I was going to write about job interviews and Milan and vending machines and poker faces but i tried to get on a plane to Amsterdam on last Saturday so i’ve got something completely different to write about.
I’m in England by the way. I came home for Christmas after finishing my contract and my stint at the university which ended with a lot of alcohol being consumed and friends being made. I left Sakasai at about nine thirty last Saturday morning and headed to the airport for the flight back to England via Amsterdam. Jake, one of the other teachers that i’d been working with, was on the same flight as me so we stood in the queue at the airport ready to check in. Except we didn’t. Amsterdam was swimming in snow and the flight had been cancelled. We stood in the queue for five hours being entertained an elderly South African man who plans to sail around the world and didn’t have a good thing to say about his home country. Jake paid for a wireless internet connection and we stood and watched the Ashes and gave complete strangers weather updates. That night we got put up in a busy hotel that had no spare tables in the restaurant so we ate instant noodles and soggy sandwiches from a gift shop and watched the BBC world news lead with a story all about weather chaos in Europe causing huge travel delays at airports which just kind of rubbed it in really.
The next morning Jake got on an earlier flight and i stood in line for an hour or so again. It’s strange how people strike up conversations with each other when things go wrong. If your plane or bus or ferry is on time you don’t say a word to anyone - you spend the whole time with your head in a book or music in your ears. As soon as shit happens it becomes perfectly acceptable to put the book down, switch the music off and have a chat with person next to you. So i met Dianne, an artist from Ireland who gave me a book and told me that i had the right idea with “all that teaching English stuff” and her advice that “you should just travel your arse off for the next ten years, you’re only young” was warmly received. Unfortunately the plane wasn’t as comforting as it had some technical problems that meant we were late setting off from Tokyo and I’d miss my connection to Leeds from Amsterdam on the Sunday night. Eleven hours, one book and two movies later I arrived in Europe.
Amsterdam airport looked like a futuristic refugee camp. The snow outside gave the whole place a lunar landscape and at about midnight i was directed to a business class lounge where KLM had set up a load of camp beds and sleeping bags and pillows for stranded passengers. I hunkered down and started snoozing and, amazingly, didn’t wake up until 8:10. Shit. This meant that i might be late for my connection to Leeds. I quickly got my stuff together, threw everything in my bag and with my coat inside out and hanging off my back and dashed to the toilet on the way out. As i was washing my hands i glanced at my watch again. Hang on. 8:10? I looked closer. It was 1:40. I’d been asleep for about an hour. Back to bed. In the morning we all got free sandwiches for breakfast and the connection to Leeds left late but at least it left. Some people have been in Heathrow for a week.
So now i’m back in Leeds again amongst the snow and old friends and family and Christmas. It's been freakishly cold here with snow and ice lingering longer than usual and all i seem to have done since i've been back is get drunk, get a cold and eat half my own body weight in food. But then it's Christmas in England. That's pretty much what everybody here does.
I start a new job in Tokyo in the first week of January and i leave England on Wednesday and fly via Milan back to Japan. Well, hopefully, if the weather allows. I'll try and write more about Japan in the New Year. Happy Christmas, have fun and best of luck with 2011.
Monday, December 27, 2010
Monday, December 6, 2010
Sakasai and Kamakura
This time last year i was getting drunk and sleeping on buses travelling across Europe. Now a whole twelve months later it’s all totally changed. I’ve been getting drunk and sleeping on trains in Japan. My parents must be so proud.
I’ve been a bit lazy recently. I haven’t been out on my mountain bike and the only new place i’ve ventured is Kamakura which is a small city south west of Tokyo on the coast that was, for a short period of time, the capital of Japan which means it’s littered with dozens of temples and shrines. There are some glorious old buildings and a huge bronze Buddha statue that has survived a tsunami, several typhoons and a few earthquakes in its time but still sits serenely among the trees and the tourists. Kamakura is also home to windsurfers, cheeky kites (the bird not the toy) and cute streets containing a multitude of shops hawking tat and traditional crafts in equal measure. Nice place.
There were also a massive amount of old people although there seems to be a large amount of old people everywhere in Japan. A lot has been written about Japan’s aging population and i confess to having read almost none of it. When you’re here though it does add to that mix and clash of expectations and reality. The expectation being that it’s an ultra hi-tech country full of lights and swishing trains and high speed everything. Which is largely true. It’s just also home to a shit load of grandparents all happily using all that hi-tech full of lights swishing stuff. Whilst falling asleep on a train.
There’s also loads of earthquakes as well. So many that i’ve got used to them. One woke me up last night and instead of being slightly freaked out or scared by it, as i was when i first got here, it just felt like an inconvenience as it was in the middle of the night. I never thought i’d think of an earthquake at 2 on the Richter scale in the similar way that i’d think of car alarm at 3am. But there are so many of them here that it just becomes part of life. It’s very rare that one rips up the ground and causes major damage and death so you become almost immune to them. It must be very strange though growing up in an environment where the possibility of earthquake, tsunami, volcano or typhoon could end it all quite quickly. Maybe it might explain a few other things as well.
It’s said that language reflects culture. Apparently, Intuits have several words for “snow”. The British have a variety of words for “drunk”. The Japanese have lots of words for “pervert”. Prostitutes, massages and love hotels are a part of every city every evening. They’re a horny bunch. And drugs may be highly illegal but alcohol and cigarettes are imbibed as if, well, almost as if a natural disaster could take you out at anytime.
In two weeks i’ll be back in England. In one month i’ll be back in Japan. I’m going home for Christmas but will return for more teaching in 2011. Have fun. See you soon.
I’ve been a bit lazy recently. I haven’t been out on my mountain bike and the only new place i’ve ventured is Kamakura which is a small city south west of Tokyo on the coast that was, for a short period of time, the capital of Japan which means it’s littered with dozens of temples and shrines. There are some glorious old buildings and a huge bronze Buddha statue that has survived a tsunami, several typhoons and a few earthquakes in its time but still sits serenely among the trees and the tourists. Kamakura is also home to windsurfers, cheeky kites (the bird not the toy) and cute streets containing a multitude of shops hawking tat and traditional crafts in equal measure. Nice place.
There were also a massive amount of old people although there seems to be a large amount of old people everywhere in Japan. A lot has been written about Japan’s aging population and i confess to having read almost none of it. When you’re here though it does add to that mix and clash of expectations and reality. The expectation being that it’s an ultra hi-tech country full of lights and swishing trains and high speed everything. Which is largely true. It’s just also home to a shit load of grandparents all happily using all that hi-tech full of lights swishing stuff. Whilst falling asleep on a train.
There’s also loads of earthquakes as well. So many that i’ve got used to them. One woke me up last night and instead of being slightly freaked out or scared by it, as i was when i first got here, it just felt like an inconvenience as it was in the middle of the night. I never thought i’d think of an earthquake at 2 on the Richter scale in the similar way that i’d think of car alarm at 3am. But there are so many of them here that it just becomes part of life. It’s very rare that one rips up the ground and causes major damage and death so you become almost immune to them. It must be very strange though growing up in an environment where the possibility of earthquake, tsunami, volcano or typhoon could end it all quite quickly. Maybe it might explain a few other things as well.
It’s said that language reflects culture. Apparently, Intuits have several words for “snow”. The British have a variety of words for “drunk”. The Japanese have lots of words for “pervert”. Prostitutes, massages and love hotels are a part of every city every evening. They’re a horny bunch. And drugs may be highly illegal but alcohol and cigarettes are imbibed as if, well, almost as if a natural disaster could take you out at anytime.
In two weeks i’ll be back in England. In one month i’ll be back in Japan. I’m going home for Christmas but will return for more teaching in 2011. Have fun. See you soon.
Monday, November 22, 2010
Sakasai and Bingo
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.
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.
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.
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