1.45am: Showering dead rat germs off my back

This post about last week is waaaay overdue, but I promise you that it's worth a read ;-)

At 1.45am on Saturday morning, I did not awake from a nightmare in which I had been coated with dead rat germs. Being slightly OCD about cleanliness - the sort that uses tissue paper to flush the chain and open toilet doors - a nightmare of that sort would have certainly been a nightmare worth sweating a few pints about. Sadly, however, dead rat germs were a very horrifying reality.

The setting: an Izakaya in Shinjuku for Ulrika's 20th birthday (she can now legally drink in Japan!). It was the same chain as we went to for Lucy's birthday - all dishes are 270yen and can be ordered by a rather fun touch screen that each table is equipped with.

Whilst the company was great and everyone was in good spirits, some dishes took over an hour to arrive. The result was that we had already ordered loads more food and were struggling to finish the plates. Also, mysterious items appeared that no-one claimed responsibility for. A bowl of tomatoes, a plate of frankfurters and burnt chips....oh wait, that was actually ordered by someone.

Now, I'd already been feeling slightly under the weather. Throat a little tender. But 4 hours in a crowded smoke-filled room and I was soon unable to talk and sat pathetically slumped in the corner. Still watching the drunk business sing and dance...and collapse provided ample amusement:

And the Swedes were having a good time:

Oh wait, one Swede was missing. He was too busy being cool with the ultra-cool person on the right:

The evening then took a turn for the worse. Not only was there substantial panic and confusion over the bill - I ended up paying 4,000yen for everyone else's drinks - but then our unexpected guest was discovered. Where we had been putting bare feet all evening. Here he/she/it is:

How did it make it out from under the table? Good question. I soon found out.

Random Swede who fortunately is NOT on the JSLP: *stroking my back* Hey. This hand touched the dead rat. *stroke, stroke, stroke*

Me: Haha, very funny. Stop that. Seriously though!

Random Swede: I'm being serious. I touched it. *Proceeds to waggle his fingers in my face*

I stopped short of punching him in the balls. But I kind of wish I hadn't been so controlled. I made my way as fast as I could to the toilet and began rubbing alcohol sanitiser over my back. And that's how I found myself at 1.45am, showering dead rat germs off my back.

Still mute, I went to bed optimistic about the return of my voice. It's a shame optimism is often mismatched with realism. And so the next day, for the sake of my voice, and most definitely my wallet as well, I passed at the opportunity to go to another izakjaya. Instead I hung out with the Swedes (NB: NOT random rat boy), watching films and making use of the wonderful entertainment resource AKA Youtube. Calle is now a proper Swede as he has finally seen Let The Right One In - a dark, vampire romance film that avoids all cheesy, crappy elements of both genres. I haven't seen the re-make yet - reviews say it's very faithful - but I recommend you all to see the original first. It's brilliant, poignant and atmospheric.

Anyway, enough gushing over that film. To my credit, I wasn't able to praise it enough at the time due to lack of voice. I also discovered that sarcasm is ineffectual when you sound like the love child of Alvin the Chipmunk and Kermit the Frog.

The next day, I dragged myself out of bed at 8am to go to a tea ceremony with my wonderful friend Rie. Although I allowed myself 25 minutes to find her once I arrived at Shinjuku, even this proved too little time to deal with the maze-like mass that constitutes the busiest station in Japan, and possible the world. Asking for directions when one cannot speak is also difficult. Who wants to help the croaky/squeaky gaijin who doesn't speak Japanese?! 40 minutes later we eventually found each other and discovered that we were in a similar state: her voice was better than mine, although that's not saying a lot.

We laughed and coughed our way to the tea ceremony. It was held in traditional, small, Japanese style rooms set in beautiful gardens. We all sat down and watched the ladies in kimonos bring in a special Japanese sweet. And then tea was served. You have to twist the bowl twice in one direction before you drink, wait until the most senior person has finished drinking before you finish your own and then wipe where you've drink from the bowl and twist it once again before finishing. Very intricate. Everything is precise and like art. Just like this amazing lunch I got given. It tasted as good as it looked. おいしかたです！

Afterwards, I went back home to rest and recover. However, I discovered some photos which show that once night fell, I ran wild across a play park with the others, who sat around drinking on benches like chavs. I whooped too loudly, swung too high on the swings and failed at being a spinning-cage-thing hooker:

Ulrika, Antony and I also made it up onto the roof of our apartment on our way back. So much for taking it easy.

Next post: Karate, The Homo Sausage and the Dirty Gaijin (foreigner AKA me)

Wait! Is that a...comet falling out the sky?

That was how my very romantic date was interrupted. Lucy and I were taking a stroll in very romantic date spot AKA Yokohama when this unexpected phenomenon disturbed our peaceful meandering along the waterfront.

I shouldn't have been that surprised. Less than an hour earlier, I'd seen a guy wearing goldfish hanging off his ears.

The backstory....

The JLSP crew had been invited by some of the Nihon Uni volunteer students to Yokohama for Oktoberfest:

"Do you know about Octoberfest? It is a german festival.You might already know that Germans drink beer and eat potatoes everyday.And we can experience this lifestyle."

"I want to experience this lifestyle," Urvesh proclaimed. And so we all set off for this experience.

A beer festival, however, is not exactly my idea of a grand day out. So I joined Tom P and we crashed Calle's visit to the Yokohoma Museum of Art. On approaching the museum, Tom was a little slow to program his cultural mindset.

Tom P: "Is that a rollercoaster?"

Calle: "Yeah. For Chihauhaus."

The museum was exhibiting Degas, a 19thC French artist who liked to paint dancers. I wasn't a big fan of his work - the early work sat uncomfortably between impressionism and realism, and lots of the paintings were evidently unfinished, whereas the later work were repetitive paintings of naked women, bending over drying themselves. However, I did get to see a bit of Dali, including this awesome statue (the one on the right, in case you can't tell):

Tom P and I then ventured towards the beer festival, only to be smacked repeatedly with those "Only In Japan" moments. Firstly, the only available food without queuing to go into the festival was a "Love Box" - which included a sandwich and some chicken nuggets. Then we saw this dude:

I would love to know the thought processes that went into this costume creation. How organic was it? "Hmm, it'd be really messed up if I wore goldfish round my ears" versus "I love Kenta and Riku so much - how could I possibly leave them at home?"

From being confronted by the weirdness of Japan, I was then confronted by all things German. Pictures of beer and sausages grinned down at me. The festival was packed and included a traditional German band on stage. And a vast number of foreigners sloshing their way between tightly packed wooden benches.

Lucy and I were, unsurprisingly, less than enamoured and so we ventured along the waterfront. It was quickly evident that this was a very popular couple activity. So whilst we were feverishly snapping photos of the landscape and sunset, the couples snapped away couply photos of themselves. So of course, we did things properly - we got our own couply photo too.

Then I saw the "comet". To be honest, it was falling WAY too slowly to be a comet. So slowly it didn't actually look like it was moving. And there are two of them! Here are a couple of shots:

And here are some zoomed in photos:

I'd love to know what you make of it. Or if anyone has heard about this in the news.

Sunday involved no "comets" but a fun afternoon out with my friend Rie. And some purikura - these photos machines that make you look uber-cute with super big eyes:

Fatty flesh of tuna ship: izakaya, karaoke, anime and life in general

Hello. Long time, no speak. There’s a lot here. Choose your favourite subtitles below, or read it all if you are a devotee to my wonderful writing ;-)

Lucy's Birthday: karaoke, drunkenness, foot massages

This is Lucy with her birthday candle dinosaur. I should state first off that the title does not refer to Lucy. She is a non-drinker like me. And I don't think she participated in foot massaging. She may have been responsible for the karaoke though.

For her grand 24th, we piled off to an izakaya for much food and merriness. Here’s some of the tempting English menu:

We then gave into her obsession: karaoke. Antony and I duly got the party started with a rendition of “Don’t Stop Me Now.”

And Tom and Niklas did a beautiful duet:

It was sweat-fest and the floor was sticky with spilt drinks but we did ourselves proud and had several dances en masse. Towards the end of the evening, several people were drunkenly slurring their way through “Ring of Fire.” When the fire alarm began to ring. Only Lucy’s Japanese friends and I seemed able to hear it. In my exhausted, semi-trance like state, I just sat and pondered the irony whilst Lucy’s friends rushed to find out what was going on. False alarm, fortunately.

There was of course an after-party. Here’s a riveting scene:

Axel is massaging Tom’s foot and Lucy just can’t take it any more. The night ended with some very very drunk people. An unnamed member of the party brought his own “member” to say hi when someone took pity on him and tried to get him to drink some water and go to sleep.

Life Safety Learning Center: typhoons, earthquakes and penis envy

Friday was our visit to the Life Safety Learning Center so we can deal with the dangers of living in Tokyo. I was in an earthquake when I was here last summer so I was interested to hear what they were going to teach us. Instead I found that the Life Safety Learning Center was more a Life Hazard Center. The whole building was so warm that I almost fainted on several occasions whilst the smiling “Heatstroke Warning” posters mocked me from the walls.

Nevertheless, I endured a magnitude 7.0 earthquake which lasted all of 5 seconds at maximum magnitude and left us all with bums in the air and heads under a table.

I also experienced a typhoon in waterproofs that were clearly misnamed. It was unpleasant as I couldn’t breathe properly without inhaling water. We also crawled on our hands and knees through a dark smoky room, whilst covering our mouths with handkerchiefs. Keep low, keep below the smoke. Don’t you dare go above ~1.4m or …the sensor will locate you and “advise you to get down”.

My favourite part of the trip was easily the fire extinguisher practical. We got to fire real fire extinguishers at a screen with a simulated fire - whoosh! Hoisting up the heavy canister was uncomfortable but hosing the screen was immense. It was the closest thing I’ve ever had to peeing up a wall. Guys, I envy you so much. I might have to rethink my career plans just based on this 15 seconds of freeeeedom and train as a firewoman. Judging by this photo, I wasn't the only one who enjoyed it....

Sophistication, with a hint of naughty snacks

Despite the above note, I passed the weekend in a very sophisticated manner. On the Friday night, I hosted a film night. We opted to watch “The Ghost Writer”, which purported to be an intense political thriller. Sadly, I discovered that even though a film may star Pierce Brosnan and Ewan McGregor does not mean it great. In fact, I found Ewan McGregor to be incredibly annoying in serious need of accent coaching because his English accent made him sound part-Cockney. Also, my dreams of being a grand hostess were shattered when Axel brought back chocolate-covered crisps and some other crunchy things labelled “Bukkake”. According to Wikipedia, bukkake means “splash” or “heavy splash” and represents a practice that occupies a “relatively prevalent niche in contemporary pornographic films.”

Undeterred in my pursuit of sophistication, on Saturday I met my friend Akiko for lunch, before admiring her new apartment and borrowing some literature. I will casually skip over the fact that I then napped for an hour and half before passing out for eleven-and-a-half hours that night due to cumulative lack of sleep. My start of the day on Sunday was therefore closer to the start of the afternoon. But still undeterred, I transformed myself into a domestic goddess. I hovered and scrubbed my floors, I cleaned my cooker, my sink my bathroom, my toilet and put on two loads of washing Then I cooked myself a nutritious meal and did my homework. Oh yes. My mother would be proud…or scathing that such transformations never rarely occur at home.

Reality check: Japanese classes

In case you were wondering, I am learning Japanese in the interludes between these anecdotes. Still, classes can be fun. In Japanese, they have a distinction similar to “this bike” and “that bike” in English. You say kore if the thing you are talking about is near you, sore if it’s near the person you’re talking too, and are if it’s far away from both of you. This gave our wonderfully enthusiastic teacher Iwami an excuse to steal our items and hide them around the room for the lesson. She managed to sneak items into pencil cases and bags, turning students into unwitting thieves. I hope that I manage to make a grammar lesson half as fun when I teach English!

Apathy of a lazy student…leads to boy love

No. I was not involved in any boy love. Boy love is between boys only, you see. And sadly, despite my penis envy during the fire-extinguishing, I haven’t yet saved up enough for the op. What I’m talking about is yaoi, anime about love between boys, apparently made by women for women. It’s the equivalent of yuri, which is the girl love stuff (read: lesbians) for guys.

During serious vocabulary learning procrastination, I set out on an Internet tour to explore yaoi. I was hoping for stories of forbidden love, deep and complex relationships, and lots of angst, but ultimately touching and sweet. I was wrong. Let’s see….

Forbidden love: check.

Lots of angst: check.

Deep and complex relationships: well, I suspect that’s what they were aiming for.

To be honest, I couldn’t get past the fact that whatever the hell I’d loaded was depicting an older, masculine male raping an effeminate teenage boy (yes, that is a boy in the picture) that he’d bought at a gay sex slave auction in order to “save” him, because he knows the boy from a forgotten past and loves him, really he does. He feels so guilty in fact that he promises he’ll try not to rape him too much in the future. And he even made him dinner when the boy was sick, and he’s a mean person who has never made dinner for anyone before. Isn’t that sweet? Needless to say, I didn’t make it to episode 2. I don’t know which women are enjoying that but I'm not one of them.

Friday fun :-)

Friday came round again. I like Fridays. We finish classes at 12.10 on Fridays. However, I don’t like 3 hours of chapter tests, a hiragana and katakana (Japanese scripts) dictations “quizzes”, a review, followed by more grammar. My TEFL-instincts were also inwardly screaming at the teacher to let us practice the phrases in pairs instead of going round and round the class for 40 minutes, speaking on average once every 5 minutes. Yet lunch in the cafeteria which serves amazingly delicious food, followed by hardcore shopping in Harajuku was enough to maintain my mood. Here we can see Calle examining the choice of male clothes on Takeshita Street. Which do you prefer: Bi-Men’s or Nudy Boy?

The evening resulted in another sophisticated film party, with a beautiful yet mind-bendingly crazy anime suggested by Calle called “Tekkon Kinkreet”. Fantastic animation. Sadly, the night degenerated into some not-so-sophisticated content being loaded onto my computer amidst snorts and giggles. At least I avoided more “boy love”.

Weekend update coming soon.

Who knows what was going on here? Simon says, touch your head!