scary bus

28th of Dec, 2002ce* in: diary

Awoke under Kotatsu with my legs thoroughly roasted. Didn’t wake up the other guys around the table as they were probably too drunk to understand where they were anyhow! But I did turn off the Kotatsu so they didn’t roast to death. We snuck out of the front of the house and out on to ‘a road’… right quite lost now, must find the main road, probably the biggest problem in Japan is the way roads are laid out or rather the way they are sign posted.

Finally made it back to Yuki’s house and got cleaned up, fell asleep under another Kotatsu until late into the afternoon then continued on wards back to Tokyo, as our final destination is a town some 8 hours by bus. My girlfriend locked her keys inside her bag somehow, so we had that to contend with - plus the fact that we were lugging 4 huge bags on wheels!

After wisely going to the huge coin lockers in Shinjuku station we could continue our separate paths. Me to buy a nice digital camera for my friend (with my friends money, which I could have used for numerous activities) while my girlfriend went off to collect the tickets for our bus journey. Theres some fucking fantastic cameras about at the moment but all of them were just out of my reach. I did however manage to pick up a Nikon Coolpix 2500 with a 64mb card within my budget (only just), it runs in English and has a real zoom factor of x3 plus a footprint of 2.0 mega pixels… those specs may seem wonderfull but are just a drop in the ocean over here - most new cameras are tiny little toys but take a footprint of 4.0 mega pixels, and have an operating system to rival most PCs!

The bus we travelled on was rather odd. As long as a National Express but instead of the usual 2 seats on each side that don’t recline very much this bus has rows of 3 seats one on each side and one in the middle and they recline fully (to crush the knees of the person behind).

Lights off, front window curtains down, total darkness.

Karaoke!

27th of Dec, 2002ce* in: diary

Not slept a wink since I left Cornwall on Thursday evening, really starting to show; from the stale sweat clinging to my balls, I am a mess! (I’ll continue to mix past and present tenses thank you very much) Hung around in Narita airport for a bit while my girlfriends flight fell out of the sky.
This really felt odd, like I wasn’t in Japan at all, it was my fourth time to arrive at Narita and somehow the clear vinyl wipe clean surface image I have of Japan is in need of a clean.

To my amazement I was able to speak Japanese ‘fresh from the bag’! Seeing how I didn’t really try to learn ever, not even while I lived in Tokyo for a year and even the six months I’ve spent doing practically nothing, it shocked me when the words flew outta my mouth! So I started talking at any opportunity until the Japanese bird fell from the sky and we started conversing in Englo Lingo. Always ironic, story of life one must belive.

A good six hours laters later and we had jumped the train out past Tokyo to the land of Karaoke & sex pubs, Kanagawa!

Met up with our old friend called Yuki and her brother at their nicely situated house, between SagamiOno and Machida… plenty of Convini (convenience stores), FamiRa (family restaurants) and KaraokeYa (foolish places to sing). By this time I was almost dead! My body had practically given up so when we had to spend another 5 hours waiting for Yuki’s New Zealander boyfriend to finish work (so we could all go to Karaoke together) I just went into a deep trance like sleep in the middle of a FamiRa. Possibly shouting, mumbling, dribbling and getting spontaneous erections within this trance, its always funny to wake up in a packed restaurant feeling highly self conscious.

Eventually the time came when we could depart, bound for Karaoke and the possibility of meeting some new faces. We drank, sang, drank, sang, drank and used about 3000 yen a piece - thats about 15 GBP - for the 4 hours or so of utter joy! Karaoke could never work in a western country, well not in the way it does over here. (click here for information on Karaoke).
We descended on a convini at about 6am buying up stocks of beer and food to be consumed at a Malaysian mans house, he is the boss of this New Zealander… we all fall asleep in front of the telly with our legs under Kotatsu (under heated table).

Japan bound

26th of Dec, 2002ce* in: diary

After the insanely boring bus journey from Cornwall to London Heathrow, arriving at 5am, I sat and tried to stay awake the long 8 hours before my flight departed. As it was the day after Boxing Day there wasn’t the usual travel options to hand. The bus journey was in some ways better than travelling by train, as I would have. The major downside to all travel is that I can’t sleep a wink!

When flight check in time eventually came I wondered over to Terminal2 and right into the most shite system I’ve ever had the misfortune to be controlled by! Virgin had taken all the destinations and flight numbers out of the millions of check in points held to the virgin empire and instead manned four or five said points with the objective of checking in any passenger for any flight within the day!

Needless to say, the queue grew to gargantuan proportions spilling into other and out of their own slices of ground to sky domination.

Thirty minutes before my flight and two hours into resting a book upon my vaguely moving trolley, I was checked in. ‘oh you better hurry’ was the information uttered by my check in attendant seemingly oblivious to the fact that their incompetence was causing that days entire flight schedule to be grounded… the check in point next to me left a customer waiting while he casually wondered off returning some ten minutes later, two coffees in hand.

On my tickets it says ‘doors are locked 30 minutes before take off’.

My flight left in approximately twenty minutes, I still hadn’t been through the fake gold watch detector, my luggage still un scanned for sex toys, dead animals and explosive lighters.

Sod it! I bought time by running the 300 meters to the gate, as I just wasted another 10 minutes buying tacky London souvenirs to pay off my girlfriends family in Japan. As I got to the gate, and produced my boarding pass, the flight attendant asked me if I could speak any Japanese. ‘Can you announce a final boarding message for us? In Japanese?’ - I didn’t have much of a clue how to go about it so I declined, although on contemplation I could have done it.

Found my tiny seat on this new Virgin skybus sitting next to probably the most hated breed on earth (for myself); a female Japanese artist studying in London… so at least I didn’t have to talk very much! The entire contents of the seat sack… what can I call that place pushing into my legs laden with stuff? Anyhow, the entire contents of that place was covered in molten chewing gum. Given the opportunity to move I declined as sitting in the center of the place just ain’t my thing man. One vastly redeeming factor was the v.port system that was embedded within the back of each seat! Everyone could watch movies on demand… very cool. (the whole system ran on linux and crashed countless times, a right botch up. Half of the screens were in linux dos for the entire journey.)

As the speedy flight was drawing to a close, I treated myself to a trip to the toilet. Fantastic spaces, these new Virgin toilets on both their planes and trains… certainly enough room for mile-high club antics! It was rather dark inside but I could make out some graffiti scrawled into the plastic walls; ‘Virgin staff stole from me’ it said. Make up your own mind as to what that might mean!

burnt finger

19th of Dec, 2002ce* in: diary

Wednesday and the last day of christmas shopping, at Truro.
Although I didn’t go to Truro for that reason, I was there on bussiness! After spending all night and morning finishing off the final samples for flyin times new site.

When I got to Truro after much wrangling in a town called Liskeard (some 40 miles away) unfortunatly the people who were meant to see the site in flyin time’s main outlet shop were… not home. No problem, many more things to do. Met up with a cool programmer guy who gave team dadako some work for a disability standards compliant site.

Got very drunk. Noticed how many of my friends drive when they are drunk (slightly worrying)

As I was talking to some friends of mine in a bar, my eyes suddenly rolled in the back of my head and lapsed into a much needed deep sleep. They huffed and they puffed but could not reawaken me! Eventually Damon (you’re rumbled!) took his lighter and proceeded to try and cook my finger in an attempt to rouse me!

Dazed and confused, I rose. There after I continued in my misshaps, falling asleap while waiting for my train, again on the train… like that till I arrived at my door.

oh fuck! christmas is coming! look out