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!
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