Accelerated Update
I don’t need cheering up; that was not a sad tale. I’m lean, I’m focused and I’m feeling alright – I’m comitted to enjoying these rare moments of healthy living while they last; I don’t delude myself into thinking that they’ll continue once I’m back h0me. When I first arrived here they gave me a friendly urinalysis and bloodtest, which surprised me both with my high cholestorol and pristine liver. The latter, of course, confirms that the Lord has sanctioned my way of life, but the former caught me off guard, and has led me to fully embrace this diet of rice and tea so that my heart doesn’t give out before I manage to get back to England and start wrecking myself again.
I’m going to quickly run through what happened between the fall of the last incarnation of the glog and the rise of this one. The previous glog was hosted on one of the company computors at Rob’s old place of employment in Hove, and when the company went under so too did this journal. The old entries, as well as some photographs that I’d like to put up here, are still safe on that machine (which is now under Rob’s bed), but I don’t think I’ll be getting my hands on them in the immediate future.
I spent a lot of my time getting to know the town. It ain’t too much bigger than Brighton but it merges into a much larger city on the Eastern edge. Cheap resteraunts are on every backstreet – people seem to be able to just open their houses up and cook for you in their living rooms. They put flags outside, covered in kanji that I can’t read, advertising what it is they do, but I just tend to wander insider and have a look. Most places only cook one kind of food, so they’ll be a dumpling resteraunt next to a ramen shop next to a yakiniku place. Korean barbeques are very popular – they’re generally very slightly more upmarket than the other cheap resteraunts because the require those grilles built into every table. I took some pictures last time I went.
Those are my friends from a gender studies module that I took. Gender studies at APU is rather an unsettling experience; there are students from such a huge number of countries that there are quite a lot of people that had never come across any of the ideas we’d been talking about, and worse, quite a few people that follow rather extreme paths of Sharia law. A lot of women were standing up and arguing against just about every feminist viewpoint, every suggestion of equality. In an university level discussion of gender, there were students that hadn’t heard of Freud.
It can be difficult to find to people to easily communucate with. Often with my friends from gender studies it took a lot of effort to converse. With the Japanese students it’s easier - they all speak a little English, I speak a little Japanese, and we can knuckle through between us – but with people from other East Asian countries broken English tends to be the primary medium and there is a definite limit on what can be communicated. Left to my own devices I don’t tend to seek people out, especially just for conversation, but if I do find myself making friends with somebody I like to be able to understand them a little deeper than I might through class-taught small talk.
Well, so it was that last semester the greater number of my companions were those that spoke better English than the majority here. That has upsides and downsides, of course. These friends were mostly American and Finnish; I think that the major difference between these guys and the Japanese was the culture of alcohol consumption. Especially the Finns. It takes maybe two beers to make most of Japanese friends lose their head, the Finns, on the other hand, just never stopped. Foul, raw vodka.
The final months of last semester were arctic. I’m further South than the rest of you here but I’m high up and the end the snow had built up pretty high. The night before I was supposed to get my coach to the airport the roads froze over on the mountain and all the buses stopped running. We’d arranged to go out to a sushi resteraunt before we all departed, and I took everything I could with me down to the city so that I could catch the train.
Excuse the Myspace style photo. I was trying to get everybody in but I mostly photographed my shaving cut.
Paper walled rooms. You get your own in any good sushi resteraunt. Expensive though. Classy stuff, anyhow. Then: back to England for February!
Leave a Reply