Culture clash

An intern is visiting my unversity for a few months. Spying an opportunity for my students to interact with a native English speaker, I invited her to join my class of maths majors for a Q & A session. My maths majors are freshman; 19 years old, exclusively Japanese and exclusively women. The intern is 21 and American. In the interests of avoiding the usual questions of, "What's your blood type?" and, "Can you use chopsticks?", I had directed the students towards the following categories: student life in the US and women and society in the US.

We began the session then with the question, "Are there women-only universities in the USA?", swiftly followed by, "What's your ideal guy?" This rapidly degenerated into, "Do you like the colour green?" and "What mascots do you like?" The intern's incomprehension of the latter led to a barrage of examples from around the class: "Disney!", "Hello Kitty!" they cried. When the intern confessed that not only had she never been to Disneyland, but she had no desire to do so, the maths majors screamed in horror. When she added that adults in America tended not to get much into such things, there was an audible gasp.

Knights

I am seldom quick to jump to the defence of the British government, nor indeed Queenie, who does not even write her own honours list, but I feel that someone should point out to the governments of Iran and Pakistan that Queenie (and most of the time the British Government) is not answerable to the British people let alone the Iranians and Pakistanis. The thing is, with all due respect, Queenie/the British Government doesn't make the honours list for them.

And anyway, I don't hear them complaining about Ian Botham getting one and I'll bet he's got much nastier and less erudite things to say about Islam. Maybe it's the skill with which Salman puts it that pisses them off?

What would save you?

"What would you save if your house was falling down around your ears?" is the kind of question people like to read about in the Sunday papers. The altogether more practical question, "What would save you if your house was falling down around your ears?" tends to attract less attention. In Japan, one is well advised to keep an "earthquake bag" ready packed with the type of items likely to save one's life in the event of being buried under several tonnes of rubble for days whilst a panting German Shepherd scours the scene. Typically, these items include batteries, a torch, a whistle, bottled water, dried food, a blanket, painkillers, etc. Whilst hunting for his camera, which had disappeared in the move, Timorous Beast became desperate enough to search in our earthquake bag. It contained two backets of biscuits (sell by date November 2006) and a rubber band. But no camera.

A room with a view

Here's a picture of what The Family Beastie see outside their window as they sit on their new sofa, which was provided (mostly) by Mrs McBeastie in Scotland.

food meme

I've been tagged by the beautiful Liisa to tell you my five fave places to eat in Tokyo. There's a bit of a French flavour here:

Fujimamas
The food is wonderful, if a little pricy. The building is an old tatami factory, and the owner is a cool woman who tries to source the food and drink from small local producers with a responsible approach to the environment. They also support local artists and run the fabulous wine school that Beast and I have been attending.

Tokyo-Paris Shokudo
So old school that they don't have a website. It's a tiny French place, run by a lovely, continually sweating Japanese fellow, who always has a smile and a wee freebie for us because we are regulars. He makes great, simple French food for really great prices. Three course lunch with huge portions, 1800 yen.

Doma Doma
An Izakaya chain. That's a kind of Japanese pub-cum-resturant, where patrons sit in dark little booths and trough their way through thousands of small dishes including salads, sashimi, things on sticks, and cute little fritters. All accompanied by cold sake and a lot of smoke.

Kiraku
This used to be our local. For anyone not living in the east (arse) end of nowhere, it's a bit of a trek, but the food is great and the owner is a charmer. He speaks English and they have an English menu. The scallops are heavenly.

Great India
Our new local. This time it's a hole-in-the-wall slice of New Dehli in Tokyo. Sag, korma, nans, the works, all cheap as chips, dead tasty and with a bloody handsome waiter to boot.

Because I've never been good at maths, here's a sixth:

La Bretagne
Genuine sarrasin galettes courtesy of a lovely French Canadian in Kagurazaka, one of the nicest areas of Tokyo.

if you are reading this, consider yourself tagged and tell us 5 nice places to eat in your hood.

Infestation

It's not easy to get me riled when I am teaching. No matter how much I might be sweating, flapping and thinking, "What the fuck I am going to do to fill the next 20 mins?", my outward demeanour is one of calm. My aura of control was seriously threatened this week, however, by the infestation of spiders that visited my classroom. The first was efficiently dispensed with by lifting it, complete with the table upon which it was crawling, over the heads of the squealing students and replacing the furniture without pausing in my issuance of instructions. The second was discouraged from approaching the bare legs of another group of screaming girls via a brisk sweep of a textbook towards the corner of the room. A third, as it made its many-legged way across an unoccupied desk, was spotted only by myself and pointedly ignored in the hope of averting another round of leaping up and down and screeching. The fourth, alas, was not so easily dismissed and had to be scooped onto a piece of paper and deposited out the window before the students for whose feet it was headed fainted from sheer hysteria. As I bore it window-wards, the little bastard began scuttling towards my wrist, and it took more professional decorum than I ever hope to call upon at a single sitting not throw the whole kit and caboodle into the air and run from the building waving my arms in terror.

Shedding my skin

Apologies for the long absence. This post comes to you from a whole new part of Tokyo, courtesy of bandwidth stolen from our new neighbours. The Beast and I have moved, and this time it really is to Paradise. Our flat looks over a tree-filled courtyard far removed from any roads. As I sit here typing, I can hear a breeze rustling through the leaves outside and the muted tones of someone elsewhere in the building playing piano. No cars, no motorbikes and no karaoke bars are within earshot. Despite the peace and verdure, two minutes from our flat is a street lined with antiquarian book shops, cafes, restuarants and bars. There's a convenience store on the corner, a post office and a wonderful little wine merchant just across the road, and a supermarket a couple of minutes walk away.

But it is not just the outside world that has transformed itself into something wonderful. The view on the inside has also taken on a rosy new glow. It may be simply that, because we cleaned everything before we moved, I hardly recognise our coffee table without the usual sticky rings and tufts of grey fluff. It may be that the duvet cover just feels somehow fresher with the sweaty yellow stains washed away. But I suspect there is something more fundamental at work. When I look in the mirror, even I look more attractive; the angles of my hips and legs somehow pleasing and the bags under my eyes less...well, baggy. My thoughts in idle moments run to pleasure in my surroundings and excitement about what lies around the corner rather than dread at being one of the grey commuters.

Moving has been like taking off an itchy, badly fitting garment and putting in its place a silken robe. Only afterwards do you realise quite how close to desperation it brought you and what a relief it is to get it off.