I'm not dead

Sorry for the ridiculously long delay between posts, though I’m sure my readership is low enough that very few of you care. I’ve been without internet for over a month, but have safely resumed bereaving my senses and being utterly reliant on it like everyone else. Case in point: sharing the internet with another person is terribly unproductive… very often “I Internet” becomes “Let’s Internet” and instead of blogging I usually end up playing impromptu Wikilink games where the object is to see how many Wikipedia pages you have to go through before you wind up at a proposed page by clicking on the links for related articles. Incidentally, it takes 10 pages to navigate from Mussolini to penny-farthings. And there are only 5 between Cary Elwes and Chernobyl. Don’t say I never taught you anything.

There’s been too much goings on in the last month to cover in any detail, so it’s bullet time:

· Took salsa lesson/ paired with Salary Man/pondered the probability of real-life Shall We Dance
· Boyfriend came and we did Tokyo
· Was served food by a ninja
· Razorback pig on a leash
· Went to all night psychedelic rock festival/made eyes at Gene Wilder*
· Found and moved into new apartment
· Bought a Vespa/woo-hooed
· Got addicted to Dr.Who
· Went out into the mountains/rowboating

Here are some pictures of the apartment. I’ve enjoyed dressing it up in curtains and buying it things and whatnot. Truly a domestic thrill… more than it ought to have been, really. I think this means I`ve gone through some sort of twisted rite of passage and soon enough I`ll be putting cocktail wieners into Jell-O moulds. (Logistically, that`s how these things work. If curtains then Jell-O wieners.) You’ll be interested to know that my apartment is located next to a pirate bar. The owner has spared no expense in making it as piratey as possible: including treasure chests, plank booths, and possibly latent syphilis.

Japanese fruit stacks well

Living room with kotatsu

Tatami room/bedroom

And here's a picture of my new (relative to me) Vespa:

And while I'm in the spirit of uploading pictures, this is from a test I gave to the first year students:

I'm pretty sure they're fucking with me. One student was apparently under the influence of LSD when he wrote this test:

In case you can't read that, it says:

1. When's your birthday? "My birthday is April 18th."

2. What is your zodiac sign? "My sign is Aries."

3. What's your blood type? "My blood type is lazy."

4. What kind of person are you? "I am clean my room."

5. What kind of person do your friends say you are? "My friend is help with cooking."

....ANYWAY.

Tokyo never disappoints. Especially on Sundays, when the Harajuku Dance Gang, a faction of the Tokyo Rockabilly Club, are out in full force. Yes, this lot is bad news. Dressed in full 50’s Greaser garb, they’ll hang around like miscreants and reinforce their bad-ass street gang image by dancing around to Sha Na Na. You don’t want to mess with these people. They rebelliously endorse pomade and suspenders with no shirts. These people take their exclusivity seriously. I mean, they have T-Shirts:

Yes, that’s a pompadour skull with a comb and a switchblade. I’ll leave it there...

...

No, I can't leave it there. It's just too absurd. Here's a video:

Did I mention that Adam and I were kicked out of a yakuza bar? Bored on a Saturday night and thirsty for adventure, we wandered out into Takasaki in search of a place to drink. We came across a shadowy brick building, no windows, with a life-sized statue of a black man in a white suit holding a trumpet out front, and the words BLOCK SHOT flashing in neon across the entrance. So of course we went in. The entrance led to a set of stairs, which we climbed, and when we turned to go inside we stumbled right into the middle of some smoky, skeevy club house where a dozen men in suits all stopped what they were doing to look at us. Uncomfortable silence. Chelsey weighs her options, and settles on giving an unassuming double thumbs-up and asking to come inside LIKE AN IDIOT. We were promptly welcomed by the bartender, who then turned our asses around and showed us to the door. Adam and I ran away to the nearest Belgian bar to lick our proverbial wounds.

Anyway, that’s it for now. I'll leave you with a couple engrish pictures I took.

Cheers.

*May not have actually been Gene Wilder