Nomihodai

Today is gorgeous, it`s hot and sunny but with a nice breeze. I bought some CD`s today and made the perfect banana smoothie. I love the simple pleasures in life. It`s been nice to chill out this afternoon by myself since I`ve had a hectic weekend. Tuesday after work I went to Mango for a post-work beer with Pip, Donna, Ben and Shannon (the two guys who live down the road from us). After the Mango man closed the bar (he likes to go to bed early) I didn`t want to go to bed so we all went back to our flat and made pasta then sat around drinking tequila and playing poker until 1.30. Shannon had work at 10. Good effort, that man.
So because of the beer and the tequila, I didn`t go to my Japanese class. Naughty. Instead I met Yukie for lunch (who I haven`t seen for ages) and produced some dreadful Japanese. I can`t do Japanese with a hangover. Later in the afternoon I cycled into town and met Jo. We went to the cinema and were pleased to find that it`s only 1000 yen for women on a Wednesday. An odd discount, but who am I to argue. Pirates of the Carribean is a weird film. It seems that instead of coming up with a plot they went "here, have some implausible special effects and quite bizzare fight sequences and lots of shots of Johnny Depp looking sexy and rakish. Did we mention the Johnny Depp thing?"
We headed to Sakae and Red Rock for their infamous Nomihodai night - 1700 yen for all you can drink. Naturally the place was packed. It was great; cheap booze and I felt like I knew everyone in the bar. Finally it feels like I`ve got something like a community here. I got introduced to lots of other people too, and after talking for two minutes we`d find some other connection through other people we knew. After they chucked us out there we got kebabs then weaved home unsteadily on our bikes. Great night.

Last Orders

Gah, I want to go home and make curry. I`m so tired, curry is the only thing that will help. I fell asleep in a class for a couple of seconds today because the student was taking so long to give me an answer.
Last night was the last night of Kei`s bar in Inuyama, and Lisa`s birthday. We started off a huge group in the Hakkenden around the corner eating grotesque amounts of gyoza to soak up all the alcohol we were about to consume. Kei`s was busy, and we made a fair go of helping him get rid of his alcohol. Such a bummer he decided to have his closing night on a Saturday when every teacher has to work early the next morning. I finally drank some of the snake whisky (3, I think) and found it very pleasant despite containing a pickled poisonous snake. It was very mellow and tasted like maple syrup. We played bingo and I won a bottle of gin. Hurrah.
I`m sad to see that place close, I had a lot of fun times there. I`ll miss it.

Only slightly weird

Hey y`all. It`s pouring with rain here and has been for the past 3 days. Yuk.
On Monday I went with a big bunch of people to watch fireworks at Nagoya Port. They were cool, but it was raining.
I went out for a drink with Iain on Tuesday night and it was fun and only slightly weird. I was glad to see him, I`d missed hanging out and talking rubbish. It was a relief to find we could be in each other`s company with only a few Tourette`s-like evil comments from me. I`ve been assured this is a normal response and will pass soon.
Tonight I`m going out to Club ID with a big bunch of girls. We will mostly be dancing badly and letching at fit Brazillians.

Busy

I don`t know what to write about how I feel right now, but I will tell you what I`ve been doing. Last night I went to Dan`s final leaving party (he did manage to string out leaving a fair bit - he finished work a couple of weeks ago). I liked getting to chat to my students outside class and getting to use a bit of Japanese - but I noticed I`m slipping because I hadn`t practiced much for a couple of weeks. I met Dan`s language exchange partner Tomomi and her friend Yoko and swapped numbers with them. Yoko plays the guitar and is into the Nagoya music scene - I made her promise to take me out sometime. After that we went to karaoke and committed criminal acts against music. I went home at 1.30 and taught 7 kid`s classes today so I`m bloody knackered. Tonight is Claudio`s leaving party which isn`t even starting until 10, so obviously he has plans to make us all miss work tomorrow.
That`s all for now.

So, what now?

Today was a bit weird, naturally. I slept in late because I`d been so exhausted from the day before. After much coffee and pondering, me and Donna went to Bic Camera to see if we could get internet for our flat. I`d been told we couldn`t get anything better than dial-up (and I`d rather use internet cafes than go back to that), but Donna is more persistent than me and found out we could sign up for wireless. We got to Bic Camera, found a helpful sales assistant, and went about setting up an account. In Japanese. It was pretty tricky, I have to say. Donna had her Lonely Planet phrasebook (about as useful as an extremely uselss thing) and looked up things for me to say, and the sales assistant had a translator in his computer which gave helpful phrases like, "Please admit to the businessman when he is commence operational," which we decided loosely meant, "please be at home when the delivery guy comes." Now I understand where all those meaningless t-shirt slogans come from. So with the two dictionaries, my bad questions (taske no eigo no denwa bango imas ka? something along the lines of, do you have a english help phone number? with hideous grammatical errors) we managed to get sorted. Normal service should begin next week.
After that we went to Don Quixote, the weirdest shop in the world, which is right behind my house and I never knew was there. I bought The Girl with the Pearl Earring, The Maltese Falcon and To Kill a Mockingbird on DVD for 950 yen, or about 4.50 in real money. Then we spent a fascinating hour upstairs amongst the furniture, home appliances, games, toys, clothes, makeup, fancydress costumes, rice-crispie coated crabs, and sex toys. The crabs and the sex toys weren`t together, I hasten to add. Some photos from the shop will go up tomorrow if I can figure out how to get them off my phone. Night night.

An e-hangover

Thank you to everyone for being so supportive. I especially liked the 3 bottles of wine and the bottle of whisky you sent along with all that chocolate. Just as well it was virtual alcohol or I`d be in a bit of a state now. Thanks for all the hugs and kindness. I`m very lucky to have such great friends.

MySpace

And here are some photos of where I live. It occurred to me I ought to show you. I`d been meaning to put these up for a while.

So, about these flatmates

In all the drama, I forgot to mention I have 2 new flatmates, Donna and Pip. They are both Auzzies and playing hell with my accent. They are both very chilled and lovely, and right now they are doing an excellent job of taking care of me. Here are some photos from the night we went Salsa dancing last Saturday with a bunch of Donna`s friends.

Entropy gets us all in the end

On Sunday I had a fun evening with Iain in Inuyama, listening to music, messing around, drinking beer and eating food at the Hakkenden across the road.
On Tuesday night Iain texted `I want to talk`. Nothing good ever comes from Talking. I didn`t sleep all night. Sure enough, this morning he came to my house and broke up with me. This is not what I wanted. No opportunity to fix things, no chance to make it better. It was weird, miserable but we were still making each other laugh at stupid things.
Jo came over, helped me with a bottle of wine and some chocolate and then we went on a weird drunk sleep-deprived shopping binge. The results are pleasing. Maybe I should shop like this more often. Donna and Pip, my new flatmates (more on them later - this has wrecked my blogging priorities), have plans to keep me busy for the whole of this week. I`m glad I have people around to help me out, to stop me missing Iain and wondering where the spark went.

A hole in time

I`ve been terribly slack in posting recently, I do apologise. I don`t know where the time goes. I think this is one of those signs that you`re either getting old or are crap at time management.
So to sum up: Japan crashed out of the World Cup but it was fun watching them do so and even better chatting to strangers on the train home who loved us because we were covered in Japan stickers.
Japanese lessons continue much the same, slowly, but they give me the confidence to try out bad Japanese on my poor collegues and Japanese friends. Many conversations go like this.
"Watashi wa... chotto matte kudasai... wa, wa... nandake? yopparai des."
(Loosely translated: I am... hang on a minute... am, am... what`s the word? Drunk.")
But I`m getting better. I managed to say `last year I worked in Thailand, and my friend was very good at Thai because she spoke to people every day. I am not good at Thai because I am lazy,` and felt very proud, even though it took me about 5 minutes and three attempts to get there.

I went for dinner last Friday with my poor, long-suffering language exchange friend Yukie and two of her collegues. It was great to meet more Japanese people I have the chance to talk to in Japanese with. Of course I talk to Japanese people every day, it`s just a shame I`m only allowed to talk in English to them during lessons. We discovered that Yukie`s work is pretty close to my house, so I`m going to make them lunch sometime soon. Is it weird to be slightly nervous about that?

Boyfriend advice

So far I've avoided talking about my work and the students I teach. Mostly it's because to me, work isn't the most interesting part of my week. I'd much rather talk about the fun things I've been doing. It's also partly because I don't want to get sued. This, however, was too good to leave out. Our students have 40 minute-long lessons with up to 4 students per class. If they want to have a man to man lesson, they can book all of the other seats in that lesson. At my school they tend to be low level students working on the principle that if they've paid four times the price of a regular lesson, they'll learn four times as much. It doesn't often work out that way.
The other week I had my usual lesson with this particular student, a lady in her early forties though she dresses as though she's in her early twenties. We started chatting, and I mentioned I'd gone to Inuyama to see my boyfriend.
"Oh! You have a boyfriend! Eeeh!" and delighted, she firmly shoved her textbook to one side. "Where from?" She launched into a barrage of questions, how old is he, where did you meet, what does he do, which actor does he look like, and so on; she put her point across in a mixture of English and mime and asked the sort of personal questions that would make Jerry Springer squirm.
"You, no work. Get married. Have children. You are young, young is best for children." Oh right, no bother. I nodded and smiled politely, thinking she wouldn't like it if I told her to stop stickybeaking and open her book. "What is he buy birthday?" I told her I got flowers. "And?" And he was halfway around the world at the time, and we'd only just started going out, but she didn't understand. "Pah. Only flowers," she scowled. "Christmas?"
"Books and CDs."
"Books?" She looked horrified. I thought she was going to tell me to dump him.
"I like books." I said, getting irritated.
"Humph. Books. No ring?"
"Why would I get a ring?"
"Pair ring." What? "You - " she struggled for the words and eventually settled on a beautifully executed mime of dragging poor boyfriend to a shop, pointing out the ring and wanted and shoving him at the till. "Nice ring. Brand ring, maybe Tiffany."
"What about you?" I wanted to talk about something else. "Are you married?"
"Eeeh! Secret. No no no no no," and with that the bell rang and I scarpered before she could give me any more life advice.

Darius` birthday

On the 21st I went to Inuyama for Darius' birthday party. There were just a few of us there (the problem with working as a teacher is that everyone has different days off) and I got to meet Sian, the new teacher at Iain's school, and her flatmate Lisa. They both seemed really nice people, and Lisa speaks pretty good Japanese. I've been going to classes and that makes me more confident at trying to talk to other people like the Japanese staff at work and my language exchange friend, Yukie. I can make whole sentences now! I'm so proud.
We went out at Kei's bar, Kei was a bit twitchy and distracted the whole night because his wife was about to give birth to their first child. We had a few drinks there and then Darius decided he wanted to go to karaoke, so off we set in search of karaoke. Unfortunately the two karaoke places we knew were shut - one of them permanently, by the look of it. It wasn't such a bad thing, I'd sung karaoke in there once before and it looked like a creepy American motel where you'd get knifed on your way to the ice machine, but this meant we were short on entertainment. Iain decided it would be entertaining to get Darius to do silly things, like climbing the pyramid in the middle of the fountain in the town centre. Darius was keen on the idea, even after he'd tripped over taking off his jeans (because the correct fountain climbing attire is a pair of white boxers), and then fell over again, and fell off the side of the pyramid into the fountain. It was funny but probably a bit cruel. We decided to get some more drinks and go the river. We hung out there while Iain tried unsucessfully to persuade Darius to swim across the river (Darius was wise to Iain's tricks by then) and then convinced Darius it would be fun to have a sword fight with the long bamboo poles they borrowed from a nearby boat. Darius managed to crack Iain on the head. "I used to do fencing at school."
"Ow, you could've said."
And strangely enough, Iain ran out of silly things to get Darius to do at that point. We stayed by the river until 4.30 and the sun started to come up and the rain started to come down. I went to bed for a couple of hours before getting up to go back to Nagoya to do the overtime I'd very foolishly said I would do. It wasn't fun.