hasty memories

i think i left yall off at the passing out phase of the first nite. wells, let me tell ya, we endured some tedious lectures over the next two days, some which people atcually tried to make entertaining. the timetable was pretty full of this "your going to be doing a job" biz, enough to make you beg for centrelink again. took to waking a bit earlier, getting breakfast in before the other few hundred hangovers roused, then going out for walks around shinjuku. unfortunately the timetable meant that i was kind of locked to 30min walking from the hotel where all our lectures were happening. took some random tokyo alleys, past some fairly dishevelled apartments, play with a stray cat, went limp in the train station currents, twas mostly dazzled by being there.

went to a "rock" bar on monday night with most of the hyogo crew. twas apparently
some bonding exercise. did shots with with the bartender, requested plenty of tracks i embarrased myself to, went to eat (somewhere?) and was quite sozzled. i dont know if you could be a drunk in tokyo. double to triple vision with all the neon and people... twas quite a stumble back to the hotel. the next day involved heavy bursts of lightheadedness and pain...

bailed on the tuesday afternoon events to sit in shinjuku park. found a quiet spot between the bums, suits and breakdancing kids to dehydrate in the afternoon swelter. took a bit of a pass out back at the hotel, endured stupid questions during a prefectural meeting (felt like asking the poor sod dealing with the idiocy what the square root of 49 was).

hadf to head to the austrlian embassy that night, but they put on crownies and decent red for us. took a taxi back to the hotel, sat in the sky lounge and got fairly hammered with a brissie gal. last looks at the tokyo skyline before passing out.

was well cranky by the wednesday (re: hangovers, aeroplanes and generally very little sleep for 3 weeks). then it was all action. bus to tokyo central station. was allowed to kill 40 minutes there, so i ended up getting lost and needing to get back to the meeting spot. dont run in japan unless you have immediate access to showers and clean clothes. made some poor girl on the shinkansen endure my cigarette/sweat stench for an hour before i stood inbetween two smoking carriages for the remaining two and watched honshu bleed by at 300kms/hr.

next stop, shin-osaka!, where after another quick cigarette the hyogo gaijin massive get shoved onto buses to take us to the aforemention yashiro. next did we expect our reception....

we are assigned a number. outside the yashiro complex we assemble single file according to a number previously designated. in groups of ten we are led past our long lost luggage, then into The Room.

there are couches, but these are all occupied by japanese. our single file is strung out along the walls of the room and they are just STARING at us, whispering to each other while we sweat in out professional attire. the girl next to me mutters "they're STARING at us" and my reply is "uh, YEH, just look out the fucking window". i felt like they were getting us cheap cuz some kid had already removed us from the packet.

eventually our name were called, some happy japanese teacher stood up and collected his bundle and drove it back to its new home. my stop was the my high school first, sitting in the admin office while people dashed around me, asking questions i lacked a second language to answer so i just sat, looked as bewildered as possible, and signed where they pointed. next stop was home. plenty of fossicking about there with the vice principal, my predecessor, a few teachers, neighbours and a dude from the gas company. eventually all but my pred left (he stayed for the next few days) at which point i spent the next ten minutes swearing. twas the msot bizarrely traumatic thing ive enduring thus far in the narrative of richard.

and so concludes the getting here story. the cicadas are dying as autumn kicks in, and impending typhoons have decided that tokyo would be tastier.

apologies for the scattershot recollections... more recent stories soon (maybe the all you can drink on the top of a department store building, or the local autumn festival, or the being bored shitless at work while the students are still on summer holidays?).

kisses