Bloody hell, it is HOT here! It's the kind of hot that doesn't let up,
the best you can hope for is to escape into a nice air conditioned room
for a while but that means that when you have to go back outside again
it's even worse. Saku is pretty bad but Tokyo would best be described
as fucking horrendous, not only is the town in a warmer area but it
also has loads of very tall skyscrapers which do a nice job of
preventing any breezes. Also since every office block and shop is
packed to bursting point with air conditioners the natural temperature
outside is boosted a rather significant number of degrees by the heat
from inside the buildings. The next time you hear from me I might exist
only as a puddle of Joey somewhere. In the nicest possible way.
A recent weekend in Tokyo for a birthday party resulted in me going to
see the Dancing Elvisses of Harajuku. I'd heard of these guys before
but had never been to see them, they hang out near a park in the area
of Tokyo that's particularly well known for it's collection of freaks
(for example the schoolkids who dress up in weird pseudo-goth stuff)
but the Dancing Elvisses are something else. They all dress up in
1950's rocker gear, complete with winkle picker shoes and insane
quiffs, and then block off an area of a car park with traffic cones and
dance to a mixture of rock'n'roll and the Grease soundtrack. At times
it seems as though their dance moves are choreographed, at other times
they seem to be making it up. Very strange, it was like the scene in a
1950's-set high school movie where the "bad kids" show up at the school
dance and start taking over and causing trouble. Or like watching the
Fonz in action in Happy Days. There was this amazing thing about it
where so much effort had gone into getting everything right but somehow
there was something just slightly wrong. I guess the fact that they
were in a park in Japan dancing to "Greased Lightning" with a group of
confused looking Western and Japanese tourists watching them might have
contributed to that. Anyway, further into the park we found some large
groups of (non-goth) schoolkids who were practicing either dance or
cheerleading routines. There were loads of them, all doing different
variations of basically the same routine and chanting along with it.
One of the groups noticed the big group of Gaijin sat nearby looking
confused and decided to give us a proper show, dancing, jumping and
shouting away about 20 centimetres from where we were. It was quite
funny to start with but after the second routine I was really hoping
for an escaped psychopath to show up and brutally murder the lot of
them. What was funnier were the groups of high school boys who were
hanging around trying not to look as though they watching the girls
dance. Eventually some of them started doing their own dance routines,
which were nowhere near as complex, but most just stood in big circles
shouting into each others faces. Like I may have said before when
talking about Japan, odd.
Comedy teeshirt slogan: "STAR! All girl feel at home on street or natural hearth."
We have a new Japanese teacher at my school so of course we had to have
a welcome party. This started off in a local bar where we had gone for
an all you can drink deal. After a couple of hours nature took it's
course and I was forced to visit the little English teacher's room, at
which point I discovered that the toilet signs were only in kanji. I
faced a dilemma: choose a door at random with a 50% chance of
terrifying some unfortunate Japanese girls or ask a student to
translate with a 100% chance of looking like a twat. Luckily I chose
the second option as it turned out that the door I nearly walked
through was the door to the ladies. Very inconsiderate I thought, there
are at least 10 people in the city who can't read kanji.
What with the insane temperatures we've been enjoying here, ice creams
are becoming the snack of choice and I saw what qualifies as the
strangest looking food since I arrived. Basically, a group of high
school kids were sucking on what looked like condoms filled with white
ice cream. I REALLY hope it was white ice cream. That's what I keep
telling myself. I don't dare ask what they actually are, this is Japan
after all...
Well, that's your lot, I've just worked a 11.5 hour day so I'm going to
go and get badger-rapingly drunk. Bye for now.
