Walke About

Wanderings

2009-07-12T21:37:00.002+09:00

Wandering is what we do; restlessness, part of our nature or at least it's part of mine. And in that hubris sweeping statement, I have found one of my more primary truths, that for me, contentment is impossible.

I used to believe that contentment and complacency, while hanging out in different subtleties of the same semantic neighbourhood, amounted to the same thing. Then I had a heated argument with my then girlfriend's mother about it. Though I hated to lose an argument to her, in that case, it seemed she was right and I did have an erroneous view of the two concepts. Contentment didn't mean an end to striving, just an end to neediness, a satisfaction of one's status anxiety. Complacency, on the other hand, the abdication of active participation in maintaining or growing one's life situation. Two very different ideas. I'm sure if I'd bothered to look it up in a dictionary, her point of view would have been there, writ plain as day with all the weighty authority an Oxford could muster. But I've never been one to play things the easy way. I value self-discovered knowledge above that passed on to me via reading etc, which makes my style of thinking rather intuitive. Regardless, Contentment, it was argued, was a noble thing to strive for in life and completely attainable for those posessing enough humility, industry and self-awareness. It was what she hoped for her daughter and the family her daughter would eventually create. Contentment was part of happiness and completely natural.

Now, however, I find myself having dug and searched and considered for months on end, trying to discover my truer self, looking for happiness and, yes, contentment. Yet I find I remain plagued by all the failings I have ever been afflicted with. I am often late, I remain messy, I fail to communicate regularly with people I care about, and more telling than any of it, I have failed to repeatedly and regularly do the things I've decided would be good for me, things that I know make me happy or that I think would make me happy. Slipping out of my grasp as often as we have cloudy days, consistency remains my greatest bugbear. I just don't seem to be able to do anything consistently besides breath, but that's autonomic (and a good thing too!), so it doesn't really count...

Anyway, the contentment issue is, for me at least, really an extension of this inconsistency in my behaviour. With anything requiring a sustained, repeated activity to come to anything largely not getting done, I find the only things that I can reliably do to make myself happy are things that are one off kinds of things, immediate, instant gratification things. No plan survives contact with the real world, but it would be nice if something resembling some kind of directed activity could be installed in my life. It's not as if I don't want to do the things that I'm not managing to do consistently. I think I do want to do these things, but there is some monkey wrench, a cosmic simian tool getting tossed back and forth in my ambitions like a cat in a cartoon street fight.

This is what is leading me to believe that contentment is impossible, that I'll always be wandering from one idea to the next, unable to create a plan of action that extends beyond three or four days. I suspect that if I was actually able to maintain a schedule of practice with ANYTHING, that I could get really good at it and find it really rewarding. I might even find some kind of contentment. But it's not going to happen. I'm no longer a kid, I'm not even a young adult anymore, and yet consistency still eludes me. I think I'll always strive after it, exploring different possibilities, tracking it like an elusive forest beast, but I don't think I'll ever find it. And I guess the trick with that is I just have to accept what is, live in the here and now and get over not having an ability to relentlessly, pursue a goal over an extended period of time. I've just got to get over not being consistent.

I wonder if I'll manage even that consistently...

Just another holiday

2008-11-03T22:04:00.000+09:00

Today I woke up early. I don't know what time, but it was earlier than I wanted to be awake. I meant to go climb a mountain today, but yesterday's tennis had left me sore and unmotivated. It became a down day.

I made coffee, the kettle building to a plastic clatter before the clack of the mechanism killed the boil, the steam creeping up the old wooden stairs to the bedroom. Shaking out the kernels of freeze dried joe, I pondered my choice, a poor man's pinch hitter, instant coffee, brought to a dark chocolate brown life by the hot water. It filled the need for a hot drink, leaving a galling lack where regular coffee would have filled my nostrils with a rich roast, my mouth with a deep, complex symphony of tastes. As I took my first scalding sip, I remembered something important: I hate being poor.

Well, nothing to do for it at the moment. I quickly peeled and devoured a smallish banana from the baskets hanging by the kitchen window and my coffee mug clutched in both cold hands, climbed back up the stairs to our bedroom, where M lay still in dreamland. She talked for a long time on the phone last night, with a good friend from her university days whom she hadn't talked with for ages. I figured they were up until 2, so I didn't wake her, didn't even make her coffee.

I plunked myself down on the hard little steel stool that currently serves as my computer desk chair and got to work on my spaced repetition software (SRS), going through repetitions of French, German and Japanese sentences, just bringing them up into memory at just the right time to trigger their storage into long term memory. Lately, though, I've been prevaricating about which SRS to settle on.

There are three that I'm puzzling over. The first, Supermemo, isn't even written for Mac, so I'm running it on a windows emulator. However, it's a beauty in terms of life-style learning. It has a feature called incremental reading which I just love. The only thing about it is it seems to be rather buggy and the Japanese interface is sort of awkward. The second is based, apparently, on a Supermemo algorithm, but is open source, which I like, and is a much more vital piece of software. It has a good, active community working on it's development. The only kicker for me is that it doesn't have incremental reading. The third is called Anki. It's also opensource, which, as I mentioned, I like. It also has a funky furigana feature which automatically gives readings for kanji inputed onto cards. Cool feature. I found it kind of awkward to get into though. The start-up is just a little to fast. Once you've opened the SRS, it just starts right into whatever library you had open at the last session. There's no opportunity to chose what to study etc. I find it just a bit abrupt, and there's no incremental reading.
So I really do love supermemo, but it really is buggy, and not for Mac, or Linux, and do I really want to run windows just so I can run supermemo? Hmmm...

Anyway, time passed, as it does, and M woke up, we had breakfast, she hurt from tennis too, so we really didn't get up to much today. We went for a walk, climbed up the local hill and enjoyed the view, looked at some stuff at the stationary shop nearby, made supper, argued about food, and watched some TV. I found myself back in the kitchen, washing up the dishes and making lunches for tomorrow. M got a call from a friend in Tokyo and is still chatting away. All in all, a low energy day, designed to recoup for tomorrow.

Bachelor Party

2008-08-11T21:03:00.001+09:00

"You're going to a strip club, right?" M asked as I was getting ready to go off to Toronto for my little brothers' bachelor party. There would be no peelers, there would be none of that stuff as my future sister-in-law had, fairly, in my opinion, noted that there was a certain lack of respect in that kind of bachelor party, both for her and their relationship. M figured her idea of a bachelor party, constructed mostly from North American movies, perhaps didn't cover the whole picture. I was actually surprised she was cool with the idea of me going to one!
So M dropped me off at the bus station and I rode it into Toronto for probably the first evening of shared drinking with my little brother ever. I don't think I'd ever actually gone drinking with him. There was poker, there was music, a lot of booze, more for some than others, and a vinyl set of boobies that made the evening. We went to the Madison, a giant conglomeration of two big old 19th century houses cobbled together in a cozy, warren-like arrangement with patios and lounges and pool tables. An amazing place like something out of an opium dream. Heaps of fun, it was. Little brother has an amazing manner about him in the bar, he's friendly and just brattish enough to give him that air of unpredictability that women find so attractive and guys love to feed off. He had so many girls signing the vinyl get up, it was unbelievable. At least for reserved old me. My personal favourite was "Call me when you get a divorce..." which was followed by a number. A real number. Amazing. I'm sure his fiance will love it.
So, the evening wound up and LB & I grabbed a couple of gluten free pizzas from Pizza Pizza & called it a night. Good times with the LB.

Bruce Trail Hike

2008-06-08T23:37:00.001+09:00

Hey everyone,
I'm not sure if anyone's actually reading this blog anymore, it's been a while since I last posted, but I figured I'd post something here. I'm planning on walking from Brock University, starting today, at the place I finished a section hike from Queenston back in 2001 with my friend Allister Neill Steward and my dad. I'm planning on just doing as much as I can. I've lightened my pack load to a base of 12 pounds, but I seem to have a lot of food. We'll see how that pans out. Anyway, I'm planning on doing about 40-50km a day. I figure I'll be able to manage something like that as I'll be hiking dawn to dusk with an hour or two of breaks for naps and cooking along the way. I've read Ray Jardine's Backpacking Light and I've decided to camp when it gets dark, just by hanging my hammock. I'll be eating in the midmorning and late afternoon in terms of cooking, so I won't have a "kitchen" at my sleep site. This way, I hope to avoid uninvited guests. There are no bears to worry about, but the rodents have always been my biggest problem. Somehow, if they're around in the area, they get into something or other. I don't know how they manage to navigate through my knots and into the bags, but they've had pretty good success with me so far. I can take solace in the fact that most of the critters who've stolen my food over the years are probably dead now. I know that's petty, but it makes me smile.
Anyway, I'll be up at dawn(ish), with the hammock back in the pack and me on the trail by 6ish. I figure, hiking at a conservative 3 km per hour, by the time I stop and hang the hammock in the evening, I'll have covered around 40 km. Depending on how much flat trail there is, that figure could grow. Anyway, I'll just poke along, take it easy and just keep moving.
I'll be journaling and takin' photos, so I'll... maybe post them. When I get back. Maybe. If I... well, yeah. Maybe.
It's supposed to be thunderstormin' Sunday night and Monday, but maybe not down in Niagara... Maybe.

Anyway, happy trails.

Overwhelmed by depth

2007-03-30T01:42:00.000+09:00

Drinking, and finishing up reading the Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac and The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton and am finding myself fully overwhelmed by the concept of depth of place.

In 4 months, I will leave Kita Ko and Matsue and nothing will ever be the same, yet in all that time, I don't feel I've ever really touched any heart of Matsue or Kita ko... I've gone deep in this place, but there's ever so much more... The realization makes me mourn my travel ambitions... how can I understand souls, places and identities, without living a lifetime in their company...?

Impossible. All of it. It makes me sad in my drunkenness. Most of my friends will understand...

good night brothers and sisters whom I do not truly know...

Podcasting

2007-03-29T11:19:00.001+09:00

Hey there. So, over the past couple of days, I've been looking at podcast language stuffs. Specifically chinesepod.com , japanese101pod.com and a french and spanish podcast too. There's a lot of content in each site and the lesson plans are pretty well put together. So what I was thinking, is, why not do this for endangered languages or languages that might need a bit of help, especially with preserving cultural material like songs and stories? I did a brief look around for ojibwe, cree and inuktitut podcasts and, maybe not surprisingly, there aren't any. Maybe there are recordings out there somewhere, but why doesn't someone arrange to build a site like there are for these other major languages? I'm sure there'd be funding available from concerned governments. It sounds like just the sort of thing that would go over in Canada. Maybe with the CBC or Ministry of Aboriginal Affairs or whatever it's calling itself these days. Although, due to the size of the speaking populations, it's not likely that a podcast site could make a lot of money, but most people learning languages do it for fun if they don't have to. If they're doing it cause they have to, they don't need the podcast, but if it's extracurricular, podcasts are a great way to bring it to the peoples... Imagine learning Cree while listening to your ipod in Bali or something...

Podcasting

2007-03-29T11:19:00.000+09:00

Hey there. So, over the past couple of days, I've been looking at podcast language stuffs. Specifically chinesepod.com , japanese101pod.com
and a french and spanish podcast too. There's a lot of content in each site and the lesson plans are pretty well put together. So what I was thinking, is, why not do this for endangered languages or languages that might need a bit of help, especially with preserving cultural material like songs and stories? I did a brief look around for ojibwe, cree and inuktitut podcasts and, maybe not surprisingly, there aren't any. Maybe there are recordings out there somewhere, but why doesn't someone arrange to build a site like there are for these other major languages? I'm sure there'd be funding available from concerned governments. It sounds like just the sort of thing that would go over in Canada. Maybe with the CBC or Ministry of Aboriginal Affairs or whatever it's calling itself these days. Although, due to the size of the speaking populations, it's not likely that a podcast site could make a lot of money, but most people learning languages do it for fun if they don't have to. If they're doing it cause they have to, they don't need the podcast, but if it's extracurricular, podcasts are a great way to bring it to the peoples... Imagine learning Cree while listening to your ipod in Bali or something...

Spring...

2007-03-28T13:13:00.000+09:00

Wow... so that was some haitus... now that I've decided to blog again, I'm wondering, should I fill in what happened between July and Now? I'm tempted, I must admit. Since then, lots of stuff has happened. New JET year, trip to Australia with my friend Tim's weddin', trip to Totori with Maya, trip to Kyoto with Maya, most harrowing hike of my life with Luke, Ashley and Will up Daisen the back/dangerous way, a trip home at Christmas, and three months of winter. Frankly, there's a lot. I wish I'd blogged it, but then, I wish I'd done a lot of things differently. That's just me. Livin' in the past. As Garth, the guru from Wayne's World once said... "Live in the now, man!". Well, that's what I'm doing.

Since I decided not to recontract, this is my last year on the JET programme. I will leave Matsue Kita High School at the beginning of summer vacation in August and go do something else. The current plan is a bit of hiking in the Japanese Alps followed by the beginnings of a round the world trip. I'm hoping it will be able to stretch for a full 4-5 months (maybe more, but that's another story), but we'll have to see how it goes in terms of cash. Maya will quit her stressful job on Friday and take up a no stress job, making a lot less money than now... something she has mixed feelings about. I have to be honest, I also have mixed feelings about it as although it was incredibly stressful for her and consequently for me, she did enjoy it. Well, she enjoyed making a lot of money doing a job. She's not so keen on doing a job for not a lot of money. However, having 4 months of being not so busy will give her time to spend with friends and family before we bust out of here. Important, for sure.

Our trip is looking like we will spend the fall in Europe. We're a little worried about the tourist season being 'over', but I have a feeling, we'll catch the shoulder of it... maybe everything won't be open, but surely to God people visit Europe in seasons outside the summer. Anyway, Europe for the fall, cheap as we may and then we'll work our way down through the Balkans into Turkey, Jordan and Egypt... then go through the middle east probably by plane... depending on how dangerous people are making things out to be at the time. We'll head down into Pakistan and India, see some stuff, get sick and enjoy the diversity, maybe see Bhutan and Nepal, then move into South East Asia with Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, maybe southern China, followed by Malasia and Indonesia. Then, depending on our money situation, we may pop over to the Philipines, Australia and New Zealand. We've friends in both New Zealand and Aus, so it'll be good to see them again.

Anyway, we're pretty pumped about the trip. really looking forward to it. I'm a little worried about food in Europe as it's the land of bread and pasta and neither of those works well for me... I think India and Asia will have me eating better than Europe will... stupid gluten...

Well, for now, that's where things are. I will try to get on here more often to blog and keep everyone posted on what's going on. For now, matta bai bai.

Blogsergreat

2006-07-22T11:17:00.000+09:00

My friend Brennan, who's currently holed up in fantastic Halifax, sent me this blog addy. http://mrtoronto.blogspot.com/
I think it's great. It's a testament to making sure that you laugh at yourself before someone else does. Always get the first laugh in (at yourself) and everything will be ok. Good fun, that blog. I like the eyepatch. I just finished reading Neil Gaiman's "American Gods" so I think the eyepatch is kind of funny. Odinesque. And yet completely not.

Awesome.

2006-05-23T20:37:00.000+09:00

I was takin' a wee break from watching news and trying to understand it and I stumbled upon this piece of fantasticness.
http://www.zerosign.net/
The robot fighting vid really made me laugh. With big gafaws of laughter that probably disturbed my neigbours... The internet is a wonderful thing. I really hope Jane Jacobs is wrong and that we're not slip sliding into a dark age. I'd miss the internet, and the 'enough food thing'.

Anyway, life is goin' on, things are busy and I'm procrastinating with getting photos up, as usual. Soon, I promise.

Cuttin' down, cleanin'out and generally simplifying

2006-05-02T11:39:00.000+09:00

I've been tidying up my internet experiences lately. I'm a news junky. Esepcially a science, tech and politics news junky. I'm fascinated by where the world is going and by just about every country on the bus. I could spend all day on the internet, reading, watching, searching and surfing and never get around to doing anything on the productive side of intellectual intercourse. I wouldn't be alone, but I would feel a little lonely. Maybe a little like a lurker or a peeping Tom... always interested in other people's stuff but very unwilling to have that interest made public. Definitely a lonely approach to information and community.

In real life I don't often say a lot in groups, but I do let people know I'm there and listening or at least thinking about something that might be helpful to the conversation or meeting or whatever. I don't generally say a lot because whatever it is I might have to say might not be immediately relavent or even apparently connected, but on the web and in other circles of communication I'm almost entirely a lurker/consumer. I have trouble getting back to people via email, or even emailing them at all. Blogging seems to be a major effort, even though when I actually sit down to write an entry, it just seems to flow out. I almost never post comments anywhere. As such, when one searches for my name in Google, you find real, communicative participation in the world from me only really from the 1990s. My younger self, of course was busy filling it's head and heart with all the idealism and cutting edge causes of the time, highly interested in participating with hardly a care for what might in fact be contributed. Probably a good thing, but not something that works for me now. I'm pretty unlikely to offer my any advice without a good dose of qualifying or disclaimer. I've taken uncertainty and doubt into the very core of my being and while I'm still an unreasonably prideful man, I have an almost fossilized doubt in my heart about what I can do and what I really know. Which is why I read.

I read every day. I read and read and read. I almost never write about what I read for the reasons mentioned above, but there's hardly a subject I haven't read something about. This wide breadth of interest, perhaps it's even neurotic, makes me a bit of what are called Otaku in Japanese. It's a double entendre playing upon the highly formal form of adressing someone "otaku-sama" and a polite word for house "otaku". They have different kanji, but sound almost exactly the same, with only slight variations in tone (grammatically speaking non-existant) to differentiate the two meanings. Context, context, context as usual. Anyway, the idea is that people who are media junkies, never leave their house (otaku) and so they don't know anyones's name, so they have to be extra polite and refer to others as (otaku) instead of using their names. This supposedly emerged in the mid-late 1980s, but I'll throw in a little disclaimer here and say "or so I've read".

Having been described as an otaku with somewhat greater frequency lately, I've taken it upon myself to wrench myself away from my computer and books, foisting more of my Japanese study upon unsuspecting university students standing at stoplights, trying to decide if they will acutally cook a full fish or whether they should just go with the personal sushi, or waiting in line at the drug store. Now I make an effort to get out with my flash-cards, making up ridiculous or vulgar stories to fit the word sounds and meanings and experiment with sentence forms with the kind help of those surprised Japanese kids. Just as a note, what seems funny to us in English as word-play usually doesn't translate into humour, just confusion and strangeness.

Anyway, even though I'm getting out more now that it's spring and I've decided to lose the Otaku moniker, I really wanna read news and new web pages etc. So what's a body to do?
Well, I happened upon this site and got some good ideas. I love tech fixes, drastic fixes and new stuff, so I quite enjoyed them. You can't be an expert on everything. Hell, she says you can't even keep up with everything. I'll tell you she's right. Keeping up with one or two things as well as a social life and health is a struggle of monumental proportions. I guess it fits with my April post. Simple, fewer choices and greater happiness/effectiveness etc. Still, for me, simple really does feel very strange. Although I've been finding simple to be much more fun and happy, complexity is so much more interesting. Life's a balance...

Tests...

2006-04-22T12:09:00.000+09:00

I'm testing the email blogging function... this is a test. Maybe I'll be able to blog more often now...? Hah...

Choice, Freedom and Happiness... Compatible?

2006-04-22T11:45:00.000+09:00

What's in a life? That's the question I've been asking lately. Not anything like "what's the point in life" or any other such nonsense, but what should be in a life? We get 80+ years these days on average and that's a lot more than ever before. Old news, I know, but have you ever really stopped to think about what that means? Where do the kids come into it? Where does the "education" start and end? How are we supposed to manage to stay married to only one person for the whole time we're kickin' around this rare ball o' mud in space?

With shorter, more uncertain lives, none of these questions matter a damn. Getting an education that would let you develop your talents to let you earn a living, so you could get married and do the old biological imperative thing and then be a responsible genetic being and kick off to make room for your successful progeny and their progeny... etc. You kicked off between 50 and 60, leaving all your life's work to them so they could build on what you made... or something idealistic like that anyway. But we're not going to die nice and simply like that anymore. We don't even keep the same job for more than a decade or so anymore. We move with increasing frequency and become more transient and absorbed in our own interests as the years go by.

Now, I've already decided that I believe humans, well everything with chromosomes, is inherently selfish by nature. It's not an evil, it's not good, it just is. A lot like humans are bipedal, or learn a language if they're exposed to one while they're growing up. I used to think that selfishness was an evil, but even people doing good for the world are doing it to satisfy their own internal reward system, that rewards them for doing things for others... essentially selfish, even if it does benefit others. It's the most favourable (as far as society and others are concerned) kind of selfishness.

Anyway, being selfish by nature, we naturally tend to do things we're interested in. It only makes sense. Why would you do something that's not rewarding for you in some way? The straight answer is that you wouldn't. There are more beneficial things wrapped up in whatever we do than there are in whatever we're not doing, That is, of course, for the time being. Maybe something changes in your world-view or your values or your understanding... That would lead to a change in behaviour-reward loops that would have you doing different things. Well, now that we live four-score and something, and few of us are dying of hunger (at least in the industrialised world) most of us have some disposable income and along with that income, a host of things to do. There are tens of millions of books, more maybe. There are CDs and LPs and comic books and sheet music to last lifetimes... there are hundreds of different musical instruments, millions of songs, an infinite number of interpretations. There are hundreds of different disciplines, academic and technical, with new ones emerging every year. There's food you've never tasted, flowers you've never smelled or seen. There are teas you've never even heard about, animals, birds, fish, all manner of creatures that most of us have never even heard about. There is more under the sun than any of us could imagine. Now that it's all becoming accessible to the average Joe and Susan, how are we to keep ourselves satisfied with a 9-5, 2.5 kids and a car?

Fact is, we can't. We can't. We dig for extra hours with caffeine, amphetamines, and new drugs and research designed to get the most out of the 24 hours in a day. Cutting back sleep, improving sleep, making it a little more of a cut and dried affair. We try to make ourselves smarter, stronger, better so that we can do more. We go to the gym, or imagine that we'd like to, Or that's the idea most of us have anyway. The realities of this hectic mess are increasing depression, decreasing stability, strained friendships and family relationships and general ennui.
I've been thinking the thing that's making us miserable, if indeed we are miserable, is too much choice. My friend Nige read a book about how choice is doing that very thing. It gave a lot of evidence to back it up... book name... book name... uh... I'll post it later... Anyway, the synopsis was that we should just create fewer possibilities for choice. A kind of self-imposed discipline of choice poverty. If there's nothing to get frozen over when you are trying to decide something, there's no discomfort from wondering if you made the best choice. Just make your choices and stick with them. Unless, obviously, you are presented with overwhelming evidence that your choice sucked.

With that in mind, I've been streamlining my days... I've stopped going out of my way to see people I don't particularly enjoy and have withdrawn from activities that I'm similarly ambivalent about and have basically started focusing on work, mountains, fitness, Japanese, French, mnemonics and mnemonic techniques, the current interest fad in my life. I hang out with my girlfriend Maya, on the weekends or for an occasional supper during the busy week and I don't go shopping. I do see the friends I like and do do things I like, but they're the wee gems in the crown of my new chrome-plated life... I wonder if that's a metaphor with good feelings... ah well, if you have thoughts, leave them to me! I do like contact from my good friends the world o'er.

Senryuu baby, yeah!

2006-02-16T10:07:00.000+09:00

I'll never really get over how short winter really is here. It's snowed way more this year than in almost any year in memory, but it's still hardly anything. Now it's back to raining and the alcohol has come up to about 12 degrees again. This is apparently typical of the San-In coast. The San-In has feelings of shadow, the negative, rhymed verse, yin, gloom and crappy weather/gloomy life and an inward looking nature wrapped up in the Japanese meaning. I think most people just feel a little hard done by that they don't live in a vast mega-city.
Matsue, although not a particularly lively city does have its merits. the view from my window at work, the cheap rent, the old-folks growing vegetables and selling them at dirt cheap prices. There's also the access to the country-side, the relatively unspoiled coast and the relatively clean air. Living on the edge of the city, I can walk 10 minutes and find myself in farmland. Which is pretty cool, I think.
Anyway, things do happen in Matsue, just not a lot of big things, not a lot of high-key things, or a lot of things interesting for young people. It's an old-folks town. Still, that didn't stop us from having a bit of a 1950s prom-fund raiser. There was a contest for prom king and I was chosen as a lucky contestant. I was to perform a talent and answer a battery of questions. 15 minutes before the show, I still didn't have my talent together. I'd decided to read poetry, cause I didn't think about singing or... well anything really. Bit silly. Anyhow, I cranked out an English haiku and what turned out to be a Japanese Senryuu. I meant to write a Japanese haiku, but my friend Yoshi looked it over and said, "that's a senryuu, not a haiku". "Oh, I see..." I was thinking why the heck isn't this a haiku? It's got 5 then 7 then 5 syllables, it's nature themed... what's wrong with it? Turns out that the rules for actual haiku are pretty strict and it can't deal with feelings. Nature only. No action, no feelings, no people. Just nature. The poem went like this.

雨が降る (ame ga furu)
**it's raining
気が滅入ったな (ki ga meitta na)
**my spirit feels gloomy
山陰ですから (San-in des kara)
**It's because it's the San-In

While it sounds pretty glum in English, it's actually pretty funny in Japanese. If you live in the San-In and say it just right. First like is flat, second droops at the end and the third reveals the realization of cause in the tone. I did it with my own special brand of expression that anyone who knows me will probably recall with ease.
Alas, I did not garner the prize. That went to the only Italian JET in Japan. He sang a song he'd written words for to some Italian music about all the stereo-typing he's encountered in Japan about Italians. Hilarious! Truly inspired. After all that, everyone started getting pissed up, went off to a nomi-hodai (all you can drink) for two hours, after telling me they were all heading to a club down-town. I showed up and talked with a bunch of Japanese and some random foreigners who don't come out more than once a season before deciding my time would be better spent elsewhere. I have to admit, although I do enjoy getting drunk now and again, the drinking culture's getting me down a bit. Anyway, the evening wound up with me hangin' out with Maya, shooting the shit and drinking coffee until an ungodly hour with the next day being pleasantly restful. Beat the snot out of a smokey bar, expensive drinks, conversation limited by music volume and a greasy feeling style hangover the next day.

Back at it... Thanks for a great visit everyone!

2006-01-10T09:54:00.000+09:00

Well, that's all for Canada for now! Thank you everyone! You made my trip! For anyone I didn't manage to meet up with, I hope you had a fantastic Christmacha-NY complex! I realize everyone was busy as crazy can be and as we get older, there seems to be less and less time. Certainly my 30 days went far more quickly than I ever expected. It seems like only yesterday that I was here in the office. Anyway, seeing so many friends and family really made me realize just what I'm missing here in Japan. I have friends here, but only a handful. At home, I have dozens of friends who've known me for years and years! Some I've even known half my life! That amazes me. I used to wonder at people who'd had friends they'd known since kindergarten or elementary school, being alternatively jealous and just plain amazed that anyone could have been friends with anyone else that long. I now realize that what was missing was just the fit. I am truly blessed to have the friends I do. You know who you are! Thanks for everything! I'll come back real soon, y' hear!?! That said, if anyone wants to visit me in the remainder of my stay here, do get in touch!
Anyway, now for the gory details. I arrived back in Japan last night, safe and sound. What a flight! 15 hours on a 777 is really tough. I lucked out in the morning on Sunday and my cheery mornin' nature led the attendant checking me in to switch my seat to an emergency exit aisle seat. Fantastic! Even still, it was no walk in the park. I slept maybe 4 hours of the flight. Sudoku, a Murakami novel and CSI episodes occupied my scampering mind while the hours ticked on past. I sat beside a woman from Toronto whom I'd met on the flight from TO to Dallas, who was (and probably still is) a teacher for a private company in Osaka. Interesting person to talk to as although our interests seemed completely divergent, we were coming from the same place, had both grown up in Ontario and were doing a pretty similar job in the same foreign culture. So, there was lots to talk about and some good fellow feeling. It turned out that she had a Japanese boyfriend, which shocked the hell out of me, as she came across as having in abundance all the traits that I'd heard Japanese men say they didn't like about western women. She was really outgoing, outspoken, frank, quick to laugh, but not at all a "girly" girl. Nothing infantile about her. Good travelling companionship for sure.
Anyway, I took the train back to Matsue, standing room only on the 45 minute Shinkansen trip to Okayama and then a nice sprawled out sleep on the, as usual, Super Yakumo. I got back to Matsue and it took me almost 15 minutes to realize what was odd... there was snow all over the place! My car was covered in snow about a foot deep! I couldn't believe it! There was more snow in Matsue than London or Toronto! Anyway, it was late, but I realized I'd need groceries, so I headed out to the grocery store to stock up, made my lunches, unpacked and crashed out. I was up at 5 and going. Yay Jet lag!
So I'm moving all my books to school where they won't be collecting dust and making my house unlivable. I've also decided to strip the gritty wall paper in my aparto and paint it with some kind of mildew resistant paint. I'm not gonna take the alergies anymore! Helping Richard out with his reno in his London rentals has given me "reno fever", as his friend Rob put it. Hopefully I will follow through on it... My main new years resolution is to follow through on shit and take those baby steps to build up my capacity for gettin stuff done and the resultant cockyness that comes along with the self-esteem you get from doing that. We'll see.

Ganbatteimasu!

Gettin' Excited...

2005-12-01T12:08:00.000+09:00

Well, this week has been really hectic. I've made a test, recorded and edited questions for three others, and begun to mark essay type questions for all grades. That coupled with whipping up lessons for surprise classes and when I get back in January, cramming for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test this coming Sunday and getting an issue of the Black Taxi magazine out before Friday have turned my life into a dawn till dusk work affair. I'm feeling very Japanese...

Anyway, I'm getting really excited about going home next Friday. It's hard to believe it's coming up so quickly. Fantastic! Wow...
This is my flight plan...

Flying American Airlines... Stops in Dallas where they require $60 for me to sit in their lobby waiting for my connecting flight... both ways, I might add. Hope the service is good and that there are free showers in the Dallas airport.

Dec 9th
Kansai (Osaka) KIX departure: 18:55 Flight # AA124
Dallas arrival: 15:30
Dallas departure: 18:50 Flight # AA420
Toronto arrival: 22:44

Jan 8th
Toronto departure: 7:45 Flight # AA603
Dallas arrival: 10:13
Dallas departure: 11:45 Flight # AA125

Jan 9th
Kansai arrival: 16:55

With that there, I'll leave you all to wonder about... well, whatever you want to wonder about.

November Darkens the Mind and Heart...

2005-11-22T10:14:00.000+09:00

Today's my first day back to teaching classes at Kita after almost a week away. I've realized that as much as I love this job, the social situation here is... limited. I think I'm really starting to miss home. There's a very strong streak of homesickness rising in my subconscious here as I while away the days to my flight home. It's not that I'm not busy, and not that I'm not interested in what I've been doing, it's just that I'm having trouble feeling like I fit. I've never really fit anywhere, but here most of the folks I meet have little stake in anything and only connect in the most superficial way. I guess I'm a little tired of feeling alienated and would like a little break from it. I sometimes wonder if my Japanese was better if I'd still feel the same way. Hard to say really. It's probably all cultural exhaustion. I still step on people's toes even though I've been trying to be polite and go along with the culturally important things. It's really frustrating.
Don't get me wrong, I do love being here. There are lots of fantastic people I've met and the kids are just super! I get to teach at Seishin twice a month, which means I get to play with elementary school kids for a day every second week. Yesterday they had made me a really cute pamphlet about Matsue. There was the Matsue song hand written on it and everything and it brought tears to my eyes. I guess I was just really missing honest expression of feeling. The kids haven't learned all the subterfuge of Japanese society yet, and maybe, given their special needs, they never will. As such, the teachers that work with these kids are much more relaxed about it too. I really love visiting that school. I practically squirm with anticipation. Which I have to admit is a really strange feeling. It's like one of the only things I really look forward to with excitement.
Anyway, my mind's pretty tired right now. I had a bit of a rough night and got to Kita a bit late this morning. A few cups of coffee and I should be alright. I was probably just freezing all night, but sleeping too heavily to wake up and do something about it. Getting out of bed this morning was brutal. It was 13 degrees in my apartment, and although that's lots warmer than my room when I was growing up in Lucknow during the winter, coupled with all the other pressures, it becomes quite difficult. I'm a little ashamed of it, but shikatta ga nai. So, I'm off to teach the young keeners again... more later. Hopefully.

Back to Basics.

2005-11-04T11:48:00.000+09:00

So I've decided to do a body-building contest in July. The gym I work out at is run by a guy named Aoto-san. He was the national javelin champion when he was in University and he's an all-round good guy. He doesn't speak any English at all, but we have some good chats. I wouldn't say he's exactly a friend though. Hard to get a good idea of what a friend is, but i quite like him and the feeling seems to be mutual. I'm a bit of a hamster at that gym, but I can deal with it. I don't speak English when I'm there because no one understands it. So I watch Japanese TV on the bike and talk to the women and old men doing cardio. It's always the crazy stuff talk-game-shows, so it's always kind of interesting. I usually get off the bike when they put the medical horror stories on.
So I'm lifting pretty heavily again. I'm sitting at 94 kilograms and roughly 18% body fat, which is pretty good for not focusing and eating out too much. I'm going to aim for 8% body fat by April at around 100 kilos. I'd forgotten how much having focus at the gym makes the rest of my life just work better. I only wish that Aoto-san opened the gym at 5 or 6 am. Realistically though, no one would show up that early in Japan. Very different culture in so many ways.
The workout culture is something that lots of people feel is sort of a sub-culture or cult in the West, but it's thoroughly Western, no matter how alien it feels to people who feel ill at ease with gyms, exercise terminology etc. In Japan, it's completely different. Obviously they work the same muscles, they're human after all, but the reasons they do it are quite different as is how they go about getting results. I remember reading somewhere years ago that Japanese people, by and large do things for how they make them feel rather than how things look or what other effects they will have. I'd say that health is a pretty primary focus, but the looking good factor that drives so many Westerners into the gym doesn't seem to drive Japanese people into the gym. People eat natto for protein instead of chicken and there's almost no one trying to get big and muscular. There's lots of bouncing stretches, lots of fast exercises and stuff that I'd always assumed or had been told would wreck a person. There's also what seems to be very little in the way of exercise knowledge. Aoto-san knows what he's doing, but there are people in there working out with weights long after their body chemistries have shifted into a catabolic state.
Still, there are quite a few guys in there who do the amateur contests, so it's a good place to workout, a good place to spend time talking with Japanese folks about something we're both interested in. That's something I feel I've been missing in much of my interaction with natives. They're just not interested in the same things, so asking them questions about themselves really only goes so far. Basically to the edge of my vocabulary. Talking with the guys at the gym goes beyond my vocabulary as they help me out when I'm fishing for a word.
So, I try to get to the gym about 4 times a week for a bunch of cardio and a weight training session. I'm doing a two day split, alternating lower and upper body. I'll probably stay with it until I leave for Christmas. It'll be kind of hard to stay lifting through the break as I'll be all over the place, but I'll try to give it the 2 or 3 times a week while I'm back in Canada. Ganbatteimasu.

秋が来たので僕の未来について考えます

2005-10-13T14:42:00.000+09:00

Yep, I'm trying to think about my future while the fall comes creeping ing. Old friends have left, family and friends at home have become a little more distant as life winds back up to speed leaving little time for things and people not holding a participatory role in life. I don't really know how I got busy again, nor really what I've been busy with. I know what I've been doing, but it doesn't feel like it would be enough to fill all my time.
In August, I had started to feel that recontracting with Matsue Kita High School was a mistake. I was frustrated by the dogmatic way in which the vice principle responsible for the ALT position, my job, was handling my requests for professional development during down time at school. I was also getting pretty tired of feeling like my efforts were lost on my students, interested as some of the more studious and outward looking ones were. I just felt that it was not a place I was able to make any kind of real difference.
However, throughout September, I began noticing little things that seemed like my teaching and coaching had been having positive effects. Students I had never before realized were interested in English came out of the woodwork for the season of speech contests, bringing with them a shy but keen approach that may be more representative of the rest of their classes than I had realized. They actually appeared to like me and see me as something more than just the guy who comes in to speak gibberish to us once a week. I don't know exactly what they view me as, but I'm starting to realize it's generally favourable. I have to keep reminding myself that they're teenagers, plagued by rampaging hormones and scant experience. They haven't really even been socialized to fit into Japanese society yet, so I shouldn't find it odd that I have difficulty with them sometimes. There's always a reason people behave the way the do and I have to keep that in mind while I try to coach them in English.
And that's really what I'm here doing. I'm not really a teacher, I'm a motivator, a coach. Whether or not I have OC class with them will not make or break their test scores on it's own. 45 minutes of oral communication taught in English, where the kids use Japanese to figure out the English they've been learning for the past four years really doesn't cut it as far as learning an L2 is concerned. What it does do though, is give them an oportunity to interact with someone who sees the world from a completely different perspective. I notice subjects, they notice context. I think about nouns, they think about verbs and relations. English is really hard for them because it's so difficult to see any point to it in a place as remote as Matsue. The images they need to conjure in their minds as motivation are not readily available, but with me there, showing an interest in them, learning their language, showing how excited I am to be learning and how intermittant my success is, they get an image of what English can be. English can be friendly, interesting and interested. You can live in it. That's what I do, I motivate them in ways that no-one else in the school can. I'm a living breathing person from a completely different civilization who never-the-less is both a friend and advocate.
So from that perspective, I keep slogging away, making those lesson plans fun, making sure I keep ahead of any schedule changes and making sure I get to know the people. I don't really regret the second contract anymore and I'm thinking seriously about teachers college now. I don't know if I'd like to teach ESL for too much longer, but I'm pondering Env. Studies and Biology. I'm over being sad about friends leaving and the uncertainty of life etc... in retrospect, I'm not sure exactly why I was upset. People come and go, and we should be happy to have the time we do with them, but nothing lasts forever, so I shouldn't expect it to, either emotionally or intellectually. Heck, I'm even a different person than when I came to Japan last year. If I can end up different after only a year, the world with all its people and things has more than enough potential for change. The thing that should be surprising is that it doesn't change faster.
That's not to say I don't miss my friends and family, because I do very much, but as a very good friend told me once, "yeah, it's sad to leave everyone behind, but think about all the new friends you'll make, all the new and interesting things you'll see and do." I keep a stone that she gave me years ago in my pocket that reminds me of the spirit and letter of that. It's a somatic "ganbatte" reminder. I reminder to go get 'em. To do and see more, to meet more people on more authentic and interactive levels and to just generally give my life my all.
Even with that stone in my pocket, I sometimes forget to rub it with my thumb and I usually have a poor few weeks for it, this time it was late summer. There's always some trigger, though, that reminds me that there's a smooth polished stone in my pocket that's my ganbatte reminder. Once I remember that, I give it a rub and it's like drinking a pot of coffee without the heartburn. So now, I spend my fall days walking to school, enjoying the dimming sunshine, the cooling weather and the little blown leaves from the sakura trees. I spend them talking to anyone who's willing to listen and asking questions of strangers left, right and centre. I've been seeing more of what Izumo area has to offer and meeting up with more friends. All of this translates into more energetic lessons and more genkiness at school. I feel sharper for it and way more alive than I did during August.

Rain, rain, rain... but in a nice kind of way...

2005-07-07T08:39:00.000+09:00

Well, it's rainy season again... I woke up this morning around 4:30, but didn't really feel tired. I wasn't sure what to do with myself as I'm used to running out the door still eating as I run to my bike. The past three weeks have been pretty incredible at school. It kind of feels like February all over again.

It may be somewhat telling about the school though. It seems to operate in a cyclical crisis state. Periods of low crisis are taken for the equivalent of down time. These times are the only times I find myself with time to wonder and think.
However, in the past three weeks, I've made 4 lesson plans, a 100 mark term test, marked and organized marks for all the quizzes that have been turned in from the term and finally marked all those 300 term tests. On top of it all, there's been the same 300 students who've had English interview tests. 4 minutes of one on one conversation with the ALT. Fortunately, most of the kids like me enough that this isn't an exercise in pain for them as far as embarrassment goes. One class seems to have an inordinately high percentage of kids who fear me though. They all look like they want to vomit and die when faced with the terrifying prospect of speaking to me. They're at once maddeningly frustrating and lamentably pitiable. I really wish I could get through to them, but it might just be that I simply need more time. I've been trying to learn all their names, but 300 names in the best of circumstances is tough, but my kids have names I've never heard before. The syllables are still entirely forgettable for me. I wish that was different, but I'm not there yet. I don't have a single student named Mike though! Not even any derivatives like Miguel or Michel or Mikhail... none!

Anyway, the interview tests have been starting at 8 every morning before school, so I've had to drag my weary carcass the 15 minute, 4 kilometer bike ride through heavy traffic, hills and 30 degree heat to school more than half an hour earlier than normal.
Given the shear weight of paper and the shear number of words and interpersonal interactions I have to wade through in a day lately, I've been trying desperately to find some kind of solace in social life while simultaneously trying to get all of the ancillary bits and pieces like workouts, paying bills, Japanese lessons, editing the Black Taxi with Nigel and myriad other one-shots... done. I've basically been burning the candle at both ends and I've begun feeling it.

This morning however, I had this burning need to move. I looked at the pile of dishes threatening to grow things from soup of the wee bits of food left after I'd rinsed them and decided they had to be done. I looked at the pile of laundry, noticed that I didn't have any underwear for the day and decided that doing laundry before I went to school was a must. Before I would tackle any of the dishes though, it was put a load of laundry in and then slip on the running shoes and one of my sleeveless t-shirts I'm embarrassed to be seen in whereupon I hit the road running. I ran for 30 minutes out of town, up into the hills around Nishi-kawatsu-cho's reservoir which looks so much like it's abandoned that I felt like I was in some post-apocalyptic movie where all the stuff is left behind when the people left. Going for a run at 5 in the morning is something else, I've gotta say. I was surprised at how many people I saw up, gardening, walking and delivering bread... I'll be honest, I was shocked to see anyone delivering bread at all.

Several slightly uncomfortable Ohayo gozaimas's later, I was thinking that if you're an 80 year old 35 kilogram woman (or man) pulling weeds around your walls and garden on an empty street at 5 in the morning, seeing a 90 kilogram foreign guy with a shaved head and a beard running your way at a determined clip is probably pretty unnerving... I wish I could do something about that, but the hair just isn't there anymore... I give people the best smile I can given my state of near exhaustion and determination. Still...

Anyway, it was a fantastic way to start the day. I got home, cleaned the entire place up, made a kick-ass breakfast and worked on language tapes for an hour before leisurely pedaling my way to school in a down-pour to arrive really early for once, to await my similarly sodden students.

All in a days work, this guiding and motivating of young minds... I'm 99% sure that teaching is my calling and that I'd be happy doing it for years and years, so I've decided to look into getting my teaching qualifications so I can do something similar at home. Going for that run this morning and then seeing my kids come in for their tests, eager but shy and all soaking wet really hit it for me. I'm a teacher! :-)

I'm also still soaking wet, but I'm happy enough, no dampened spirits here.

Palaces, drums and a quiet night in.

2005-05-02T18:31:00.000+09:00

So today was a bit of a late start. We finally dragged our carcasses out of the sketchy hotel around noon, made for the coffee joint round the corner for a wee bit of real coffee. I've been somewhat nonplussed about the coffee I've so far encountered here. It tastes like someone's spiked it with powdered marshmallow. Fortunately though, Starbucks has been globalizing good coffee. I know it's kind of the same thing as Coca-cola, but it won't rot your teeth, it keeps people in poorish regions in cash, some more than others, and it makes mornings the world over just that much more comfortable. I really ought to buy stock in them... If only I could care enough.

Anyway, after we scalded ourselves and my companions devoured various baked goods as a somewhat imbalanced breakfast, not that mine was exactly balanced, consisting entirely of coffee and milk, we hit the subway intent on a royal palace or two. We popped up a mere hundred metres from the inner gateway in a plaza reminiscent of Tiannamen Square, in that there was a gate that looked remarkably like Qianmen opening onto a jeezly great big square. It was unlike Tiannamen in that there were no beggars, you could see mountains in the background and there were no "undercover" police waiting to bundle away meditators, zealots or people displaying backbone. I find I'm developing a bit of a tolerance to old/traditional palaces. I don't know what it is exactly, but I'm far less fascinated by them than I think I should be. I may simply be palaced-out like I got templed-out in Kyoto after seeing so many. I think for me, watching the people and seeing how they live now, their civic buildings, museums, shops and institutions holds more interest for me. If the palaces were still used, I'm sure I'd find them more interesting, but realistically, they're just full of tourists. That's not to say they're not beautiful, but more that one oughtn't to come just for the palaces and temples.

I give you colour!

Within the palace we dressed up in traditional Korean garb and had our pics taken.

Shortly after the Korean garb pic, we ran into a woman doing a masters in international law at one of the women's universities in Seoul. I can't believe how many universities there are here! Anyway, she was almost fluent in English, though she claimed to have never studied it in school. She said she'd done her undergraduate in the history of criminal law, and was proceeding with the appropriate masters. She also spoke Mandarin fluently as well as speaking some Japanese and a bit of French. Impressed we all were. I perhaps moreso as she was fully 5 years my junior. We talked with her for about 40 minutes in the middle of the palace. I thought it the height of peculiarity that we were having an English, Mandarin, French and Japanese conversation with a Seoul native in the middle of a building that would surely have stunned anyone back home. Just sitting there, on the step of the building next to the one where King Jeong-jo created the Hangul alphabet, having a conversation that might occur anywhere.
Anyway, Nigel's friend Tori had to go back to Jeonju, so Nigel, Steve and I decided to wander around the neighbourhood. We happened into a drum concert set in an old more palace much more muted in colour than the royal one. It didn't actually seem much like a palace to me, but more of a nobles house or something. Lovely it was though, with it's peonies, wooden architecture and tiled roof.
The day didn't get much more lively after that. We tucked into a steak, we'd all eaten enough spicy food for a few days, and turned in early. Nice day of walking though.

Lost for Words

2005-05-01T17:43:00.000+09:00

What a place...
Today was our DMZ tour. We woke up bright and early and caught a taxi half-way across the city to the USO which stands for something I never learned, but probably includes United States and something else. It was stinkin' hot by 7:00 in the morning, but we boarded the bus with all the other folks keen for a bit of cold-war reality. Most people didn't seem to have any idea what they were really getting into and treated the trip like some kind of Disney ride. Although they all made me ill with their amazing je ne sais quoi, I managed to keep my temper and my tongue. Inane is how I'd describe about 1/3 of the people on that tour. We got to the DMZ about 8:30 or so, and were briefed on protocol for entering the Joint Commission village. We got to have a look inside building 2 where talks are held between the north and south. We were actually able to step into the North within the building, which was slightly creepy. The Republic of Korea soldiers, known as ROK soldiers stationed around the building and within it I first took for mannequins. They stood so incredibly still for the entire time we were there. I could only see them breathing. There were no other motions.

The rest of the tour included the site where two American officers were viciously murdered in what's known as the "Axe murder incident". What struck me most about the area was the profoundly undisturbed appearance of the wildlife. There were hundreds of manchurian cranes nesting in a colony near the axe murder site. It was definitely the biggest colony I'd ever seen. It left me in awe and wanting the bus to stop so I could watch... of course that would have been incredibly dangerous, but I couldn't help but hope.

We also saw one of the four tunnels the North had dug through the granite into the South. It was so far down, it's a wonder anyone was able to find it. The whole tour left me feeling pretty sad, a little scared and deeply philosophical. Korea is a very damaged nation.

Anyway, when we got back to Seoul, we managed to find new lodging at a hotel where the owner sleeps in his office. Ok, maybe he just works out of his bedroom... I dunno, but he's been in there, sitting on his futon, watching his 30-something inch screen TV in his pjs and taking people's money who want to stay in his slightly dodgy place. In Japan, for roughly 30 bucks I could stay in a capsule hotel. It's a little, little room or rather closet, but it's clean, clean, clean and the bathrooms aren't at all sketchy. My room's bathroom at this dodgy hotel was "ok". Mildew, yellowed tile, but ok. I actually managed to have a good sleep which I was a bit worried about, given the area. Itaewon is the area within Seoul where this place was. We originally tried to get into a place we found in the LP that was noted as a little dodgy in the book, but cheap. That was full though, which was just as well as it was smack dab in the middle of well over a dozen brothels. I couldn't believe it! I suppose prostitution must be legal here, but it was still a pretty big shock to see bar after bar full of women showing way too much leg for the hour and venue, just sitting there, looking a little bored, but lascivious. The whole area kind of made me feel just a little bit dirty, but there weren't really any other viable places to stay and we were all tired and wanted to dump our stuff. After that we hit a steakhouse and a few expat bars Nigel's friend Victoria recommended. Nice places all.
Ok, gettin' tired of typing so that's all for today.

First Weekend in Korea

2005-04-30T11:30:00.000+09:00

Flying from Yonago airport was like flying from Toronto to Detroit. We were really only up in the air long enough to have lunch. Not the best airline lunch I've ever had though. Takeoff is my favourite part of flying, but I loath the landings... something about that point just before the wheels touch down where you know you're about 1 meter above the tarmac just makes me feel queezy. Incheon airport is about an hours drive from where we were heading in Seoul, the bus taking us along a highway through an estuary full of birds of all shapes and sizes. Pretty neat looking, but I couldn't help feeling that having the highway running through it had to have some pretty significant effects. I was talking to someone a while ago about Asia not really having much in the way of environmentalism. I couldn't help but wonder about that, seeing all the construction in places that my instincts, training and experience tell me are sensitive. Not a thing I could really do about it, but it still makes me think. That's probably the important thing, but I wish I could do something when I see things like that.

Anyway, Seoul is a pretty amazing city. It feels a bit like Rome in that it's built all over a bunch of hills. It's one hell of a lot more colourful than any city I've seen in Japan and there are more people out and about doing healthy activities like jogging, cycling, inline skating etc. Actually there are more people out "taking exercise" than in any other city I've ever seen. Neither are there many obese people here. Quite remarkable really.

The city's pretty smoggy. The traffic is terrifying (if you're a pedestrian, anyway). The city is also tremendously varied. There is one area called Itaewon that's an absolute haven for foreigners. Walking around there, I feel like I'm in Toronto. It's really quite a neat place.

Our accomodation on the first evening was supposed to be at the Windroad hostel near a couple of the universities and some palaces. We dropped in, left our stuff, the attendant saying that our rooms were just being fixed up. I figured they were being cleaned or something. Nigel and I went off to get some food, finding a bunch of hot rice stuff like bibimbap but different. Very tasty. However, upon getting back to the hostel to meet Nigel's friend Steve, who's studying Mandarin in Beijing, we found that our rooms weren't being cleaned, they were being renovated. "Done by 10" they kept saying, "Done by 10, no problems". It being 6 and they being in the process of installing the lights into a room with a concrete floor and no paint, we were perhaps rightly skeptical. We complained and argued and haggled over a price for these non-existent rooms before deciding that Nigel's other friend Victoria probably wouldn't go for the place, even if they did somehow manage to get beds with clean sheets into the rooms by 10 at night. Nigel, Steve and I figured we'd stay if we could get the rooms for 5000 won each, but our standards simply required beds, sheets and a door to keep out the dogs. Anyway, it didn't go well, so we hit an internet cafe, where to our surprise easily 50 kids our age (all male) were glued to 19 inch screens, playing video games. We managed to snag a couple of computers and set about finding somewhere in this overbooked city to set up kip. We found a place somewhere on the south side of the Han river at a guy's apartment. He was renting out his extra rooms as a guesthouse. It was actually pretty super. Cheep, super clean, homey, had a giant television playing terrible programming, and four decent, clean beds, all for 10000 won each. Which is about 10 bucks.

Anyway, I'm off to do some more stuff... as that's what I'm here to do...

Hanami-Ho!

2005-04-28T14:10:00.000+09:00

When I came to Japan, I think I was caught somewhere in a paradoxical state of knowledge about the real-life modern Japan and the fictions of life we construct for other people. I knew a lot about different traditional activities, foods, and attitudes, but I hadn't really reconciled in my conception of the place the time demands of reality with how "culture" fits into the modern Japanese consumer lifestyle.

Imagine my surprise when life here was pretty much the same kind of getting by, human experience as living in Canada. Anyway, in Canada, we do the Christmas/Easter/Thanksgiving dinner thing... here, they do several similarly historic things the most recent of which I've experienced being Hanami.

In Japan, the end of the school year is in March. Everyone wraps up their year in early to mid-March, with final tests, graduation ceremonies and the like taking every second day out of your teaching regimen. Anyway, one of my classes from last year were pretty extraordinary kids. They were in the "math and science" class here at Kita and so were pretty book smart kids. What really set them apart though was their energy and enthusiasm for learning. They participated in every class as if it was the most fun thing they could possibly be doing. Their interest translated into some pretty huge gains in English competence and by the end of their first year at high-school, there were few things that I could say to them that they didn't understand. Those things that they didn't understand, they could identify immediately. These kids were always surprising me with phrases like "Hirose cut the cheese". Teaching them was always a bright spot in my week. I miss them now that we don't have Oral Communication class anymore, however, they invited me to go with them to Tamayu, a little town just on the edge of the now enlarged Matsue City. It's famous for two things, its onsens and it's sakura river. In the spring, when the cherry-blossoms are blooming away in their brief affair with our senses, the entire river that runs through Tamayu is flanked by a startling display of pink and white.

We took the train from Matsue station and then walked from Tamayu station along some quiet backroads, past people's gardens and yet unplanted rice-fields. Once we got there, we held the obligatory photo session as everyone captured the moment for their box of memories. As you can see, I was among those covetous souls. I have two blades of grass in my mouth like fangs... but you can't see them very well, so I just look silly... er, right, yes, because... you can't see the grass... blades...

Me and many of my favourite (yes, I know I'm not supposed to have favourites) students.

Anyway, we had a super time having a bit of a picnic on the banks of that placid stream, surrounded by countless cherry blossoms, the fresh spring grass that always looks greener than it should and bustling old folks, starting their gardens for the year. Amazingly relaxing really.

Tamayu-cho's blossomed creek be dammed, yar.

I'm gradually getting used to having infrastructure as part of the scenery. Not all of it's an eyesore, though the wires everywhere really give your aesthetic sense a real run for it's money.

I go before you always...

2005-04-04T10:40:00.000+09:00

I arrived late to school today, it being Spring Break, I come in to do few work related items each day. I did a bit of tidying at home and then pedaled my way across the city. Getting to school, I greeted some tentative looking new first year students, come to collect their schedules and slippers. I greeted them in English and they looked like I just told them I was going to eat their pet kittens, take pictures and torment them throughout their entire first year. Now, I know sometimes look like a brute of a person sometimes, what with my balding buzz cut coif and my heavy set and grizzled good looks, but I haven’t been in the business of tormenting children since I was a child… and even then, I don’t recall tormenting many kids… I was too often on the receiving end to inflict that kind of misery on anyone else. So, I switched into Japanese and said a few things that in their English translation would have sounded friendly and reassuring to kids, coming from someone who’s obviously going to be one of their teachers. However, it too seemed to unnerve them… It occurred to me that none of the other adults I know says things like “that’s an awfully big hill eh?” to… well, anyone. Ah well, that’s part of internationalization and as such, part of their official education, even though it’s not officially during school hours. I often accost my students with English out and about in the city. I think it’s good for them. Keeps them on their toes and able to use what they learn in real contexts.

Anyway, new students aside, I was expecting changes today, but I was wholly unprepared for the kind of unimagined distressful circumstances that awaited me in the office. I expected there to be a new computer in the English room and that the network would be accessible from all of the desks. Nope. The room isn’t even clean yet. The messy teacher who just left, who makes me look like a neat freak, left reams of his crap behind. Unreal. The coffee maker’s on the fritz and made a mess all over the table, which I found inordinately frustrating, upsetting even. There are boxes and books piled all around my desk and I don’t know whose they are. And, I read on the BBC website that the Pope’s finally bought the farm.

It’s strange. I missed mass yesterday because I wasn’t able to haul my carcass out of bed because I was unable to get to sleep on Saturday night. I might have heard about it there. I went out to a movie in Yonago, a neighbouring city with a real movie theatre with some friends, ate some real buttered popcorn and drank beer whilst watching The Aviator, that new(ish) flick about Howard Hughs. Creepy, but very interesting, it was. I guess he didn’t know much about the power of a human immune system. Anyway, the whole day we were out and about and there was not a whisper to be heard of the J2P2’s passing. It was just like Easter last week. Not a peep. Not a single indication that it was a Sunday unlike any other.

Last Sunday, I missed Easter mass but had a conversation in Japanese with one of the deacons and the Philippino priest. They explained to me that the English mass was on the second Sunday of each month and that there would be no English Easter mass. They suggested I feel free to go pray in the church as the building would remain open all day. I took them up on their offer and went in to pray. It felt strange and lonely in there though. After maybe 15 minutes, a pair of (gorgeous) young Philippino women came in, arm in arm, to do their Easter make-up prayer stint. The direction they left in made me wonder if they were hostesses in one of the dozen or so Philippino bars in town. That would explain their inability to make mass in the morning. What I don’t get though, is, given the number of peeps from the Philippines why aren’t there masses in Tagalog? Anyway, I digress. The Polish Pope is dead and I feel my family is somehow diminished for it. Knowledge of his passing was really the crowning glory of a frustrating and uncomfortable morning but I’m at a loss to explain why it made me cry. I seem to be crying a lot this year, not from arguments or movies or disturbing documentaries, but because there are peeps I can’t see at times that are important to me. There are peeps whom I will never again see as they’ve died while I was away. I feel that even as I wrack my brains, trying to get Japanese into my head and make it mine, I’m being somehow diminished in other ways. It’s as if there’s only so much room in my head and my heart. I think, as much as I love being in Japan, it will be an error to stay more than 2 years. It may be a wonderful place, but it’s probably not a place with which I should try to cultivate strong ties. That’s just how I’m feeling this morning, though I feel like there’s a part of my life that’s inaccessible to me here. Which, of course should be obvious to anyone taking a quick look at my circumstances. So with that feeling of inaccessibility, I feel in a way, that with the Pope passing, I’ve lost a friend from home. I always seem to be absent when people die, and I feel, rightly or wrongly, a right shit for it. The Pope, for me, was one of those people who is like a grandfatherly figure, yet another person to whom I looked up to who has gone on. It seems that as these giants of life pass on, I, in a way become a more senior figure. I feel grossly ill sized to the shoes the Pope has left behind, but of course, it won’t be me filling them, so my worries and feelings are really only internal fictions. Which is precisely the problem this morning. My attachment to the Pope is really only one based on shared faith and maybe my own feelings of need for people to look up to. John Paul 2 was a giant of a man. Whatever people’s criticisms of his autocratic, conservative nature, he was a profoundly caring, disciplined, brilliant and powerful man who spent his days in faithful service to his tour group. He did everything he could to seek the true paths by which we should hike. And he did it in sneakers, always respectful of the people he visited, Catholic or not. We’ve lost a powerful philosopher, a shining mind and a heart of mythic proportions. Going on to greener pastures, of course, but still… it’s something we always find difficult. There’s something about not interacting physically with people anymore that is profoundly disturbing for us.
I think it’s probably attachment to the static appearance of life. The Pope was never a static figure really. Whatever he was, and he was, and is a lot of things, he is a process. Even from a strictly physical perspective, all people, things and relationships are processes, or flows. The change though, is something that really gets to us. It picks the scabs of our heart wounds, it scratches itches on our skin to the point of pain. Change, however, is as much a part of the process of being as the natural feelings of relationship we have for each other, the events we experience, and the things we interact with and the places we visit. The problem is that we grow attached to the physical existence of particular processes in particular states, heedless of the knowledge that they cannot remain in that state. As such, attachment to my relationships to the people and the things by which I define my life is really the problem as far as my frustration and discomfort are concerned. As is the case for everyone I’m sure. I am worried about becoming something I feel should not, about loosing the things and relationships that despite my feelings that they define me do not in the least define me. It’s quite a difficult state of mind to manage, despite my increasing experience with meditation and biofeedback.

I think, I probably just need to go get plastered at my friend Seigi’s bar. Seigi’s a philosophy graduate, a DJ and an English teacher, so our conversations are always grounding for me. They always leave me feeling that even though the world feels like a strange and unwieldy place without meaning or sense, it is in fact simply a metaphysical experience of exploration, an adventure without true physical direction. He’ll be happy enough to toast J2P2 with me as he’s read his early work. Imagine that. Meeting a Japanese DJ who’s read Karol Wojtyla tending bar in a little side street place in a small city in Japan feels like something out of a Robbins novel.

Anyway, all we truly have in the world is our choice of response to the circumstances of our lives. With that, my head comes unraveled and so I will go back to sitting on the windowsill watching the raucous and fascinating white heron colony grow. It will, after a fashion be a prayer for an old man who would have appreciated the sight.

Spring "Break"

2005-03-31T18:08:00.000+09:00

Living overseas in a foreign country, or rather, living in someone else’s country as a guest, (they like to call us outside people, which is a minor generalizing quibble I have) one gets settled. Things that once inspired staring are now experienced as commonplace and banal. Not that life is ever boring, as I’m inclined to feel that boredom is simply an indication of dissatisfaction with one’s life. I am anything but dissatisfied. I am however, acclimatized enough that the old women staring don't bother me anymore.

I’m on “spring holiday” right now, but I have to go to work every day unless I want to use my precious nenkyu (holiday days). I don’t, however, have to show up in a timely fashion or indeed stay after I run out of things to read on the internet and all my friends using MSN go to bed. The other teachers, though, they have heaps of work to do. They’re here long before I get here and they stay long after. It’s like there is no break. It’s a distinctly different kind of dogged occupation and if you subscribe to the “a change is as good as a rest” mantra, you’d find the packing up and leaving of the leaving teachers, the coming of the new and the time table and test planning of those staying around quite refreshing. I however, do not subscribe to that bit of folk wisdom wholesale. A change is as good as a rest if, one gets to play with one’s spouse and kids more often, maybe get a whole week’s worth of good sleep and maybe hang out with your friends once or twice. For me, it is a change that’s as good as a rest as it is, after a fashion, a holiday. I don’t teach at all this or next week. So, I’m writing, chatting, studying and watching movies. Most of the other JETs are out of time, and my Japanese friends are all busier than usual, having something to do with this “hiruyasumi” (spring break). Tomorrow all the old teachers will leave and the new teachers will finally settle into their desks. I’ve managed to snag a window desk so I can watch the white heron colony in the front yard of the school.

My favourite teacher, the one who’s moving half-way down the prefecture, gave me a present today. She’s a kid at heart, I think that’s part of the reason I like her so much, so she got me traditional Japanese toys. She gave me marbles, which in Japanese are Bidama in a nice little paper box, hiragana playing cards and a traditional Japanese picture matching game. I’d always had a good time talking with her and I was beginning to think she’d just move to her new school and I’d never get to see her again. Gifts, however, appear to be something of an indication of proper friendship in Japan, so it may not be the last I’ve seen of her. I got her and another teacher I taught oral communication with who is also leaving some nice ceramic tea mugs with little rabbits looking at the moon. Crazy Rabbit Moon Cult was what I was thinking, but everyone else who saw them thought they were cute… must be my Western cultural identity…

Anyway, today was spent largely online, talking with friends in Canada. Interesting links courtesy of my friend Dave in Waterloo included the following two hilarious and creepy, respectively, links.

I wish I could...

creepy... but kind of reminiscent of my own childhood frankenstein phase.

One major upset today that started as an “Oh F@*K” moment and ended in simple incredulity was brought on by finally seeing the fruits of my labours these past weeks in print form. Unfortunately, to top off my grumbles about the quality of my writing and the difficulties of working in a group to produce an article, I noticed that my editorial on education contained some odd items in parentheses. It turns out that the printer somehow got hold of the draft version of my manuscript and printed that, complete with editing commentary from my dear friend Dan. So, there it is… this never, obviously, would have happened with an English printer. I suppose they simply took the inserted commentary compiled at the end as “Notes”. So, I properly should be feeling as embarrassed as hell. I’ll admit my ears did turn red and tears did grace my desperate hilarity, but I don’t seem to feel quite as embarrassed as I think I should. Every other JET and JTE in the prefecture gets a copy of this sucker, not to mention that it gets stowed in government and academic libraries. My name is probably mud in this business.

Note to self, never, never, never give people instructions as to the name of a file when there are other files with part of the same name on the same disk… better yet, never, never, never give anyone a disk with anything on it but what you wish them to see or use. Some lessons, as I’ve always enjoyed experiencing, get learned the hard way.

Ah well, at least the beards almost made me pee.

Class wraps up.

2005-03-24T09:40:00.000+09:00

This is pretty strange. Yesterday was the last day of classes and today has so far been just cleaning followed by a longish farewell ceremony. About 20 of the 80 teachers at this school are leaving for other schools. There were many tears, long speeches of thanks and commendation and then after that everyone sort of filed out enmasse and started going to thank their favourite teachers who were leaving. Quite a sad affair really. The whole impermanence thing is really hard to take sometimes. Friends and family, teachers, students and co-workers all off on their own personalized life journeys. It's such a hard thing, adjusting to change and separation from things and especially people you've become attached to. Students are in tears, teachers are showing the strain of feeling in their faces, everyone will miss these relationships, but there's just no keeping them the same. We cannot be children forever, however much we might fantasize about and long for things to stay the same. Buddha seems to be right.
It's really just hit me how much I'm going to miss the company I've kept here in the office. There's only one teacher from my office staying on. I live in the same apartment complex as he and his wife and family, so at least there will be some continuity with my work/social life in the midst of this upheaval. I hadn't realized though, how much I rely on two of the teachers socially. I feel like I'm having many of my friends torn from me. The thing is, here, that teachers are so busy outside of school that they usually have little time apart from school. So, it will be difficult to get to see them after they leave. Anyway, that seems to be life. I've got friends all over the place that I never see, some of whom I never hear from either. Not that I'm any better really. Ah well, no sense crying over split milk.
Besides, it's frikin cold and sleeting today, so I shouldn't think long on that sort of self pitying tripe. Life changes, change sucks, happiness is a choice. Meh.

Time flies...

2005-02-28T10:17:00.000+09:00

So this weekend, my friends Nigel and Erica-chan put on a grand Scottish dancing party. Designed to showcase their remarkable and distinct Scottish culture. Which is not English. J Unfortunately I had one of my little time-sense lapse periods starting from about Wednesday and leading right up until Sunday morning. This involved forgetting all kinds of things including breakfast on two occasions. Who forgets to eat? I mean really! Forget your keys in the change dish just inside your apartment, sure (did that too), forget to call a friend in Canada at a time that wouldn’t wake the entire household, sure (did that), loose track of time on Friday evening so you don’t realize you’re still working at 9:30 at night and all your friends are at the izakaya already, sure (did that), but forget to eat? Well, I did, but that wasn’t the worst of it. I missed the Scottish dancing. I kept calling people and no one seemed to be picking up their phones. I’d never experienced such a dearth of available companionship. I was almost tempted to call up some of the teachers from work to see if they wanted to hang out and do some lesson planning or something. Ok, probably would have been sitting in an izakaya eating chicken gristle or something. Anyway, I felt like a right shit when I put it all together and figured out as the evening was ending somewhere on the other side of town at the Scottish dancing that I’d made a pretty big scheduling error. I wanted to reformat my hard drive, so great was the embarrassment, and that was just me alone at home watching movies. Few other times in the last decade have I felt like such a goof. Nigel and Erica had been working on the arrangements for the party for about a month and a half and were both keen to have me there. I feel I’ve let them both down, even though I’m sure they both had a smashing time as apparently scores of people showed, such that the little gymnasium they had rented was actually too small for the numbers of revelers. Good on them.

Anyway, I’m spending my morning here perusing the news and trying to figure out what my next lesson plan will be. Nothing I teach from now until the end of the year will actually be tested, as the kids are writing the oral communication final this afternoon. Anyhoo, it will probably just be a bunch of games or something.
While reading the news, I’ve become increasingly aware that biotech seems to be growing its fine tendrils subtly into our collective media consciousness. Reading the news feels more and more like I’m living in a science fiction novel. I read about this creepy little tidbit in New Scientist

Creepy Bone Rings

Strikes me as just a little bit goth, eh? I’m not sure what actual benefits this kind of thing would have for people, but I can only imagine a pair of gloomy star-struck lovers thinking it the perfect metaphor for their shared undying love. Think under-exercised, social misfits with a penchant for too much makeup and live action role-playing. Fantasy comes to life. What’s next? I’m thinkin’ keratin finished bone flatware grown from one’s grandmother’s bone cell culture. The ultimate heirloom.

I just noticed actually that several teachers are going over the listening parts of the various English tests, for which I was the voice. It’s really a bizarre experience hearing your own voice reading things in a slowish, with a relatively pared down vocabulary from two directions at once when every body sense tells you that you are in fact not speaking. Ah, the miracles of MD recording. Far from being an exciting voice, though, I think I could make a good go of reading meditation or sleep aid listening tapes. My voice sounds hypnotic. It will be a wonder if the kids can stay awake through the test. I guess I’ll have done something to lower the level of stress in the room. I wonder if I always sound like that. If so, maybe I should be a hypnotist, a counselor or a psychiatrist. Calm everybody down. Woah, I’ve got to go do something active, sitting here listening to that’s going to put me in the embarrassing position of waking up some time later to find I’ve been drooling on my desk.

Grey, wet, cold... with flowers a bloomin'

2005-02-18T13:21:00.000+09:00

Well, it's February, but not like we know it. There should, frankly, still be snow kicking around, but it looks very much like it's given up the ghost for the year. All we get now is the messy rainy weather that ought to be snow storms trundling across the Nihonkai from Russia, bringing all the sunny happiness you'd expect of an official Russian donation. Everyone keeps saying how strange and warm it is this year, but no one besides my students has, at least in conversation, let on that they figure it’s climate change and we’re in for further weirdness and uncomfortable weather.

Well, news flash: it’s climate change and oh, by the way we’re responsible.
Yet more evidence: I give you the BBC (love ‘em)

Greenhouse gases "do warm oceans"

Before and After

Scary. I think I like the pictures of the mountains better now, but warm weather sucks any which way. I’ll never understand people who like the summer because it’s so warm.

Anyway, I’ve just finished about four weeks of the most ridiculously busy days I’ve had in ages. Matter of fact, I can’t ever remember being quite that busy. I’m basically shot. I’m an ex-mind. I go home after work now, not to get ready to hit the gym or head out to a Nihon-go class, but to gather steam to make supper so I don’t end up dragging my sorry ass to the oh so conveniently placed Chinese restaurant, Sushi joint or Konbini. I always want to have a scotch when I get home, even a beer, but I’m taking this Lenten fast thing seriously, as I feel the need to assert my cultural heritage and religious distinctiveness in this sea of ambivalence. What I’m preparing myself for are the cutsie plush Jesus-on-a-Cross or smiling, cutsie Stigmata Jesus dolls that are surrounded by bunnies taking up residence in the store windows or on little commercial displays in the stores. That would about do it for me. I’m sure someone’s already thought of it.

Anyway, speaking of people (or God) cheating death… (is it actually possible to cheat anything if you’re the alpha and omega?)… maybe we won’t have to die after all…

1,000-year lifespan a possibility, geneticist says

I for one will welcome a few extra hundred years. Think of how many languages you could learn in that time! You could be part of a dozen different cultures for a full generation! It would be so fascinating! Wa!
Hell, you’d even get to see the fruits of your reforestation efforts!

Ringin' in the New Year...

2005-01-01T09:40:00.000+09:00

Well, it's 2005, and what a year! We started it in a sadly underwhelming party that neither did a count-down nor cut the music during the turn over. The music just throbbed on, people kept talking about whatever mundane things they were talking about and we shouted, kissed, hugged, clanked our beers together and tried to sing Auld Lang Sign. Maybe 20 Chinese peeps raised their beers and shouted a "HAPPY NEW YEAR" along with the four of us, Kevin, Caley and Anna, over the blare of some generally unmemorable song.
The day had started out a little later than most, as we were all pretty nackered from the Wall the day before. We managed to get out to see the Temple of Heaven and the Lama Temple before grabbing possibly the best vegetarian meal I've had in over a year, heading back to the hostel and hitting the acrobats with Kevin followed by a taxi, a subway and another taxi to the expat area where we dug into some tasty indo-thai grub prior to hitting the bars. All in all a pretty full day.
The Temple of Heaven was a nice place. It was gaudy inside and pleasantly laid out on the outside. How it managed to get through the Cultural Revolution intact I have no idea. By rights, the sucker should have been smashed by that meat-headed movement, but it remains, a testament to the place greenery has in our soul. It's a big park. I mean a big, big park. The grounds are expansive to say the least. The thing may well be a kilometer on either side, stuffed full of as many cyprus trees as you'd care to count. All in a nice orderly fashion, of course. We wouldn't want any aspect of chaos in the human arrangement, now would we.
The Temple altar was pretty stunning inside. We didn't get to go in, of course, but we got a nice look inside from across the railing. Gold, red, blue, yellow, it's all there, all in mind-distressingly intricate patterns. Dragons and dogs and cattle and all kinds of things, it seemed. Nuts, absolutely nuts. The altar was under repair while we were there, so the one side of the building was covered in scaffolding. They say if something isn't baroque, don't fix it, but in this case, it's probably a good thing they are. It's almost baroque in it's intricacies anyway. The vault of heaven wasn't under construction though, and we got a good look at the whole thing. Possibly the most interesting thing, unless you consider yourself somewhat bookish and inclined towards 17th century Sinic cultural materials, say maybe if you're a kid or something... or maybe me, is the smoothly polished perfectly circular wall surrounding the vault grounds. You can look north along either the eastern edge or the western edge and hear the person at the place opposite you speaking in a normal voice. I thought it was pretty neat. Ok, so I'm not winning any maturity awards here, but that shouldn't surprise anyone. Lastly, the southern bit where there're concentric tiered levels made out of white polished marble was pretty neat. Standing in the centre and speaking made your voice AUDABLE AND SONOROUS, which was fun. The actual park area of the grounds needs only a cursory description as everyone knows that the profound excellence of being surrounded by your far distant photosynthesizing cousins, especially when they’re all fascinating and gnarly (Cyprus), cannot be conveyed by mere words, powerful as they are. When some people use them. Not like me.

Vault of Heaven. Neat place.

Anyway, the Lama Temple, which we arrived at following a harrowing cab ride was actually an active temple. The Tibetan monks were hanging out in each of the galleries, just to keep things kosher. We knew they were monks because they were wearing robes and had buzzed scalps and walked about a centimeter off the ground. Ok, ok, maybe not all of that is true, but I felt pretty comfortable assuming they were monks. Anyway, the temple itself was just interesting to look at, a welcome reprieve from the gaudy Qing stuff of Temple and the Palaces. One thing that this visit clinched for me though, is that Tibetan Buddhism is scary material. There are some profoundly disturbing images in their art. Demons with little human heads emerging from their foreheads like beads in a circlet, other Bodhisattvas with wild predatory faces, claws and giant phalluses shaped like and in forms only possible for a flat worm, things stepping on people, swords, canine teeth, brains being eaten. It all seemed to be the stuff of nightmares. I don’t know, maybe that’s the point, but it was not “nice” to look at. There was also some interesting “history” presented in an exhibition on the close bond of friendship between the Lamas and that good ol’ boy Mao. Apparently the Tibetan government gladly accepted China’s friendly offer to rejoin China after carefully reviewing China’s excellent relations with its ethnic minorities. “What!?!” you might be asking yourself, “I didn’t know China had ethnic minorities!”. Well, indeed, it would seem that China does, in fact have ethnic minorities. They all speak Putonghua and have the same rights, freedoms and opportunities as real Chinese though, eh? Of course, didn’t you see the exhibition at the Lama Temple? Ok, I’m letting it go…

Following that little afternoon segue way, we meandered to possibly the cleanest, nicest Chinese restaurant I saw in China. The deep fried eggplant was superb and the stuffed tofu and the ma po tofu were also excellent. The curry rice was so so, but the tea, was really something else. They served it in little glass cups that were as light as you can imagine something substantial being. They fit in the palm of my hand and were made of one thin film of heat tempered glass doubled over to create an enclosed insulating space and at the same time a depression in the ball creating a little space for tea. Superb really. So from there, we made our way back to the hostel, found Kevin and went out to the Acrobat show.

The Acrobats were incredible! They made a few mistakes, but the sheer excellence or utter wrongness of some of the things they were able to do was simply incredible. The vaulting, bounding, accurate flips, balancing, precision of every motion, and stunning grace with which they achieved all this were simply overwhelming. There were two performances that really stuck with me. One was of a kid, he could have been no older than 10 but was probably more like 8. He did back flips as easily as he walked. He did back flips up and down a vertical pole as easily as most of us run. He was like a little monkey, he was so agile! I know other white men have been given a lot of grief for calling Chinese kids monkeys, but if you know me, you’ll know this is descriptive rather than pejorative. If I’m anything, I’m a culturist rather than something as silly as a racist. Discriminating based on appearance is utterly foolish. Discriminating based on culture, now that’s another story. People do it all the time… it’s the basis of nationalism. Anyway, back to the acrobats. The second act that wowed me was a balancing contortionist act. This woman balanced what looked like intricate chandeliers, but turned out to be layers and layers of tiny balanced glass water goblets, on trays on first one foot, then hands and the other foot and then finally the head via the mouth support thing. She proceeded to bend into shapes that I wasn’t even able to recognize as human anymore. The utter anatomical impossibility of what she was doing made me have to redefine my parameters for human anatomy in this manifestation of reality. It was profoundly bizarre. Imagine, if you can, how a woman sitting on her butt can come to be resting her backside on her head while balancing a tray full of glass water goblets stacked five high on each of her limbs as well as with her mouth, via that balancing arm mouthpiece. I couldn’t even understand how she was doing it while I was watching her, let alone after. Simply… awful. Proper old sense of the word.

Anyway, that watched, we exited into the only slightly colder Beijing night to catch a cab to the subway where we caught a train to the expat area. As I mentioned there was some wandering, the patronizing of an indo-thai establishment with really cheap, but good beer followed by the walking of our sorry, cold asses back to the proper expat area where some Nigerians offered us some “blunt, or whatever else you need”. Frankly though, the last thing I wanted was to be caught with a presumably illegal substance in country that murders people for saying we want a meaningful multiparty vote. I could just envision it, my home for the next 30 years would be a Chinese gulag somewhere in northern Inner Mongolia where they would have me instructing school-children in ESL while pretzeled into a meter cubed cold iron box with a slot over approximately where my mouth would be. I would be set upon a desk and coerced to lead the children through pronunciation and listening activities. All my various nutrient and waste needs would be dealt with in a surgically altered automated fashion. “No thanks dude” I shook my head as I passed up the Nigerian guys offer. What the hell was he doing selling drugs in China anyway? I guess the living must be worth the risk and the omnipresent cold. Whatever. We made our way into one of the first expat bars we found, mostly to avoid the little swarm of pickpocketing kids who were getting their busy little hands into whatever spaces they could find and reach. I was reminded of younger versions of Oliver Twist. These kids were probably no older than 7 or 8 though, if I weren’t such a hard-hearted, grizzled bastard, it probably would have broken my heart to see these kids. Anyway, since I am, we just went into the bar and spent more on beer than those kids would have taken to feed for a week. We rung in the new year, rather underwhelmed and subsequently meandered down the street to a little pub with a table of Brits and a table of Chinese youths being entertained by and in turn entertaining (it was their bar) an older Irish couple. We were introduced and subsequently singing ensued. I gave them “The Last Saskatchewan Pirate” as well as I was able. All the other Canadian songs I know just weren’t with me in that bar for some reason. Anyway, we got a wee bit drunk, Anna sang something in Irish and we caught a cab back to the Hostel where we promptly turned in.

New Years day so-far has been a bit of a slow day. Anna leaves at 3:30 or so for Korea, so we’ll just do a bit of souvenir shopping and call it a day. Then Caley and I will find something to do before we turn in for our last night in China. Sniff. I will miss this, tough as the cold and the spitting and the sheer dirtiness of almost everything is to take, I’ll miss it. China is vital, its alive and humming. A roiling, boiling, reactive stew of peoples and stuff. I will miss hanging out with Caley and Anna and Kevin too short time as it is since I’ve known them. Good peeps for traveling with. Many thanks guys!

Contortionists, jugglers and opera oh my!

2004-12-30T09:47:00.000+09:00

There is a ridiculous number of things to possibly do here in Beijing. My friend Kevin has taken to lounging about in the hostel, reading books. His knee is bothering him a fair bit though, so he's got an excuse. Some days, however, I feel like I want an excuse to just stay in bed and read. I stayed in and read some issue of Time, the one with the "Person of the Year" on it. Perennial "good-guy" Dubya made it again, and got a fancy dose of some interestingly kitschy photography that comes as close to rhetoric as imagery allows. It's funny, but the more I learn about the guy, the more I'm almost glad he's in again. Not that I'm for much of his mandate. I do applaud his interest in getting back into space and making Mars by 2020 or whatever it was, and I also applaud his laudable avoidance of destroying the moon with nuclear weapons. I don't find much else in common with him, with the possible exceptions of liking a nice steak every now and then and appearing to be heterosexually inclined, white and male. What I appreciate, though, in all seriousness, is his consistency. You can pretty much predict how he'll act under a variety of circumstances. He's a predictable animal, if a canny one with suspect logic underpinning his values. I don't think he's an especially good guy, but there are scores of people I can think of who would make more evil statesmen/women who are considered by most people they know as "ok". I don't think you can get into a job like "President of the United States" and not be at least a little bit suspect in your niceness. He'd probably be someone you could get shitfaced with in a bar and not be too sorry for his company though, until he started a fight with those obvious deviants hunched over their cheap whiskey, all variously shaggy and shorn, pierced and tattooed smelling of well worn, sour denim, dusty leather and metal buckles, expecting you to back him up. Anyway, enough of politics. I'm on vacation, not employed as an apologist for the younger George something Walker Bush as person. I'd rather he was Woodrow Wilson, but I'd take him over Mao or Jerry Springer.

Beijing. Yep, that's where I am. It's still cold here. Not like I expected it to change, but the persistent omnipresence of the stinkin' coldness, in the shower, in the toilet, in the restaurants, in the stores, in the touristy spots, the computer spots, that's beginning to get to me. I guess I'll get used to it, probably just the day I leave. I'll probably get up to use the facilities in the early morning and find myself oddly unaffected by the bits-numbing icy chill of the frozen latrine.
Anyway, the cold is frequently offset by a nice hot cup of some of China's best. The tea here is great and ubiquitous. Famously so. I drink various varieties and incarnations a minimum of three times a day. The four eggs with hot peppers, rice and yogurt just aren't the same without a morning dose of North America's least preferred post-dinner drink.

So yesterday Caley, Anna and I mustered a noon wander around that famous square that oddly enough looks slightly more impressive than a big Walmart parking lot back home. If it weren't for the imposing architecture framing the large openness, you might have trouble figuring out where you were. We started with a look in the park on the west side of die Vorboden Stadt, then, after a quick bit of reasoning, we determined that indeed we would have to pass under Mao's big ol' mugshot to get into what is ecumenically termed 'the Palace Museum'. Forbidden City it is, Palace Museum, though it's current moniker, it is not. Communist-authoritarian rhetoric always likes to push it's vile little head into things that are bigger than it and had a better understanding of human nature. The whole idea of centralized communist states makes me ill. I used to think I might have communist leanings, given my socialist tendencies and preferences, further reading however, has led me to believe that capitalist, co-operation and communalism under a democratically elected and fully accountable division of powers between judicial, executive and legislative branches of a federal-style government, with subdivisions of similar bodies that are regionally responsive and accountable is really the best form of government and that it cuts the mustard quite well. The only things we really need to stay vigilant about is people trying to screw others, intentionally or otherwise or gather too much unaccountable power and influence. Nothing wrong with making a damn good go of things so long as you don't mess with people's ability to do something similar if they're inclined and able.

That said, I think a proper liberal education is essential. People need to think for themselves, even if they don't want to. They should never be allowed to abdicate enmass to any particular body, public or private, because as God is recorded as mentioning to Samuel, if people abdicate their freedoms so they don't have to be responsible, then they open themselves to tyranny. Jefferson's suggestion of eternal vigilance was primarily inward towards the US government rather than towards external threats to freedom and all that stuff. Anyway, in my humble opinion, communism failed miserably as a "people's movement". It's tyranny through and through and all this "Worker's Cultural Palace" or "People's Square" or "Monument to the People's Heroes" crap is utter tripe and the most vulgar kind of offence to human dignity. Of course we'll have to temper that with the fact that I'm a white male, and even if I am Catholic, I'm supposedly part of that tyranny machine called The West. The myth of The West can probably be exposed pretty nicely in The Lord of the Rings with the Men of the West in decline from a golden age and the onset of a kind of age of the myriad non-West forces. All that stuff aside, I think we're too hard on ourselves when we feel guilty about making judgments or holding opinions about non-Western civilizations that someone might be inclined to call ethnocentric.

Pervasive cultural relativism is crap. There have to be some basics. Sure the Chinese have different ideas about the manner with which they interact with each other in daily life, but when it comes down to it, parents love their children and vice versa, people fall in love, hump and have children. They eat and enjoy food. They sleep and like to keep healthy. Most people don't want to get killed. Most people aren't too keen on having people steal from them or sleep with their spouses. Most people feel their parents deserve some respect and most people seem to realize that wanting what you don't have leads to trouble. Everyone recognizes the need for rest as well. These things are not relative. Food and drink, clothing and speech, sure. That little tirade probably just marks me as a racist or something, not that I care too much about appearances. The proof should be in the pudding. It should be ecumenical and figgy.

So, back to the Forbidden City. It was pretty neat. There were haulkers galore without and not a one within. Turning down several offers by "English-uh-speakin-toua-guides" whose knowledge seemed to only slightly excel my own, we hired the esteemed Rodger Moore's voice on disk to guide us in his gentlemanly, at times subtle and gratuitously lascivious manner through the courtyards and passages of the former Son of Heaven. Times past, the place must have been something else. The shear quantity of marble and other nice materials is simply ridiculous. Full of Ming and Qing imagery, the place must have been quite memorable for the lowly unwashed who managed at some point in their lives to manage a view of the outer areas. Apparently the Emperor held audience with the relevant ministers and officials at the gate to his inner sanctum beyond which no one but him might pass. Some of them would have to get up at some ungodly hour every day to manage the meeting time of 6 am (I think it was 6, but it might be 8, early morning in either case).

If, the outer courtyards and buildings were pretty impressive if in poor repair, the inner areas, also in poor repair although actually being repaired, were simply interesting. The three of us sheltered from the bitterly cold wind in a souvenir shop and drank some grainy beverage that claimed to be coffee but tasted and bore bottom-of-the-cup evidence of being something more like millet soup. The imperial gardens were pretty neat too. My main impression was of opulence and I've decided that cypress trees, apart from sporting some pretty otherworldly forms, are not my favourite trees. It was cold in the garden too. The only places it wasn't cold were the alleys between areas. These were sunlit and sheltered from the wind. That, coupled with their orangy red imperial warmth and nifty gate carving served to elevate them to my favourite bits of the city. I tried to follow many places with open gates, but was often turned back by the stern looks of the bored security peeps. All in all, the Forbidden City was a good day, but it would have been more interesting if there was more reading to be had on the signs in front of all the gates. Rodger Moore gave some interesting accounts, but I think I prefer reading. I would even have paid another 20 RMB for it.

This is a lion guarding the right hand side of a major gate. His paw is placed upon the world... read into it however you like.

When it came down to it though, the only thing that could have made it more of a significant even for me would have been more interest in Chinese history. I find it a wee bit difficult most of the time though, as I find it less meaningful than the history of other places in the world. It's a Confucian world and as such, is hugely different from the Judeo-Christian world I was formed in. I guess being used to denigrating and criticising the West, I get a bit tired of hearing how China's so old and so dominant. The centre of the world. Well, sure, the centre of the Sinic world, but not the rest of the world. If you think about it, China sort of changes significantly every time someone new captains the ship. There are the Chinese characters that to anyone without a good background in Sinic history represents some long line of continuous culturally hegemonic nation. However, the characters are a bit like Arabic script and numerals or the Phonecian or Greek alphabets in terms of their omnipresence. These things span continents, and are indicative of related civilizations and nations, but everyone who uses some form of the Phoenician alphabet doesn't speak Phoenician or even English. They're often so different that people from different nations who happen to use the same alphabet cannot understand each other. This seems to be the Chinese experience too. The Chinese civilization is no more the Han civilization than the West is the Roman civilization. Heirs yes, but not the same. China is Han no more than the West is English.

Anyhoo, on to tea and a less expensive dinner than the duck. The three of us, following a brief stop in a tea house to look at the prices and say "oh, do we have time for this before we need to be at the opera? We should probably go." and then unseating ourselves, thanking the waitresses in the otherwise empty place and bidding them all a "merry zaijian", made our way to a clean looking restaurant with a few dead fish in it's aquariums out front. Possibly not the wisest course of action, but I'd been studiously avoiding seafood so I didn't think much of it. Meat and vegetables can't die of diseases because they're already dead... Everything turned out to be fine, everyone was a diligent hand washer and the kitchen appeared as sterile as China gets. People were spitting on the floor in the dining room, but none of the staff could be witnessed flinging phlegm. It was almost classy. We ordered a tofu dish and some eggplant as well as fried rice, lemon chicken and Singapore noodle. The tofu turned out to be Ma Po tofu with, of course, ground pork. All vegetarians, Muslims and Jews like a little ground pork in their ostensibly vegetarian course. Don't fight it, you know you love it! Anyway, Anna and I, both being omnivorous C & E RCs promptly devoured the tofu. Anna had some sense and left most of the red pepper stuff in her bowl. I, thankful to finally have some kick ass hot food devoured everything wholesale which I was to regret at a later time both for the discomfort it caused while I tried to sleep and the discomfort it caused before breakfast... Evidently not enough numbing spice. Anyway, all was tasty and we set off for a little opera place recommended by the LP. Finding it in an alley behind the main road, we sadly discovered it was closed for renovations. We chose another, less favourable option in the area and set off at a brisk pace through the nightlife of the hutongs. The places come alive after dark, it's really amazing! People abound, doing all kinds of business, chatting, gathering in eateries, selling carved wooden pipes and jade pendants, oranges and crab apples. Wonderful, cacophonous, vital, dirty and fascinating. We managed to make it to a place called Lao She Teahouse, which despite the apparently obvious origin of the name turned out to be named for Lao She the novelist who wrote a book named Teahouse. Not sure if it's irony, fitting or what. Learning this left me a little unsettled, as the Lao She Teahouse is a teahouse. It would have been fine had it been a restaurant named for the book, but it was a teahouse! Dunno about that. Anyway, for 60 RMB we took one of the tables furthest from the stage, drank as much tea as we could manage and ate some very interesting Chinese tea sweets. There were anise flavoured pumpkin seeds that turned out to be very tasty indeed, but were a bit tough to chew as we were trying to eat the shell as well as the interior. Later we noticed the folks in front of us spitting half masticated seeds into their hitherto unused wicker basket. Looking around, everyone else was doing the same. When in Rome...
The performance included some Beijing opera, which we were hoping to see, but which turned out to be mildly more annoying than it was interesting. Pretty, yes, interesting yes, buying the album and looking forward to my next opportunity to see it live, no. There were also a couple of pretty awesome acrobatic acts, complete with contortionists and jugglers. Following them were a couple of Chinese folk groups that were pretty neat, again, not that I'd buy the album. Then came the Sichuan Face-changing opera. Sugoi! Wow, if there was a highlight to the show, this was in close competition with the fish magician. A little is all you need, but this opera style is hugely cool. The guy paraded around the stage with a big hat and a cape looking every inch the gaudy Chinese version of the Phantom of the Opera. The music was upbeat, kind of like the Phantom of the Opera tune, but what was hyper-cool about it was that this guy was wearing a mask and he was somehow able to change the mask completely in a microsecond, sometimes without the apparent possibility of using his hands or having anything to obscure his sneaky presto-chango. He even walked out into the audience spread his arms with his cape in front of one table, nodded his head and his mask was changed. Incredible!
The other slight of hand act was the fish magician. This guy had a fishing line and an aquarium. The aquarium was empty, but he started doing a bunch of things, and pulling fish out of nowhere. He took a piece of paper, folded it up, cut it up and had some audience members cut it up a bit more. He then took all of the little bits of paper back to the stage, next to the aquarium, put his fists, holding the paper into the air, shook them and opened them over the aquarium, dropping something like 20 goldfish into the aquarium! Other tricks included catching fish from inside people's buttoned jackets, including a 5 pound trout! Super fun!
After that excellent bit of entertainment, we wound up back at the hostel for a bit of baijio. Caley and Anna went to sleep and I stayed up a bit, drinking with Kevin and the Chinese guys running the tourism shop until they closed it to catch the last bus home.

The following morning was a bit harsh, as we had to get up around 6:30 to catch the bus to the Great Wall. Three hours in that "bus" without heat, on hard seats. Had a chat with a British woman teaching in some south-western Chinese city. She claimed people felt she was going native, as they kept saying she looks more and more like a Chinese girl every time they see her. She had straightened her hair and was wearing a puffy down jacket that you see all the Chinese folks wearing. She claimed that virtually everything, yes, except the bra was bought, not just made in China. Interesting girl, trying to be less interesting because it seemed to cause her stress. She’s the only English speaker in her city, so her opportunities for more in-depth conversation are somewhat limited. I guess she copes by dumbing herself down. I applaud her courage, but I have no idea if I even could just stop trying to be interested in things. Interesting for it’s attempt at being not interesting. There’s some irony in there I’m sure.

So the wall was cold but awesome both for its antiquity and the stubborn persistence of its resident haulkers. We walked ten kilometers along an old assed bit of defensive masonry outlining the spine of a mountain range and for all but three of those kilometers, we were followed or hounded by people with bags full of cheap touristy stuff they wanted to sell us. “I’m a poor Mongolian farmer” seemed to be the identity of choice among all of them. Every last one of them was a poor Mongolian farmer, even the old women and young men. Hell, who was I to argue with them. I couldn’t even speak their language, but they seemed to be able to understand a fair bit of English. We thought the older women were guides, because they followed us without really asking us to buy anything. A few kilometers out, they did mention that they’d like us to look at the books they were carrying that were full of some wonderful and some poor quality photographs of the stretch of wall we were hiking. We broke down and bought a few things after about 5 kilometers. Then the women thanked us, bade us take care and wandered back the way we had come. We weren’t long without company though, as there was a tall thin dude in a big fur hat waiting to help us up into a tall tower about a kilometer past where we left the old women. The party in front of us had left him there, telling him there were more people behind them, a bigger party. Cheeky bastards. Anyway, this guy hounded us for 3 kilometers, not just walking with us, but constantly telling us to buy something. “You buy, you buy”. I’m sure his knowledge of protocol among Westerners was better than ours among Chinese, but he was really pushing it. We would stand looking out at things and he would be trying to push postcards in front of us while we were looking out. We probably should have just done what I’d seen some Chinese tourists do and yell at them to go away, but I just couldn’t leave my own ideas of what Western social etiquette required of me as an aspiring gentleman. Regardless, we managed to leave him behind just in time for some brutal descents. Truly crumbling ancient stonework made the wall so treacherous at points that the trail actually cut down to the mountainside. Fantastic.

Caley, Me and Anna (left to right)

We made our way back to Beijing just in time for rush hour. What a delight, 4 hours, instead of the original 3 on a freezing cold bus where the driver used a windshield wiper on the inside of the windshield (with his own un-mitted hand) to clear the condensation gathering on the windshield. The driver also stopped the bus just north of the city to do a bit of haggling with a farmer who had vegetables and persimmons for sale outside his house. Different world here… Anyway, we’re all back, safe and sound.

Tomorrow is the ultimate day of the year. It’s funny, but it doesn’t feel like it at all. We’ll see how tomorrow turns out… should be relegated to the Lama Temple and the Temple of Heaven and we'll hopefully go to the expat area of the city and find a party.

It's cold outside, but warm inside.

2004-12-28T00:26:00.000+09:00

It's something like minus 10 in Beijing right now. In the Hutongs that's alright. There's no wind to speak of in these little warrens, but out on the main avenues, boy it gets chilly. I've been seeking out the warm sunny walls and leaning against them as breif respite from the bone-chilling wind. I'm not one to usually complain about the cold. Heck, I love the cold. I'd far rather be cold than hot; the idea of a tropical vacation makes me mildly ill. However, this cold is somehow different. It gets me in the bones. My toes are always cold, the back of my neck is always cold and my fingers are always cold. It's almost embarrasing that I find myself so affected by the cold. People find that I'm Canadian and automatically assume that I'm a polar bear and are enormously shocked when they discover that I'm cold all the time. I'm cold when I'm drinking tea as well as when I'm drinking beer. The only time I'm not cold is when I wake up in the morning in this hostel with the sun beaming in, adding it's unmeasured energy to the 30 degrees the heater is struggling bravely to achieve. I'm not sure what all that means, but I find myself eating less, thinking more and mustering less ambition to sight-see.

What I seem primarily interested in is architecture and people watching. I'm getting a huge kick out of watching the locals amble along, occasionally and loudly doing the gratuitous suck-back-and-spit. It's disgusting, but amusing. I'm not sure when it was that I left my Western disapproval by the wayside and just started enjoying the spectacle, but it's happened. I now just smile and chortle to myself whenever I see it or hear it. It may be seeing other Western faces' reactions to the sights and sounds, but I think it's mostly the absurdity of the affair. There's a widespread and deep-seated folk belief that hauking lougies is promotes health and longevity. While this may well be true as far as the interests of the individual go, it is entirely at odds with everything I know about pulmonary infections, disease vectors and general hygeine. Spitting is not a good idea from a proactive public health perspective. I would have thought that in a 'communist' country, the workers might be concerned about burdening their fellow workers with the financial woes that the West has discovered spitting imposes. This isn't even going to touch the smoking as that's a whole other kettle of fish that I'm not, this evening at least, interested in mulling over. Matter of fact, I'm done with spitting too, because as much as I find it hilarious, I also find it deeply repugnant. Moving swiftly on...

I've taken to haggling. Haggling, for those of you who have yet to be introduced is basically the way the world works outside of market commercial arrangements. Prices are always debatable. People ask way more for things than they actually expect to get. I was offered a set of postcards by a haulker at Tiannamen Square the morning I got off the train from Shanghai for 30 yuan, which is about 4 Canadian dollars. I initially tried to ignore them, but I was trying to orient myself (no pun intended) and I just couldn't leave them behind. I offered 1 yuan. They looked shocked. No, no, no, is good, friend. You friend, you buy, 30 yuan. Yes, yes. I'm shaking my head the whole time, while I'm trying to look through my LP guide to figure out where I am in relation to where all the things, like the hostel are, but they're not taking the hint. I offer 2 yuan. They look hurt. They drop it to 25. I shake my head and start to walk away. Ok friend, is 20. Yes, you buy. No, 3 is all this is worth. I can buy this anywhere for 3 yuan. We argue about the prices of postcards in stores we've never been to, me in my language, they in theirs. I offer 3 again. They drop to 15. I walk away. They follow pulling my sleeve. Ok, 10 yuan, you buy! They start looking a little pained, so I offer 5 as a final offer. Done. I get a dirty look and start to move off quickly as a half dozen other haulkers selling the same things descend on me, hoping to sell me more postcards of Tiannamen Square. I quicken my pace and tell them that The Lord of the Rings was a great movie trilogy but that Tom Bombadil shouldn't have been removed in the screenplay. I've tried saying I don't understand in French and German, and sometimes it makes them leave me alone, but sometimes they speak better French or German than they do English and I'm in for a difficult time getting rid of them. Of course, haggling isn't always applied just to haulkers. This morning as Caley, Anna, Kevin and I were heading out to the Summer Palace, I bought a couple of one use cameras as I was expecting my digital battery to die shortly into the day. It's really important to price the item well before you make your offer because you can't go down from where you start. That's their job, you have to go up. Having worked the sales person down 20 yuan from where he started, he starts looking at another sales person and talking about what they can offer. I talked with Anna a bit about how much the yuan price would be in euros and decided to leave, telling him we couldn't go any further. So, he threw in another camera. We paused a bit, but then told him sorry, we wouldn't pay that much. So, he threw in another camera and jumped the price to 140 from 80. I offered him 90, he stopped looking happy and told me 140. I went to 100, he sighed and dropped it to 110 as a final offer. So, we walked away with three cameras for just over what two would have cost. I guess the idea is that they will never sell you something that they won't make any money on. Walking away usually drops the price significantly if it's prefaced with a bit of haggling and then an 'I'm sorry'. The other evening, I was buying some oranges from a few guys hanging out with their fruit cart, smoking in the cold and they seemed really pleased with my bargaining, laughing, offering me a cigarette and asking me where I was from. The whole exercise is absolutely super. I think it's one of the most enjoyable things I've done here.

Anyway, yesterday, after Caley and Anna arrived, we hit a hot-pot restaurant for some of the most stupid hot food I've had in ages. It may as well have been lava. It was brutally hot, but super tasty. Hotpot is a sloppy mess, but the lotus root, tofu and mushroom combination was pretty super. After that, we wandered about in Tiannamen square, watching all the plainclothes officers standing around looking like police officers. There were at least three paddy-waggons on hand to deal with any peeps who thought they might put a political bent on their tantric-hockey-yoga spiritual practice. Bizzare. The whole idea of a communist state is bizzare. 'we keep spendin' most our lives livin' on in a worker's paradise...' (sung to a very familiar Coolio tune)

China is no workers paradise though. People just do what they do, ekking out a living in whatever way they can. Although one might claim that communism has done a fair job of elevating the status of women, it can only properly be said that men and women seem to be equally oppressed. I'm getting a wee bit tired, so I'll leave this thought alone for a while...

Last night we went out for the obligitory Peking duck. We, not knowing any better, ordered the set as it was a tad pricey, but not too steap. We tasted duck liver pate, red preserved duck meat, spicy duck entrails, bamboo shoots with duck feet and a bunch of other things that just didn't work so well... the actual Peking duck was ok, but only ok. Oddly enough, my favourite dish was the spicy duck entrails. Live and learn.

Today we trapsed out to the Summer Palace via the metro and a crazy cab ride that was double what the LP said it should have been. I guess prices have gone up. It's like that pretty much everywhere here. Things are just a lot more expensive these days. It was relatively uneventful though, and we got some nice views of the hills surrounding Beijing as well as a look at some super architecture (new, of course) that we might not have seen otherwise.

Nice view across the frozen lake.

The Summer Palace itself was quite beautiful. I certainly wouldn't have complained about having to stay there. There's a huge lake circumnavigated by a paved path. (probably done by hand). The lake was frozen and people were milling about on it, but when I started out on it, I create a crack in the ice that I was able to watch run off to the limit of my vision. This, perhaps understandably, disturbed me and I removed myself in a slow and deliberate fashion from the ice. Maybe all those Chinese have hollow bones... ANyway, as I've been largely innundated with temples and stuff in Japan, although I found the palace quite beautiful and it captured my imagination quite a bit, there was little to amaze me besides the absolute audacity of the circumstances of the construction. For one, I have a hard time seeing how this largish structure was able to bankrupt an entire state, let alone one as freaking huge as China. Secondly, if indeed that was going to be the case, I kind of feel Cixi was behaving reprehensibly given the circumstances. It's my understanding that most Chinese agree with me and view her in somewhat of a bad light. Anyway, that's dictators for you. Solomon was a bit of a spend thrift too.

So after walking around the palace for the afternoon, we haggled ourselves a minivan ride back to Tiannamen Square. This was a ride from hell. The driver was driving exactly like those sporty cars you see driven by careless youth on the 401, zipping in and out of traffic by margins too close for comfort, honking all the while. None of our Chinese was good enough to ask him to slow down and a miming effort would have probably further endangered us. It's funny how once you commit to something like that you just have to trust the person. I got a haircut after I got back to the hostel and they buzzed my hair as I'd asked and then pulled out a straight razor and before I knew what was happening they were shaving the back of my neck. Shouting bao shir would probably have ended me up with a big gash in my neck, so I just had to make a fast decision to trust her. Scarry though. Why couldn't she just have buzzed my neck hairs. I'm alright with having my hair moving down my back... At least it's going somewhere rather than just making a full exodus.

So trusting people you don't know you can trust seems to be a very strong part of travelling. Maybe it's just more apparent when you can't talk to anyone in an indepth fashion, but it seems like when you're in a society where you are functional, you don't have to be as trusting to get by. It may be just that you know the conventions though. I couldn't say for sure. Something for a lengthly tangent I think... another time, when it doesn't cost me money and I'm not in a computer room open to the elements.

Anyway, I finished today off with a good meal at a restaurant serving dishes from all four schools of Chinese cuisine. It was pretty damned tasty and a whole lot cheaper than the duck and all it's bits. Man, it still makes me cring a bit. If you go for duck, just get the duck. After the meal, back at the hostel, I settled in for a conversation with a bunch of the German guys staying here. They all switched their conversations into English so I could be part of it and their English was pretty much as versitile as their German. I must resolve to aquire fluency in these languages I have studied. I got to use my francais a bit, as the Israeli guy in the conversation, who was fluent in German, English, Hebrew and French, (and probably another few just thrown in for good measure) was trying to work on his French a bit. It turned out that my French has not fallen quite as far as I'd feared. Maybe it's just that most of the French folks I've run into so far have just been irritated by my attempt and subsequent butchering of their fair tongue. Dunno. Regardless, I think I'm going to sign up for a distance ed French course and one for German too. I may stop drinking a fair bit to accomodate these goals... I wonder how that will work if I'm learning Japanese too... and then what about Chinese? I have another entry visa that I have to use by June 23rd of 2005... Ah the possibilities... I think I'll go to Kunming next time.
Ok, I'm going to sign off. My fingers are not responding quite as quickly as they should and I think it's because they're naked in sub-zero temperatures and have been for the past hour... Right, off to bed.

Beijing, everything old is new again.

2004-12-25T13:30:00.000+09:00

Qianmen, the north tower of the Archer's Gate which used to be the southern gate in a now absent wall that encircled the inner city. Silly communists...

So Beijing is indeed cold! I got in this morning after an overnight train trip in a soft-sleeper car. It was super! I've got to say, that was one of the most comfortable 1500 km I've ever travelled. I'll get to the trip and where I am now, on Christmas day in the Beijing Far East International Youth Hostel in something of a developing chronology... So, I last posted on my first evening in Shanghai. The 23rd worked out to be a bit of a disordered day. It was very interesting, just not what I'd intended to do. I set out that morning, with a breakfast of fried rice looking out onto a thoroughfare choked with bicycles and scooters of every shape and size racing and honking and almost hitting each other time and again. Walking along the European architecture lined streets into some of the older parts of town turned into quite an adventure. I wandered and met a Chinese guy on his way to work. He spoke English quite well and we talked about how the city was changing. I left him at his bus stop and set off into the old town area where, apparently, most of the small machine shops are. I passed guys cutting 6 inch steel bar on the street with no protection for them or anyone walking by. They were just there, in the middle of my path, cutting steel, sharpening or grinding things all the while women, children, dogs and all kinds of guys were walking by. The sidewalk was about a metre and a half wide at that point, so it wasn't as if there was a lot of room... I found myself worrying my pants would go up as I passed him, by mere inches, having my boots showered with sparks.

From that neck of the woods I got deeper into craziness and danger. I wonder how they don't die more often from construction and industrial accidents. I accidentally stumbled into a construction site while trying to make my way along a 6 lane road when the sidewalk just ran out into a construction site. There was a giant front end loader with two and a half metre wheels heading for me with a load full of bricks. Kinda scary. I caught a taxi to try to get to the train station and that was again scary, although more for the people the dude almost hit... I was empathizing with them... my first mistake.

Anyway, the guy dropped me off at the north side of the Shanghai rail station. This was an all Chinese place. There were third world style warrens with peeps putting together all kinds of stustainance, that I mournfully declined. I keep finding myself wanting to engage, but the gluten and the general risk of three days of daihorea (sp?) keep me at a distance. I also felt a little weird walking through there with my pack, my warm leather boots, gortex jacket and big, functional backpack and generally well padded wallet. Not sure if I felt it was an affront, but I definately felt the difference my opportunities had made.

So following a long walk around the train station that involved ultra-modern, maybe even post-ultra-modern architectural phaluses of glass and steel juxtaposed between warrens of two century old, poorly treated poverty stricken craziness, populated by throngs of Shanghai's unwashed, disadvantaged cooking, smoking, sitting, talking, spitting, haulking, watching people go by, fixing bicycles and the like.

Profoundly telling.

After all that, I managed to buy a softsleeper ticket for Christmas Eve. I then took a metro to People's Square and checked out the Shanghai Museum for about five hours. Lots of pottery, jade, caligraphy and painting. Yep. Pretty neat. Lots of foreigners. Tea for 30 RMB. (my hostel bed was 60).

After that I went back to the Captain's Hostel and got another night. I went upstairs to relieve my headache with a nap, had a conversation with a couple of guys speaking Putonghua, one of whom turned out to be Japanese named Yoshimura. The other guy was from Huangzhou and had adopted the English name Johnson. We later went for Uyghur kebabs next to a construction site and followed it up with a bit of wok fried stuff in a place with a lot of cats hanging around chasing things. I though, if there are cats, there won't be rats... I was a little leary as I'd seen a rat in a place that afternoon and was really wishing I'd seen it before I'd eaten in the place. So, the place with the cats was a comfort. Pollished the evening off with a few beers, and a chat with an American woman named Katie, who turns out to be an English teacher in Yamaguchi, near Ube-shi. We arranged to hit up the French Concession the following day. Midnight, I turned in.

The following morning, after a super sleep, I hit up a green beans with garlic and fried rice breakie and hit the road with Katie, catching the subway down to the absolutely marvelous French Concession. I have to say, that place was the highlight of Shanghai for me. I could definately have tolerated living there. There were Plain Trees lining all of the streets and the architecture was cared for, not just used up. We got ourselves a couple of hour long foot massages. It was possibly the nices thing my feet have ever felt. Afterward, I stuffed the poor things back into my big leather boots and shouldered my fourty pound pack, heading back out onto the street to find some of the famous grub in the area. We ate at a place called Yang's Kitchen. It was super! Absolutely unrivaled in my stay here so far. After that, we tried our hand at the metro to get up to the train station. After two jam packed trains had come and gone, we decided that a cab was going to be our best bet. We hired one and he took us on a winding route to where we assumed the Jade Buddha was. Katie, being a perhaps a little more realistic, worldly or cynical, (I'll opt for the first) figured he was paid to drop off foreigners in a giant commercial miasma. He left us two km from our destination with only 2.5 hours to go on the clock before I had to catch my train. We hoofed it and made the distance in half an hour despite the traffic. Jade Buddha. Awesome. Jade Buddha temple. Wonderful. Jade Buddha temple's throng of beggars. Amazingly persistant. Like two blocks persistant. Even after you finally give up and hand them a bill that should feed them for the day, they keep coming after you, grabbing at you and stuff. It's only when the police come by that they give up. You can run, but they're like the mummy, shuffling after you... creepy.

Anyway, the overnight trip to Beijing was spent in company of three Putonghua speakers learning a bit more about the language. I ended up having a good conversation with a guy who happened by and heard my English who had studied in Nottingham. Interesting, this travelling thing... Anyway, that's about where my hour of internet time leave me. More later. Back into the cold to face the haulkers and spitters...

Shanghai

2004-12-22T23:06:00.000+09:00

So, I left Matsue at 10:30 last night on the overnight to Osaka. I arrived early this morning at Umeda and promptly caught the on-time limo bus to KIX. That airport is hugely neat. It's like a big tent, complete with sweeps of something that looks from the ground like fabric, arcing across the width of the vaulting ceiling. The flight was uneventful although at the Japan end the order of the airplane announcements was Japanese, English, Mandarin in contrast to the Mandarin, English, Japanese at the Shanghai end. I was pretty excited about just being in China for the first time, so I didn't even realize I was probably the only native English speaker on the plane. I've never been the sole white dude on a plane before. It was... interesting.

Anyway, it rained all day in Shanghai. I mean all day. It's cold, although not as cold as it should be for this time of year, so the wet is that much more difficult to deal with. It makes sight seeing a little difficult, but I managed a bit of interesting looking around by walking with some students through some mazes of back alleys and other people's buildings in this weird, public-private seemingly boundaryless warren of a city block. There were plants growing where you wouldn't expect them, laundry hung all over the place, despite the rain and people watching TV and smoking in what appeared to be actual residences half sectioned off from the places we were walking through that acted as garages for bikes, storage areas for mounds of stuff and hallways between people's more private places, like the plastic walled little rooms full of smoking men watching television. Very strange, very sureal, very much a throwing out of all my ideas about living spaces, utility spaces, public and private spaces and more generally boundaries like inside and outside. Wildly weird.

So I managed to find this place called the Captain's Hostel after about an hour of looking around in alleys and stuff. Turns out it was on a main street, so it would have been a breeze to find if I wasn't expecting it to be difficult. I was propositioned by four women in a little skilled massagi team at one point. They beckoned me across the alley and me, being still a little naive went over to see what they wanted. The weren't dressed very provocatively and there was an aquarium full of fish in their window, so I thought they were probably trying to get me to come in and eat. I figured I'd see what was on the menu. Well, a quick demonstration of the technique of massagi applied to my upper arm and I understood a little better what was on offer, being fairly certain at that point that it wasn't going to be black mushroom with garlic flavour and young corn. The one woman who grabbed my arm was being assertive and saying massagi and then sticking her tongue out like she was licking something... at that point I figured it was time to go. It was more difficult to leave graciously than I would have liked as four attractive women trying pretty persistantly to pull you into their shop is a little... well, lets just say it makes you wish you didn't have morals or a brain.
I found the hostel, and it's description as Art Deco is quite apt. at 60 RMB a night in the dorm, it's a bargain in comparison to the rest of the places in town. There's an Aussie, a Japanese guy, an American and a Chinese kid who doesn't speak or doesn't like to speak any English, French or Japanese. Conversations have been pretty good. I had dinner with a middle aged Taiwanese woman doing some backpacking on her own and she had some pretty interesting stories to tell. She'd lived in the US in Minnesota, New York (city and state), Canada, Brazil. Pretty interesting dinner conversation over some flaming hot beef, some garlicky beans and a nice fish soup. After that I went for a walk on the Bund and took some neat shots of the colonial facade and it's upstart counterpart across the river. Impressive and gaudy. People keep trying to hauk me pictures, umbrellas etc... it's kind of annoying, but I haggled with this one woman for an umbrella using fingers. I whittled her down until I saw pain in her eyes and then coughed up a little extra... ;o) I'm only kidding, there was no pain asside from her embarassment over the umbrella not actually opening.
Anyway, I find myself here at the end of the day, paying far too much for internet access and an espresso. I'm turing in soon and will hit up the Shanghai Museum tomorrow before I try to catch myself an overnight train to Beijing. Anon!

Shanghai: one of the many old alleys from which the spires of modernity erupt...

Who's Bad With Addies?

2004-12-21T18:04:00.000+09:00

Many have asked and I half the time forget to send it when I get home and remember the nitty gritty, so in the interests of continued contact with my cared-for-ones I give you:

Colin's Address in Japan

Colin Walke
#303 Maison Century
509-6 Kuroda-cho
Matsue-shi, Shimane-ken
690-0876

My home number is 81 (Japan's country code) 0852 22-1560 however, this phone is wretched. I have a sneaking suspicion that my dad is right and Japan has signed some kind of "Anti-Landline Treaty"
My cell number is 81 08052320191
However, if you just want to get ahold of me post haste, sending me a phone email at colinwalke @ ezweb.ne.jp will be just as speedy and much less expensive.

I'm off!

2004-12-21T17:27:00.000+09:00

Here goes nothing! I just finished the last of 34 rounds of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer with my last class of the year. I bade everyone good-bye and took my leave of the school. I promised Kawaoka Sensei a panda. ;o) Everyone else just wanted some good stories when I get back. So all travel arrangements are in place save my train ticket from Shanghai to Beijing that I'll procure when I reach Shanghai tomorrow at noon. It's supposed to be overcast and rainy while hovering somewhere between a balmy 12 and 2 degrees. I was only able to find the temp in Farenheit, so my conversion may be a little wonky. Anyhoo. I'm planning on packing (yes, I told you I'd be packing last minute) three days worth of clothing and buying a bunch while there. I've been told the shopping is superb there. Who'd have thought you'd ever hear me say or write anything remotely like that except in jest!?! I'm thinking silk long underwear, not fashion. Either way, I'm not going to need that much stuff. I can go on three or four days of stuff in alternating shifts. Realistically, I should be able to do this kind of a trip with my 40L bag. I removed the CBC patch as I thought if China blocks the BBC site, they're sure to take an interest in such an unbiased source as the CBC, which would be troublesome. Oddly enough, I'm also leaving my knife at home. I'm going to have my pack as a carry on so I don't have to muck about in the airports. I've just confirmed that I'll be able to recharge my camera whilst I'm there, so that's coming along too.
So, I'll be taking a camera, my ipod, my LP guide one pair of rugged pants, my boots (obviously), my MEC shell and fleece, four pairs of socks, the usual compliment of underwear, a couple pairs of long underwear, four undershirts a longsleeve jobbie, of course my touque, my gloves and a collared oxford shirt that can't help but look good even 5 years post purchase. The whole lot of it that I'll be carrying will be only twice as heavy as the two litre water bottle I'm planning on having on hand. (can't drink the tap water in China). It's possibly the lightest I've ever packed. It's less than I took to Kyoto for four days.

I really can't believe I'm leaving! It's almost as surreal as leaving Canada for Japan loe those many months ago. Of course I'm planning on coming back to Japan within two weeks, so it's realistically not a big deal. I mean, people go to Mexico for two weeks on sun-seeking holidays. The difference here I guess, is that I'm basically going alone and I'm going for the unexpected and alien. I'm not going for comfort. I'm going for the challenge of managing to travel 1500km from one major communistish, alien metropolis to another in a country where I know how to say two things and some city names. That and to watch people doing Tai Chi in the square in the snow. I'm sure all the museums and such will be pretty interesting, but it's mostly about the old people doing Tai Chi in the snow and the explode fried sea bass with garlic flavour. In Beijing, of course, it will be Beijing Duck, but I'll cross that road when I come to it... ;o)

I think the most uncomfortable part of the ride will be the bus to Osaka overnight tonight. I'm really not looking forward to it. As much as I think busses are the responsible choice, barring rail, I don't like the current set-ups. I've done many an overnight trip on a bus and I can honestly say that it's tolerable. Not comfy, but it beats driving and environmentally, it beats flying. Of course I'll be flying to China... I could have taken a ship, but that would have taken two and a half days to get to Shanghai. The next time I go to China, assuming of course that I want to go back, I'll arrange to take the ship. Anyway, it's bus, jet, train. I hope I get to see Planes, Trains and Automobiles at some point on this trip. Not really, the movie just popped into my head as a laterally connected tidbit I recall from when the movie came out and was showing at the movie theatre in Kincardine some 15 or 18 years ago... Weird. Anyway. I should pack, as I need to be on the bus in under four hours now and I'm sure something will pop up that will distract me just enough to create crisis.

I'll be writing from the People's Republic if I'm able...

Tickets and visas and complexity oh my!!

2004-12-17T01:07:00.000+09:00

Hoo hoo! I just talked to my travel agent last night and she has both recieved confirmation that China has granted me a double entry visa and that she's ordered me my return plane ticket. Wednesday next week I'll be in Shanghai!

This makes me think I should pack. I probably won't pack until Tuesday evening before I leave for Osaka though. I'm just like that. Why would I spend boring time packing when there're Christmas parties to go to, Christmas cards to write? No, it will be Tuesday evening, almost time to race for the bus and I'll be worrying about getting everything together.

I've got to start planning a decent framework for this trip too. It's all well and good to have one's days fly by the seat of their pants, but quite another to have nowhere to retreat to in the evening. Stressful, I believe is the appropriate term.

I haven't felt too stressed in a while, but somehow traveling brings it out in me. I think it's rather odd that although I find traveling stressful, I find myself wanting to do it more. It's as if I'm employing methods of resistance training to my mind. Push it hard, but not hard enough to tip it over the brink, just hard enough to elicite a strengthening response. Can that make one mentally and emotionally tougher though? I think I sometimes appear worldy and rugged to people who meet me and rather than getting to know the soft, crab-like interior, they look at the places I've been and the situations I purposefully put myself into and say, that dude's a rugged man. Quite possibly the beard and buzz-cut as well as the fact that I always carry my knife and wear hiking boots with my suit has something to do with it. Meh, whatever. I'm a softy and I'm by no means inclined to take risks. I hate risk, but risk breeds diversity, in whatever forms it's inclined to. Ecologies develop because creatures take risks based on their predispositions. Sometimes they work and that reinforces difference. Sometimes they don't and the things perish under what would usually be considered wretched circumstances. I think the same is somewhat true with individual's lives and cultures. Although properly speaking, there isn't the same kind of Darwinian melodrama in human circumstance. I'm no Social Darwinist, humans are stupidly adaptable creatures and they'll do whatever they need to to get by. If that means joining some esoteric cult in the backwoods of the midwest or mideast, they do that. If it means speaking American English rather than some form of British English or Mandarin, they'll do that. There's nothing inheritable about culture beyond one's exposure to it.
Whatever we're inclined to do, largely because of our lifespans, is almost entirely personal. What we seem to be responsible for, however, is our own moral, emotional and mental growth, which is, I think, why I choose to travel and inflict difference upon myself. It makes me more me, as it enables me to mould myself into the kind of views I have about diversity and life.
I think that is an important point. I view diversity as strength. I view difference as vital and complexity as beautiful. Having been initially drawn into world spanning ideas about complexity and interconnected destiny by the mythic appeal of the way the Gaia hypothesis is often portrayed, I've dug a little deeper and gone to the less new-age-fruity roots of Lovelock's ideas. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin the Jesuit scientist and teacher had a host of interesting ideas regarding complexity as moving towards an omega point where we would be able to know God. His ideas weren't based on hokey bible fact mining but on rigorous empiracly based hypothesizing. Others who looked at natural history and scientifically derived evidence evolved a similar idea about complexity being the overall evolutionary trend with consequences for consciousness being that it seems to increase as complexity does. All questions about whether that means rocks are at least somewhat conscious aside, it points towards a much richer implied destiny for human kind and society. I happen to like that approach. As much as I think everything that people do is actually as natural as ants building giant warrens or orangutangs building nests for the night, I do think there is some manner of guidance involved now. We get more complex and things become further revealed. I don't think people in the modern age are expecially more or less conscious than people of any historical age, but our complexity and maybe our consciousness seems to be 'increasing'. Anyway, it appears to be very late and I'm pretty foggy inside my head right now... I'll leave all those thoughts on the table, not bothering to tidy in any way, just like in real life.

Cold mornings, morning colds

2004-12-16T02:52:00.000+09:00

I woke up this morning, to find the world outside of my little envelope of comfort to be super cold. I think there was frost last night, but I didn’t look outside early enough to tell dew from frost. It was cold though, and with the gaps in my windows I was feeling it. Sometimes I feel like my life in Japan is one big camping trip complete with a base camp and everything. The elements and I are simply in a closer relationship. We get to know each other intimately. The cold gets into my bones and during the summer, the heat found every pore my skin has, some it never knew about, and had each of them gushing sweat. Frankly I’m surprised the Japanese live as long as they do, given the actual physical stress of living in this poorly engineered amalgam of build and natural environments. One would think that insulation, in the minds of a culture that by all rights ought to be material-efficiency oriented, would be high on people’s list of technologies to ensure were widely utilized. I dunno, but maybe people feel that somehow by ensuring their buildings are limited to uncomfortable environments they find more pleasure in those little comforts. Then again, maybe it just gives them a peculiar sense of superiority. Given some of the literature I’ve been perusing of late, the latter wouldn’t surprise me, even if it maintained their manners, generosity and kindness. However, given what I know of the several dozen Japanese people I know, I’m inclined to think it the former likelihood.

Anyway, I’ve started eating Japanese breakfasts. I cook rice, miso soup, sometimes some eggs with a little sake and onions and coffee. There’s often a fair bit of seaweed and sesame involved in that arrangement as well as on occasion, some Japanese pickles, or tsukemono (漬け物). 漬け物 are delightful in small quantities and unbearable in large portions.

Ok, the coffee isn’t typically Japanese, but they’ve got inclinations towards the comforts it affords just as the rest of the world seems to have. The coffee is not always good in the various establishments that offer it, and I refer mainly, here to places where it’s an after-thought or actually from a vending machine (mmm… thick, syrupy, sour badness). The coffees in coffee shops here are actually quite nice, but they should be! I’ll put it in terms of sustenance. I can eat for a day, or I can buy a coffee with virtually the same number of yen. Sometimes I go for the coffee, though this doesn’t actually mean I don’t eat, it just means that I don’t eat out and that my day gets a little more expensive. That’s ok every once and a while, but mostly I make my coffee at home, where it only costs me the use of my stove and something like 200 - 600 yen per 100 grams of coffee, depending on whether I want it to taste like used tanning fluids or a nice, soul-soothing, full bodied bitter fluid worthy of the name coffee. Although I cut corners with money, like not heating my house, hanging my laundry to dry and cycling 12 kilometers into the countryside to find cheaper, locally grown produce, I don’t cut corners with coffee.

On my walk to school this morning, through my still gummy eyes, I watched the local pair of white something or other swans paddle under the bridge I had to cross, looking very serene against the reeds and grasses of the canal bank, despite the scores of people and vehicles bustling along the road bridging the canal beside the baseball diamond. It was kind of a surreal picture, as I’ve discovered most biological encounters are in Japan. It’s definitely a magical place, and the concrete only serves to make it all the more surreal.

At school, I joined the other 70 or so teachers in the teachers room for the morning meeting, which is for me, really just a Japanese listening exercise that I get paid to participate in. Still, it makes me feel and seem like part of the team, and that’s important. It’s probably more important for seeming like part of the team than drinking everybody under the table at enkais. Anyway, many of them shouldn’t have been there. There were very obvious fevers, remarkable pulmonary-sinus drainages and some very clear general malaise occurrences there in that room. It make me wonder about the social responsibility of quarantining oneself upon the onset of illness. Evidently the Japanese, at least when it comes to non-life-threatening illness, feel that a “ganbatte kudasai” is more appropriate than “go home before you make everyone else sick, you coughing, spluttering, shambling vector. And, oh, by the way, if you were able to avoid sneezing your goo on the keyboard that everyone in this office has to use, we’d think the world of you”. Today, my supervisor has a high fever, and she’s at school. While she’s super, a trooper and I esteem her greatly, the poor woman looks like she’s on the verge of tears. I wish I could convince her that being at home drinking soup and hot herbal tea all day would be better for her than wandering around a cold, drafty and frankly unsanitary place like this school. Anyway, I'll keep washing my hands and touching as few things here as possible, but as a backup, I think when I get home, I’m going to gargle with vodka and eat a bulb of garlic. Ganbatte kudasai!

Huzzah! Exams are Done! Right, Back to Work You Lazy Good-for-nothings!

2004-12-09T06:00:00.000+09:00

So these poor students just finished a gruelling set of exams stretched over four days and cruelly including a Saturday. I felt the cruelty myself as I crawled out of bed to answer my keitai at quarter to 9 only to have my supervisor ask me without a hint of irritation, frustration or anything nasty if I could come to school soon because there was work for me. I guess working all those essentially unpaid over-time hours "for the children" pay off in that I don't get crucified for sleeping in accidentally. Nice. I had expected something else, but this place continues to surprise me.

All the first and second years are outside playing soccer or badminton depending on the genitals they happened to grow some 17 or 18 years prior. There's no grass here, so they played in the sandy mud. Pretty cool really. You can tell people were really working at it when they walk past, covered in yellow grey sand-mud up to their eye-brows. Youth is something to be treasured here as the third and fourth years had no break, they just went straight back into classes today. Poor buggers. Me, I just have to mark 368 written exams. Much of this will have to be done outside of work hours in order to get the exams back to the students before Christmas. Fortunately I still have a fair bit of scotch left and sitting at my kotatsu watching NHK and marking into the wee hours carries some strange appeal for me. Who want's to meet up with friends or go to sleep when you could do that?!!?

Anyhoo, the sun is shining, the leaves have turned some very pleasant colours and I'm really enjoying my walks now that I don't get drenched in sweat. As a matter of fact, I find it pretty difficult to get out of bed in the morning now because my apartment is essentially open to the elements and there is now the occasional frost to contend with. Luckily I have a REALLY big duvet. I like to pronounce that "dove-ette". Others disagree. Apparently though, it's not really a matter of tomato, tomato, but more along the lines of facade and fakade. Still, with people teasing me about the way I say my 'ou' combos, I've taken to grabbing people by the nose when they tell me that's not how ya says it.

This picture is of the short-cut up the hill I climb to school every morning. I've got to say, Japan likes it's stairs. This may be yet another reason they don't tend to die of heart disease so early.

Finally!

2004-11-29T04:04:00.000+09:00

Well, I finally sat down and made it. The blog is here. Hopefully I'll be a little more dilligent about posting than I am about doing other things... like sleeping or eating. ANyway, on to something interesting... maybe.

I'm now living in Japan. I've been here for four months and have been variously confused, frustrated, awed, disgusted, puzzled, interested, fascinated and virtually any state you can think of besides those ranging into the deathly ill, dead or crimial states. Today, I am anxious, frustrated, lonely and mildly disaffected.

Yesterday, I went to an American Thanks Giving feast. I had intended to help, but my perenial propensity to find other things to do in an intermitently unconscious way leading time to disappear at an alarming and untraceable rate led me to show a mere two hours before D-hour. I moved tables, carried plates and generally conversed with the people already working at creating a feast for 120 people. However, I was feeling that kind of feeling you get when you haven't really had any good community time. I was surrounded by people, but none of them had known me for any longer than four months, and most of them not even that. They had no idea who I really was, because as I sorted out on a walk I took as an escape from that bustle, they were never fully clear, open and honest with me, nor I with them.

The JET programme seems to demand of people that they be relentlessly chipper and outgoing, while at the same time, inciting the most severe of alienated, lonely and lost feelings. People seem to rise to the challenge with gusto, but there's always something going on, people keeping busy, and there's usually a lot of alcohol involved. Not that that isn't pleasant, but it affords limited opportunities to spill your guts to people.

Spilling one's guts, it seems, is often exactly what one needs to feel safe and real again. In reflecting upon my troubled state of mind, I determined, for the third time since coming here, that "indeed, leaving everything you love and care about to go to a place that is filled with things for which you have a subtly deceiving average interest" is hugely difficult. I am adapting, but I miss home a whole lot. I miss the people, the landscape, the language, even the silly politics. I miss my community. I miss Waterloo and my old haunts and companions. I needed to be able to tell someone that yesterday and have them care, but everyone is so close to crying or is so done with that state that you just can't open up. So, we get drunk instead. I know from my donning days that this is indeed a healthy way to deal with issues. No problem is so difficult that a few stiff whiterussians can't help with the perspective... which leads me to this link...

http://www.asahi.com/english/nation/TKY200406180160.html

Anyway, I managed to get through the evening with my pride and reputation intact. However, I've resolved to start paying more attention to the close friends I've developed over the years, and send them all post cards and cards at Christmas.