As I sit here drinking my free ice milk coffee from the enormous vending machines near the netcafe entrance and battle with this semi-broken keyboard littered with hiragana and katana and " where @ should be, I think I have found a nice analogy for my experience with Japan thus far. It is a country that at the same time manages to be both extremely helpful and convenient yet confusing, frustrating and lonely for the gaijin (foreigner.) (I guess those two sentences also give an indication of just how much of a minefield of bad grammar and poor spelling this blog is going to be.)
I'm still toying with ideas as to how I'm going to organise these postings, so it may change in the coming weeks.
[You:re going to have to endure : instead of ' and other erroneous characters, I cannot be bothered trying to learn to touch type on a new keyboard layout just yet.]
So, I:m living in Naka-ku which is, as far as I can gather, the ward that includes most of downtown Hiroshima. My appartment is small (duh) by Austrlian standards, but much larger than I had expected. It:s going to take a while to get used to paper (literally) thin walls and having no oven. The shower is huge (although the shower head is annoyingly low for 187cm tall people) and the bathtub is an enormous couldron like beast that I:ve not wanted to try out yet for fear that I will go crashing through the 9 floors below mid-bath.
My housemates are both very nice guys. Lee, 21, from Adelaide and Wes, in his 40s (I assume) from Toowoomba. They haven:t been home heaps, since they both work 38-odd hours a week. Lee did spend his day off and parts of other days showing me around which was really helpful. I speak the most Japanese out of the three of us (which isn:t much) but Lee has started lessons and I:ll go along too once I start work next week.
This is all sounding a bit dull so far... I think its going to take me a while to get the hang of what to mention and what to leave out. I have to keep in mind that my audience here on this blog includes my grandma, parents and other relatives, as well as friends and fellow japanophiles.
Lets rewind and try diary style for a bit...
The flight was pretty poor, 1st leg MEL to KUL was filled with noisy babies and hopeless dated films so I ended up watching various bits of Good Night and Good Luck 4 times. Malaysia Airlines had great staff though, and reasonably tasty food. The 2nd leg was staffed by some of the most gorgeous Japanese girls I:ve ever seen, even after being in Hiroshima for 4 days. I finally got off to sleep around 3am but was woken at 5am with an "OHAYO GOZAIMASU!" and the worst breakfast I:ve ever seen.
Osaka Kansai airport felt like a space terminal and since I:d only had ~5 hours sleep since Monday morning it felt a thousand times stranger. Before I realised I was through customs and standing in a huge crowd of Japanese people in the international arrivals. My first "wtf" moment of the trip came soon after when I attempted to do number twos only to be confronted with an odd trench in the ground where a toilet should have been. "Mmmm fuck that, I can hold it" were my thoughts, I believe.
I met up with the Nova staff, a very chipper British chap, and was pointed in the direction of the local train to Shin-Osaka where I would transfer to the Shinkansen (bullet train.) I got to test out my Japanese for the first time on the girls working at the Starbucks in Shin-Osaka. They greeted me in broken English and when I replied with Japanese they all began giggling and covering their mouths with their hands. Transaction completed, giggles and all, I waited for my coffee in the designated area. Despite my zombie-tiredness I did notice that the girls making the coffee kept peering around the machine at me. I took a stroll through Shin-Osaka's shops/market area and saw such sights as a Pokky the size of a baseball bat for ￥1,900.
The platform for the shinkansen to Hiroshima was a good km or so long. I had to walk the full length of it to get to the unreserved seats and in doing so passed about 300 schoolkids all waiting to board. Every single one of them stared at me and the more adventurous started yelling out "HARRO! HARRO!" while waving and grinning. I gave a group of them my best "G'day mate" and got a huge round of laughs for my troubles.
The shinkansen ride to Hiroshima took 1hour55minutes exactly (like they said it would). Those trains are seriously impressive machines, so incredibly smooth and fast. Sadly most of the journey was through incredibly long tunnels but the glimpses of country side that I got were gorgeous.
A Hiroshima Nova employee met me at Hiroshima station and escorted me by tram to my appartment. The tram conductor was this wonderfully camp bloke in his 20s who delighted at my confusion with the ticket machine (you pay to alight not to board). For a city of less than 1.5million people (from what I:ve read) it sure does feel far bigger than Melbourne. I guess that:s largely because the Japanese build up not sideways. Naka-ku is full of buildings well over 10 stories tall and all sorts of flashing lights. It wasn:t until my third day that I discovered the entire underground section of the city that contains even more shops and walkways.
I spent most of my first day walking around the city centre, getting stared at, failing to find a single shop with towels for sale and buying very cheap alcohol from the delightful old couple that run a small shop opposite my appartment building. ￥1000 for a 6pack of 500mL "Draft One" (5% alc) cans, awesome. Relaxing on the couch in front of a Hiroshima Carp vs someone Orix baseball game while downing those beers definitely put a grin on my face.
I:m going to upload this now as this netcafe machine is starting to do very strange things... this better work!
