indeed! it was exactly like that!

like a wizened bit of naan indeed! the topography of you face is quite extraordinary!

sorry for the delay in blogging. there always seems to be something going on that keeps me busy. so, a lot of stuff has happened but not much has changed. im still in asakusa after a brief frolic in Yokohama for a couple of weeks. its my favorite area by far, so i thought i might as well stick around. the weather is improving, most days are sunny and pleasant. whenever anyone talks about the weather here the conversation always drifts to the topic of the fabled “Japanese summer”, which i have been reliably informed is so hot that people regularly crawl into furnaces to cool down, and the humidity is in such high volumes that people have been known to drown while out on light strolls. when i explain that i have yet to experience this and that it will probably be fine, there is much consternation. they suck in their breath and regard me with both horror and pity. bring it on i say! i could do with a bit of sunshine. speaking of the unpleasantness of nature, there is some suggestion that japan is bracing itself for the big one. by that i mean a rather nasty earthquake. the other day i was idly trying to watch the latest episode of house at the hostel around 11ish when a rather sprightly earthquake weighing in at about 6.8 on the scale of hellishness proceeded to ripple through Tokyo. the other guests and i just stared at each other as the whole room began to buck to and fro with wild abandon. after it subsided some minutes later i noticed some laughter coming from outside. investigating i found Bailey, an Australian friend, had legged it out of his room and into the street so fast that he had neglected to put on any cloths. he was currently sporting a tiny tea towel. amidst gafaws it suddenly occurred to me that earthquakes are in fact potentially dangerous and i had no idea what i was supposed to do in the event of a nasty one. a few days later china is hit. mildly concerning.

my suit situation is has come to a grating resolution. its smells and i try and stop it smelling. hanging it up outside seems to be the best way. the smell disappears, but only to return a day later. i honestly don’t understand it.

today was rather interesting. a few days ago i went to a Thai festival in harajuku with some guys from the hostel. it was fantastic. many pleasent memories returned with the smells of Thai food wafting from the many stalls. after scrumming down a bowl of curry we relaxed at a table drinking Chang beer and watching the fairly dreadful band up on the main stage. some chap aproaches us rather diffidently. he tries to talk to me and a American guy called Kyle. he quickly gives up as his English is not the best and talks to our Japanese companion asuka. he wants us to model for him, she says. really?, we say, somewhat sceptical. the chap brandishes a small case, i assume cigarettes and start shaking my head, but it flips open and inside are business cards. rollingstone, he says. we must have looked confused. rollingstone japan! this seemed unlikely and a bit dodgy to me. i peer at the card, it did indeed sport something that looked like the rolling stone logo as far as i recalled it. how much? we asked. 10000 yen (50 quid) asuka translated. Sign us up! after we made sure it was not some wierd naked photo shoot he took our photos and bade us fairwell sayinghe would call monday. he called tuesday after we had begun to be convinced it was a load of rubbish. next sunday at 12. me and Kyle. at a station 20 mins away. all to the good. so today we went. it was good to go with some one just in case it was in fact a scam and things turned a bit dicey. we arrived at the station and promptly got lost looking for the building. eventually the guy came and found us. he took us to the studio. if you can imagine all of the cliched images ever of an artsy photo studio then you will have pictured something similar to this place. absolutely fantastic. the size of a small aircraft hanger, it was all industrial concrete with stylish chairs a chandelier or two and a young palm tree bristled from a plant pot. in the corner stood a babyfoot machine and the veranda looked out onto the river. i loved it and wished i lived there. as it turns out it is all going to be torn down soon. shame. the place contained about five startlingly fashionable types sauntering about and smoking on the veranda. there was also another western guy there, who apparently had done this sort of thing before. after greetings and wotnot and general faffing around a tall thin chap of somewhat feminine aspect beckoned me into a side room with a chair and a whole bunch of vanity mirrors. i was to have my hair done. this chap was clearly a master and a perfectionist. he toiled over me with hot crimping irons to achieve the perfect curl and wave to my hair. a good 45 minutes later i emerge, looking more like Aslan then anything else. my companions tried to hide their amusement. i am presented with a clingy teeshirt. i then walk about in front of the camera in a brooding manner. then i stand still in front of the camera and look like i am contemplating infinity. this done we take a break and its Kyle’s turn. he has to wear a teeshirt several sizes too small and a pair of simply appalling multicoloured shorts made from towels. this is insanely funny and its tricky to keep ones professional composure. as he has a close shaved head he is also given a beanie to wear. he looks exactly like a complete hippy-lite cretin. just like, i look like an angst ridden rock idiot. he has a shoot in which he has to look masculine. no smiling, says the photographers assistant as he envariably cracks up. i go again, this time wearing a teeshirt with some random numbers on it and some large sunglasses. now i have to look like an amazingly cool rocker who is also chilled and laidback. my stylist scampers over to rearrange my hair. i have no idea what i am doing. it seems ok though and its Kyle again. this time they are dissatisfied with his look. they try many pairs of glass. all hilarious. the stylist takes him into the sideroom. he has no hair to speak of, what could they be doing in there?, i remark to the other guy. Kyle reappears and something is different but i cant tell what. there is a look of confusion on his face. he points at the bridge of his nose. they gave me a uni-brow, he says horror in his voice. no way! i say. i see it, rather neatly done line of hair bridging his eyebrows. a bubble of gurgling laughter forms in my stomach and almost bursts free. i have to stare at the wall and think of other things for a while. things continue in a similar vain. i do another shoot and so does the other guy then someone comes in with a horde of sushi and we have lunch. delicious. we then get a crisp 10000 yen and head off. not bad for 2 hours of hanging around in front of a camera. i would have done it for free just for the interesting experience. dunno if our stuff will make it into the actual magazine. ill keep an eye out.
right im off. shall blog again at some point.

wasn’t sure if you would recieve photos from my phone. neat. ill send more and better ones

hail all.
cheers liv! this computer cant seem to compute the complexities of this new blog thing so ill do the captions later

interviews so far. i was going to do this once i had a job as it would be more amusing. but as i don’t have a job yet it is perhaps quite bleak.

so the first one was for a kids school, teaching children from 0 to 12. and when they said zero they aparently meant it. the chap interviewing me made it clear that if they could teach children in the womb english, then they would be doing it right now. i assured him that i could change a nappy and wotnot.

the interview went off to a bad start with him fixing me with intense look and stating “i am really interested in hearing about your experiences at this willow nursery”

it took me a moment before realization hit me and i had to explain that this was a plant nursery not in fact a childrens one. this seemed to depress him somewhat and put a bit of a damper on the rest of the proceedings. in fact i began to get the feeling that he was going through the motions after that. any way needless to say they didn’t get back to me with a time for my second interview.

next was one helpfully engineered by alex’s friend angie. it was once again for teaching english to kids (we had been told that this was where they jobs lay) but this one had a unique drama method of teaching. we met up with the chap who seemed somewhat like a walking cliche, intensely interested in the sound of his own voice, jabbering on endlessly about various aspects of the job until we were quite stupefied. then things took an unpleasant turn. with a cheery “lets step things up a bit!” he suggested we progressed to the next stage of the interview. (this was the first we had heard of any “next stage”) this involved us acting out a delightful bit of roleplay. where a bunch of people would come and we would all pretend to be 4 year olds and alex and i would take it in turns to teach us. this may well sound deeply unpleasant, and i can assure you it was. asked to recite and teach a childrens song (i have no recollection of learning any children songs) teaching words with aid of flash cards and carrying out imaginary conversations with fictional parents, we were a little nonplussed and perhaps concerned. summoning extreme mental strength we managed to pull of insane feats dispite the horrifying embarrassment of leaping around with other grown men pretending to be four years old and singing at the top of your lungs the “grand old duke of york” complete with full body gesture acomplyment. all in all i think we did a good job, or “well job” as our slightly perculier interviewers ensisted in saying continuously throughout. in fact they were a wierd bunch and im not sure i like them. its hard to like some one when they turn from grinning and chanting to deadly serious and talking about monetary gains in a fraction of a second. they came across as completely false and i would hate for my children to be a sent to a school with teachers who had masks of caring but inside where nothing but bleak machines. still that seems to be the “drama” way. everyone is playing a role mainly because there original personality is mildly unpleasant.
dispite warmly assuring us they would contact us in 3 days we never heard from them again.

next was gaba…which seemed to go alright. minor horror was that i needed a black suit. i had a black suit but for some unknown reason it smelled like someone had taken a leak on it. someone probably had at one of the balls i frequented at uni. any way i took it to a dry cleaners. they said it would be back at six. this was handy as my interview was the next day. hold on it was a quarter passed five now! how could they get it done in 45 minutes? needless to say i went back at 6.30 to find that they in fact had meant six tomorrow. alright, not too bad. my interview was in the evening. went back the next day and lo, they meant PM! and if it was alright by me the suit would be ready at 7pm. my interview was at 6pm! curses. deciding i would just have to wear my grey suit. went onto the internet to check what i needed to take with me. hmm somehow i confused the dates and the information seminar was yesterday. fail! felt a bit rubbish. decided to ring them up and the girl on the other end said i didnt need to worry just reschedule for then next seminar. jolly good. i did so. that day rolled around and i started to get ready. peeling open my freshly drycleaned suit that i had collected a few days ago i quickly realized there was a problem. it still smelled of yak pee. i stood there, incredulously sniffing my siut for many minutes trying to convince myself there was some sort of mistake. the mistake was that they had clearly not drycleaned my suit at all. they had spent 2 days not cleaning my suit! fiends! i had about five hours until the interview. drastic measures were needed. i alternatively sprayed it with deodorant and my crystal spray and hung it up out side. i took it down an hour later and the impossible had happened, it smelled worse. somehow the melange of chemical scent, crystal and pee had created something horrible. i took it inside and demanded alex smell it. he said it was fine but his sense of smell is somewhat suspect. still i began to suspect i was being paranoid so i slither into the fetid thing and headed off. it takes about 45 minutes to get from yokohama to tokyo where the interview was taking place. that is as long as you don’t get on the local train which takes about 2 hours. i didn’t know this. needles to say i was on the local train frothing at the gills as zero hour slowly aprouched. my suit was beginning to ripen in the heat of the train and it was making me physically sick. i was sweating profusely. i admitted to myself that i wasn’t in the best frame of mind for an interview. i got to the destination station dead on five. which was the time i was supposed to be at the interview. actually they preferred if you were there 15 minutes early. i charged out of the station and headed of at a sprint in entirely the wrong direction. 10 minutes later, peering at my poorly drawn map of the location of the recruitment place i began to suspect that i was quite lost. this really took the biscuit. the gods did not want me to get to this interview. i rang up again. i explained that due to circumstances entire beyond my control i was 15 minutes late and lost and would it be ok if i rescheduled? it was ok. huzah! i spent the next half hour finding the place and recording the location in my internal map.

i went home in a somewhat bleak mood. i didn’t know of any other dry cleaners. i contemplated buying a fresh suit. but the expense was an issue. deciding that there was no way i could make things any worse i decided to wash my suit by hand. it was only the jacket that smelled and only on one side. i gave it a stab and hung it up outside. i then promptly forgot about it and went off to yokoham for the evening. it began to rain. rain in japan is not some sort of half hearted drizzling affair, but full blown torrents of water jetting down from the sky. no umbrella and you may as well give up going outside for fear of drowning. this concerned me somewhat. i had tried to minimise what i had washed to keep the potential damage to a minimum. ahh well at least it will be clean now. came back to the hostel and had a look. not as bad as i suspected but pretty wet. i made the bold decision to leave it out over night and hope that it would be a nice day tomorrow. as it turned out it was. the winning combination of sunny and really windy. and outside a glistening fresh suit jacket. it was dry looked fine and smelled kinda alright. jolly good!

i went to the next interview date with only minor mishaps. chatted to some of the other people going for the job. most of them seemed to have been in japan for years. we were called in and told about the job. then we had to do a test of sorts. it was not too difficult. then the interview. this consisted of the chap peering at my passport and talking about good places to live in tokyo. then he slid over a date for the next interview. i met up with some of the other people afterwards and we went for a relaxing drink. the end to quite a stressful process.

i shall keep you updated with more tales of idiocy as they occur.

Some sort of sky scraper

hail all!

things are ticking along nicely here in nippon. recent developments suggest there could well be a job on the horizon, or at least a source of income while i look for a better job. anyway i have met some really nice people both western and japanese and had some exceedingly good times.

currently alex and i are living in a place three stops from yokohama called ishikuwacho. to describe this place as “a fetid hellhole, stinking of rotting fish and filled with the largest concentration of homeless people i have ever seen ” would be a bit of an understatement.

it is deeply rancid. strolling down the street is reminiscent of scenes from a zombie movie as hundreds of old men lurch about clutching cans of chu hi (korean alchohol mixed with lemon, the cheapest drink avalable) and “one cup” sake easthetically served in jam jars. the smell is not dissimilar to an open sewer and regulaly the stench of spoilt meat or fish will burst from an open window of doorway and send you reeling into the gutter, retching and gagging for air. our room is on the fifth floor of an apartment block. this is nice as the bottom three floors seem to have been annexed to the old men and appear uninhabitable to anything human. since we arrived the smell of the place has got steadily worse. before long i believe the fourth floor will have to go and then we will have to break out the shotguns and start nailing up the windows. occasionally we will see the local yakuza having meetings a few blocks from us and give them a cheery wave.

apart from the fact that we are living in the worse place in the world im have an excellent time. yokohama is really nice and exciting without being as garish as tokyo. i think i will try and go back to asakusa though. actually i have been trying to book a place there for some weeks now.

asakusa is quite touristy on one side of the river and on the other really calm and quiet. its a pleasent mix with the only downside the lack of parks.

once again i am on a computer with no means of shrinking my pictures, so i will put some up that i grabbed from facebook. you can go and look at them yourselves if you like but you will have to trawl through about 800 of me being drunk at karaoke.

me in the commen room of khoa san tokyo, moderatly happy

a jolly meal at a classy japanese resturant

delightfull lantern lit sukura (cherry blossom)

the shoe depository at koah san

me and some dudes heading of to sightsee in tokyo

might mail you some more that i cant resize

anyhoo shall blog later with some more news. i have an interview on the ninth so fingers crossed.

happy mothers day mama!