Kids make me sick.

Teaching kids exposes you to a lot of germs.

Teaching kids in a foreign country exposes you to a lot of germs you've never been exposed to before, which in my head basically equates to double germs.

Two months ago a four-year-old coughed directly up my nose and a week later I was swaddled in blankets curled up like a snail-shell on my bathroom floor. This week the SAME child spluttered blithely and without remorse into the blameless air of my classroom, over and over again like an automated snot machine, so now I'm sick again. This week's national holiday was ruined because I needed to stay home with my nausea, and I can't get into a deep sleep so I keep having weird dreams about the mundane things on my bedside table. Wonderful.

Here endeth the lesson: buy your children biohazard suits until they learn to cover their mouths like proper humans.

On appearing stupid on a regular basis.

"No no no", my dentist tells me. It's nine in the morning and I am barely aware of my fingers and toes. I haven't had coffee or breakfast. My head feels like an untuned radio.

He begins to explain in halted English. "This filling" - he points to the diagram he printed out for me at my visit two weeks ago - "is a filling you have. Already."

"Ah. So...I'm not getting a filling today?"

"No filling. No treatment. All is okay. Not problem. Please come back in a half-month."

But that's what you said last time. Here is a diagram of a mouth, with one tooth highlighted saying "filling". Come back in a half-month. Here I am, a half-month later, apparently making myself look like an idiot.

He says something to the receptionist in Japanese. I catch the word "hantoshi" - half a year. I realise he must have made a mistake with his English at the last appointment and told me to come back in two weeks, when he meant six months. I repeat: "Ahhhh, hantoshi! So desu ne! Okay! Arigato, gomen, arigato gozaimaaaaaasu" and hurry out of the clinic backwards, half-bowing as I go, flailing as I change from slippers to outdoor shoes. I just want to get out as soon as possible, rushing out so quickly that the receptionist has to chase me down to give me back my health insurance card. 

I'm too polite to set the dentist straight on his error. And I'm still not sure why he gave me a picture of a filling I already have. It doesn't really matter. As the foreigner, you always look like the stupid one.

***

"Ima", my hairdresser tells me, "なになになになになになに".  His face indicates that he's expecting something from me but I've no idea what. Not a clue what's supposed to happen next. He seems to be indicating that I should stand up - maybe to go over to the sinks? But he's already done the shampoo - or at least expecting me to say or do something. I'm wary of randomly choosing to say yes or no, in case it results in him giving me a massive weave like they do on America's Next Top Model. So I stand up. He looks confused, then seems to make sense of my bizarre decision.

"Ah!". His face clears. "You want bathroom." He points. I don't need to go but obviously I have to go now anyway. I'm at least grateful he gave me a way out of the situation, making me look like I'm just shy to ask about anything toilet-related rather than just clueless about how to operate as a human.

***

These two things happened in the space of two days, yesterday and the day before. It might seem like I'm sharing these stories to make fun of myself, but the truth is I'm sort of proud of them. If I were being melodramatic I'd say they're my battle scars. If there's one thing I can put on my CV after I come back from Japan, it's not language skills or teaching abilities - it's simply the ability to get used to looking stupid. It's a very underrated skill. 

See, I'm a petty person, and I don't like to appear as though I don't know what I'm doing. One of my parents' stories of my early childhood involves me furiously shouting "BY MYSELF!" as they try to help me solve a three-by-three puzzle, batting them away as I try to shove incompatible pieces together over and over again; I'm a bit better at puzzles now but emotionally I'm not sure I've moved on that much. But continually being placed in situations where you can't understand people, don't know the rules and have very little skill in communicating your problems really is one of the best things that can happen to you, and I'd highly recommend it to anyone. Your skin thickens. You brush off embarrassing moments more quickly. You start to be more open about your fallibilities. See, just now I had to Google how to spell "fallibilities" and I was perfectly comfortable telling you that. Maybe I'm just trying to put a positive spin on things, but whenever I feel my gut twist sideways during an awkward miscommunication, I like to think of it not as an embarrassment to be forgotten, but a moment of personal growth.

Tomorrow I have to go to the local government offices to fill out my tax forms. I expect I'll grow a lot.

On tiny plastic bags.

Dear Japan,

It's fine. Really.

I don't need you to put a plastic bag around my fruit. When I picked it up and put it in my basket, I chose not to bag it for a reason. When I get home I'm going to peel it/wash it/eat the dirt off it like an urchin anyway. It's fine. I promise.

I don't need you to put TWO layers of plastic round my meat and cheese, before you put it in a separate plastic bag. I understand. The juices of animal products are best kept separate from vegetable products, for reasons of safety and out of respect for the four vegans still alive and well in your country. Nonetheless, you're being a smidge excessive. I think the four vegans might agree, before they make the forty-minute trek across town to the one restaurant they know that doesn't put beef chunks in the vegetable soup.

I don't need you to wrap pharmaceutical products in a miniscule plastic bag, and then put the miniscule plastic bag in a paper bag. I don't need you to put feminine hygiene products in a separate bag from all the other pharmaceutical products in case they get tainted with Witch Disease. (N.B.: I also don't need you to get a matronly female clerk to push the young male clerk aside and take over when the feminine hygiene products need to be scanned. It's okay. Really. He will learn.)

I don't need to open a bag of sweets and find every sweet in there individually wrapped. It's okay if I offer someone a sweet and they put their hand in there. If their hand is gross, or they are of an age where their hand is very likely to be gross, I'll shake the bag over their hand until it comes out. We do it all the time back home. I swear it works.

***

I have six different waste disposal bins in my flat. Paper and card, plastic, tins, PET bottles, burnable refuse and non-burnable refuse. "Does this burn?" is the mantra of our household. I have thought more about which materials could be defined as burnable than most chemists and a good deal of serial killers. I do this because obaasan yell at you if you fail to separate burnable and non-burnable refuse properly. Putting recyclable material in non-recycling bins is punishable by staring and pointing, and littering is punishable by catapult. In short, you seem to put a lot of effort into the environment in this area. And the Kyoto Protocol was invented in Kyoto (I guess), so the environment definitely on the agenda. I'm here to tell you, you don't even need to deal with electric cars or whatever. You can fix the environment right now. Just stop putting plastic bags over everything.

It'll be fine. I promise. They're just cluttering up your house and mine; I've got a whole shelf of them in my kitchen. And I can only draw faces on them so many times before I get bored of pretending they're my ghost friends.

Typhoons

A typhoon has come, the second in a week. There was another a couple of months back too. The previous two both spun out into mere gusts that wouldn't bother a moth, but this one seems more serious, and we had a proper man coming round with a loudhailer telling us to stay inside and everything. My phone went off with a special ringtone I didn't know it had, which basically declares a state of emergency and tells you to get your shit together. I am in my flat with the doors and windows shut. I have an emergency bag ready, containing energy bars and flashlights and my external hard drive because what on earth would I do without my Elder Scrolls saves from eight years ago. I took the washing in. I steeled myself.

And it turns out typhoons are really, really boring.

I have to wait here until tomorrow morning. The internet is slow because everyone is in watching students prank cats on Youtube. We forgot to stock up on food, so I can't snack out of boredom and then wonder why my teeth hurt all the time. I poked my boyfriend with a stick and he didn't do anything worth observing. Nothing else to report.

Bored.

Music and castles

I always start posts short and then they grow like tapeworms. So I thought I'd keep this one to a mere threadworm for a change. A couple of weeks back I had a couple of nice, low-key days I thought I might tell you about. I have action-packed posts on Tokyo, Mt. Fuji, sumo, tissues, foot peels, tiny plastic bags and much more waiting in the wings, but we cannot do everything at once.

A couple of weeks ago I went to Inuyama for work. Inuyama is known as the home of the oldest original castle in Japan. 'Original' is a key word here. Despite being stalwart-bordering-on-stubborn when it comes to tradition, Japan has an odd habit of...moving its prized historical buildings about. Castles, temples and shrines get rebuilt and shifted about every now and then, perhaps to evenly distribute the magic all over the country, perhaps just for a laugh. I'm not sure. Whatever it is, any time you pick up a tourist pamphlet for a beautiful piece of architectural wonder, seemingly frozen in time and quietly proud in its longstanding majesty, there'll be something in there about it being moved from some other place on wheels in the 1920s. Like Springfield in that one episode of the Simpsons (the one from the season where you finally stopped watching). 

So Inuyama's quite special. I went there for a festival back in April, which involved blokes in trad clothing heaving giant wooden carts full of children in between sips of Asahi. (You can read about it here, on my gentleman companion's blog.) That time I didn't get to explore much, what with trying not to get crushed by floats, but this month I ended up spending the day there for work reasons, so I took the opportunity to enjoy a little after-school excursion.

Wasn't quite the same without the doom-floats this time, but still perfectly nice.

The old town streets feel calming, and since they lead towards the castle and several shrines, they seem to build a sense of anticipation and purpose within you as you walk along them, like the path towards the final boss in a videogame. At one point I walked past a building with a couple of dozen people hanging round it, looking inside. The door was open and inside were a bunch of people watching a guy with a clipboard telling jokes to a few other people on stage. Haven't got a clue. My bafflement punctured the final-boss effect a bit. A few blocks down, I came across a couple with a giant dog which I was too afraid to take pictures of. Inuyama means "dog mountain", so I can only presume he was the city mascot/security guard. Fortunately the house a couple of doors down had a front yard full of small cats, so the balance of the universe was restored. Great trip so far.

The castle itself was closed, but I didn't mind. I just like looking at them and picturing myself in a big crown. I enjoyed taking time to walk around with no real goal in mind. I also found this rather attractive series of gates, at the end of which was a bunch of love notes written by visitors on wooden pink hearts:

I was too chicken to put my dead-spider handwriting all over one.

Inuyama, there.

Then I just returned to the station, down quiet streets featuring the occasional unexplained steampunk statue:

and went back home. The next day was even nicer - I went to a gig featuring some all-girl pop-punk bands - but I can't think of much to say about that apart from that it was brilliant and fun. (This lot. Also this lot. Recommended.) This was all after a few weeks of being ill and doing nothing with my life so it was good to get back into general being-aliveness again.

That's it really. Coming up, my trip to Tokyo last week, then maybe I might have to face going into my backlog of stupid shit I didn't write about but meant to.

Nagashima Spaland: On Fear and Levelling Up

This is my childhood nightmare.

All through the blazing, sticky-moist, dog-star-pooing-all-over-your-shoes summer, Nick was keen on going to this waterpark. Supposedly the best in Western Japan, and world record holder for highest number of waterslides per square metre. His enthusiasm was like that of a small child being offered a kaleidoscope or a playing card smeared in chocolate or any object. I was a little more reserved, for reasons that anyone who has seen me try to swim will understand.

I don't like water. I have grudgingly accepted that I need it to live, but outside of the appropriate parameters I'm not really happy with the whole concept. I don't like water in my eyes or up my nose. When I am in a body of water, I am not graceful, nor do I accept the situation with grace, instead flailing as if fighting the water will turn it back into air and earth. My P.E. teachers laughed and cried and stamped their feet in a series of one-man operas. I can swim well enough to not die, probably. Anything past that gets a bit murky.

But new things are the order of the day. I live in a faraway country. I tried weird fish. (Carp-e diem?) Most importantly, shut up I'm not a chicken YOU are. Off I went to a waterpark!

Nagashima Spaland is comprised of a shopping centre, a set of waterslides and a set of rollercoasters, and the most reassuring thing about the waterpark was that the rollercoasters looked far, far worse. A fear to conquer another day. I approached the first slide with jellylegs. It was the kind where you swirl around in a bowl, before falling into a pool through a hole in the middle. It reminded me of the charity bins you used to throw coins into in McDonalds.

Not pictured: my screams.

"Can I go ahead of you?" I asked Nick. "If I don't do it right now I won't do it at all." When I took a breath and pushed myself down the slide, there were a few nanoseconds of pleasure interspersed mainly with upset and lizard-brain fear. After a few dodgy laps of the bowl I dropped through the hole like a weight. I think my foot found the surface first and through waggling of all limbs I somehow uprighted myself. The lifeguard at the bottom looked concerned.

Two or three more slides followed. I had the same feelings: anxiety, trepidation, small bursts of adrenaliney something that might have been fun. It was on the fourth slide, I think - a tube slide mostly in darkness - when it clicked. I was about a third of the way down when it happened. I stopped being scared. I got it. The lurches in my stomach became exciting, the twists and turns exhilerating. Suddenly I was laughing and not afraid at all. I was enjoying myself. I didn't want the slide to end. I actually said whee. And then I finished and wanted to get right back on again.

This is probably really boring for anyone who isn't me. But in life you generally grow up subtly, imperceptibly. You realise that it's been a few months since you found anything growing in your coffee mug. You wonder when you started being able to dispose of spiders. You gradually care less and less about what people think about you, to the point where you can write an obtuse and barely-read blog and not really worry because you do it for yourself. There aren't many moments where you level up, in an instant. I was lucky to have one. On a waterslide. With my arse squeaking against a dinghy.


After that I almost completely stopped being a chicken, at least about water-related things, and even went on the biggest ride in the park, which goes vertical and causes gravity to eat your stomach. It was a pretty amazing change for someone who's been crap with water their whole life. I even wanted to go back to Nagashima the following week. Everyone else did too. Highly recommended.


Many thanks to Nick and Alyssa for not laughing at my stupid face and brain. Many thanks to the lovely staff member who helped me when I got stuck on a wet mat (don't ask). Many thanks to Nagashima Spaland in general for being great and fun and making me feel warm fuzzy things inside.

Many not-thanks to the one shitty slide I didn't enjoy after my epiphany, not because it was scary but because it was clearly old, poorly-maintained, bumpy and gave me big old bruises on my elbows. Fuck you, slide.

This fucker.

Hokkaido 2: Hokkaidening

After our trip to Hakodate we took a grumpy, overloaded, beige-flecked train to Sapporo where we spent the rest of our holiday putting beer and ice cream in our mouths and then also more beer. We reclined in biergartens. We discovered there is such a thing as a 'standing bar', which is basically a bar where you can't sit down, and also discovered that this is as terrible an idea as it sounds.

Look, so happy.

Most of the holiday involved either lying down or sitting down chewing, so I won't log the whole thing in detail. However, for the benefit of future generations I thought it prudent to sketch out a few highlights:

Log Kit

The first morning back, we wanted burgers. After seven months here, the volume of guilt I feel about eating non-Japanese food is rapidly approaching nil. The mysteriously titled "Log Kit" restaurant squats at the end of Tanuki Street, a covered arcade named for a Japanese raccoon/fox/dog-like creature which features prominently in folklore. You might know it as the thing Mario turns into sometimes.

Log Kit had a TV blaring in the corner and a wall full of photos of people enjoying burgers and chilli fries, including a prominently positioned one with white people in it as a proud show of authenticity. I had a BLT slathered in Japanese-style mayo, which is slightly less egg-like and a little more piquant than Western mayo, for those of you who are interested in mayonnaise.

The food was pretty good but the main thing I enjoyed about it was the TV. I don't have a TV in my flat, so doctors' offices and bars are the only places I really get to see Japanese shows. I've seen TV crews out filming more times than I've seen any actual shows. From what I've been told, Japanese TV is actually a little boring - far from its international reputation as OMG CRAZIEST SHIT EVAR, apart from a few good dramas it's apparently pretty mundane and tends to stick to tried-and-tested formulas: show food, interview celebrity, get celebrity to eat food, celebrity compliments food, host does vox pops about food, man cross-dresses for no reason. Nonetheless my lack of exposure to these shows mean they still fascinate me. The show we watched involved two...teams (?), who were either family or dressed up like family (some in school uniforms, older women deliberately dressed as pearl-bedecked powdered matriarchs etc.), who had to sit round a table and guess (?) whether the food they were eating was cheap or expensive (?), and did a lot of strategising about something or other. After the break there was a second element, clearly sponsored, where people had to pretend to order something from a sushi restaurant and an angry woman would tell them whether the restaurant actually served that item or not, followed by a big enthusiastic endorsement of the item. There was a big eel and a massive onigiri and so on. This is what I see pretty much every time I see any Japanese TV.

We also walked past this shop a lot. 

Don Quijote

Tanuki Street also has a Don Quijote, which is something of a cross between Wilkinsons, Poundstretchers, Hawkins Bazaar and the back of a guy's van. There's actually one or two in Nagoya but I hadn't come across any, so popping in here for novelty hats and tin openers and weird underwear was a top priority. My favourite part was the transition between (I think) the third and fourth floors, which takes you via escalator from a cheap-and-cheerful discount snack store to a weird-sex-costume-and-dodgy-discount-electronics sleazedungeon:

Even the hair straighteners in this section looked unsettling.

TV Tower

The central line of greenery which neatly and politely cuts through Sapporo is dominated by the figure of the TV Tower. You can go inside where there are souvenir shops and arcade games and stuff, including the very first whack-a-mole game I've ever actually seen in real life. For a few hundred yen you can also go up to the observation deck and view the whole city stretching away towards Hokkaido's adorably bumpy mountains.

Undoubtedly the best part of the tower was the part where you could buy fridge magnets featuring Hokkaido's mascot animal, the bear:

No comment.

Beer gardens

Blue beer!

Cherry beer! Tasting like cherry-almond bakewell!

And regular beer! You know what that looks like!

Something like this?

Accidental squid

I accidentally ordered some squid, and then, because it was a small restaurant and it was very hard to deflect attention, I ate some squid. It looked like a pork or chicken curry in the picture, but when the curry came I ascertained, from my years of experience in veterinary medicine, that it wasn't either of those meats. My main clue was the big rubbery tentacles. I don't like seafood, and I especially don't like squid. My last experience with squid involved me almost choking after a tragic onion ring/calamari mixup. But since I am now a pretend adult who lives in a different country and pays tax (probably), I swallowed my unhappiness and finished my meal anyway. It was all right. Bit chewy, bit fishy. Anyone who isn't a picky eater will probably look down on me for being so proud of eating squid; for eating a relatively normal meal without blecking and mithering like a child. I don't really mind. My brothers in arms will understand.

Romantei

Hokkaido makes dairy. Cheese, chocolate, butter. Cream. Chocolate. Butter. Chocolate. Cream. I'd read about this well-respected confectioner online, and was able to blindly prod my way through their all-Japanese website enough to roughly discern where it was (opposite the train station...maybe). We reached the right address but weren't sure where to go from there. Nick and I paced between buildings like uncertain cats, sniffing for the scent of chocolate and meowing at strangers. Eventually we tried our luck in the one that looked like a department store. I think I expected some sort of chocolate palace, which I didn't receive....or at least, not right then. I roamed the department store's food hall looking for the big glossy cake shop, possibly contained within an actual big cake. I actually found it right when I was about to leave, in a corner by the door; a humble, unsuspecting stall. But such a tasty stall.

I meant to buy one or two things for myself, maybe some souvenirs for others as well. I actually bought five things for myself. I even bought some non-chocolatey fruit-based desserts which, as we all know, are for chumps. They were also pretty reasonably-priced for something so rich and fancy-looking. Japan supposedly has a high cost of living but apart from a few noticeable things (rent and fruit are the big ones) I'm usually pleasantly surprised by how little people try and rip you off. In London you'd probably have to sell at least one of your eyes for five attractive desserts.

Then we couldn't find a place to sit down and there were no nice parks or benches so I sat on a ledge and opened the box and suddenly all my cakes were gone and there was custard on my face.

The world's longest garlic bread

                                     

Aforementioned chocolate palace

After the Romantei incident I clearly hadn't had enough. We took a subway to the end of the line in search of Shiroi Koibito Park, a chocolate-themed attraction created in celebration of a famous local biscuit (white chocolate, sandwiched between two spongey vanilla cookies, oishii as all-get-out).

The area around the park is unremarkable. Wide American-style roads, a petrol station, some sort of medical facility. Then you smell white chocolate. Then you see the brightly coloured windows filled with bubbles and Rube Goldberg machines. Then you go in, and everything is magic.

Rose gardens, mock-Tudor decor, model trains, creepy animatronics. All the hallmarks of a half-remembered place your parents took you as a toddler. I'm cynical and awful and I loved it. Unfortunately we got there quite late in the day, after the factory tour had closed, but there was a fascinating part where you could watch staff make sweets through a window. No pics of that, felt too weird. I also felt too weird to take a picture of the middle-aged businessman sitting on his own in a child's wendyhouse, so here's one of me instead.

***************************

So yeah. I went on holiday. You don't like it? Well DON'T COME ON HOLIDAY WITH US THEN. Go on, get out of it. Go on your own holiday.