chidade.net

On Monday, I received an email on my phone that said “WE ARE HERE!” with an attached photo of Cairns Tourist Bureau.

Okay, that’s nice, but who are you?

Oh! Holy crap! M & T from Yokohama! My old students! They’re in Australia? Why didn’t they tell me?! One excited telephone conversation later, and I make plans to meet them in Sydney to give them a guided tour of the little I know. Yay! Yokohama friends! I’ve been feeling massively homesick for Yokohama lately and seeing M & T would probably only make matters worse but the weekend looked like it was going to be lots of fun.

Every day up until I left for Sydney, I received emails with cameraphone photos of things like shrimp-on-the-barbie, Ayer’s Rock and Fosters beer. They seemed to be having fun. After some misunderstandings, frustrations and drunkenness, Mi and I finally met up with M & T in seedy King’s Cross on Saturday. That place is kinda scary. It was even scarier when I learnt the next day that M & T decided to wander around there arter midnight! Anyway, hightailed it to George Street promptly, where we ate at a nice Spanish restaurant and caught up on the last few months and talked about their holiday so far.

“Did you see any Australian animals?”
“No, but I ate emu, kangaroo and crocodile”
“Ehhh~?!” (I reverted to my Japanish pretty quickly)
“I didn’t see anything!”
“Even at Ayer’s Rock? Or in the Daintree Rainforest?!”
“No! Nothing!”
“Okay, I’ll take you to Taronga Zoo tomorrow. You can see some Australian animals that aren’t on a plate”

I hadn’t been to Taronga since I was…oooh…6 years old? So I was looking forward to it. First we looked around Circular Quay to take happy snaps of the Opera House and Harbour Bridge. Then the zoo, where those animals have a better bloody view than most human residents of Sydney.

After that, an accidental round trip on the ferry (they need to make signs that say ‘DARLING HARBOUR’ not just ‘Aquarium’) to have another nice meal where I discovered that I actually quite like oysters (Dad will have heart failure when he hears it). It seems that Australian seafood is much cheaper and better quality than in Japan, so M & T had been gorging themselves.

They wouldn’t let me pay for anything either! Two dinners, lunch and Taronga Zoo admittance! I felt quite bad. I know I was the guide but it wasn’t that much trouble that they had to pay for me. The best I could do was buy them a round of drinks at the pub >.< Gaah! Must go to Japan and buy them lots of meals!

It was a great day-and-a-half with them. I had lots of fun with Mi too, going on an Ikea adventure and learning just what household objects can double as a hammer when assembling furniture (note: solid glass candlestick is best). Cheers for looking after me, mate.

But, Chidade, what about that other part of your weekend? The one you were really looking forward to but blew up in your face and left burn marks so bad that no amount of Vitamin E cream seems to make it better?

Ah, well. Actually, I'm feeling kinda liberated now. It was like the last few weeks in Japan when my eikaiwa’s bullshit had reached new heights and although I loved Japan dearly, I couldn’t stand working there anymore. One day, I had a realisation that I could resign and go home. I was due to go home in two months anyway. Just quit! You have no obligation to go through this bullshit, and it seems like they will do nothing to help you out no matter what your own dedication is. So quit! It was a fucking fantastic feeling to hand in my resignation.

The same applies here. So much stress and frustration, but I had the same realisation - I don’t have to put up with this. I have no obligation to go through this bullshit, and it seems like they will do nothing to help me out no matter what my own dedication is. So walk away. No more bullshit! It’s very liberating.

Those burn marks will be gone soon.

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i’ve joined the Rovers again since I came back home. Rovers, for those who don’t know, are Scouts, between the ages of 18-26. But rather than doing voluntary work and trying to get that next badge for Basket Weaving, Rovers are more concerned with drinking, shagging and generally socialising. Oh, there’s the badges and volunteer part too, no fear. I think that our Rover Crew actually does more for fundraising than the Joeys, Cubs and Venturers in our district combined.

Lately though, I’ve come to the conclusion that Rovers have one important function in our society - keeping it down to earth. Take our last two activities, for example. We had a Shonky Golf night, where we dressed up in the most geeky golf clothes we could find (P had outdone himself in tartan) then ran around town taking photos of us playing golf in the most unusual places we could think of.

My team went to the local bowling alley, the cinemas and the game arcade where we posed on the Dance Dance Revolution machines, for example.

Then this week we had a Scavenger Hunt with another Rover Crew. We were given a list of things we had to do and a video camera to prove we had done it. This to-do list included:

• Group hug a police officer (30 points)
• Get a grocery clerk to sing a well-known song on camera (30 points)
• Go to a petrol station and get 30 cents worth of fuel - with a receipt (40 points)
• Film your team in a stranger’s living room (70 points)
• Serenade people sitting outside a restaurant with songs that they request (20 points)
• Suffer narcolepsy while ordering food at a McDonald’s (40 points)

…and so on.

As you can imagine, a lot of these activities involved walking up to strangers at night time and doing unexpected things to them. It takes a lot of trust and goodwill on their part to put up with our larrikinism. As an aside, my team won. It may have to do with the fact that we were all females. Or maybe because we cheated a bit and asked everyone permission first.

But seriously, I find it amazing that people were still willing to let us do strange things to them - and on camera! They only had our word that we were scouts doing an activity that night. None of us were Muslim males - I wonder if it would have been less successful if we were?

My Dad has a theory that Australia is becoming worse than the Communist Poland he grew up in and ran away from. “Howard was planning this. First he took away our guns and now he’s slowly taking away our rights” - all while trying to make us cower in fear. Now, my Dad does have a tendency to be a melodramatic exaggerator on occasion. But when you hear stories about bobbies in Britain arresting children for damaging trees while making cubby houses - or the gated communities in the U.S. - or when you look at the security cameras on every street corner in the CBD…it was a relief to find that people could still be “relaxed and groovy” about young adults mucking about.

I’m the new Secretary of our Rover Crew. Not sure how I got sucked into doing that. But I think that I could start something that I hope every Crew would do when they have activities like the ones we’ve done. Just send out a letter - like a card or similar - saying thanks for putting up with us. Put the Rovers and Scouts emblems on it, have a forwarding address. Let people know that they were right to trust us and and thank you for doing so.

It doesn’t have to be anything formal and boring either. That bowling alley where we played Shonky Golf - they were so awesome to us. They even let us out the back so we could have a look at the machines that count and set up the pins. I’d never seen them before, so it was kinda exciting. We played golf next to those machines, too. They asked for copies of photos of the night. So, I’m designing a kind of poster with the photos and a thank you message from our Crew. I think I’ll do the same for the people we approached on the Scavenger Hunt night. Especially since they helped us win.

Rovers: Keeping the Community Relaxed and Groovy For Over 100 years!

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Something I can see becoming a long running series - I found a website called pinktentacle.com (and no, I wasn’t looking up tentacle porn when I found it) and it has some of the awesome randomness that you’ll find in Japan everyday in tasty, bite-sized blog morsels.

One of the recent entries was about this:

It’s a real underwater maibox, located off the shore of a small town called Susami, in Wakayama Prefecture, somewhat near to Osaka. It does actually get serviced. Mail is collected everyday. There’s no explanation of why it’s there or how it all started but I imagine it was a ploy to get Small Town Japan on to the map of the world. It worked! I want to see this!

I’d like to do more diving in general, and Japan has some awesome diving places. So, congratulations, Susami. This is the first entry on my Thing To Do Next Time list.

Link:
Pink Tentacle

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Today, Subway sandwich shops stopped giving out stamps, at least in the Australian stores. They’re replacing it with coupons, which are fairly good value but are less easy to come by. It’s a nostalgic day for me. I have one card left with 5 stamps on it, which will give me something like a $3 discount, but once it’s redeemed, that’s the end…

Sigh.

All those times where my Subway card fed me while I was penniless at university. I’m almost tempted to keep this card just for the memories.

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