Life in Japan roles on. In the last few weeks i’ve played bingo in the rain, got falling down drunk in a nightclub, eaten food cooked by students, seen heavy metal moshpits in the afternoon and fallen asleep on a train. I think i’m fitting in quite well.
The place i work is a university filled with people far cleverer than i ever could be (tri-lingual biotechnologists make dreaming bums like me seem a bit daft) and they know how to have a good time as well. Most universities in Japan have a festival every autumn where the campus closes down for a weekend and is taken over by the students who set up stalls making different foods, play little gigs and share whatever hobbies and interests they’ve got with everybody else. To celebrate the start of the festival last week there was a game of bingo played amongst a crowd of people in front of a small stage at the entrance of the university. Unfortunately it was shitting it down with rain on a cold November evening at the time and the pre-game entertainment of a faux boyband singing ballads was slightly tempered by the fact that the amp didn’t work properly and so they had to share one microphone. In the rain. Before a game of bingo. They were followed onto stage by a group of dancers who jigged and bobbed and clapped in time to a remixed version of Desree’s You Gotta Be. In the rain. And then we played bingo. The winner, whoever it was, won a Playstation 3. Everybody else got mild hyperthermia and seemed pleasantly happy with that. But then a lot of Japanese people seem to have “pleasantly happy” as their default setting.
The festival itself was a colourful mix and mash in the middle of the campus bursting with people, food and music. I stood amongst the buildings and trees and bodies trying to figure out how and why there was a heavy metal band playing to an audience of about a dozen men, some who had dyed their hair green for the occasion, who were throwing themselves at each other in a sober mid afternoon moshpit. About ten metres or so away was the cycling club who were all, for reasons that are still unknown, dressed in drag and doing line dancing all day. Next to them was an old woman stuffing her face with fried noodles next to a cute girl wearing a t-shirt advertising, “Noddy the Pig Hunters” as she ate a chocolate covered banana. I looked around and wondered how it was that even amongst a combination like that i still kind of self-consciously stood out as being foreign.
A night out in Tokyo is, as you’d expect, extremely good fun. The main problem though is that as i live about an hour by train from the centre of things you can’t get a taxi back home (they’re way too expensive) and you have to either get the last train around midnight or stay out until the morning. I thoroughly recommend staying out until the morning. Especially if it includes a nightclub that has several DJs and a live James Brown-esqe blues/soul band with a lead singer who only sings about temperatures and directions, “Hot now. Get down. Yeah, bring it up. Mmm right. Cool that.” By about five o'clock i couldn’t even pronounce my own name and made several nice women wish they were sitting or standing somewhere else. Which they then politely did. I got the train home at about six. Or at least i tried. I definitely remember getting on the train heading back to Kashiwa but I woke up at 9am on the train in Tokyo so i was probably slept all the way to Kashiwa and all the way back to Tokyo again without knowing it. Still, great night. Great city.
Thanks for reading. I’ll write some more rubbish soon.
Monday, November 22, 2010
Sunday, November 7, 2010
Sakasai and Stereotypes
I’m half-way through my contract already. It ends in December so i’m on yet another job hunt. But this one is a little bit more fun – it’s in Japan.
This country seems to be a place that confirms and denies your pre-conceived ideas of it with equal measure. Before i came here i had an idea that Japan was way ahead of the rest of world, somewhere in the future, in terms of technology. The truth appears to be slightly different. Japan is home to an array of electronic gadgets from robotic vacuum cleaners to toilet seats that wash your arse to mobile phones that do almost everything. However, there’s also the nagging fact that i have to use a blackboard and chalk at work and that a lot of buildings don’t seem to have central heating and most cash machines close at night. I think some of the technology needs sharing around a bit more. I’d rather push a vacuum cleaner around than teach by scrawling a white rock onto a board of black.
Then there’s the whole safety aspect. Japan is known for being one of the safest countries in the world with ridiculously low crime rates and politeness everywhere. This is undoubtedly true until you realise that the trains have women only carriages during the packed rush hours so dirty old men can’t grope girls on the sly. And while the rest of the population is friendly and polite the country itself has an earthquake of varying magnitude every single day, sees typhoons every autumn, floods every summer, smog every spring, snow drifts every winter and is home to approximately 10% of the world’s active volcanoes. So, yeah, safe-ish, in a way.
I realised that Japan has this give and take of its stereotypes last week when i visited the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo. It’s a bit of a controversial place as it’s a memorial to Japan’s war dead which doesn’t go down too well in Korea and China. I went to see the flea market which is held there every Sunday and i was a bit surprised to see a small group of right-wing idiots at the shrine’s main entrance dressed in blue fatigues with baseball caps standing next to cars and vans which were decorated in imperial flags and pro-Japanese slogans whilst blaring out music that, although i couldn’t fully understand, probably wasn’t a Japanese remake of What A Wonderful World. All of this was outside a shrine that other countries, especially Asian ones, see as extremely provocative as a result of the wars of the past. I walked one block from there to a part of Tokyo called Jimbocho which is home to dozens of bookshops. There was a second hand book festival in full swing with shops and shelves spilling out onto the packed pavements. There were lots of food stalls outside local restaurants in the back streets (including Thai, Indian and Chinese) and you could listen to live music courtesy of a Latin jazz band. All very international and civilised. And all just down the road from the Japanese ultra-nationalists. It was a bit like the BNP in England having small get-together a block away from Soho in London.
Tokyo continues to amaze. Today i went to Shinjuku which is Tokyo in a nutshell. A nutshell that contains a red light district, street food, bars, chic designer shops, huge department stores, skyscrapers, cheap market stalls, upscale restaurants and a train station that, apparently, sees more than 3.5M people pass through it every single day. Quite a nutshell.
Over on the eastern side of the city there’s Ueno which is famous for a huge park with temples, lakes, lots of homeless men and handful of museums and art galleries all right next to a market that crams itself under train lines and between buildings selling everything from dried squid to fake designer handbags. I found a great little restaurant that serves delicious bowls of steamed rice with grilled fish that almost melts off the chopsticks for a few quid. If i lived near Ueno i’d eat there every day.
But i live near Kashiwa which is a practical functional place with enough to keep you occupied for a few hours on a Friday night (especially if it involves something called atsukan which is essentially hot sake) and enough shops to waste a few hours in on a Saturday. It also has a British themed bar which doesn’t look anything like a pub in Britain (it’s friendly and clean for a start, the portions of food aren’t supersized and there’s a severe lack of fat ugly people) but it does contain beer, big screen sports and lots of drunks. And so that’s where i was last night watching the Japan baseball finals with one of my co-workers as fans of one of the teams shouted and cheered whenever anything went half-way towards decent and an old Japanese man joined us amongst the din of chants and whoops seemingly oblivious to the live sport and alcohol around him and pursued a mainly one way conversation that lasted about thirty minutes and managed to include such topics as Britain’s nuclear deterrent, cricket, China, ice hockey, Scarborough, “a famous Canadian lake”, political corruption, hot springs and an amazing story about his son who was working in the World Trade Centre in New York on that day and lived to tell the tale. He was eccentric and friendly, loud yet quiet, in a British themed-pub in the middle of Japan talking to an English man watching baseball. Everything here is familiar yet different, new but old, obvious but subtle and confirming yet disproving. I love it. Fingers crossed for the job hunt.
This country seems to be a place that confirms and denies your pre-conceived ideas of it with equal measure. Before i came here i had an idea that Japan was way ahead of the rest of world, somewhere in the future, in terms of technology. The truth appears to be slightly different. Japan is home to an array of electronic gadgets from robotic vacuum cleaners to toilet seats that wash your arse to mobile phones that do almost everything. However, there’s also the nagging fact that i have to use a blackboard and chalk at work and that a lot of buildings don’t seem to have central heating and most cash machines close at night. I think some of the technology needs sharing around a bit more. I’d rather push a vacuum cleaner around than teach by scrawling a white rock onto a board of black.
Then there’s the whole safety aspect. Japan is known for being one of the safest countries in the world with ridiculously low crime rates and politeness everywhere. This is undoubtedly true until you realise that the trains have women only carriages during the packed rush hours so dirty old men can’t grope girls on the sly. And while the rest of the population is friendly and polite the country itself has an earthquake of varying magnitude every single day, sees typhoons every autumn, floods every summer, smog every spring, snow drifts every winter and is home to approximately 10% of the world’s active volcanoes. So, yeah, safe-ish, in a way.
I realised that Japan has this give and take of its stereotypes last week when i visited the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo. It’s a bit of a controversial place as it’s a memorial to Japan’s war dead which doesn’t go down too well in Korea and China. I went to see the flea market which is held there every Sunday and i was a bit surprised to see a small group of right-wing idiots at the shrine’s main entrance dressed in blue fatigues with baseball caps standing next to cars and vans which were decorated in imperial flags and pro-Japanese slogans whilst blaring out music that, although i couldn’t fully understand, probably wasn’t a Japanese remake of What A Wonderful World. All of this was outside a shrine that other countries, especially Asian ones, see as extremely provocative as a result of the wars of the past. I walked one block from there to a part of Tokyo called Jimbocho which is home to dozens of bookshops. There was a second hand book festival in full swing with shops and shelves spilling out onto the packed pavements. There were lots of food stalls outside local restaurants in the back streets (including Thai, Indian and Chinese) and you could listen to live music courtesy of a Latin jazz band. All very international and civilised. And all just down the road from the Japanese ultra-nationalists. It was a bit like the BNP in England having small get-together a block away from Soho in London.
Tokyo continues to amaze. Today i went to Shinjuku which is Tokyo in a nutshell. A nutshell that contains a red light district, street food, bars, chic designer shops, huge department stores, skyscrapers, cheap market stalls, upscale restaurants and a train station that, apparently, sees more than 3.5M people pass through it every single day. Quite a nutshell.
Over on the eastern side of the city there’s Ueno which is famous for a huge park with temples, lakes, lots of homeless men and handful of museums and art galleries all right next to a market that crams itself under train lines and between buildings selling everything from dried squid to fake designer handbags. I found a great little restaurant that serves delicious bowls of steamed rice with grilled fish that almost melts off the chopsticks for a few quid. If i lived near Ueno i’d eat there every day.
But i live near Kashiwa which is a practical functional place with enough to keep you occupied for a few hours on a Friday night (especially if it involves something called atsukan which is essentially hot sake) and enough shops to waste a few hours in on a Saturday. It also has a British themed bar which doesn’t look anything like a pub in Britain (it’s friendly and clean for a start, the portions of food aren’t supersized and there’s a severe lack of fat ugly people) but it does contain beer, big screen sports and lots of drunks. And so that’s where i was last night watching the Japan baseball finals with one of my co-workers as fans of one of the teams shouted and cheered whenever anything went half-way towards decent and an old Japanese man joined us amongst the din of chants and whoops seemingly oblivious to the live sport and alcohol around him and pursued a mainly one way conversation that lasted about thirty minutes and managed to include such topics as Britain’s nuclear deterrent, cricket, China, ice hockey, Scarborough, “a famous Canadian lake”, political corruption, hot springs and an amazing story about his son who was working in the World Trade Centre in New York on that day and lived to tell the tale. He was eccentric and friendly, loud yet quiet, in a British themed-pub in the middle of Japan talking to an English man watching baseball. Everything here is familiar yet different, new but old, obvious but subtle and confirming yet disproving. I love it. Fingers crossed for the job hunt.
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Sakasai and Lions
I’ve been in Japan for almost a month now and things are coasting along nicely. Everything seems friendly and strange all at the same time.
A couple of weeks ago i watched Japan beat Argentina in a football match (a friendly, of course) in a bar in the nearest city, Kashiwa. The Japanese watch football in a slightly peculiar way. Normally when people watch sport they might cheer or sound frustrated or sing or curse or make a variety of different noises to reflect the game itself. The Japanese don’t do this. All they do is scream. Anytime the ball goes anywhere near the goal (even when it’s quite obviously not going to be a goal) they scream like scared school girls on a ghost train. I still have no idea why they do this.
There are a few other things that i haven’t quite got my head round yet and probably never will. I love the way that everybody falls asleep on the trains. People get on the train in the morning, sit down and snooze away. As simple as that. You never see anybody oversnooze and miss their stop either. It’s as if all Japanese people have an inbuilt hardwired sixth sense for sleeping in moving trains on the way to work. There’s also the overly polite service industry which means that whenever you walk into a shop or restaurant or bar or pretty much any building that isn’t either residential or religious you’ll be greeted by a chorus of welcomes and hellos from the staff. At first i felt compelled to reply with a hello or a little bow straight back but then I realised that all the Japanese people don’t say a word or do anything when they walk into a place. The over politeness has just become part of the background noise for them like drunk swearing and car alarms in England.
My job is going fine. I teach speaking classes to university students so essentially i get paid to have conversations with people which is a bit different from my last teaching job in Korea where i was a glorified babysitter and crowd controller. Still, Asian students are Asian students and a few choice gems that have come out in class so far are the questions, “How often do you live in a house made of asbestos?” and “Would you like to buy a gorgeous lion?” And who hasn’t asked those questions before?
Tokyo is also going fine. I think. It’s difficult to tell such is the size and speed of the place. It’s a monster. I’ve had a wander around and done the inevitable and got lost and found my way back to somewhere familiar but it fully lives up to the hype and everything you’d expect. It’s a living breathing moving maze. There are the vein-like train lines over and underground, hundreds of restaurants and bars line its stomach, suit-clad business men stressfully fill its wallet, old temples mark the past while glitzy shops and sleek new buildings escort everybody to the future. It’s a wonderful organised mess that seems to have no beginning, middle or end. It just is. It’s Tokyo.
I need to see more of the capital as well as the museums, flea markets, parks, temples, mountains, bike tracks, shops, rivers, harbours and galleries. Too many places, not enough weekends.
A couple of weeks ago i watched Japan beat Argentina in a football match (a friendly, of course) in a bar in the nearest city, Kashiwa. The Japanese watch football in a slightly peculiar way. Normally when people watch sport they might cheer or sound frustrated or sing or curse or make a variety of different noises to reflect the game itself. The Japanese don’t do this. All they do is scream. Anytime the ball goes anywhere near the goal (even when it’s quite obviously not going to be a goal) they scream like scared school girls on a ghost train. I still have no idea why they do this.
There are a few other things that i haven’t quite got my head round yet and probably never will. I love the way that everybody falls asleep on the trains. People get on the train in the morning, sit down and snooze away. As simple as that. You never see anybody oversnooze and miss their stop either. It’s as if all Japanese people have an inbuilt hardwired sixth sense for sleeping in moving trains on the way to work. There’s also the overly polite service industry which means that whenever you walk into a shop or restaurant or bar or pretty much any building that isn’t either residential or religious you’ll be greeted by a chorus of welcomes and hellos from the staff. At first i felt compelled to reply with a hello or a little bow straight back but then I realised that all the Japanese people don’t say a word or do anything when they walk into a place. The over politeness has just become part of the background noise for them like drunk swearing and car alarms in England.
My job is going fine. I teach speaking classes to university students so essentially i get paid to have conversations with people which is a bit different from my last teaching job in Korea where i was a glorified babysitter and crowd controller. Still, Asian students are Asian students and a few choice gems that have come out in class so far are the questions, “How often do you live in a house made of asbestos?” and “Would you like to buy a gorgeous lion?” And who hasn’t asked those questions before?
Tokyo is also going fine. I think. It’s difficult to tell such is the size and speed of the place. It’s a monster. I’ve had a wander around and done the inevitable and got lost and found my way back to somewhere familiar but it fully lives up to the hype and everything you’d expect. It’s a living breathing moving maze. There are the vein-like train lines over and underground, hundreds of restaurants and bars line its stomach, suit-clad business men stressfully fill its wallet, old temples mark the past while glitzy shops and sleek new buildings escort everybody to the future. It’s a wonderful organised mess that seems to have no beginning, middle or end. It just is. It’s Tokyo.
I need to see more of the capital as well as the museums, flea markets, parks, temples, mountains, bike tracks, shops, rivers, harbours and galleries. Too many places, not enough weekends.
Saturday, October 9, 2010
Sakasai and Tokyo
Japan is expensive. It shouldn’t be but as the UK pound is currently worth about the same as a tramp’s second hand shoes i’ve found myself in a position where i’m essentially living like a student until my first pay day. I eat instant noodles, baulk at the price of beer and ask newly found friends for some cash to tie me over for two weeks. Fun, no?
The company i’m working for seems to be actively helping me in my student lifestyle. They’ve provided me with an dinky flat that feels like a halls of residence and a mobile phone that won’t allow me to make outbound calls which makes it a bit redundant as a mobile phone – it kind of takes the “phone” aspect out of the equation altogether. However it does send me an automated warning whenever there’s an earthquake which was a bit strange last week. Especially when the warning wasn’t followed by an earthquake. Which pretty much takes the “warning” aspect out of the earthquake warning equation. This is a long winded way of saying that i’ve got a really shit phone.
The flat is in a place called Sakasai just on the edge of a city called Kashiwa outside Tokyo. Sakasai hasn’t got much apart from a train station, a supermarket and a little bar where you can get drunk with an eclectic mix of business men talking shit and feeling better for it, English teachers trying to understand what’s going on and friendly couples hell bent on force feeding you sake and soju until you can’t see properly.
Sakasai also has a swimming pool and so i thought i’d attempt to keep active and bought a month’s membership. I went for the first time on Monday night and was greeted by an aqua aerobics class which is something that seems to transcend cultural and linguistic boundaries. They’re the same everywhere – slightly large middle-aged women flop around looking like they’d rather be anywhere else and being encouraged and led by a maniac who shouts and claps in time to music that’s played far too loud. Don’t worry, i didn’t join in but did some lengths instead with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones blasting through the speakers.
Last Saturday was interesting. I went out on my mountain bike (did i mention that i’d brought it with me?) and cycled all day along a river that cuts into Tokyo amongst the buildings, bridges and bustle and ended up that evening being really quite sunburnt and red. I looked constantly embarrassed and drunk. Which was unfortunate because that night i went on a blind date with a Thai girl in Tokyo in an area of town called Roppongi which is famous for its night life and African pimps. No, really. And that’s how i came to find myself in a bar eating and drinking with a cute crazy girl trying not to look embarrassed or drunk and attempting to draw attention away from my face. And then two of her friends showed up and told me that we would be drinking until 5am. I should go to Tokyo more often.
It was only a few weeks ago that i was living with my parents in British suburbia and working in soul-melting arse-numbing office job. Somehow i’m now living in a flat in Japan and spend my time teaching English, getting drunk, swimming with middle aged women and going on blind dates in Tokyo whilst sunburnt from cycling. Life changes quickly doesn’t it?
The company i’m working for seems to be actively helping me in my student lifestyle. They’ve provided me with an dinky flat that feels like a halls of residence and a mobile phone that won’t allow me to make outbound calls which makes it a bit redundant as a mobile phone – it kind of takes the “phone” aspect out of the equation altogether. However it does send me an automated warning whenever there’s an earthquake which was a bit strange last week. Especially when the warning wasn’t followed by an earthquake. Which pretty much takes the “warning” aspect out of the earthquake warning equation. This is a long winded way of saying that i’ve got a really shit phone.
The flat is in a place called Sakasai just on the edge of a city called Kashiwa outside Tokyo. Sakasai hasn’t got much apart from a train station, a supermarket and a little bar where you can get drunk with an eclectic mix of business men talking shit and feeling better for it, English teachers trying to understand what’s going on and friendly couples hell bent on force feeding you sake and soju until you can’t see properly.
Sakasai also has a swimming pool and so i thought i’d attempt to keep active and bought a month’s membership. I went for the first time on Monday night and was greeted by an aqua aerobics class which is something that seems to transcend cultural and linguistic boundaries. They’re the same everywhere – slightly large middle-aged women flop around looking like they’d rather be anywhere else and being encouraged and led by a maniac who shouts and claps in time to music that’s played far too loud. Don’t worry, i didn’t join in but did some lengths instead with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones blasting through the speakers.
Last Saturday was interesting. I went out on my mountain bike (did i mention that i’d brought it with me?) and cycled all day along a river that cuts into Tokyo amongst the buildings, bridges and bustle and ended up that evening being really quite sunburnt and red. I looked constantly embarrassed and drunk. Which was unfortunate because that night i went on a blind date with a Thai girl in Tokyo in an area of town called Roppongi which is famous for its night life and African pimps. No, really. And that’s how i came to find myself in a bar eating and drinking with a cute crazy girl trying not to look embarrassed or drunk and attempting to draw attention away from my face. And then two of her friends showed up and told me that we would be drinking until 5am. I should go to Tokyo more often.
It was only a few weeks ago that i was living with my parents in British suburbia and working in soul-melting arse-numbing office job. Somehow i’m now living in a flat in Japan and spend my time teaching English, getting drunk, swimming with middle aged women and going on blind dates in Tokyo whilst sunburnt from cycling. Life changes quickly doesn’t it?
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
London and Sakasai
This silly blog thing started over a year ago when I went travelling around Japan. I'm back.
The last couple of weeks in England zipped past. I finished my job as on office monkey and spent two days travelling backwards and forwards to London to apply for a working visa at the Japanese Embassy. I've never lived in London and i've never really had the chance to spend much time there so i wandered around and took it all in. There are three things that struck me about central London. Coffee, joggers and tourists. If you're in London you will either be jogging in a park, drinking coffee or taking pictures of shit. Some people were doing two at once. For a country famous for drinking tea there are rivers of coffee in central London. London actually smells of coffee. Until you get on the Underground that is and then there's a definite aroma of piss and sweat. Anyway, i was a tourist so i got lost and took pictures of the old iconic buildings dripping with history and strutting around on the monopoly board.
After a weekend of goodbye beers in Leeds i left Leeds Bradford Airport last week which is less an airport and more an inadequately sized over-priced shopping centre with a runway next to it. The flight was delayed so i wasted time trying not to laugh at a man who was showing off his iPad to his equally annoying friends by playing them a youtube video of Phil Collins. Goodbye England.
I flew to Amsterdam and then onto Tokyo. There's nothing quite like the feeling of leaving one life to start a new one. You put everything in bag and set off someplace new with no idea of what's going to happen next. You feel happy and sad, eager and hesitant, excited and nervous. When i took my seat on the plane i didn't know if i was batting, bowling or fielding.
And i'm now sat in a little flat about an hour by train from central Tokyo. It's a very quiet and peaceful little neighbourhood which just seems to amplify the sense that just on the horizon is one the biggest silliest cities in the world. You can almost hear it teasing and calling you to go and spend too much money and get drunk. Which is obviously exactly what seems to have happened so far.
I'll write more soon. Thanks for reading.
The last couple of weeks in England zipped past. I finished my job as on office monkey and spent two days travelling backwards and forwards to London to apply for a working visa at the Japanese Embassy. I've never lived in London and i've never really had the chance to spend much time there so i wandered around and took it all in. There are three things that struck me about central London. Coffee, joggers and tourists. If you're in London you will either be jogging in a park, drinking coffee or taking pictures of shit. Some people were doing two at once. For a country famous for drinking tea there are rivers of coffee in central London. London actually smells of coffee. Until you get on the Underground that is and then there's a definite aroma of piss and sweat. Anyway, i was a tourist so i got lost and took pictures of the old iconic buildings dripping with history and strutting around on the monopoly board.
After a weekend of goodbye beers in Leeds i left Leeds Bradford Airport last week which is less an airport and more an inadequately sized over-priced shopping centre with a runway next to it. The flight was delayed so i wasted time trying not to laugh at a man who was showing off his iPad to his equally annoying friends by playing them a youtube video of Phil Collins. Goodbye England.
I flew to Amsterdam and then onto Tokyo. There's nothing quite like the feeling of leaving one life to start a new one. You put everything in bag and set off someplace new with no idea of what's going to happen next. You feel happy and sad, eager and hesitant, excited and nervous. When i took my seat on the plane i didn't know if i was batting, bowling or fielding.
And i'm now sat in a little flat about an hour by train from central Tokyo. It's a very quiet and peaceful little neighbourhood which just seems to amplify the sense that just on the horizon is one the biggest silliest cities in the world. You can almost hear it teasing and calling you to go and spend too much money and get drunk. Which is obviously exactly what seems to have happened so far.
I'll write more soon. Thanks for reading.
Saturday, August 28, 2010
Leeds and Sausages
Perhaps it’s not until you’ve lived somewhere familiar for a while that it starts to feel less normal and you see things in different light. If you’re hitchhiking across Mongolia or roughing it in a yurt with some nomads in Kyrgyzstan then the wonkiness hits you between the eyes. You have to look a bit closer and pay more attention when you’re living in suburbs and working a desk job doing monkey work. But perhaps the normality is that everywhere is abnormal.
My Mum and Dad’s street is a dinky cul-de-sac in suburban Leeds. Walk down it and you’ll see nice detached houses or semis or little bungalows, neat hedges and lots of leafyness. All average and normal. Nothing to see here, move along please. Apart from the bungalow at number 8 that had a huge family of eastern Europeans living there for months who had a garden party during the summer that lasted two weeks. I think they invited Estonia. I don’t know what they were celebrating but it looked like a lot of fun. They all moved out about a month ago and last week while it was empty there was a fire that completely ravaged the placed and since then the blackened, half-melted furniture has sat on the front garden and the driveway waiting for somebody to do something about it while everybody does the opposite.
Next to the former eastern European immigrant party fire house there’s a big old red bricked house occupied by a man who does his gardening in a shirt and tie. I’ve always wondered if he wears his gardening clothes to business meetings. Anyway, it’s a bit disconcerting seeing a man in smart attire cutting a hedge on a Saturday afternoon. Next door to him at number four is a family that have semi-feral children and the Dad drives his Porsche like Michael Schumacher drives home when he’s desperate for a shit.
Over the road from the burned out house is a home that looks like it was designed by three year old. Give a child a red pen and a piece of paper and they’d draw this house. They seem like a nice enough family but they run a printing business out of the garage and the office above it so technically it’s not a residential property. Which means any one of us could put a call in to the correct planning office and either get the business shut down or increase their council tax by about 400%. Might be fun.
Next door to the illegal business lives a thoroughly disagreeable kid who swaggers about as if he’s a thirteen year old Eminem and they live two doors up from a Sri Lankan anaesthetist who lives over the road from a Scottish couple who are retired born-again Christians (retired from work, that is, not Christianity) and they live next door to a house that was, for a short time a few months back, at the centre of a rape allegation against the nobhead youngest son who lived there and the house spent 24 hours covered in police tape and forensics. No charges were brought. The family threw him out. My Mum and Dad live across the road with me, their youngest son, who once fell out of a house in a jungle in Laos and dreams of going to places he’s never even heard of.
And the thing that makes this even stranger is that I barely even speak to these people and don’t really talk to the nice people either – such as the friendly plumber at number seven or the nice old couple two doors down who train guide dogs. But that’s suburban British life. We bemoan the fact that immigrants can’t speak English and don’t join the community but never make conversation with the man at number six who mows his lawn wearing a waistcoat. And that is abnormal.
I’ve also come to appreciate the little idiosyncrasies of Leeds. The fact that it’s littered with Sikh Gurudwaras, Islamic Mosques, Jewish Synagogues, Hindu Temples and stockpiles of churches. A quick search revealed that we have a Roman Catholic Cathedral, the Episcopal seat of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Leeds and places of worship belonging to the Assembly of God, Baptists, Christian Scientists, Mormons, the Community of Christ, Greek Orthodox, Jehovah's Witnesses, Jesus Army, Lutherans, Methodists, Nazarene, Newfrontiers network, the Salvation Army, the Seventh-Day Adventists, the Society of Friends, Unitarians, United Reformists, the Wesleyan Church and an ecumenical Chinese church.
And of course let’s not forget the 21st century religions. There are hundreds and hundreds of places devoted solely to a burgeoning population of people who follow the glorious religion of Undiluted Alcoholism. And then there's omnipresent Latter Day Faith of Capitalism and Frivolous Expenditure which has 210,340 square metres of floor space in the city. That’s 30 square cm of retail for every man, woman and child who live here.
Then there’s the world’s biggest fish and chip shop and Europe’s oldest West Indian Carnival and in 1880 Louis Le Prince recorded the world’s very first moving images with a Leeds back garden as his subject. It’s also a city that houses a higher class of crazy. Every UK city has its fair share of drunks, tramps and layabouts but Leeds’ drunks, tramps and layabouts seem to be a little bit further leftfield from the others. They slump next to the entrance of banks singing and making animal noises. Or they are the smelly bearded men who come up to you at bus stops and start conversations half-way through by saying something like, “But it’s not always like that is it? Sometimes he eats sausages.” And then stare at you expecting a response before sneering and walking off.
So there you go. It turned out that home was just as interesting and weird as everywhere else. Which means I should be happy to stay here now, right? Ah, well, there’s the silly thing - I can’t wait to leave (i might get that on my tombstone) as i’m going to Japan in a few weeks. I’ve managed to get a job there teaching English for few months so we’ll see where i end up and what happens next. It probably won’t be normal. It never is.
My Mum and Dad’s street is a dinky cul-de-sac in suburban Leeds. Walk down it and you’ll see nice detached houses or semis or little bungalows, neat hedges and lots of leafyness. All average and normal. Nothing to see here, move along please. Apart from the bungalow at number 8 that had a huge family of eastern Europeans living there for months who had a garden party during the summer that lasted two weeks. I think they invited Estonia. I don’t know what they were celebrating but it looked like a lot of fun. They all moved out about a month ago and last week while it was empty there was a fire that completely ravaged the placed and since then the blackened, half-melted furniture has sat on the front garden and the driveway waiting for somebody to do something about it while everybody does the opposite.
Next to the former eastern European immigrant party fire house there’s a big old red bricked house occupied by a man who does his gardening in a shirt and tie. I’ve always wondered if he wears his gardening clothes to business meetings. Anyway, it’s a bit disconcerting seeing a man in smart attire cutting a hedge on a Saturday afternoon. Next door to him at number four is a family that have semi-feral children and the Dad drives his Porsche like Michael Schumacher drives home when he’s desperate for a shit.
Over the road from the burned out house is a home that looks like it was designed by three year old. Give a child a red pen and a piece of paper and they’d draw this house. They seem like a nice enough family but they run a printing business out of the garage and the office above it so technically it’s not a residential property. Which means any one of us could put a call in to the correct planning office and either get the business shut down or increase their council tax by about 400%. Might be fun.
Next door to the illegal business lives a thoroughly disagreeable kid who swaggers about as if he’s a thirteen year old Eminem and they live two doors up from a Sri Lankan anaesthetist who lives over the road from a Scottish couple who are retired born-again Christians (retired from work, that is, not Christianity) and they live next door to a house that was, for a short time a few months back, at the centre of a rape allegation against the nobhead youngest son who lived there and the house spent 24 hours covered in police tape and forensics. No charges were brought. The family threw him out. My Mum and Dad live across the road with me, their youngest son, who once fell out of a house in a jungle in Laos and dreams of going to places he’s never even heard of.
And the thing that makes this even stranger is that I barely even speak to these people and don’t really talk to the nice people either – such as the friendly plumber at number seven or the nice old couple two doors down who train guide dogs. But that’s suburban British life. We bemoan the fact that immigrants can’t speak English and don’t join the community but never make conversation with the man at number six who mows his lawn wearing a waistcoat. And that is abnormal.
I’ve also come to appreciate the little idiosyncrasies of Leeds. The fact that it’s littered with Sikh Gurudwaras, Islamic Mosques, Jewish Synagogues, Hindu Temples and stockpiles of churches. A quick search revealed that we have a Roman Catholic Cathedral, the Episcopal seat of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Leeds and places of worship belonging to the Assembly of God, Baptists, Christian Scientists, Mormons, the Community of Christ, Greek Orthodox, Jehovah's Witnesses, Jesus Army, Lutherans, Methodists, Nazarene, Newfrontiers network, the Salvation Army, the Seventh-Day Adventists, the Society of Friends, Unitarians, United Reformists, the Wesleyan Church and an ecumenical Chinese church.
And of course let’s not forget the 21st century religions. There are hundreds and hundreds of places devoted solely to a burgeoning population of people who follow the glorious religion of Undiluted Alcoholism. And then there's omnipresent Latter Day Faith of Capitalism and Frivolous Expenditure which has 210,340 square metres of floor space in the city. That’s 30 square cm of retail for every man, woman and child who live here.
Then there’s the world’s biggest fish and chip shop and Europe’s oldest West Indian Carnival and in 1880 Louis Le Prince recorded the world’s very first moving images with a Leeds back garden as his subject. It’s also a city that houses a higher class of crazy. Every UK city has its fair share of drunks, tramps and layabouts but Leeds’ drunks, tramps and layabouts seem to be a little bit further leftfield from the others. They slump next to the entrance of banks singing and making animal noises. Or they are the smelly bearded men who come up to you at bus stops and start conversations half-way through by saying something like, “But it’s not always like that is it? Sometimes he eats sausages.” And then stare at you expecting a response before sneering and walking off.
So there you go. It turned out that home was just as interesting and weird as everywhere else. Which means I should be happy to stay here now, right? Ah, well, there’s the silly thing - I can’t wait to leave (i might get that on my tombstone) as i’m going to Japan in a few weeks. I’ve managed to get a job there teaching English for few months so we’ll see where i end up and what happens next. It probably won’t be normal. It never is.
Thursday, July 1, 2010
Still Leeds
I’m still working in Leeds, i’m still dreaming of teaching English somewhere and i’m still a drunk idiot. Not much has changed since last updated this thing but i thought i’d try and write something anyway.
Actually, i’m not just dreaming of teaching English again. I did an English teaching course called a CELTA which was like swimming through the sea of syrup that is the English language for four solid weeks whilst conducting classes to immigrants and asylum seekers and having your teaching constantly assessed, evaluated and commented on. I’ve been applying for some teaching gigs on the back of that and in the mean time i’m still being an office monkey and living with my parents.
It’s not all practicality though. The added bonus of living in your home city is that there’s always somebody you’ve not seen in a while who wants a beer. Although as it’s Leeds this comes with its own unique drawbacks as well. I was walking home from a friend’s house one Saturday night a few weeks ago when a car pulled up next to me with the passenger window down. It was a Mini (one of the new girly ones) but filled with lads. The fella in the front passenger seat called out to me, “Scuse me mate, do you know where Napa is.” Napa is a bar just down the street from where i was so i pointed down the street said, “Yeah, if you just keep going on down here it’s on your-” which is as far as i got. The fella in the front passenger seat squirted water all over me from a sqeezy bottle and somebody else in the car threw an egg that whistled past my face and hit the hedge behind me. Then they drove off.
I stood there laughing to myself (actually i was laughing with them) as i just realised that i’d been victim to the world’s most white, English, middle-class version of a drive-by shooting that there will ever be. No need for semi-automatic, pump action, high velocity firearms in this part of the world. Oh no, just some common baking products and a girl’s car – not even a pimpmobile or a Hummer. And just what is the standard white, English middle -class reaction to this event? Lob back some spoonfuls of mango chutney and glass of gin? I also enjoyed the way they were polite about the whole thing by saying, “Excuse me”, before initiating the one sided drive-by food fight and then fleeing the scene at a pacy yet legally acceptable speed limit. I wasn’t watching close enough but i bet the driver even mirror-signal-maneuvered his way back into traffic without a firearm in sight.
I, on the other hand, have very recently used a gun. A paintballing gun. One of my mates is getting married this summer so the traditional stag weekend was duly rolled out all the way to Edinburgh which was a wonderful mess that included some oversized levels of alcohol, quad-biking and, yes, paintballing which is an activity that provides right and wrong in equal measure all at once. If you’ve been paintballing before you’ll probably understand that it turns placid, nice, affable people into mad, anger-filled commandos before you can even say, “Capture the flag”. Give a nice man a jump suit, a face helmet and gun and all of a sudden it’s you against the world and everybody else can eat paint. It’s also seems impossible to be good at and generally just involves being in pain and sweating and trying to find out where the hell you are or who you’re meant to be shooting or who just shot you or, more to the point, why the hell you and a large group of young men are celebrating the fact that one your best friends is going to be spending the rest of his life with the woman he loves by scurrying around a forest trying to impale each other with paintballs in the blistering summer sunshine of Scotland whilst nursing a hangover from the previous day. And that’s a lot of stuff to be thinking about when somebody’s just shot you in the arse. Which they did.
In other news i’ve now got a hearing aid. I know. I’m already short sighted with an acute drink issue. Give me a walking stick and tweed jacket and i’d be fucking pensioner. Anyway it got fitted yesterday morning so i now have perfect hearing through my right ear for the first time in years as my hearing has been slowly deteriorating for a while. It’s now a bit weird. I feel like i’ve got bionic hearing. I can hear a mouse fart in the room next door. Things shouldn’t be this loud. It’s ridiculous. It also sounds as if everything is being played through a Dictaphone including my own voice. Twenty-eight years gone and two out of five senses already malfunctioning. Which one’s next do you think? I’ll let you know when i do. As long as i can hear it or see it.
Actually, i’m not just dreaming of teaching English again. I did an English teaching course called a CELTA which was like swimming through the sea of syrup that is the English language for four solid weeks whilst conducting classes to immigrants and asylum seekers and having your teaching constantly assessed, evaluated and commented on. I’ve been applying for some teaching gigs on the back of that and in the mean time i’m still being an office monkey and living with my parents.
It’s not all practicality though. The added bonus of living in your home city is that there’s always somebody you’ve not seen in a while who wants a beer. Although as it’s Leeds this comes with its own unique drawbacks as well. I was walking home from a friend’s house one Saturday night a few weeks ago when a car pulled up next to me with the passenger window down. It was a Mini (one of the new girly ones) but filled with lads. The fella in the front passenger seat called out to me, “Scuse me mate, do you know where Napa is.” Napa is a bar just down the street from where i was so i pointed down the street said, “Yeah, if you just keep going on down here it’s on your-” which is as far as i got. The fella in the front passenger seat squirted water all over me from a sqeezy bottle and somebody else in the car threw an egg that whistled past my face and hit the hedge behind me. Then they drove off.
I stood there laughing to myself (actually i was laughing with them) as i just realised that i’d been victim to the world’s most white, English, middle-class version of a drive-by shooting that there will ever be. No need for semi-automatic, pump action, high velocity firearms in this part of the world. Oh no, just some common baking products and a girl’s car – not even a pimpmobile or a Hummer. And just what is the standard white, English middle -class reaction to this event? Lob back some spoonfuls of mango chutney and glass of gin? I also enjoyed the way they were polite about the whole thing by saying, “Excuse me”, before initiating the one sided drive-by food fight and then fleeing the scene at a pacy yet legally acceptable speed limit. I wasn’t watching close enough but i bet the driver even mirror-signal-maneuvered his way back into traffic without a firearm in sight.
I, on the other hand, have very recently used a gun. A paintballing gun. One of my mates is getting married this summer so the traditional stag weekend was duly rolled out all the way to Edinburgh which was a wonderful mess that included some oversized levels of alcohol, quad-biking and, yes, paintballing which is an activity that provides right and wrong in equal measure all at once. If you’ve been paintballing before you’ll probably understand that it turns placid, nice, affable people into mad, anger-filled commandos before you can even say, “Capture the flag”. Give a nice man a jump suit, a face helmet and gun and all of a sudden it’s you against the world and everybody else can eat paint. It’s also seems impossible to be good at and generally just involves being in pain and sweating and trying to find out where the hell you are or who you’re meant to be shooting or who just shot you or, more to the point, why the hell you and a large group of young men are celebrating the fact that one your best friends is going to be spending the rest of his life with the woman he loves by scurrying around a forest trying to impale each other with paintballs in the blistering summer sunshine of Scotland whilst nursing a hangover from the previous day. And that’s a lot of stuff to be thinking about when somebody’s just shot you in the arse. Which they did.
In other news i’ve now got a hearing aid. I know. I’m already short sighted with an acute drink issue. Give me a walking stick and tweed jacket and i’d be fucking pensioner. Anyway it got fitted yesterday morning so i now have perfect hearing through my right ear for the first time in years as my hearing has been slowly deteriorating for a while. It’s now a bit weird. I feel like i’ve got bionic hearing. I can hear a mouse fart in the room next door. Things shouldn’t be this loud. It’s ridiculous. It also sounds as if everything is being played through a Dictaphone including my own voice. Twenty-eight years gone and two out of five senses already malfunctioning. Which one’s next do you think? I’ll let you know when i do. As long as i can hear it or see it.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
