The Tokyo Marathon and Tokyo's Alice in Wonderland Cafe

So, Tuesday is my birthday and living in the arse crack of Japan doesn't present a whole lot of opportunity for birthday celebration...especially not mid-week so today I met up with six friends and spent the day in Tokyo, a very fun time had by all. It was great!

We went to watch the Tokyo Marathon (unfortunately it was pissing it down with rain...not that I should complain cos any much further East and we would have been likely to have been hit by a tsunami, so rain I can cope with, and cope with well, being British). The main rain issue was that the umbrella's made actually seeing anything of the marathon a rather tactical affair. We wound up ducking and diving all day by Asakusa (a bit touristy area by a large shrine in Tokyo) and it was really fun.. There were people dressed up as all sorts of things just like in the London marathon...we had Japanese characters like Anpanman, Duraimon and Pikachu, plus a Spiderman, people in suits, and even a man dressed as a Swan Lake style ballerina who stopped to give us a five-minute ballet rendition in the middle of the course!! It was also really funny to see so many people stopping mid-race to take photos...how Japanese!! We were right by a stage two which had some traditional Japanese music and dancing...including these poor old women wearing next to nothing in the freezing cold, who were doing the most pain-stakingly boring dance to the most pain-stakingly repetitive song for about 45 minutes....I bet they were just dying for the tsunami to hit Tokyo to put them out of their misery!!

After we had finished watching the marathon (which is very tiring....much worse than running I'm sure) we stopped for cake (as we often do when we have nothing else to do) and then made our way over to the posh part of Tokyo, Ginza, to go a themed Alice in Wonderland Cafe Restaurant!! It had a wicked atmosphere, all the waitresses are dressed as Alice and they have Alice music playing and all the dishes are laid out to look like faces and animals of things that are in the books and the film. It was all very random and very Japanese...but then that's just how I like things really! A great time had by all I think!

Japanese Food...or not

Japanese food can sometimes be delicious...sushi, sashimi, udon, soba, ramen, okonomiyaki (is like a mix of all sorts of things with eggs and milk I think and sort of fried), yakitori (grilled chicken kebabs), shabu shabu (which apart from anything is fun to say) and nabe (both hotpot stewy type things) to name but a few. HOWEVER, Japanese school lunch is something that I would not really class as food at all, but rather random high-calorie gloop slopped on plastic plates, usually cold, and usually not remotely complementing the other gloop it is sat next to. And I am eating this school lunch (kyuushoku, きゅうしょく, 給食) EVERY DAY! You're not supposed to leave any...everyone eats it...all students and teachers, with no choice of dish, everyone gets what they're given and everyone gets the same. Sharing it out every day is a prime time for fuss and takes such a long time (hence the coldness of the meal) that the smell has been lingering in the air for half an hour before you can actually eat it. It's actually quite incomprehensible from a British perspective at least that there would be no choice whatsoever and that the teachers would all eat the same as the kids (I'm talking about a lunch designed for 5 year olds being eaten by the 60-odd-year-old head teacher!!). It is a very respected tradition though...at my junior high school, we had a whole week's worth of special (seemed the same to me though) lunches to celebrate its birthday (?) and one of my schools has a song dedicated to it every day (played during the school lunch sharing and distribution fuss, which really deserves its own place in the school timetable).

Today was a prime example of an odd and not particularly appetising lunch...dessert was fromage frais, Danone too (they really pushed the boat out there), so that was ok, the soup was an udon soup which I like, but it was very very salty. The salad was covered, dripping and drowning in a very vinegary dressing (possibly vinegar) and had some very questionable meat in it, which I think was probably innards of some description, but I'll never know because I can't read the menu. Then there was the obligatory carton of (full-fat) milk which I must drink every day! I know that in England drinking milk on its own, let alone full-fat, let alone with a straw, let alone out of a carton with a smiley cartoon cow on it, let alone to wash down a hot meal with in the middle of the day, would be only something kids up to the age of 6 would do, but here ALL the kids and teachers do it every day. Then was the creme de la creme...かまぼこ....kamaboko....a steamed white fish-paste and (very yellow) cheese sausage! I wish I had taken a picture...I can't find one online at the moment. It was this horrible white stick, with the texture of rubber, the smell of fish and taste of horrible cheap cheese...not three things that should go together! They couldn't believe I didn't like it! I couldn't believe I wasn't sick in my cold salty soup!!

Today's Year 6

Bless my year 6's in the East school (I have four primary schools...north, south, east and....itakura, even though they are all in Itakura and the one named "Itakura" is indeed in the west, but calling it west would just make it all too logical). Anyway, the year 6's, so last year of primary school (which makes them 12 here) had to do a self-introduction speech in English with the simple sorts of phrases they've learnt so far (name, age, likes, dislikes). They are my favourite year 6 classes (there are two classes in that school) and they did really well...they're not that used to standing up in front of the class and speaking in Japanese, let alone in English, so I was pretty proud that they could all do it. Also threw up some very amusing English...I managed to stop myself from sniggering at the time but I have to share it with someone, so with virtual people I don't feel so guilty....

"I like sing singing singys"...not she doesn't have a stutter, she just thought that you needed that many "sings" in a sentence...I suppose you can never have too many "singys" though.

"I want to be a hairdresser because books are interesting"...can't fault the English I suppose.

"I am October 21"...riiiiiiiiiight.

"I want to be an orange"...somehow what this boy meant to say was "forensic scientist", easy mistake to make I suppose!

I know I shouldn't laugh...and I didn't actually! Did you? I hope you feel guilty if you did!

Welcome to my blog

Hello!

I didn't really know what a blog was until I saw Julie and Julia a couple of weeks and I still don't know exactly what you're supposed to do with one...so this "blog" may be very short, but I'm giving it a go.

I am a 22-year-old (that's right...I have no excuse for not knowing what a blog is) Londoner who got a job teaching English to children in Japan last year. So, I came bright-eyed and bushy-tailed ready for my life full of two of my favourite things...sushi and karaoke, cos everyone knows that that's what Japan is all about right?

Well, apparently there must have been some administrative issues as I seem to have accidentally been sent to the arse-crack of Japan. A small town called Ita-where?, famous for cucumbers (woo), which has a surplus of old people and rice fields and a distinct lack of both karaoke and sushi. I have been here for 7 months so far and I have somehow grown to love it and have just signed up to stay for another year (until August 2011), but basically, my life is pretty funny and being in the arsecrack of Japan, I have very few people to share the madness of it with, as everyone here is Japanese and thinks that I am clearly the mad one, not them. Of course, I know better.

So, this blog is mainly a means of self-therapy, aiming to prevent me from going mad or worse...turning Japanese (no masturbation pun intended). If you'd have asked me 7 months ago (or even 2 weeks ago to be honest) whether writing a blog was normal or not, I would have said definitely not, it's a sign of madness to sit and write random crap about your life on your own and then post it to some general (virtual) public with no idea who is reading it or what they are thinking. I can't imagine who would read this, but desperate times apparently call for desperate measures! So, if you are....a) don't be offended by anything I have just said about bloggers and b) Enjoy! Please laugh along at my misfortune and ring the loony bin on my behalf if I start sounding too Japanese...I have nothing to gauge my normality by anymore!!