Tewnty-ten!

Happy New Year! Winter holidays are over and it’s back to work. After Christmas I spent most of my time showing a friend around Tokyo and its surrounding areas. We got to see a kabuki performance, which was lucky, considering the famous (and very old) Kabuki-Za theatre is being torn down in a couple months and being completely renovated.

We also played some pachinko. Pachinko is way less fun than it sounds. And it sounds horrible. When walking into a pachinko parlour you’re met with the sound of a million million steel balls ricocheting off the pegs inside the game. It sounds like the engine room of some great ship. Couple that with second-hand smoke and flashing neon lights, the whole experience is a sensory overload. Oh, and the chairs are designed to pull you right into the machine, should you push away or lean back. It was like being inside the heart of some giant out-of-control manic robot clown.

New Years was spent drinking nihonshu (a mix of sake and shochu) in an izakaya in Tokyo this year. We did the countdown with everybody else in the restaurant, except for the table adjacent to ours, who did theirs two minutes later… which struck us as odd. What did they think was going on beforehand?

My New Year’s resolution is to stop carrying around so much shit in my bag. I never wanted to become one of those girls with irritatingly full shoulder bags, but I find myself reaching in for my wallet when it’s time to pay for something and embarrassingly grope away like a 13 year-old boy trying to get to second base. Here, then, is what’s in my bag:

-emergency battery for iPhone
-assorted tea bags (this month is Lady Grey and popcorn tea)
-pamphlets/tickets to things/receipts
-extra pair of underwear (black, if you must know)
-iPod
-broken South Africa keychain
-book (currently reading Kafka on the Shore) (So guhd)
- 2 spoons
-no, wait, 3 spoons
-magnets
-lip shimmer
-insurance application form with scribbles all over it (this is telling, don’t you think?)
-mittens
-packet of soy sauce
-maple candy I brought from Canada (I don’t like maple. I brought these to give to other people, but now they’ve gotten all scummy and manky at the bottom of my bag and would likely give someone a bad case of thrush)
-glue stick
- earrings I thought I lost
-broken pens

…I may have issues.

Tokyo is a walking city, but after a while we were able to duck into a basement cigar bar near Harajuku, where we sat down like rakish highbrow types and ordered port and sat in high-backed leather chairs and exchanged sly witticisms while smoking cigars etc etc. Struck with the realization that I had an opportunity to indulge in some bad-assery, I opted to try the whiskey, mainly to satiate my preoccupation with Captain Haddock. Nope. Still can’t drink the whiskey. But going to places like this may ruin my life in the most magnificent ways.

I was recently made aware of a place in Tokyo’s Ikebukuro district (lit. “pond bag”) called Nekobukuro (lit. “cat bag”) where you can go and play with cats all day. If everything is born of necessity, places like this is what makes Japan so bloody peculiar. Adam’s allergic and I’m in kitty-withdrawal, so I made a special trip with Juan to see this place, which is just a big room with cats comfortably tucked into every nook and cranny, as only cats can do. They’re used to being pet all day so they’re completely indifferent if you go up and poke at them while they’re trying to sleep. I happened to have some string with me, but I was popular only as long as their attention spans held out. Either way, they were soft and cute so I was happy.

Overall, it was a busy and tiring holiday. However, Adam and I weren’t so worn out that we couldn’t appreciate the novelty of this enormous carrot, which provided suitable entertainment for an entire evening.

What small lives we lead.

Ho Ho etc..

Merry Christmas! My internet gift to you lucky readers is this Youtube clip of a monkey bullying a couple of tigers. Please enjoy.


Adam and I went on a day trip to Haruna shrine on Christmas Eve, easily one of the nicest shrines I’ve been to in Japan, and it’s only about an hour from home. Most shrines and pagodas are rebuilt as copies of the originals due to fires or earthquakes or bombings, but this one is the original structure, built in 1869. You can really feel the history in the faded paint and weathered wood. To get to it you have to hike alongside a mountain path lit by lanterns. Really nice. We packed a bento and drank some hot tea before hiking up to the top, and we pretty much had the place to ourselves.

At sunset we headed up to Lake Haruna at the top of the mountain, where there was a Christmas illumination show taking place. This was an involved production which culminated in Christmas lights, hand-holding couples, peevish adolescents in Santa suits, and a bubble machine. (Which was awesome because the bubbles froze in mid-air. Frozen bubbles. Frubbles, if you will.)

We caught a bus back home and bought some fried chicken for dinner. I could go my entire life without going into a KFC and be content, but Japanese eat fried chicken on Christmas, so I thought we’d do it their way this year. Japanese are also big fans of Christmas cake, so I decided to make one of those too. We don’t have an oven, so I made a cake in the rice cooker. This is completely reasonable, since most Japanese homes aren’t equipped with ovens or anything else that would encourage much baking. Rightly so, as baked goods in Japanese homes are doomed to failure. 7 hours after putting my cake in, I gave up waiting for it at 2 am and went to bed. After that time I turn into a surly underslept harpy and nothing good happens after 2 am anyway. The aftermath of it all was something more like a Christmas bagel. We dressed it up and ate it anyways.

Christmas morning was spent hunting down presents and opening packages from home. Thanks to everyone from home. All the gifts exceeded far beyond what I deserved for Christmas; namely pervasive neglect or a swift punch to the nose.

Also, I made Adam a Christmas TARDIS. I am the coolest.
Oh, and check out what Adam made me for Christmas. He was a slave to Microsoft Paint for 2 weeks in order to make this. Steampunk Santa! If you look closely, you can see a man riding a penny-farthing in the background. There's also a TARDIS if you can find it...

Christmas Scavenger Hunt

The next clue is an easy one,
If you can read between the rows,
Tralfamadorians and guns,
Dead one by one, and so it goes!

Sick Muffins

I write this in bed on a Monday afternoon. Having taken a sick day from work only to wake up briefly in the morning to accept a Christmas package from my dear friend Mandy, I slept all afternoon and am the better for it. And so begins my undoing: blogging under the influence of cold medicine in excess. A slow but steady progression to sedatives/uppers.

This weekend, Adam dragged my sick-ass out of bed so that we could take a 1 hour ride up into the mountains to go see something called the Sistina Chapel Trick Art and Monkey Show. Yes, it’s exactly what it sounds like. That is to say, it’s a facsimile of the Sistine Chapel set up in the middle of nowhere. Inside, there’s a stage where a troupe of zoot suited monkeys do shtick for a keen audience. The rest of the building is devoted to various optical illusion exhibits that provide great photo ops for camera-happy tourists such as ourselves. Enjoy. (note: there are no pictures of the monkey show because both of us were just too depressed by it to take any. Contrary to what their whimsical costumes would have you believe, the monkeys were defeated and broken. So sad.)

An anatomically incorrect statue:

Trapped in a mirror.Vampire Chelsey.
There has been a lot of Christmas shopping lately, which means multiple trips to Tokyo. Living so close to a world class city has its advantages. You get a nice mix of old:

And new.

We took a shopping break to go to Ueno zoo, which was all kinds of amazing. I saw some animals that I never even knew existed. The tanuki were my favourite, mostly because Japanese folklore makes them out to be the bearers of drunken tomfoolery. They also have magic testicles that can take the shape of anything. Also, someone was rather underdressed for the party:



In other news: License to scoot!

Getting my license was a giant pain in the ass. The prefectural driving office offers foreigners a half-hour window to come and apply for a license, and if you’re not closer than 4th in line, you’re pretty much SOL. I know this because I went to obtain a license last Friday, and being 7th, was promptly told by an overly shouty man that there was no point in me waiting around since they probably wouldn’t get to me anyway before the window closes. I had to come back on Monday and elbow and pinch my way to the front of the crowd in order to be first. It’s a terrible system, and it’s almost as if they’re trying to make it so frustrating that foreigners give up on getting a license completely. But there’s a silver lining, at least if you’re Canadian. People from the U.K, Scotland, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, etc, are all exempt from having to take any kind of test. Americans have to take a written and practical exam, both of which are extremely hard and I’ve heard of people failing it 13 times before they could get a license. Presumably, I’m exempt because all of the aforementioned countries drive on left side of the road… same as Japan. Which is true. Except for Canada. Yeah. I don't know either.

On a completely unrelated note, I’ve decided that the best Doctor of all time would be played by either Michael Caine or Geoffry Rush. Despite my wild arm-wavy attempts to advise the BBC to increase their budget to accommodate either of these actors should they wish to consecrate the show, they’re still going with Matt “I-can’t-pronounce-th” Smith. Please accept this vandalized Matt Smiff photo as a symbol of my irrational resolve to dislike him, as Caine or Rush could likely drop a fart with more intellectual and emotional resonance than anything put forth by Mr. Smiff. (I find googly eyes are most effective.)

11 days till Christmas!

DEAR JAPAN YOU ARE ON THE MANK

My favorite is the ping-pong ball drop and the shuffle for first base.

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

First Week of Classes

JOHNNY DEPP. JOHNNY DEPP. JOHNNY DEPP. There. I had to make sure that if he ever idly googled himself he might stumble across this page, whereupon he might find me winsome enough to make contact, and I can woo him into a steamy bang session. It’s crass, but at least I have my bases covered.

So classes have begun for me. The first morning was allocated for formal speeches and a welcome ceremony, where I had to give a speech. It was only 2 minutes long, but it took me ages to write since the Japanese had to be perfect. It took me ages to memorize, too, since all the teachers in the office who saw me trying to memorize it just had to come over and see. My furrowed brow and tappy fingers may have given me away. At any rate, I would show it to them with a HAY LOOK WHUT I MADE grin, but they would take it from me, kindly tell me that I fail, and begin to make big red X’s everywhere, regardless of whether the speech was my final draft. Each time the speech was changed, I re-made it since I wanted to have a final copy to practice with. I would presume each revised copy was my last and memorize it all over again. I’m just too much of a pussy to say no.

My classes are impossible to predict; sometimes the students will be completely silent and unresponsive while at other times they’re impossible to control. So far, I’ve found no reliable way to gauge how rowdy my class will be. The students in my first ever class were completely disengaged, and some were even sleeping. (Sleeping is more or less acceptable in Japanese classrooms, by the way) At any rate, I spend most classes talking to myself. Or throwing things at the students to get them to shut up. I suppose things will be easier when I get the hang of this teaching thing and settle into a routine. Or maybe I’ll quit and be free to concentrate on my new career as a mail order bride.

My apartment has a ton of leftover stuff that I’ve been using to settle in with. For example, I’m using my predecessor’s lunch box to pack my lunches in. Her name is Lesley and she’s one part bunny rabbit, one part cotton candy, and one part bubbles. So it stands to reason that I’m now in possession of the most adorable lunch ever:

I spend Tuesdays and Fridays at my visit school, Takakoh ‘Le Monstre’ Kogyo. So that you may understand what this school is like: I was told by the teachers that the students were “monsters in a zoo.” I was advised to buy a double bike lock, as it was likely my bike would be stolen otherwise. It’s a technical school and English is low on their priority list, so it’s not the students’ strong point. I went in assuming I would be teaching a bunch of these:

As it turns out, it’s mostly a bunch of hormone-saturated teenage boys who all credit themselves as the epitome of virile manliness. One boy actually claimed that his shirt fell off through no fault of his own, and had taken that new found opportunity to flex, no doubt his attempt to invite me to some manner of gun show etc etc. My JTE had to ask him to keep his clothes on while in school.

I have all the classes do a paper airplane self-introductions on the first day, which means they have to write their names and something they like on a sheet of paper, fly it across the room, and have someone else introduce them. I gather all the papers at the end of class. One cheeky scamp wrote this:

That last bit can either mean that he loves me because I’m young, or he thought it fitting to divulge his love for Angus Young. Or both. I’m commonly mistaken for that guy in AC/DC.

So I found a new apartment. It’s all hardwood except for one of the rooms, which has a tatami floor. It’s 2 rooms plus a kitchen/dining area; well-lit; near both my schools and Takasaki station; it’s the corner unit of the apartment complex so I only have to worry about neighbours on one side; and it’s CHEAPER than my other place. Also, it comes with a free stove and 2 air conditioners. I’m looking forward to moving out of this confounded excuse for a solitary confinement cell and I won’t be looking back, lest I turn into a pillar of salt and other such colourful metaphors which are either from Greek Mythology or the Bible; I can’t quite recall as I am uneducated.

In other news, check out this awesome moustache mug I bought! Complete with jaunty top hat! SEE?

YES I AM WEAK SO WHAT OF IT.

Also, please enjoy this video I took of the accordion lady who hangs out in Takasaki Station on weekends. She makes me want to wear a stripy shirt! And eat baguettes and smoke at the same time! And get drunk on cheap wine and curse at everything! And other fun qualities that all stereotypical Frenchman have!