Monday, March 9th, 2009
The urban jungle provides many moments of entertainment.
My morning commute is usually pretty dull. The only excitement I get is from the playlists I make every day, seeing if I can musically one up myself on my twenty minute journey. Somehow, I always manage it. You can find me plugged in, zoning out to whatever is blasting through my earphones, maybe reading a book at the same time and generally ignoring everything and everyone around me.
The other day though, some unexpected excitement came along. The Whispers had just come on my playlist and I was congratulating myself for such a stellar choice in sound when all of a sudden I could hear a kerfuffle. My first thought was, I should probably get some new earphones, I shouldn’t be able to hear shit, outside of the musical stylings of The Whispers. I looked up and saw everyone around me looking down the train carriage. I took my earphones out and heard some crazy screaming going on. Real, bloody curdling screams.
For a moment, horrible things flashed through my brain, like what if this woman was being assaulted or some dude was trying to rape her. I leaned forward and cautiously took a look at what everyone else was gaping at. I saw a woman, shouting at the top of her lungs at two girls who were standing near the doors.
“Get the FUCK away from meeeeeee!! Don’t you speak English bitch?!! Get your fucking hands off me! Get away from me!!!” She was screaming this over and over. “Get the fuck out of my face!” Everyone around me looked confused. And so they should have been. No one was in this woman’s face, except for maybe her imaginary friends. The two girls she was shouting at were looking increasingly uneasy.
See, here’s the thing: Canadians are so damn reserved that when they do actually lose their shit, I take a ridiculous amount of pleasure in it. It takes balls to be crazy in Canada, so I kind of applaud it. I just sit back and watch the show. Sure, it’s a little awkward watching someone who is clearly a sandwich short of a picnic, but it’s funny seeing peoples reactions to it.
Unfortunately, this was all going down just a couple of minutes before my stop. She had some powerhouse lungs and kept up her screaming non stop. When the train finally pulled into the platform, the girls she had been shouting at hightailed it down the platform and into another carriage. People were practically saying ‘run like the wind!’ as they dashed away from her.
Crazy lady was not deterred though. She got off the train and just stood on the platform to continue her nonsensical ramblings. I could still hear her when I was almost all the way out of the station. That high pitched, crazy wailing may never leave me.
If only these moments happened more often in Toronto to spice things up a bit. who knows, one of these days in the near future, I just may be the one doing the screaming for your entertainment. Feel free to sit back, enjoy and even make donations if you feel so inclined.
Tags: crazy bitches, toronto, trains
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Wednesday, January 30th, 2008
Everything shook, the tea in my mug rippled, Nads hit the deck. She was saying it was an earthquake but the words just weren’t registering with me. My jet lag had kicked in hardcore and I was in a daze. It wasn’t a very strong one and was over in about 30 seconds, but the whole thing was very strange.
I had about 4 days before I had to start my job training, so I threw myself, full force, into exploration. I’d spend my days getting lost, finding all these amazing stores completely by accident and getting used to being stared at everywhere I went.
I even went clubbing with my Japanese friend, Ruru, who’d come to England as an exchange student when we were about 16 and I’d kept in touch with. I couldn’t get over how the clubs in Tokyo played all the same hip hop as the clubs in the States and how everyone in there could mouth the words to every song, but when I tried to talk to them, they’d look at me like I had three heads.
I was having a blast.
The only downside at this point was my jetlag was a mother bitch. I’d be awake all night, sleep from 5am-9am and that was it. That was my sleep pattern for the next three weeks. Not very practical when your new job is to teach English and some days you’re so tired you can barely string two words together yourself.
My job training started Monday morning and I had to teach people that afternoon. Talk about throwing you in at the deep end.
With all the information that had been thrown at me, by the end of the day, I was dead on my feet. I couldn’t wait to get home and crawl into bed.
It was dark when I left work to catch the three trains home. The first train was no problem, but when I got to the second station, I couldn’t find one sign written with the English alphabet. I didn’t have a phrase book and had no idea how to ask for directions (not that I’d understand the response if I could). I stared at the signs in Japanese kanji all around me, hoping they’d somehow magically make sense. The station got busier, I got swept along in crowds, pushed and had my feet trampled on to the point where I just wanted to sit down in the middle of the station and cry.
I tried to pull myself together. I got my huge subway map out of my pocket and approached any and everyone, pointing at the station I was trying to get to, making random, indecipherable noises.
Eventually, I was pointed in the right direction and managed to make it back to my home station.
At least there, the streets were quieter and I could breathe a little easier.
As always, I thought a cup of tea would make me feel a whole lot better. On the walk home, I stopped at the grocery store to get some milk.
As I stood in the dairy section, catching a chill from the refrigerators, I felt like I was three years old. I couldn’t read any of the labels. I just wanted to buy skim milk. Why was this so hard?!
I’d been so carried away with my four days of fun that the practicalities of life in Japan (like work, travel and groceries) hadn’t really occurred to me. But now, reality (in the form of coming between me and a cup of tea) was biting me on my ass.
Four hours of sleep, a full day of flying-by-the-seat-of-my-pants teaching, that hideous journey home and goddamn it, I just wanted a cup of tea!
I stood there, looking at the 76 varieties of milk on offer to me, having no clue which one to get, and cried.
I had reached a new low: crying in the supermarket. As the only white girl in there, I was attracting enough attention as it was; the crying wasn’t helping. I fumbled around in my bag for a tissue while Japanese people looked at me like I was a psycho.
I grabbed whichever carton was closest to me, paid and went home.
After making the tea, I called my parents.
“I can’t even buy milk in this country!” I sobbed.
“Oh come on,” says Mama. “Stop crying over spilt milk – literally.”
I bitched about my day for a while and then Mama chimed in with her always profound words of wisdom: “Suck it up and deal with it bitch!” If I’d have been there, she would have slapped me across the face for added dramatic effect.
“Fair point Mama,” I said. Give the woman credit – she always knows the right thing to say.
In time, I sussed out the milk situation, mastered the trains and even became a mediocre teacher.
Tags: Japan, Teaching, trains
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Thursday, November 29th, 2007
When I was in Japan and heard about Onsens, I immediately wanted to go. Outdoor hot springs just sound so relaxing. Then my students told me you had to go nude. This threw me off somewhat. It seems very un-Japanese to get butt naked and frolic around in water. But whatever – I was down to nude it up.
So, on our day off, me and my roommate, Nads, decided to venture to an Onsen. Our new roomie had just moved in, so we invited her along because we thought nudity would make that whole ‘getting to know you’ thing easier.
We caught a train to Hakone, which is a couple of hours outside Tokyo. Once there, we found out the Onsen was up in the mountains so we had to catch a bus. We were told to wait in the middle of this bridge and the bus would be along in about 10 minutes. As none of us had planned on ending our lives that day, the ‘middle of the bridge’ instruction lacked appeal. But we walked there and waited. Cars whizzed past us as we huddled at the edge of the road (of course, there was no sidewalk). We started to think this was a cruel joke the Hakone natives played on foreigners.
Soon enough, the bus came. As if waiting for the bus wasn’t hazardous enough, the driver had a death wish and drove like Mel Gibson on a bad night up the steep, narrow, winding streets.
Ten minutes later, we arrived and got off the bus, a bit shaky from the wild ride we’d been treated to.
It was the equivalent of $5 for a whole day at the Onsen. On the way to the changing rooms, they gave us towels and robes. We stripped down, donned the robes and began to walk outside. An employee stopped us and started babbling. She was an older Japanese woman and we couldn’t understand a word she was saying. We looked at each other and shrugged, then realized she was speaking Portuguese. Great. As if the English/Japanese language barrier wasn’t enough to burst your brain. Yet the more she talked, the less the words mattered. It became clear she was trying to tell us we couldn’t wear the robes outside – we had to parade out there in the buff.
This woman became a kind of ‘house mother’ to us due to our complete and very obvious lack of knowledge of Onsen etiquette.
So, slowly we disrobed and readied ourselves for our nude debut.
Now, I’m not body conscious, but letting all my alabaster skinned goodness hang out in front of a bunch of Japanese women, who are bones with a little skin wrapped around them, was a little daunting. Nads and I (who are normal sized people, I might add) thought we’d look like a couple of heifers. (The new roomie was Asian, so her tiny frame would blend right in).
The towels they gave us were no bigger than dishrags. You could cover one nipple at a time, your groin or half a butt cheek.
Brave Nads led the troops to the great outdoors. Once outside, we were greeted with the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. It was nothing short of breathtaking. [Cue harp music] We were up in the mountains, pools of hot springs dotted about, trees and flowers everywhere to shade you, steam rising from the water and rays of sunshine peeking through the trees – it was like something out of a fairy tale.
After taking a moment to absorb all that, we got in one of the hot springs to relax. But then, something became increasingly hard to ignore – Japanese women have never heard of bikini waxing or a good ol’ Trim ‘n’ Shape.
‘Holy Jesus! What is going on with the pubes?’ I say to Nads.
‘I know!’ She says while averting her eyes from some woman’s offending jungle. We then hatch a plan to import Trim ‘n’ Shapes, become traveling saleswomen and sell them at Onsens.
We laze around at the Onsen for a few hours and then decide to take the bus back down to the town and have a look around. We explored and did a little souvenir shopping then got on a train that’d take us on a tour up in the mountains.
The train didn’t seem to go anywhere. It just zigzagged up and down the mountain. People were getting off at the stops as if this was their regular route. Every time someone got off, we debated; ‘what are they doing? Who the hell lives here? There’s nothing but hill and trees damnit.’ We put this down as another conspiracy theory to confuse the hell out of foreigners.
People neglected to tell us that Onsens make you very lethargic, so when we were on the mountain train to nowhere, it was all we could do to keep our eyes open. The higher we got, the more intense my headache. Since we didn’t know where the hell we’d end up, we thought we should get off at the next stop, cross the platform and go back down.
On the descent, there were a bunch of schoolgirls in the next carriage over. (Where the hell was this mountain school?) The girls saw us and started giggling and waving in true Japanese schoolgirl fashion. We waved back. Then they started rummaging around in their bags. A couple of minutes later, they had written a note and held it up against the window between the carriages.
“You are cute,” it said.
We found some paper and wrote back. “So are you.” This was greeted with fits of giggles and bows from the girls.
“Where are you from?” They wrote.
“England, Canada and Australia”
“Do you like Japanese food?”
This conversation went on for an age. We were scribbling on random scraps of paper (they were much more organized with a seemingly endless notebook specifically reserved for meeting random foreigners on mountain trains).
At one point, the whole of our carriage seemed to be involved in our note passing. There was a group of Chinese tourists sitting near us. As I was writing and my pen seemed to be running out, new roomie, who can speak Cantonese said ‘This guy says he’s got a pen you can borrow if you need one.’ Go team!
The never-ending train ride finally came to a halt and the schoolgirls took some pictures with us on their cell phones.
We boarded the train back to Tokyo, refreshed but exhausted. We hit Tokyo just in time for rush hour. Ahh, how we’d hate to miss that. While on the subway squished between an armpit and a briefcase, I fantasized about my new life as a Trim ‘n’ Shape saleswoman. I’d bring pubic jungle freedom to all and be hailed as a Japanese national hero.
Tags: Japan, Japanese chicks, nads, onsens, tokyo, trains
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