Pretty leaves and other autumnal delights

Last night I went to a moon drenched night viewing of the famous red maple leaves. I'd tell you the name of the temple but I have forgotten it. I can tell you though that it was truly impressive, the trees are lit up with lights wich only adds to the beauty of the scene. It is possible to go into the temples as well. There you can see a Buddha looking away from the crowds, apparently this is because he finds it too painful to look on the imperfect humans in front of him. So of course we walked around the shrine to see his face. He is no foolish deity though and had his eyes tightly shut. So no Buddhas offended. The only slight marring of the night were the hordes and hordes of tourists all over the place, I think that is something one just has to accept. Japanese people know all about the beauty spots as well so, reluctantly, I am prepared to share them!

I walked back to my flat after a night of dancing and some liquid enjoyment. I may have mentioned we live over the mountain, and it is a big old hill. It takes a good while to walk home and I did eventually give up and catch a taxi. However before that I was able to experience a few moments of silence. Japan can be a pretty noisy place with advertising blaring out of the shops and millions of cars, but at three in the morning the mountain pass is almost silent. It was a very peaceful end to a crazy night. It really is true there are people who lead the dancing in Japanese clubs, in this case a very entertainingly dressed 80's throwback (he looked a lot like my old English teacher Charles Cowling).

There are some very pedantic people here. Sending postcards the other day I was baffled to discover that some cards were costing more to send than other ones. When I asked why, or rather looked quizzically at the post master, he explained using a ruler and an angry face that I had exceeded the space allocation for the message and was encroaching on space designated for the address and would therefore have to pay more money! Why I don't know perhaps he was just having a bad day...

Not much more to report except that there are lots of bears in this country and they seem to like eating people, but they are so cuddly looking I think its an invented conspiracy so some physco can go out and shoot them.

Hope my many millions of readers are well, all the best,
Roger

Compliments Japan Style

Sorry it was just too good!

Sometimes there can be break downs in communication between teacher and student, caused by a combination of language deficiency and sometimes quite serious cultural chasms. An old man was attending my class on compliments, when I asked him to give me an example, perhaps something nice he would say to his wife, he looked quizzical and told me, "My wife is old and fat." Well what can you say to that?

I have finally been paid a full salary cheque so now self indulgence can reassert itself. Even better the money arrived on the same day I discovered that South Africa had lost to Ireland, a very very special day.

I have also now experienced Kareokee. Not in a huge corporate club either. Jon and I went for a quite drink last week, predictably it was anything but and as we were walking back form the train he mentioned that he had seen a kareokee bar 'around here somewhere' we never found the one he meant. But we did discover a tiny little place run by a woman who had clearly had her 15 minutes of fame judging from the rosettes and pictures on the walls. We managed to sing and drink exactly the amount of money we had left which was quite an achievement of good luck! The bar also doubles as a cook your own food restaurant so it might well merit another visit just for that.

Japanese men are rather like Italians they live with there parents until they find a wife to look after them. It seems that some peoples parents are so delighted with this arrangement as there is an organisation that does a kind of speed dating for parents who want to off-load their children. You'd have to worry if you were relying on your mum to hook you up!

Some things are quite disturbing, sometimes when channel hopping on the TV one comes across the strangest stretching exercises. Is not so much that they are stretching that is weird more the way they twist and bounce around like little rubber dolls. Or the spooky counting people who have turned up around the station in the last few days. They sit on chairs on every corner and tap away counting everyone, I think they have different catorgares of counting they all seem to have about 5 or six counting machines. It feels a little like the secret police are onto me. Paranoid me? Never.

And here to end on a cheerful note is a very impressive selection of Origami boxes, courtesy of Jim and Maki (they all fit into each other like Russian dolls).

What a lot of boxes.

Raw Octopus and other Bar Snacks

Who says sex doesn't sell?

You will not find a tastier bar snack. Chop up raw octopus into little bits and smother it in wasabi and you have a tangy gloopy mess that is perfect for accompanying a few pints of frothy beer. Other tasty nibbles include Korean seaweed (I'm not sure how it is different from the Japanese variety but apparently it is), young soy beans with salt, a bit like peanuts but without the fattening potential. One of the other teachers, Joe, left the office on Monday and this of course demanded a little going away bash. Much beer and food was consumed and yet the bill still only came to about fifteen pounds, to think in places at home that would just be the price of the first few drinks. Ah, it could be dangerous yet I hardly seem to be drinking anything I cant quite work it out.

Rickshaws operate here as well, much in the same fashion as in Dublin, late at night. Although here you can also catch one during the day at major tourist spots. I was very impressed until I saw that the drivers have it easy, one guy pulls whilst his friend pushes from behind making it all rather easy. In fairness the carts are a little bigger and much more luxurious they even have rugs for people laps. So if the teaching doesn't work out I can always return to the Rickshaw business.

Wendy a Cumbrian lass working in the same school as Jon and Mike organised a Guy Fawkes party for the 4th, a day early but everyone was working on the 5th. We went into the centre of town and down to the river bank. We then launched fireworks over the river and burnt our Guys. It seemed only fitting that one of them should be a celebration of the events of the 2nd of November. Here's a pic!

Guy Fawkes for 2004

If it doesn't sound very strange to have a few fireworks you should realise that we were launching them on the equivalent of the Broadwalk in Dublin or the Embankment in London and to make it even stranger Kyoto is a wooden city. Apparently its quite normal behavior though and the police never turned up to arrest us.

Americans don't know what a Lorry is, strange people. I knew they are generally fairly backward but this was new one for me. Its actually quite interesting there are lots of linguistic differences I was aware of but I keep discovering new ones, for example 'reckon' is considered real red-neck talk, so poor Mike gets more and more irritated every time I ask him what he thinks!

Because this is a wonderful opportunity to show of in front of a global audience (as if) I have received not one but two compliments on my teaching the first came after what I thought was one of the worst lessons I had taught. In fact when I saw one of the students talking to Kenta (one of the staff) I was sure she was complaining! How wrong I was. Ah to be arrogant. The fall comes next by all accounts.

All the best,
Roger

Meat Eating Vegies

I was teaching a class about foods the other day, a student told me he was a vegetarian, so I was a little surprised when he answered my question of what was his favorite food with "I like anything with meat, I'm a paradox."

Here is a picture of me getting to know a very large can of beer recently liberated from a vending machine mmmmm.

I am listening to the BBC at the moment on the edge of my seat, it seems that there really are people ignorant enough to vote for Bush, the mind boggles, even when they accept all the cock-ups they still like him, 'He's tough' and such statements hardly fill me with confidence. The radio isn't the only form of entertainment here though, there is of course TV. Now occasional we get films in English, but if you want non-Japanese language programs your best bet is too learn Spanish, there are loads of dodgy Mexican soaps providing melodrama aplenty.

We tend to think about evacuation as a hardship endured in little Welsh villages during the war. Of course it happened here as well and because of the allied blockade it seems rationing was even worse here. It is the war generation who are the keenest whale eaters, whale meat was used during the war as a cheap and convenient food source.

People here do not lead 9-5 lifestyles I think it is probably more like 9-9, if you catch the trains at what we would consider rush hour then you stand a far better chance of getting a seat than if you travel latter at night. I wondered how they could survive with so much work, then it dawned on me people sleep on the trains, they sit or stand on the subway asleep until there station turns up and the miracuosly they wake up, its an inbuilt instinct a bit like birds migrating across the world!

Hope you are all well,
Roger