Spring is.. (wait for it...)

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Originally uploaded by p1ckle.

here.

We've finally started our long, ungainly lope towards the typhoon season; whilst this isn't for months yet, we've been reliably informed that before that, we've got the rainy season and the hot season - which is apparently two whole months of continuous sweating. Can't wait. But for now, it's lovely - there's a nice warm breeze, and all the windows are open, meaning that from here we can hear the trains going past, and the buzzing of the electrical poles. Nice.

This little tree is just at the end of our road, and is about 8 feet tall. All the trees are like this - even the ones that are on communal land. I'm missing the normal English 'let it fend for itself' tree, but at least it means that someone's looking out for the wildlife...

Peeple - I miss them so.

Laura & Luke
Originally uploaded by lauraespence.

I stumbled on this picture a couple of weeks ago - and it made me think; the last time Em, Luke, Laura and I were on the same continent at the same time was 2003. Damn! That's a long time...

It's funny, really. When you're in familiar surroundings, you don't really think about it, and when you're just settling in, you don't really have the time to - but now, when the dust has settled, and you're not fazed by a trip to the shops like you were in the first couple of months, you start to think about how disparate your peeps are. Not in a maudlin way, you understand; most of the people concerned are coming (or plan to come) to visit during the course of our stay, so no worries there (and Laura, consider this an open invitation to cross the pacific anytime you want), but the fact that it's just that little bit harder to talk to people than it was bach in the UK is a little odd. However, I've managed to call people, thanks to Skype, and that's cool. But at the end of the day, it's no substitute for going for a coffee with someone (or sitting on a couch for that matter, drinking herbal tea and being rude about Eastenders - sorry J, P, B and C...)

Nakatsu's really started to feel like home the last couple of days. This is possibly a combination of more training at work, doing the same journey enough times that you can do it without really paying attention (that interesting tree becoming less and less interesting every day until 'wow - how did they manage that?' becomes 'only 4.2 mins to work' and eventually blends into the background), and finally getting 2 days off in a row (training, cover-shifts etc).
However, as soon as we settle down, as usual we're looking to mix it up. We're already starting to think about what to do next - we're in no particular rush, but it would be nice to do a season somewhere next year (07), and that would mean working very hard. I don't plan on staying with NOVA for more than a year, as i need varied experience if i want to get the DELTA/MA or some other such qualification, and we quite fancy another Asian country - perhaps China or Taiwan... but that's all really nebulous at the moment. We'll see...

brand spanking and all that

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Originally uploaded by p1ckle.

Today I ran out of space. I'd bought a big old hard drive with me (80 gig; looks a bit paltry now) so that we could have media in case we were stranded in the middle of nowhere with nothing to do/see/watch/etc. As you are well aware this hasn't been the case, but even so, I've managed to fill the rest of it, and the mini was getting kind of clogged, so I went to the local DeoDeo and bought myself a new drive. It was 250gb, and comes in a rather attractive brushed aluminium finish (and true to geek form has a blue LED on it that changes to a rather fetching purple colour when it's working and stuff). and the best bit: it was 16,800 yen - about 65 quid. get that!

This is me.

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Originally uploaded by p1ckle.

This is the picture drawn by one of my students today - rather fetching i thought. If you were wondering what the odd ponytails are, they're the arms of my glasses - I know, but she's only seven... Actually, she spent most of the lesson wearing my glasses, but at least she answered the questions OK.

'so I increase the suspense with my voice and a bag'...

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Originally uploaded by p1ckle.

...was one of the more obtuse things that I heard today, when we went to do some training today, so that we can take over some of the kids groups when one of the teachers goes at the end of the month. The training was in Kashii, which is about 10 minutes east of Fukuoka, and was pretty average - except that the 8-hour training day became a 14-hour marathon, due to the train timetable. Nobody's fault, really; Kashii's not a big stop on the Express train in that it 's so near Hakata that if you actually wanted anything, you'd just go there. Anyhow, this meant that when we finished for the day, at about 7.30, we had to go away from Nakatsu to Hakata, before hanging about there for a half hour, before coming back again. Boo. Anyway, what with that and the upcoming Chibiko training (2-4 years old, taught with parents present, mainly to stop me from being a human set of monkey bars, i reckon) there'll be more variety on the teaching front, and it'll take some of the pressure off the other teachers there who are already trained.

On another note, i bought myself a Flickr Pro account tonight, on account of them only recording the 200 most recent photos on the regular account - that was ok when i wasn't taking many, but now i'd like them to be about all the time, and i'd be well miffed if they started disappearing from the blog posts. Thus, i can now upload them in their original bigness, so if people want to DL them they should all be there (J, i reckon that'll fix your problem...)

The balding gentleman in the picture was seen today in Kashii outside a ramen restaurant - had it been open i would have tried some, but unfortunately it was way too early. Next time i see his shiny pate, I'll grab one.

On a side note, I got some gum from my folks the other day - it was much appreciated, and i've chomped about a packet and a half. Should last for ages, then.

Onsen Day (or: Get nekkid with a bunch of old Japanese men)

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Originally uploaded by p1ckle.

actually it's not quite like that; the Onsen is the traditional Japanese bath, and is actually quite fun. We went to the nearest onsen yesterday with Dan and Narumi (pictured after cycling up a big hill), who go quite often. The basic procedure is thus: you go in, pay your 500 yen, take your shoes off, get a little wooden chitty, separate into male and female sections, wash, sit in lots of different types of hot spring, sit in the sauna, sunbathe, repeat until you can't take any more hot water. For the most part it's really relaxing (however the pool that sends short-range electric pulses every second is a bit wierd - in the same way that that science experiment where you make a frog's leg twitch with a 9v battery is wierd) and well worth the trip. Dan and Narumi got married this month - the registration part anyway. If you're a gaijin here you have to marry your Japanese partner twice; once by filling in some paperwork in the local city office, and once in a proper formal affair. Their 'big' wedding is next month, in Tokyo, and we wish them luck. After the onsen, we went to Jusco, a big 'ol shopping mall, with all the usual stuff plus a pet shop with some proper cute little puppies, guaranteed to reduce even a pro-wrestler to tears. Lahhvly.

who lives in a house like this

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Originally uploaded by p1ckle.

is just one of the questions i ask myself about Japan. This is one of the houses near our (thankfully new-built) apartment, and is really cool, i reckon. Don't be deceived by the exterior - i'm assured that the outside appearance of a Japanese house bears no relation to the interior and/or the social status of those therein; think the property tax laws in France that calculate tax based on the appearance of the exterior, leading to many homes looking like crap on the outside and like Loius XVI's crashpad on the inside (or did i just make that up). I'm not as yet in a position to confirm/deny the veracity of this claim as i have yet to visit a home that wasn't a fellow teacher, but i'd be really interested to find out. That said, this house still has a real charm, and the old woman that lives inside is really happy-looking. Her garden really is something else - there's a flower there that has its own little umbrella to stop it getting wet. Only in Japan...

hiragana, what hast thou donest

hiragana
Originally uploaded by p1ckle.

tonight was our weekly nihongo lesson, and over the last week i've been practicing the first of the three Japanese scripts - hiragana. It's used for when there isn't a kanji for something, and is pretty tough to learn, in that there are loads of them to learn (117 if you count all the extensions to the 46 basic ones) so as you can imagine, i haven't exactly been able to internalise them all... about 35 of them are in the brain, and luckily most of them are modifiers to the basic ones. The ones in the picture are ta, chi, tsu, te, na ni nu ne no, well, you get the idea. But, it's a fun language to learn - there's a real sense of achievement in being able to decipher a sign even if it just says 'sushi', or 'kudasai'... and then there's about the same number again for Katakana (the one used for borrowed words like birru, teribee and the like). We're going to try a Kanji test in December, where we need to know 100 Kanji, but that's a whole other story. For now, i just want to read ingredients...

marzano, your days are numbered...

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Originally uploaded by p1ckle.

this is the way that instant coffee should be - although it's something of a challenge to work out what the hell to do with it... it's real ground coffee, in a little porous bag, with these little origami legs that you pull out and stretch over the side of the mug. Then, in one smooth motion, you tear off the top of the bag, and this perfect little container of coffee grounds is left hanging. Sure, each one comes in it's own little bag, and it's a marvel of 'too much packaging' (but that's nothing for the land of extraneous wrapping - you try not having a bag with your groceries...) but boy is it better than instant. You damn straight. It's even nicer than the filter at MZ...

Jumping fish and other shrine stories.

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Originally uploaded by p1ckle.

On monday we went to Usa shrine, one of the biggest shrines in Japan. As you can see from the photo, the scale is pretty vast - this is only one of the entrances to the shrine. The shrine itself was really quiet; normally it's really busy, but it was a really peaceful, quiet place for somewhere that popular. As seems to be the tradition, whilst most of the trip was just your normal visit to a national monument kind of thing, we did see a woman walking her cat - not even with a proper lead, just some bits of rope. The poor cat was trying to escape, and didn't look happy at all, but to no avail...

The shrine buidings themselves are beautiful; the sort of thing that'd make it onto one of the quarters of a 'Greetings from Japan' postcard, if such tacky things existed here (and if they do, I want one). There was a small lake behind the main shrine buildings full of Koi Carp, who were jumping for flies or something. Very cool.

Please sir, can i have some more?

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Originally uploaded by p1ckle.

These are mushrooms. Rather, these are the tiny mushrooms that are left when we've munched all the really nice big mushrooms behind them. It's actually really strange to go into a supermarket and see more than one variety of mushroom - normally it's just a couple of trays of watery button ones. Here, there are about 20 different types, and the fact that they're all different shapes and sizes means that it's pretty much a lottery picking which one you want. We really need to start picking up the pace on the whole Japanese front, so we can understand what we're eating.

It was nice to get a postcard from Lukas yesterday - full of his typical wit and not without a hint of mint... but good to see that he's having fun in America.

We had dinner at Cory and Kristen's last night, which was most delicious; we ended up playing Cranium, girls vs. boys, which should not have been as difficult as it was (possibly because they give you play-doh in the box - that was my concentration gone) but, as usual, the ladies were victorious. Pah. A good night though, and I've heard of a T-Shirt that, if it turns out to be true, will be the BEST EVER. Expect pictorial evidence should it prove to be genuine...

how to ameliorate your office environment, #23 - the letters.

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Originally uploaded by p1ckle.

Work has been really busy this week - it's the first day back to school for all the junior high and high-school students, so there have been a fair few Novoids coming in for extra lessons. As a result, there are quite a few lower-level students coming in for lessons; they're mostly 11 or 12, and fall into two categories - they're good at english, and really enjoy the lessons now that they're taking 'adult' classes, or they're painfully shy and wouldn't say ouch if they were on fire. Take a wild guess which ones are in the majority... but actually it's quite nice if, by the end of the lesson, some teenager who may as well be made of stone is shouting - 'I like fish and chips' at the top of his lungs...

hello hello, goodbye goodbye, time to eat a tiny pie...

tiny pie
Originally uploaded by p1ckle.

The thing in the packet is (or rather was) a tiny pie. 'Was' is not strictly true, i suppose it's still technically a tiny pie, but it's now quite mangled. This is it's story:

Last night we went to our hanami, or cherry blossom party. All the teachers and staff were there, along with a few others (Paddy's parents, his girlfriend and a couple of others) and the whole thing was held in the hall of David's church as there were no lights outside. The hall was a little odd and smelled like i imagine the set of M.A.S.H smelled like, but you can't have everything, and the company was good.
Anyway, everyone brought food, and one of the particularly spectacular additions was a big bag of individually wrapped hexagonal pastries, which were really small and filled with chocolate. Satchi (i think that's how it's spelt), who is our office manager, offered me one, and when i asked what they were, she replied "it's a tiny pie". I was hooked. I ate a few, and pocketed one for posterity. Unfortunately, after the party, we went to a bar, and then to a pretty raucous karaoke session, and when I looked at it this morning, it was like this.

I guess this is a sign that i should take more care of my cakes in the future.
I'm sorry, tiny pie.

Coffee, coffee everywhere

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Originally uploaded by p1ckle.

I've been enjoying the abundance of coffee products over here; it's possible, should you so desire, to get a can of iced latte at any time of the day or night for the princely sum of ¥120 (about 60p). You can get both hot and cold drinks from vending machines, but the catch is that they are, as a rule, bloody awful. There are a couple of exceptions, however - there's a black coffee called simply 'Drink It Black', which is ok, and a couple of others (for anyone who's seen my flickr photos- no, 'wonderful body' doesn't taste good).

The problem is, having worked in a coffee bar for a fair old while (props to the MZ massive both past and (in the main) present), so I got used to being able to get a really good coffee pretty much every time, and the price was right too *wink. Now though, it's harder to find; mainly 'cos the milk is different - i'm not sure how, but it's a lot richer here. That's not to say that there's nothing about - there's a nice coffee bar around the corner, but when it comes down to it (and I never thought I'd say it), sometimes I'd quite fancy a MZ latte... maybe in a couple of years.

Anyway, on the subject of missing things, there are a couple of things that I just can't seem to get over here:

• Wrigley's Extra Gum
  
  There are literally hundreds of different gum brands over here - you can buy it everywhere, but IT ALL TASTES LIKE CRAP. You can get Cherry Mint, Lemon Mint, Blueberry Mint, Menthol Mint (which tastes like cheese) and bloody Lychee gum, but no mint. Just mint.
  
• Cheese
  
  There's no shortage of cheese here - you can get all sorts of processed, soft, smoked, tubular and the like, but it's almost all synthetitic. I think i saw some brie the other day, but it's ¥600 (3 quid) for a piece that would normally cost about 80p back home. Sometimes I dream about stilton - interestingly the idea of blue cheese is always the one that makes the Japanese students cringe when it crops up in lessons.
  
• Shoes That Fit
  
  I'm only a size 11 (US12), which is not exactly monstrous, but over here it's crazy. Not a chance of buying any here, so I'm resorting to the wonders of the interweb. Laahvley.
  
  
  Oop, i'll be late for work if i don't get going...
  

decoding the Barbecue genome

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Originally uploaded by p1ckle.

In keeping with the spirit of doing random things at odd times, we went to a barbecue on saturday night on Emma and Katie's 3rd floor balcony. Out here, that's not as odd as it sounds; they have a pretty large balcony (enough to comfortably seat 14 or 15 people and not worry too much about crashing onto the people below anyway) and the weather, which has been very changeable stayed warm, dry and in every way clement for the occasion. After being thrown a can of lighter fuel, and being shown the barbecue, Katie and I tried to light the barbecue, to no avail. This was probably for two reasons - 1) Katie, despite being Australian and hence genetically predisposed to all things barbecue told me that there was always 'some boy who wanted to do the barbecue and I was quite happy to let them' and 2) After putting the coals on, finding some paper and dousing the whole thing in lighter fuel, the whole thing went up with a satisfying 'whoomph'. Fun indeed. Cue Cory and Em (pictured), who not only stepped in to light the thing actually stayed to cook all the food. As Kristen (Cory's Girlfriend) observed, 'Have you ever noticed that some people are just natural barbequers? I think it's genetic". I have to say, I agree - and how happy we all are for this phenomenon. Perhaps I can invent some kind of pre-natal test for it...

bye bye Marky, back to Blighty...

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Originally uploaded by p1ckle.

Mark (the one on the left) is leaving with his new wife and kid to return to England, after three and a half years here in Nakatsu, and some of us gaijin went out for 'one last night out' last night. We went to a Gofu Place - essentially indoor barbecue - and did something called Nomihodai (unlimited drinking for a set price within a set time limit - in our case 2 hours). We were all dressed in suits, and it was a whole lot o' fun. Paddy (the one on the right) was on form as always, and Dan and Cory were also in fine fettle. After the Nomihodai, we headed to 'Queen's Echo' - Nakatsu's premiere Karaoke bar to belt out some oldies until one by one we walked, biked and in some cases stumbled home. Now and for ever more, the /Mickey Mouse Club' song will trigger two very different memories - the first is the excruciatingly long car journey from Norwich to Croyde in Luke's car, singing out of the window, and the second is Paddy and Mark's rendition, which mainly comprised shouting 'Mickey Mouse, Mickey Mouse, Mickey Mouse' over and over and with a dance that is truly a sight to behold.

So long, Marky - you'll be missed. We only knew you for a month, but it was a good month nonetheless. Have fun.

Sakura season

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Originally uploaded by p1ckle.

I had an impromptu day off yesterday, so Katie, Kumiko and I drove to Osada Park just outside Nakatsu to indulge in one of the great Japanese traditions at this time of year - the appreciation of the Sakura, or Cherry Blossom. In essence, people go to anywhere where there are cherry trees, and appreciate them. The Sakura only lasts for about a week, but it's really beautiful whilst it's there - added to that there's another tradition which is even more fun; the hanami (i think that's how you spell it) which means 'Cherry Blossom Party'. Loads of pink lanterns are strung between the cherry trees, and people come at night, sit down with loads of food, sake, shochu and beer and have a bash right there under the trees. We're having a Nova hanami next week - should be a good time... Weather wasn't great when i went though, hence the grey, overcast pictures, but the weather has been really changeable right now. Not complaining though, it's just tough deciding whether to bring a coat. Bah.

..."i want what he's having"

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Originally uploaded by p1ckle.

this was taken from a cookery book - apparently this guy is the nihon equivalent of Ainsley Harriot, without the baldness. Talk about keeping your emotions hidden; I wonder if he ever walks around his house with 'GRUMPY' or 'HALF-CUT'... I guess I'll never know.

We start our Japanese lessons on Friday night. Our tutor, Mutsuko is really cool; she's taught Japanese in Australia and is going to teach us in our home for 1000 Yen each - abouit a fiver, which is roughly 1/5 of the cost of learning in the UK. We even get all the materials we need - diamond.

It may be a couple of days before I can update the photos - i lost my miniSD card for my phone in the machine at the Video Store (another story for another day), and they're about 3000yen to replace, but there are plenty of photos still to upload - keep watching... for now, here's a link to the oddest thing I saw in the Youme Town supermarket today (but by no means the oddest thing in there). Watch it here.

introducing the Auto Shoeser

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Originally uploaded by p1ckle.

I went bowling the other night - the second time in as many weeks, which is more times than i've been in about 10 years! Bowling's actually not too bad in Japan - it's really cheap, and everything is proper retro - except for the shoe system. Back in the UK, if you need some bowling shoes (assuming you don't have your own pair... but who does) you queue at the counter only to be met by a vacant looking school-leaver, who after ascertaining your size comes back with a pair of battered red-and-black monsters, and proceeds to dispense a liberal dose of lemon-scented corrosive spray inside each one. Over here, however, you place your ¥300 into the 'Auto Shoeser' and out come a pair of minty-fresh bowling trainers. Yup, trainers. They look a bit like retro Vans, and boy are they comfortable. There's one drawback for me however; being the gaijin monster that I am, there isn't a Shoeser in my size - i have to go to the counter and get the special 'monster sized' pairs. They still look good though. To top it all off, I managed a 160, which beats the crap out of all the other scores i've ever got...