I’ve just returned from a five-day trip to the capital, where I wandered about with my trusty Nikon D90, poking my lens into all sorts of places, not just the usual touristy bits.
Now you too can enjoy the best eighty or so photographic renderings from this spring metropolitan outing by going to my website here.
Meanwhile, here are a couple of examples to tempt you:
How do you like to spend your weekends, dear readers? Personally speaking, I like nothing better than to writhe about on the floor, weak as a kitten, in a pool of my own effluent. But I’m getting ahead of myself here.
Let’s rewind back to last Friday to get things in their proper perspective. Now after work I find myself in the company of Williams Nerd the Elder and our banter comes around to the question of memory, and more pacifically, the lessening of it as one is dragged screaming towards dotage.
What better way, then, to see if us Old Uns still have it than by challenging each other to a staggering feat of memory the like of which would make proud the Homeric bards of the Pelopennessus or the brothers of the cold North chanting Kalevala against the long dark watch of the night. Thus it was that, both being fans of Roman history, we did challenge ourselves to commit to what little memory remains to us, the names and dates of the reigns of the first sixteen Emperors, and yes, you are right, there is far too much ‘of‘ in this sentence.
Nerva the Nose - Forgotten Roman Emperors No.32
Later that night I was to be found in the galley, chef’s hat upon my pate at a jaunty angle, mug of Mount Gay rum in one hand and a huge meat cleaver in the other, preparing the evening repast whilst trying to grapple with Galba, negotiate with Nerva, calculating my Caligula and marking down my Marcus Aurelius. Ae you serious? Tiberius?
Now all of these mental exercises got me a tad distracted, and it was at this juncture that two small items in your Humble Narrator‘s regimen were neglected, with, as it turned out, disastrous consequences. Pay attention, dear readers, and learn from this sad tale of culinary mishap, gastric mayhem and bacterial proliferation. For having chopped my chicken, I failed to wash my cleaver and turn my board before preparing my lettuce and tomatoes, and thusly are we come to a salad replete with fine specks of raw pullet.
Now, as you should know, uncooked chicken and the human intestine do not a happy couple make. When wed, they have a tendency to bring a pair of unwanted guests along on the honeymoon. The first of these made his appearance felt around 3am, when a speedy liquid release was required from the lower portals, if you get my drift. Bright and early next morning came Lady Projectile Vomit and her cheery attendants, insufferable stomach cramps and all-pervasive debilitating weakness. Huzzah!
Now, as I ran to the khazi crying tears of pain and wondering which end to put over the toilet bowl, I did at first think I had contracted the dreaded influenza, which would have been mightily ironic, since just the night before I had been waxing lyrical on the subject of the all-conquering Tamiflu jab I’d had to ward off the dread malady. But no, later eye-witness testimony to my kitchen gaffes and the relative short duration of the unpleasantness (3 days) confirm it as nothing less than a dose of the old salmonella.
Some salmonella, yesterday
Well, that put paid to the three day weekend, and also any attempts to begin learning the Romans. In fact, I completely forgot about it until mid-week. Now your Williams Nerd had been citing various fancy-schmancy methods for memorising things, but you know what? I had the names all down in an hour and could slot the dates in about twenty minutes later, et voila (or whatever that would be in Latin).
Now the modern trend in education no doubt eschews the learning by rote of lists of things, and I too was of the same opinion, but suddenly having this chronological framework internalised allows me to make sense of the whole period. Think of it this way: imagine you’re in Tokyo and you only ever use the subway. You become familiar with some of the locales where you emerge, but you can never get an appreciation of the layout of the whole city without actually walking it on the surface. See?
So there we are. Now go out and learn pi to twenty decimal places, but don’t let it distract you from the harsh microbiological realities of the kitchen.
Professor Pieface
I’m off to Osaka tomorrow.
Now I said to myself that this summer I would eschew my usual ‘week out of here.’ This is where I bugger off to either Tokyo or Osaka/Kyoto straight after classes finish at the end of July, for no real reason other than to escape the often claustrophobic feeling that the humid weather brings to Hiroshima‘s village-like ambience.
But not this year, I vowed. You see these last eighteen months have seen me shed wads of cash like…er…something that sheds something very often and in large amounts. So, in the interests of financial rectitude (more tea, vicar?) I vetoed my wanderlust and spent the last month skulking around various local shopping malls in search of free air-conditioning.
And yet now, here I am, about to thrust a few socks into a haversack and hit the road for Osaka. Why? Ironically because of money!
It’s a long story, for which a future post has already been composed, but the bottom line is, I have to haul my bottom to the British Consulate, there to have my visage compared to my visa by the governor-general-consulmeister resplendant in his tropical suit and pith helmet. Once gold has crossed his palm, a parchment of authenticity will be issued which will enable me to unlock a treasure chest of dubloons a gang of pirates in the Channel Islands have been ‘looking after’ for me.
I told you it was a long story.
Well, and so it seemed daft to go all the way to Osaka just to spend a few minutes inside the sandbagged compound of the British Consulate and then bugger off straight home, so I decided to spend a couple of nights there, to sample once more the cultural delights of the Kansai region such as the Apple Store in Shinsaibashi.
As luck would have, my fellow Hiroshima rogues the notorious Williams brothers will also be in town, so what better than to hang around with my old pals, get irritated by their unreasonable behaviour, shout at them and then go and do my own thing?
…but aeroplanes crash - thus sang Wiltshire punks The Subhumans in the early 80’s, so here I am to remedy the enormous gap since my last post by telling you right here, right now, about how I chucked a few things into a bag and decided to eschew aviation by taking the train to Tokyo on August 5th, there to reside a week in opulent splendour at the fine Chisun Akasaka Grand in, er, Akasaka, swish dipomat-type area of the Big Sweat (my own invented name for summertime Tokyo).
Well, I stumbled round the usual places, hopping from one Starbucks to the next, meeting the occasional glamouous and well-heeled doctor’s wife, and generally enjoying the switch from hicksville village rubbernecking (Hiroshima) to cosmopolitan megalopolis laissez-faire (Tokyo). Teenage skanks in Shibuya, Armani-clad executives in Ginza, and smelly homeless old ladies in Ikebukuro, a varied human palette in which I could immerse myself and enjoy the liberating feeling of knowing that no bugger knows me. Ah…bliss!
However, the trip had a serious intent other than endless Caramel Macchiatos and eyeing up trendy Tokyo totty - I was in search of the elusive Rickenbacker 4003, a handmade bass guitar of unusual tone whose rarity is legendary. Several years ago there were some to be found on these shores, but I never had the enormous wad of cash ready to make a purchase. In recent years these fabled instruments have vanished, with two year waiting lists the norm, and some stores not even taking orders for them anymore.
However, being an optimistic fellow, I scoured the many musical emporiums of Tokyo in the faint hope that ‘something might turn up.’ From Shinjuku basements to the myriad establishments of Ochanomizu I systematically went through every store, each time leaving disappointed, until I reached the final outlet, a run-down shoddy shack in a back alley. Cautiously peering in, I was bid welcome by a Yoda-lookalike, who showed me his wares: medieval lutes, shimmering bongos and a plethora of squirming bagpipes. I was just about to beat a hasty retreat when suddenly out of the corner of my eye I glimpsed something shiny, something bright, something silken, luring me siren-like to the great upending of the purse that I knew was now imminent. For there it was, held aloft by pure art, a brand-spanking new Rickenbacker 4003 in rare blueburst finish!
A bargain at $2000, make no mistake, and what with the little Marshall MB30 amp I bought, she do be singing sweetly, just like what you can hear on those old Jam records….yeah!
So there we have it, or rather, so there I have it, the bass guitar that I’ve been after for 27 years, ever since my bandmate of yore in my fledgling musical ensemble bought a Japanese copy called a Hondo II back in 1980, and me was mucho jealous…
Having thus fulfilled one long-standing quest makes the enormous drag of having to return to shitehole yokel Hiroshima slightly easier to bear…
Just nailed up 35 exciting pictures of my recent trip to Tokyo to the website: hit the Photo button on the menu to your left, and voila!
Meanwhile, here’s a sample to whet your visual appetite:
The drums are beating in the distance and the little park just down the road from me has been miraculously transformed into some sort of ethnic happening which I suppose is connected to the Obon holiday season. What is Obon? Buggered if I know, as I’m rarely in the country during this time, but I think it’s the Japanese equivalent of Halloween.
I mention this because the goings on in the park seem so rustic and alien, and believe me, Hiroshima is a rustic place. I suppose it’s the equivalent of Somerset or Wiltshire in the UK, both locations which are mocked for their dialect and alleged backward inhabitants. Apparently that’s the way Hiroshima is viewed by much of the rest of Japan, although I’ve never really noticed it before.
A lot of foreigners complain about Hiroshima being boring, but I’ve never felt this way about the place. Certainly it seems a lot smaller than the city of 1.2 million souls which it is, but recently it has become stuffed full of trendy cafes, all manner of eateries and all the nerdy electronic stores you can ask for – perfect! Added to this the surrounding mountains, inumerable rivers and the sea, and a city centre small enough to walk across, and you have a fairly livable place.
However, I’ve just been in Tokyo for a week, and I really did notice a difference in the people this time. No getting around it, Tokyoites seem a lot more sophisticated, better dressed and far less peasanty than the creatures I regularly meet on the local trains in Hiroshima. Nobody was staring at me as I meandered around the capital and I felt comfortably anonymous, something that is difficult to feel in Hiroshima not only because of its size, but also because of the propensity of some of the poorly-educated inhabitants to still be freaked out when they see a gaijin.
Here’s the kind of calibre of folk we’ve got here in Hiroshima: yesterday at the station as I waited for a train this slightly odd-looking dude actually had a small cockroach walking around on his floppy hat! Today I took the bus into town and this homunculus occupying the seat in front of me kept smashing its limbs against the side of the bus and mumbling incomprehensibly, while another gentleman at the back talked loudly to himself and occasionally emitted the most explosive sneezes I’ve ever heard in my life. And the dress sense of the older folk here, Jeez!
Yep, Hiroshima really is an overgrown village after all.
Off to Tokyo tomorrow for a week’s hanging around using other peoples’ air-conditioning. Hmm…did I correctly employ the apostrophe in that last sentence? Anyway, some folk choose to escape the humid hell of summertime Hiroshima by going to the sea, or indeed over the sea, but me, I head for the hottest sweatiest chunk of concrete in the world. Why? Well, I just can’t resist the lure of the ‘Business Pack‘ which for a mere 30,000 yen gives you a round-trip airfare plus one night in a business hotel. Stick on a few more nights , and there I am, wandering anonymously in an urban area of 30,000,000 souls – what could be better?
For us grunts manning the frontline trenches of the English Teaching Front: Far Eastern Sector, June marks the onset of the most unpleasant time of the year. A little over half way through the term, and as the interest and enthusiasm of our charges wanes, so too does our own friendly classroom demeanour give way to prickly bad-temperedness and the ensuing ejaculation of the kind of phrases we ourselves were subjected to at school, and vowed never to inflict on others. Oh, history does indeed repeat itself!
To compound this educational ennui comes the Great Time of No National Holidays, a barren stretch of no release which does not let up until late July, and if this wasn’t enough, the elements too begin to conspire against us poor pale big-nosed barbarians. By now temperatures have soared into the high 20’s C, and sticky humidity is being stockpiled prior to the imminent launch of the rainy season, home to foul-smelling gaijin armpits, clinging warm damp under garments and a perpetual classroom battle with students over who gets to control the air conditioning. That’s if we’re lucky enough to be in establishments who deem it even necessary to switch on said machinery.
Still, there is much to look forward to this summer. Late July should
see us up in Tokyo for a spell, that enchanting 40 C of the capital
easilly offset by the pleasure of being an anonymous dot in an
earthquake-prone concrete jungle.
Early September and the Missus and I are off to Prague to see what the
rich Americans and rampaging mobs of EasyJet lager louts have done to
it in the twelve years since my last visit.
September 18th should see brother Matt arrive for a two-week stay, and
so of course a few days up in Kyoto are a must, and always a great
pleasure.
Meanwhile, whole teams of overall-clad geeks are working round the clock to bring http://www.ardle.net into the 21st century. Yes, the site is getting a complete overhaul. In anticipation of the future move from HTML to XML, I’m redoing every page in the transitional form XHTML, together those sexy Style Sheets that I have only now come to grips with. Most pages will look the same, but some are being redesigned graphically, too (look at that groovy new main portal, for example!). You never know, even the mythical computer wargaming section may materialise this summer…
