Living abroad

I know it's unethical, but this one was too good to pass up. One of my students, in his essay on the challenges of studying overseas:

"Japanese students studying overseas must use local languages to do almost every thing, like finding an apartment, opening a bank account and buying a sausage."

Hokkaido animals

Dressing for dinner

Timorous Beast and I travelled to Hokkaido by train. The journey takes 16 hours and fancy French meals are provided in the dining car, so needless to say it is oversubscribed. There were no shared carriages and no French meals left by the time we booked, so I ended up in carriage 6, while Beast was in carriage 9. We bought our own bentos and boarded the train having arranged to eat dinner in my carriage at 7.30. Beast called me at 7.25, “Open the wine. I’ll be there in 5 minutes.”

By 7.45, my belly was grumbling. The conductor, who’d started at carriage 10 and checked everyone’s tickets on the way, had been and gone, but there was still no sign of Beast. How can anyone be so late when he only has to walk through 3 carriages? Maybe he got waylaid at the dining car? I called him. He was still in his own carriage. “Just getting changed,” he announced.

When he finally appeared, I was disappointed to note that he was wearing neither a tuxedo nor a cocktail dress; just the same old t-shirt and trousers.

Dinner

“Dinner is at 6.30” said the receptionist, “In the main building, over there.” He indicated the large concrete edifice across the car park, “Down those stairs”.

At the appointed time, we set off hungrily across the car park and down the shaky wooden stairs, following a faded plywood walkway that had been tacked on to the back of the hotel. It led past the air conditioning units to a heavy, unmarked door.

“Is this right?” I hesitated in front of the door.

“Must be” decided Beast with a shrug, “This is where he said.”

We opened the door to find a deeply carpeted corridor containing two hospital-type beds behind floral screens, a cabinet of bottles, jars and towels, and a guy in what looked like white surgical scrubs and slippers reclining on a sofa. I turned to run, but Timorous Beast grabbed my elbow and pushed me forward. Doctor Mengele rose from the sofa and extended his arm in an upward sweep, “Massage?”

Rebun Island

Lord of the flies

We took a bus to the other end of the island, from whence an eight-hour hike would return us to, we hoped, a bus home. We set off along the ridge of a peninsula in high spirits, the sea glittering hundreds of feet below. The trail led upwards, across sunlit meadows of wildflowers, then plunging down again into dark, mossy woods. We climbed cliffs, scrambled down gullies and jumped across streams. At one point, we even crossed a rocky beach and paddled in the sea. All along the way, unseen creatures rustled in the undergrowth, butterflies fluttered by our faces, and birds chirruped and warbled with the thrill of nature, wild and free.

Eight hot hours later, Timorous Beast was reaching the end of his tether with nature, wilderness and freedom. First there was his failure, at the last village, to procure a boat ride the rest of the way home. Then there was the last uphill stretch, which saw him scowling and stopping every two minutes to frown up at the gradient before him. Finally, as dusk approached, there was the valley of the flies. They swarmed, buzzed and bit, undeterred by Beast’s furious swatting and cursing.

It was thus that we staggered from the forest, red-faced and muddy, to the surprise of a group of locals who were roasting fresh prawns and crayfish on a barbeque. Beast’s face lit up as they waved and handed us an ice-cold beer. But this was just the beginning. Seconds after we finished the beer, the last bus of the day came bouncing round the bay towards us, stopping to pick us up even though we were nowhere near a bus stop. We grinned. All that remained was to get from the ferry port, where the bus would drop us off, back to the hostel. As it hissed to a halt, there was a knock on the bus window beside Beast: the old bloke from the hostel smiled toothlessly at us. He had come to pick us up.

Hokkaido

We are off to the home of wholesome dairy products, crabu setto, and bears. See you in a ten days if we don't get eaten first.

Shopping

Beast and I met for a coffee and then went to the bizarrely named L-breath to buy me a new rucksack and a money belt for my forthcoming trip. We emerged two and a half hours later and around 70 thousand yen poorer with a rucksack, a money belt, two pairs of trousers, a set a waterproofs (trousers and jacket), two hats, two cannisters of oxygen, two tubes of insect repellent, two sets of ear plugs, a padlock, a flask and a sleeping bag.

Taking control

There was a night out in Roppongi, home of everything sleazy and filthy. There were two wine tasting parties at our place followed by karaoke. There was the quiet Thursday night drink that ended with me spending the night on the toilet floor for fear I was going to vomit. Then there was the farewell party during which I fell asleep in a bar and then got home at 4.30 am.

In the last couple of months, I have probably drunk more alcohol than I have in the rest of my life put together. I've slept no more than 4 hours most nights and have spent the majority of my days with a face like an old sleeping bag and a personality like Margaret Thatcher.

I've had some great times, but I now realize that the combination of exhaustion and weighing 42 kilos does not make for a happy relationship with heavy drinking. It's got to stop.

So, now that the semester is over, I plan to sit on my arse eating ice cream and biscuits all day. This will resolve both the tiredness issue and the weight issue in one fell swoop so that I can resume my binge drinking without further delay.

No seriously, I'm taking the express wagon out of Tokyo and getting a fucking grip.

Highlights

The semester has finished and all that remains is grading those pesky final papers. For your delectation, here's the choicest morsels from this year's undergrads:

"Cooking in Japanese are often called 'Japanese food'.”

"India has many official languages and Indian speaks different languages depending on the area they live in. So, if people go to India, they will feel as if they were in a different country."

"Today, many students go to school since the compulsory education system had developed in a large number of countries, especially in advanced nations. The positive aspect of going school is that they can learn many things with their friends."

"Young people all over the world envy Japanese young people because they live in houses."

"Western people are reluctant to invent robots because they fear that they break the teaching of Christ that human beings were made by God."