It's Chris Akabusi!
Hallowed hullos to you all including previous un-emailed types cranking it leek-side. You know who you are!
The past 10 days have seen my musical and schooldays comrade Colin make the brief trip over the bullet riddled sea from Korea and wander the land like Bruce Banner on a noodle-heavy diet. As I have shambled into school each morning he has done a me and walked for countless hours around various metropolitan areas sucking in the atmosphere through our respective experience-baleens. One for the marine biologists there.
On Saturday we went along to a little tour of my city to bash some of the obvious tourist spots that none of us living here have bothered our hoops to see, namely the castle and the towel museum. Nor will we likely bother our hoops going there ever again. Now to be fair, in both cases there was a Ronseal (exactly what it says on the tin) level of fulfillment to both spots. The castle, was just that. And the towel museum had towels and was indoors. Tick and tick.
However the castle was 5 hard earned squids to get a bit of a view of the monochrome drear of my town from a height. Oh, and some ostentatious and possibly quite old pyjamas.
The museum had 4 floors of towel shops to march through before you hit the museum, and after a few towel machines cranking away you had to walk for a kilometer passed all manner of Moomin paraphenalia. Moomin?
Moomin!
So the vast majority of the museum merely showed a bunch of these mercury poisoned hippo-eunuchs recreated in towel form. And halfway through there was a Finnish tourism board booth, with brouchures and posters. Another stunning victory for the Finns.
It's the bollocking Sarajevo winter olympics all over again! Damn you Marja-Liisa Kirveniemi
Once the tour had.... Finn-ished (eh?..... EH?) we all trundled out via local bus into the surrounding hills to go to a party for a local friend of ours whose parents had opened the doors of a holiday home they have to all of us eejits. The bus dropped us in a car park up a hill and gradually we were ferried up via a not maintained piece of country death trappery thatr at times beggared belief. So much so that when Meg was following my shoddy directions up the hill she stopped 2 minutes from the house figuring any chance of it being the right way had stopped somewhere about all the time all the rubble appeared on the road. Thankfully she realised there was no way to get back down that didn't include going over a cliff into a river and subsequent hurried prayers to all the major deities (back of the line Ganesh!) 20 minutes after the time she had jokingly suggested I should set out to find her wrecked car (heh heh...) I was heading out into the inky night and she eventually turned up looking not unlike me that time we may have met a gerontophile. Do yourself a favour and don't look up that word.
The rest of the night was a mess of grilled meat and mixed drinks including some more or fewer awful stories from one fellow JET who it turned out lived in Cork for a few years. Now this guy has been mentioned in the emails before, mainly in conjuction with his knee slappingly funny story about purchasing Doritos in bulk and having a crack a Meg while she was holding my hand.
Apart from trying to enter the country illegally, driving an uninsured and untaxed car and selling knives door to door of dubious quality he may have diddled a "not very clever person" into paying an exorbitant sum for a cheap watch. On completion of the transaction, he "ran away laughing."
Hard to tell but we may get a clearer picture of the scene if we switch "not very clever" with "intellectually disadvantaged."
Yeah... I know.
Other highlights of the night included people getting their kit off at <insert small number here> in the morning to partake in the local hotspring bath that was downstairs and explaining to an American in which way he was holding his ciggarette like a scumbag (between the index finger and thumb.) Also met a young lady called Jun who may have served myself and Meg lunch back in Dublin, she used to work in Yamamori on the quays and wasn't one for missing work apparently.
For anybody whose playing fantasy football, I currently am innappropriately close to my cousin at the summit of the family league while Meg has unknowingly released the dragon by passing out Gridzer on the inside, while the former persists in her campaign of only buying players whose moral fiber she feels is beyond reproach. Just Brad Friedel and Wigans groundskeeper then.
There are few groups of men as odious as those in English professional football (footballers in other countries at least have the good grace to be gimpy in languages we can't understand) and I fear if she persists, Ingrid will fall to the level of a certain doomed Arsenal fan, who is slumping down the table like pooteen on a hockey puck (note to self: live with a Canadian less. And use better similes. And wash.)
Pictured: Gits
In other news I have just been told I will have to wow all the teachers again with my eye watering German-skills as we sing some Beethoven that they don't understand and haven't the wherewithal to pronounce anything close to correctly.
Isolated as they are, national stereotypes don't necessarily land here as they might elsewhere. For example the Irish stereotype is that we are from Iceland. The American stereotype is that they are internationally minded. And the German stereotype... from Japans perspective, is probably that they are a bunch of happy go lucky layabouts. Compared to the Japanese anyway.
Peace of cake,
Moomin in Japan
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