Livejournal Refugee

As I'm translating a book I'll be throwing some thoughts in the general direction of this journal every now and again. Not for your benefit, specifically, but I'm wondering how my attitude will change over the course of the book so I want to have some kind of log.

For now:

- I'm at the end of chapter 2
- It's ... not harder than I thought. I think the biggest challenge is going to be finishing it.
- I think not reading ahead is key to keeping it fresh, though fresh is relative. I've gone over some passages so many times now that I'm starting to know them by heart.
- I want a shower. There's music playing and it's distracting me from writing this down.

Please leave my password alone, thanks.

End of trip.

Well there's still tomorrow but that will be filled with packing and cleaning and goodbye drinks and convincing the guesthouse administration that I've left for the airport at 16:00 when INFACT, unbeknownst to them, I will sneak back in with our secret spare key and sleep in the kitchen. Because that's the kind of ninja rebel I am. I tell you man, once you've done your laundry in a foreign washing machine there's no turning back.

Here are some things I have learned so far:

1. Japanese people don't steal your money, but THEY WILL STEAL YOUR HAT.

2. If you are in Tokyo and find a shop that sells goods you like, go in and buy everything you want. If you don't have enough money on you, steal the rest. Because once you have left the shop it will vanish into thin air, never to return, and you will be doomed to wander the surrounding streets for the rest of your stay looking for it and gloomily muttering to yourself about your lost hat.

3. Japanese women will touch your boobs for no reason at all. They may pretend to admire the butterflies on your t-shirt or to say "thank you" when you get up and offer them your seat on the train, but it's all just to stab at your chest. And after the incident they pretend nothing happened. Filth.

I will now take a shower and then visit my favourite bar where the cook and barman wave at me when I come or leave and make sad faces when I say I'm going back on the fourteenth and have the foul habit of bringing me food without asking me if I want to eat and then charging me for it.

But it's good food. I don't mind.

For Chris:
I just got woken up by the cries of the guy who can't get into the toilet in the Gulroz Chang Poo cutscene. Though it was really a garbage man guiding the garbage truck backwards through a narrow street.

[Edit: Guru Logic Champ. Thanks, Google!]

For the rest of you:
Nothing to see here, move along. I am not a nerd.

While ace (on the second day I beat Hitoshi and got free drinks for the rest of the night), Kanazawa wasn't the best thing I could have done, travel-wise, as after that I had the choice of backtracking to Nagoya and going on from there or traveling on to Nagano. I took the latter option but by the time I arrived there I'd been on and off trains for 6 hours and neither I nor the city itself seemed to care very much about the rest of the day. So I traveled on for another 4 hours, reached home, spent some time trying to wash a cockroach down the shower drain (not as fun as it sounds) and then had an evening meal consisting of a bottle of sake and several packs of wasabi beans. Yesterday was not a good day.

Today was better though. I wrung the last bit of use out of my rail pass by visiting Matsumoto and spent part of the train journey there talking to a guy who said he was a high school english teacher but changed his story halfway as he handed me a business card that said he worked for the Power Division. He couldn't explain to me what the Power Division was but I generated lots of impressed noises anyway.

He started the conversation by coming to sit next to me, looking at the book I was reading for a while and asking "Excuse me, where are you from?". I closed my book and replied. He stared at the seat in front of him. I waited for a bit but as he didn't react I opened the book and continued reading. After about two seconds he ventured "I teach english". I closed the book again and said "Oh is that so? Do you teach in high school?". He didn't reply, didn't even look at me, just stared into the distance. I again waited about 15 seconds, then reopened my book and read on. For two seconds. Then: "yes, in high school". I closed the book and looked at him expectantly, but nothing more came out and he just kept staring at the seat in front of him. I waited. Nothing. I reopened my book. After half a sentence: "I'm going to Kofu". I decided that reading was just not going to happen and put the book away, saying "Aha. Do you work there?". A very uncomfortable 20 seconds -I counted- followed as he fell silent again and I had no book to return to. I looked out the window. I gave up, got the book from my bag again and opened it, at which point he informed me "I go to visit my son". I closed the book.

You get my point. It took me a while to realise that he was both extremely shy and not good at english at all and needed all those seconds inbetween to parse what I was saying and to phrase his next sentence. After about twenty minutes we had established that he had a wife and liked sakura and that I had come to Japan to do some swordfighting and liked samurai. And that he worked for the Power Division. Cute but tiring, so I moved on to scribbling down some kanji - always a hit with the japanese as they get to laugh at my drawings and I get to learn some new signs. This whiled away the rest of the journey and when we got to Kofu he jumped off the train with a jolly "Auf Wiedersehn, beautiful woman!" and I went on to see Matsumoto-jo. Which was really small.

Tomorrow is my last sunday here (man!) so I /got/ to see the gothic scene at Harajuku station.

I jumped through hoops trying to get a reservation for a tour of the ninja temple (from having to speak to someone I couldn't see through a HOLE IN THE WALL to answering questions like "how many of you are there?", "how did you get here?" and "who sent you?"), I finally get on the tour -which was the only way to get into the temple- which is in japanese so I have to tag along and read sparse descriptions in an english booklet, and at the end they tell us "actually we just call it a ninja temple, but it really has nothing to do with ninjas at all". Nifty.

[Previous entry edited for readability as alcohol really hits home after you haven't had any for two weeks.]

Lo,

still alive, posting from Kanazawa - Japan's pleasant surprise, from a bar with a barkeeper called Elvis who is really crap at pool, and his associate Hi... Hitoshi I believe but I already forgot, who is a lot better and keeps beating me.

First I got to Kyoto. Kyoto was full -actually they put a NO MORE ROOMS AVAILABLE sign in front of me right as it was my turn at the tourist office, exactly like you see in the movies- but as I was gathering my stuff it turned out there had been a cancellation and I could get a room for two days. I liked the city, though it was teeming with old American tourists (one of whom approached me on the street (the sheer nerve) while I was looking for my hotel asking me in a thick southern drawl where I was going and if I needed help. I was so surprised that I forgot to even be fake friendly and just stared). Anyway, the hotel was bland but I got to see Sanjusangendo, which was more impressive than I imagined anything could be. First castle: Ni-jo (was it? I keep forgetting the name), second castle Himeji-jo. Two off my list.

Then I went to Koya-san, which was not at all like how I had imagined it (much more, er, normal) (don't ask how exactly I'd imagined it), and where I slept in a monastery, and, well. Look I'll just say it: it was one long, long, enormously long string of personal and social disasters. Really. I went into my tatami room with my slippers, making a monk yell "NO! NO!". I accidentally kicked in the door to my room. I sat down at a table reserved for monks. I dropped both my keys and my telephone in the toilet of the biggest monastery in Koyasan. I invaded the private quarters of the head priest looking for the shower and had to be shooed out. I splashed two naked pilgrim women with ice water. I stashed my bag in the wrong way so that it fell out of the closet at 1:30 in the morning, waking up the whole monastery. And then I tripped up the same head priest during the buddhist morning ceremony, making him stumble in front of all the attending people. I swear when my bag fell down and I heard this big 'BLAM' in the middle of the night for a second I thought the monks had actually come to kill me. But alas, they hadn't and I had to live with my shame another day. I couldn't get out of there soon enough.

But Kanazawa is nice. Kanazawa is fiiiine. And they have a ninja temple, which I will visit tomorrow and where I will conduct myself in an orderly fashion. Yes.

Cool. I got a very official looking rail pass valid as of tomorrow, which is when I will be heading for Kyoto. I just made a list of the things I want to see and 7 days is going to be extremely short, but okay: to Kyoto, Himeji castle, Nara maybe, Mount Koya, Kanazawa/Eihei-ji/Myoryu-ji, Kiso Valley, Matsumoto castle. Is the intention. Two of the things in that list are temples where you can sleep so I hope I will at least have a bed those two days, although I may have to flash the monks. I may not (actually I probably will not) complete all of this in 7 days in which case I'll probably travel on without my rail pass as by that time I'll be close to Tokyo again and the distances will be short and the fares will be cheaper. But anyway you may not hear of me until the 7th/8th/9th of April. Then I'll be back in Tokyo and have great stories to tell, oh yes. And there will only be like 5 days left, oh no!

I knew my ongoing quest to find weird food and consequent habit of pointing at some kanji on the menu and smiling at the waiter in restaurants was going to bite me in the ass someday. Today I was brought a plate of slime with bits of tomato and tofu in it. You think I'm exaggerating for comic effect. I'm not.

Tour of Japan has been postponed one day because we're going to the fish market after seeing Apparat tonight (at which point it should be about 4 or 5 in the morning) to have sashimi for breakfast, so I'll probably be sleeping tomorrow. In the park, with any luck. I could use a tan.

In other news, this noodle diet makes the fat on my bum disappear so lately I've not been sitting very comfortably at all. And the pants that used to hang somewhere near my hips are now actually falling off. Which would make for some pretty amusing anecdotes if I hadn't remembered to bring a belt.

In yet other news, I'm probably going to see Apparat perform tonight. How's that for a friday evening!

In still other news, it's raining so I can't get my clothes to dry, so I'm not washing, but my travel pants smell as if I've been rubbing dead rats on them, so I might not be able to leave for my Pat-does-Japan tour on saturday. I hate it when my world conquering plans get canceled because of decaying mammals.

Good thing today: Ueno. I like Ueno. It offers commercial fun without me actually wanting to buy anything, as most of what is on offer is pulverised fish. This was also the good thing of yesterday as I went there twice. Compare this to Shibuya, where I went into a store, saw the most amazing boots ever, had a look at the price tag and ran out screaming as they were the same price as my trip to Japan. Other good thing today: the cat sculptures of Asakura Choso. Yes I do cultural things too.
Adventurous thing today: nothing. Because I got home at four with only the energy to eat biscuits.
Bad thing today, and yesterday, and probably all coming days: they're building an apartment around the corner and have now started a certain part of the building process that makes it necessary to, I don't know, bang big metal objects against other big metal objects, or drop them on big metal plates, or drill large holes in them, preferably at 7 in the morning. Which partly explains my lack of energy.

The other part of the explanation is the heat, but that's a good thing.

Not much point in doing good/adventurous/bad because it was all pretty mixed up today. I decided to be a tourist in the true sense of the word for a bit, but it stunk. Got home late, then went out for a drink with Anna to an izikaya where all the waiters were punks, which was nice. Then walked back through Yoyogi Park, so I can now report that the cherry blossoms are also very lovely at night, then at the exit we got approached by a japanese guy who asked us for help, in a very specific area as it turned out. We were of course not helpful, but this didn't keep him from following us around even as we got out in the street and were waiting for the traffic lights to turn green. He just stood there saying "help please?" but apparently quite happy to help himself. And I was mostly thinking "I could kick him in the groin, probably, but I'm wearing these heavy boots and he is really unprotected". Anna clearly had a less compassionate attitude and assaulted the guy in a way that made me pray that she would never be bothered for real. I think he only left because some other guy also came to wait for the traffic light.

Ah and for all of you wondering: no I didn't feel the earthquake, yes everything is still standing upright. As our new japanese friend so kindly demonstrated.

Good thing yesterday: sakura in bloom so sitting in the park with the hangover was a very nice experience.
Adventurous thing yesterday: buying pants. I think they might be boy pants. Buying clothes turns adventurous when you only know the words "big" and "small" but not "bigger" or "smaller" and certainly not "I like the colour but the legs are a bit wide and my bum looks fat in this".
Bad thing yesterday: mmm. Well. How to explain. If the sakura is in bloom, the japanese swarm to the parks to sit and watch. This is fine. What I hadn't realised is that they seem to do this mainly in couples. And there were just a tad more couples than I cared to see.

(Crowd goes "awwww")

Not that I spend all my days here missing people, mind you.

I'm a bit frustrated by my adventures. As in, they're not real. Everything you do for the first time is an adventure but I've been feeling at home here since day three. I wake up, I make coffee, I go out and do things, see things, get a bit lost perhaps, have lunch and dinner somewhere, come home, watch a movie or go out with or without people, write something down here, go to sleep. I don't mean to say that I don't like it here, because I do, very much, and just walking around is an assault on all your senses, but it's so ... safe. Having a room for a month is amazing in a sense, but, well, yeah. It's home. I go home at night. Meh. I'm going to do a bit more of Tokyo (see some of the sights) for a few days and then I'll validate my rail pass and head out into the unknown with the sleeping bag and without the laptop.

Good thing yesterday: going out for a goodbye drink as Jordi is leaving. We hooked up with some of Miguel & Jordi's japanese friends who took us to one of the photo/sticker booth places. Oh so cheesy, oh so fun. Also, trying Nikka whisky - japanese brand.
Adventurous thing yesterday: natto.
Bad thing yesterday: natto.
Bad thing today: hangover. But the fine weather is back so I can suffer this one out in the sun in the park. Now I need breakfast.

Lots of jingu everywhere. I've seen 4 shinto temples now. That's enough.

Good thing today: visiting Choisai's tomb (and the Katori shrine which was "yet another shrine" by this time, but nice in a symbolic sort of way).
Adventurous thing today: none yet. I will be going out in Roppongi later this evening to remedy that.
Bad thing today: discovering that I've been here for 5 days and I've already spent half of my money. Something I'm sure Roppongi will most certainly not remedy (although I get a free entry to the party because I'm housemates with one of the bands, yay!). And I haven't even bought any clothes yet. Then again it looks like I'll have a hard time finding clothes I could actually wear back home anyway: anything that would normally be "my style" that I've seen has big blotches of tacky skulls and loud engrish plastered all over. On the other hand, all those stylish japs must get there clothes somewhere. Maybe I should just follow them around a bit. And max out my credit card.

Said goodbye to the sensei today, somewhat sad that we only got 6 hours of training, somewhat happy in the sense that now it really does feel like a holiday - I can just go out and not worry about where I walk or how lost I'll get because I have to be home in time to pack my sword and stuff. On the last day of training two Katori-Italians arrived who were pretty miffed about not being able to train at all, but we had dinner and shared some stories and made a vague deal to train together in Tokyo, maybe.

Apparently yesterday was a bank holiday. That explains the weird train behaviour.

Oh man, I guess it couldn't keep going well. It's like this morning I got up and Japan said "okay, I've been playing nice because you just got here, but now you're on your own". So today I first had a very weird trip to Ofuna, with no english to be found on the platform or in the train, and not at the time it was supposed to go. But it went kind of okay because I had been memorizing the kanji for some of the inbetween stations on my two earlier trips. I did arrive too late so I had to apologise profusely to the sensei. Then we had training and every step I took was wrong and he yelled at me every single time only to grin each time he saw my face (my please-don't-yell-it's-been-such-a-terrible-day-already face).

Now on the first day of training (monday), I got back from the dressing room and we went for a drink and the guys were all "didn't you have a shower in your dressing room?" and I said "probably, but I'll shower at home, and anyway I didn't bring a towel" (as this is my custom in Holland), and they went "oh okay". And that was that. But after drinks sensei also went "wednesday you can shower!". And I said "yes, okay" and privately took a whiff of myself to make sure I didn't stink but I really didn't, so I thought maybe it's their custom to shower in the sports centre or something. And then yesterday me and the sensei went to Kamakura, as said, and during dinner AND when saying goodbye he, again, happily said "tomorrow shower ok!" and I got really paranoid and took deep breaths under my armpits but I swear I smelt like the beautiful flower I am (I hadn't even smoked that day and my clothes were fresh, too). Nevertheless, if they wanted me to shower so badly, a shower was what I was going to take (I do have to add for clarity that I already shower mornings and evenings, like I do at home). So today after training I boldly went into the shower compartment, sporting my towel and ignoring the fact that the girls who had been practicing kendo next to us were blatantly not cleaning themselves in any way whatsoever, instead choosing to spray each other with big clouds of deodorant. I turned open the tap. Freezing water came out. I waited. The water remained bitterly cold. I waited, a dark cloud of despair forming over my head. Cold. Cold cold cold. But after all that had happened I couldn't very well emerge from the dressing room dry. So there was nothing left to do but get in and pretend I was taking a bath in a mountain stream. And when I jumped out with clattering teeth and wildly groped for my towel I saw the same box on the wall that we have in the guesthouse: a thermostat box with some buttons you press to get hot water. So apparently they have them in public showers as well. Aha.

Then (after finding the others and proudly swishing around my wet hair, ha!) I made the mistake of asking the sensei where the Katori Shrine was (this is why I usually don't do small talk), by which he thought I meant I wanted to go to the shrine with him (or he took it as an excuse to have another day out with me, I don't know), so then we went through an excruciating hour in which he tried to explain to me what train to take from Tokyo, and where to transfer, and what hour his train would be arriving, and that I had to get into the last wagon, and he assaulted a poor railway information woman and made drawings and wrote things down and led me to a map, and back again to the ticket information booth, and wrote things with his finger in the palm of his hand, and tried to make me understand and I think I understand, now, more or less, but after the train experience of this morning I have lost all faith in my rail navigating abilities, or rather in the railway system, plus, for his scheme to work I'd have to get up at 6 in the morning, and for me to make sure I get there on time I have to get up half an hour earlier. FIVE THIRTY. Nyarrrrrr.

Don't get me wrong, I don't mind rail adventures - they're the best stories. But I have this doom image of me doing something terribly wrong and that poor old man looking forlornly through the window as his train tuffs off into the distance, to the Katori Shrine, while I end up in, I don't know, probably China or something with my luck.

Good stuff as well though. I bought a traditionally made knife (yay!) and as I was in a traditional crafts centre anyway I had a look around, and was approached by a crafts centre person (my fourth day and this is the first stranger to initiate a conversation, and no it wasn't his job, he was a security guard, who explained what some of the strange things were and asked me to try some calligraphy. He pushed a brush into my hands and led me to a piece of paper and suddenly all the Japs around us were very interested indeed and came to watch as the blood drained from my head and took with it every kanji charachter I ever knew (a pitiful 15), except one: mizu (water). Which I painted in what I suspect looked much like the hand of a 4 year old. Gasps and clapping and oohs all around as I looked in horror at my work. But oh how they loved me! Here's an idea, Japan: next time show your love by answering me if I ask where the train is going, okay?

Good thing yesterday: finding the train to Ofuna all by myself, meeting the guys from the sensei's dojo (they're ALL OLD MEN).
Adventurous thing yesterday: deciding (FOR FUN) to get out a stop early and "walk the way back home".
Bad thing yesterday: getting hideously lost in Tokyo for three hours, paying for the wrong metro lines by mistake, getting home at 11 in the evening.

Good thing today: buying a bokken and quite a handsome sword bag, sensei giving me a tour of Kamakura (well I don't know if that was a good thing per se, but it was terribly nice of him anyway and he kept pestering everyone he met until they gave me discounts and free stuff. Muaha.).
Adventurous thing today: doing the laundry. No really. There's a machine in the garden and I can only pray to god it's for washing your clothes because half of mine are in there right now and I pushed pink buttons with lots of kanji on them until it started making noises.
Bad thing today (and yesterday, for that matter): it's really, and I mean really bloody hard to pay for anything yourself if you're running around with an old japanese man. He keeps giving me things! I keep saying please don't give me things! He grumbles and gives me things anyway! I feel like a leech.

In my room, alive and hungry. You can all go back to your graves. :)

Christ, I swear today has 36 hours and every hour has at least half as many minutes as usual. And people keep asking me if I'm stressed. I've never had a more boring day in my life.

One week to go and it's becoming quite clear that I've never been so ill-prepared for anything in my life. And I don't even care. I guess reading all that nihilist material is finally paying off. ;)

(I really shouldn't be flaunting my pitiful faux-bohemianism like this. I have a bed, so "ill-prepared" is a bit of an exaggeration. Still, the bed is in Tokyo, and I'll be in other parts of the country for at least one week, sleeping in bins or on benches like a bum.)

(Using my MacBook as a pillow. I think I might just be the worst bohemian ever.)

All previous entries (except for the last three, as a nod to the past and because they were -vaguely- travel-related) have been removed, and this journal will now officially be used as a travel log/blog/blah/meh type thing. Which means: if you want to know what I'm doing, this is where you might find out. Provided I actually write things down. Which I probably won't.

Oh well.

So now that that's been decided (only my travel partner, should there be one, is still shrouded in the fog of mystery), I have started to learn japanese - even though I've been given reason to think that this will only serve to heighten the confusion once I'm there.

Other things are slowly taking on the form of "sure thing": it will be in march (or mid-march to mid-april), I will go and train with Hatakeyama Sensei (though for how long I don't know), I will have to spend an obscene amount of money because apparently it /is/ that expensive and it's going to be aces.

So basically all that is left is to secure a plane ticket and practice sentences such as "omae no saigo da!" and "omae o korosu!".

That's "this is the end of you" and "I'm going to kill you", respectively.