imisstokyo

Thailand - a short holiday

2009-05-24T00:24:00.000-07:00

I recently spent a week in Thailand with Emi. It was a impulsive holiday, planned just a few weeks before. Unluckily, I got asked to do a big music project by a big-shot record producer here just a few days before leaving. I really shouldn't have taken the job but I was worried I may never get the chance to show my skills again, so I took it and spent every day-time hour working on it, right until the flight. I confirmed it's completion to the guy on the phone while the plane was taxiing for take-off to Thailand. Seriously.

Well, I say Thailand, but I really mean Taiwan. You see, it wasn't a direct flight. In fact, we had three flights in one day: Tokyo to Taiwan, Taiwan to Bangkok and Bangkok to Phuket Island. I told Emi that I would take care of planning the trip (not knowing that the music project would sap every last minute) so it turned into an impromptu backpacking expedition from Phuket to Bangkok via boats, trains, buses, taxis, tuk-tuks and walking.

We flew with China airlines (why is it only with flying that we use "with"? I mean, we never say "oh, I rode with Virgin" for trains, or "I rode with East London transport" for buses) which was unfortunate because the planes looked like collectable items. They were still using the occasional big red-green-blue fuzzy projectors rather than individual entertainment panels. IAs we sat waiting for take-off, I expected the captain to announce that the main propeller elastic band needed replacing.

The scheming scamming Thais hit us immediately as we landed in Phuket and searched for a bus to go... well, anywhere. I stupidly asked at the official TOURIST INFORMATION DESK for help-
"Excuse me. We want to take a boat to the Similian islands. Where does the boat go from Phuket?"
"No bow go. No bow go. You wa bow, you go Pooket tao."
"OK, so the boats leave from Phuket town?"

And then a man darted over to us and chatted in fast Thai to the woman I was speaking to. Suddenly she said:
"Bow no go from Pooket tao, only froa Phang-nga, only fro Phang-nga."
"Um, OK, but you just said that the boat does leave from Phuket Town."
"No no no, bow no leave fro Pooket tao, you go Phang-nga."

And of course they were lying. The man had obviously told her that he had connections to boats to the Similian islands but his company only went from Phang-nga. Immediately my Asian distrust mechanism kicked in, dusty and unused in Japan, but born during my month travels in China. But I was ready for it. China had taught we well - it's much worse there.
We found the real bus into town (everyone was telling us that there was no such bus and that we needed to pay five times as much for their taxi) for about 50p and looked for a place to stay when we got off. It was getting late and we were tired so almost anywhere with air-conditioning would have done, but such a place turned out to be harder than I thought. We eventually found a cheap hotel that had air-conditioned rooms (it was sweltering) and paid the £5 for the room up front. Only once we paid did we realise it had no hot water.
I scrapped the idea of going to the Similian islands since I simply couldn't find the truth from anyone so we went to the Phi-Phi islands. I had expected our boat there to be a small white yacht or something but instead I was met with a three-story tourist-gobbling machine. It must have sat around four-hundred people and was hot and horrible for the whole two hour journey. Things didn't improve much once we got off; hoards of Thai men shouting "you wa hotel, you wa hotel" and trying to get us to stay at their place. It was a genuine tourist trap. This island was purely for tourists and although it was nice walking around in the evening when things quietened down, and the food was great (real Tom Yung Kun!), I wouldn't recommend it. Our hotel though was beautiful. We had an individual bungalow set on wooden walkways over marshy-tropical flowers and reeds. We walked across one of the main beaches as the sun set and just wandered across the island as far as we could. On the way we found a fire-dancer. He had what looked like two huge fire nunchakus and was dancing over and around theme. He could 't have been more than eight years old.
The next morning we took the boat back to Phuket and then a bus to Phang-nga bay, which was to be our centre-piece of the trip. The plan was to boat to a vast bay of uninhabited islands and to go canoeing through some of the ones which contained caves. Well, we arrived in Phang-nga in a storm so the place just look grey and Englandish. We had no idea how to get to the bay area. We just sat under some tarpaulin, next to some fat woman cooking food for all the locals, peering at us occasionally, and waited for the storm to pass. She came over to us and said "you wa taxi?" and yes indeed, for once we did. I got out a photo of the bay area and said "go here" so we got in a complete stranger's car (it was certainly not a taxi) and rode to the bay area. The man tried to ask us which hotel we were staying in. After eventually figuring out what he wanted, I replied "we don't know" so he just pulled-up at the largest hotel in the entire area (and in fact the only one, as it turned-out) so we stayed there. It was an eerie place. Very "The Shining". We appeared to be the only people staying in a three-hundred room or so hotel. I kept thinking "we must have gotten the wrong area".
Since the plan was to boat around, we needed a man with a boat. So we walked to the isolated tourist information center where a woman answered my questions mostly with "he can help you" as she pointed to skinny scrubby local guy who was hanging around like a vulture. Well, he had a boat - he would meet us at 8am the next day and drive us wherever we wanted for the whole day. He'd do.
After a walk around the sparse neighbourhood during which the locals stared at us and successfully tried to sell me a fake Puma cap, Emi got really depressed and lonely. She grew increasingly tired of everyone thinking she was Thai (everyone was speaking to her in Thai at first) but I think she does look kinda Thai. And what's so bad about that anyway?! The grey raining weather continued into the night, matching our grey mood. Dinner in the hotel restaurant didn't do much to take away the "The Shining"ness of the place: we were the only people dining (save an odd mother/son couple on the other side) and the waitress had a "in training" badge on. Upon closer inspection of the entire hotel staff, I couldn't find anyone without an "in training" badge. Perhaps the entire previous staff had been murdered.
The morning was a god-send: bright gleaming sun and clear blue skies. Our spirits instantly soared as we walked to meet our very own scrubby local at 8am. Would he even be there? Yes he was! He asked for the money first which was something I hadn't planned for. I considered doing a "half now, half later" like in the movies, but then realised he had nowhere to run to with the money so I gave him the 1500 Baht and off we went in this noisy long-tailed boat into pristine blue waters and huge limestone-based islands towering over us. We spent most of the day hopping on and off onto uninhabited islands, just as planned, just as I really wanted. One island had loads of coconut and mango trees. We found a freshly dropped mango (they were all too high to get) and ate it. Another island contained bat caves and ancient paintings. Another was the set for Scaramonga's island in James Bond: The man with the golden gun. The highlight by far was getting into a three-man canoe and silently paddling through limestone caves, going under very low entrances (we had to duck) and occasionally taking a dip in the extremely warm swamp-like pools. I'll never forget the boggy muddy bottom my feet sunk into - I imagined thousands of swamp-dwelling insects crawling over them, Indiana Jones style.
After a slightly dodgy meal of luke-warm lemon squid at the only small area of restaurants on the water, we got on the boat and Mr Scrubby Local Man let me drive most of the way back. We were on a pretty tight schedule since our next plan was to go back to the bus station, get a bus into Surat-Thani, a major city, and take an over-night train into Bangkok. We checked out, got a taxi back to the bus station and were please to find that we'd be able to get a bus that would arrive in Surat-Thani in time for the 8.30pm overnight train. There were other trains running that night but the internet site I had researched said this was the quickest and most comfortable one. I started feeling a bit sick on the coach and couldn't stop thinking about the lukewarm lemon quid. We found the train station and were told that all tickets had been sold out apart from, would you believe it, the most expensive private room sleepers.
"Really?" I said, "but this isn't a busy season."
"All tickets sold. Only private room. You wan priva room or no?"
And so we paid the ridiculous price of 1200 Baht each (unheard of in Thailand and another example of the institutionalised corruption that goes on across Asia and ignorant naive tourists don't even see) and waited an hour for our train since the 8.30pm was also apparently "full". My sickness grew worse and I just wanted to cry: we had one more full day left which was dedicated to exploring Bangkok but now I seemed to have full-blown food-poisoning. Poor Emi ended-up nursing me for the rest of the evening as I threw up heavily twice (don't you hate it when you are sick but you know that's not the last of it) and could hardly walk. The private room ended up being the best-case scenario. I recovered much quicker than I ever have after food-poisoning and slept for most of the 12 hour journey but Emi, bless her, hardly slept a wink as she lay freezing in the top bunk, unable to turn off the air-conditioner that was right above her, even after asking the conductor to help her twice (who obviously didn't understand her). The bottom bunk was warmer and in my state I wasn't too fussy about being cold. Poor Emi - all she had to do was turn the knobs on the black sphere-like direction controllers and it wold have turned the air off.
The train journey was nowhere near as comfortable as we had both imagined (especially considering we were paying the highest possible price) because the train was just so noisy and so slow. We were an hour late, so we quickly found a travel agent at Bangkok station and booked a hotel for that night. Now we needed to hire a taxi to take us there. This was ridiculously difficult. Taxis and Tuk-tuks were streaming through a single pick-up point but everyone was just leaping out in front of the vehicles and jumping in so unless you were prepared to seriously risk your life, you had to wait ages for a lucky moment as we did. And then our driver didn't even know our hotel. So I showed him a map - he still didn't know. So we got out of the much-prized taxi and repeated the whole damn process. We eventually settled on a Tuk-tuk driver and experienced our first dash through the city. If crashing into another vehicle wasn't going to kill us, the smoke and fumes soon would so it was just as well that the journey wasn't so long.
The hotel looked promising but after climbing six sets of stairs to our room, I had to come back down and politely demand a room on the ground floor explaining that we were both sick and simply couldn't do this hotel without an elevator. Once the new room was secured we tried to find a taxi boat on the river to the Grand Palace. We were met with a tattoo-covered guy who aggressively assured us that the next taxi boat was at least ninety-minutes away. And would you believe it - he owned a private taxi-boat service! This constant dishonestly from the locals to make a quick buck really pissed me off and was too reminiscent of China for my liking. So we went back to the hotel and found a better spot to board the taxi boat which cost almost nothing to ride compared to the one-month-salary price of Mr Tattoo fuck-you-over man. When we got off, I asked a friendly-looking guy if he knew where the Grand Palace was, and after ten minutes or so of chatting in the blistering sun-light (I kept thinking of saying "could we just walk a few steps into the shade please?") he made our entire itinerary of the day, marking the hot spots on our big "I'M A TOURIST" map for us and even going so far as negotiating a super-cheap Tuk-tuk who would run us around for the entire day for a mere 40 Baht. I'm guessing we were the only tourists to ride at that price. This guy seemed a bit obsessed with telling us about how cheap precious stones were in Thailand and how we should buy one (not from him) and sell it in Japan for a huge profit (since we could buy one as a "gift" - i.e. from me to Emi, thus avoiding the huge export taxes).
Our first stop was a local temple in which a local showed us how to do the ritual of lighting the incense and rubbing a gold leaf onto the Buddha statue. This guy also spoke about the great system of buying local stones and selling them abroad - why was everyone so obsessed with having me buy these stones? And so, sure enough, our next stop was the previous stones shop in which we were met with the most aggressive salesman you will have ever met: his main tactic seemed to be making you feel like scum for even considering not purchasing anything. We got out of there alive and diamondless where our personal Tuk-tuk driver was waiting to take us to the giant gold reclining Buddha at Wat Pho, which was great. The area was a huge mass of Thai temples and heavily ornamented buildings. We both took a massage there. We had been planning to take one but it seemed hard to find a place that didn't promise more than was on the price-list. But here was an open-plan legitimate place. Still, I was kinda looking forward to being massaged by some Thai goddess with slippery hands but instead was met with a skinny young guy... and Emi got an old frumpy woman. Still, it was great although Emi seemed to be more tense than relaxed since she couldn't stop laughing every time Mrs Frumpy touched her. My guy was just fabulous!
We paid off the Tuk-tuk driver and caught the "Sky Train" (Bangkok's monorail-style metro system) to the main shopping center where I bought a shirt but nothing else - the prices were just not much cheaper than Japan or the UK. Then me and Emi had a argument based on "why did we come here again?" which resulted in Emi storming off. Now, storming off is something you do in the same house, or even perhaps the same building, possibly something you do in the same town back home when you could just phone each other and meet somewhere, but it's certainly not something you should do in Bangkok, when only one person has the plane tickets, passports, money and address of the hotel. So I walked around looking for Emi, very conscious that this was our last night in Thailand and each minute walking around in circles was a waste. After thirty worrying minutes, I amazingly found Emi in some shopping mall. I was furious but contained it as much as I could until we both felt better and arrived at the night market. This was last on our itinerary for Bangkok and it was a lot of fun - endless inside-markets of food, jewelry, clothes, souvenirs, shoes, DVDs, everything really, and there was a great live band playing covers in a huge stadium with endless tables in front of it for drinking and eating. We were looking for an elephant, having been told that there was often one there, since Emi was desperate to ride one, but it wasn't there that night. Emi bought a truck-load of souvenirs for friends and colleagues back in Japan in the form of dried fruit and coconut toffee. Japanese people tend to go overboard on gifts for people back home. Emi is no exception.
The funniest and most heart-stopping moment of the trip came on our way back to the hotel from the night-market. We got the "Sky Train" back to the river and needed to get a river-taxi back to the hotel. But they had stopped running some time ago, although there were some very exclusive-looking posh lighted boats which were just for the super-high-end hotels such as the world-famous and incredibly luxurious "Oriental" (noted as one of the world's greatest hotels, see http://www.mandarinoriental.com/bangkok) . So I suggested to Emi that we should just jump on one of those and pretend we were guests at the Oriental since our hotel was right next to it. I figured that since all the piers were public, we could just hop off and go to our hotel instead. So we got on and I immediately started to doubt the strength of my previously solid plan. It was only us and another couple, who were surprisingly well-dressed on this big lavish boat. I kept hoping that no-one would ask for any evidence that we were indeed staying at the Oriental. Things seemed to be going OK as the boat started pulling in to dock and I noticed that we were to dock directly into the private gardens of the Oriental. Oh no no no, shit shit shit. I told Emi to just act relaxed, like we stayed at top-notch hotels like this all the time. But as we got off the boat, a posh-looking security guard with a walkie-talkie approached me and said it:
"Excuse me sir. Could I ask if you are staying at this hotel?" I babbled. I blundered. I stuttered and murmured-
"Er....yeeeeah. Yes. Sure. Of course. Why?"
"Well it's just that you're wearing ... (a swallow of repulsion) shorts, sir. You know we don't allow shorts here in the evening."
I improvised -
"Oh yes yes. Of course, of course. How stupid of me. Naturally I have a pair of trousers in my bag" which was true, I really did have a pair of trousers in my bag since I had read that I couldn't enter certain temples in shorts.
"Oh very good sir. I'm so sorry to trouble you. If you'd just step this way into the an area where you can change. Sir. Madam" and he led us through the beautiful hotel into a glamourous bathroom where I quickly changed into my trousers and went back out into a posh corridor with a confused Emi, and no security guard.
"He's gone" Emi said. And so we were in the Oriental Hotel. On no account could anyone just walk into the hotel without a reservation, but we had. I started pushing my luck -
"wanna get a drink here Emi?" I asked with an air of satisfaction and mock poshness.
"No!" she replied, "let's get out of here" which was much easier said than done. After ten minutes of winding corridors, lavish lobbies and the gentle tickling of expensive crystal glasses, we finally found the main entrance and ran the hell out, seeking refuge in our meeker hotel, much more suited to the likes of us commoners. But oh, just briefly, we were one of the elite class.
The next morning was just a cab-ride to the airport for our flights home. I bargained a four-hundred Baht journey and at the end gave him a five-hundred Baht notice saying "you have a hundred change yes?" to which he said no, which was bollocks because he I saw he had it. So I snatched the note back and found the correct change. Honestly. Everyone. Everywhere. Just like China.
The flight home was fine apart from a nasty huge black guy who we were met with as we went to sit down, sitting with his thick arms over one of our seats. The tiny fragile Chinese cabin crew member clearly saw the situation and naturally said nothing to help us out. So Emi sat with just half a seat, having swapped with her to the black guy announcing "now that seems to help the situation", pointing out that Emi was smaller than me. Nasty piece of work.

So me and Emi had a good time. The few arguments we had were predictable and not so bad but once we got back, I found that it was as if nothing has changed - we argued about the same old shit, and after a week of this, I put it to Emi that we needed to split-up.

And that was about a month and a bit ago. I've been single since. It's sad to have to end an eighteen-month relationship but one of us had to do it since we had been arguing since November and Thailand was really an "emergency" holiday. Sadness.

Thanks for reading. Sorry for the somewhat sober ending. The next email will be happier I hope.

Trev

FROM SHANGHAI TO LONDON BY TRAIN: England: London - home

2007-05-12T06:48:00.002-07:00

The train came to a stop at Waterloo station. I took my final picture there, of the station sign and walked through the passport control and into Waterloo underground station. Jesus, everything had shot up in price. I got a one day travel card for much more money than I can ever recall paying as announcements flooded over the PA system, notifying customers that the Waterloo and City line wasn’t running at all, there were severe disruptions to the Central and Piccadilly line, minor delays on the circle and District line and part suspension of the Victoria and Northern lines. I had to dart around several lines to the station where an overhead train would take me to my dad’s place. Just as it had taken me two hours to get from Brussels to London, it took me a further two hours to get home, even though my dad lived some 15 miles away from central London.
I got a strong sense of humility having arrived in England by myself, having left by myself for Japan some two years previous. I surely felt stronger, ready to tackle whatever would be thrown at me. Japan had certainly given me new tools to tackle hard situations and I had learnt to appreciate true friendships, the effort needed to find happiness and being content with myself, as I am. This journey home was a struggle, as much of living in Japan was. But I couldn’t help thinking what was the point of such a struggle only to come home and forget it all? Perhaps I’d return one day. But for now I thought, let’s give England a chance.

FROM SHANGHAI TO LONDON BY TRAIN: Belgium: Brussels

2007-05-12T06:48:00.001-07:00

I had only twelve hours in Brussels as I had arrived at 6am and was due to get the Eurostar into London that evening at the same time. I locked up my bag and walked into the vague direction of the city centre, stopping at a bakery for fresh pastries. I found myself in an area of small streets with nothing but private art galleries for rich people. I also stopped in a pleasant looking café to try an authentic Belgium waffle which was indeed very nice and surprisingly stodgy but the service was nonexistent. I had to approach the waiter to order and pay and he seemed pissed-off that I didn’t tip him.
After another thirty minutes of aimless walking, I came across a nice view of the city and noticed a huge silver modern-art type structure in the distance which was instantly familiar. I decided to make it my day’s goal to walk there. So I set off which only a small compass to guide me which one of the Tokyo Comedy store members had given me at my leaving part. The weather was on the cusp of being sunny so while I’m sure everything could have looked more beautiful than it did, it wasn’t as nice as I had expected.
I saw signs for the European parliament and followed them to find large dramatic modern steel buildings, covered in logos and lined with many flags. I wandered into the absurdly tiny and dull visitor’s centre only to find myself wandering back out minutes later. I wandered past some older building, with that characteristic sandy colour. I’m sure I would have been much more excited about them had I known the significance of them. I kept walking, using the compass as the vaguest of guides and found myself wandering out of the city centre. Surely I hadn’t already walked through the entire city centre? It seemed I had. I could spot the modern art metal thing anymore and finally decided to look it up at an internet café, most of which are strangely hidden in metro stations. I found it as a part of an international convention website, an Expo, and was surprised to see that it was a lengthy metro ride away, well outside of the tiny city centre.
I got a metro, and sure enough there it was on the station guide above the seats, marking as the “Atonium”. I got off in what looked like the middle of nowhere and passed a cinema and a few vague buildings to get the giant metal structure. It certainly looked impressive, both from afar and up-close. It was surprisingly busy, filled with people wanting to pass through the giant metal atom centre points to get to the top. I was happy just to take a few pictures. After all, this was probably the last thing worth seeing before I’d be home. Wow. Home. I had been holding out for some kind of dramatic welcome party, Waterloo station lined with people celebrating, ticker tape falling from the sky, champagne bottles bursting and general joy and elation. I had emailed friends, asking vaguely if they’d like to meet me in London as I arrived but the plans came to nothing as I realised I wanted everything or nothing. I found myself being drawn home by the thought of a familiar bed, familiar food, friends and a life more complex than just the three priorities of next place to sleep, next meal and next train ticket.
I dwindled through the main shopping strip and added yet another country onto my list of “countries I’ve eaten McDonalds in”. I found myself in the central business district, surely the most boring part of any city, but in Brussels it didn’t seem so different from the rest. I took each new corner, each new road hoping that I’d finally see something to get worked up about but had to resign myself to the fact that Brussels was a big disappointment.
I thought about my family back home and suddenly realised that I hadn’t got them any gifts. Well, here I was in Brussels, so Belgium chocolates all around. But as far as I searched up and down the streets, I couldn’t find a chocolate shop. This was the first capital city I’d been in where you’d struggle to see how the country’s stereotypes had come about. In the end, I popped into a small supermarket and bought boxed chocolates there, which were absurdly cheap but would have to make do.
I returned to the station well in time for the train, collected by bad from the electric locker and passed through passport control. It felt strange having to show my passport just to board a train. This was it. My last journey. I found my seat and sat down next to a middle aged woman who had been speaking posh London English on her phone. There was something for an aircraft feel to the Eurostar carriages. I half expected to be shown where the emergency exits were. I took a magazine from the netting in front of the woman’s seat and flicked through it.
“Ah! Isn’t that typical!” I said, “a train that runs between France and England and all the magazines are in French.”
She seemed to hesitate just slightly before answering, “well, they are my magazines.” The embarrassment rose inside of me and I apologised. She was fine about it, and it served to break the ice as we proceeded to chat about the English, the French and all the business she had been doing. I remarked that this was my last train from Shanghai and was pleased to get a big reaction from her. At least I’d be arriving in London with someone who appreciated the enormity of this journey.
I was looking forward to the novelty of the tunnel and coming out to England, what with having heard about the building of the tunnel throughout my childhood. But how exciting can a tunnel be? Not very much at all as I came to realised within seconds of entering the tunnel. The lack of visual stimulation outside stirred up feelings inside about my life waiting for me in England. Would things work out with Maki in a new place? Would I feel euphoric on arrival and how long could I make that feeling last? Would my plan to teach in a high school work out? Would it be fun? What would happen with Aki? Would I ever see her again? Would I ever see Japan again? And the train sped out of the tunnel and into the English countryside at sun-set. England looked much more pretty than I had remembered. Much less functional and more old-fashioned than Japan, with its little houses between hills and animals grazing.

FROM SHANGHAI TO LONDON BY TRAIN: Germany: Berlin

2007-05-12T06:47:00.001-07:00

I got off at a surprisingly small station. I’d been expecting a Waterloo style station but instead found myself in a six platform station which just a few small shops and cafes. I went immediately to a big are with “DB” on the front, assuming this was some kind of reservation office. I found the international desk and told the fluent English speaking lady what I wanted. Now, I had a price of about £80 in mind for the two journeys together, as I’d seen this price on the internet. Instead, she said the Berlin to Brussels train would be €115 and the two hour Eurostar from Brussels to London would be €225. That’s €340 altogether, over £200! I said there must be a cheaper way, especially the Eurostar fare. She assured me there wasn’t. Just then a younger with carefully designed facial hair and a wry semi-smile took over. So I explained everything to his again and he gave me the same prices.
“But I know the Eurostar price is cheaper on the internet” I said, pleading with his static face.
“That’s the cheapest” he insisted. “OK, take me as far as Brussels. I’ll work it out myself from there” I replied.
“OK, as you wish” he said, with the manner of someone who had just listened to a friend state that he wanted a few days stint in Las Vegas to repay all his debts.
I suddenly remembered there was a youth discount and the Berlin to Brussels price was reduced to €74. Within thirty minutes I had checked in to a local hostel, been online and booked a train in two days time from Brussels to London for £40, a third of the price he assured me was the cheapest, even though my having to ask for the youth discount clearly contradicted this.
Berlin looked good in the low early evening sun as I wandered around looking for a restaurant. I got speaking to a Korean girl who was studying piano in Dresden. She walked me to a cheap Italian place which turned out to be very nice. In my random wanderings, I had picked up a free booklet in a Dunkin’ Donuts which at first glance looked like some advertisement supplement but was in fact a great little guide of the city, featuring maps, restaurant and bar reviews and details of where and when you could meet in order to get a free 4 hour walking tour of the city. I notice a nice review of a jazz bar so I took the metro and spent the evening there, drinking excellent blonde beer and chatting to an old man from Leipzig who worked for Amnesty International and had worked with many leaders of the world. He had even dealt personally with Nelson Mandela. We became beer-fuelled best friends and he made me promise to write to him.
That night as I went to bed in the hostel, I noticed one guy across the ten-bed room who was vaguely looking at me. It was late and I wanted to turn the light out after some reading. As I started reading, I noticed he went to do the same.

When I woke up, I peered over and saw the he was just waking up. I got out my book and started reading again in an attempt to quickly warm up my brain and sure enough, he started reading too. Isn’t doppelganger a German word?
I went for a shower in a strange large room with a timer button for the water and transparent doors. Five minutes later he came in to have a shower. Was this guy trying to talk to me or something? I quickly forget about it as I went for an overly sweet breakfast of apple pie, coconut macaroon and coffee at a local bakery. I checked out and put my big bag away before going to Dunkin’ Donuts for 12.30pm, the meet up time for the free tour. It was simply great. For hours me were shown around Berlin’s most famous spots with all the interesting stories entertainingly told. I met new people, learnt important new things and my love of Berlin quickly blossomed.
The most interesting thing I learnt was how the fall of the Berlin wall came to be. Summarised, an important member of the German government was a famous alcoholic and had forgotten to attend an important meeting to discuss ways in which the government could appear to be helping the people to once again be able to cross the wall. At this time the government had no such intention but as protests were escalating, they just wanted to offer a phoney carrot. In bold print, some people could cross the wall but the small print would show that actually nothing had changed. So one day, this important government guy was giving a speech when he noticed a memorandum about the missed meeting, entitled “meeting about the new freedom to cross the wall.” So he included his into his speech which suddenly caused the bored journalists and officials to listen. He simply announced that people could free cross the wall, based on the wording of the memorandum. One journalist jumped on this, asking when this new freedom came into effect. The question was repeated as the government guy hastily improvised and famous said “as of now” and that was it. The crowds formed at the wall, all demanding to be let across and they were, albeit with water canons feebly trying to deter them.
During the tour I had bumped into an Italian girl on two occasions and it was a little awkward. She was clearly shy and we had already done the “goodbye and have a good life” thing at the end of our first meeting. But at the end of out second meeting, I fumbled and said “well, see you… again” and kept cursing myself for sounding like a stalker. As it happened, we met a third time as I was walking through the city centre in the evening. We went for dinner and she really opened up. But then she started talking about letting God into my life and I didn’t quite know how to respond.

My over night sleeper to Brussels was in fact just a seat. It seemed that the DB facial hair guy didn’t like me after all and had booked me a seat, even though I clearly asked for a sleeper. And who followed me into the six-seat compartment three minutes later? Yes. Mr creepy copy-everything-I-do man. Having never spoken a word to each other, I opened with “so, we seem to be following each other all the time” to which he agreed, which to me confirmed one of two things. Either he had also noticed we’d been doing a lot of the same things or he really had been actually following me for some unknown reason. But actually he was a nice guy and he had a good chat although I moaned a lot about not having a bed .When I approached the conductor and told her that I had the wrong kind of ticket, she looked at it and said “no, this is right, it’s a seat ticket.”
“No, I’m supposed to have a bed.”
“Oh no no no. This is a seat ticket. It’s a ticket for a seat and you’re in the right place so it’s OK.” Fortunately I had three seats to myself and the arm-rest reclined so I laid down and slept surprisingly well. As I woke up we were just pulling into Brussels.

FROM SHANGHAI TO LONDON BY TRAIN: Poland: Warsaw

2007-05-12T06:46:00.001-07:00

I got off the train to a grey dreary Warsaw and half expected to see another “Trevor” sign. But alas, I didn’t see it. In fact I didn’t see anyone very much, let alone any “very tall” people. After 45 minutes of yet more waiting (not forgetting the previous evening’s wait for Chris) I went to an internet café to see if he’d emailed me and to get his phone number so I could call him. A young Polish guy noticed me struggling with the attendant as I tried to explain that I wanted to use the internet (what the hell else did he think I was going to do in an internet café?!) and said I could use his phone to call Machiek.
Machiek had gone to the wrong station which was a fair mistake as I had told him the station since my ticket displayed the wrong arrival station. Anyway, he was a great guy. Relaxed, laid-back, ambitious (he had cut-off his studies to focus on making films) and very friendly. We immediately got on well, talking mostly about movies, then girlfriends, then beer, then cities amongst other things. He advised me to stop off in Berlin if I could as it was a very interesting and beautiful city. Warsaw is generally an ugly city but has some nice spots, much of which was rebuilt as 95% of the city’s buildings were destroyed in the second world war. He treated me to a kebab (again! Not much fibre in my diet in those days) and a beer in a jazz café in the ‘old town’ which is remarkably similar to the ‘new town’. The apartment I had to myself for the night was beautiful and was extremely central, being across the road from the grand neo-classical city hall. He made tea as I watched his first short film which wasn’t bad but was clearly somebody’s first film.

I couldn’t sleep well because I kept worrying about waking up in time to catch my train to Berlin as I had no alarm so I was fairly early, well, so I thought I’d be, for my first sit-down train ride during the day since Shanghai to Nanjing which just seemed worlds away. As I approached the station I realised I was going to need to eat something so I bought a “megaburger” from a take-out kiosk in the station. It was horrible. The burger was still frozen in the middle. When I complained she just reheated the remaining burger and handed it back. It was then I realised how much I was missing the love, care and attention that Japanese people put into everything they make or do.
As I walked up to my seat in the train, I noticec a young german girl in my seat. I showed her my ticket.
“Umm, this is my seat I’m afraid.” She looked around her before replying,
“Well this is my seat so sorry.” I waited a beat, just looking at her.
“My ticket says seat 42. You’re in seat 42.” She shouted over to some older guy who was in charge of the huge group of kids she seemed to be a part of. He shook his shoulders in a manner that suggested I was clearly nuts. She repeated, “well, this is my seat. This is the right seat, I’m sorry.”
I waited for someone else to realise their mistake, which the dumb German guy eventually did, some five seconds later.
The ride was the smoothest yet, like a Japanese bullet train, although this Polish train wasn’t so fast. I was really playing things by ear now. I had no accommodation booked in Berlin and no idea if I could get a reasonably priced ticket for two more trains to London via Brussels. The train passed mostly quaint green landscape, no heavy industry and no big towns. It was very nice although I kept wishing I had saved some money for a coffee and a Mars Bar on the train. The guy must have past eight or nine times.

FROM SHANGHAI TO LONDON BY TRAIN: Crossing Belarus

2007-05-12T06:44:00.000-07:00

As soon as I saw the train I felt it was going to be a good journey. My room mates were an Asian-looking Russian guy whose name I always forgot and a fairly young Russian woman who was called Xena. He spoke some English and she seemed to understand most of what we said. It was a strange compartment, having only three beds and a big area close to the roof which I initially thought was my bed as all the beds hadn’t yet been unfolded. This really tickled the Russian guy and it broke the ice as he explained where I’d be sleeping. Soon into the journey they got out the Vodka and I drunk extremely strong Vodka and cokes with them with seemed to roughly followed a 1:1 ratio. A space physics university professor from the next compartment also invited me for Vodka with his room mates who were folk musicians, and gave me a special tape entitled “For Friends”. The pressure applied by the guitarist to drink more and more Vodka was a little worrying. Maybe only my falling over unconscious, or better still dead, would satisfy him.
I put my watch back two hours as Warsaw, and indeed the rest of Europe until I arrived in England, was two hours behind.

I woke up with a sharp hangover, even though I had followed the advice of the university professor the night before and had continually eaten during the drinking of Vodka. Very few Russians drink Vodka without food. Whereas back home such advice would be to potentially lessen a hangover, I couldn’t help but wonder if such advice in Russia is to simply stop you from dying from the stuff. Perhaps it is the constant eating while drinking that makes Russians such big burley people. Either way, I once again felt like a complete lightweight. Maybe it was the beer just before going to bed that did it for me. Either way I felt lousy. It was then about 7am. My body was still on Moscow time. You’d think that train travel across the world wouldn’t allow for any jet-lag but there must be such a thing as train-lag because I had it.
Suddenly the guitarist came into my compartment with a glass of beer for me, which he insisted I drink. I bypassed my initially shock and disgust and forced myself to drink it to please him. Jesus I though, how far do I have to go for this guy?! It tasted awful, it being first thing in the morning, as the warm lager went down but almost immediately it took the edge of my hangover. I felt tired for the rest of the journey but was unable to sleep. The time passed uneventfully apart from the drunk guitarist whose drinking knew no boundaries. A few days previous I had arranged for a globalfreeloader to meet me at Warsaw station so I could stay at his place for the night. I had no information about him other than the fact that his name was Machiek and he was extremely tall, therefore easy to spot.

FROM SHANGHAI TO LONDON BY TRAIN: Russia: More Moscow

2007-05-10T12:50:00.000-07:00

I was left to tackle Moscow by myself the next day which I did by walking around the Red Square area, aimlessly, but that wasn’t until I spent the morning trying to get my next train ticket: Moscow to Warsaw, Poland’s capital. First I went to the train station where it took thirty minutes to find the correct ticket office only to be told I needed a Belarus visa, as the train would cross Belarus, a vague new post USSR country I knew nothing about except the capital is Minsk. She handed me the address of the Belarus Embassy which I found an hour later, arriving at 11.55am only to be told that visa applications were accepted from 10 to 12 and I was too late, regardless of the fact that it was actually before 12. I was insane with frustration and started to seriously consider how I could get to England around Belarus. There was nothing I could do until the next morning.
That evening I met Maria and her sister for a tour of Moscow’s pretty area during sunset including the main university, which we wouldn’t enter due to obscene security. It seems Russia is as paranoid as America. We settled in a semi-bohemian café having eaten cheap street-vendor pies and chatted about travel horror stories. I told them about Fabio getting attacked and Maria responded with a “I can do better than that!” style gusto as she launched into a story of how she was mugged at knife point and nearly raped within the same day. I was a little perplexed at the glee with which she told the story, almost like she was proud of it and happy for it to happen again. Her naivety was worrying. If these events didn’t make her stop and think, how easily will she allow such things to happen again?

And so the next morning I arrived at the embassy just before 11am to a queue of about twelve people. I waited for just under an hour until it was 11.55am and again I was thoroughly pissed-off with the prospect of having to come back yet again. I went up to the counter, put on my best “little boy lost” look and struck lucky. This seemingly hard Russian woman was an English speaking and middle-aged who mothered me a little: my photo was too big for a visa but that’s ok, I hadn’t made a copy of my passport, that’s ok, she’ll do it. I needed to pay exactly $45 in US dollars with bank notes that were no older than three years. Crazy. Luckily, a guy next to me offered to exchange some of my roubles for dollars but I had no idea how much money I had. He gave me a $50 note and I just about had enough roubles, according to him. She gave me change even though there was a notice on the counter window saying that no change could be given. She chatted to me about my journey.
“So you’re a traveller?”
“Yeah, from Shanghai to London by train”.
“And you don’t speak any Russian?”
“No, none… yeah, I guess it is kind of difficult.”
She laughed, “well, good luck. Are you writing a book about it?”
“Actually, I’m trying to.”
“Good luck. Be careful with your money and your passport.” When all else fails, use the “little boy lost” look.
I had to return at 4pm to pick up my new Belarus-friendly passport which now allowed me a narrow two day window to pass through Belarus, so I had to get a ticket on thee days. So I went to the railway station, queued for thirty minutes to be told I was in the wrong queue, queued for a further twenty minutes and managed to get a Moscow to Warsaw ticket to leave three days later. Then I met Vania and we walked through a nice lively studenty street with lots of street musicians, stalls and pickpockets. One guy started to walk by me while firing questions to me, edging closer and closer. After a meal at a cheap school-canteen style restaurant we went back to Vania’s place, a tatty apartment on the edge of the Metro system.

The next day I spent two hours in Moscow’s main museum, the Pushkin gallery which was surprisingly bad. It cost 300 roubles for foreigners (100 for Russians) and an extra 250 roubles for an audio guide which was pretty much essential as none of the exhibits featured any English. This was Moscow, a capital city, and there was no English.
Most exhibits featured ancient Greek copies of plaster casts, which are incredibly boring even with an English guide. The highlight was a twentieth century room with some famous Monets, Gauguins and Van Goghs, although I didn’t recognise them myself. Chris was to arrive in Moscow that evening, having spent a week in Mongolia and four days on the train. By coincidence, he was due to stay at Vania’s, having contacted him some days before. I went to meet him at a rather strange train station where the platforms were across the street from the main ticket office and waiting hall. It was a novelty to see him and to take him to a park, where we were due to meet Vania later where we caught-up with each other.

I spent most of the next day on the internet in Vania’s home, emailing friends and starting to apply for teaching jobs in London. The plan was to live with Maki and another person in London, renting a place. Maki would continue her degree at the London College of Fashion that she interrupted to work back in Japan to save money for her return to London. And I’d get a job as a high school music teacher. May was the peak month of teaching vacancies so I was trying to get ready, get started early, although the most I could do was ask for application forms to be sent to my home, ready to fill on my arrival. Not the nest things to do upon arriving home after such a change in life.
I met Maria and some of her friends in the evening. Chris was supposed to show up but never did so we left to buy a few bottles of a local speciality: honey beer. It was sweet and strong and gave me chronic heartburn, but of course the Russians had no problem. We sat by a huge fountain, lined with huge gold statues of women, each one depicting one of the new states created by the demise of the USSR, although of course, they all looked the same to me. The surrounding area was peaceful. People were roller-skating or drinking. The area was once a large soviet exhibition, which supposedly showed the USSR’s great achievements. At one end there still remained a couple of small passenger Aeroflot planes and a small space rocket which looked old and faded. We walked around and bought kebabs which reminded me that I really was getting closer to home, and then we went home with the sun going down at around 10pm.

Again I did pretty much nothing the next day before leaving to meet Chris which was to be our last few hours together on this journey. The plan was to meet at a station at 6pm. I was hoping to take a walk around red square so I could get some photos of St. Bail’s cathedral just before dusk but again Chris showed. I waited until 7pm until I walked away thoroughly pissed off. I need to return Vania’s keys to Chris so Vania could get them (Chris was going to stay for a few more nights) so I had to go all the way back to Vania’s place to throw them under the door and back again, which was pretty much my last few hours in Russia. I did however get some nice pictures of St. Basil’s at dusk, which was surprisingly important to me. A song in Japan called “Kremlin Dusk” had meant a lot to me as it was playing when me and Aki first dated, more specifically when I first stayed over at her place and felt really happy. And I always pictures the scene of Kremlin under a nice sunset and here I was, actually in Moscow, staring at the Kremlin under a cloudless pink sky.

The Wedding

2007-05-07T07:47:00.001-07:00

I had a wedding yesterday, in a tiny place in the middle of nowhere, near Wolverhampton. Last week I booked my train tickets. It would take three and a half hours to get there and two and a half to get back on a direct train. The wedding was on a Sunday and I figured that since I had work the next day, I’d need to get there and come back in the same day, but of course, we have a bank-holiday the next day (what does the ‘bank’ part mean?!) which meant I could have stayed over and enjoyed the party in the evening.

I knew the bride from University, Grace, a girl my age who I’ve seen once in five years so I was a little surprised to be invited. She asked me to play piano before the meal. It was one of those weddings where I knew very few people there so there was a lot of awkward standing about, and walking with intent to other areas of the courtyard as if I knew everybody there, when in reality I was seeking out the 3 people I knew in the whole congregation.

As weddings usually go, it started awkwardly and quickly warmed-up with the aid of that great social lubricant, alcohol. We asked each other the same questions and as I’d describe my job, the phrase “bloody nightmare” and “can’t wait to quit” would soon follow.

So I got picked up from Wolverhampton after a long train ride and a horribly early morning for a day off and after a 5 mile drive from Grace’s brother who picked me up form the station, found myself at the church. That’s not too far I thought, I’ll be able to get a cab back to the station easily enough. But after the ceremony, we all got in cars and drove a further 15 miles to the reception venue. How on earth would I get back to Wolverhampton station?! It would cost a bomb.

I can never forget about “Four Weddings and a Funeral” when attending the meal at weddings. But I was placed at a table full of couples, apart from one brightly dressed attractive girl who seemed way too sensible to want to talk to me. You have to make quite an effort not to get drunk at weddings, what with the free champagne and wine. I played piano, finished, sat down again, and looked at my watch: 6:30pm. My train would leave at 8.30pm. That meant I had about an hour here before I’d need to leave and we hadn’t even started main course yet.

I put off having to organise anything, hoping for a magical solution, which never materialised. So I thought, oh forget it, I’ll just stay, knock myself out with booze and make sure I collapse somewhere inside, ideally with a carpet, or better still, with that sensible pink-dress girl. But suddenly, I met a friend at 7.45pm who said he was getting a cab to go back to a station which would be on the way to Wolverhampton so I got in the cab with him and after the 5 minute drive to his station, asked the cab driver if he could get to Wolverhampton station by 8.30pm. It was 8pm now, so he sped most of the way.

Twenty-eight minutes and a horrendous cab fair later, I got out at Wolverhampton station at 8.28pm. I rushed straight to the first platform where I saw a big Virgin train waiting. Ahh! Just like in the movies! Made it at the last second. It was as if everyone on the train was happy to see me and glad I had just made it in time! I thought I’d confirm with the train guard “this is to London yes?” and he said “London? No, that’s across the bridge on platform 4, you’d better hurry.” And so followed a panicked dash across the biggest railway bridge I’ve ever seen with an unnecessary amount of stairs, and the obligatory slap on the train door, from the outside, seconds after it closed on me. I’d missed it. I turned to the station attendant who said “stay here. There’s another at 9.30pm. We’ll try to get you on that one.”

So I sat for an hour. I’d forgotten to pack my book so I felt the hour going by slowly as I played snake on my ancient phone, lost interested, realised there was nothing else to do in Wolverhampton on a Sunday night, played snake again, got bored etc. 9.30pm came, as did the train. The station attendant told me to speak to the train guard and explain that I’d missed the train before. I immediately know this train guard was an utter bastard. For a start he was from London.

“No sir, you needed to be on the train before.”
“Yes but the wedding overran, I missed the train by seconds. Can I not just get on this one? It doesn’t look busy at all,”
“No sir, you read the terms and conditions of the train ticket yes?”
“Er… what?”
“Yes? And you would have read that you can’t ride on any other train than the one you missed.”
“But this is the last train to London.”
“Do you have £80 sir? The ticket will cost you £80.”
“Oh come on. I’ve already paid… I…”
“It’s £80. Goodbye sir.”

And the train went. That was it. 9.30pm in Wolverhampton, 140 miles from home. On a Sunday night. Having missed the last train to London. I was stunned that such bastards existed. Well, no, I’d met them before. They’d knocked me off my bicycle and they worked at my school.

So I exited the station trying to engage my brain. Maybe I could get a coach? I walked through Wolverhampton and found a coach station.

“Are there any coaches to London left tonight?” I asked. It was now 10pm.
“Er… yes, a 2am to London.”
That was it. I really didn’t want to be on a coach all through the night.
“But if you get a local bus to Birmingham, you’ll be able to get an earlier coach since they leave every hour there, on the hour.”

Great. So I took this local bus into Birmingham, which took an hour and a half with the last half hour spend standing by the driver so he could tell me where to get off.

So at 11.30pm I found myself in the middle of Birmingham. After asking three people, I found the coach station and went into the dingy lonely waiting room. Ah! There it is! The 12am coach to London… oh… no, from London. I was looking at the arrivals board. So where was the departures list? So, it turns out there is no 12am coach to London, and no 1am coach, and not even a 2am coach. The first coach to London was at 3am. How is it that every thing is wrong?!

After a few minutes of throwing my fists around as if having some kind of psychotic boxing match with an invisible person, I started wandering around drizzly Birmingham, now desperately tired, looking for a place to just wait and lie down.

I had just over 3 hours to kill. God I hate killing time, so much. But I had no choice. So there I was, still in wedding attire, looking for a dark spot to settle down for three hours. I found a set of empty market stalls, under a roof. I didn’t want to lie on the filthy ground so I needed something to lie on. I figured a bin-bag would do it. So I took one of the stuffed bin backs from the back of a pub and went to a large bin to empty it. I was lucky as the bag contained old pub curtains. So I took one of these and wandered back to the stalls. I put down a curtain and lied down, like some high-class tramp in my suit. But people kept walking by, and some guy pissed on the ground just a few yards away from me. So I needed a new spot. I wandered around for about an hour looking for a suitably dark spot, so tired by now. I settled for a shabby lorry park behind some lorries so I couldn’t be pissed on by any drunken clubbers walking home. Of course I couldn’t sleep. I don’t know if it was the fear of being found by some nutter, or having one of the lorries suddenly reverse over my face, or the stink of the smoke on the curtains. But eventually 2.30am came so I got up, freezing and stiff, and walked to the lonely coach station.

The ticket machines weren’t working properly. Of course. Why should they?! That would have been way too much to ask. Only on the six attempt did the machine randomly accept my debit card and spit out a paper ticket for the 3am trip home. As I was in the remarkably busy line to the coach, I was told my the driver that he couldn’t accept my ticket because the booking reference number was wrong.

“I don’t know what that means” I said, “I bought a ticket for the 3am coach.”
“No no” said some dickhead manager who came over when he heard my voice rising, I was starting to loose it “you see, the ticket machine has issued you with the wrong journey. So we can only let you on this coach if it’s not full.”

A 3am coach to London on a Sunday night is packed. How do you explain that?

I was losing it now.
“Look, what the hell?! I’ve just paid for this ticket, it has today’s date, the right route and the right time, now if you know the journey I’ve had so far…”
“Look sir, the computer has issued you with a ticket for tomorrow’s journey. The sysem’s not working properly”
“WELL THAT’S NOT MY FAULT IS IT?! THAT’S YOUR FAULT!””No sir. It’s the computer. The computer’s all wrong so…”
“SO THAT’S YOUR FAULT!”
“Well no sir, not my fault.”
“OF COURSE IT IS, YOUR COMPANY’S FAULT.”
“Well you could write a letter of complaint to …”
“OH FOR GOD’S SAKE. WE BOTH KNOW THAT FUCK-ALL WILL HAPPEN IF I WRITE A FUCKING LETTER OF COMPLAINT. NOW WILL YOU LET ME ON THIS FUCKING COACH.”
And by chance, just by chance, some polish guy wasn’t allowed on the coach so there was a spare seat for me. I got in at London Victoria station at 6.30am and into my house at 7.30am, some 8 hours later than I had planned.

FROM SHANGHAI TO LONDON BY TRAIN: Russia: First Day in Moscow

2007-04-18T12:40:00.001-07:00

In the morning Roman gave me sausage and bread and offered me oranges, cake, tea and rolls. I was starting to worry about what I’d have to do upon reaching Moscow: I had no certain replies from the many globalfreeloader people who said I could stay at their place because I had moved it a day earlier and sent an email explaining this at the last minute. I figured I’d call one of the people who gave me their phone number and ask to stay, although I didn’t want to surprise anyone. As out arrival drew closer, I became more and more certain that I’d have to call someone or just find a hostel for the night. I’d only told two of the potential hosts when my train would arrive and neither had replied when I checked just before leaving for Moscow.
I got off the train, said bye and thanks to Roman and the conductor and slowly walked down the long platform, whispering “fuck fuck fuck” to myself with each new step that resulted in nobody approaching me. At one point during the journey I’d even imagined, during a moment of seemingly irrational hope, that I’d see my name in large letters on a board and that both of the hosts had turned up and were fighting over who would get me. Well, life is funny, because ten steps later that’s exactly what happened. There was my name in thick black hand-written letters being held up high by a young girl, standing next to a young guy. Both were indeed the two hosts I had contacted. She was Maria, twenty, and he was Vania, nineteen, who I had assumed wrongly was a woman. I was ecstatic and relieved these strangers were here only to help me. What a nice feeling that was.
She was ridiculously talkative and geeky, overjoyed I had come to visit her city and got us immediately on a metro to go to a park, chat and drink beer. It was 5pm. He was much more laid back and slower in general although his interest in me seemed a little less superficial than hers. He had bum-fluff on his chin, long hair with natural tight curls and a dopy demeanour. These guys were barely out of high school! It felt a little strange to be older. I don’t know why but I’d expected them to be in their late twenties with families and regular lives. Maria was a part-time student who worked as a website editor and Vania was a full time Theatre Arts Criticism student. There was a clear edge of competition between them as they asked me questions and told me what they did as if they were fighting to see who would be the greater host. Moscow looked nice immediately, which was a first on this journey, and as we sat drinking in the park, surrounded by hippies and Goths, I realised Moscow was a real city with all walks of life and I only had to look around to tell how close to Europe I was now.
Vania left to get back to his studies, having said he’d host me after Maria, who then took me to the Red Square, clearly Moscow’s most touristy area. As we walked I looked around for the Kremlin and saw a few Kremliny-looking churches, one of which was actually a part of the Kremlin. When I asked Maria, “is this church the Kremlin?” she replied that the whole square was the Kremlin and this church, St. Basil’s was just a part of it. I thought, these are the kinds of things you learn when you travel and delve beyond popular knowledge. That or I’m just a bit thick.
St. Basil’s was so colourful, much more so than in any pictures, and so pristine and obviously impeccably maintained, just like all of Russia’s churches from what I had seen. Maria’s family was very religious. Her mum was an Icon painter, she made those orthodox pictures of Christ you always see in big traditional churches, or any church in Russia.
After a fairly long bus ride to her estate (she lived in a huge block of flats, one of about ten in that area), I was treated to a traditional Russian meal, featuring lots of fish, salad and potatoes, with a side of too much church red wine. Maria drunk it like water while I struggled with my small glassful. She had been calling people on her Nokia all the time since I met her but no one wanted to go out as it was Easter weekend and everyone was at home with their families.
Maria’s geeky constant-use-of-progressive-tense English was already starting to get annoying and at first I didn’t know why, after all, here was someone who was only helping me. But later I realised it was because she never actually listened to anything I said and only asked questions to set up a story or topic she wanted to talk about. And this was all with a flat intonation except at the end of every sentence that would incur a rise in pitch, making everything sound like a questions or more dramatic than the actually words or point justified. None the less, she was nice and after a visit to the one friend of hers who’d have us round (even though all we did was watch him play a computer game; he was another geek), I went to sleep with the aid of cranberry wine which we had started drinking a few hours before. The Russians drink more than any other nation I’d known about. To them I was a laughable lightweight.

FROM SHANGHAI TO LONDON BY TRAIN: Russia: Yekaterinburg

2007-02-15T13:49:00.000-08:00

Again we had no accommodation set up in Yekaterinburg and I had decided to get to Moscow a day earlier than planned so the first thing we did was book our onward tickets. Fabio to St. Petersburg and me to Moscow. Next we asked some people how to get into town and they told us to take tram number seven but we went in the wrong direction and ended up in the suburbs. Two trams and a helpful guy later, we got to where we wanted to go, only to find, surprise surprise, that the Lonely Planet was well out of date and there was no accommodation agency or internet café, as marked in the thoroughly useless Lonely Planet. So we just walked into the nearest large hotel and stayed there. We paid a reasonable rate for our rooms and as we walked through the corridor to our room, we observed the plush doors and thought how lucky we were to get such good value for money. Then the corridor darkened, the doors became less frequent and the décor took a turn for the worse. Yes, this was the budget corner. We had to pay extra to have a shower. In fact, this is a common theme in Russia, where you have to pay extra for something you would expect to get with your original payment. For example, when you buy a sleeper ticket on a train you have to pay 52 roubles extra to have sheets on your bed. And you aren’t allowed to not have sheets on your bed. And you can’t use your own sheets. It’s like buying a car but having to pay extra for the engine.
Yekaterinburg was much nicer than Novosibirsk. It seemed the further west we travelled across Russia the more pleasant the landscape, the weather, the towns and the people. Yekaterinburg featured parks, European style streets and well presented shops and restaurants. On the flip side, just like the previous Russian cities I’d seen, there were large derelict areas, crumbling buildings and many people wandering around with a bottle in hand, especially after 6pm and at the weekend.
That evening was to be mine and Fabio’s last night together and by chance we found an amazing restaurant with a nice English speaking manager. We could help ourselves as many times as we wanted from a large selection of salads, fish, meat dishes, breads, vegetables, fruit, cakes and other desserts. Having spent over three hours sampling everything, Fabio wanted us to go to a nightclub, but the frustration in Irkustk was enough for me. I accompanied him anyway and we found an area with two clubs and followed some people to see which club was the more popular. They happened to be a nice group of four nineteen year-olds, three of whom could speak pretty good English. One of that three was a really beautiful girl called Vera who immediately took Fabio’s interest. I could see where this was heading so after chatting to them on the street for an hour, I headed back to the hotel by myself. Fabio was 35, which made him almost double her age and sure enough, as he reported happily the next morning, he made-out with her in the club. Fabio was a nice guy but there were times when I was reminded of what a player he was, and his constant Italian-style lust for new women could get grating from time to time.
The morning was grey and cold but slowly the sun poked through clearing cloud as me and Fabio wandered around Yekaterinburg, in and out of shops, amused at the securitisation from the beefy security guards in every shop. It seemed in Russia that everyone was guilty until proven innocent, and the constant holes being burnt into me were unsettling. Fabio met Vera at 3pm which I attended for the first few minutes before saying goodbye to Fabio for good. I headed back to the hotel to pick-up my bag and got the surprisingly roomy and gothic-looking metro to the main railway station. My last impression of Yekaterinburg was being met with a shrug of the shoulders as I showed the metro ticket woman where I wanted to go. Perhaps she forgot it was her job to give tickets to people or she couldn’t make the link between a tourist with a backpack holding a note with the name of a metro station written on it (in Russian) and the fact that I might want a ticket in order to get there. A shrug of the shoulders?! I was truly sick of this attitude, having encountered it for so long now. The conductor on the platform looked nice, which was a good start. Maybe this last epic train ride across Russia would be great, and it was. One of the passengers, a guy called Roman, took me under his wing, actually having asked that I be moved into his room, having discovered I was stuck with some old grumpy farts. He paid for my bed sheets without even telling me and proceeded to pay for snacks and beer for the rest of the evening. At one point he unpacked a huge hack of smoked salmon, longer than my head and about six centimetres thick, and cut it up for us. He explained he was in military school but was working right now for the army in administration in Moscow. The other guy in our compartment was also in military school who couldn’t speak English but after a few beers, spoke fluently to me in Russian anyway. I quickly got drunk on the strong beer and had a great time. Even the carriage conductor got friendly with us, providing us with tea and occasionally sitting with us, chatting and laughing. And the train was by far the best I’d been on. Polished wooden panelling, spotless rails and handles and shiny metal fixtures made it look brand new. I felt just great as I chatted to Roman between bouts of listening to feel-good dance music on his mp3 player and drinking the beer. His kindness was so natural as if he did this kind of thing every day.

FROM SHANGHAI TO LONDON BY TRAIN: Russia: Novosibirsk

2007-01-31T13:39:00.001-08:00

As soon as we got off the train we booked out next train, to leave at 7pm the next day, giving us around thirty hours in a very grey dreary-looking Novosibirsk. The ground was covered in a layer of mud and melting snow, which made for pretty slow progress. We had no accommodation lined up so we found the accommodation agency and in the station and eventually settled on a room near the station. Fabio’s Lonely Planet said many people spoke English at the station but in fact nobody spoke a word, not so much as a single “hello”.
Our room was in a nearby apartment ran by a sweet old lady who showed us where everything was, from the shower to the spoons. I had no plan other than to call Maki as today was her birthday but I never thought it would take a total of four hours to be able to make the call. As I bounced from railway station to kiosk to post office to phone exchange, I got more and more frustrated. It seemed impossible to make an international phone call. I was constantly given wrong information and when I eventually got the right 100 roubles card, it gave me a measly eight minutes to call Tokyo. Novosibirsk was a little better than Irkustk although once again everybody still seemed to be walking around with a bottle. After a good meal in a good restaurant, I called Maki and chatted for ninety minutes since she called me back.

The next day brought a different landlady who, like most Russians I saw, couldn’t smile and would only complain. She made noises that suggested we should have checked out by 10am, even though every other place I had ever stayed at was 12pm. When I picked up my bags, having asked her if it was OK to leave them, she told me I was terrible (I recognised the Russian, which sounds something like “blockka”) and asked for a hundred roubles I fled to the station to meet Fabio there, not particularly bothered that my name in Novosibirsk was now forever muddied, just like the streets. Fabio and I developed a mantra to express our understanding of Russia so far:
“In Russia the land is hard, the weather is hard so the people are hard” and it really was true. From day one in Russia we didn’t come across any real warmth in people, just cold moody faces, bitter indifference (if there is such a thing) and icy reluctance to do anything to help us. In terms of providing any kind of service, Russia is similar to China: things will only get done if you beg people to do them, regardless of the fact that you may have paid a lot of money for them to provide the service in the first place. And so my soul sank further as I was met on the platform by an icy pissed-off middle aged woman who seemed to immediately despise me for no apparent reason.
But lo and behold we struck lucky. In our compartment was a beautiful cute English talking young woman who was warm and friendly with a keen sense of humour. She made the journey go much quicker and reassured me that there are some nice people in the ice-hell that is Siberia. Like Japan, Russia is a nation where the men seem to be very different from the women.

FROM SHANGHAI TO LONDON BY TRAIN: Russia: On the train

2007-01-31T10:19:00.001-08:00

We got a cab to the station as Fabio was understandably concerned we’d get set-upon. We were in separate carriages: 1 and 17, so we said goodnight and boarded. My bed was in a four-bed compartment with one other young lady who didn’t speak any English at all. Russians are unsmiling and serious upon first meeting and she was no exception. Since it was late I just wanted to sleep but these scary skin headed young tattooed guys kept coming in to chat to her while drinking beer, slamming doors and allowing their mobile phones to ring. At 3am I eventually worked up the courage to point at the main light just above me (I was in a top bunk) and asked that she use her reading light instead. I didn’t understand her response and when I turned the main light off she blew-up and turned it back on again. What a bitch. There was simply no reason to keep this light on other than to stop me from sleeping. As she was sat on the bottom bunk, speaking to a person opposite her, it made no sense to have the main light on for her. Truly scared that some soldier might stab me or similar, I stayed quiet until 4.30am when she decided she didn’t need the main light but continued animated chatter with these rough guys until around 6am where she slept for three hours. I know this because I laid awake counting the passing hours, occasionally muttering “what a bitch”.
That day was spent entirely on the train and things got better and better as the day progressed. In the morning I walked to Fabio’s carriage which took about fifteen minutes and involved fighting through the sweaty smelly third class, jumping between carriages and ducking under the hard stares of the female carriage conductors for whom we have to be entirely submissive too. Later that morning, two big Russian men settled in my compartment which I was pleased about as they would prevent the super-bitch from doing another light-on/chatting all-nighter. In the afternoon I met Fabio for lunch in the restaurant carriage and decided to opt for the ‘can’t beat them join them’ mentality and got chatting with the soldiers. Well, I say chatting but it was just guessing mixed with animated gestures. They were interested in me but only in a novelty kind of way, like I was a freak show. One guy kept pestering me to see my mp3 player and I let him handle it. Then I think he said words to the effect of ‘I’ll borrow this until you get off the train ok?’ and off he went.
The two big Russian men, stubbly and gruff, about fifty years old, were strange in their response to me: every time they’d see me, one of them would explode into real fits of hearty laughter and the other would chuckle in that kind of ‘I’m only laughing because you are’ way. Perhaps he was a tad retarded. Mid-evening they got off and two beautiful thirty-something women took their place. One of them was keen to talk and although she only knew a tiny amount of English (and French), we communicated pretty well. I discovered they were both single mothers who worked in the same business together and were going home to Novosibirsk, my destination. We had a good laugh together and I felt wonderfully reassured when I told them about super-bitch woman and the more talkative one responded with “I’m big boss” with super-woman style gestures. I could feel the passing soldier’s eyes on me and could guess their conversation:
“how does a weird foreigner like that get to talk to women like that?”. Indeed, super-bitch woman made a brief appearance and seemed a little intimidated as she took some of her stuff and retreated, probably to a soldier’s compartment. These pretty ladies, Ann and Katarina, completely changed the mood of the journey for me and Ann in particular was so helpful. She even found the soldier with my mp3 player and demanded he gave it back to me now as I hadn’t known he wanted to borrow it.

FROM SHANGHAI TO LONDON BY TRAIN: Russia: Thinking of Aki and Maki

2007-01-30T13:44:00.000-08:00

We got the 10.30am bus back to Irkustk main town and just lazed around until our train that evening which would leave at 1.20am. I posed a letter I’d written to Maki. Aki was ending me emails that just made me feel bad, sad, guilty but also a little angry. It was clear she wanted to make me feel bad and that had been a continuing theme for the last half of our relationship. I remember how she would express that I always wanted to be with friends, female friends, and never had time for her, and never gave her enough attention. Aki wanted to visit me in July, which seemed strange to me. It was always known that when I leave we’ll always be in touch but we couldn’t continue romantically. We both knew it but Aki wouldn’t accept it and hated my acceptance of it. Regardless of the time bomb nature of our relationship, we never fitted right. We survived mostly of a need not to be lonely. Her loneliness came from being single with no marriage prospects aged twenty-eight and a father who died in a car crash when she was nineteen, an age at which she was just starting to get to know her father. My loneliness came from being in a completely foreign country and not being entirely happy about it. I had no true close friends when I met Aki and I lived in a small apartment with two other guys with whom I had nothing in common. There was Jon, a twenty-two year old Canadian who had just graduated and spent all his time on his laptop, chatting to his Canadian friends on MSN, downloading Canadian basketball games and watching movies. He hardly went out and his tap-tap-tapping from his room next to me drove me crazy and would only cease at around 3 or 4am. The other guy was Kelly, a twenty-six year old Aussie who had moved into our place having already been in Japan for a year. He had a small squeaky Japanese girlfriend who would come round two or three evenings a week and generally get in the way. The place wasn’t big enough for three, let alone four people. It was in these conditions I met Aki and I was absolutely determined to make it work with her. In that determination I turned a blind eye to our suitability to each other and just fed off the non-lonely buzz the relationship gave me; gave us. Her single apartment was a sanctuary from my cluttered flat but it all happened to quickly. After our first night in the same bed a panic hit me and wouldn’t go away for three or four weeks. I still can’t quite explain it but I think it was a snowball effect: the first sign of my panic made me think “oh no! I’m going to ruin this relationship. She’s going to leave me because I’m just a ball of stress” which made me panic more. My base fear was that she’d leave me and I’d be on my own again and would have to return to England as the guy who couldn’t deal with being in Japan. Simple put, as soon as we got together, I fell quickly in love and became terrified that she might leave me. She never did. Over time, things became inverted: I was more confident and more integrated into Japan, and ironically Aki helped that to happen. Aki became scared that I’d leave her and increasingly jealous of all my other friends, especially my female friends.
I met Aki at Nova, the private English conversation school I worked at. She was a student and it was a big no-no to even socialise with the ‘clients’, let alone date them. So that added to my fear: would someone find out? If she left me would and thought I was a bastard would she tell Nova? Would I get sacked? It was a secret I desperately wanted to tell everyone but I simply couldn’t, it drove me nuts and certainly added to my loneliness.
I met Maki about a year into the relationship. She was one of the reception staff at my branch of Nova and the immediate intensity of our genuine friendship was a feeling I hadn’t had for a long time. We saw each other lots but nothing happened. She actually lived with me for the last five months of my time in Japan along with Scott, a fellow teacher who needed a place to stay. Jon and Kelly had long since moved out, as had Anthony and Sam, their replacements with whom I did have a lot in common and life in my apartment was great.
Everyone at Nova thought me and Maki were a couple but we were both confused as to the true nature of our friendship. As my departure date grew nearer, I grew nearer to Maki and further from Aki, but not in that order. In the last few weeks before I left, me and Maki couldn’t see enough of each other. She had lived in London for two years as a student in the London College of Fashion and was planning to return in the summer to continue her studies, having taken a few years work in Japan to save up some money. We made a plan to live together in London. I would return to the UK in early May, find a flat, find a job and have things ready for her return. My letter to Maki confirmed how much I wanted to do this and above all, to be with her.
Aki is classically beautiful, slender, with a slightly wide face with gives her a very cute look, as well as beautiful. Her wavy shoulder-length dark brown hair compliments her face perfectly. She smiles easily and I was immediately attracted to the ease at which she spoke to people, whether it was in her first language or not. On out first date she described herself as a moody person and a faithful person. She lived up to her self-analysis but was also incredibly in need of affection, unlike anyone else I’d met. Many times I was reminded of how fiercely ‘Japanese’ she was: unable to express deep-rooted emotions, practical, organised, unable to just let go, and very domesticated.
Maki is eight years younger, shorter, less concerned about her weight, cute, with a round face and sexy over-one-eye thick black hair, long at the front and shorter around her head. She allowed her time in the UK to compliment her characteristics and embraced the chance to break out of her Japanese culture. Her ability to look at Japan from an outsider’s point of view allows her to understand my view of Japan. Aki and Maki are both incredibly kind, as many Japanese people are.

FROM SHANGHAI TO LONDON BY TRAIN: Russia: Lake Baikal

2007-01-30T13:42:00.000-08:00

I woke at 11.30am and me and Fabio got our stuff ready to go into town to catch a bus for Lake Baikal, a huger frozen late which took the train thirty minutes to pass the previous morning.
In town we shopped in a supermarket in which we had to put our bags in a locker before entering and collect on the way out. Fabio was asked to empty his pockets. I was slowly coming to the conclusion that I look a little Russian, having received no strange looks since entering Russia.
The bus arrived in a small village which seemed to be a tourist spot for the locals. Families had packed and were drinking beer and eating incredibly fresh smoked fish by the lake. I tried some myself. It was the lightest flakiest fish I had ever had, probably no more than four hours fresh and it was delicious. I just ate everything, leaving a cartoon-style head and bones which I’d never actually seen in real life.
We walked onto the lake, an amazing sensation, and I immediately fell over. It was covered with a few inches of snow but when I brushed it aside and looked into the ice I couldn’t help but think how thin it looked. A puddle formed in the area where I was standing. In fact there were many puddles of melting ice on the lake which discouraged me from venturing far.
We went back to our incredibly simple hostel which was by the lake to relax before dinner. Our room was panelled entirely in chipboard and had a large and extremely out of place light fixing on the roof which upon closer inspection had a small pile of dead flies in each of the three lamp-shades.
The sun was still well up when we headed out for dinner at around 8pm. We passed a group of young guys drinking on the street who may or may not have called out to us, I couldn’t tell. Once inside I looked at the Russian menu and the two unimpressed old women by the counter and asked Fabio if he’d go back to get his Italian Lonely Planet to help us with the menu items. Our hostel was barely a few minute’s walk away but Fabio had been gone for ten minutes. Our table was by the window and as I looked around, an ugly feeling grew inside me. Men were wandering around, drinking, not smiling, aimless. I started to worry for Fabio. It seems the bloody Lonely Planet had got me in trouble again. He thirty-five I reminded myself. He’s not stupid. But then I saw some people gather near a car. One swung a punch at another, full in the face, who in turn punched back and they started kicking each other. A man got between and separated them but seconds later they were doing it again. My stomach leapt: was one of these people Fabio? I looked carefully from where I sat, wanting to press myself against the window to get a good view but not wanting to draw to much attention to myself. He wasn’t there. So where the hell was he? He’d been gone thirty minutes now. The fighting continued down the street and I noticed small groups of people, some young girls, watching with no intention of stopping the brutality that was going on. It hit me: this is Siberia. The land here is hard. The weather is hard. The people are hard. I was very nervous as I finally struck up the courage to leave the restaurant and rushed back to the hostel, hoping Fabio had just fallen asleep or something. A very nervous Fabio was sat on the bed looking like he’d just seen a ghost.
“Fabio, are you OK? What happened?” He looked stunned.
“Oh is terrible! When I walk back, I walk past some girls, I say hello and suddenly this man runs up to me. He says something in Russian but when I reply he punch me in the face. There were two of them. And one of them try to break my nose with his head. Then he try to force my head down on his legs, like a wrestler. Is crazy. Like animals. And their eyes. Their cold blue eyes. Oh. Is terrible.” He’d been set upon by drunken young guys, obviously bored and looking for a fight. I tried to calm him down. What a hell-hole this village was. Suddenly we felt so alone. No police. Nobody who cares about us. He told me how he ran to the hostel and was shouting for help. When he got to the hostel, the owner just looked at him and laughed.
“I think this is not the first time it happen” he said. So we stayed in our chipboard room, prisoners in our hostel, very afraid to go out.

FROM SHANGHAI TO LONDON BY TRAIN: Russia: Irkustk

2007-01-29T12:13:00.000-08:00

After another good night’s sleep on a train, I woke up and realised I was by far the last to rise. Fabio told me how the shady Kazakhstan guy lived up to his first impression and had been snooping around our bags before getting off. The Mongolian guy confirmed, saying he had been poking around all of our bags. I wasn’t worried. I always sleep with my passport and money under my pillow.
We got off at 2.30pm and were met by a very Russian looking Russian whose hotel we had booked when we were in Mongolia. It was slightly euphoric to be in another new country again, now surrounded by Russians, and how Russian everybody looked: the noses pointing up at the ends, the deep-set ice-blue eyes and sturdy builds. He explained that his hostel was inspired by a time he stayed in the UB guesthouse in Ulan Bator, the hostel me and Fabio stayed at. He wanted to recreate such a place in Russia and sure enough he had done.
After a few hours, we set off to find a place to eat which was remarkably difficult. Fabio was determined to have local food, a sentiment I first shared during the first hour of searching but faded which faded away as the hours passed and my hunger increased. We stopped a group of young people for help, a few spoke a little English and helped, recommending a place that on arrival, had cheesy modernised folk music blaring and a group of five people dancing. We went away and came back an hour later when we couldn’t find anything better. A pretty young woman with unnecessarily thick eye liner guided us through the rustic-looking menu. It still amazed me how you can always find people speaking English in the most obscure places. Fabio pressed the issue in this Italian English.
“We want local food… good food… what is this?” as he pointed at the menu.
“This is soup” she replied. “Is it local soup? Good soup? I want good soup.” Slightly perplexed, she answered simply and slowly “yes.”
“OK” concluded Fabio with his thick rhythmic Italian accent, “I want this good soup.” She turned to me. I just pointed randomly and asked what it was.
“This is umm… salad… with meat… with chicken.” Fabio did the culture check for me: “is it local food?” to which she once again replied “yes”. We sat back and relaxed while we waited for our wholesome local cuisine. Fabio got tomato soup and I got a Cesar salad.
We ate as a group of six people partied to karaoke versions of Russian folk songs sung by two resident singers who didn’t ever smile. I couldn’t stop smirking as I watched these thirty and forty somethings get on down to what sounded like the demo of a cheap Casio keyboard.
Fabio had been going on about a nightclub that was recommended to him, called “Stratosphere” which was in our current town, Irkustk. Having killed a few hours in the restaurant (the club didn’t open until midnight), we went to the club, paid the huge 300 roubles entry fee and went in. Reassuringly, we had to walk through an airport-style metal detector. The signs read “no dogs, no alcohol from outside the club, no trainers, no guns, no explosives” and the bouncers wore authentic-looking combat attire. Well thank god I’m not a casually-dressed dog-loving alcoholic psychopath. And then I looked around me. I simply cannot describe the sight. If someone had taken man’s most sexy and seductive image of the perfect looking woman and created 400 variations on that theme, it would be equal to the inhabitants of this club. Their dress (mostly short skirts, high boots and outrageous tops), their attitude (icy-confident) and their bodies made for an extremely frustrating three hours. I couldn’t talk to anybody. We didn’t share a common language. And the men! These beautiful girls were with ugly old men or just-past-puberty lanky young guys. They just looked so confident and sexy. As I sat down, one again needed a breather, I’d watch girls walk past huge mirrors on the wall, dancing as they walked, pointing to themselves in a manner which spoke “you go girl!” I’d simply never seen so many beautiful girls all under one roof. Every hour or so, the lights would focus on a runway in the middle and nine models would show themselves off, the crowd would cheer and then everything would go back to how it was. An hour into the night I walked up to the bar and having no clue how to order any other drink, simply said “vodka”. I drunk it down in two big gulps and then danced for the rest of my time in the club. Unable to take it anymore, I walked home at 3.30am to light snow, still gawping at Russia’s best kept secret.

FROM SHANGHAI TO LONDON BY TRAIN: Mongolia

2006-12-28T12:11:00.000-08:00

Finally at 1.30am, we started moving again and after a surprisingly good nights sleep, woke at 8.30am to exactly the same landscape: nothing as far as you could see part from a low battered fence running by the track. The three other people in my compartment didn’t speak a word of English and Chris was with an Italian guy called Fabio and two Chinese people who could say hello enthusiastically. Fabio was a nice guy, typically Italian in his laidback approach to life and his passion for football, coffee, music and women. He was a governor lawyer assistant who had five months holiday every year and would travel the world in this time. Right now he was slowly coming home from Asia, not looking forward to starting work again in May.
Having sent an email to the “UB (Ulan Bator) Guesthouse”, a representative had Chris’ name displayed at the platform and drove us, Fabio, an Aussie, a Korean and two Irish guys to the obscurely located guesthouse. It was set in a small square with a half rotted children’s play area in the middle and strangely random patches of dust outlined with low metal bars. It seemed to be the type of thing you imagine Russia to be by watching TV. Although a capital city, everything had a derelict feel to it; a bit of a no-man’s land but this part of the city was a little bustling with banks and currency exchange places on every corner, bars, cheap restaurants and odd shops such as one place that only sold flowers and pottery.
Back at the hostel Chris had changed his mind again and said he wanted a five day tour. I hate tours and told him that I only wanted to see a little of the countryside and then move on. Sure it was interesting to visit such an obscure place but our plan was never to spend a week in Mongolia. Over lunch with Fabio I told him my situation and after twenty minutes of consideration, told him that I’d move on with him in a few days time. I thought about how nice and safe it felt to be with Chris who did all the worrying about everything all the time but realised that his style of travelling allowed much less room for fun. That evening I told him my plan and said I’d meet him in Moscow. He didn’t seem surprised and shared a can of Mongolian beer with me. We were going to let each other go and I’m sure it was going to be for the better of us.
After chatting to a nice Aussie guy who was going to go to London to try to make it as a stand-up comedian, I told Fabio I’d go on the next day’s two day tour with him and went to bed feeling oddly liberated.
The two day tour was very simple. We’d be driven to the middle of nowhere and would stay win a small circular tent/house with a stove fire in the middle and a big metal chimney poking through a hole in the roof. We were to stay with a Nomadic family. It surprised me to hear that half of Mongolia’s 2.3 million population are Nomads although most of them don’t own a TV as this family did, which also surprised me. I was with Fabio and two girls, an Aussie and a Brit, who were nice and coincidently had been working in the same English teaching company I had in Japan.
After a lunch of rice, shredded vegetables and beef, we were dressed by the husband of the family in preparation for two hours horse riding. His name was Odka, easy to remember as it rhymed with one of Mongolia’s favourite drinks, and he dressed me and Fabio in three jackets, but didn’t give the girls so much as a hat. I could only guess men take priority in a land where farming is the only thing a populace can do. The horses were small and looked more like donkeys although they were well trained and well tamed. We were given a twenty second lesson as to how to ride one and then off we went on a two hour journey that I’ll always remember as being the coldest two hours of my life. It was already well below freezing but the harsh sharp wind made it doubly cold and after twenty minutes, everything started to hurt, to really hurt. My toes, my hands, and my face in particular. The dry barren rolling landscape, dotted with huge rock formations was amazing but I was simply too cold to appreciate it. My hands and feet started swelling after an hour and I literally couldn’t move any digits on my hands or feet. Neither could I turn my head or walk without limping once I had got off the horse. Our guide shouted “chu!” to get the horses moving and didn’t speak any English at all. He was entirely without sympathy for our cold states of being and out light trots on the way back (our resting point was a frozen lake) ensured sore arses for everyone as well. We all had the same heavenly vision in mind: the warm circular tent and hot tea. When we got back we were immediately served a beef pasta dinner with hot fruity tea. I slowly warmed up but my hands would continue to hurt for the next few days.
With nothing else to do other than sit around and chat, we did just that. Odka came back to explain his sister was having a baby that very night so he had to leave us, communicated mostly with dynamic gestures, like a game of charades. Later out horse-riding guide showed up with a bucket of coal, making gestures to explain we should put it in the fire for the night. We did so and went to bed in a very warm tent.

I woke up at around 5am, freezing. The fore had long gone so I collected as many blankets as I could find and buried myself. I woke again at around 9am and thought we really should get up so I grabbed some toilet paper and broke a few pieces to stuff under some kindling. It went up beautifully and the place warmed up quickly, making getting out of bed for the others much easier than it had been for me. Fabio and I had a train to Russia leaving at 1.50pm so we had to get moving. When we returned to the hostel we quickly changed our remaining Mongolian money into Russian roubles (nowhere in Russia would change them apparently), had a shower and bought some food for the train. The kind manager of the hostel put us into a cab and said farewell. It was truly a great hostel, as all hostels should be but rarely are: warmly welcoming, genuinely helpful and friendly.
Our compartment on the Mongolian train contained me, Fabio, a Mongolian small-business man who was a little overly keen to speak English and a shady looking guy from Kazakhstan who showed no interest in us. The Mongolian guy was a cheery character with a family and a successful business, operating a tour agency. He opened out a load of food and said that we must just help ourselves: what is him is ours, in true communist spirit. One bag contained huge hacks of beef and fat, another sweet bread rolls, another sausage, another dark malty bread and other bits and pieces.
Soon into the journey, someone dumped six large rolled-up felt blankets in our compartment and the Mongolian guy explained that one of the train attendants needed “help” to pass all these blankets through Russian customs and asked us to each claim two blankets on the customs declaration form. Though nervous at the thought of Russian officials asking why I asked two large Mongolian blankets along with everyone else in the carriage, I cast aside scenes from “Midnight Express” and agreed to it.
After eating a packed lunch included in my ticket and chatting to some other Westerners who were on the train for the full five day stretch to Moscow, we stopped just before the boarder. Our passports were checked and an hour later we rode over the boarder and stopped again for scary Russian officials to board to routinely intimidate us all. One of them came to out compartment and greeted us in Russian. I nervously repeated some Russian I had learnt years ago and he seemed to understand. He explained the boarder crossing rules to us in a manner that suggested we were all prisoners of war. He looked at Fabio’s Italian passport and said something to him in Italian.
“Oh your Italian is good” said a nervous Fabio.
“No!” said the official, “No! I do not speak Italian.” He had shouted as if someone had just asked him to stick his head in a toilet. Fabio recoiled and the tense examination of passports continued. The Mongolian guy was almost visibly sweating as his wife had accidentally washed his passport with his clothes only a few days previous and his passport looked consistent with such information. The official took our passport, explaining that he needed ninety to a hundred minutes to examine them. They all returned ninety minutes later stamped and approved. Our Mongolian friend audibly thanked God for passing through with his frazzled documents. The whole process took about four hours and finished around 2am.

FROM SHANGHAI TO LONDON BY TRAIN: China: Beijing

2006-12-28T08:50:00.002-08:00

At 6am, Beijing was cold, and with hardly any sleep, all we wanted was a bed. Some of the locals from the train showed us where we needed to go in a kind of we’d-be-better-off-without-them style but I appreciated the sentiment anyway. Eventually I said “ok, we’ll be fine from here thank-you so much” and after a short ride on Beijing’s half finished metro, we found the youth hostel and slept for about four hours.
The first thing we needed to do was to locate a large foreign bookstore in the city centre to buy a never copy of Lonely Planet’s “Tran Siberian Railway” guide. It wasn’t there and according to a couple of British travellers we met in the travel guide section, it couldn’t be found anywhere in Beijing, even though Beijing is either the start of end of one of the main routes, being the Trans Mongolian, which we planned to take. We’d have to make do with our four year old copy.
After a more-satisfying-than-it-should-have-been lunch at McDonalds, we wandered around a big glitzy mall and commented on the incredibly high prices. We had been told that Beijing and Shanghai were very different cities but capitalism seemed to have taken even firmer root in Beijing, with it’s trendy business areas, shopping malls and endless banks.
We passed a food market which sold silk worm on a stick, snake skin on a stick, lambs testicles (again on a stick) and other various animals that belonged in horror movies only. I had a contact number for a guy from globalfreeloaders.com who couldn’t put us up but was happy to take us out, so I went to one of the many public phones in a small kiosk to call him. In China, these kiosks always have a phone for public use which display the cost of a call and it is never more than ¥1. Having called him once, I paid the ¥0.6 I owed to one of the two guys behind the desk and realised I needed to call him again. The cost was ¥0.6 again so I went to pay this but the guy said I owed ¥1.2 for the two calls. Since we were the only customers, there’s no way they could have forgotten my first payment of ¥0.6 but one of the guys got really angry, throwing the phones across the kiosk and shouting at us. The extent that the Chinese will go to to squeeze a few extra pennies from foreigners made me want to puke.
We needed to buy a ticket for our next train: Beijing to Ulan Bator (Mongolia’s capital) so naturally we went to the main ticket office in the train station, but couldn’t find an English speaking desk. A few people told us to go to the “international hotel”. What did this mean? A hotel was the only way to get this ticket? So we walked in the vague direction of someone’s pointing until we saw a huge slab of a building, concave in shape and very grand-looking. Sure enough there was a travel agency on the second floor and although it was closed, a woman gave us a price list. It would cost us ¥600 (about £45) and the journey would take 32 hours.
The guy from globalfreeloaders met us at 8pm with some friends, a nice group of creative people: graphic designers and photographers, and took us to quite a posh restaurant for our first taste of true Peking/Beijing duck, which was nice but very gristly. Chris was feeling sick so we returned home early.

Our first full day in Beijing was a bit of a non-event as Chris stayed in bed all the time, occasionally leaving to bless the squat-style toilet with a large dose of poo-moose. So it was up to me to get things done: namely buy the train tickets and organise some free accommodation by meeting with a Chinese guy who called himself “George” who I found on globalfreeloaders. He kindly picked me up from the hostel and we drove to a café that he owned where we sat and discussed the next few days over some Coca-colas. He was an older guy, about forty-something, and had a family. He ran a small air-conditioning company and had invested in the café, buying the land outright when he was particularly successful some years ago. Now the café just acts as a meeting place more than anything, mainly for his friends, to discuss travelling. He seemed to have been to every country in the world and had brought back various artefacts from each one, all of which were on display in the café: African masks, Turkish pottery, Australian road signs, French football scarves, Italian opera masks, Indian tea pots, Russian plates to name a few. I told him we’d move in the next day for three nights as Chris was currently ill, and that was it sorted.
So I then went back to the ominous international hotel, brought the tickets and went to the toilet in a toilet with an attendant who I didn’t know needed tipping or not. He didn’t do anything apart from watch me so what should I have tipped him for? Maybe he didn’t even work there.
That evening the hostel was very restful and peaceful for me. I got dinner in a small restaurant attached to the hostel and met a young American girl who sat across from me on the same table even though there was plenty of space. Sensing that she wanted to talk to someone, I struck up a conversation and she burst into a breathless speech about her two weeks travelling in China. Then I spoke to an older Korean lady who had been travelling for seven months and would go back home the next day. Seven months? How can you return to normal life after that? But then again, she didn’t seem like she had a normal life. Then I just wandered around and settled in the café area, writing in my diary and chatting to the new guy in our room.

Chris was still sick the next day but well enough to move to the cafe4, under the kindness of George. After settling, I set out into town to visit the infamous Tiananmen Square. Within minutes of getting off the bus, two not-so-young girls came up to me, asking where I was from and all the other usual questions.
“Would you like to come and have some tea with us?” they said with a little too much urgency, too early on in our acquaintance. I asked what their jobs were,
“oh, we’re students”. I replied that I just wanted to walk around and that they were very welcome to join me. After a suspicious pause one of them said “sure, we want to talk English with you.” I asked their names: Tina and Susan. I laughed a little and explained that I didn’t trust anyone who approached me in China.
“That’s terrible” and Susan, who did most of the talking and had ridiculously thick bright turquoise eye makeup, “why don’t you trust anybody?” I explained how almost everybody just wanted my money “included you I suspect” I added. Susan stopped dead in her tracks and looked at me with a little disgust, “how did you lose your trust in other people? That’s sad.”
After some more semi-tense chatting, during which she frequently commented how handsome I looked, I asked how old they were.
“That’s a terrible question” replied Susan.
“No it’s not” I said, knowing full well that to ask a woman’s age in China doesn’t have the same taboo as back home. They both looked over thirty and I’d already had many women come up to me claiming to be students to go with them and be enticed into spending outrageous amounts of money.
“OK then” I said to Tina who looked the oldest, “what did you do before university?” This clearly had her stumped.
“Er… high school” she muttered unconvincingly.
“Really?” I said, “but you’re too old! You’re telling me you were in high school three years ago?”
“Yes” she replied. Then Susan spoke in fast Chinese to Tina, turned to me and said “do you want to have some tea with us?”
“Sure” I answered, “if it’s cheap, maybe about ¥10.”
“No” she said firmly, “we like expensive tea, cost you ¥200.” I just stared at them, “so you are just trying to get my money?” and they walked away. Within minutes of walking away, still chuckling to myself, another pair of girls said hello but much more passively than the previous couple. They asked the same old questions, I gave the same old answers but they didn’t say they wanted me to do anything. Upon my questioning they explained that they were English students. It fitted: they looked young and seemed eager to learn new words from me.
“Why are you in such a touristy area if you live here?” I asked, my suspicions dissolving away.
“Because it’s the weekend and we’re out shopping” said the girl with a yellow Addidas tracksuit and a dark Thai-style complexion. So I just followed them around for an hour or so, enjoying the company of people who weren’t after anything. After a quick photo, within minutes of departing, another two girls came to me and said hello. They asked the same questions but in a much more ‘just passing’ style and I soon rejoined my own company to wander through the surprisingly large square. There were many kits being sold and flown of all types and heights, some impossibly high like distant planes. Salesmen were everywhere, selling more cheap junk, and connect to chairman Mao in some way.
That evening George took Chris to the local hospital during which he waited five minutes to be seen, had an immediate blood and poo test, got the results within ten minutes and was prescribed and given drugs ten minutes after that. In a country where the maimed and starving bed for anything in all the cities, the health service still beats England’s by miles. This hospital was very simple. Things were just getting done without fuss or complaint. However, it looked much more basic, less well facilitated, and the Chinese spat on the floor which is surely a bad thing to do anywhere let alone in a hospital. In fact, the Chinese seem to hold no ground exempt from spitting. As we walked down a carpeted hallway in an office building, a dirty-jacket man spat on the floor, looking strangely pleased with himself afterwards.

“The Summer Palace”, one of Beijing’s major sights, was to be the next day’s plan for me. About 2.5 km square, it acted as leisure ground for one of China’s old Emperors when it was summer time and too hot to be indoors. It was beautiful. Willow lined paths between two lakes, rock garden patches, archaic decorative bridges and many traditional old Chinese buildings. Included in the entrance fee was admission to many small museums within the park, some ridiculously boring (as the young daughter of a British couple put it: “it’s just a bunch of chairs”) and some fascinating, if for no reason but the age of some of the relics which surpassed 3000 years. But Beijing’s eternal haze hung over the park, making it hard to see objects across the lake (although the lake was large) and at around 4pm, I could stare straight at the sun which then looked more like the moon: pale and misty.
Beijing is the place to see the Great Wall of China, well, at least where you need to catch a bus from. After a seventy minute journey we excitedly past patches of the wall itself before pulling up into tourist hell: “T-shirt one dollar, one dollar, postcards, book, T-shirt one dollar” was the local mantra yet again but our faces showed we had already experienced almost three weeks of this and were sick of it, although Chris still had to stop to look!
We first went to the Great Wall cinema which showed a film about the history of the wall in 360˚, using eight projectors, technology and film alike being about thirty years out of date. And it was only in Chinese with no subtitles. Crazy for such an international tourist attraction.
We wandered around for thirty minutes trying to find the way onto the wall and eventually found an absurdly tiny sign. Although the wall covers some 6000 km, you’d never guess it because of the bloody Beijing mist. The tower sections at every 200 metres or so consisted of a series of tiny tunnels you had to squeeze through although some Chinese considered these areas fit to have a piss. I noticed one woman doing herself back up, a puddle just below her.
It was extremely steep in places and the height of the coarse steps varied from around 10 cm to 50 cm. It was so busy that at one point people were crushing each other by one of the thin steep stairwells, seemingly unable to simply let one go at a time. 90% of the crowds were Chinese. The relative expense of China’s tourist attractions make it harder to enjoy them. You certainly get a sense that it’s just all about the money and this must surely be China’s biggest threat to a dwindling tourist industry. Surely no one who leaves China could forget the constant money grabbing, can’t-get-enough, tourist preying mentality and prevents me from recommended China to anybody. Whether you’re on a big budget or not, the persistence of the Chinese to trick, con and mislead foreigners is simply too much to create a fulfilling experience. Bottles of water were on sale on the wall for ¥10. A bottle of water in a shop was about ¥1.
So we got on the wall, walked about a mile, took our pictures and came off. There were no signs to tell you where to go, no information about the wall, no guides, no maps and no organisation. Things didn’t improve when we went to a restaurant in the city centre, as reviewed by the now utterly useless Lonely Planet, in which prices had risen by 50%. A half of a duck ¥100. We ordered a half between us and out came a serious looking chef with a meaty-looking half duck. He asked us how we’d like it cup up and proceeded to cut small slithers of meat and skin and serve it up on a small plate. Although the meat on this duck looked barely touched, he served up the small plate and left. This was it. Our ¥100 half duck. It barely enough for a sandwich. Sure it was tasty especially the oily skin, I’d never tasted anything like it but we couldn’t forget about the bill. It turns out that ¥30 is a fairly standard price in Beijing for a whole duck. Sure enough, our restaurant was full of fat Americans and glitzy foreigner business people.

Onwards into Mongolia the next day, leaving at 7.40 am, the longest railway journey I’d ever taken. It was a Chinese train and each compartment had four beds, two bunks on each side with a small table in the middle against the window. Me and Chris were in separate carriages as there weren’t many beds left which was a good thing in my mind. After a few hours of relaxing, listening to Eddie Izzard comedy CDs I ventured tot the restaurant carriage where I sat on an empty table. Within seconds the miserable Chinese “waitress” ushered me over to a table already occupied by a middle aged Scottish couple. I gave my order from a choice of the two items that were actually still available on the English menu (or so she said: I saw Chinese people eating fried rice and prawns which didn’t even feature on the absurdly concise menu) and happily chatted to the couple. I don’t know if the Chinese waitress was merely trying to save tables or had been administered the job of social ambassador, but I was pleased for the blunt introduction.
At the China/Mongolia boarder the wheels of the train were physically changed to ride the differing Mongolian tracks. The whole boarder process took about four hours, during which I decided to get off and couldn’t come back on until the process was finished. I had no idea what country I was in when I got off, a fairly unique feeling, until I saw everything priced in Chinese yuan in a small supermarket that most of the travelling Aussies and English were over-stocking on beer in. Having had our passports carefully checked by the Chinese for two hours, the train ran for ten minutes and the whole process was repeated by Mongolian. A young Mongolian woman official in ridiculously large oval hat scrutinised my passport and called some other officials over just to add to the drama of what would otherwise be an incredibly dull job. Having spent five minutes inspecting my battered passport like it was a nuclear bomb, she returned it with an air of contempt that said “just this time I’m not going to send you to a Siberian slave labour camp.”

FROM SHANGHAI TO LONDON BY TRAIN: China: Datong

2006-12-28T08:50:00.001-08:00

At Datong, our destination, we decide to push onto Beijing as quick as we could. The next train out was 10pm, a seven hour journey and all we could get was another hard seat. It was 2pm so we had eight hours to spare. We spend a few hours in an internet café (in which hotmail couldn’t load again. What was going on?!) and the rest of the time in a “Mr Lee’s Beef Noodle” shop, which featured red and white signs and a stark picture of some old Chinese guy, smiling brightly, wearing a bow tie. And I thought China didn’t want to be like America.
The train wasn’t as bad as the last one but this time there was no chance of an upgrade. After chatting to some of the locals around us, entertaining them by showing some English and Japanese money I had, I tried to sleep but ended up just counting the hours away with my eyes close.

FROM SHANGHAI TO LONDON BY TRAIN: China: Taiyuan

2006-12-28T08:49:00.000-08:00

After ten minutes sleep it was time to get off and I could barely walk straight because of the pain that flushed through my body. Suddenly our new Chinese friend showed-up again and kept telling us to stay in a cheap hotel near his college in Taiyuan, our destination. We declined at first and the three of is went to a cheap hotel by the station as recommend in the thoroughly useless Lonely Planet, which stated that dorms were from ¥25 a night. The miserable looking receptionist muttered ¥50 to our new Chinese friend (who was called Young) so we contested that we were once again being conned. After a brief speech from the miserable lady, Young turned to us and translated:
“she says that you have to pay a high rate because you can’t share with other Chinese people in a dorm.”
“What?!” we replied, and he continued:
“because she says it is the law of China, so you have to get your own room.” Having never before encountered such disgustingly unashamed racism before, we marched straight out swearing out loud in our unrecognisable English.
So we followed Young to the hotel near his college. “We need to get a bus” he explained”, “only ten minutes”.
After a twenty minute bus journey we started walking through his college. “It’s a three minute walk, only a short walk.”
Ten minutes later, we arrived at the hotel were Young told us it was ¥58 for a double room. Oh great, at last. Having been so sick and drained of all my regular senses, it was a relief to find somewhere to crash. As we got ready to pay, Young explained that the ¥58 would cover us for only twelve hours.
“But it’s now 9am” I said, “so we would have to leave at 9pm or pay another ¥58?”
“Yes” confirmed an increasingly useless Young, “well, you could stay at my place if you like. I have spare beds.”
“Really?” I said, a flood of doubt flowing over me, “two spare beds in your university room?” I just couldn’t imagine it but sure enough, when we entered his room, we found four sets of bunk beds, as well as a wet concrete floor, rubbish and books everywhere, and two spare beds. The dorm hallway stunk of urine and sewage. None of the taps in the bathrooms worked and all of the squat-style toilets had crap smeared on the floor.
Chris went out for the day while I dozed on and off all day, trying to get over the food bug. I got up at six o’clock in the evening to buy some pure juice at the local supermarket (it seemed to be a rare and expensive product) and a small loaf of bread, being the first bit of food I’d eaten in 24 hours. Chris returned and I went back to bed.

I felt better the next morning and ready to tackle the three to six hour journey to Wu-Tai-Shan, a sleepy village built around Buddhist temples and monasteries (according to the Lonely Planet). Having spent an hour trying to get to the right bus station, we found ourselves constantly harassed by a dirty looking man in a jacket who wanted to do everything for us. I was deeply suspicious, especially when he led us to the only battered minibus that was parked amongst a row of gleaming small coaches. I didn’t want to get on it. I could foresee us stopping off in every tiny town and going to Wu-Tai-Shan via the most roundabout route possible. And that’s exactly what followed, for six hours.
The dirty jacket man got on our aging minibus and shouted at everybody we passed, trying to convince them that they wanted to go to Wu-Tai-Shan. He looked like a moron. The driver didn’t look any better. In fact he was more moronic: as we drove up the mountains, riding in thin mountain-edge roads that plummeted into mist, he was using his cell phone, driving at full speed with one hand which contained a lighted cigarette which he was also smoking.
Each sharp corner had a large rounded mirror, vital to see if you were safe to turn into the corner without hitting anyone from the opposite direction, but all of these were smashed. How the hell did they get smashed all the way up there? UFOs? Angry birds?
There was a gate to the entrance of Wu-Tai-Shan town, and we needed to pay a ¥90 entrance ticket. Now, everyone else on the bus had paid ¥45 but for some reason, we had to pay ¥90 which I later discovered was for the previous year’s peak-season ticket. It read ‘2005’ when we should have paid ¥45 for this year’s off-season ticket. Ripped off again. I was getting very tired of it. It just wasn’t funny anymore.
We checked in at a hotel that was pleasantly situated by a river filled with rubbish and went for a walk around. We climbed a small hill and found ourselves in the most peaceful and genuinely moving area so far. It was a Buddhist temple, of which we peaked through the huge wooden doors at a troop of monks in ceremony, chanting and walking into the main temple room while other monks hit drums gently. We were away from all the craziness and clutter, and for that sort moment, I was so happy to be there.

The next day was infuriating. We got nothing done, didn’t see anything and got ripped-off even more. The Chinese will rip you off and it’s not a case of being wise against it, they simply leave you with no other choice. In other words, they won’t allow you to pay the same as the Chinese or they’ll make it virtually impossible for you to do so.
We spent most of the day trying to locae a bus station and a computer room which were marked on the almost useless Lonely Planet map of Wu-Tai-Shan. Every other person shouted “hello” to us and tried to get us to buy something or get in their taxi. People trying to get us to use their taxi was the funniest. As if we’d spontaneously decide to take a taxi somewhere because someone said “hello”.
We eventually found the one computer room in the town and when we started to use them, we found we couldn’t access hotmail at all. After trying for ten minutes we returned to the fat woman who we had to pay up front, and asked for our money back. She refused to fully refund us and after twenty minutes of reasoning, nothing changed. Then we had to pay ¥60 for a ¥45 coach ticket to our next town from the hotel because we never found the bus station. The only nice things that day were a climb up a few hundred steps to a nice view of the town, and dinner.
After dinner, I started really thinking about Aki and burst into tears as I thought about how lonely she might be now and how I made her happy. I felt so guilty for leaving her. Although we both knew there was no future to our relationship, she gave no impression of really believing that, and that really cut me up. Me and Chris talking about her and he calmed me down as he relayed the facts to me straight: she wanted to get married and have a baby. I wanted to do so many things in my life first. She was 29. I was 25. In Japan, marriage values are more traditional and the pressure to be married with kids was much higher for a 29 year old woman in Japan than in England. We had a great time together, and really loved each other, but it couldn’t last.
The bus left at 8am and again, people were being rounded up and convinced they wanted to go to wherever the bus was going. We had to change buses halfway. Moving from an uncomfortable bus to a more uncomfortable bus. We passed through the mountains again, making precarious turns on small mountain roads across plains of indented hills, with huge ridges, like giant steps.

FROM SHANGHAI TO LONDON BY TRAIN: China: Xian

2006-12-28T08:48:00.002-08:00

We were being waited upon at Xian station, as the youth-hostel we booked the day before had sent a woman to the station with a somewhat Slavic spelling of my name: “KRAVOR”.
This place had a great review in the Lonely Planet, but the more we used the Lonely Planet, the more useless it became. This youth-hostel was just a big money sucking tourist machine, ran by an overly cheerful Chinese guy who called himself Jim Beam. Once we arrived there, Chris needed to wash his clothes, “OK, ¥10” said one of Jim’s overly smart henchmen.
“That’s a bit expensive” said Chris, not unfairly, since this would have paid for five beers in China.
“OK, ¥8” said the cheeky Chinaman. Chris settled on ¥5 but we still wondered how low we could have gone. The problem with haggling is that the British aren’t much good at it (Chris especially it has to be said) so they feel embarrassed to haggle and usually end up paying at least three times what a Chinese person would for the same thing. Since we had arrived at about 6.30am, we took a rest and then walked about.
Xian is a smaller city but still has huge buildings, big roads, McDonalds, KFC and shopping malls. But unexpectedly, it also has a large Muslim population, along with a large Mosque (although it looks just like a regular Buddhist temple).
As we wandered through the many markets, a kind lady started chatting to us and showed us some of her art-work, which were paintings of the four seasons on silk paper. Midway through our chatting, she started to name prices and it felt really wrong. This kind-looking lady had invited us into her studio, told us about her life and now just wanted money. As with most of the stall holders, she focused her attention on Chris and not me, as Chris’ face is one of “oh I feel like buying something” whereas I know mine is more like “well, this is all very amusing.” I did however buy an ice-cream and when I asked how much it was, the young lady said “fifty” and assuming this meant five jaio (there’s 10 jiao to ¥1), I gave her a ¥20 note and she only gave me ¥5 change. Now, ¥15 for an ice-cream is absurd. I previous day I bought one for ¥2, but she wouldn’t give me any more change. So I waited another customer to come to see what they would pay and I think I could guess what they were saying.
Clerk: Hold-on. This strange foreigner is watching us.
Customer: Why?
Clerk: I charged him ¥15 for an ice-cream and now he’s pissed-off. Would you mind coming back in a minute or two?

That night Chris showed me his plan for us to go to a mountain, climb it, stay on the mountain over night, then get a train to another city, climb another mountain, and then go to Beijing. He had adapted the plan from a suggested route in the increasingly annoying Lonely Planet. I went along with the idea but commented on how difficult the travelling would be. Chris disagreed and I couldn’t help but realise a little stubbornness in his voice. Oh dear I thought, will we be parting ways so early in this epic trip? I hoped not.
We spent the rest of the evening chatting to two Norwegian girls who were coming to the end of three months travelling across the world.

The Terracotta Warriors was to be the big theme of the next day. These were thousands of clay figures, set in the earth in a remote part of Xian, as a kind of memorial to the death of China’s first ever emperor. But in the morning we had to get our train sleeper tickets for the mountain-climbing leg of our journey.
Chris carefully wrote out the Chinese for each railway journey we needed and I managed to shove it in the tiny money hole for the clerk to see before some dirty Chinese guy tried to shove his cash in for his ticket. Almost immediately, the stern looking woman (who’s ticket booth included a sign that read “English assistance”) said “No. Only Xian here. This no. This no” and after a gentle enquiry from me as to how we could buy these tickets that run between stations other than Xian, she burst into the usual frantic Chinese, interjected with “I don’t understand” and “I don’t know.”
We needed a new plan but now we put travelling difficulties to one side and headed on a rickety old bus to the Terracotta Warriors. Since me and Chris had decided before that we wouldn’t hire nay English speaking guides, I confidently walked passed the small group of “official” guides who verbally barked at us, claiming how vital they were to learn anything about the Terracotta Warriors. If I hadn’t have decided already, their sales pitch alone would have been enough to discourage me from wanting to be led around by another person who was after my money. But to my amazement, Chris stopped and listened to her.
The most terrible thing about these guides is that they try to make you feel guilty for not hiring them.
“You’ll only come here once in your life”, “you need me”, “you won’t learn anything about it without me.” But I could watch Chris’ confidence seep into the dusty ground as he haggled a mere ¥5 off her original offer of ¥50 to ¥45. Pissed-off, I approached him and said “what are you doing?” and then he repeated the same gobbledygook that the guide had just given him.
“OK” I said, “I think now’s a good time to separate for a while. I’ll meet you back in the hostel tonight.”
They were certainly worth seeing and I enjoyed walking around by myself, peering at the English and Chinese inscriptions and occasionally muttering to myself. Originally these life-sized clay soldiers were painted in bold colours and held real life-sized weapons. But now the colours had faded, the weapons were stored out of public sight (why?) and two thousand years of fire, water leakage and theft had reduced many of these models to great piles of clay, with the occasional head or arm poking through.
Over 2000 years old, the most astounding thing was how many of these models were yet to be uncovered. It reminded me of walking through the Egyptian museum in Cairo as I glanced at objects that had been made in an age impossible for me to imagine.
Another small but equally amazing feature was how some of the Warrior’s weapons on display (there were only a few) were perfectly smooth and sharp, like they had been made the day before. Apparently they had been preserved with chromium 2000 years ago, a method of preserving metal that was invented just after the second world war! As I did in Egypt, I got the sense that our current age of technology is not the same one as that of 2000 years ago. So what happened between now and then?
I met Chris at eight o’clock that evening back in the hostel and then I went on the internet for a couple of hours, writing long messages to Aki and Maki. Me and Maki kept darting around the same subject but neither of us could quite bring ourselves to ask the obvious question: were we going to be a couple when we live in London?
I was happy to read that Aki was doing OK, getting on with life and spending more time with her friends. I went to sleep thinking once again about these two completely different people.
Chris really wanted to hire bicycles and cycle round the city. I wanted to meet Leo, a Chinese guy who was a part of the global-free-loaders.com group. This is basically a network of people form all across the world who are willing to let travellers stay at their place for free, no strings attached. In response to a request for accommodation, he replied saying that he no longer had his own flat so we couldn’t stay with him but he’d be happy to show us around Xian. Chris was determined to cycle by himself, so I met Leo by myself. He came to the hotel and we immediately fell into a nice friendship of honesty and gentle cultural comparisons. First we got a bus to a restaurant to meet two of his friends where I tried a delicious rice and pineapple dish served in a pineapple.
One of these friends of his worked in a new bakery in the centre of town, which his aunt owns. It was a flashy place with young assistants ready to give advice on your choice of cake. Leo told me that it had only been open for just over a week and was already popular with students, who apparently have a lot on money and can therefore afford this bakery’s inflated prices.
We then walked to a couple of local universities and just sat and chatted. Leo was a really interesting guy with a great flare for English. He was fluent and could easily understand me even though he had never left China. He told me about his dreams to live abroad but every time I said “why not?” he would list a hundred and one reasons why it would never work out and I explained that most of these reasons were either fictitious, highly unlikely or easy to solve.
China’s a strange place. As we walked past the university fence, I noticed all these stencil-sprayed adverts, all with a phone number and Leo told me they were people offering fake diplomas and exam results. He informed me that it was almost “English Corner” time, when many students would gather in the main square to talk in English. Rather looking forward to the prospect of being a superstar, I wanted to stay but Leo said I’d just be asked the same questions all the time, which I knew would be true, so we moved into a new area having once again visited the bakery for some free strange oily coleslaw sandwiches.
We walked into a really pretty open area lined with new old-style buildings (with the curled roof corners and all) which Leo assured me had a musical fountain display every day at 8pm. We walked to a large flat polished marble square with coloured lights inset in the ground, about 8- metres by 80 metres.
“Oh this is nice” I commented as we continued walking through the square.
“It continues down here too, to the water over there” said Leo, and I realised that this fountain square was just one of six 80 by 80 metre squares that stretched right across the park. By now it was dark and almost 8pm, so we got in a position that Leo told me would keep us dry, and sure enough the music started and all six squares lit up and I watched one of the most dazzling and beautiful sights in my life. The water shot up in rhythm to the music, moving diagonally, in circles, in ovals, in waves, in any pattern you could think of, all with different coloured lights. The water made shapes you could never imagine it could make and the whole thing was truly breathtaking, and also free.
On the way back to the bakery, we walked through a beautiful newly built area that consisted of small squares of grass and carefully positioned decorative trees, lit with subtle lighting. I commented to Leo, “you know, this would be wrecked within weeks if it was in England.”
“Why?”
“Well, because there are a lot of dickheads in England with nothing better to do.” The sheer fact that he couldn’t imagine why anyone would purposely wreck something like that made me think about one of England’s worst elements: vandalism.
Back at the bakery we chatted more about Leo’s possible future as a tour guide or Mandarin teacher abroad and I left extremely happy to have met such a nice guy. When I got back to the money-sucking hotel/hostel, Chris and I chatted about our day and although we had originally planned (well, Chris had) to climb a mountain the next day, I told him that I wanted to see Leo again. Getting to know the locals was more important than following tourist trails for me. He seemed a bit stumped and told me that he wasn’t very good at changing plans. Bloody hell I thought, had Chris really ever been travelling before?! Isn’t not having a plan the very essence of real travelling?! I could see now that we’d be spending more than a few days apart from each other over the next five weeks or so.

And so I spent the next day with Leo, just following him around on his daily schedule. Fortunately for me, he didn’t have a day job, just some English teaching assistance in a small English school an hour away from where he lives. With his great English skills, he could be doing so much more so I persisted with reminders of his own dreams, as he had told me about the day before.
I met the aunt of his friend who owned the bakery, an interesting lady who had lived in America for six years, but Leo’s English was better than hers. She kept asking him when she didn’t know a word, and her Chinese accent was thicker. She drove us to an industrial estate and we walked into a graphic design studio where they were designing paper bowls for a new fruit, ice and bean product to be sold in the bakery, which is apparently common during Chinese summers. They asked for my help so I gave my opinion, and they changed the design to follow it! So it seems I will leave my mark in China in a pretty unusual way.
After another free meal at the bakery, which had seemed to become my Xian base centre, we got the bus to Leo’s small English school and met the main teacher, a good friend of his called Austin. Austin was one of those instantly likeable, full-of-enthusiasm-for-everything guys: perfect for an English teacher. I sat in on the class, which consisted of four girls, the youngest about sixteen, the oldest about thirty, Leo and Austin. Each student spoke a very different standard of English to the next, and what with the amount of Chinese being spoken (with Leo interpreting), I was not sure how useful the lesson really was. After a ¥3 ride back into own on a rickety old noisy tricycle taxi thing, I walked back to my hostel and chatted to Maki on the internet while I wrote a long email to Aki. A strange situation indeed.

The next day I met Leo for lunch in a restaurant that served “waist” noodles. These are huge fat noodles, which you order a few at a time, about 4cm wide and 40cm long, which you mix into a soup of herbs, tofu, tomato and other unidentifiable things.
We took a leisurely stroll through the city, passing hundreds of shops, many with techno blasting out the front, some with cute girls with microphones doing some promotion. It’s easy to see the entire range of China’s economic classes by simply standing on the corner of a street. There are rich couples with designer handbags, tiny phones and huge cars which drive past hoards of day-time shoppers in more casual clothes, either walking or on electric or petrol powered mopeds. Then you have the “jacket” class. These are men dressed in tatty clothes with filthy hands and inconsistently dark faces, but all wearing a jacket, usually riding bicycles. These men were either carrying, eating or cooking food on the street. And finally there are the beggars and the dodgy street sellers, which seem to be one and the same. I’m quite sure a man selling franchised labels of water and soda who looks like he hasn’t smelt clean water in a year isn’t an official representative of Coca-Cola products.
We went to the main public library and I browsed in the English books section while Leo dozed on a table. After some more walking around, trying to get him to promise me that he’d get going on getting a job abroad we said goodbye, which really just felt like more of a ‘see you later’.
I met Chris in the hostel and picked up our bags, which the hostel tried to charge us ¥10 just to hold them for seven hours. I argued the price down to nothing. After buying four large beers to help knock us out (we were going to be on hard seats on twelve hours), we rushed to the station, grabbing some fried vegetable rolls on the way from some random street stall. It was absolute bedlam at the platform, just chaos. People were pushing into other people cramming into door, guards blowing whistles and gesturing aggressively and a sense of panic was everywhere. I just held onto the knowledge that we actually had seats, unlike many of the others.
The journey was just awful. The train was filthy, nothing like the other trains we had got on before. Dirty people, well, 99% men, were sprawled about everywhere: on the floor, against doors, on the wash basins. People were actually perched on the sinks trying to sleep on them. And everyone looked miserable. People were smoking under the “no smoking” signs, spitting in the aisles and always coughing great hacking coughs that sounded like their intestines would be revealed at any moment, and shouting at each other.
And then I started to feel sick, more and more so. My stomach started swelling to the point that I’d run out of holes to reposition my belt buckle. What was happening?! Was I going to explode like a balloon? I couldn’t stop burping awful pungent burps. I felt like I just needed a crap and then all would be fine but when I tried to go (there were no people sleeping in the toilet which kinda surprised me), I just couldn’t.
I felt worse and worse and I noticed how horrible my environment was more and more. Some fairly respectable looking young Chinese guy had started chatting to Chris, who wasn’t really (understandably) in the mood to listen to yet more enthusiastic broken English. But he turned out to be a big help as he helped us to upgrade our tickets so we could get beds and I desperately needed to lie down. Midnight passed and we had just settled into our new beds and I was starting to feel like I wanted to vomit. I didn’t get any sleep as I kept going to the toilet and dry gagging, unable to vomit-up anything, constantly sipping water to try to control my feverish body. As I watched the first morning light drain into the dank sleeper carriage, I finally vomited a thin-carrier bag full of vomit which was a tremendous relief as the previous dry retching, when I sounded like some kind of deranged animal, coughing up air, was hideous, but I only felt a little better.

FROM SHANGHAI TO LONDON BY TRAIN: China: Nanjing

2006-12-28T08:48:00.001-08:00

The first thing we needed to do was to buy a ticket for the next leg of the journey, Nanjing to Xian. We found a tiny ticket booth with only once section open and after queuing for twenty minutes, a woman behind us (who again spoke good English), told us we needed to go upstairs and offered to help us further. After another then minutes of queuing, we got our ticket for a ‘hard-sleeper’, a night train leaving three days later.
Our residence for the next three nights was to be in Nanjing University dorms so we headed there. I bought some delicious fresh pineapple on a stick (things on a stick seem to do big business in China), which was much needed as it turned out to be an hour-long walk from the station, which, with our heavy backpacks, isn’t funny. The map in Chris’ China Lonely Planet offered very little help but after a lot of guess-work we found the university. Then it struck me that we had no idea where to go so we made sleeping gestures to various security guards and were vaguely pointed in the right direction. Sure enough, these were the halls of residence for the university students, set quaintly in a twenty floor concrete tower.
We rested and dined at a very local super-cheap restaurant, the idea being to pick entirely random items but the woman there made gestures that indicated either slight mental retardation, or the fact that we’d never be capable of eating the things we’d chosen. She produced an old note book with a dozen or so hand-written translations of dishes. The food was great and during the meal, she asked for Chris’ Lonely Planet so she could copy out some more translations of dishes from the “useful phrases” section.
We wondered around and found that this area was much more relaxed and studenty than anywhere in Shanghai, with may bars and restaurants. We bought some fresh yogurts from a tiny street kiosk and sat down on some boxes to drink them (we had to return the bottles). We thought it was milk before we tasted it but instead it was a very sweet rich plain yogurt. I turned to some while guys sitting near us and we got chatting. They were students here, on of them studying (Chinese) medicine, both from America. We joked about how the perception of western medicine must match out idea of eastern medicine: “those strange westerners with their little magic pills”, and they told us a little about living in China. I mentioned how strange it was to have everybody staring at us all the time, and asked if they were talking about us as well. They replied that when you’ve been here a while, you get to learn the kind of things they say about you but you wish you’d never known.
The next day we hired bicycles from a guy who didn’t speak a word of English but we managed to conclude that he wanted a ¥100 deposit for each bike, a charge of ¥15 and they were to be returned by 8pm. It’s really amazing how much you can communicate without a common language. We set off for the Nanjing Memorial Museum, which was all about the Nanjing Massacre of 300,000 Chinese by Japanese soldiers. We got impressively lost deep in the dry open suburbs where there were few cars, few people and surprisingly, a huge exhibition complex, so we asked for help there. We compared our useless Lonely Planet map to their detailed local-area map and discovered that one of the most useful phrases you could need when travelling was not in the guide-book, being “where are we on this map?”
We eventually found the museum and were offered personal assistance by an English-speaking member of the museum who was working there during her PhD in tourism. She guided us across the mass grave of over 100,000 people, showed us piles of the victim’s bones, and added more information that wasn’t popular knowledge in China. For example, the leader of the “safety-zone”, an area set aside to help fleeing Chinese people in Nanjing, was a Nazi, even though he is heralded across China as a national hero. We read accounts of the Japanese burning, raping, beheading, burying alive, machine gunning and bayoneting their victims, all mostly innocent civilians. The museum spoke of the importance of never forgetting everywhere although the general feeling portrayed was one of anger against the Japanese rather than the need to remember such events for the sake of all mankind. The museum offered a purely one-sided view and gave no possible reason as to why this atrocity was committed.
We rode to a huge market area, filled with restaurants, stalls and heart-breakingly low-tech versions of Japanese photo booths, where you could get a cutsie picture with a variety of different backgrounds and graphics. By now it was dark and there were long rows of red Chinese lamps lining the streets, all lit up, and many buildings were lined with small lights, giving a strange synthetic beauty to everything. We chose a fairly random restaurant and dined on fried rice, sweet and sour pork and omelette soup. We had lost track of time a little and realised we only had twenty minutes before 8 o’clock. Nanjing’s main roads are formed in a grid pattern and it’s traffic lights all have large indicators that count-down in seconds when the lights will change.
Nanjing is a very busy little city, with about six million people, and so our dash through the city centre wasn’t without fear as we rode by huge dirty bushes, crazy cab drivers and constantly beeping scooters. What made the scene more surreal was the fact that we could always see two or three of these down-counting traffic lights ahead of us, and we were desperately trying to make the next set before zero, and then the next set, and the next, as if we were in some arcade racing game where you have to keep making the checkpoints or your money runs out.
After 25 minutes of this frantic cycling, we arrived at 8.05pm to an unfazed Chinaman who gave us out deposits without fuss and then locked-up for the night. We bought some beers and gate-crashed a party in the courtyard of the halls we were staying in. It turned out to be someone’s birthday and nobody spoke English apart from a Swiss and German girl who were about as warm and welcoming as the Chinese were to the Japanese in 1937. After an hour of so of pained conversation, I gave up and watched TV in our room while Chris located some Japanese guys and had a chat. Feeling drowsy with the weak Chinese beer, I laid down and thought about Aki and Maki. I desperately want to see both of them again. I’m sure I’ll see Maki again, and that’s wonderful, but I don’t know about Aki. Surely her pride or dignity will stop her from visiting me in the UK. Once again I found myself unable to answer any of these questions so I just read my book until I feel asleep.

We hired the same bicycles again the next day and rode to a mountainous area near the city to climb up and get a good view of the city. After five minutes or so into the gentle ascent, two very young looking girls said hello to us. I started talking with them and discovered that they were actually about twenty-two years old, even though they looked about fifteen. Their English was pretty good if a little strange. One of them had a pot of dried sugared plums and when she accidentally tipped them onto the ground the other girl said “oh no, I think surely your heart is melting.” I accounted this to either poor English or a keen sense of poetry beyond that of an ordinary person. The view from the top was almost comical, if not tragic: a sea of mist, dust and pollution only allowed the closest proportion of the city to be seen and everything else was drowned in smog.
“Oh today is much clearer than yesterday” one of the girls said, which bought to me images of people wandering off the mountain because they couldn’t see two steps in front of themselves.
On the way down we talked about how China and Japan compared and found the girls to be interested in studying Japanese. We rode through the city again and to a bridge that crosses a famous river in Nanjing. My only reference to the river was from the museum the previous day when I read that the Japanese had run-out of petrol to burn all the dead Chinese so they just pushed the rest into the river. This river was the barrier that marked the fate of so many Chinese because they simply couldn’t get across in time to escape from the approaching Japanese. Again, the bridge just faded into a haze and you couldn’t see the other end.
We then rode into town to look at a large bookstore and within minutes, a Chinese guy asked us if we needed help. He directed us to the English section which was the size of a small phone-box. Disappointed, we turned to look for somewhere for dinner and this guy clearly wanted to help us so we asked him to show us some places that the girls on the mountains had singled out. We found a dumpling restaurant without an English menu so this crazy guy ordered for us, pausing between items to check with me that we were gonna actually pay for him,
“you invite me yes?”
“Sure”, I replied, all too used to this kind of subtlety what with having lived in Japan for almost two years. So we ate out dumplings, and he gave us his card, practically begging us to email him sometime. With under an hour left before we had to return our bikes, we tried to squeeze in one more sight, the city’s entrance gates. They were nicely lit in the dark and the high solid brick wall had more lights lining the top. It was strange to think that when the Japanese invaded, this wall was the city’s only defence, and now it’s just a tourist sight. Again, we got the bikes back five minutes late, and then Chris passed-out in our room while I went on the internet to email Aki and Maki. Aki was online so we chatted and I cried a little. I had an early night for the sake of having no other plan.

This was to be the day of our first long railway journey, from Nanjing to Xian, on a not-very-comfortable-sounding “hard-sleeper” carriage over fourteen hours, leaving at 5pm. We had an extremely lazy day, just milling around, using the internet (I chatted to Maki for an hour or so, it was great) and chatting to each other. Suddenly it was four o’clock and we met our first major disagreement: I wanted to get the bus and he wanted to take a taxi. We got the taxi, at a cost of eight times more than what the bus would have cost and arrived in plenty of time. Again, the train seemed pretty modern and our “hard” beds were, well, yes, hard, but they were more than bearable. There were six beds to each section which were connected by a small open walkway running across the side of the train. We had middle beds. The highest were the cheapest and the lowest had the most head room and were more expensive; these occupants could use a tine table and while sitting on their beds. The top-bed people could use small fold-down seats in the walk-way, again with a tiny table and the people in the middle-bunks had to make do with just their beds.
For some unknown reason, the Lonely Planet had listed these beds as being the best. I had left my bag of snacks and water in the taxi so as Chris crashed out on his bed, I waited for passing trolleys. I watched as a snack-trolley went by, and then a hot-food trolley passed and I watched what money was being exchanged, an unfortunate necessity in China to make sure I was paying the same as the locals, so I watched the change carefully. But then he was gone and I’d missed it.
I eventually bought a big pot of instant noodles and emptied the various plastic sachets into the small dried noodle-brick. I found one of the many huge boiling water urns and started to eat the spiciest noodles I’d ever had. It turns out that one of the sachets was concentrated chilli paste and I’d used all of it. It took about forty-five minutes to eat. I bought a pot of pineapple pieces that were passing by thinking this might ease my stomach, which it seemed to do.
I then walked up and down the train, entering the restaurant car which seemed to be only for employees, the police and other dodgy-looking characters. I got chatting with the couples on the beds below us, who offered us a place to stay in Xian and gave us a number of a college who would accept us at a cheap rate. The guy did all of the talking, and he seemed a little overly confident in his “knowledge” of different cultures.
“Yes. I know much about Western Culture because I study it, part of my tourism studies. “
“Oh, when did you go to Europe?”
“”No, never. But I’m a tourism teacher. I know about your culture well.”
“That’s great” I replied.
“Yes. For example, I know that Chinese are very noisy when they eat dinner.”
He was starting to really sound as if he could see his own culture from an outsider’s point of view so I agreed, “yes, I guess so.”
“And you English are completely silent when you eat, because you feel the eyes of God watching you.”
Perhaps not. I paused, “um… what do you mean?”
He repeated his last sentence pretty much word for word and in the end I agreed whole-heartedly as it dawned on me that nothing was going to change his mind.
After exchanging brief conversation with the two other men in our section I settled down to a very unsettled sleep, but felt surprisingly happy and optimistic to once again be truly travelling.

FROM SHANGHAI TO LONDON BY TRAIN: China: Shanghai

2006-12-28T08:47:00.000-08:00

When I opened the curtains in the morning, I peered across a sea of small old tiled buildings and looking down at a somewhat generic ‘Asian’ scene. Bicycles loaded high-up with boxes and food, animals and cages, beggars, rich people, and many street vendors. We needed a cheaper place to stay so we set out across Nanching Road, the main strip in Shanghai.
“You want watch, DVD… very cheap for you… hello, where do you come from?” were blurted to us by men and woman, and more obscurely: “you wanna come to art exhibition?” which we later discovered was a genuine invitation just with a not-so-genuine entry-fee. Everybody had someway of squeezing money from us so every ‘hello’ from a Chinese person was met with well-founded suspicion.
We found a tourist information centre and on entry, discovered three young people, about our age, all eating lunch. Nobody attempted to acknowledge our presence (even though we were clearly the only customers) so we approached the guy who was concentrating hard on his noodles and asked what places we could stay in tonight. He replied after a second’s pause:
“No. No places.”
I persisted,
“you mean there’s nowhere in Shanghai we can stay?”
“Yes, nowhere, sorry.”
He seemed eager to return to his noodles. They did point-out an internet café so we went there and after five minutes of checking out passports and visa, settled to check our mail and to find details of places to stay in Shanghai. An email from Aki sent me spinning again… that chin… that cute cute chin which I’ll probably never see again… just unbearable horrible heart-ache. Those tears, those hard sad sobs. I cried in the dark computer room, wondering when this pain would stop. Thank-god we’re always on the move, I thought. It would be too much to stay in one place and just think… think…hope… of Aki… and Maki.
Lunch was a KFC meal, with a cup of hot orange juice, a first for me. We moved to the next place we’d be staying in, a large YHA hostel known as “Captain’s Hostel”. We had a dorm room with about eight other beds and Chris was a bit annoyed as he’d been placed right by the door, which didn’t have one of those heavy-duty-slow-down things on the top. We set out for a walk across “The Bund”, a famous walk-way by the river, decorated with street vendors every ten metres or so, selling watermelon and pineapple on sticks, river tours, drinks and various types of meat, cooked over small charcoal fires. Across the river was the somewhat hazy sky-scraper district with many oddly-shaped buildings, in particular a huge globe in the middle of four vertical columns which reduced to a large TV aerial at the very top. It was kind of red and dirty gold coloured but the constant Shanghai mist made it hard for any vividness.
We wandered into the more authentic backstreets, past a group of men who were flying extremely high fish-shaped kites across one of Shanghai’s main roads, and into an entirely different world. Everything was to do with food: people were either carrying it, cooking it, maintaining it (there were many washing up bowls filled with fish with hoses running water in a constant flow) or eating it. It seemed to be rush hour now as people dodged between endless ancient bicycles and mopeds and electric bikes. We passed hundreds of vague shops, at the back of houses, repair shops, fish, fruit, vegetables, books, many textile shops and more strangely, places with young women in them who would open the door and call “hello” as we walked past.
It was a chaotic free-for-all when it came to roads, although there did seem to be some vague adherence to the many traffic lights. In complete contrast to Japan, nobody waited for the little green man apart from when there were traffic wardens, armed with whistles, who blew and pointed at cars that didn’t follow the lights with such an intensity, you’d have though the drivers had just personally insulted the warden’s mother.

That night, we met a friend of Chris’ from long ago, a guy called Kiren who now lived in Shanghai as an English teacher. Chris hadn’t seen him for about four years and didn’t know what to expect but he turned out to be the nicest guy you could ever hope to meet. He clearly loved living in China, and having been here only six months, was able to confidently converse with the locals. He even seemed to enjoy chatting to the beggars and dodgy salesmen. Over dinner in a pretty nice place, he told us that he always had opportunities to practise, what with people always approaching you. After dinner and wan coconut juice, he walked us around the city centre and pointed out some sights, at one point referencing a huge concert hall that was the first building in history to be literally picked-up and moved to a new location, apparently because it had been built too close to a busy road and the noise from the traffic could be heard during performances. We passed many beggars with abnormalities such as a missing arms or burnt withered hands, and these people all had themselves in clear display. Although not warm, one guy with no hand or arm was kneeling in the subway with no top. These types of beggars were everywhere and it really made me think how sad a total lack of a welfare-system can be. Shanghai’s metro closes quite early so Kiren had to get back after pointing out a shorter way for us to get back to out hostel with a weak nautical theme.
The next day we had to decide when we’d move on to Nanjing, so we took a metro to the north railway station and discussed in a Starbucks what we should do. I disliked being in a Starbucks for the usual reasons but also because I was paying international prices once again for a local product, some black tea. We settled on leaving the next day and started queuing in the one counter out of twenty that said “English speaking”. The amount of people pushing-in was no=where near what I’d expected and we managed to get out “hard-seat” tickets (hard being second-class, soft being first) after dealing with a rather blunt severe ticket woman.
We decided to walk back to the hostel via the main market area which sold a huge amount of crap touristy crap but also a lot of intriguing food. I kept seeing people eating what looked like a deep-fried bat on a stick and after some serious consideration, bought one myself for a closer look. It was some type of bird. It’s head was sagging downwards, as if ashamed. I couldn’t quite deal with this little beaked face, so I plucked it off and enjoyed the rest of the remarkably meaty and tasty bird. Then we practised haggling, which is expected almost everywhere in China. Chris wanted a wind-up Chairman Mao watch with a flicking arm that waved every second. He got the initial price of ¥120 down to ¥20 within a minute. All you need to do it seems, is to offer a low price and then slowly walk away until they rapidly reduce the price to your original offer.
“¥120? No no no… ¥80… last price ¥70… wait… last price ¥60… last price ¥20” was about how it went.
We took a quieter road by the river to get back to the hostel and found one of Shanghai’s many out-door gym areas for public use. We attempted to use the various pieces of equipment but a few totally perplexed us, until an old man wandered over to us and demonstrated how to use them and what parts of the body they were supposed to help, while speaking Chinese. Somewhat more confused than when we arrived, we continued onwards and once we arrived, I got chatting with two Japanese guys in our dorm, who were traveling as a celebration of their university graduation. Having quickly used up my entire Japanese vocabulary within minutes, I was happy when a Chinese guy came back to the dorm, who called himself Davy, and spoke English and Japanese. He told us that he lived in Japan and had a very good friend there (surely his boyfriend) and was back in China because of a new job opportunity that wasn’t turning out to be much fun, so he was in a hostel as he didn’t want to commit to being in an apartment. I asked him to take us to a good cheap restaurant, so the five of us found ourselves in a busy basic place just around the corner. The prices on display were very low but when we were handed an English menu, everything looked more expensive. Davy confirmed this and asked the waitress why. She responded it was because the food is cooked a little differently for foreigners, total nonsense of course. It was just another chance to con us. So after some seemingly high-tension dialogue between Davy and the waitress, she agreed to charge us the same. On the way back, we bought a few bottles of “Tsingtao”, which comes in large green bottles but is 3% alcohol, and drunk them back in the hostel, not wanting to go to the hostel’s bar to pay ¥35 per Tsingtao, as opposed to the ¥3 they cost from a convenience store. We got Davy a sweet fruity drink for a sweet fruity guy, to thank him for showing us the restaurant.
As I closed my eyes that night, and the French singing Spanish guitar player had finally sand the last of his many encores just outside our room, I thought of the two people who had been floating around my head with equal intensity: Aki and Maki. Funny how similar those names are but what such opposites they are as people. I was too tired to cry once again when I thought of Aki’s heart-breaking sobbing, but still alert enough to get yet another pang of heart-ache, guilt and love for her. I believe I’ve seen the saddest sight in the world, but I’m the only one who’ll believe that.

We woke at about 8.30 which seemed to be the norm on this trip and after collecting our things together and saying goodbye to the Japanese guys, got the metro to the railway station. The Shanghai metro has people selling all sorts of rubbish in the subways and a unique feature is the to-the-second count-down that the information screen gives until the next train. It would have been more impressive if it didn’t keep jumping back up a few seconds,
“20-19-18-17-16-35-34-33-32-37-36-35…” until the train arrived, which seemed to somewhat undermine the whole automated point of it.
Once we arrived, we needed to find the right platform but in actuality, we needed to find the right waiting-room, a huge room filled with people of all kinds, many watching the huge TV screen at the front which was playing an English premier league game. British football and snooker are very popular in China. After some announcement was made, everybody reacted in a way which suggested a delay. This was confirmed to us a few seconds later by a sweet young Chinese girl who spoke good English and explained the train will be fifteen minutes late.
“Wow, you speak great English! Did you live abroad?”
“No, I just like to study English.”
“Did you learn English at school then?”
“Not really. We just studied grammar and reading. I learn with movies and English TV.”
I’d managed to lose Chris in the crowd and she guided me to the right platform. I was a little surprised by the newness and softness of the ‘hard’ seats and was relieved to find Chris next to me, although someone was already sitting in my seat. I showed my ticket and he loved although the guy next to me was clearly unaware of my existence and leaned over me and stretched his legs apart as if I wasn’t there. There was a woman coming through the carriages with hot water for people’s flasks of tea, and occasionally a tray of snacks or drinks was on sale. Half-way through the journey, the Chinese girl from the waiting room appeared and told us what a beautiful place her home-town was , and much better than Nanjing, our destination. She seemed a little disappointed when I said we couldn’t go, much as we’d love to see her town. The watery landscape passed and I asked someone when our stop was. We arrived in Nanjing without incident.

FROM SHANGHAI TO LONDON BY TRAIN: Japan

2006-12-28T08:41:00.000-08:00

Here is my diary for the 6 week journey I took going home from Tokyo. I'm typing it up as I go so please be paitent. It starts in a pretty sombre mood but if you can get over that, it gets better I think. It was written as I travelled. I hope you can enjoy it. Each blog entry will represent a part of the journey, starting with :

Japan: The Saddest Day

I never thought I’d be looking at the passing urban suburbs of Tokyo and thinking how I’ll miss it all. As I drove with Aki to the airport, we burst into tears for the majority of the journey. I’ve rarely known such sadness. This was it. This was the final journey to the airport, having been in Japan for twenty months, having fallen in and out and in love, having had my world turned upside-down, spun-around and shaken-up. The way her chin pointed up sharply and quivered as she sobbed hard broke my heart again and again. Her desperate croaky voice, broken by crying:
“I don’t wanna go to the airport… no… no… don’t go Trevor… don’t go… let’s go somewhere… let’s go to Disney Land” and my heart broke again, shattered and scattered across this country that was once so foreign and unwelcoming to me. Now I clung to it desperately, unable to comprehend the enormity of leaving my life here, my friends, my routines, Aki, and Maki. Maki is another story.
We were late for check-in and I had to rush from one counter to another, as my travelling buddy Chris, and his Japanese girlfriend of six months happily waited for me and joked with each other. Aki stood a few metres away, in her own desperate world, sobbing and sobbing as she leaned against a huge pillar, unable to support herself. I finally her and told her I loved her, and I’d see her soon, unable to know if either was true. She held her handkerchief against her beautiful smooth face, against the mask she was wearing, in an attempt to convince the strangers around her that it was all just a strong bout of hayfever. But her inconsolable sobs gave her away. I cried and cried as the incredibly strong bond between us was starting to be roughly torn apart. I had to leave. Chris was waiting. The plane was waiting. This was the plan. But I couldn’t help asking myself again and again “why am I leaving Japan now?”
As I was boarding onto the plane, I noticed the most stark and beautiful sunset I’d ever seen in the land of the rising sun.
So, our plan was to travel by land from Shanghai to London over about six weeks, passing through China, Mongolia, Russia, Beralus, Poland, Germany, Belgium and France. I’m not expecting all to go according to plan but I’ve realised that that’s why people like travelling. Instead of turning around and landing back in Tokyo, as my heart and soul ached for, our plane landed uneventfully in Shanghai in fog that was so thick, we still thought we were in the sky as we looked out the window and the plane suddenly jolted onto the runway.

Once we were through customs, we collected our backpacks and searched for ways of getting to central Shanghai.
“You want taxi? You want taxi?” was the mantra of the shady tourist-fishermen as we walked around looking for a phone to contact one of the places listed in Chris’ “Lonely Planet” guide to China. A semi-hysterical group of young Chinese ladies were frantically trying to get our attention:
“You want hotel? You want hotel?”
We went over to them and was asjed about our budget for a bed. Chris said “three hundred and fifty” and her reaction failed to hide her happy shock to which she replied “oh, we have many options for three-fifty”.
But I’d landed without any Chinese cash so I found an international ATm and withdrew an almost random figure of ¥1000. I had no idea what the Yuan was worth. Most of the hotel’s phone numbers in Chris’ new-edition guide didn’t work but we found one place, the Nanching Hotel. The guy told us to get the no.2 metro and get off at… somewhere. It just sounded like noise. We went to a taxi desk and were told a bus would take 2 hours but a taxi would take forty-five minutes or one hour, depending on which liar you listened to.
“Can we get the metro?” we asked.
“No. Metro stops at 9pm.” It was 10pm. I wandered out the exit and found some buses. Instead of the ¥350 cab ride that was being strongly advised to us, we took the bus for ¥16, which tool fifty minutes, over-taking hundreds of slow driving taxis as it sped down the highways. We got talking to a Chinese guy who was coming home from his job as an aircraft maintenance engineer. Having formed the impression from the Japanese that the Chinese hate them, I was surprised to hear he could speak a little Japanese and liked Japan very much. He told us that his English name was “Pannis”. When I asked how does a Chinese person work-out their English name, he said “we don’t. Just choose a cool word. I like ‘Pannis’”

Once we were dropped off somewhere apparently vaguely near our hotel, we eventually arrived to a surprisingly nice place, having passed through downtown Shanghai late in the evening with offers of “beautiful girl” and “ma-sar-gee”. It occurred to me what a strange impression of backpackers these guys must have, as if the first thing on our minds is to get lard, having just stepped onto the country.
Once we settled into the room, I flicked through the TV channels, and was surprised to discover a few English speaking channels. I tried to put thoughts of Aki and Maki out of my mind and went to bed.

Looking ahead...

2006-12-03T14:26:00.000-08:00

I just got off the phone to a friend and realised that I gotta stop looking in the past. I must look ahead in to the future. I think I only want to go back to Tokyo to recreate the same situation, exactly as it was, same friends, same girlfriend, same situation, I may be wrong there, but either way, Tokyo was a whole little life in itself, and I loved it because I knew it had to end.

So I must look ahead now. What can I do after this year teaching music at the high school?

Lost in Translation

2006-11-29T12:34:00.000-08:00

You know, I never really talked much about the times I went to drink at the bar in the hotel that Lost in Translation was filmed in. That film is sepcial to me because when I first thoght about going to Japan, it was with the JET programme (a government-run scheme where young foreigners can be classroom assistants in Japanese schools for English lessons). Although Tokyo had always facinated me, I never really thought seriously about living there until I watched this movie. When I tell most people this, they usually say that the movie made them especially not want to live in Tokyo but for me, it really caught me. I seemed to like the idea of it being the ultimate metropolis, a place of opportunity, surely, a place of excess and noise and light, yet many other things that we would never consider but Lost in Traslation starts to get you thinking about such things.

This photo was taken on my mobile I was issued with out there. It wasn't a great model so the picture resolution is poor but even so, it shows the warmth of the barm, which incidently in on the very top floor of the Park Hyatt hotel in a central area of Tokyo called Shinjuku. It was really special to be there. I first went with the guy in the picture, Justin, a good friend, who like me, felt like this was somewhere we had to return to one day, once we were successful and full of money. It cost £10 just to sit down, with nothing included. But the atmosphere was bang-on exactly like you would have expected form watching the movie: classy, warm, intense, and smooth. There was even a jazz singer just like in the movie. I still carry the receipt around with me in my wallet. Is that really sad?!

My Local Market

2006-11-27T14:36:00.000-08:00

Here's an odd bit about the local fruit and veg market near where I lived, unfinished.

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Every morning on the way to work, I’d pass by the local fruit and vegetable shop. It took a while to muster up the courage to actually buy anything from there as it looked like once of those places only regulars ever go to. I didn’t want to feel like I was invading some private unofficial club by attempting to purchase discounted fruit and vegetables. I guess the beauty of big soul-less supermarkets is that you are never in danger of feeling out of place.
This particular market was next to the local 7-11, about a minute’s walk from my apartment, and it was fantastic, offering everything at much lower prices than supermarkets offer. The rule of cheap huge supermarkets verses more expensive independent shops doesn’t seem to apply to Japan, although the price of a watermelon in either location is still around $25. Having asked and asked about why fruit is so expensive here, I’ve been met with as many answers as there are varieties of rice-dishes in this green and mountainous land. In fact, the mountainous landscape of Japan has been one such answer: the farmers have such little fertile flat land that they must charge hugely inflated prices to justify any farming at all. Another answer involved the Japanese desire to have their food look as good as it tastes; dirty looking apples, battered lemons and non-spherical oranges just won’t do. The fruit does indeed look better than any other fruit I’ve seen, a lot of it being individually wrapped with protective foam, which is nice, but I guess at the end of the day, I’ll just be eating it, rather than putting it on my mantle piece for visitors to comment how orange my oranges are or how perfectly hairy my kiwi fruit is. (Speaking of Kiwi fruit, don’t you think it’s strange how this is the only fruit in the English language which doesn’t have a name of its own, just a reference to its origin. I spend many a lonely night thinking up names for this poor forgotten fruit. How about “Hairy Fruit” or “Scoop fruit”?)
This market was one of those semi-outdoor/indoor types with the fresh stuff on display outside and a selection of what seemed to be anything you could possibly need (for a Japanese kitchen) inside. When I pass, I am usually running to catch the train, but on the rare occasions when I am not attempting to cover the course of a 7 minute walk in 2 minutes, I sometimes say ‘hello’ to one of the market assistants. I have been surprised to get a response in English from her sometimes, usually ‘good morning’. This one assistant was the only person who gave me definite eye-contact, thus inspiring me to actually offer some kind of pleasantry. She doesn’t look Japanese, her skin is darker and her face has sharper features, and she seems to be working for the owners of the market, rather than with, even though she appears to be approaching middle-age. The other workers looked typically Japanese, and there is one pretty girl, maybe about my age, who I always wonder about as I pass. She was probably the daughter of one of the market owners and I know it’s wrong to say, but she just looked too pretty to be working in a fruit and vegetable market. I’d never spoken to her of course.

Another Student's Essay

2006-11-27T14:32:00.000-08:00

And this one is titled "Why Is the Media Coverage on Japan So Biased?"

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Why Is the Media Coverage on Japan So Biased?
Seven Problems that Prevent the Improvement of Media Coverage on Japan

I have come to realize that many of the articles in the media in the western countries especially in the United States publishes on Japanese society and culture, received from its office in Tokyo, are heavily biased. There should be, I would imagine, a certain set of reasons behind why these kinds of heavily biased articles are written over and over again. The subject of these articles may differ, but the quite a lot lately about the issue of biased media coverage on Japan, and have come up with several problem that seem to permeate articles in the foreign media.

First of all, all national media, in both Japan and the United States, are geared towards a domestic audience and are self-absorbed. The Japanese media has assumed all these years that no foreigner would read what they write in Japanese, and has indeed written what could only pass uncontested within the nation. For example, we should be reminded of the famous Marco Polo magazine scandal; in one of their issues, they published an article which claimed that ”Nazi gas chambers never existed,” without any historically-founded evidence. The publishers decided to include this article in their magazine, never questioning nor even trying to verify the claim. Consequently, the magazine was heavily criticized by Jewish organizations abroad. One of the magazine’s sponsors, a foreign firm in Japan, withdrew its sponsorship, and soon after the magazine was forced to discontinue its publication. I believe this could happen because the editors were ignorant about what was going on in the international scene, or, even if they weren’t entirely ignorant, they probably thought they could get away with it, imagining that Japan functions in a vacuum, completely isolated from the rest of the world. There sure was a perverse sense of complacency in the belief that only Japanese would read articles written in Japanese.

But times have changed. In this day and age, non-Japanese read the Japanese press even when articles aren’t translated into other languages. However, although English language media is already widely read all over the world, the “national media” image of the American press is quite strong, much stronger than that of its European counterparts, and the American media seems rather reluctant to imagine the reactions of the foreigners portrayed in their articles. In that respect, the American media is as self-absorbed as the Japanese press is.

The second problem has to do with a tendency of the media in the U.S. to ridicule issues concerning Japanese women. Ten years ago, one could already predict that Japanese women would become the next target for Japan bashers. Since Japan has become triumphant in the U.S.-Japan Trade War and other economic conflicts, the United States began to run out of trump cards in its battle against Japan. There was a time when Japan could even brag about its lasting marriages while the United States was dealing with an increasing number of families falling apart. Because women in Japan pay the price for the stability of the Japanese family, I was expecting that Japan would soon be attacked for being an underdeveloped country when dealing women’s issues. Sure enough, I was quite right to assume that sooner or later, the phenomena surrounding the family, such as the fact that Japanese marriages don’t fall apart so easily or that the divorce rate don’t go up because people in Japan don’t marry out of love, would be used as symbols of Japan as a mysterious or a backward country.

Thirdly, there is a problem of orientalism. The word “orientalism” originally came from Edward Said’s book of the same title. “Orientalism” refers to a specific gaze which views “the East” as an exotic, mysterious, unintelligent, and underdeveloped “other”. What is often misunderstood is that orientalism isn’t an attribute to the East, but rather part of the self-consciousness of the West trying to hold up its own supremacy. It naturally follows that, even if you understand what orientalism means, that does not mean you understand the East. It does mean, however, that you understand what Westerners think the East is (or what it has to be, or what it wants it to be). Successfully subverting the meaning of orientalism by pointing out that it isn’t about the “other” but about the consciousness of the “subject” itself, is Edward Said’s noteworthy achievement. The notion of orientalism, therefore, is closely connected with issues of gender. Because the subjects casting such a gaze are exclusively male, there is a tendency to feminize the other. And male subjectivity is established through the female “other”. Orientalism isn’t situated in the Orient. It’s in the heads of Europeans, and nowhere else. Likewise, the Japan featured in such kind of the New York Times or something only exists in the heads of journalists.

The fourth problem is the way in which orientalism is paradoxically supported by the Japanese, in a kind of reversed orientalism. During the hype of Japan bashing, Japanese theorists on Japan chose to criticize the United States on its deteriorating states of familial relationships. The logic they used to do this was exactly the reverse of orientalism. They advertised that the success of Japanese society is due to the stability of familial relationships in the country. In this kind of discourse, the Japanese family or marriage is idealized, in a reversed direction from that of the orientalist discourse. You could call this reversed orientalism. The logical structure in both discourses is the same.

Japanese cultural theory that reinforces orientalism by reversing it was never in short supply. Those cultural theorists (most of whom are men) go around making statements along the lines of “once you get married, it’s the wife who calls the shots,” or “women are more than happy with the way things are, so why bother with women’s liberation?” Orientalism and reversed orientalism mutually reinforce each other. I think the orientalism that surfaces in the media is dangerous, but the Japanese discourse on Japan which reinforces it from the other side is equally dangerous. We have to do something about it.

If we would like to discuss issues of sexuality and gender in both countries, it is necessary to compare the two through a careful examination of historical and/or cultural differences. But in reality, “women” are used as being emblematic of a “backward Japan.” I am tired of such a schematic way of thinking. Both history and culture always have their own specificity, and it is impossible that only the United States and Europe can be universal.

The fifth point is concerned with the nature and credibility of representation in those articles. People often say that the writing in Japanese media lacks a sense of distinctive individuality, when compared with its Western counterpart. But I have the impression that the American press, always determined to increase readership, is very arbitrary. There is a specific style in American journalistic writing. A journalist would write, for example, “Hanako Yamada, a 22-year-old office worker, says…” This style is part of a method firmly established in American journalism, to attract the reader’s attention and to make identification of the subject of the article easier. But when Hanako is quoted, no mention is made about Hanako’s representativeness as an example. There is no guarantee that Hanako is a typical example.

Another characteristic of American journalistic writing is that articles are signed by their writes. It is rather favorable as they don’t pretend that there is such a thing as objectivity or neutrality, notions which the Japanese media are so much obsessed with. However, those people or the words they are reported to have said are only arbitrarily chosen, in order to give the article, with a byline on it, a seeming credibility. I have a lot of doubts about the storytelling and sensationalist style of American journalism. Even in such an influential medium as the New York Times or something, there often appear very exaggerated articles, written in such a style that may more appropriate in tabloid magazines. If they are to use a particular informant, they should also give readers the necessary contexts. For instance, how many more people are there who hold the same or similar point of view as the informant? Or, what kind social, class, or cultural background has this informant come from? These pieces of information should also be given alongside the actual report. The article is probably based on actual facts, but I can’t keep from having the impression that examples are chosen to fit the story already formulated in the writer’s head.

Problem number six is the commercialization of media. This is also a serious problem in Japan. Media sources always justify this phenomenon by claiming that they publish what the readers want to read-the kind of information they are looking for. The press likes to say that there are no complaints from their readers, and that their publications are well-read. At the moment the commercialization of media might be even more severe in the United States than in Japan, although it will surely get worse in Japan. It’s hard to say what one could do about it, but in any case it is better to be conscious of the fact that the media is rules by commercialism.

Lastly, I have to point out that there is a desire behind orientalism to construct a universal “Western subjectivity.” Japan is often ridiculed through such ways of identification as “In the West…” or “We, Westerners…”and there is something perverse about the way in which these words are used by Americans. Americans are not aware how particular their society really is, when it is looked at in the larger scheme of world history. Especially in the way in which the population of the contemporary United States is constituted of immigrants from all over the world, one can hardly say that American is representative of the “West.” The American gaze directed towards the uniqueness of Japan is reflected back onto itself in order to prove the universality of the United States, and this alleged universality is referred to through the sign of the “West.” There is a kind of parochialism to the American national media and they have no idea how their face is read by others.

This is, of course, also the case for the Japanese media. It would be better if journalists were more conscious of the fact that national media crosses borders.

A Student's Essays about Japanese Culture

2006-11-27T14:29:00.000-08:00

I had a student who spoke English pretty well, and seemed to be able to criticise her culture more than any other Japanese person I had meant. She wrote very well, and I wanted someone to keep her essays, so here they are. This one is titled "Re-write the terms of Marriage". I'm sure she won't mind me putting these here.

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Having been struggling to balance my career and family in this male-dominated society, having been told by my foreign acquaintances many times,“ So much for Japan being a developed country!” I was just wondering how come women’s social advancement can’t be realized in Japan, despite the fact that late－marriages and late-births are now the norm (I thought it meant there must have been a lot of possible female workforce, though) in Japanese society, and the ratio of unmarried women is high.

Lately, some of my male friends (in their early 40’s) rushed into arranged-marriage, and somehow all their brides are 39 (it seems that most of Japanese people must draw the line whether or not she is fertile, or her marketability as a woman ends at 39 years old. It’s deplorable. I believe I’m still available. And more surprising thing for me was that the letters of invitation I received were all written under the name of their fathers. I know it’s just in the Japanese manner. But! Over forty guys! And much more surprising thing to me was almost all of my male friends got married to the first woman they met at the first set –dating, maybe with their parents. for prospective arranged―marriage. Furthermore I suppose their partners (women) also could have been in the same situation. To be honest, aside from men, I was just wondering how they are supposed to be able to develop a good relationship before really knowing each other well, just knowing their backgrounds. I just can’t understand why they want to get just marital stage, not real love (actually it depends on how you define true love, though), If he/she loves her/him dearly, and wants to share their life, all they have to do is living together, they don’t have to rush into a lawful marriage, right? I suspect they have mistaken having good feeling for real love. I’m sure it doesn’t apply to young generation.), and all their brides had no jobs before their marriage.
Then many young women, college students I meet in particular, say to me,“ For us, it’s more important to find Mr. Right (probably, a prospective rich doctor) than studying in our college life so that we don’t have to continue our jobs.” So I asked why they thought so, they answered, “Because, if I give up being a businessperson in this society and I submit to being a woman, all I have to do is to compete with only women . That is the possibility to get the status of“勝ち犬, top dog ,winner” becomes ｄｏｕｂｌe, right?” （Currently the phrase“top dog, under dog” is quite popular in Japan. Simply speaking, in this case, top dog means to become an advantaged housewife, under dog means to remain unmarried after turning thirty years old or a drained working mother.）
I don’t know what they want to win against, and I don’t know why 負け犬,under dog, loser is evil, either. In the first place, how come they want to divide everything into winning and losing? Is something wrong I being an under dog?
Statistics says the number of women working outside the home is rising. But young unmarried women seem to think they don’t want to work.

Since last year, the government has created incentives to reproduce(actually that made me blush, though) against the birth rate continues to plummet and it has been on going, and sad to say, many officials－mostly male-blame the women, saying women value their careers more than children, so they don’t need to be educated. But number of kids born to working mother is almost identical to full-time homemakers. So simply demanding that women dump their job and have two kids instead of one to pump up the number of births to the replacement rate is unrealistic. And the latest survey says 90% of young adults in their 20’s have strong desire to marry, and more than 80% of women are willing to resign their jobs after their marriages. And they prefer a baby girl (*1).The latest magazine said young men tend to think that they want to have family(baby) in their 20’s, because they seek for the “healing”. Even if young men seek for healing in young women, it’s impossible. Because young women also seek for the healing (*2)(The American magazine called Forbes said, Japanese “Host Club”( I think it doesn’t exist in other countries.) is becoming a trend. one of owners, whose two host club shops earned 1billion yen last year, said that “Not only the idle rich mesdames but also young business ladies have become to come here to seek for healing, so I became successful”).
The survey in 2002 says the ratio of the women who want to be a single because they want to devote their job was less than 10%. In other words, no matter how much the government plans to increase day-nursery or alter the Labor Standards Law, women in question are not interested in such issues. Many young people say,“we don’t marry simply because we have not met the eligible person so far. Besides we find ourselves being no longer young.”

Then,
What are terms and conditions of marriage?
What is the eligible person like, for them?

Take conceivable opinions of young people,
>>>Women’s opinion
A reputable person=having a more educational background than hers=make sure not to become 坂本竜馬
A person having a dream=becoming getting higher income=make sure not to become an adventure after quitting your job.
A person being kind=working only for the sake of enriching her life=make sure not to lend your money to the needy kindly.
（Women dissemble their actual intentions so that their fictitious innocence can be evaluated.）
>>>Men’s opinion
A beautiful woman.(good grief)
A thrifty woman, no job=so that they don’t have to feel inferiority complex
A woman who likes kids=so that they want their wife to take care of themselves(not kids).
(Men dissemble their weakness.)

Thus, they seem to marry to satisfy their egoism. That is to say, we could say,顔と金の交換(exchanging face to money) is done in their marriage. Then, after clearing these conditions, becoming “top dog”, how do these couples live in their life?
Here is an intriguing investigation done by Ms.小倉, the author of 結婚の条件(Terms of marriage), a socioloｇist.
She said in her book, her survey has shown 3 patterns in their marriage life. There can be divided 3 courses depending on wives’ academic backgrounds.②is the state of top dog)

①----high school graduates
>>before marriage－less job- marriage to survive(生存)
>>after marriage – part-time job to support their life
②----college(2year-university, so-called 短大) or middle-class university graduates
>>before marriage-enough job, but after 4-year-perfunctory work on average, they become parasite single-marriage to depend（依存）
>>after marriage- stay-at-home mother to be dependent and satisfy self-realization (*)
③----top-class university or graduate school graduates
>>before marriage-to secure career－marriage to conserve（保存）
>>after marriage－as a matter of fact, the job of the women who have been able to continue their job until their retire age are a nursery teacher, an elementary school teacher, and a government official or a doctor, a nurse.
. (And Ms.小倉also described,
Lately, if a girl student could pass several universities, she would choose rather lower level university to enter, being afraid of “Fear of success”. Even after joining a company, she doesn’t seem to want to get promoted. She is willing to take a back seat to realize ②states to become “top dog”.　Lately, the number of colleges has been going down, so ② and ③ situations are getting closer.)
(*)She continues, more than half of women are in ②, And the number of women like them are expected to increase. In addition to 3 pattern mentioned above, she said the forth course④ has been appeared. That is specialization of ②, sort of special-class housewife state, after raising children, they get so-calledカタカナwork, like flower arrangement, a tea adviser, a color analyst.(what is it?) and so on. These jobs have one thing in common. That is kind of a instructor.
Actually their incomes are less than the costs to maintain their rooms, clothes as much as to be envied by their students. They work to consume, they would probably waste quite a lot of time just arranging their jobs to become professionals, and invest their husbands’ incomes in maintaining their jobs. She coined their behavior “Labor to consume”
They make their husbands be toiling away and work to consume. They say, “ Just because I am only a woman, that is why I deserve to be conceded the privilege of getting away with labor. That is the very top dog
(On the other hand, in spite of getting the state ②, in today’s shaky economy, there are housewives who have to work, because of a pitfall such as their husbands’ layoff.)

What does this signify?

I think there are 3 possible reasons for that. Specifically, from the aspect of law, predisposition in parenting, and history.

----In view of law

Various legal factors are taken into account, here is one example.
In Japan, in general, unmarried status is equal to being single (the ratio of living together, cohabitation is 1.7% in Japan, on the other hand, it is 40% in north Europe), and it also means low birth rate.(I think the reason for that is in the current outdated marriage system. For example, people have to hand in a child birth certificate filled in, asked if you have a registration of your marriage, when you started to live together, what your occupation was at the time your baby were born and your present job, and so on. In other words, the government implies it doesn’t want a couple to have their baby without living together, and illegitimates are inevitable to be distinguished from legitimate children in many situation especially inheritance, even though The Supreme Court ruled these articles related with discrimination has no constitutionality in 1993. In general, many couples don’t want any trouble, as public sentiment. In terms of laws, people wouldn’t presume to become minority. And our culture of shame places emphasis on outward standards of conduct. ) In other countries, being single doesn’t necessarily mean living as single or having no children.) I happened to find an article written about this issue.
Thus, the nation tends to control people’s lawful marriage. (Shot-gun marriage still has certainty for a lawful marriage)

----In view of parenting

One of sociologists,　山田昌弘氏 who coined “parasitic single” said, cited a research into Japanese couple vs American couple has been under way for over 10years, “The results of such researches indicate the obvious difference between them. Compared to other countries, Japanese tend to feel that parenting is a burden for them, and seldom get satisfaction out of their parenting” He gives some reasons for that as fallows;
For example, in the U.S., a married couple shares and enjoys raising their children, because they think all they have to do is raising children until their children become 18 years old. After that, the couple enjoys their own life each other. Basically, children are supposed to take their responsibilities in life, after becoming adults (it seems natural to me). Therefore parents don’t have to feel parenting is a burden. (.But if their life is not enjoyable, they change their partner. It was interesting for me. At first I couldn’t understand the meaning “because American are very married, they get divorced.” As a Japanese, I had a silly mind set, that is “If you value your marriage, you shouldn’t get divorce. You have to compromise to keep your marriage.” This perception gap must affect the difference of divorce rate.)
Meanwhile in Japan, people have their own roles as a member of family, and they rarely act together. According the survey which researched so-called salaried-man families, how much the couple can get along with depends on their children’s school scores. In Japan, almost all of education tuition costs are supposed to be paid by parents (I think it also applies to the U.S.), so an academic background they have is equal to the class they belong to, that is, child’s school score is the symbol of their wealthy. So they tend to use their children as a tool of competition
Even worse, although, in pre war era, children couldn’t live without relying on their parents, so there is an authority of parents or a bond between them, now, parents cannot believe the bond and are afraid of being abandoned and being hated by their children, they give their children huge financial support to keep their relationship after their children’s leaving their home, in case they feel they no longer useful. .

---- In view of history

In the 1940’
War footing, the nation had controlled people’s sexuality to keep social order, especially there was a need to make men go to the war, as a pretext or justify whose catchword was “to protect your loved one (who is supposed to love only you)”
Therefore, at that time, as a propaganda,
Nation= the biggest family
Numerous family were existed under the emperor system
Patriarchal system controlled women and children. Their sexuality and eros were allowed only within household to make a strong bond of honor between a husband and a wife.
Polygamy, free-sex were considered pre-modern and died out.

1955-1973
The end of the war brought about dramatic changes in social structures. The ancient family system gradually but irreversibly gave way to new development. And the period of high growth and economic success in the post-war era started.
Democracy had been formed. Everyone could seek to become a member of upper class.
Even though democracy could help individuals release from family system, people have been dwelling on becoming upper class, that is, people thought children from good family, if not blue-blood family, never had premarital intimate relationship and stuck to their so-called romantic love (monogamy, eternal love), so premarital relationship couldn’t get publicity.
Ms. 小倉 said, a reconstructive surgery of hymen (where is it?) was common in those days.

After 1990
Premarital relationship or relationship out of household are becoming acceptable.

--Mother’s history
Mothers’ ressentiment
Their parents said to her,“There is no need to be educated to become a wife of the masses. You don’t have to study.”
So she couldn’t achieve hypergamy (from middle class to upper-middle class)
She did part-time job for daughters tuition cost（not for living）
She wants daughter to achieve hypergamy and go easy life
She made her daughter the person who seemed to have everything in life.
She wants her daughter to keep at least the present level in her life even after her marriage.

--Fathers’ history
Fathers’ war trauma
They got through the struggle of existence to find themselves having a sense of loss. They believe only money and estates.
He always has focused on financial incentive and keeps being in a financially strong position.
He made his daughter a good material girl.
He thinks his daughter’s marriage must be an exchange with a person who stores equal values.

It seems to me that they don’t want to feel any financial disadvantage in their daughters’ marriage. And daughters also think they don’t want to reduce their living level.
But it is obvious that young men can’t maintain their rather fancy life feeding his housewife.

These views bring me to another point of discussion, that is “escaping from labor”. Considering my experience as a teacher and an observer of changing society, I feel many people seem to think that labor is disadvantage (According to the statistics, more than 30% of young men also think they don’t want to work, if possible.) And I think it is obvious this thought produces a lot of spontaneous so-called “フリーターfreeter”.
From only financial and materialistic point of view, if you have to do elderly care, you have to do work for living, and you have to do take care of several children, and you can’t afford to buy something you want, you can’t afford to spend enough time you want, it might be disadvantage.
I just would like to ask you, if you suffer an overwhelming disaster, if you are diagnosed serious disease, if you lose your loved one in unexpected accident, are they disadvantage for you?
If you can live in trouble-free life, you might be happy. But it doesn’t sound like happy to me.

It is not your fault even if you have to get involved unpredictable misery. But you can be leaning a lot of things from it and process it better. You can break through your constrains and move forward.
What do you want out of your life? What matters to you? What does labor mean to you? I think I can associate these questions with 結婚の条件.

I have been thinking about it.

(*1)
Statistics says, up to 75% of young Japanese mother now prefer baby girls. Daughters are seen as easier to handle. Boys don’t listen and are harder to rise. Besides boys and their mothers seem to have a weak bond, but mothers and daughters stay close all of their lives.
Although inheritance laws in Japan no longer favor sons over daughters, and failure to produce a male heir is no longer grounds for divorce, pressure to bear sons -especially in rural areas-has not vanished altogether, as they say a traditional proverb, “A bride who doesn’t have a son finds her position is weak.”
In 1982, the survey found that of those families who wanted only one child, 51.5% wanted a boy, but by 1987, only 37.1% wanted a boy, and by 1997 it was just 25%.
More parents want girls because life is no longer sweet for Japanese boys. It’s tough to be a man, even when they little boys have to compete. They have to get into a good university and get a good job. There ‘s a lot more pressure on them. Life is easier for girls. They have more choices. Mothers feel pressure to raise these boys as they always did. Become a good man. Of course, these pressures existed in the past, but then men had special privileges. Now the privileges are gone, but they still have all the responsibilities.

(*2)
Let’s move on to thinking about the word “healing”
Why do they want to be healed?
Although Japanese parents are perceived as rather responsible, Japanese children don’t feel the bond with their parents so much. Rather they feel they have mental scars given by their parents.
I doubt there have been many young adults who had a troubled childhood and were abused both mentally and physically. I don’t think many of them had to come through the ordeal.
But their parents conditional loves have various adverse affects on children who have no strong self.
For example, their parents’ saying even “We have expectation for your future.” is ,strictly speaking, the metaphor for “I am not satisfied with what you are.”
So children seek for healing to make up for the sense of not having something. They love someone to seek for being accepted who they are. They value their own feeling that I love you, kind of self-love, so as long as they can benefit from the love each other, it continues. And they confirm their love in the way that how much he/she loves me depends on how much he/she is at her/his demands, kind of mutual dependence, more like addiction.（it might be the beginning of ストーカー.）They love someone to satisfy their self-love for themselves as their parents have done
(I guess this emotion is associated with Japanese suicide style, a double suicide, accompanied with kids) emotional involvement.

In addition to that, I think having children never gives healing to them. God knows, raising children is serendipitous, but at the same time having children is being pulled back to their own childhood. It makes people confront realities they have been through and they might prefer to ignore or forget.(it might be the beginning of child abuse.) And I think having family doesn’t give healing to them, either. When you get older, the relationship get more complicated, all kind of feeling is there. Some of those feeling are changing, becoming different kind of love. In the near future you might have to think, like how we can love someone, even if the loved one has lost their former attraction. I might say your expediency is not available in your real life.

( I really hate this word “healing”. You might have known, anywhere anytime, anybody seeks it. But I convince, before people feeling that I want to be healed, they must have had the feeling that I was victimized or got hurt by someone. By whom? Nobody hurts you. Only yourself, right?)

Nova Sucks

2006-11-27T14:24:00.000-08:00

Here is a bit I wrote when in Tokyo about Nova. It really is a poor company and here's why.

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

I’m not writing this as a result of a particularly bad day. I have no reason to lie about Nova. I wouldn’t bother writing this unless there was a good reason. I haven’t had any major personal reason to write this about Nova, I haven’t been fired so disciplined by Nova in any way, nor have I been treated any more unfairly than most employees of this company have. I just want people to know the truth about how bad Nova is. Here are a few things that come to mind:

- The vast majority of Nova employees have little choice but to start by living in a Nova apartment and most employees will continue to live in this apartment until the end of their time in Japan. Nova charges exceptionally high rent for what it provides its employees. Figures of over 70,000 yen a month to share with other people in a very normal apartment in an area that is not close to a major city is common. Nova takes advantage of foreigner’s ignorance and rips them off. Nova makes money from the excessive rents.

- When new employees arrive, there is no social plan, no cultural initiation, and no effort to make the employee feel at home. My experience appears to be common. I was picked up by a woman who seemed ill at ease with what she was doing, answered all my important questions with bare-minimum one-word answers, and simply dropped me off in my flat with no other to help me any further. I was left alone in an empty flat in a completely unfamiliar country with no back-up plan.

- Nova rips off the residents of its apartments by process of “inspection” and official cleaning. If it deems an apartment unclean, instead of asking the residents to do something about it, it hires cleaners and then over charges the residents for the work done, surely another way for Nova to make money. In my case, my housemate ad I were charged $150 EACH for having two cleaners some and scrub the shower. That was all they did.

- Nova hires questionable “teachers” and seems to make a habit out of hiring very close-minded, career obsessed foreigners as bosses. Although it official states that all of its employees have University degrees, this is simply not true as many, particularly Australians do not. Any type of degree is deemed acceptable and at no stage at all is the Nova “teacher” tested on their grammar.

My Japan Email Diary

2006-11-27T14:07:00.000-08:00

Here is a compilation of all the emails I wrote to friends while in Tokyo. A few friends have said they liked them so I put them here for them to have a laugh at, and for me to remember just how much fun it was. It all started here...

To all the people this goes out to: thanks for reading and it would be great to hear from you soon! I thought I’d update you about my first month here in Tokyo.

The only bad thing about the British Airways flight was that I had a window seat next to two Japanese women who liked to sleep a lot. So every time I wanted to go for a wee or try to prevent deep-vein-thrombosis, I had the choice of waking them or just waiting for the blood clots to form. I flew through customs and my first spoken sentence in this nation was rather poorly: “I only speak English” to a customs official who jabbered to me about not filling in the correct landing card . My first few hours in the country were pretty euphoric, as tends to happen when you enter a foreign country, and the enormity of what I was doing and where I was really hit me when I noticed some girls pass me by in typical Japanese-style white socks, twenty minutes after landing. As I waited for the Nova representative to pick me up, I listened to the “Lost in Translation” soundtrack while I walked around the shops in the airport. I noticed a melon that cost 2940 yen, which is around 15 pounds. With fruit that expensive, you’d expect Japan to have the highest rate of constipation on the world, a fact I have yet to confirm on account of my poor Japanese.
As the Nova representative accompanied me on the train, dusk fell over the strange landscape of curvy-roofed buildings, foreign-looking trees and the odd cluster of Neon signs as we passed through some small towns. I was already pretty scared by now and this Nova woman was doing me no favours, as I asked her various questions about what the hell to do once we arrived, and she gave the shortest, bluntest, coldest answers. As we walked through the small city I now live in for the first time, I told her that I hadn’t eaten all day, and so she led me into a small supermarket and left me to get some food. I kindly reminded her that I had in fact been in Japan for a total of 6 hours and had no idea what anything in the damn shop was. She seemed remarkably surprised at my last comment and made the feeblest of feeble attempts to help me out. I bought some ham, 6 thick slices of bread (that’s how you buy it here) and some butter, which comes in ready cut segments. As we continued to walk, it became clear that we were now passing the heart of the city as the streets darkened and the traffic lessened. I was really quite nervous by the time we reached the three-bedroom apartment, the empty three-bedroom apartment, and she told me two things: that I was the only one living here and to “enjoy my stay”, before she promptly left. I wanted to run after her and yell something like “EXCUSE ME, BUT WHAT THE HELL AM I SUPPOSED TO DO NOW?!” but I just walked into the apartment, turned on the light, and cried.

It turned out that I did in-fact have a flat-mate, a Canadian called Jon who is my age, and a decent guy. After the usual greetings and opening questions, he stated his intentions to transfer to another area of Tokyo. It seems that our home town wasn’t great.

I tried to suppress the initial thoughts of “why the hell did I do this?” during the first few days by keeping busy. I wondered around a few suburbs, went food shopping (a near impossibility when you’re new to the country and everything is labeled in gibberish) and chatted to my flat-mate. I had 4 whole days to kill before work started and told myself that once work started everything would be fine. Once work started, I told myself that once I get used to work, everything will be fine. It’s been four weeks since then and things really have got better. I have made friends quicker than I though would happen (why do I always think that I’m the only one having a tough time of it and that everyone else is fine?) and have got into the swing of work. As for the job, well, it’s not difficult, and I do sometimes look at myself laughing and chatting with Japanese English students and think “wow, I’m getting paid for this!” and at other times I look at myself repeating the work “wont” six times to a low-level student who can’t say who she is and think “at least I’m getting paid for this.” In that sense, it’s like any other job.

I go out with friends pretty regularly, about every other day, and have compiled a list of 4 good things about the little city I live in.

The 7 floor 100 yen store, where you can buy almost anything from electric speakers to tins of tuna for 100 yen (50p)
A little Italian restaurant where you can have a pizza or pasta for 400 yen (2 pounds) or just drink as much tea/coffee/soft-drinks as you want for 120 yen.
A great bar, where you and a hundred mates can all sit around a huge table and eat and drink good stuff fairly cheaply.
The local Karaoke centre where you hire a room per hour and sound like the greatest singer to have ever sung… in that room… during that song.

I guess I’ve spent so much time worrying about whether things will get better here or not that I haven’t consciously noticed things improving when they have. I’m picking up bits and pieces of the language, enjoy the odd adventure into Tokyo central, and have found myself to have a remarkably busy social-life. Alas, no Japanese girlfriend (why did SO MANY people back home tell me that they’d be fighting over me, it’s simply not true) and bad TV (it’s all in gibberish apart from a 7 and 10 o’clock news programme) but a nice balance of routine and adventure keeps me happy, although I miss my friends, my family, Cadbury’s chocolate, decent black tea and cheap… well, cheap anything. Everything here, apart from the things listed in the list above, is very expensive. Let me quash a few myths:

You cannot buy used school-girl’s underwear from vending machines here. You can however buy cigarettes and beer from vending machines.
The Japanese DO sweat. Someone told me they don’t. Oh how you notice it on the packed trains when all the business men swelter over the poor submissive Japanese women.
Electronics are cheaper to buy in England. You’d think YAMAHA keyboards would be cheaper here. Amazingly, they are more expensive.
The Japanese language is not easy to learn.

Thanks for reading. I’d really love to hear from you and would appreciate a line.

Take care
Trevor

Hello. Thanks for being in touch. There are some advantages of living in a foreign country that I had never thought of. For example, I can talk about people who piss me off in front of their face, I can claim to be an ignorant foreigner if I ever get caught buying child tickets for the otherwise expensive Japanese railway system, and I don’t feel guilty anymore when I pass Big Issue vendors, what with not being able to understand the squiggles on the front cover (and just not wanting to buy it anyway). But unlike America and Australia, you always feel far away from home here and just in case you start to feel at home, perhaps in the local Starbucks or McDonalds, you are quickly reminded of just how far from home you are when you watch young heavily tanned Japanese girls apply their thick black eyeliner for hours, or natter on their dinky mobile phone with a hundred trinkets hanging from it, which I think defeats the purpose of a small light mobile phone. I have been to a couple of sushi conveyer-belt style places, due mainly to peer-pressure resulting from the constant “have you eaten suhi yet? Have you eaten sushi yet?” and the problem is, it’s really nothing special. If you like smoked-salmon, you’d like sushi. For me, it’s just not filling enough. On my birthday, I ordered fried chicken cartilage, thinking that it couldn’t possibly be what it sounded like. It was, and it tasted pretty much like you’d expect, like bloody cartilage. What is wrong with these people?! A few weeks after being here, I put in an advert in a magazine for English speakers, saying that I was a piano player looking to do anything. I got an amazing response. It was from the Tokyo Comedy Store, saying that they were looking for a keyboard player for their Friday night comedy improvisation performances. I met-up with one of the comedians, he seemed to like me, and an hour later, he took me to the local Yamaha shop so that I could pick out a keyboard for me to play in the shows. “Er… that one” and he bought it. Incredible. So now, on Friday evenings, I rush straight from work, catch 3 trains (and change at the station where the terrorist gas attacks took place) and go to Roppongi (very popular clubbing area) to play for an hour and then hang out with thespians, comedians, and other odd people. It’s a great experience and the doors seemed to have opened to many opportunities, with the only problem being I work full time at Nova. Nova really is the McDonalds of private English language schools here: you find them everywhere, you get sick of all the advertising, and the staff can’t speak every good English. I’ve been clubbing a few times, once to this amazing little pokey place full of Western models and rich men where you pay 12 quid to get in and can drink as much as you like. Oh, and girls got in for free, and they can also drink as much as they like for free. Could you imagine this policy in England. The place would be in bedlam within an hour of opening. But here, things are more civilized, and the clubs have a really nice friendly atmosphere. A couple of days ago I caught the last train home from Tokyo to where I live. I was literally crushed from all sides for an hour, and counted 5 people squashed beside me. I genuinely started to panic as I started finding it hard to even breathe. I though of sardines in a tin, and realized that it was a bad analogy: sardines are practically free-ranging compared to being on the last train from Tokyo. It was a surreal experience, wedged between sweaty bodies, not needing to hold onto anything because we were so crammed together. And nobody says anything, they just get on with it. I was doing my best to remain dignified, trying to move my hands away from this woman’s chest, but it only made things worse. No wonder stories of the Tokyo Metro fumblings exist. I had been seeing this cute little Japanese girl called Misaki who is 28 and it was good, although her English was pretty basic. But the strangest thing happened. She said that she was ashamed of herself because her English was not good enough . Since after that, I haven’t heard from here. Blimey, I thought, I’ve never heard that one before. My vocabulary has completely dried-up from the constant low-level English that I deal with. Nova is reminiscant of the America-Africa slave trade. They round up all these westerners, ship them out to Tokyo where they suck all the language out of us. When I go back to England, I shall talk like a stupid four year old. Even typing this email has taken ages as I try to find the right words, like “typing” and “even”. Somewhere in the Tokyo smog, my vocabulary is floating about along with all the other Nova teacher's lost vocabulary: words like…. er…..you see? I can’t think of them. One day, all these long heavy words will fall from the sky in a big storm, and all Tokyo people will suddenly sound like academics and poets. This is what I predict. Thanks for reading. Please stay in touch. Trevor

Hello again, thanks for being in touch!

When asked how many hours of sleep they get every night, the Japanese normally answer 6 hours or so. When asked how many hours of work they do each day, they normally say that they start around 8 or 9am, and finish at around 7pm. Quite a few people have said that they start at 9am and finish at around midnight. They all work so hard here, and it makes me feel slack for doing the 38 hour week that I do. The people who study English really study it, they dedicate all of their spare time to it. I have been regularly amazed at the amount of Japanese people who have managed to speak pretty good English just by having English lessons, and watching films. Nova is a very expensive hobby for many of them, it costs them around 3000 pounds for a set of 600 forty-minute lessons. And to think that many of them have difficulty in answering why they are actually studying English: “er… so I can watch movies without Japanese subtitles”, wow, that’s dedication.

I on the other hand can still barely speak Japanese. What I can say however, really well, is the phrase “I can’t speak Japanese very well” which they seem to take as utter modesty and reply in fast fluent Japanese, to which I just say “hai!” before the realization quickly dawns on them that I am indeed bluffing and have no clue how to lead any kind of Japanese conversation, other than that of a retarded 3 year-old. There are people who have been here for 10 years, and still can’t speak the language well. English and Japanese are about as compatible as Mac/Microsoft software, and I have a nasty habit of crashing all the time.

One of my housemates is really started to bug me, because he has a little squeaky Japanese girlfriend who seems to spend more time in my flat than I do (she’s bloody here now, squeaking away), and they spend their time making-out on the sofa and giggling sweet-rubbish to each other. I wouldn’t mind, but the Japanese girl seems kinda stupid, she says “nanny? Nanny? Nanny?” all the time in this really nasty nasally voice, which is not a call for her grandmother, but translates as an informal way of saying “what?”, perhaps a bit like “whaaaaaaat?” like really stupid people say. And the thing is, he cheats on her all the time, and she has no idea. People like him give people like me a bad reputation. I try hard to explain to Japanese people that I did not come here for the Japanese girls, but it falls on death-ears, mainly because they can’t understand what the hell I’m talking about, but also because there are so many lust-hungry western guys here who quite clearly can’t get laid in their home country.

So we’ve had a couple of typhoons recently, which are always exciting. I walked home yesterday while in the middle (literally) of one. Because it was the very middle of the typhoon, everything had suddenly turned warm and humid, and the wind had died right down. Once I got home, they winds started up again, about 150km, and 10 people died. This poor country gets battered by typhoons, devastated by earth-quakes, worn-away by floods, and raided by randy westerners, no wonder I catch the occasional sinister glimpse towards me on the subway train by a Japanese guy. It’s as if they are saying “you are coming here to take all out beautiful women, and there’ll be none left for me, which is why my wife is an old bearded wrinkly crusty lady-boy. Go home westerners” or I could be unfairly elaborating.

My poor diet continues. I have discovered an instant meal in the supermarket, which is very tasty but I suspect, not at all healthy. It costs 80 yen, (40p: that’s the appeal) and consists of noodles and a milligram of something green (I think it’s the vegetable content) and 2 milliliters of flavoring sauce. I like to think it is healthy for me but can you really label something as being healthy just because it contains water? It is labeled rather strangely as “UFO” and I can’t think why. But that’s Japanese through and through. The amount of nonsense English around here is astounding. I think English is used in Japan as a marketing tool, to make products appear trendy and fashionable (English seems to be ‘cool’ here) and whether it makes sense or not, is not important. My housemate said to me one night: “what you eating tonight? UFO?” and I said yeah. If that small verbal exchange was heard back home, I’d be in the nut-house before you could say “just add water”.

There’s a Nova policy where we can’t see students we teach socially outside of Nova, ever, which is a pretty harsh policy and one I don’t plan to follow. Anyway, one evening, me and my mate Steve were drinking coffee in a Starbucks here (they’re everywhere) and one of our mutual student’s walked in and came over to us after ordering a coffee. This would be fine in most cases, but this student was a very odd, 32 year-old woman who seemed intent on telling us just how single she was, and how happy she was to see us, and how nice we were, and, well, it went on, and my coffee tasted more and more awkward with every passing minute. She started handing us little “presents” from her bag, things she just happened to have on her and we didn’t want, and she insisted on buying us more coffees. Not wanting to be rude, we stayed. Two hours later, things were getting ridiculous and we make our excuses and left. She proceeded to follow us out:
“Er, don’t you have a bike?” Steve said, recalling a recent conversation with her,
“Oh yes” she said, rather disappointed, “but I will walk you to the station” and so she left her bike and walked the 10 minute journey to the station. As we approached the station, Steve whispered to me,
“what if she just keeps following us?! What if she comes all the way to mine or your house?” and the panic set-in. Thankfully she didn’t, but if I see her again, it may-well happen.

I’m currently watching a TV program, where 4 women dress-up as school-girls and are whittled-down to one by a guy dressed in school uniform. The guy has to guess their age in order to find which one is the true school-girl and can date the girl of his choice. You really can’t tell how old Japanese women here are, but I had no idea that Japanese people can’t tell as well. It’s crazy here.

Love Trev

#203 Junes Kaijin
1-31-31 Kaijin
Funabashi-Shi
Chiba-Ken
273-0021
JAPAN

Hello, thanks for reading.
Before I came out here, I assumed that Christmas would not be celebrated at all, what with Japan being a Buddhist society, yet I am now surrounded by neon Christmas trees with pixies singing Japanese carols in high prepubescent voices, which is scary enough the shake the Christmas spirit out of anyone. Christmas is a complete paradox here, and very typical of the Japanese desire to take something from abroad and make it their own. Christmas here is all about the cuteness of it all, the novelty factor, and most importantly, the potential to make profit out of it. And so Christmas is a big deal here, but only according to the leading department stores, who try their hardest to convince everybody that Christmas is a wonderful time of year, even though 90 percent of the population don’t do anything different on December 25th. In fact, I had to put in a request to take the day off work two months ago, and it even looks like I may still have to work (but I may have to be ‘sick’ on that day).
There are some Christmas traditions here though, obscure as they are. Most people make a Christmas cake, which is nothing like the rich matured cake we have at home, but is a strawberry sponge cake. For some reason, Kentucky Fried Chicken is considered to be a Christmas treat here in Japan, I have no idea how this came to be, but I do know that people queue up outside KFC’s everywhere to get their buckets of fried chicken. Some families give each other presents but the vast majority just treat it like any other day. But seeing life-size models of Colonel Sanders dressed in the Santa outfits is just too strange.
As for me, I’m going to be spending Christmas with my mate James who is coming to visit me (a guy I lived with last year during my PGCE), and with Akiyo, who I think is excited at the prospect of seeing how genuine Westerners ‘do’ Christmas, so James and I will have to do our best to give each other crappy presents (come on, admit it now, who bought their father Gillette Sensor gift packs because you couldn’t think of what else to get?!), start drinking in the afternoon, light a pathetic blue flame on the Christmas pudding on the forth feeble attempt and watch as everybody gasps at how small the flame is, play board games while still drinking, and feeling bloated and so tired by the evening, that we just end up sitting around the box, watching Jim Davidson and Bruce Forsyth wishing everyone a happy Christmas. Oh, except that I wont be able to get that here, what a shame.
I walked around a famous district of Tokyo called Ginza the other evening with Akiyo, which was genuinely beautiful, with the Christmas lights, decorations and neon signs of Panasonic, Canon, Rolex and just about every major company in the world. Ginza is like a giant Piccadilly circus, yet many Japanese people tell me how their favourite part of London is Piccadilly circus, which must be a tenth of the size of Ginza. As we walked through the small side streets of open bars with the hundreds of salarymen drinking beers in an attempt to warm-up (it’s really cold here now), I thought “Christ, I’m actually in Tokyo, this is amazing.” These salarymen are the people who work 12 hour days, never see their kids, have housewives and usually stay in the same job all their lives. I’ve met some real interesting characters, such as a train conductor who works 9am to 9am every other day and is responsible to piecing together suicide victims who jump in front of the train from the platform. Around 30,000 Japanese people do this every year (30,000?!) and it is the job of the conductor (not the police) to scrape the dead body of the track/train and make sure that the train system continues running smoothly. He gets the equivalent of 50 pounds extra for each body that he recovers. He’s had to do this about 5 or 6 times so far. All in all, he gets paid less than me. As I say, things are very different here.
My music life here is taking off a little more, and I have had some amazing offers to play for an hour, getting paid 25,000 yen, which is about 125 pounds, a figure I’ve never been paid for such a short time! I was also offered the position of hotel lounge pianist in a different area of Japan for 2 months, with the possibility of staying longer, my flights and accommodation in the hotel all paid for. I’m sure it would have been a great way to save money, but a hell of a lonely experience. I could picture myself living the life of “Lost in Translation” every day, but without the novelty of Scarlett Johansson.
I’ve been spending a lots of time in a quirky bar called “Sala”, mostly filled with Japanese, but also lots of foreigners, and it’s a great place to meet Japanese people. One time, my friend and I were asked to come over to a table full of Japanese girls and to just talk to them in English, I’ve never felt like a hostess before, but this must have been pretty close. There were some Japanese guys with them, who turned out to be in the Army, so I was concerned with what they thought about me and Justin. Anyway, they were all perfectly friendly. Another time, an older Japanese business man overheard me trying to talk Japanese, and approached us. He invited us to his table and paid special attention to his female friends, of whom he kept telling us were single. So once again, Justin and I made strained conversation, feeling a little bit like conversational prostitutes, as he paid for us in beer. It was raining that night, and he kindly lent me a spare umbrella he had, and I promised to return it to him 2 weeks later when we’d both be at the bar again. So 2 weeks later, he was overjoyed when he discovered I had kept my promise and bought me more beer and introduced me to more women. Oh, it’s a hard life here.
Please stay in touch.
Happy Christmas and look forward to the New Year.
Trev

Hello,
Sometimes as I am running down the street, trying to do up my tie while eating a piece of extraordinarily thick toast dripping with butter (I’m trying to put weight on), I am stopped by the dreaded railway tracks. You see, on my way to the railway station, I have to cross these tracks and in Tokyo, the barriers come down every few minutes and you have to wait ages for the seemingly never-ending train to pass. And quite often, the barriers stay down once the train has passed because there is another train passing in the opposite direction. And then, I have to face the pedestrian crossing, which gives you all of two seconds to cross between hour segments of free-flowing traffic. I always ignore the red man and just cross when there’s a gap, to terrified Japanese onlookers, who are probably thinking how crazy I am to be risking my life so unnecessarily. Well, the Japanese are what you might all ‘over-cautious’ – many of them consider themselves sick if they have a headache. If you’re not fully functioning in all ways, then you are sick here, that’s one of the many differences in mentality. So I have been officially late to work twice since I started, well, that’s not bad for 4 months is it? God, it’s been 4 months already!
I have to say it’s been a bloody tough month of ups and downs. Having a Japanese girlfriend is turning out to be a total mind-job for me: never really knowing quite what she is thinking, and wondering if I am saying something that will offend her. Our times together are lovely of course, but she works hard in the week and has weekends free, while I have easy weekdays but work all weekend, so it’s certainly not ideal. We’ve been going out for almost two months now, and she is lovely, intelligent, funny and cute. And she’s older than me, 28. Last week she started asking about our plans for a summer vacation, next year. Blimey, I thought, I’ve never thought that far ahead in my life, let alone with a girl. But I guess that’s a good sign!
Recently, I have really been out and about, seeing some amazing things and feeling like I’m really in Japan. I went to a district about an hour train ride away full of beautiful gardens and temples, with the different colours of the autumn leaves everywhere. The area was open and clean, spacious and full of symmetry, amongst the 800 or so year-old temples, with incredible old and intricate wood carvings that must have taken a lifetime to achieve. The clear blue sky contrasted beautifully with the reds, greens and yellows of the autumn leaves, and I really felt happy to have finally seen some true beauty in this mysterious country. The next week, I went to a huge temple district with 3 other (Nova) friends and found even more beautiful temples and gardens, with intricate little rivers and astounding temples which seemed to glow when the late afternoon sun hit upon the deep red and gold colours. The day was rounded off nicely as I shock a fortune shaker, in which a single thin rod of wood falls out and predicts your fortune. I was told that things were going to get much better for me! Well, it sure made me feel better. On my way home, we met a sharp contrast in culture, as we stopped off at a TGI Fridays for half-price drinks and hamburgers.
I came here partly because I wanted to be in Tokyo, and I must say that the novelty of the central areas is hard to ware-off. There are many centres to Tokyo, no particular central area. In “Lost in Translation”, you would have seen Shibuya, perhaps the busiest area in Tokyo besides Shinjuku. I once organized to meet a friend at Shinjuku station, and when I arrived, I remembered the fact that Shinjuku was the busiest railway station in the world, and also the second largest in the world. Needless to say, it took quite sometime to actually find each other. But sometimes, the business pisses me off, because it just never stops. Someone here said that the problem with these busy areas like Shinkuju and Shibuya is that it’s like Christmas eve everyday there, the frantic rush, the masses of people, the stress, and so it can be a little wearing! Recently, I went into an arcade centre with the same friend, and we played this game where you hit these big traditional Japanese drums called Taiko drums, with big thick sticks in time to some frantic trance music on the screen. We were really getting into it and before we knew it, we had an audience of a few guys and mostly attractive Japanese girls who clapped and cheered us as we completed each section of the song. We got chatting to them afterwards, and as we left the arcade centre, I was once again reminded of the craziness, the novelty, the fun of living where I am living.
Also, the kindness shown by some Japanese people towards me has been astounding. I was recently told, by a Nova student, that I could have his keyboard if I wanted it (I have been long moaning about the fact that I have nothing to play in this country). I said that’d be great, and he assured me that he didn’t play it anymore. Well, he met me and took me to his home, which took about an hour on the trains, where he set the keyboard up and asked me if it was good enough. It was great, and he said he would take me home in his car. Well, we left at 2pm and got into my home city at around 6pm having stopped for lunch on the way. I had no idea that he lived so far away from me, but hr refused to accept any petrol money, or any money for the keyboard. So I got a free keyboard, which was worth about a thousand pounds when he bought it, with free delivery. He said “buy me a beer when I visit England”.
Thanks for reading and please stay in touch.
Trevor

203 Junes Kaijin
1-31-31 Kaijin
Funabashi-Shi
Chiba-Ken
273-0021
JAPAN

There is a certain type of person who comes to Japan, whom I resent greatly. They are labeled “Mr Charisma” man, a which comes from a comic published in a monthly English magazine here in Japan, which depicts the life of an English teacher who came to Japan because he couldn’t get laid in his own country. These are the type of goofy looking guys who act geeky and awkward in their home country, but suddenly become Mr Charisma when they are in Japan, surrounded by beautiful girls who mindlessly admire them for no good reason, other than being an exotic foreigner. These guys quickly let their ego explode and act as if this kind of attention is the norm. The other night I was in Sala, my local bar, when I saw this rather ugly looking guy with a strong northern (English) accent chatting to two much younger Japanese girls. He was giving them some kind of impromptu casual English lesson, and suddenly declared that he would given them his mobile phone number, to which the girls exploded with delight, clapping their hands frantically and making out that it was the greatest news they had heard, although in actual fact, this was just them being polite. So this ugly goofy guy walks to the other side of the bar with a walk which suggested he had some kind of bowl irregularity, or maybe he was trying to look cool. He takes his mobile phone and walks back to the girls in a walk that said “I’m the coolest cat around here” or “I’m a total dickhead” to me. After giving them his number and announcing that they should do “something together soon”, he throw his jacket over one shoulder and walked out the bar in a manner that suggested he was the coolest man in the world, or at least, trying to be.
Unfortunately, as I’m walking down the street with my Japanese girlfriend, Akiyo, I can’t help but think people are looking at me thinking “he’s only here because he can’t get laid at home” and I want to tell these people “actually, I wasn’t even attracted to Japanese girls before I came out here, and I didn’t know that Japanese women were particularly attracted to foreign guys.” My friend, James, who visited me over Christmas, got some first hand experience of this. One night we went to a Japanese pub, where we sat near 4 rather drunk Japanese girls. Two of them came to sit next to us (highly rare for a Japanese girl to do) and one of them asked James if she could be his girlfriend for the night. Well, it doesn’t get much more direct than that does it?
For Christmas day, James and I cooked a traditional English style Christmas dinner for Akiyo and her mate. He had even bought a Christmas pudding from England. It seemed a near-impossible task, what with Akiyo’s oven being the size of a toaster and her only having one gas hob. But amazingly, it all came together and the girls were mightily impressed, as were we to be honest. It was a lovely day, and a Christmas I’m sure James will never forget. The preparation was a little bit much, and I felt bad that James’s Tokyo holiday was too much work, but he didn’t seem to mind. We spent a couple of rather stressful hours shopping for Christmas food in the largest supermarket I knew. We couldn’t find gravy anywhere so we made do with a demi-glace sauce, which turned out to be gravyish enough. We went to a café to relax before the big shop, and James asked the girl who served us if she spoke English. She replied “yes” in a really sweet English accent. I asked how she had such an accent, and it turns out that she went to my University, Oxford Brookes, for 4 years! She told us what a wonderful time she had in England, and seemed sad when she added “but now I’m here”. As James and I sipped our coffees, I thought that she was too good to miss, so I wrote my email address on a napkin and passed it to her on the way out. I’m so glad I did, because now we are good friends, and see each other lots. In fact, I saw her last night, we drunk beer and did Karaoke. She spent the whole night telling me that she was no good at singing, so I thought I had found an ideal Karaoke partner, what with my singing being as stable as Iraq/American politics. Unfortunately, after my shaky off-tune rendition of “Man in the Mirror”, she proceeded to sing a Japanese song, perfectly, with faultless tuning, and a really sweet soft voice. God, I thought, I need another drink.
I had a really nice moment on the 27th December, when we went into Tokyo and had drinks in the same bar that I went to after my first day in Japan. The first time I visited this bar I was unsure of everything, nervous, and anxious, but now, this time around, I was surrounded by genuine friends, I was stable in my job, and I had a great relationship with Akiyo. It was nice to compare. I remember thinking, during my first visit to the bar, if I would return here again, what situation I would be in by the time I did. Actually, things with Akiyo took a battering over the new year (something I kinda expected) as she spoke about wanting to get married, and how her being 4 years older than me was a problem. Things were on the cusp, but they cleared-up, after some serious chats, and now things are better than ever… and I’m left with a heavy decision to make… shall I go back home in May as planned to find a job teaching music, or stay here another year, get a better job, and try to make a go of it? Answers on a postcard please. Serious stuff. I have until April to decide.

Thanks so much for reading. Please stay in touch.

Trevor
#203 Junes Kaijin
1-31-31 Kaijin
Funabashi-Shi
Chiba-Ken
273-0021
JAPAN

Hi,
As I stood wedged between 5 sweaty businessmen (yet again) on a late train from Tokyo, I was suddenly pushed out of the way by another businessman, clearly over-worked and under loved, who was making a mad dash for the door, but in his sleepy stupor, he was barging the wrong way, and was actually heading down the train instead of out the door. He eventually remembered that most modern trains have doors on the side and headed out of one, with his head down, still looking half-asleep. As I watched him disappear back into his world, I felt so sorry for him. Businessmen in Japan work more hours than any other country, and sleep the least.
I was coming home from a period of teaching I had been doing, but it wasn’t English teaching, it was… ready?... it was Improvised Comedy Singing… for Japanese people. Now, I don’t know how it happened myself but somehow I have managed to start teaching weekly two-and-a-half hour classes to the Japanese Comedy Store group. All their comedy is improvised. I had a guy translating for me… which made me feel so important, you’ve got to try it sometime. So there I was, with 12 young eager Japanese comedians doing everything I tell them. It’s like someone asked me what could be the best possible job for me and then gave it to me, I feel lucky indeed.

Nova (the English school I work for) continues to be crap, boring etc but more and more bearable. I have developed a bit of a “them and us” mentality, and it’s nice being back at school: bitching about the bosses with like-minded colleagues when the bosses are out of the room, doing practical jokes on each other and generally mucking about when the bosses aren’t looking. There was a leaving party for 8 Nova teachers, most of whom were utterly forgettable people. I went to be polite, and found myself totally indifferent to the fakeness of the whole thing-
“Oh we must stay in touch” or
“Come and visit me, you’ll always have a place to crash at in Kansas (or whatever daft place they came from)” or
“It’s been great working with you, really great”.
… yeah yeah yeah, why are you going home then if it’s so great? I hate to sound so cynical but most Nova teachers hang-out with other Nova teachers because they can’t be bothered to find other friends, especially Japanese friends, so they hang-out with each other, foreigners with foreigners, just because they are there. 99% of all these people will never see each other again. Let’s not pretend we’re the best of buddies, just because we work together.

I went to Kyoto a couple of weeks ago and it was great fun. A small portion of Kyoto was featured in “Lost in Translation” and I made a point of going to that area. It was of course beautiful, although it rained of the entire 3 days we were there, bar a 2 hour period during which we visited the “Golden Temple” made out of solid gold, which just glowed in the brief intense sunlight. We got a bullet train to Kyoto from Tokyo (isn’t it funny how To-kyo and Kyo-to are the same name reversed?) which was …well… fast. Other memorable times on the trip included watching Geisha chatting-away on their mobile phones, visiting a wooden temple that claimed to be the largest wooden structure in the world (along with a dozen other places I’m sure) and going to a sweet little restaurant in a sweet little district called Gion where this sweet old Japanese lady (who couldn’t speak a work of English, not that she should) served us a sweet dinner, and then sweetly ripped us off by charging us 15 pounds each for some meat and salad.
The highlight of the trip was a visit to a very large temple which was half way up a mountain and the weather was very dramatic, stormy, rainy and moody. It was really atmospheric, as the rain swept in from the sides in the strong wind, making me wonder just how stable Japanese woodwork really is (considering they never use nails for building, just wood locking). That evening, the late evening sun was strangely strong and as it hit against the green bamboo forests, everything lit-up an intense green and looked beautiful.

Things with my girlfriend Akiyo are great, although I’ve recently found myself to be in an utterly original situation. I had a (really quite sexy) student ask me to give her some help with an English test she was taking, outside of Nova. Not giving a damn about Nova’s anti-student-socialising-outside-of-work policy, I happily agreed and was subjected to 5 hours of thinking “am I a nice guy? Am I a nice guy?” as she told me to dump Akiyo and go out with her. In the end, I told her that the idea would probably be better than reality, but I was chuffed indeed.

And then there was Tomoe, this great girl with a wicked sense of humour, who I had some drinks with the other week. She …er… made things clear… and once again, I did the whole “I have a girlfriend routine” and told her that I’d love to be good friends with her. She was astounded with that, and later told me that no foreigner guy had ever wanted to be “just friends” with her and that I was the first. So, as it happens, we are good friends now, and we organised a drinking party for my single friends and her single friends. We ended up doing Karaoke and running up an enormous bill (150 quid) and everyone missed their last train home because of the fuss other the money. So Tomoe and Chris, a good friend from England, came back to my flat and I politely gave them my room (in which I had prepared 2 futons) and slept on the sofa. The next day it appeared that only one bed had been used… my bed, and not the spear futon, which was consistant with Chris’ and Tomoe’s good mood.

I still perform for the Japanese and English Comedy store every Friday, which is great fun, and occasionally I play in a one-off gig somewhere, like in a Secondary school. A couple of weeks ago I played for 40 minutes and got 100 quid, which was great considering I was only expecting 25! I also give piano lessons to two middle-aged housewives who are remarkably good, and their speed of progress frightens me a little!

Thanks for reading. Please stay in touch.

Trevor
203 Junes Kaijin
1-31-31 Kaijin
Funabashi-Shi
Chiba-Ken
273-0021
JAPAN

Hello,
My company, NOVA, has a popular and mildly witty phrase associated with it that many students tell me is “NO VAcation” with highlights their rather poor treatment of employees. We are essentially numbers, easy to get in, easy to get out, because the company offers hardly any incentive to stay at all, which is particularly unusual for a Japanese company. If you stay for a year, the common pay increase per month is twelve pounds, which I think is a bloody insult. The average length of time a NOVA employee stays within the company is 9 months and that’s just now NOVA likes it: a constant stream of fresh ignorant employees means no need for high promotion salaries. You have to wonder at the people who work at Nova for more than a year or two.

I catch myself unawares sometimes, as I realise just how normal my very abnormal surroundings have become. Sometimes I look at the masses of Japanese people cramming into the electric burrows under Tokyo and it hits me again, where the hell am I?! What am I doing here?! And when I come away from teaching the Japanese comedy group, or a nice lesson, or a good night out with some nice Japanese friends, or from my girlfriend, or from one of the comedy shows, I am reminded again of why I’m staying here, but I’m still not comfortable; I think it would be wrong for this place to become the norm, to become comfortable.

I saw a really sweet thing the other evening. I was riding a fairly quiet Metro and opposite me sat a very unusual couple, a large black man in a traditional African dress, holding the hand of this tiny Japanese-looking woman who was wearing a more feminine dress made of the same African material. They seemed to be holding onto each other for dear life, they looked so in love, and they were talking in English. It occurred to me that English was clearly a second language for both of them, and while they were pretty good English speakers, they had heavy accents of their home country. It was the most cosmopolitan and cutest thing I’d seen in Tokyo. Just an observation.

The other night, Akiyo (my Nova-student girlfriend, 7 months now!), and myself were talking about people’s names. I realised that she didn’t know what my middle name was so I asked her to take a guess. I was mortified to hear that all of Aki’s guesses were characters featured in the NOVA textbook, “George? Jeffrey? Dave”. When I told her it was Anthony, she seemed a little perplexed, as if a name not mentioned in the NOVA textbook could possibly exist. I became a little nervous as I wondered just now far this kind of thinking could go… does Aki decide what our social activities are based on the adventures on George and Jeffrey in lesson E27? Does Aki compliment me using only the phrases from the “praise and compliments” lesson? Does she tell me she misses me only because that’s what Dave says in lesson E11 when his girlfriend goes away for the weekend? OK, so these aren’t serious concerns of mine, but I realised that Aki’s Novafied English was crafted by the very people I hate, the morons in the “Education Planning” department who are responsible for the absurdly poor textbook. I only hope that my various Briticisms have the strength to overpower the nonsense that is NOVA English.

So I’ve been here a while, over 9 months now, and I’m starting to get a bit cocky. The other day I was in a McDonalds, queuing to order some fatty monstrosity, when I remembered the trouble I had had in a previous MacDonalds, trying to order off the Japanese menu during which the woman serving me had promptly turned over the Menu to reveal an English menu. So as I was queuing, I thought I knew what to do. As I approached the counter I made the usual futile attempt to order a “cheezu-ba-ga, fo-lai-do potato”, totally expecting the usual panicked expression from the poor MacDolands girl that read something like “why was he allowed to enter this country to ruin my sense of harmony?”. But this time was different! I remembered the previous time when the other girl had turned the menu over, so with a rather smug expression, I turned over this gibberish menu to reveal… another gibberish menu, all in Japanese, exactly the same. She looked at me as if to ask “and exactly how is that going to help the current situation?” and I turned a little red, and resorted, once again, to the rather pathetic point-at-the-picture-and-raise-a-finger method, tried and tested by foreigners all across Japan. Why did I ever think I could break the method?

Japanese people use three sets of symbols, and once of them is used almost exclusively for foreign words. This set is called Katakana, and it basically makes an English word sound Japanese. For example, cheeseburger, becomes Chi-zu-ba-ga, and drink becomes do-li-n-ku. By far the most annoying thing about the Japanese language is when I try to say an English word to a Japanese person and they go ahead and correct MY English by pronouncing it in Katakana. So there I am in MacDonalds, screaming milkshake! Milkshake! Milkshake! and after ten attempts the poor MacDonalds girl clicks and pronounces “Ah! Mi-ru-ku shi-e-ko!” as if my proper English word bares no resemblance to the authentic and true Japanese pronunciation. Madness.

Just a small thing here: you know how one language has words for something that another language doesn’t? Well, I recently discovered a case between English and Japanese. In English we always talk about a dog barking or a cat meowing or a chicken clucking, which is ridiculous when you think about it. Why don’t we just have one word that describes any animal ‘talking’? Well, the Japanese do, and they think it’s crazy that we have a specific word for each animal. But that’s the thing! We don’t do we?! I mean, what does a Wildebeest do? How about a Reindeer? And what exactly does a penguin say? Madness I tell you.

Please stay in touch. Thanks for reading.

Trevor
#203 Junes Kaijin
1-31-31 Kaijin
Funabashi-Shi
Chiba-Ken
273-0021
JAPAN

Hello,
It’s strange to be experiencing the same kind of weather I knew a year ago here. I’ve never been abroad more than a year and so I’m feeling kinda nervous: will I be Japanesified if I stay here too long? Will I become “slitty eyed” like the great Prince Philip once remarked, what a guy.
I guess I was looking for something to make me stay and it certainly came, Akiyo’s pregnant… no not really, something else. I’ve been offered the job of Musical Director for a pretty big production in Tokyo. I’ll have to compose/arranged music for a full length musical-style pantomime, based on “Sleeping Beauty.” It’s very daunting but I think I can do it and the director is a good friend of mine, who I know will help me. So there we are, I’m staying, at least until Christmas, because this show is on in November. So if anyone wants to visit me, come in November and see the show!

Recently, all of my best non-Japanese friends left to return to their country, which left me wondering if it was worth staying here anymore, but it’s been ok, although I miss them sometimes. I have many Japanese friends but it’s hard to see them regularly, what with always bloody working over the weekend. I never fail to be surprised at how this suits some Nova teachers who are happy to just teach rubbish English and then go drinking, repeat x5 for the week and spend the two days off doing nothing. I find myself distancing from my Nova ‘friends’ more and more. In fact, I can’t take the leaving parties anymore. My best friend here, Justin, had a leaver’s party and amazingly, all the staff he hated turned up, just to make a formal showing. I suspected he felt like he had no control over his own leaving ‘party’ and I had an utterly crap time. I found myself constantly turning to the stranger next to me and having the same mundane conversation which always starts with the questions “Where do you work?” and “Where are you from?” and very quickly I switch-off, numb to the continued alcohol-enthused conversation about Japanese girls, the job and shallow pointless observations about Japanese society. It sounds immensely arrogant of me, but I sat there thinking “I’ve actually got a life here, I have Japanese friends, I’m busy, I have a proper girlfriend, I have commitments and things to do every week.” So I feel like Nova is simply the money earner while all the fun stuff happens outside of work.

The auditions for “Sleeping Beauty” were very strange for me. I had to test the singing of fifteen people, all older than me, all far more experienced in the theatre than me. In my attempt to put people at ease, I asked them to sing very basic tunes that everyone knows, like “Head Shoulders Knees and Toes”. There was one woman who simply refused to sing what I wanted and instead gave an overly long and ornate rendition of some jazz tune. Sure it was great but it made me think “damn, if she doesn’t do what I say now, how are rehearsals going to be?!” At the end of the auditions, I met with the director and assistant director to discuss who to cast. I felt like such a fraud as we disgusted the pros and cons of each person. Much as I hated it, it seems that the jazz-singing woman is going to be Sleeping Beauty.

The sheer volume of people here can get a bit much sometimes, it’s just relentless. Normally when a train pulls up, it’s so crammed full of people that there isn’t much window space with sweaty skin not pressed against it. And then the doors open and the only people to get off are those who thought that somebody behind them needed to get off, but of course nobody does actually get off, so those people who got off in the first place have to squeeze back in and the new people have to attempt to squeeze in. When the doors slowly shut, you can just feel the noses being scraped and faces rubbed against. As I find myself wedged under the armpit of the only Japanese man in the world who has a severe sweating disorder, I try to get out a book or my CD player only to find that the woman I’ve accidentally gently poked in the process is staring at me like I’ve just pulled out a bomb. Surely, you wouldn’t be surprised to receive a little accidental poke now and again in a train crammed to beyond rationality.

A lovely thing about Japan is that you very rarely encounter people arguing or creating any kind of bad atmosphere. It’s a far cry from the Romford pram-pushers back home who shout and whack their kids until sufficient mental scarring has been achieved. On the contrary, kids in Japan appear to be able to do what they want, which isn’t a bad thing, since they are inherently much ‘better’ behaved. And another huge difference is how safe you feel, even if you’re walking home at 3am past a group of drunks. I’ve never felt threatened in the least and I’ve never had a bad word said or action made against me, well, at least anything I’ve understood. I’m sure it happens but ignorance is bliss. I know that when I get back to England, I’m going to have to quickly break out of the habit of talking loudly about the person in front of me to my mate next to me.
“Blimey, look at his trousers; they’re wedged right up to his shoulders.”
“Yeah, maybe this mother still dresses him.”
I’d be killed instantly if I said this in Essex.

And I like the sense of fashion here: it’s far more individual and whacky than back home. I don’t know why. Maybe a bigger attempt to make themselves individual is needed when a monoculture lives in such close proximity. A fellow Nova teacher once pointed to a case of stairs in a train station that hundreds of Japanese people were pouring down and he said they all looked like salmon rushing to get somewhere. Just before I was about to say it was no different to back home, I realised it was: the monoculture makes everyone look much similar. I’m still working out if such a monoculture is a good thing or not. Most of the population in Japan seem torn about that too.

So I phoned my dad and mum hoping I could use their credit card number, but neither was in. So I phoned my brother, who’s only number I had was his mobile, which was ridiculously expensive to call from a Japanese mobile. I explained the situation and he said that he didn’t have a credit card and he’d try to contact mum or dad or me and would get back to me. Now in full panic mode, I reluctantly turned to Akiyo who did have a credit card. Could I use a Japanese credit card to pay for some UK travel insurance? I went to her flat and explained apologetically that I was running out of options. Then my brother called me to say that mum or dad didn’t have a credit card. So I had to use Akiyo’s card, which thankfully worked. Now I needed proof of having bought the insurance to satisfy Nova and I only had about 5 hours before the UK business would stop for the day, but the time difference meant it was well into the night here in Japan. I phoned Endsleigh again, got cut-off, phoned again and begged for them to call me back, to which they said they couldn’t. I explained that I needed them to email me a copy of my insurance policy immediately, to which the girl said that she couldn’t do that until 4 hour’s time. I said that that only gave me an hour’s grace before Endseligh would be shut, so they absolutely had to email me the policy without fail. She absolutely promised me they would. It was about midnight now, so I went to bed for 4 hours and set the alarm to wake me up at 4am to check my email.
And of course, there was absolutely no email. I called Endsleigh again, got cut-off by them as they forwarded me to the travel insurance department, phoned again, got cut-off again, by which time my once-full calling card had about 10 minutes left. And of course I had to go out into the streets to make these calls, since if you make any noise in a Japanese apartment, a hundred sleeping people will wake up. So, in an utter panic, I went to a 24 convenience store and went to the trusty automatic international-phone-card topper. It was making strange noises and I couldn’t get it to work. I eventually guessed from the shop-assistant that it was ‘resetting’ itself, which it does for 30 minutes at 4am every morning. It was now about 4.30am so that was useless. Endsleigh would be closed in 30 minutes and I would lose my job. I only had 2 minutes to explain my entire and unusual situation again to yet ANOTHER Endsleigh insurance member, having already explained my story to about 5 different staff. I phoned them and was put on hold again, for about the sixth time, this time for about 8 minutes, and they cut me off again. With one minute remaining, I phoned Endsleigh, now in a total panic, and to the first person who answered I gave the following speech at rocket speed:
“I’m very sorry but I’m calling from Japan and I only have a minute left to speak. I desperately need you to send me an email of my insurance policy. I’ve spoken to so many different people at Endsleigh and nobody has helped me. You keep cutting me off. My name is Trevor and my insurance policy number is BAC4558656. You must call me back. I have no way of calling you.”
By now it was gone 5am, and Endsleigh was shut. There was nothing more I could do. Defeated, I walked slowly back home (by now I had wondered the majority of my home-town, looking for shops which sold call-cards but all the machines were ‘resetting’) and as I approached my flat, my phone miraculously ringed. It was a girl called Lisa, which a strong northern accent,
“Hi is that Trevor? This is Lisa from Endsleigh Insurance. Just to let you know that we’ve emailed you the policy.” I thanked her from the bottom of my heart and went to bed totally knackered. My name must’ve been circulated in about 10 different Endsleigh offices.
I woke up at 11am, relaxed. All I needed to do was to print a copy of the insurance policy and fax it to Nova since Nova had no email address I could send it to. I don’t have a printer so I went into the town where I worked, dressed formally (I needed to use the fax machine there so I had to dress up) and went to the main internet café. I tried to explain that I needed to print something out and pointed to the computer close to me that had a printer attached. The café assistant told me that I was prohibited from using that computer and printer (for some enigmatic reason) and that I needed to ‘rent’ a printer. So he actually handed me a printer, with all the cables hanging from it. I had to ask for paper. I went to the prescribed booth, number 100, which was 5 minutes walk away. Once I was there, I discovered there were no spare power-points for the printer so I unplugged the unnecessary overhead lamp and used that socket. I connected it up and turned on the computer, which promptly told me that I needed a CD-ROM to install a printer driver. In a state of disbelief that this was really the normal procedure for wanting to print something, I took the long hike back to the café assistant, who had now changed into a slightly less nervous-looking guy, and tried to explain that it wouldn’t work. He looked at me and pointed at the original computer and printer which I had been told by the first guy I couldn’t use, and he said “why don’t you just use that?” Honestly, it’s hard not to think “is it because I’m a foreigner?!” sometimes. It worked fine and I faxed it OK with 2 hours before the deadline of losing my job to spare.

First of all, I’m coming home from September 15th (my b-day) until the 27th so please contact me if you’ll be about in England then because I’d love to meet up.

I’ve been here for over a year now, the longest I’ve been away from home! I marked the anniversary by waiting for an obscene amount of time in the local immigration centre to renew my visa, getting increasingly frustrated with every passing minute. Japan seems to over-employ people in every possible situation, apart from of course, this particular immigration centre. So I collected my “no.84” ticket and sat down to watch the two staff members deal with a hundred different families, all equally huge, all with one ticket per family, with each person needing a new visa. There were times when the number didn’t move for twenty minutes or so… and it was at no.42 when I arrived.
Another new boss has arrived in my branch of Nova. He’s been here for 6 years and is possibly the biggest tit I have met in Nova, which is really saying something, since Nova seems to have more tits working for it than everybody on the books of “Playboy”. His name is Greg and the first ever conversation we had was about how terrible he thought my teaching was. It’s fascination how people-skills just seem to by-pass some people.

I was in McDonalds the other day when a group of dynamically-dressed mid-teens decided to point at me and laugh and giggle, which isn’t particularly rare. What was rare however, was when one of them turned to me rather cautiously and said “hello” in a manner which suggested she was coaxing some timid animal out of its hiding place. I politely repeated the same greeting back to her and her reaction was one of “wow, it can talk”. Never before had I felt like somebody’s play-thing, a mere amusement, like an animal in a zoo. She followed with “where are you from?” and I told her. Then she said “you very cool” which I decided to translate as “you are very cool” and I replied “no, just a normal person” to which she and her friends lost interest and continued to play with their mobile phones with mountains of dangly things hanging off them. I felt absolutely flattered that my ability to say “hello”, “London”, and be a foreigner marked me as being cool. But of course, it’s not cool as in popular, funny, respected and sophisticated, no, it’s cool as in having ‘wide eyes’ and a ‘pointy’ face. Such superficial character judgments for foreigners are commonplace here and can be pretty grating sometimes.

Another thins that marked my year’s anniversary was the expiry of my travel insurance, which I had completely forgotten about. Apparently, Nova had been sending me warning letters that if I didn’t renew my insurance, I couldn’t work for them anymore (a law for foreigners in Japan) but these letters had gone straight to a dusty inbox that I never check. So, one day before it would expire, I was handed a letter telling me I had a day to renew my insurance and to send evidence of the new insurance to Nova head-office in Tokyo. Otherwise, I would lose my job, and would have to go through a reinstating process that took ages. The thought of having no proper income in a city as expensive as this gave me chills. First, I went online to the Endsleigh Insurance site and entered the details of my UK switch card to pay for a new period of insurance. The computer refused my card. Not terribly worried, I knew I had a credit card, so I entered in the details of that, and again, it was refused. I then phoned Endsleigh and tried to pay on the phone but the girl told me that neither card was recognized. A little panicked (how was I going to pay for UK insurance if none of my payments worked?), I phoned Halifax bank who promptly told me that both of my cards were out of date, even though the expiry date on the actual cards were in the future. They told me that I needed to register a lost card and that I’d have to wait up to 7 seven working days for the new card to arrive. I explained that I didn’t have that time available to me, and I was cut-off. I called again and was forwarded to the same department but in the process I was cut-off again. I called again and explained that it was too expensive for me to keep calling them and asked if they could call me back on my Japanese mobile. They said that I could ask the operator of the country I was in to make a reverse charge call to Halifax, and they would pay the charges. I replied with “um… can you tell me how to say that in Japanese?” It still astounds me how people assume the world speaks English. I asked them to tell it to me straight, is there anyway I’d be able to pay for anything using any of my bank cards within the next 20 hours, and they replied “no”. Anyway, this story kinda goes on and on, so if you want to read about about it, open the attachment.

A couple of nights ago I was invited over to one of my student’s mansion to watch the fireworks (it’s currently the season for many firework displays in Toyko). I’m sure everyone reading this is picturing some glorious housing estate overlooking the Japanese countryside, right beside the firework display. No. It was just a small apartment (the Japanese use the word ‘mansion’ meaning apartment, when they speak in English) about a mile away from the display. It was a very urban experience, as we climbed to the roof top of this large block and drank beer with many other families, who were also out to see the display… a mile away… on top of a block of flats. Overlooking all the rooftops of Tokyo to see a tiny version of what would have been a great display up close seemed to me to be a wonderful and very Tokyo experience. There was clearly a real sense of occasion with all the families there, even though the display was easy to miss.
A few weeks later, I had planned to spend the evening on the boat meandering through Tokyo’s main river (yes, there’s a big river that runs through Tokyo, did you know?) to watch more fireworks, this time up close. This had been planned for months by a friend of my girlfriend’s and I was looking forward to it, especially considering it would cost 50 pounds. I told everyone at work about this trip and they all said how great it would be, and that there’d be food and drink flowing, unlimited, as much as you like. Well, we turned up to the rickety docking area to find a small white fishing boat, the kind that featured in Jaws, well, a bit more modern, and without all the shark-fishing equipment, minus Richard Dreyfuss and Roy Scheider, although we did get attacked by sharks, no, that’s not true. BUT there was no elegant ball-room, so flowing champagne, and actually, no food or drink at all! Just about 50 people crammed onto this boat, oh, and it rained. I had visions of me and my girlfriend waltzing around on a beautifully polished ball-room floor, surrounded by caviar and champagne, but no, just a dirty great boat.

Don’t forget, I’m coming home from September 15th (my b-day) until the 27th so please contact me if you’ll be about in England then because I’d love to meet up.

Please stay in touch
Trevor

Hello all, thanks for staying in touch.
First of all, PLEASE VISIT ME! Come and visit me over Christmas/New Year, it’s a great time to be in Japan. If you’re a guy, I promise you’ll get laid, if you’re a girl, then, well, there’s all the culture stuff. But seriously, flights aren’t too expensive and it’s great to have someone around at Christmas time.

I’m forgetting things recently, more and more so, and this really depresses me, because I want to be able to remember all the amazing stuff that’s happening these days. It’s all too often that we find ourselves in colourful situations which quickly turn to monochrome and then to dust via the intermingling of too many lesser memories. If we judge our lives on what we’ve done and experienced, then memory is primary to measuring such things. I guess secondary is as honest an account of these events as possible, so I write this diary. I guess memory is everything.

The behavior of Japanese people on the train never stops to amaze me, in particular their ability to sleep. Sometimes, you’ll see a businessman rushing through the denser-than-lead crowds and leap onto the train a millisecond before the doors shut. He searches for a seat, along with the five other businessmen who all have their eye on the single remaining seat, and he plunges towards it in a manner which is brisk, let polite, that kind of walking/running thing that people do when they really want to get somewhere quickly, but don’t want to look too fussed about it. Then as soon as he sits down, he’s out like a light, in a deep sleep like he hasn’t sleep properly since he started employment at his company twenty years ago. Once I saw a man whose face was covered in deep shadows, such was the intensity of his tiredness. And then he yawned, a horrific yawn that suggested profound constipation rather than simple tiredness. The Japanese can sleep in any situation. I’ve seen, and this is true, people sleeping while they are standing, people sleeping while they are gripping steadfast onto their briefcases, and most impressive of all, was a woman sleeping while she was eating. She was mechanically placing small sweets into her mouth, yet clearly snoring at the same time, but also managing to chew and swallow to some degree. And you know, these people have inbuilt timers, or some magic form of external hearing during their sleep, because when their station is due, they leap out of their seat and get straight off the train, like they’d been anticipating this journey’s end all this time.

There’s a really annoying thing that Japanese people do when they are crowded in a train; they just lose all sense of muscle control and become limp, like dead bodies. There seems to be a cut-off point between normal self-supporting standing and the utter limpness that accompanies Japanese people past a certain point in density of the crowd. Everybody leans on each other and just seems to give up with supporting themselves. So I find many sweaty bodies swaying into me. So I tried this myself and of course, the reaction was different, I was promptly pushed back into an upright position by some anti-foreigner.

So I’ve been having rehearsals for “Sleep Beauty”, a production in Tokyo for which I’m musical director. I had no idea how annoying people could get. The actors were telling me how they’d like their song to sound, and how the composer should have done this and should have done that. I really didn’t have the heart (or the guts) to tell them that I was actually the sole composer. Still, it’s good fun, although there is one person, who plays the evil godmother, who told me her song was too “scary” for children, which I completely disagree with. I asked what she had in mind, and she suggested a slow soulful jazz number… hmm, I thought, and what has that got to be with being evil? I wanted loud drums, cymbals and startling melodic phrases, but she thinks mellow trumpets and a brush drum kit is more evil. Perhaps the fact that she has her own regular jazz singing shows has something to do with it.

I recently started giving private lessons to lady called Kiyomi, who turned out to be a bit of a surprise. I have no idea how old she is, this is well hidden by expensive cosmetic surgery, but she’s got to be at least 35, and she has an 11 year old daughter. She is separated from her husband who she only refers to as her “future ex-husband” as she is going through a lengthy divorce process. I had no idea how much money was involved. She picked me up from the train station in her new Mercedes convertible, and drove me to her detached fairy-tale house. “Do you like my glasses?” she said, as she sat on the mini blue sofa in the ‘study’. I replied positively and she told me that they were titanium frames, possibly rather expensive I thought. She then told me that she just liked the look of the frames and doesn’t actually need them. Sure enough, they were just unfocused plain glass. As she smoked cigarette after cigarette, she told me various accounts of the people she’s met and how everyone seems to be after her money. The irony is that she is solely dependant on her husband for her income, via humungous support payments for her and her daughter, and so her husband’s money is paying for her lawyer to fight him in court! She asked me what she should do as her daughter in currently in a private school in Australia, but an ex-friend of hers in Australia is trying to revenge on Kiyomi via the exploitation of her daughter in some way. I said I didn’t know, move her to a different school or something. Kiyomi said she had been thinking about that, and she asked me what good schools I knew. I said that I only knew about English schools and that there are some very good private schools in England? “Really?” she replied, her unnatural face lighting up. A week later, and again, this is true, she moved her daughter out of the school in Brisbane and is now going to live with her in England, where her daughter is going to Wells Cathedral School. At the end of the two hour lesson, she handed me a 10,000 yen note, fifty quid, and said “thanks for listening.”

Book those flight to Tokyo now!
Thanks for reading.
Trevor

NOVEMBER 20th

I’m guessing this is the first email I’ve wrote from on the train. I have my laptop on my lap, it’s just gone midnight, and I’m on the last train to my hometown. Even though it’s a Sunday evening, I just about got a seat, and as usual, about 70 percent of the people here are asleep. I’ve just finished my 6 show run of “Sleeping Beauty” which was of course, great fun, although there were more technical problems than I would have liked, and the whole thing seemed to obliterate the phrase “it’ll be alright on the night” as some things certainly were not aright. We’ve just had the after show party, which consisted of much self-congratulations and cheerful reflections of how wonderful everything ran, even though the technical faults were enough to make the show look like a shoddy amateur production at times. I had 15 of my friends come to watch, which was really nice, and it seemed like a poetic way to say goodbye to everyone, had I been leaving, but I’m not leaving yet, so it wasn’t, but I did sometimes picture having my bags packed and ready for the final encore to finish and then I’d rush to the airport and arrive in London, still glowing from the show. But no, I’m still here.

Edit: I assumed someone wanted me to write a brief bit in the programme for "Sleeping Beauty" so I prepared a paragraph, but it never got used. Here it is anyway:

“His music successfully combines the humorous with the sublime”, “funny yet painfully touching, a triumph in modern pantomime music” and “yet another extraordinary score from the legendary Trevor Ferdy” are all reviews that I just invented for myself but I like to think that they are well written. As for my music, I hope it does the job. Should it do more, then that’s a wonderful bonus. I researched for months, spending time with various Beauties, (but they weren’t asleep quite all of the time) and various fairy-tale fictitious characters, such as the Nova Usagi, Pikacho, and speedy immigration visa staff (now, they are certainly fictitious). You may well ask how I came to find such melodies. Well, one night, as I slept, I dreamt of many wonderful and sweet melodies, none of which feature in this show, as I forgot them all, but anyway, I hope these tunes make you happy.

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

I have to go back to Nova tomorrow morning, which will have my stupid boss Greg there. I’ve recently realised why I hate him so much. It’s because he has no imagination, none whatsoever. He needs to follow the instructions in the lesson guide word-by-word and fears anyone who deviates from this, so he gets angry with then and tells them off, like he’s done with me. Right, I’m too tired now. I’m gonna join the 70 percent of the people here and continue later…

DECEMBER 8th
And now it’s later, I’m writing this from another train, this time from a “bullet train” which is one of those super fast 200mph trains where you arrive to your destination before you leave. Technology these days. These trains are much more luxurious, although they consist of exactly the same clientele as regular trains: stressed-out office workers, like the guy sitting next to me, who I’m hoping can’t read English. I’m on my way to a city called Osaka, to work at the main head office of Nova. I don’t know how, but word got past around I could make music and somehow I was asked to record all of the music for a batch of Nova Kids English education CDs, so I have to make tunes to sing the days of the week to, the months, numbers, alphabet (although that’s generally sung to Twinkle Twinkle isn’t it? I may do a trance remix). But Nova being the awful company that it is, offered absolutely no incentive for me to do this, their attitude being one of “it’s a privilege for you”. They asked me to work 6 day weeks, and I’d have to stay in Osaka on my days off. I quite clearly said no, and if you wanted me, you’d have to let me work normal 5 day weeks, and pay for the bullet train home every weekend (which is 75 pounds for each single journey!) They reluctantly gave it to me.

DECEMBER 12th
So I’ve already spent a few days working in head office: this is where they produce all the crappy textbooks, all the crappy Kids materials, all the crappy speech CDs, crappy illustrations, crappy flashcards and crappy crap. I am astounded at how unprofessional this whole set-up is. Nova is a huge company, one of the biggest in Japan, and the biggest English school in Japan. They put everything together in such a slap-dash last-minute way, it’s shameful. There’s no proofreading department, so all the publications are filled which mistakes. But of course, the Japanese people just accept it, being a culture of acceptance and minimal complaint, an attitude which is starting to get on my nerves.

Actually, I really want to play Space Invaders or watch a DVD on this computer but I feel that I can’t: I’m wearing shirt and tie, and I mix in fairly well with all the stressed office types, so I’d look a bit weird if I did that… sod it, I’m gonna watch “Meet Joe Black”.

DECEMBER 16th
Back on the bullet train 5 days later, next to two business men who are happily drinking out of their silver Japanese beer cans. Drinking is quite a different thing in Japan. The idea of day-time drinking doesn’t seem to be an issue. You can buy beer with your hamburger at Wendys here, and from vending machines on the street. Japanese beer is strong, at least 5% and the drinks that are catered mainly for women are even stronger: the alcoholic lemonade is 7%. But most Japanese people can’t really tolerate alcohol, and some not at all. They either go bright red after one drink or just get drunk very quickly. Seeing business men slumped on the floor in their shirts and ties is not uncommon in Tokyo on a Friday night. I’ve seen many people drunk, mostly women. I regularly see some guy holding back the hair on a woman who is dribbling out sick onto the train platform. I’ve seen women with plastic bags dangling from their heads, under their mouths, each handle looping around their ears. One time I saw a woman expelling an incredible amount of puke onto the platform and hanging over it in pain, then her mobile phone rang and she actually answered it and conducted a business-like conversation. That’s the thing: the women you see drunk off their face are not young girls or homeless, they’re business women.

JANUARY 9th
Christmas has come and gone. I had ten people round in my tiny apartment and cooked a semi-Christmas dinner. It felt great to have so many Japanese friends with me, like I’d really settled here. I went skiing for the first time after Christmas, it was my first time here and the friend I went with had only been once before, so the blind were leading the blind. I pretty much taught myself the basics but the one things that took ages to work-out was how to walk up a slight slope. Many episodes of slowly sliding backwards into complete strangers could have been avoided had something just told me : V-shape skis, dug inwards. It snowed all the time, and stupid though this may sound, it was too cold, and too snowy for comfortable skiing. The first day was great, having learnt an entirely new skill, it was like being a kid again. The second day was also good, having perfected some more basic maneuvers, but on the third day, I was getting annoyed with not being able to get any better. It was a 3 day holiday so just as well.

On New Years eve I went to a club in Tokyo, which was a bit of a mistake, as it was mostly full of foreign men looking for temporary new year girls. The highlight was the 4am breakfast in McDonalds. Blimey, that wasn’t a joke as well.

Then January came and I suddenly realised, I’m going home soon. I’ve started making plans to go home. So many things to consider, but it seems like I’ll quit Nova at the start of March, travel somewhere through March and April and be home at the start of May. So to everyone in England, I hope to see you soon. And if anyone can help me to get a teaching job in September, let me know!

From Trevor

It’s hard to sum-up an entire nation. I always thought I’d need to give the final word on Japanese people in this last email from Tokyo. But it’s not needed, because I simply can’t come to any conclusion about a nation which I still don’t understand. But there are some key things which have occurred to me over the past 20 months.

There seems to be three things that are important in Japan: honour, politeness and cuteness.

Honour is one of the main reasons that 30,000 plus Japanese people kill themselves every year: they find themselves unacceptably unemployed, or have brought shame on a family. It’s not uncommon for a mother who wants to kill herself to kill her baby too, chiefly because of a lack of honour. But honour is also the reason people work so hard, and Japan achieves so much technologically. Japan is very good at perfecting something that has been created by somebody else. Surprising though it is to say, Japan is not good at creating things from scratch and the Japanese have a profound lack of imagination. An opening gimmick of mine is to ask the student what their job is, and to then ask them to make-up an entirely different job; you wouldn’t believe how long it takes to get an answer.
Part of honour is conforming. Conforming is a big necessity here, nobody wants to stick out. Being exceptional is seen as dishonourable, as if grinding against the common grain, trying to stop the greater good.
One’s job is key to having honour, and everybody is expected to stay behind after hours to work late, at least until the boss leaves, be it 6pm or midnight. The working environment in Japan is an almost sacred place, where things are taken very seriously, and everyone must report on everyone else. Pressure is high, in many forms, even social: one is expected to drink with bosses and colleagues and important work decisions are made here. Formal meetings in the daytime in the workplace are mere acts of formality to seal what has already been decided in a bar somewhere over beers and sushi.
I find it hard to see the good points about such a strong need to be honourable in Japan. This is because I don’t understand why it is so important when it causes so many bad things.

Politeness is taken to new levels in Japan. When I have a conversation with regular Japanese people, I have stopped bothering to ask for opinions because Japanese politeness renders such talk pointless. In a group of people, if I say that President Bush is crazy and terrible, everyone will nod their heads enthusiastically and hum hums of approval. If five minutes later, I say that President Bush is a good leader, everyone will nod their heads enthusiastically and hum hums of approval. Nobody EVER says that are good at something, which has slowly lead me to the false impression that nobody is actually any good at anything.
Politeness includes making constant small compliments about one’s skill for various things. The classic example is when I incoherently mutter a few words to Japanese and the response is “oh, your Japanese is so good”. Of course it’s usually nice to hear such praise, but I’ve slowly come to disbelieve every compliment paid to me. As a result, I’ve simply stopped believing any compliment that anyone gives me, which isn’t good.
Politeness is closely related to honour. One wasn’t kick up a fuss, or complain. Acceptance of one’s situation is honourable. This is why Nova gets away with such a low quality service to the Japanese people. The rules are so completely different here! Nova has got into financial trouble recently, and branches are closing down. This has lead Nova to increase ‘tuition’ prices, and the advertisement for such a move was made with the opener, “until now, we’ve been too cheap, so we’re raising our prices!” Can you believe that?!

Cuteness is the nicest thing. It works on many different levels here. A small child clutching a stuffed toy is cute, and a young woman with boots, tiny skirt and low top is cute. A pink rabbit with a beak for a mouth is cute (Nova’s character), and almost anything small is cute. Girls feel a pressure to be consistently cute, and perhaps that goes the world over, but it’s certainly prominent here. In the workplace a guy can just ask someone to do something for them, but when a girl talks to a guy, she needs to talk in a ‘cute’ voice, turn their head the right way, or use the right ‘cute’ body language. Essentially, guys can just get on with it, but girls needs to imply “oh we’ve having such fun together aren’t we?” while they try to get help from other guys.

Trevor

I miss Tokyo

2006-11-27T14:00:00.000-08:00

Yes I do, and I thought I needed a place to be able to vent all my missingness out on, so I got this blog going. A blog? Why is it called a blog? What does that stand for?! Someone told me it meant "web-log", so why leave out the "w" and "e"? Anyway, Tokyo. Here's the shortest version I can muster: I lived there from July 2004 to March 2006. My job was an English teacher for Nova, a terrible company that thankfully has pretty low expectations of its employees so life was easy and almost totally stress-free. The easy nature of the work (basically chatting to people eight times a day) allowed lots of activities outside of the workplace, and while most people decied to spend all their money on booze and trying to recreate their home country (man, I met some sad cases), I managed to get lots done, playing the piano for comedy clubs, composing music for Nova's kids CDs (hey, I'm platinum in Japan!) and for a musical, running workshops for Japanese comedians and doing lots of other great weird and fun things that I got paid for!

Now I'm back in the UK, and all I can do is remember Tokyo. So, I should probably go back. Well, over the course of this blog, I guess that will be decided. And this blog will end with a decision one way or another. I have no idea which way it will go. I'll keep you updated if you are interested.

Trevor