I woke up and it was sunny and a much warmer 12 degrees; that made up for missing the free breakfast at the hotel because I slept in. Although I'm bored with rice balls and salad, it's still better than paying for my own breakfast until I start getting paid in Yen.

It was time to attempt to "shower" in the wet-room, which consists of holding the spray-head to my shoulders because the hose isn't long enough to reach my head, bowing gracefully as I usually hit my head on the sink, and trying not to wet my towel which also hangs in the wet area. The marvels of Japanese engineering.

I used the free internet in the hotel reception to make myself a useful Google map with the places I wanted to go, and markers with familiar landmarks to navigate, as nothing is in recognisable characters at all and wanted to print it. Printing, to me, is a fairly simple process, even when the PC language is set to Japanese. You click the little picture of the printer, trust that whatever on the screen is correct and click the biggest button you can see. Oh, no paper. My brilliant planning had all come undone, realising that I would need to somehow ask the staff for paper. A conversation with them, although quite fun, is almost like an episode of "Mind Your Language" (F.Perri, 2007).
Roughly translated, the conversation went something like this:
"Good morning very much, paper please" *pointing to empty printer*
The man comes from behind counter to the printer and looks at the map I had on the screen "Ah, Yaizu City Map"
"Yes"
The man returns to the reception desk and pulls out what can only be described as an A2 size black and white Yaizu-ways
I point to the printer and say "my map please"
The man goes back to the computer, then retrieves a Yaizu tourist map, again, all in Japanese (they obviously don't get western tourists in these parts).
"No thank you, my map print please I would like" (obviously literal translation, I'm not completely retarded).
He got the point and brought out about 50 sheets of paper, loose.
I hand him 20 yen, he puts in the first piece of paper and sits at the computer. This concerned me. He then presses print, clicks cancel and looks expectantly at the printer. He pulls a confused face, and repeats the same routine - Print, Cancel, confused.
Not wanting to be rude in such a polite society, I weighed up what level of rude I could be allowed being a westerner, against how long I wanted to wait until I was able to be on my way.

I was in a rush. I printed my own map. I check out tomorrow.

The rest of the day was just as confusing. Actually, what am I saying, every day here is confusing in an exciting way.

I set off on my little grey lady's [sic] bicycle with the basket on the front and took a wrong turn, only about 2 minutes into my journey. Wrong, in the sense that it wasn't where I had planned to go, yet so right because I found my nearest UNIQLO! (E. Hui, 2009)
To those unacquainted with UNIQLO, think Cotton On meets American Apparel, but with useful items from this season.

Now I expected to be classified as maybe a little larger in Japan than I would in Australia, so I took a couple of "Medium" items to the change rooms. I lined up behind 3 soccer mums with big hair, thick make-up and loud jewlery, took off my shoes, as is the custom here for anywhere you actually can't be bothered with the hassle of juggling this with your other possessions and activities (ie, the toilet, some workplaces, schools, hotel rooms, internet cafes, change rooms, some boutiques etc) and tried to put these clothes on.
I asked the attended for a size larger. He looked confused and brought back XL. At first I was offended, like when my dad asks random women when they're due, and they're not pregnant, yeah, that feeling.
When the XL t-shirt, jeans, and jumper still didn't fit, I politely gave them all back to him, went back to the floor and picked up the largest pair of tracksuit pants I could find and went straight to the registers.
I'm wearing the XXL pants now. Perfect fit. I'm not upset, I just normally stay in on a Saturday night, eat this much junk food and smoke a lot.

After my UNIQLO experience, I stopped on the side of the road and had a cigarette, as you are not allowed to smoke while walking, riding a bike, or in change rooms. In fact, as of the 1st March, you are not allowed to ride a bike with your umbrella up. Apparently it's dangerous.

I made it to Yaizu City, and rode around for a couple of hours, just exploring. I would describe Yaizu as more a fishing village than a city- not only because of the smell, but the look of the locals as well. I wasn't scared they would steal my wallet, more so my kidneys. And eat them with a nice ginger sauce with green tea.

I rode past the one nightclub in Yaizu and made a note on my map so I could come back tonight. Who was I kidding? I'm not going to ride into the city again, have a few Kirins, not be able to make conversation with anyone, and try and ride home again in the dark.

Having thought about it tonight, I actually think the people at the club would be able to ask 3 questions in English, judging from my experience so far.
The only 3 questions that everyone in Japan has asked me without fail are:
* How old are you?
* Do you have a girlfriend?
* Do you like Japanese food?

I can't imagine they'd be excited by any of my three answers.

So after a long day of riding the world's most uncomfortable bike, I had the hottest calves this side of Hiroshima, and felt like some tea.
The receptionists at the hotel had changed duties, so I was pleased when my regular Mr Friendly was on guard to give me my key, which, annoyingly enough, I can't take anywhere with me when I go out. I asked him for some more tea (yes, that awful green powder that tastes like dry peas - it's better than drinking the water here), and made that tea-drinking motion. You know that motion. The international symbol for tea. So I thought.
So..... I nearly drank bubble bath this evening. I can't, for the life of me think how the "tea" motion could be translated to "I'm tired and want to relax in green water with the smell of fresh apples".

I do smell edible now though. Maybe I should go to that club tonight after all - "27, no, hell no".

Tomorrow is "Free Soba for Westerners" day at a restaurant in Shizuoka that's just opened. Apparently they want to take pictures of attractive westerners eating their food for advertising. I think I'll be looking after the kids or something.

At least I'll smell nice.

Cheerio,

Lob.
ロブ

Memoirs of a Gaijin - v4 - 4 March 2009

2009-03-16T23:58:00.000-07:00

As I met my 3rd adults' class this evening, one of their first questions to me was "So, whato do you sinku of (to) Japan?"

My immediate response was "crazy". Not a good way to introduce myself to a new group of patriotic adults.
I had plenty of time to think about it on my ride home from school tonight, on my little grey bicycle with the basket on the front, and I've been able to pin-point just a few examples of why this country is so in front, yet so behind.

1. Patriotism. They love Japan, they think Japan is the best country in the world, has the best people (and best looking people), yet all of the advertising, and most of the more popular celebrities are Eurasians! Having said this, they still look at Misha and Konan (see v3) quite oddly when we go shopping or to restaurants like they're foreigners.

2. Banking. If one business is with one bank, their customers also have to be with that bank if they would like to transfer money, or pay electronically. If I'm with a certain bank, I also have to only go to that bank's ATMs. The banks don't communicate. They're not connected. There is no such thing as inter-bank transfers unless you pay to set up a "relationship" between your account and another bank. There's no such thing as BPay, or equivalent.

3. Paperwork. It may just be Japan's desire to have very high employment, but there are so many employees everywhere. Or maybe it's simply to process all of the paperwork that they make you sign for everything? I secured my apartment today, after signing 3 forms yesterday, and another 8 today. Not to mention the agent looked at me funny when I said I don't have an Inkan (a personal stamp, in place of a signature). I prefer to sign the "old fashioned way", apparently. I'm pretty sure the old wax seal was the "old fashioned way" mate.

4. Japlish. It has absolutely amazed me the amount of people that have said flat out that they don't speak English, to the extent that I've had to try and communicate with my limited Japanese and a lot of pointing, smiling, and bowing. (The "If in doubt, bow" principle, Tricia, 2009). Having said that, once they see I'm making a Japanese effort, they can all of a sudden be quite fluent in this English thingo. It's a little cute, but frustrating.

5. The apartment I'm moving into on Monday is very swish, professional and mostly for companies to lease for their traveling employees. I was confused when I saw that for each new tenant they provide a brand new TV, microwave, fridge, washing machine, umbrella, mattress and pillow, yet no blanket or toilet paper??

6. Speaking of the agency again, they drove me to and from the apartment, gave me coffee, lollies, a cigarette, tissues and a little gift, but I was not allowed to use their toilet. I wanted to give them a gift back.

7. Shoes. Man, does this confuse me. You take off your shoes to enter someone's house. That's fair enough. You don't want to ruin their tatami (L.Santilli, 2009), but you also take off your shoes when entering schools, or some types of businesses. Ok, I can live with that, as long as there's somewhere to leave them. What I don't understand, is why do I have to take my shoes off to use an outdoors bio-toilet? That's right, for those of you playing at home, I have to put my shoes on to leave the building, walk 3 steps to the outside toilet, take my shoes off again, leave them outside the toilet and then walk in kiddie's piddle. Awesome. I then have to open the door, put my shoes back on, to walk over the other side of the garden to use the tap to wash my hands, walk back to the school door and take my shoes back off. It's obvious why I've stopped drinking fluids after 10am.

8. I'm classified a "heavy smoker" because I smoke at times other than mealtimes.

9. Why does a hotel even give you a key, if you're not able to take it with you when you go out? You may as well just buzz me in or something.

10. Yaizu, where I live, divides their rubbish into 2 categories: combustible, and non-combustible. The only thing they don't burn is PET bottles. I have to deposit my combustibles (paper, plastic, aluminium, glass {???} and food scraps) in one cage just down the road. I then have to take my PET bottles to a different cage on another street, about 4 mins walk from my apartment.

11. Japanese people say that fast food is evil, bad for you, makes you fat, supports irresponsible American corporations etc, yet go to any McDonalds, any time of day (don't worry, I have), and you will see it packed with parents taking their children for a meal. Even more confusing is that Japanese food, in general, is much worse. The amount of bleaching, preservatives in the food, time left out on the sushi train or at the Kombini (E.Hui 2009), or the way in which it was handled by the previous person who changed their mind and put it back, makes me feel better about enjoying a McChicken this afternoon.

I bitch, because I love this crazy country, I just don't understand it.

Wakarimasen.

ロッブ
(Lob)

Memoirs of a Gaijin - v3 - 3 March 2009

2009-03-16T23:57:00.000-07:00

Here I am in my Kimono watching "Full House" in Japanese. It was either that or the pixelated porn on channel 3 again.
Ok junkies, here's your num nums....

The Japanese call Yaizu "country", but I call it a little industrial city. On a port where they receive all of the seafood, this town is really big on all things from the ocean.
So, I found the local pizza shop.

I actually found it by accident too - I was riding my little grey bicycle around the block near my hotel to try and find a coffee yesterday morning, and almost ran into the sign for the pizza shop as I was too busy laughing at the name of it. "Willy Pizza." I wondered if it was funnier that the pizza place was called that, or that I was a 27 year old blonde Australian in grey pinstriped pants and a business shirt riding a girl's silver bicycle with a basket on the front.

Back to the timeline - Sunday morning I took a taxi back from the hotel to Tokyo station (because my bag was a little bit heavier after my Ginza strip morning....).
I then took a Shinkansen, meaning "Bullet train" - perfect name, because it goes pretty fast; I felt a bit sick - well, that could have been that I was in a smoking carriage because I couldn't understand what the ticket man was asking and just kept nodding my head. I was told that if in doubt, bow, so I was. I ended up in a stinky carriage with 2 lovely lesbians, 6 businessmen, and an old lady with emphysema. Cough cough.
I took the Shinkansen to Shizuoka, and called the phone number of the school I was to be working at so they could come and pick me up soon, and then a local train to NIshiYaizu (literally translated means little freezing place in the middle of butt-f*k-nowhere).

Tricia and Hiro picked me up with their 2 kids - Konan (almost 3) and Misha (4).
Konan and Misha speak Chinese, Japanese and English, all better than I can inhale a pizza. They are such a wonderful family - they're just so lovely. Tricia is only 34 and with her husband Hiro have built a log cabin with 4 rooms for this English school, Bonorong (Aboriginal for forrest creatures, or something.... bonorong.com - have a look for yourself). Tricia teaches a gazillion kid's classes a week ranging from 6 months to 16 years old, and then goes home to her 2 kids (and Hiro, who's a big kid as well). I don't know how she does it - she's just so passionate and really cares about these kids and their development, never gets tired or cranky.. well not that I see...
The kids are gorgeous little Eurasians that are pretty well behaved, but very cheeky. Today, Konan realised that I don't speak a lot of Japanese, so he would talk to me in English, and then say something else in Japanese to the other kids. He's a cheeky little monkey.

Speaking of kids, what the hell has happened to me? I've absolutely fallen in love with these kids that I've already started teaching. They're so well behaved, love to smile, and they love to participate in the songs, games, even tidying up!

I have had a little trouble with a group of 12 year old girls though, they refused to talk to me and then would giggle to each other in Japanese. That's girls though. At what age do they actually start being nice to boys, their parents, and other girls who are prettier than them?

Cathryn, I've just read your message - the toilets are crazy. I mean, it's all well and good to sit and have a moment alone, but with all those buttons, you think i'd be able to find one that turns off the bloody music yeah?? Because I'm not in a very English friendly town at all, everything has been difficult. It's just hard, but fun. This is a perfect example of what we take for granted, being able to read things. I thought, ok, it can't hurt, i'll try all of the buttons on the toilet to see which one actually flushes the thing.... oh my... that one... does... fun.. things.....
I also found the button that cleans the toilet.
I needed a shower after that.
Other buttons include bidet, one with just a picture of a woman on it, and you can imagine what that does...., water pressure, and some other random things that I still can't work out, and don't want to test just in case I have to learn Japanese very fast to speak with a doctor about personal matters.

Finding decent food has been hard around here, as my hotel backs onto a 100 yen shop (similar to the $2 shop, except with everything imaginable, from cup noodles, to bath towels, to pot plans), and a pizza place - Willy, as above. I have seen a couple of restaurants around the next block, but can't work out what time's they're open, as I never have time to stop and look up my phrasebook for the numbers when I'm swanning around on my little push-bike.
I am also starting to hate the smell of Japanese food. Yes, It's only Tuesday, but that vinegar/seafood/rice/feet smell is starting to make me yearn for a good old McTeriaki! (Did I tell you I had one of those in Tokyo?? YUMMO.......).

Inside my hotel, however, I have green tea in powder form, no English speaking staff (i'm not complaining, i'm loving the experience), rice balls and salad for breakfast every morning, and a bath the size of my bed. No, it's not a very large bath at all.
Powdered green tea, if you'll allow me just one more tangent for this post (I know right?), is a strange concept to me. Shizuoka alone (this Prefecture/State) produces something like 44% of Japan's green tea, and so they call it "Shizuoka tea". If the tea's so good here, why the hell would you powder it?? It actually tastes like the boring inside bits of wasabi peas.

So, between the food, the tea, the weather, and riding my bike around at all hours of the night in the cold and rain without my scarf (*mourns*), you can imagine I'm not feeling 100% at the moment. Still, however, I don't wear a mask.
Yes, masks. I thought they were all a big joke for funny pictures in emails, but no, you'd be surprised how many Japanese people wear masks. You know, those SARS/Michael Jackson numbers? Yeah. It's really odd at first, but now I don't even notice them. I just keep on coughing ;-)
I asked Tricia why they wear them on Sunday and she said she also found it quite scary when she first got here; that maybe it was something to do with Hiroshima, SARS, the pollution, or just a new fashion, but they only wear them when they think they're getting a cold, in order not to spread it!
Ok, this society is way too polite sometimes.
i think someone downstairs was actually fired tonight because I asked why my room wasn't serviced today while I was at work.
Well, at least I think that's what I said?
Who knows, with my Japanese, I could have said anything, maybe "Your janitor molested my cat and ate my underwear".

Fire him I say.

little pervert.

ロブ

Memoirs of a Gaijin - v2 - 3 March 2009

2009-03-16T23:56:00.000-07:00

After surviving the Malaysian Hospitality disaster, I was pleasantly surprised when I set foot on Japanese land. So many shorter people wanting so badly to assist, point me in the right direction, carry my bags, practice their English with me, tell me to smoke, not to smoke, stand, sit, walk, bow, make myself comfortable, and not leave anything behind. So many instructions, so little time to take them all in. So I sat.

After I left the sea of smiling "Ohayo", I took a bus from Narita airport to Tokyo Station. Not to be confused with Tokyo Air Station, that's just somewhere else I was told not to disembark at.

Tokyo is Genki. Very Genki. Japanese use the word for "good, bright, cheery, happy" but I found the more accurate meaning for Tokyo in my trusty dictionary (N.Beament, L. Santilli, 2009).
Genki means "frisky", and my god, is Tokyo frisky.

My first task was to hail a taxi, to which I was directed by a smiling gentleman, get in and try and explain where it was that I wished to go.
To those not accustomed to Japanese addressing system, only some major roads have names. No no, not just signs, but only some streets have NAMES. This means that everywhere is defined by the prefecture (state), city, ward, block number, and then building number. I thought I was pretty smart and had researched exactly where my hotel was and pointed the driver the wrong way down a one-way street.
FAIL.
I then realised that he was a taxi driver and it would be easier to give him the address of where I was going and let him do all the work, so I pulled out my trusty address card (E. Hui, 2009) and gave it to the driver.
"So so so so so" and the driver then pulls out his street directory, to drive me around the block and there we are, right out the front of the hotel. Mind you, we were only 2 blocks from the station where we started... I didn't think to check that when I was researching now, did I.
So, 700 yen ($11) and 2 blocks later, I try to check into my hotel.

I had paid extra online when booking the hotel (about $50) so I could check in early in order to dump my backpack (20kg exactly, thanks C. Pernice for his neighbour's scales) and not have to carry it around Tokyo for the whole day.
They didn't, for some reason, recognise this booking, but at least they took my bag to look after for me.

So, I was free of my backpack, had a map of Tokyo, and an eager desire to explore the frisky city.

As anyone who has ever travelled with me may know, my first stop needed to be at a cafe, as I had slept a total of about 2 hours on the flight. Most of that, PS, was during take-off so I missed the best bit.
The chosen establishment was a little underground white room full of soccer mums with big hair and makeup, eating waffles with ice cream and salad, espresso, and half a packet of cigarettes. This is the city for me, i'd decided.

I spent the rest of the morning window shopping along the Ginza strip (comparable only to Champs-Élysées in Paris, except with shorter, much friendlier staff).
I stumbled into an Apple shop (by stumbled, I mean literally, I had just worked out that smoking while walking was illegal in some parts of Tokyo and so had butted out quickly and tripped) and found a surprisingly small little retail outlet with only a few laptops, some ipods, and a couple of accessories. I was a bit disappointed, and so asked one of the staff where I could find more accessories. He responded with "Revel tree". At first I thought that was the name of a neighbouring store front but then realised as I was being pointed (always with a flat open palm) to the lift at the back of the store, that he meant level 3. This place was *actually* pretty huge.

In the afternoon I had booked a bus tour of Tokyo, as is the done thing for orientation, information, and ideas on where else to go, what to see etc.
I didn't realise that in 5 hours, we would only see 3 sights. Of course the Tokyo Tower (built the same as the Eiffel, but of course 22 metres taller ... compensating for something?), a random Buddhist shrine with a bazillion souvenir shops, and the outside walls of the Imperial Palace were great to check out, I just thought there'd be a bit more, you know, stuff.

Enough time to go back to the hotel, use the free internet, watch some random Japanese TV (I think this one was a girl squeezing an oversized lemon, oh, and of course free pixelated porn on channel 3), and then shower and get ready for dinner.

Kanna was lovely enough to find her way to my hotel and escort me to dinner with her friends.... who didn't speak English. I was in for a good night.
So, we took off our shoes, ordered beer, and talked a lot with our hands, pointing at things. I pointed so much by the end of the sake that I smashed a glass, yeah, that's me, all class, and fell over in the bathroom because the wooden slippers they provide you are about 3cm from the ground. I'm not used to walking in heels. When you have legs like mine, who needs heels?
Kanna's friends were also surprised that a westerner was so small (their words, not mine), and asked if i drank alcohol. Apparently it's rude not to.
How could I not succeed here?

We had a wonderful dinner, her friends were all very lovely, they even gave me a gift - a pair of socks. They said i'd need them where I was going.
They were right.

I'll tell you more about that next time, my fingers are almost frozen. Time for some more miso.

Matane またね
ロブ (Lob)

Memoirs of a Gaijin - v1 - 1 March 2009

2009-03-16T23:52:00.000-07:00

If I owned an airport, I would think about the kinds of people that would use it. Where they'd be from, where they'd be going, what they'd like to eat and drink and how they would like to pay for it. I'd therefore let them pay by card at any of the food, drink, internet, or retail providers. I'd also not make them walk for up to 30 minutes from one gate to another because I'd keep in mind that they may want to take a moment to go to the toilet between connecting flights, or maybe pick up some water. Come to think of it, I certainly would also ensure that there would be adequate signage in at least a couple of common languages to make people feel at ease, as we all know how traveling can sometimes be stressful - especially when you're in a rush, in a foreign place, and have no idea where you need to go.

I obviously didn't design Kuala Lumpur airport.

Well, I just wrote another 6 or so paragraphs about Japan, but lost them when trying to submit. That's what you get from free internet in a hotel room that doesn't even have a shower.

PS, how could I not succeed in a society that sees not drinking as impolite?

Until next time,

Robu