I started this week in Kuala Lumpur which is home to quite a few night market hawkers selling fake everything, men sleeping on park benches and alley ways in the middle of the day and, surprisingly, a hell of a lot of trees. I escaped a few monsoon-like rain storms in the air conditioned Islamic Art Museum and the massive National Mosque and also spent a sweaty afternoon at the fantastically named Lake Titiwangsa (it's ok, go on, giggle, i did) where you can get a fine view of the KL skyline through the mist and pollution. Oh, and if you ever get the chance to visit the National Art Gallery don't go there around lunch time as the place is like a fucking creche, half-filled with little snot machines running around the place turning it into some kind of post modern parenting exhibition.
I got an 8 hour bus to the north west corner of the country to Kota Bharu a few days ago. Malaysia's default colour is green. Once you're out of a city all you can see is endless amounts of trees and jungle clambering over every peak and into every valley. Kota Bharu is a nice enough little city not far from the Thai border. It's an Islamic place with mosques scattered around between quiet shops and billboards advertising watches and mobile phones that me and you can't afford, let alone the woman waiting tables in the half empty cafes. The occasional rat scuttles about in the shadows, stalked by the stray cats and at sunset the birds go a bit mental for half an hour as a lightening storm usually rages on the horizon or, if you're really unlucky, over head. Nobody is in a rush and everybody seems perfectly happy and content with the languid pace of life and easy going days. Why wouldn't they be?
Yesterday was Friday so everything was shut apart from the mosques and the 7-11s so i rented a bicycle and headed off to a beach out of town to the north. Along the journey half the people i passed seemed to want to say hello. Kids waved, teenagers on scooters zipped past shouting greetings and giggling at my insufficient speed. As a consequence of being sucked into this happy-go-lucky sunshine atmosphere i neglected to recognise that i was wearing a short sleeved shirt and i'm now the proud owner of bright red forearms and pasty white body. Sexy. I've spent today at the War Musuem (don't ask), hiding my arms from sunlight and generally just killing time before the Kota Bharu football team plays a home game tonight. Apparently they're the champions of Malaysia and according to the guys who work in my hostel the standard of football is "a bit shit". Should be fun. Tomorrow i'm heading to an unpronounceable island with a beach for a few days to try and make the rest of my body the same colour as my arms. Then maybe a train or a jungle. Or both. Or something.
Thanks for reading. I'll try and write some more guff next week.
Saturday, April 7, 2012
Tuesday, April 3, 2012
Kuala Lumpur
I'm in Malaysia. I have a month between jobs in Japan so April is free, the plane ticket was cheap and i'm currently sat in a dank internet cafe avoiding the sweaty afternoon downpour.
Kuala Lumpur is a former British colonial city with Chinese, Indians, Malays, Muslims, tourists and probably everybody else scurrying around it. There's noodles and naan, Chinatown and Little India, headscarves and miniskirts, baseball caps and suits, smelly markets and air conditioned malls, Buddhist monks and mosques. It's a fantastic cultural mess all wrapped up with the usual south east Asian blend of thick pollution, thick traffic and even thicker air.
I wandered around all of this yesterday and somehow ended up at the Petronas Towers, the twin sky scrapers that loom over the city from almost every angle meaning that you keep catching glimpses of them through gaps in buildings or through the monotony of construction sites or between metro tracks over head. It seems a little bit weird (or apt) that that the most photogenic and famous landmark here is a essentially an office block for an oil company. Still, it's worth seeing close up and has a massive shopping centre in it filled with stuff that i couldn't really afford and is mainly home to people walking around escaping the heat trying to figure out how to pronounce BVLGARI and why they charge so much for handbags.
Last night was spent on the rooftop bar of my hostel swigging beer and chatting to people telling stories about traveling around Asia as the smell of sizzling food and wet cement and belching buses and humid fug floated up from the city below, ably accompanied by the sounds of people laughing and scooters beeping and music blaring and kids running. This is, essentially, why i don't have a job and a mortgage in England. I tasted all this a few years ago, drank lots if it in but somehow never really slaked my thirst. I probably never will.
Kuala Lumpur is a former British colonial city with Chinese, Indians, Malays, Muslims, tourists and probably everybody else scurrying around it. There's noodles and naan, Chinatown and Little India, headscarves and miniskirts, baseball caps and suits, smelly markets and air conditioned malls, Buddhist monks and mosques. It's a fantastic cultural mess all wrapped up with the usual south east Asian blend of thick pollution, thick traffic and even thicker air.
I wandered around all of this yesterday and somehow ended up at the Petronas Towers, the twin sky scrapers that loom over the city from almost every angle meaning that you keep catching glimpses of them through gaps in buildings or through the monotony of construction sites or between metro tracks over head. It seems a little bit weird (or apt) that that the most photogenic and famous landmark here is a essentially an office block for an oil company. Still, it's worth seeing close up and has a massive shopping centre in it filled with stuff that i couldn't really afford and is mainly home to people walking around escaping the heat trying to figure out how to pronounce BVLGARI and why they charge so much for handbags.
Last night was spent on the rooftop bar of my hostel swigging beer and chatting to people telling stories about traveling around Asia as the smell of sizzling food and wet cement and belching buses and humid fug floated up from the city below, ably accompanied by the sounds of people laughing and scooters beeping and music blaring and kids running. This is, essentially, why i don't have a job and a mortgage in England. I tasted all this a few years ago, drank lots if it in but somehow never really slaked my thirst. I probably never will.
Thursday, February 9, 2012
Myoden and 2012
I haven't written on here for ages which is a bit rubbish of me. Then again i haven't really done any travelling and i've been messing about with flags (see below) and conversations (see right).
New Year was a fun ordeal in navigating my way through thousands of people to see a couple temples. Everybody here seems to enjoy queuing for hours to get into a shrine or temple and then spend five minutes in it praying for family health and happiness and then paying for a New Year's fortune that you don't believe in anyway. I guess everybody does stuff at that time of year not because they like doing it but because it's just become a tradition.
Another winter tradition is skiing which, in Japan, is awesome. The snow i've experienced so far is the finest powdery substance i've ever been on. It's like skiing on dandruff. You can hardly hear the skis as they turn through the snow and get tangled together and send you head first into the stuff reminding you of the dandruff comparison quite abruptly. Winter has been unusually cold and it's claimed dozens of lives in the north as houses have collapsed under the weight of the snow and people have been injured or worse clearing tons of the white stuff from their roofs. Last month there was one metre of snow overnight in Niigata prefecture. The trains are still running though.
Hopefully this year i'll have some travelling to write about. I finish my job at the end of March and then i'll be spending April travelling around Malaysia. I'll be working back at a university somewhere from May and then the summer should include a bicycle, a tent and Hokkaido. Autumn and winter will be back teaching again somewhere in Tokyo. It'll be next year soon...
New Year was a fun ordeal in navigating my way through thousands of people to see a couple temples. Everybody here seems to enjoy queuing for hours to get into a shrine or temple and then spend five minutes in it praying for family health and happiness and then paying for a New Year's fortune that you don't believe in anyway. I guess everybody does stuff at that time of year not because they like doing it but because it's just become a tradition.
Another winter tradition is skiing which, in Japan, is awesome. The snow i've experienced so far is the finest powdery substance i've ever been on. It's like skiing on dandruff. You can hardly hear the skis as they turn through the snow and get tangled together and send you head first into the stuff reminding you of the dandruff comparison quite abruptly. Winter has been unusually cold and it's claimed dozens of lives in the north as houses have collapsed under the weight of the snow and people have been injured or worse clearing tons of the white stuff from their roofs. Last month there was one metre of snow overnight in Niigata prefecture. The trains are still running though.
Hopefully this year i'll have some travelling to write about. I finish my job at the end of March and then i'll be spending April travelling around Malaysia. I'll be working back at a university somewhere from May and then the summer should include a bicycle, a tent and Hokkaido. Autumn and winter will be back teaching again somewhere in Tokyo. It'll be next year soon...
Monday, January 30, 2012
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
Osaka
I managed to do some travelling for a change and coupled with a week’s holiday and an Aussie mate, i made my way to the country’s second city, Osaka, and the others that surround it in an area known as Kansai.
After an overnight bus a couple of Saturdays ago we found a cheap hotel in a part of Osaka called Shin Imamiya which was a dishevelled neighbourhood that was wonderfully trapped in a 1980’s time warp complete with an old knackered tourist tower, a closed theme park with a rollercoaster covered in scaffolding and lots of cafes, restaurants and game centres filled with old men in a variety of different shades of grey and beige somehow managing to successfully melt into the neon.
Just to the north of all this was Dotonbori which is the 21st century equivalent of Shin-Imamiya where the endless shops, bars and restaurants are all new and the men are fifty years younger wearing freakish haircuts in a variety of different shades of blonde trying quite successfully to stand out against the neon. We wandered around slightly bewildered, getting a bit lost, getting a bit drunk and finding our way to some tiny unpretentious back alley bars where local businessmen and office workers let one day fall into another before finding a taxi to take them home. We joined them, much to their enthusiasm, as one of them seemed extremely happy that we were staying in the 1980s time warp as this was where some of his favourite brothels were. He spent most of the rest of the night giving us rather too much information about Osaka prostitutes before meeting up with his wife. There was a slightly less drunk guy who told us he worked in “asset management” and was also part of the “camouflage business” and that when the police weren’t watching he’s “making soup”. Oh, and he also somehow, and for reasons i still haven’t fathomed, showed us a picture of his cock on his mobile phone. And this was the first night we were there. Osaka nightlife is a bit daft.
Less than an hour from Osaka is Nara which was once the capital of Japan and is second only to Kyoto in terms of historic temple tourist appeal. We hired a couple of bicycles and saw a five story pagoda, a three story pagoda, an octagonal temple, old shrines, new shrines and very grand Todaiji Temple which is the biggest wooden building in world containing one of the biggest bronze Buddha statues in the world. There are also loads of deer in Nara. I’d heard about the Nara deer and seen pictures of people feeding them. The deer there are a bit like cows in India as they just have right of way and graze around looking of people to feed them deer food which can be bought near all the tourist traps. At first i thought this was quite cute and charming until i got a shoe full of deer shit and then i quickly changed my mind to realise that they were, in fact, cute and charming faeces-filled vermin. Still, Nara is a beautiful city dripping with history and understated serenity. It’s one of the best places i’ve been in Japan.
We also managed to venture to Kobe for a day which is less than one hour west of Osaka. Kobe is probably most famous for an earthquake that ripped the place up in 1995 wiping out large parts of the city and population. Although you wouldn’t know it now as Kobe is an attractive gleaming shiny city tucked neatly between the blue ocean in front and the green mountains that loom behind it. After dodging crap restaurants and school kids in China Town we managed to find a sake museum and brewery that showed us the history of sake brewing and then gave us several samples of the stuff which was a tasty way to start another night back in Osaka amongst the back alley bars and the eclectic mix of drunks again.
The rest of our time there was a haze of alcohol, people and food with Japanese, Filipino, Irish and Australians, eating pizza, okonomiyaki, takoyaki, sushi, and pie and chips whilst drinking soju, sake, beer, Guinness and some weird mango thing. Eating and drinking is what Osaka is most famous for and what the city itself would probably most like to be remembered for. I once heard somebody in a pub in Leeds describe Osaka as “like two Birminghams”. I’ve never really been to Birmingham but i can only hope, for Birmingham’s sake, that it’s like half an Osaka.
After an overnight bus a couple of Saturdays ago we found a cheap hotel in a part of Osaka called Shin Imamiya which was a dishevelled neighbourhood that was wonderfully trapped in a 1980’s time warp complete with an old knackered tourist tower, a closed theme park with a rollercoaster covered in scaffolding and lots of cafes, restaurants and game centres filled with old men in a variety of different shades of grey and beige somehow managing to successfully melt into the neon.
Just to the north of all this was Dotonbori which is the 21st century equivalent of Shin-Imamiya where the endless shops, bars and restaurants are all new and the men are fifty years younger wearing freakish haircuts in a variety of different shades of blonde trying quite successfully to stand out against the neon. We wandered around slightly bewildered, getting a bit lost, getting a bit drunk and finding our way to some tiny unpretentious back alley bars where local businessmen and office workers let one day fall into another before finding a taxi to take them home. We joined them, much to their enthusiasm, as one of them seemed extremely happy that we were staying in the 1980s time warp as this was where some of his favourite brothels were. He spent most of the rest of the night giving us rather too much information about Osaka prostitutes before meeting up with his wife. There was a slightly less drunk guy who told us he worked in “asset management” and was also part of the “camouflage business” and that when the police weren’t watching he’s “making soup”. Oh, and he also somehow, and for reasons i still haven’t fathomed, showed us a picture of his cock on his mobile phone. And this was the first night we were there. Osaka nightlife is a bit daft.
Less than an hour from Osaka is Nara which was once the capital of Japan and is second only to Kyoto in terms of historic temple tourist appeal. We hired a couple of bicycles and saw a five story pagoda, a three story pagoda, an octagonal temple, old shrines, new shrines and very grand Todaiji Temple which is the biggest wooden building in world containing one of the biggest bronze Buddha statues in the world. There are also loads of deer in Nara. I’d heard about the Nara deer and seen pictures of people feeding them. The deer there are a bit like cows in India as they just have right of way and graze around looking of people to feed them deer food which can be bought near all the tourist traps. At first i thought this was quite cute and charming until i got a shoe full of deer shit and then i quickly changed my mind to realise that they were, in fact, cute and charming faeces-filled vermin. Still, Nara is a beautiful city dripping with history and understated serenity. It’s one of the best places i’ve been in Japan.
We also managed to venture to Kobe for a day which is less than one hour west of Osaka. Kobe is probably most famous for an earthquake that ripped the place up in 1995 wiping out large parts of the city and population. Although you wouldn’t know it now as Kobe is an attractive gleaming shiny city tucked neatly between the blue ocean in front and the green mountains that loom behind it. After dodging crap restaurants and school kids in China Town we managed to find a sake museum and brewery that showed us the history of sake brewing and then gave us several samples of the stuff which was a tasty way to start another night back in Osaka amongst the back alley bars and the eclectic mix of drunks again.
The rest of our time there was a haze of alcohol, people and food with Japanese, Filipino, Irish and Australians, eating pizza, okonomiyaki, takoyaki, sushi, and pie and chips whilst drinking soju, sake, beer, Guinness and some weird mango thing. Eating and drinking is what Osaka is most famous for and what the city itself would probably most like to be remembered for. I once heard somebody in a pub in Leeds describe Osaka as “like two Birminghams”. I’ve never really been to Birmingham but i can only hope, for Birmingham’s sake, that it’s like half an Osaka.
Thursday, September 22, 2011
Myoden and Typhoons
Living somewhere foreign gives you a bit of twisted perspective of the world. Everything is a first. Every week makes you feel like a child again reading “My First” books. My first sake, my first bullet train, my first sushi, my first sumo, my first washing machine museum. Yesterday was My First Typhoon.
The default reaction of Japanese to the news that a massive storm is approaching their islands is to roll their eyes and start mumbling something about the trains. “It will disrupt the trains,” they grumble while shaking their heads and looking solemn. “They’ll be cancelled for safety reasons. It’s just so inconvenient having these 130km/h winds and a year’s worth of rain in a few days. It just buggers up the time table for at least 24 hours.” That seemed to be the only thing anybody was bothered about yesterday. Personal safety wasn’t much of issue. Getting home on time was what mattered.
My afternoon classes got called off and we all got sent home early as the typhoon made landfall further east of the Tokyo and, apparently, had plans to skewer the country for the rest of the day and night barrelling its way north west. The closest train line to my work was already closed so i hopped on a bus for a few minutes to another train line which was also shut. The late afternoon had already turned into an eerie dark dusk. The wind seemed undecided which direction to blow in so just chose all of them at once. Rain lashed down not in a steady down pour but in intermittent buckets. I walked to another train station (yeah, in know, there are three train lines within walking distance and tiny bus ride from where i work on Wednesdays) and that one was still running. It made it about half the way home and then stopped at a small local station waiting for the storm to pass.
I left work at 4.30. It was now 5.30. The rain battered everything. Cars were lined up outside, only their windscreen wipers moving. The wind buffeted the train which rocked from side to side. There was a typhoon passing overhead. A fucking typhoon. Wasn’t this a bit, you know, dangerous? I looked up and down the train and saw people sighing, their body language saying, “This is rubbish” not “Shit! A Typhoon!” Then i realised, quite stupidly, that just because this was My First Typhoon it didn’t mean that it was for everybody else. Japan gets hit by one of these a few times a year. Some people read books, some people chatted, a lot of people pushed buttons and screens, most people went to sleep being rocked by the wind that was gyrating its way around the train, station, building, city and country beyond. Why was i even worried? I found a seat, read a few chapters and got some sleep.
I woke up to find that it had stopped raining and the wind was lessening. The train wasn’t planning on moving forwards anytime soon though and i swear that none of the people had moved either. They were all in the exact same positions reading, talking, texting and snoozing. The trains wouldn’t be running for a while yet and i figured i’d just start walking as the rain had stopped and i’d been sat on the train for the best part of three hours.
It took another two to walk home. I followed snakes of traffic, road signs and my local train line to find my way back to dinky Myoden. There was a kind of giddy yet exasperated atmosphere on the streets and in the stations. Giddy because something had broken the monotonous routine and everyday ordinariness and everybody now had a story to tell about their day. A bit like when a dog turns up in the playground at school. And exasperated because everybody was an hour or two from getting home. Damn those trains. I marched through the streets noticing all of sudden how much crap was lying about. This seems to happen in most cities when there’s a storm or really windy day. It’s as if the world has had its hair ruffled and disturbed a load of dandruff and crap that you never knew existed. Plastic bags and empty wrappers, an old shoe and bits of wood, a plant pot and an amazing amount of broken umbrellas. There was also the sight of long rows of bicycles that had, until recently, been an ordered parked row outside a train station that had, quite quickly, dominoed into a long mass of wheels and handle bars strewn down the pavement.
I walked past my local station on the way back to my flat to be greeted to the sound of a train rumbling past. They’d started running again just as i got home. I flicked on the TV to see what the latest was. There were the usual cooking shows and shit dramas and the news mentioned something about Fukushima. I didn’t understand much of the report but it didn’t really matter. It may as well have said, “The typhoon is now approaching the Fukushima nuclear power plant. Many people there are very worried...because they might not get home on time.” I am, of course, now converted. The next time i hear of an approaching typhoon i’ll roll my eyes and shake my fist at the impending death and destruction before surreptitiously checking the timetables and planning my evening commute.
The default reaction of Japanese to the news that a massive storm is approaching their islands is to roll their eyes and start mumbling something about the trains. “It will disrupt the trains,” they grumble while shaking their heads and looking solemn. “They’ll be cancelled for safety reasons. It’s just so inconvenient having these 130km/h winds and a year’s worth of rain in a few days. It just buggers up the time table for at least 24 hours.” That seemed to be the only thing anybody was bothered about yesterday. Personal safety wasn’t much of issue. Getting home on time was what mattered.
My afternoon classes got called off and we all got sent home early as the typhoon made landfall further east of the Tokyo and, apparently, had plans to skewer the country for the rest of the day and night barrelling its way north west. The closest train line to my work was already closed so i hopped on a bus for a few minutes to another train line which was also shut. The late afternoon had already turned into an eerie dark dusk. The wind seemed undecided which direction to blow in so just chose all of them at once. Rain lashed down not in a steady down pour but in intermittent buckets. I walked to another train station (yeah, in know, there are three train lines within walking distance and tiny bus ride from where i work on Wednesdays) and that one was still running. It made it about half the way home and then stopped at a small local station waiting for the storm to pass.
I left work at 4.30. It was now 5.30. The rain battered everything. Cars were lined up outside, only their windscreen wipers moving. The wind buffeted the train which rocked from side to side. There was a typhoon passing overhead. A fucking typhoon. Wasn’t this a bit, you know, dangerous? I looked up and down the train and saw people sighing, their body language saying, “This is rubbish” not “Shit! A Typhoon!” Then i realised, quite stupidly, that just because this was My First Typhoon it didn’t mean that it was for everybody else. Japan gets hit by one of these a few times a year. Some people read books, some people chatted, a lot of people pushed buttons and screens, most people went to sleep being rocked by the wind that was gyrating its way around the train, station, building, city and country beyond. Why was i even worried? I found a seat, read a few chapters and got some sleep.
I woke up to find that it had stopped raining and the wind was lessening. The train wasn’t planning on moving forwards anytime soon though and i swear that none of the people had moved either. They were all in the exact same positions reading, talking, texting and snoozing. The trains wouldn’t be running for a while yet and i figured i’d just start walking as the rain had stopped and i’d been sat on the train for the best part of three hours.
It took another two to walk home. I followed snakes of traffic, road signs and my local train line to find my way back to dinky Myoden. There was a kind of giddy yet exasperated atmosphere on the streets and in the stations. Giddy because something had broken the monotonous routine and everyday ordinariness and everybody now had a story to tell about their day. A bit like when a dog turns up in the playground at school. And exasperated because everybody was an hour or two from getting home. Damn those trains. I marched through the streets noticing all of sudden how much crap was lying about. This seems to happen in most cities when there’s a storm or really windy day. It’s as if the world has had its hair ruffled and disturbed a load of dandruff and crap that you never knew existed. Plastic bags and empty wrappers, an old shoe and bits of wood, a plant pot and an amazing amount of broken umbrellas. There was also the sight of long rows of bicycles that had, until recently, been an ordered parked row outside a train station that had, quite quickly, dominoed into a long mass of wheels and handle bars strewn down the pavement.
I walked past my local station on the way back to my flat to be greeted to the sound of a train rumbling past. They’d started running again just as i got home. I flicked on the TV to see what the latest was. There were the usual cooking shows and shit dramas and the news mentioned something about Fukushima. I didn’t understand much of the report but it didn’t really matter. It may as well have said, “The typhoon is now approaching the Fukushima nuclear power plant. Many people there are very worried...because they might not get home on time.” I am, of course, now converted. The next time i hear of an approaching typhoon i’ll roll my eyes and shake my fist at the impending death and destruction before surreptitiously checking the timetables and planning my evening commute.
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