Myoden and Yokohama

In the last couple of weeks i’ve done two important things. I shut up and just travelled.

Yokohama is less than an hour west of Tokyo by train and as a result there isn’t an obvious boundary between the two. The buildings just get smaller and then bigger again as you leave one megacity and enter a smaller one. Tokyo does that. It merges and blurs all the boundaries around it so you can never really tell just how big it is. Yokohama is probably most famous for its China Town which should be more accurately named Chinese Restaurant Town. Most of the China Towns that i’ve been to in major cities just seems to a be a load of Chinese restaurants and a couple of oriental supermarkets crammed into a few small streets with an old gnarly gateway hemming in busloads of tourists and Yokohama fits that idea very well. Still, it was a great place to get lost in, it smelt and sounded exactly like China and the food was oily and tasty.

Yokohama has a history of foreigners coming and going and the China Town plays its part in that along with a huge foreigner’s cemetery shrouded in green and trees which overlooks the city centre. Just next to the cemetery is a suburb called Motomachi that wouldn’t look out of place somewhere in Europe with chic storefronts and bakeries serving expats and Japanese with equal measure on small pedestrian streets. There’s an obvious mix of past and present, Japanese and foreign in Yokohama. Some of the grand old buildings look like they’ve been lifted out of Europe in the 1920s and dropped into Japan in the functional 1980s and then been made to sit all day next to glass fronted modern equivalents.

I also went to an onsen (hot spring) two hours north of Tokyo last weekend in a place called Kinugawa. It was a small town hemmed in by mountains and cut in two by a river. The town is famous for the volcanic water that flows up and into the onsens that have grown into hotels that now line the river and give the town its well known name. My friend booked a night in one of the hotels which was an interesting place. It was like being in a Japan in 1975. Everything seemed faded with time and creaked with age. Things looked well worn but also look as if they hadn’t been used in years and it echoed of time that was much busier. But it was still pulling in small crowds of people – most of them, like the building itself, seemed faded with time and creaked with age. Actually, it was like being in an old people’s home in Japan in 1975. The Japanese onsen is a communal experience so i shared a few relaxing hours immersed in piping hot mineral rich water with a load of naked elderly Japanese men which was much more relaxing than i’ve just made it sound. The price of the hotel also included a huge traditional dinner, a fridge full of beer and other assorted alcoholic drinks and a breakfast. So, it was like a large all you can eat and drink restaurant in a Japanese old people’s home in 1975. With a volcanic bath. Breakfast was a bit disconcerting as i looked across what was once a ball room at the buffet breakfast and saw an elderly man try to fit some more cooked fish in a bowl and thought to myself, “I’ve seen him naked.” Which is not thought I often want at breakfast. Or at any other meal time really. Onsens are funny places.

Life rolls on in Myoden but hopefully i’ll see some more random crap soon. Thanks for reading.

Myoden and Shibuya

I promised myself that i’d do something interesting and then i’d have something better to write about than trains and washing machines. Unfortunately that’s not happened yet.

I haven’t really ventured any further than work and a little bar just around the corner from my dinky flat. The owner of the bar is a friendly little bald man who loves The Beatles. Every time i’ve been in there and sat at the small bar cobbling utterances together in Japanese while other assorted drunks try and cobble together a sentence in English, The Beatles always play along in background. It’s a nice place to have a quiet beer and too much sake before falling into my shoebox sized flat.

It’s also more convenient than getting drunk in central Tokyo, missing the last train home and having to walk for about two hours in the cold and eventually sleep in a 24 hour internet cafe until about 5am when the metro starts running again. Only a complete fool would do such a thing. Or you could get drunk in central Tokyo after eating Korean-style pork bbq followed by watching Japan beat Australia in the final of the Asian Football Championships and then celebrate at the famous Shibuya crossing in the early hours of the morning by joining hundreds of Japanese fans by repeatedly running into the middle of the crossing when the traffic stops and cheering and jumping up and down like a lunatic surrounded by skyscrapers, neon and pedestrian-traffic marshals and then scampering back to the pavement when the lights turn back to green. After which, you could get the first train home. That night out was less convenient but definitely a lot more fun.

A few of my lessons are also quite fun. One of my students was trying to describe having hay fever and struggled to think of the word for “snot”. Instead she said “nosewater”. I love this word. I’m now always going to refer to “snot” as “nosewater”. Please join me in getting this fantastical new word into general usage and everyday language where it rightly belongs. One day it will be in the Oxford English Dictionary and we will laugh at times past when we called nosewater “snot”. Do it.

A small but significant portion of my other students are crazy children who bounce of the walls (and that’s not a figure of speech, it’s just a genuine observation) or educated adults who want to travel, learn a new language and have fun. It’s a bit of a mix but then that’s what life seems to have become recently. All or nothing. I teach toddlers or grandparents. I drink in a little bar in suburbia playing The Beatles or in packed bars in Tokyo watching football. I eat grilled meat or raw fish. I get the last train home at eleven o’clock or the first train at 5am. I drink beer or sake, teach English or study Japanese. And worse of all? I write a blog called shutupjusttravel but don’t actually go anywhere.

But i’m going to Yokohama on Sunday and hopefully to an onsen in the mountains next weekend so i promise (really promise) that next time i will write about something new, somewhere different and something vaguely more interesting than me disappearing up my own arse. Thanks for reading.