SHE'S BAAAAAACK

My blog from my last trip to Tokyo met a somewhat untimely end after I started doing intense, serious research (read: having too much fun). Now thanks to a wonderful exchange programme that Cambridge has with Nihon University, I am now back for a 3 month course of Japanese and for more curry doughnuts.

My story can only begin with the journey because things didn't exactly go smoothly. Firstly, I managed to tip 250ml of water into my handbag, saturating the contents, including my boarding pass. It was still legible but despite my protestations, the lady at the gate referred me to another desk in order to get it reprinted. I promptly approached this desk with the announcement of "Hello! I am water leakage girl!" Don't ever refer to "leakage" and yourself in the same sentence unless you want people to regard you with barely-concealed horror.

To top off this general leakage theme, I managed to get the seat on the plane with the fold-out tray that doesn't lie straight. The wonderful slant angles everything towards my lap. In an attempt to cut a slice of chicken breast, I near-catapulted a cup of apple juice over the elderly Japanese man next to me.

So....so far so good. After being greeted at Narita and then Shinjuku station, Antony and I lugged our stuff into the taxi and then into our raaaather nice accommodation (bedroom, kitchen, bathroom - and spacious by Tokyo standards!) to then be given a tour of the area where we're staying: Shimotakaido. Now, it's only 5 mins walk to that station but somehow we ended up..."admiring the view" along several other streets before we finally found our way back. By that point, I had been on the go for 26 hours. Whew.

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Today, my fellow students and I took a stroll round Asakusa and Ueno in the unusally high temperatures for this time of year (33degC+) but the not-so-unusual humidity. Highlight was possibly watching the wildlife in the the lake in Ueno Park. Turtles and carp and a duck all battled valiantly for bread. As a result, I can now introduce you to a world exclusive game: Duck, Fish, Turtle. Rules are the same as Rock, Paper, Scissors. Duck beats fish, fish beats turtle, turtle beats duck. Invent your own hand signs as necessary.

Twenty-two hours and several nude scenes later...

I made it. I am currently sitting in a box room at a nevertheless very friendly backpackers' place, New Koyo.

My travels began at 4.20 am - see me cheerfully posing by the car in which I was chauffeur driven to the airport. Things don't end quite so grandly - no post-travel photo is being published.

Check in went without mishaps (I was not searched for drugs for once...) although one lady did hold up the queue by trying to take several pots of yoghurt through the "no-liquids" zone. It made me wonder though, at what point does something stop being liquid enough to count? Yoghurt is fairly gloopy but if you had ice cubes....?

Aboard my flight, I heard two Japanese girls next to me converse in English with the air hostess. Being eager and keen, I spotted an interview opportunity which was sadly not carried through for two reasons:
1) I heard you're not supposed to blow your nose in public in Japan and just sniff....but my nose refuses to obey so I had to do some swift furtive actions. I suddenly noticed that one of the girls had moved away completely and the other was asleep with her eye mask on...over her mouth. Am I paranoid?!!
2) I chose to watch "Babel" as it was recommended as a film for good shots of Tokyo. It also had a mute-deaf sex-crazed nympho Japanese schoolgirl who spent a large proportion of the film graphically exposing her nether regions...I don't think this particularly made a good impression to the two potential interviewees. To dig the hole deeper, the second film I chose to watch also had particularly prolonged sex scenes that made me squirm in embarrassment as my subconscious projected disapproving eyes onto the back of my scalp.

But to move on to Japan itself - the glimpses I got from the window of the Narita Airport to Ueno connection have been superb. It's so green! Far much more than I imagined, although I appreciate it's August. The next thing that struck me were the overall ramshackled style of the clusters of dwellings. No space is wasted. Buildings lean together and stretch apart in ways that don't look physically possible. Even if the gap is about foot wide between one house and the next, you can guarantee that they'll be some green plant bursting it's way upwards and making its presence felt.

Surveying the crazily packed structures and their elegant curved roofs, and even the maze of thick wires connecting them, I fell instantly in love. It also possibly had something to do with the sleepy Buddha lying outside a graveyard. For me, it's real life anime. I know it's early days but watch out for my emerging inner Japanophile....

However, it's nap time for me now and I'll update after my undecided adventures of this afternoon.