Well hello there. It’s a bitterly cold Monday morning over here in Numazu and I am stuck in school in my wee basement office all alone yet again :(. Today I have the pleasure of watching and grading 63 skits that my first years performed last week for their final exam. For the second time. First time round, I was inexpertly recording their performances – now I get to watch them back and see just how crap I am with a handycam. This task wouldn’t be so bad if more of the skits were innovative and witty, and some are. But you have no idea how mind-numbing it is to watch 50 skits over the space of a week that all have the same story line – boy and girl talk on phone, make plans to go to restaurant, go to restaurant, order food, boy gets food poisoning, goes to doctor, doctors gives him medicine and says get some sleep, end. And to watch them over again is the dramatic equivalent of self-harm. So I’m procrastinating for as long as possible by arsing around on the internet and writing this. If only I hadn’t finished book 4 of Harry Potter last night (I’ve decided to read them all again to prepare myself for the arrival of book 7 in July. Read the first 4 books last week, then realized that we don’t have books 5 and 6. Bugger). Ah well.
So here’s what I have been getting up to since last week. Went to Tokyo last weekend to celebrate Ross’s birthday and stopped in to see Stevie Wonder in concert on the way. The man is a legend, his voice is sublime and his selection of tunes was spot on. It’s been a while since I danced, sang and clapped so much, but I think I made up for it that day. Spent the rest of the week recovering from the weekend (as you do), then on Saturday I finally went and bought myself a bass. I have been thinking about doing it for a while, but somehow always had too many other things to be doing to go shopping for it properly. This weekend, however, I quit procrastinating, grabbed my Italian exchange student Ire and her Japanese friend Sumiho (who is a bassist/body piercer/all round lovely person) and went and bought the thing. If you’re asking me what type of bass it is, let me answer you by saying that it is a cheap one. But it works and that’s all I need right now. And I have the incredibly sore fingertips to prove it. I’m starting off easy learning Pixies basslines (which are really fun to play) – I’ll let you know when I’ve mastered anything more complicated than that…
Oh, just one more thing before I sign off – what about that Ireland v England rugby match? I nearly spat my cereal all over the computer screen when I saw the final score! It’s even being reported over here, it’s the top sports story in the Japan Times today, full with commentary on the historical significance of Ireland thrashing England in the first game against them in Croke Park in light of the slaughter of 14 people on the grounds by British forces in 1920. Much as I appreciate such poignant journalism, this means only one thing for me – I am going to have to explain all the history to all the Japanese people I know at some point, because they will ask. This is easy enough when the enquirers speak English, but just try discussing the finer points of Irish politics and conflict with sign language and pigeon Japanese. I had to do it on Saturday to some punk guy who came into Sumiho’s shop to have his tongue pierced, as he had Never Mind the Bollocks and wanted to know about what the Sex Pistols were shouting about in Anarchy in the UK (that would be “Is this the UDA, Is this the IRA” etc etc). 20 minutes and a whole lot of hand waving later, I think he got the gist, but I can’t be sure. So I will have an interesting week ahead of me. Ah well, if nothing else, I’ll be deadly at charades by the time I’m finished. Now there’s a talent that’s bound to come in handy one day…
Sunday 25 February 2007
Saturday 10 February 2007
I wish i was a fisherman...
I've been sitting in my house in a wee bit of a daze today, alternating bursts of manic spring cleaning with the intense desire to curl up in a tiny ball under some blankets and sleep for days. this is mainly because of the fisherman-like hours i was keeping yesterday. amir and i decided that this would be the weekend to go to tsukiji fish market in tokyo, since monday is a holiday and we would have more recovery time from the crazy-early start we'd have to get to go. anyway, we got the 3am saturday morning train to tokyo, got in there for 5am then headed straight to tsukiji because the auctions start from 5.
tsukiji is the biggest fish market in the world, operating every day except sundays and holidays and selling most of the world's tuna. you really have to see this place to believe it - hundreds of enormous dead tuna lying either fresh or deep frozen on warehouse floors, while men in a uniform of aprons, wellies and cigarettes shout perhaps in japanese though it just sounds like grunting to bid for the poor beasts, while looking at the fish flesh with torches and scooping bits of meat out with their fingers to make sure they're buying Good Shit. because just one of these monstrous tuna will set you back something like 2000 euro.
(In case you're wondering what the things that look like missiles in the picture above are, they would be frozen whole tuna.)
outside of the warehouses, hundreds of stalls sell the less illustrious fish, keeping them alive until someone hands over the cash, then unceremoniously beheading and gutting them in front of your very eyes. the whole procedure looks like a painful as hell way to die, but the executioners of the doomed fish do all this quite cheerfully.
(this poor fella looked straight at us as he was meeting his maker. eerie...)
in the midst of all the fish blood and entrails, men on crazy motorised carts zip about the place, not really looking where they're going (i saw one guy merrily driving along sending a text message before almost ploughing into an unsuspecting american woman) and assuming that you will get out of the way before they run you over. the carts are steered by these big giant barrel-shaped wheels at the front of the vehicles, weird looking things that make you think you've accidentally stumbled into an episode of Dr Who. it's all a bit surreal - it doesn't feel like tokyo, or japan for that matter. gone is all the politeness and decorum that is so prevalent in pretty much all walks of japanese society, and it's replaced by a haphazard, pre-dawn mania that is made all the more confusing by the fact that you're walking around totally sleep-deprived. it's a scary scary place, but fuck me it's great craic. i can't explain exactly why, and i know that walking round a fish market at 5.30am on a saturday doesn't exactly sound like a good time, but it was one of the coolest experiences we've had since coming here.
(5am louise - dazed, confused and smelling of fish)
after seeing all we could see, we headed for one of the sushi restaurants in the market to taste possibly the freshest sushi that can be found in the whole world. we had to stand in line for an hour to get a seat, but jaysus it was worth it - the sushi literally melted on your tongue and tasted exquisite. we sampled 3 parts of tuna, each with a different fat content, enormous shrimp, slivers of squid, sea urchin (which we had trouble keeping down because the texture just makes you want to hurl), egg and miso soup, all washed down with some green tea. we were so ensconsed in the consumption of our breakfast, and so taken aback by how tasty it all was, that we forgot to take a single photo of what we ate. that's how distractingly good it all was. and that's how sleepy-stupid we were. ah well, we'll just have to go back again some time.
tsukiji is the biggest fish market in the world, operating every day except sundays and holidays and selling most of the world's tuna. you really have to see this place to believe it - hundreds of enormous dead tuna lying either fresh or deep frozen on warehouse floors, while men in a uniform of aprons, wellies and cigarettes shout perhaps in japanese though it just sounds like grunting to bid for the poor beasts, while looking at the fish flesh with torches and scooping bits of meat out with their fingers to make sure they're buying Good Shit. because just one of these monstrous tuna will set you back something like 2000 euro.
(In case you're wondering what the things that look like missiles in the picture above are, they would be frozen whole tuna.)outside of the warehouses, hundreds of stalls sell the less illustrious fish, keeping them alive until someone hands over the cash, then unceremoniously beheading and gutting them in front of your very eyes. the whole procedure looks like a painful as hell way to die, but the executioners of the doomed fish do all this quite cheerfully.
(this poor fella looked straight at us as he was meeting his maker. eerie...)in the midst of all the fish blood and entrails, men on crazy motorised carts zip about the place, not really looking where they're going (i saw one guy merrily driving along sending a text message before almost ploughing into an unsuspecting american woman) and assuming that you will get out of the way before they run you over. the carts are steered by these big giant barrel-shaped wheels at the front of the vehicles, weird looking things that make you think you've accidentally stumbled into an episode of Dr Who. it's all a bit surreal - it doesn't feel like tokyo, or japan for that matter. gone is all the politeness and decorum that is so prevalent in pretty much all walks of japanese society, and it's replaced by a haphazard, pre-dawn mania that is made all the more confusing by the fact that you're walking around totally sleep-deprived. it's a scary scary place, but fuck me it's great craic. i can't explain exactly why, and i know that walking round a fish market at 5.30am on a saturday doesn't exactly sound like a good time, but it was one of the coolest experiences we've had since coming here.
(5am louise - dazed, confused and smelling of fish)after seeing all we could see, we headed for one of the sushi restaurants in the market to taste possibly the freshest sushi that can be found in the whole world. we had to stand in line for an hour to get a seat, but jaysus it was worth it - the sushi literally melted on your tongue and tasted exquisite. we sampled 3 parts of tuna, each with a different fat content, enormous shrimp, slivers of squid, sea urchin (which we had trouble keeping down because the texture just makes you want to hurl), egg and miso soup, all washed down with some green tea. we were so ensconsed in the consumption of our breakfast, and so taken aback by how tasty it all was, that we forgot to take a single photo of what we ate. that's how distractingly good it all was. and that's how sleepy-stupid we were. ah well, we'll just have to go back again some time.
Saturday 27 January 2007
Happy Birthday Me...
Turned 25 the other tuesday. i'm not one for big extravagant birthday parties (i held my 21st in dingy sticky-floored Whelans in Dublin, where we all got trashed on jack and coke and bounced up and down to some half-decent alt rock for a few hours), and this year is no exception. The big difference with this year is that my low key celebrations were largely conducted in Tokyo. How fucking cool is that?!?!?!?!?!? But did we go for the traditional gaijin celebration tactic of getting wankered at a random foreigner-filled club in Roppongi? Oh no no no no no. Instead, we decided to take a trek to some of the shall we say weirder attractions that Tokyo has to offer, starting with the Parasitological Museum.
As the name suggests, Tokyo's Parasitological museum is dedicated to all things tapeworm and tropical. Though there was no English translation on any of the displays, the museum really did exactly what it said on the tin - in that there were jars of enormous worms and bugs that formerly inhabited a number of unfortunate hosts, from fish to birds to dogs to humans. The museum had several effects on me - apart from making me feel itchy when i looked at all the pics of the poor buggers who had their skin torn apart by skin bugs, i was terrified, fascinated, amused, bemused and downright entertained all at the same time. And though i couldn't be as empathetic to the case study of the man who had a parasite in his bollocks that caused them to swell and drag along the ground as the lads were, i still got my money's worth. Definitely one to recommend if you're ever in Tokyo on a rainy day, especially to look at the visitors' book to see all the weird little cartoons of people with parasites that former guests have doodled. Priceless.
After an hour of worms in jars, we headed on to an exhibition of photographs by Japanese photographer Hosoe Eikoh. The guy basically invented that whole skin-on-skin guess-the-body-part united-colours-of-benetton-ad-type-black-and-white-skin-together thing. He's most famous for the book of avant garde photos that he took of the writer Yukio Mishima, but the collection had stuff that he'd done throughout his career, and it was wonderful to see. One photo really got my attention, of a girl eating an apple. Seriously, eating an apple never seemed so erotic till i saw that photo.
After the exhibition we had to do something to keep ross interested, so we headed to the Yebisu Beer Museum. To be honest, i don't think i looked at a single thing there, i just swanned through it looking for the bar. and i wasn't disappointed - i got my sampling tray of 4 of Yebisu's finest brews including the bog standard lager, the weissbier, the red stuff and the black stuff, or watery guinness as i like to call it.
Then we found a random izakaya for some food and more beer (in substantially larger glasses, thanks be to jesus), threw some tasty j-food down us, and sprinted to shinjuku loft for a gig. Went to see OOIOO and Deerhoof play - Japanese/American noise rock at its very best. so i had possibly the weirdest birthday celebration i've ever had, but thanks to the power of tokyo, it worked out pretty well in the end. man i love tokyo...
As the name suggests, Tokyo's Parasitological museum is dedicated to all things tapeworm and tropical. Though there was no English translation on any of the displays, the museum really did exactly what it said on the tin - in that there were jars of enormous worms and bugs that formerly inhabited a number of unfortunate hosts, from fish to birds to dogs to humans. The museum had several effects on me - apart from making me feel itchy when i looked at all the pics of the poor buggers who had their skin torn apart by skin bugs, i was terrified, fascinated, amused, bemused and downright entertained all at the same time. And though i couldn't be as empathetic to the case study of the man who had a parasite in his bollocks that caused them to swell and drag along the ground as the lads were, i still got my money's worth. Definitely one to recommend if you're ever in Tokyo on a rainy day, especially to look at the visitors' book to see all the weird little cartoons of people with parasites that former guests have doodled. Priceless.
After an hour of worms in jars, we headed on to an exhibition of photographs by Japanese photographer Hosoe Eikoh. The guy basically invented that whole skin-on-skin guess-the-body-part united-colours-of-benetton-ad-type-black-and-white-skin-together thing. He's most famous for the book of avant garde photos that he took of the writer Yukio Mishima, but the collection had stuff that he'd done throughout his career, and it was wonderful to see. One photo really got my attention, of a girl eating an apple. Seriously, eating an apple never seemed so erotic till i saw that photo.
After the exhibition we had to do something to keep ross interested, so we headed to the Yebisu Beer Museum. To be honest, i don't think i looked at a single thing there, i just swanned through it looking for the bar. and i wasn't disappointed - i got my sampling tray of 4 of Yebisu's finest brews including the bog standard lager, the weissbier, the red stuff and the black stuff, or watery guinness as i like to call it.
Then we found a random izakaya for some food and more beer (in substantially larger glasses, thanks be to jesus), threw some tasty j-food down us, and sprinted to shinjuku loft for a gig. Went to see OOIOO and Deerhoof play - Japanese/American noise rock at its very best. so i had possibly the weirdest birthday celebration i've ever had, but thanks to the power of tokyo, it worked out pretty well in the end. man i love tokyo...
Sunday 21 January 2007
Au revoir Jakers
So last weekend was my birthday celebration weekend - i hate birthdays so i always find that if i celebrate beforehand i can get good party time in without that horrible 'oh shite i'm so old' feeling niggling at me. cos i turned 25 on tuesday. that's a quarter century - fuck me when the hell did i reach my mid twenties? i had a great weekend nonethless - and i will elaborate on my tokyo adventures tomorrow. but for now i can't help but feel sad because my mate jake headed back home to england yesterday. so in honour of his sudden departure, i'm gonna use it as an excuse to post some of the ridiculous photos that i have managed to snap with jakers. cos jesus tapdancing christ the boy couldn't stop himself from pullin a face every time i pointed the camera in his direction. and the result is pure gold. so here, for your viewing pleasure, is the Best of Jake...
Jake loves kebab (the filthy hoor....)
Ugly loves company
You're supposed to look like that after you've drunk the Irish Carbomb...
Parts of Jake we hoped we'd never see
What a saucy minx
Jake loves kebab (the filthy hoor....)
Ugly loves company
You're supposed to look like that after you've drunk the Irish Carbomb...
Parts of Jake we hoped we'd never see
What a saucy minx
Friday 5 January 2007
This Life...
Where the hell does the time go, eh? It has been a crazy few weeks, filled with a last week of school that nearly killed me with the unexpected workload, a holiday in hong kong that nearly killed me with the weight of all the delicious food that i consumed, and a new year that... well... wasn't actually eventful enough to inspire feelings of even mild discomfort let alone fear of impending death. I guess i have a lot of catching up to do in terms of these last few weeks of 2006, but really, fuck it. for now anyway. because all i can think of right now is Miles.
And it's not even a real life Miles. I am referring to the stuffy, now scruffy, member of the cast of This Life (that 90s show where all the lawyers lived in a house together and managed to drink, shag and argue their way round London) played by a real life Jack Davenport. Most of you probably didn't know me back in the days when This Life did its debut run on telly, but i was hooked on it from the beginning. I watched both series and couldn't wait for the next installment of gratuitous swearing and sex on the BBC, especially because i got to imagine that just maybe, one day, i too would meet a group of arseholes like the characters, and live with them in a big flat where we would cook dinner, smoke like chimneys, screw each other and drink too much wine. Beautiful... So you can imagine how utterly devastated i was when the last episode of the second (and last) series ended when millie found out about rachel coming on to egg and took a swing for her at miles's wedding to THE WRONG WOMAN, while warren walked in the door from his series-long travels wondering what all the fuss was about. What way is that to end a series anyway??? No resolution of ANY KIND WHATSOEVER!!! i have been living with this for 10 years. until tonight.
tonight, thanks to the genius of UkNova, i got to watch the 10-years-on-reunion-christmas-special of This Life from the comfort of my wee house in Numazu, Japan. And from the moment i heard that theme tune, i was right back in my house in northern ireland, sitting upstairs sneakily watching something that i know my da would go mad about if he caught me (incidentally, by the second series, i became somewhat emboldened by adoescent outrage and rebellion and actually deliberately watched it in front of him, gay sex in the jacks and all, just to piss him off. so it goes.) Everything was just the same, the same dynamic, the same snappy dialogue, the same sanse of voyeuristic thrill watching these people fuck everything up and bitch about each other. but one thing was different, and that was Miles. still an asshole, but jaysus jack davenport has got hot in his old age. now don't get me wrong, i still think he looks like a fucking public schoolboy, but what can i say, there's just something about slightly ugly men with scruffy hair that does it for me :)
you're probably wondering what i'm going on about, and in fairness after unsuccessfully trawling the net for a picture that gets across exactly what i mean, i see your point. i couldn't find a picture of him actually looking the way he did in the show, and normally he's a wee bit upper class twat around the face. lets just say he was somewhere in between posh english boy...
...and homeless boy.
but you have to trust me on this one, he looked hot!
okay, horny rant over. i promise i will never desecrate the pages of this blog again by lusting over a random actor.
well...
And it's not even a real life Miles. I am referring to the stuffy, now scruffy, member of the cast of This Life (that 90s show where all the lawyers lived in a house together and managed to drink, shag and argue their way round London) played by a real life Jack Davenport. Most of you probably didn't know me back in the days when This Life did its debut run on telly, but i was hooked on it from the beginning. I watched both series and couldn't wait for the next installment of gratuitous swearing and sex on the BBC, especially because i got to imagine that just maybe, one day, i too would meet a group of arseholes like the characters, and live with them in a big flat where we would cook dinner, smoke like chimneys, screw each other and drink too much wine. Beautiful... So you can imagine how utterly devastated i was when the last episode of the second (and last) series ended when millie found out about rachel coming on to egg and took a swing for her at miles's wedding to THE WRONG WOMAN, while warren walked in the door from his series-long travels wondering what all the fuss was about. What way is that to end a series anyway??? No resolution of ANY KIND WHATSOEVER!!! i have been living with this for 10 years. until tonight.
tonight, thanks to the genius of UkNova, i got to watch the 10-years-on-reunion-christmas-special of This Life from the comfort of my wee house in Numazu, Japan. And from the moment i heard that theme tune, i was right back in my house in northern ireland, sitting upstairs sneakily watching something that i know my da would go mad about if he caught me (incidentally, by the second series, i became somewhat emboldened by adoescent outrage and rebellion and actually deliberately watched it in front of him, gay sex in the jacks and all, just to piss him off. so it goes.) Everything was just the same, the same dynamic, the same snappy dialogue, the same sanse of voyeuristic thrill watching these people fuck everything up and bitch about each other. but one thing was different, and that was Miles. still an asshole, but jaysus jack davenport has got hot in his old age. now don't get me wrong, i still think he looks like a fucking public schoolboy, but what can i say, there's just something about slightly ugly men with scruffy hair that does it for me :)
you're probably wondering what i'm going on about, and in fairness after unsuccessfully trawling the net for a picture that gets across exactly what i mean, i see your point. i couldn't find a picture of him actually looking the way he did in the show, and normally he's a wee bit upper class twat around the face. lets just say he was somewhere in between posh english boy...
...and homeless boy.but you have to trust me on this one, he looked hot!
okay, horny rant over. i promise i will never desecrate the pages of this blog again by lusting over a random actor.
well...
Monday 18 December 2006
Tired Mii...
Christ it has been a busy week and a half. I thought that Christmas in schools is supposed to be all making Christmas cards and dossing, but apparently not in my school. I have been running around like a 5 year old on skittles, never stopping, occasionally clunking into things, not actually getting anything done. But the countdown is on: three more days of class then i am out of here for a week or so, destined for Hong Kong and all the food it has to offer.
So what with the busyness, the extended hangover from last Saturday's AJET Christmas party (it started with beer, it graduated to tequila, it ended in a big fuck off mess...), the arrival of an ex-exchange student to stay with us, the abrupt breakage of our gas supply (no cooking, no hot water, no life), and the addition of our new wii to the family (yes we finally got one. hurray!!!), i have barely sat down to answer emails all week. the wii is an especially demanding mistress. so far myself and amir have made Mii's (that'd be the little characters that play the games on screen) of ourselves, we've got our friends to make their own likenesses, and now we're moving on to pastures greener by making Mii's of famous people. So far, our Hall of Fame consists of Hitler, Einstein, Gandhi, Orson Welles, Conan O'Brien, Monica Belucci, Condoleezza Rice (complete with gap in teeth), George W. Bush, and some others that i have forgotten. what we really want to do, though, is make one of Mother Teresa, so we can have a Mother T vs. Gandhi face-off, but technology has thusfar eluded us on that count. On a related note, if anyone can think of a person interesting enough to become part of our Mii hall of fame, don't be shy, gimme suggestions.
right, this one is staying short and sweet, as i have a gas supply to fix. cos this washing self with a bowl of microwaved water is getting oooooooold....
So what with the busyness, the extended hangover from last Saturday's AJET Christmas party (it started with beer, it graduated to tequila, it ended in a big fuck off mess...), the arrival of an ex-exchange student to stay with us, the abrupt breakage of our gas supply (no cooking, no hot water, no life), and the addition of our new wii to the family (yes we finally got one. hurray!!!), i have barely sat down to answer emails all week. the wii is an especially demanding mistress. so far myself and amir have made Mii's (that'd be the little characters that play the games on screen) of ourselves, we've got our friends to make their own likenesses, and now we're moving on to pastures greener by making Mii's of famous people. So far, our Hall of Fame consists of Hitler, Einstein, Gandhi, Orson Welles, Conan O'Brien, Monica Belucci, Condoleezza Rice (complete with gap in teeth), George W. Bush, and some others that i have forgotten. what we really want to do, though, is make one of Mother Teresa, so we can have a Mother T vs. Gandhi face-off, but technology has thusfar eluded us on that count. On a related note, if anyone can think of a person interesting enough to become part of our Mii hall of fame, don't be shy, gimme suggestions.
right, this one is staying short and sweet, as i have a gas supply to fix. cos this washing self with a bowl of microwaved water is getting oooooooold....
Wednesday 6 December 2006
From the mouths of adolescents...
My kiddies all have tests this week, so i have no classes to teach. Which is great cos i get to have a nice easy week of dossing, freezing, and marking homework journals and tests. The homework journals belong to my first years which, since i teach senior high, means that they are all 16 years old. Some of the kids write great stuff (one of them wrote a great piece on saving the environment and preserving the Great Barrier Reef a while back). Some of them write utter crap (quote: 'i rove music, do you liking too?'). And then there are some people who write as if they are 6 years old. I just came across this one today, and it is worrying:
"I want to go to America as I want to meet Elmo, cookiemonster and other Sesame Street characters."
Now, i don't know how quickly any of you matured as you were growing up, but did any of you think that Sesame Street was real and that you could actually go to a real live street in America called Sesame Street and meet Elmo when you were sixteen????? How is this girl unable to separate puppetry from reality? Of course, i should have realised that she had a screw loose when i read the first part of her entry that read: "America is the middle of the world." So she must watch and believe that other institution of the make believe on tv, Fox News (har har har!!!).
"I want to go to America as I want to meet Elmo, cookiemonster and other Sesame Street characters."
Now, i don't know how quickly any of you matured as you were growing up, but did any of you think that Sesame Street was real and that you could actually go to a real live street in America called Sesame Street and meet Elmo when you were sixteen????? How is this girl unable to separate puppetry from reality? Of course, i should have realised that she had a screw loose when i read the first part of her entry that read: "America is the middle of the world." So she must watch and believe that other institution of the make believe on tv, Fox News (har har har!!!).
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