My life in Japan

Here we go again…

I started a new job in April, and moved to Tokyo. I couldn’t stay at my school in Mito and other jobs were hard to come by. I wanted something with more responsibility and more pay, and thankfully that’s what I found.

I’m now working in Chiba, the prefecture that sits between and to the south of Ibaraki and Tokyo. So I’ve waved a tearful goodbye to my 3 minute walk to school and reluctantly welcomed in the dreary morning commute. It takes me about an hour and fifteen minutes door-to-door now, and I wake up at 5:45am every day. Yuck. It’s not actually that bad, I get to sit down on the main train ride, and it makes me feel better about having bought the Kindle that spent months sitting in a corner feeling neglected in Mito.

I live in Kitasenju, a curious area on the northeast side of Tokyo. It used to be barely more than a stopping point for people on their way in to the city, but now it’s a hustling little hub of activity that, like many places in Tokyo, merges the old with the new. The old comes in the form of a few of the people that walk the streets, and the traditional family-run shops on the east side of the station where I live. My apartment is a short walk from the station, the three-storey building nestled among a random selection of structures on roads just big enough to let through a single car. Other roads are too small even for that, the occupants of the houses that line the throughways letting the plants that crowd their facades spill over, sporadic substitutes for absent gardens.

My building is about twenty years old, a one-room place with a small bathroom and plenty of floor space. I think I’ve become quite used to living in Japan now, considering that I think I once had a bedroom not too much smaller in London. There are four rooms on each of the two top floors, with the landlord living underneath. Half of them are used as offices, and the building must have been designed as such; the huge in-ceiling aircon unit and whole wall of floor-to-ceiling windows tells me so. On my doorstep is a ham shop, a bike shop, a bakery and dry cleaners. The cleaners has a great white cat with really long hair, that often lies asleep on the front counter. There’s also what I think is a house, made almost completely of plastic sheeting and bits of rope. And of course, there are some other apartment blocks. Most of the buildings in my area aren’t that tall, and it gives the area a traditional, homey feel.

To the north is a large river. Some of you reading this might have travelled into Tokyo from Ibaraki on the highway. As you approach the city, when you first get sight of the sprawling grey skyscrapers, the highway turns off towards several bridges that take you into Asakusa and Ueno. That view of the river, with the multi-storey highways twisting alongside it like wrestling snakes, the houses on the far side sitting dangerously below water-level, and kids’ baseball games played out on the riverbank against a backdrop of intense traffic always made me feel good. And now I live there.

The new comes in the shape of Tokyo Denki (electric) University. It’s a huge building plonked right by the east exit of the station. The young people that now flock there each day have brought a variety of cheap chain restaurants with them. No matter the good intentions I have to cook dinner myself, walking back to my apartment after work is like trying to navigate through a minefield. Only instead of blowing myself into pieces, I give someone some money and get something delicious and convenient that I can eat. The straight street from the station takes about five minutes to stroll down, and has around thirty restaurants. Even before I step outside, there’s a bakery and a chicken shop (I want to tell you that it’s called “Mr. Chicken” but I might have just made that up) that sells the juicy bird in all manner of varieties. This is before I even go through the ticket barrier. I do love me some bread and chicken. English stations have so much to learn…

As well as all the restaurants, that road has the essential convenience stores, a few dry cleaning places, a Softbank (my mobile provider) shop, post office, drug store, supermarket, clinic (I think), a liquor store and a few izakayas. And a Baskin Robbins. And perhaps the best shop on the street, one that alongside the Japanese katakana has the words “MEAT SHOP” in big, confident letters on its awning. They know me well by now. It’s a marvellous road, and I enjoy walking down it after work every day. Now that the weather is picking up it’s becoming narrower, with stalls popping up and parked bicycles multiplying roadside, old people doddering along, a high school American football team carrying its equipment back from practice, and the incessant hair salon employees handing out leaflets that I take every day and put straight into my pocket, just to spread the cheer. Overhead the electric cables crisscross like jungle vines from one building to the next, and there are street signs that arch the width of the road, with coloured lights in the shape of stars that look just old enough to be cool.

The west side of the station has the big department stores, with the usual infinite and interchangeable boutique shops stuffed full of frills for girls, as well as a UNIQLO, GAP, ZARA and probably some other places that have their names all in capital letters. There’s a McDonald’s, Krispy Kreme and a bunch of stuff like that. There’s also a Hub (the main chain of English-style pubs in Japan. Probably, and I’m just speculating here, the best place to go if for some reason you want to meet a dick), but I haven’t been to it. I might check it out though at some point, the main thing they have going for them is that they tend to show live football, which I miss second only to the friends that I watched it with back in London.

I’ll stop there for now. I should have plenty of time at school over the next week as there are exams, so I’ll save it for later. Next I’ll tell you a little about saying goodbye at my last school and hello at this one.

Honestly, the memories of the trip to Korea have started to grow dim. I might keep this entry short, I’m still suffering from a bad case of January and I haven’t had the motivation to write anything. Until now…(no lessons at school all day).

The next day we got up bright and early and headed to Nami Island. It’s a cute little tourist attraction sitting within swimming distance off the coast of South Korea. We had to get a boat and buy a ‘visa’. I briefly worried that I didn’t have my passport, but of course it was just a show for the punters. And there many of them. Mostly couples holding hands, sharing scarves, matching gloves, riding horses feeding each other chocolates and strumming harps in unison. The usual Asian Christmas couplefest. The island was fairly small, with a scattering of shops and cafés among the tall trees and running water. There were fires dotted along the route, where people stopped to warm their hands. And there were some ostriches too, although we only saw one as we walked up, and I think the same one again on the way back (trying to take refuge in the bank while people clicked and shrieked a couple of feet away).

We visited the gift shops, had barbecue for lunch (not great, and more expensive) and generally walked around being freezing. It had snowed, which was nice. There were some strange statues towards the end of the island, the most memorable a big fat woman with huge drooping breasts, inflated lips and a massive grin, cupping one udder towards the mouth of her squat little boy. I didn’t go to check, but from the look on the face of the Korea kid who was wide-eyed and pointing, the boy had a significant penis. The whole place actually had a strange native American (can I say Indian?) feel to it, there were little pipey bands and stalls selling feathery jewellery. Maybe it’s where the South Koreans put those kinds of foreign people. There are probably a whole bunch of tourist islands, each with a different international flavour, staffed by the immigrants that were duped into moving there. I think I may have seen a sniper in the trees near the dock, no doubt one of many assigned to stop any island-dwellers reaching the mainland.

We walked until it seemed like we’d made the most of the fact it took us well over and hour to get there, and then got the boat back. And then got a taxi, the only way back to the station, after standing in line for over an hour. And then we waited for ages at the station to get a train. The last time is always the one freshest in the mind, but I think that might have been the coldest I’ve ever been. That night we went to the 63 Tower, so called because of its 63 floors. At the top was a viewing deck and an art gallery. On the way we accidentally stumbled across a huge fish market, I think the most famous one in Seoul. We were looking for a way to get across a huge, tangled highway to the skyscraper. We crossed a bridge, and then started down the steps on the other side. I was just thinking to myself “hmm, smells fishy” and keeping an eye out for a pile of rubbish, when the steps turned and we found ourselves looking down on a bustling market. It was getting late, but there were still people walking through and all manner of seathings on display.

We went to Burger King for dinner (cultured), and then found a bar in Hongdae. It was called Jazzsomethingsomething, and was at the top of a seven-storey building. Inside the chairs were deep and comfy, the lighting was low, the music was sufficiently Christmassy and it wasn’t expensive. An ideal place to smoke away a quiet Christmas eve, and we stayed there until after midnight to drink in the 25th. For our first drinks, T-Dog, Yoyo and I ordered cocktails; Death I, Death II and Death III. Surprisingly they weren’t that nice. We had some trouble getting a cab for the short journey home. Seoul’s drivers don’t like small distances, and they also don’t seem to like foreign people waving an address on a piece of paper. They would stop, take a look at where we wanted to go, and then drive off. We eventually found one, and I paid him several times the regular fare (but still less than the fare from my apartment to the station in Japan).

On Christmas Day we set off to meet a Korean friend of mine that I met in Tokyo. We met Ahram and her friend Hye Won at an area I forgot the name off, an interesting tourist market that wound several open floors around a courtyard, selling clothes, jewellery and bits and bobs. Ahram bought us all Korean pancakes, they were really good. We didn’t speak Korean, and they made a lot of effort to talk to us in English. Yoyo was feeling ill and one of the symptoms was an inability to show emotion. The girls were concerned so we went to find him some medicine. We did plenty of walking and stopping, taking refuge from the icy wind in coffee shops. The girls were very sweet, and they’d spent the day before planning places we could go, and several different menus for dinner. We took a stroll around the main palace complex, that we hadn’t visited earlier in the week. It was nice but freezing. We went in the museum. I don’t remember a lot about it other than it was warmer than outside. The only thing that stuck in my mind was a huge, ornate traditional coffin. I say it stuck in my mind, but actually I just remember thinking it was beautiful and I can’t describe it. Perhaps it had birds on it and some bright colours, and resembled a ship.

We headed off for dinner, and ate chicken snacks on the train. They were the shape of little chicken legs, hollows and crunchy. At the restaurant we ate pork. It was cooked on two big stone hotplates, three big slabs on each, with kimchi and vegetables. We drank Korean beer and soju (traditional Korean wine, I prefer it to saké), it was a nice time. The bill for six people was 100,000 Won, less than a tenner each. After dinner we walked along the busy streets, looking at shops until we found a bar for a few drinks. Ahram and Hye Won said they were just going to the shop, and they came back with a Christmas cake. They gave us little Christmas presents too, very kind. We went to Korean karaoke afterwards, and then said our goodbyes as we waited for a taxi. It was a really nice day. Although we were all far from our loved ones, we were all touched (not just by T-Dog in the back of the taxi) and felt it was a special Christmas.

The only other things of note we did, maybe, were go to the Seoul Tower and the DMZ (De-Militarized Zone between North and South Korea). Seoul Tower was good, it’s tall. The view is nice. It was cold. Tony and I had a romantic photo taken together. The end. On the last day we headed out to the DMZ. We had to get up early, we were picked up from the hostel by the tour company and taken to a Dunkin’ Donuts, where we sat with other foreign people (mainly from other parts of East Asia) waiting for the coach. Yoyo had gone out the night before, and he didn’t make it up to join us. We made jokes about how we were going to get snatched and taken to North Korea to be slaves. Hirono sounded like she was actually considering whether it might be true. When we got on the coach, our tour guide was an appropriately energetic woman called…let’s say her name was Nana. She told us stuff about North Korea, but it was hard to work out what was true and what wasn’t. I’m almost sure she was joking when she said they are uglier than South Koreans. I’m less sure whether or not she meant it when she said that the reason the tunnels we’d be seeing (dug by the North to try and invade the South) were so small is because North Koreans are practically midgets.

We visited a few places on the tour, and it was very interesting. The first was the Freedom Bridge, and rail connection between the two countries. It was once used as the point to exchange prisoners back in the day, I think 600 from each side (sorry for the vague detail, I’m writing this offline. Google it if you’re interested). It was cold and bleak. The land in between the two countries is a 2km strip each side of the border, and for the most part it looks barren. We watched a video when we got to the tunnel, about how the area in the DMZ is becoming a haven for wildlife. I didn’t see any evidence of that, but it might be true. The video also told the story of the four different tunnels the sneaky North Koreans had dug, and how there are probably many more. The South Koreans have drilled many boreholes far into the ground and filled them with water, so that any new tunnels can be discovered as they are being dug. Outside the tunnel gift shop there were a lot of young, angry looking army men smoking.

Next we went to a viewing platform. Photos were forbidden beyond a certain point, and soldiers were on hand to take cameras from people and make sure photos were deleted if they tried to take any. For a small fee you can look through the binoculars at the two villages nearby, one on each side. The land is actually controlled by the UN. Nana told us that the villagers in the North are actors, villagefolk paid to wear nice clothes and stroll around acting like they are having a jolly nice time. Imagine that for a job. It made me think about the videos that were doing the rounds on Youtube after Kim Jong Il died, of people weeping hysterically. The general reaction was “haha those Koreans are crazy!”, but I wondered how many of them were paid to behave like that, or worse, forced to.

The last stop was a station that stood disused and empty save for the tourists that flitted in and out and the soldiers that stood guarding nothing. It had cost millions to build, and an old man standing outside told me that the hope is that Korea will be united and the station will serve as a rail link all the way to Russia. There were tourist stamps available at a desk, and everyone was advised to buy postcards and get them stamped rather than use their passports. I used my passport. That’s how I roll. We got the coach back to a strange shop selling amethyst for American dollars, that was somehow linked into the tour. We left and went our own ways, Tony and Hirono to the cinema and me to do some shopping. The next day we got up early and headed back to Japan, tired but happy. It was comforting to once again see the familiar writing that I hardly ever understand.

The time back in Japan since then has passed fairly unremarkably. New Year’s Eve was very nice, I went out with Yoyo and my girlfriend, and we were joined by Akira. I’d just like to take this opportunity to say that I have a girlfriend. I’ve met a couple of girls since being in Japan, but I never talk about that kind of thing so as to maintain some semblance of privacy on a blog that can be read by anyone. Most of the people I keep in touch with already know, plus, who wants to read about it? However, my current girlfriend has become convinced that the real reason I never mention her is that I have hos all around the globe (all of whom are avid readers of my blog, of course) and to talk about us would cause the international playboy lifestyle I’ve fashioned for myself to come crashing down. So there you have it. This disappointing lack of trust doesn’t end there, however. She’s constantly finding strands of her own hair and asking me who has been in my apartment. The other day there was a little bit of fat from chicken I’d cooked left on a plate. She thought it was onion. Innocuous enough, right? Not in my wonderful princess’s head. Her though process went like this: Onion on the plate -> Girls don’t eat onion on dates because of the smell -> A GIRL WAS HERE. Boy. The only reason I’m not in and out of hospital every week is because I don’t know how to say “I’ve got severely broken balls. Again.” in Japanese.

So New Year…we met at the station and drank a bottle of sparkling wine by the natto statue. Then we went to purikura. My girlfriend claimed it was for young people and that she hadn’t been for many years, but then giggled like a schoolgirl. I’m not ashamed to say that I like purikura. It’s fun. Afterwards we headed to an izakaya, and Akira called and came to join us. From there we headed to the 500 yen bar. It was packed, and by the time we got our drinks it was time to head to the Art Tower for the countdown. We know the bar owner well so we took our drinks with us, and got there just in time. My girlfriend works at the Art Tower, so afterwards she had a quiet word with someone and we got to go up the tower itself. It was a special little thing to do, and the four of us looked out over the city, our little city, to start 2012. We had hoped to see the fireworks by the lake, but I think they only lasted two minutes. We headed back down to the 500 Yen bar, and some beefy bald guy was inviting people to writing on his head. So we did. Then we went for some karaoke. It was the kind where you stay for hours but it’s suddenly time to leave, a lot of fun. Although there were only four of us it was a night I’ll remember for a long time.

Since then…school. I’ve updated my CV and have started looking around for jobs. I had an interesting conversation recently with one of the other teachers at my company. Some of the senior guys in the Board of Education are also senior members of Mito’s main church. So with the new teachers that are replacing us (who have no experience, and don’t know any Japanese as far as I know) coming mainly from Oklahoma Christian University, there’s a definite evangelical feel to the whole thing and I’m not sure if I like it. Native English teaching in Japan has a history of ties with religion. I’ve actually met some of the people over from Oklahoma this year, and in fairness they seem very nice. I just feel a bit bitter about the whole thing really, most of the people that are losing their jobs are good teachers and their schools are happy with them. It’s not going to benefit anyone (other than perhaps the Christian contingent…money for the church? Money for the university?) to change things up. It’s not as though we didn’t expect our company might lose the contracts for next year, but this isn’t a competitor that’s offered lower prices. The principal of one of the other teachers at my company told the BoE that he is happy with him, and the school doesn’t want another teacher. But the BoE just replied that there’s nothing that can be done…it sucks. I’d be very curious to know the reasoning behind it.

Okay, rant over. That wasn’t so short was it. No idea when I’ll write another update. Perhaps after UFC Japan at the end of February. Looking forward to that. U S A! U S A!

The day after school finished T-Dog, Hirono, Yoyo and I headed off to South Korea for a week. On the flight over I watched the film of the American financial crash from 2008 (is it already over three years ago? Time flies). It was good, and eye-opening and I just about managed to get to the end.  The flight from Tokyo to Seoul takes around three hours, but every announcement is given in Korean, English and Japanese so it really cuts into viewing time. I’ve never been a big student of history, but it made me wonder if I’ve become the kind of person that only learns about things that happen in the real world when the film version comes out a year or two later. Seoul airport was impressive, modern and spacious. We headed down to the trains via a long escalator, and on the right was a little girl shuffling around an indoor ice rink.

The trains, like everything else in Korea, are very cheap (compared to Japan anyway). The Yen is very strong at the moment, and Korean money is so small. When I changed money they actually handed me a bound wad of notes: 1,000,000 Won. I was a millionaire! To get to most places in the city it costs 1,500 Won (about 85p I think). But you get a plastic bankcard-sized ticket, and you get 500 Won back by exchanging it at your destination station. The trains might be a little more spacious than in Japan, but it’s hard to tell. It could just be an illusion caused by the way that every tiny space isn’t taken up by an advert.

The hostel we stayed at was also very cheap, about £80 for a week. The four of us were sharing our own ‘family’ room. I think I was the dad, but I don’t know what that makes everyone else. The heating is much better than in Japan, heated floors! So I was rarely too hot or too cold. Just comfortable. I’m guessing that it’s not practical in Japan because of the frequent earthquakes, but if someone told me that it was for another, sillier reason, I wouldn’t be surprised. At the moment back in Mito I’m sleeping in a hoody and I have to put the aircon on an hour before I get out of bed so I don’t die. The people running the hostel, Konda and Panda, were cousins, and two really nice guys. Konda studied in London and spent months cycling around Europe. He was a graphic designer but returned to Korea with a desire to do something that involved meeting people. I think he’s found his calling.

The area we were staying in, a short walk from Hongdae (the main bar and club area of Seoul), is home to a lot of taxi companies and drivers. So there were some very cheap restaurants along the main road. Once we’d dumped our stuff we headed to one of them with a guy from the hostel, Marcel, to get some food. He spoke Korean but he was hungover and therefore pretty useless. I can empathise with that. The food was good; plates of pork, plates of spiced vegetables and stuff, and you put them in a lettuce leaf and eat. After dinner we went into Hongdae to get some drinks. We ended up in Ho Bar, one of about 10 in the area. I actually really enjoyed it, as it’s the kind of place that you don’t find in Japan – loud dance music, open tables, cheap drinks – but it’s not the kind of place that I’d go if I lived there. It’s not the kind of place that I went in London. I’d say it’s a good starting point for a tourist in the area though. We left after a couple of drinks and wandered around looking for someone else to check out. We ended up in another Ho Bar.

This one had three floors, and after a drink on the third we went down to the second. We were sitting across from two groups of people, two guys and two girls, and four girls. Yoyo and Marcel were interested in talking to them, so Hirono went over and said hello. She’s great like that. Pretty soon we were all sitting together, communicating in English, Japanese and Korean. The two guys were from Hokkaido in Japan, I think the two girls with them were Japanese too, and the other girls were Chinese and Korean. We drank tequila and then all headed off to a club together.

The club was quite big (I think) with a couple of floors, playing hip hop. I found Marcel at the bar, he was fumbling in his wallet. “Can you give me 10,000 Won?” he asked. “Sure” I replied. Just under £7 I think. He bought a bottle of tequila. The bar was packed, but the barmaid moved some people over and we sat down. I felt like a rich man, I was having a great time. I don’t know how long we were there for, but later on one of the girls that we arrived with stumbled over and sat down next to me. She was pretty drunk and was slumping on the bar. I did my best to prop her up and make sure her dress was covering where it was supposed to, and carried on drinking.

After a little while a couple of foreign guys came over and stood at the bar, on the other side of the girl. I don’t remember the entire conversation but it started with the more muscled apelike of the two saying “I’m taking this girl” with a sneer and me saying “no you’re not”. And it ended in a fight. The bar was packed with people and there wasn’t much room to do anything. When I eventually stood up Yoyo was there trying to stop any trouble. So he got punched first and then it all kicked off. I don’t think even threw a punch, just got hit in the eye and then the back of the head. If you get punched in the back of the head there’s a good chance you weren’t winning. I did manage to grab someone and get them in a front choke, but it could have been an innocent bystander for all I know, ha. The strange thing was that when it was happening, all I remember amid the blur of people is that I was laughing. It was the same laugh that I had the time I was sliding down the cliff towards possible death. Afterwards I was grinning too. And it wasn’t the kind of “something bad just happened, but I’m going to try and put a brave face on it” kind of grin. Maybe this society of ours has taken such a toll on whichever part of my brain is responsible for making me excited that it takes something dramatic to wake it up.

Yoyo tells me that the other guy swung a bottle at him, at which point some Koreans jumped in. Pretty soon the bouncers were involved and we were all taken outside. The two guys were across the street, the ape was shouting rude things and the bouncers were between us and telling them to go away. I turned to put my jacket on, at which point one of them ran over and punched me in the back of the head! More grinning. I had no adrenaline rush at all, which must have been down to the tequila. In the past even the threat of violence has been enough to sober me up. We went back inside and got our things, I made sure to retrieve the nice scarf I’d been given for Christmas. It wasn’t the best way to start the holiday, but it could have been worse. I tried to do the right thing, and I think the guy was just one of those assholes that likes to start fights. Honestly though if I hadn’t had so much to drink we probably could have avoided the violence.

Day 2. Woke up. Puked. Went back to bed. A bit of a lame way to spend the day, but as Chinny said to me last summer when we were discussing our strengths and weaknesses “Ye’re useless on a hangoover, pal” (then he lunged at me with a sharpened biro, luckily T-Dog was there to restrain him). After we got home the night before I sort of sleepwalked. I vaguely remember having a dream, that coincided with needing to go to the toilet, and I’m certain there was a good reason that Yoyo woke up to find me trying to undo the latch to the window so I could get out…twice. He asked me who I was, where I was, and suggested I that use the door. I half woke up and did that. A similar thing happened before when I went to Corfu a few years ago. We spent one evening in the disgusting strip of bars where English people like to go to meet English people, just to see what it was like. The kind of places where they give you free drinks with your free drink. After we got back to the resort, my ex-girlfriend awoke in the night to the sound of someone knocking at the door. Seeing that I wasn’t laying next to her, she went to open it. It was me, naked. No idea where I’d been. Anyway…my phone was the only one of ours that worked in Korea, so I couldn’t get in touch with the others to go find them when I eventually surfaced late in the afternoon. And I felt like it was too cold to go wandering by myself.

The next day we headed out to see some of the famous palaces in Seoul. The first one we went to had a big statue of a guy. I told Hirono another lie. I should point out that my lies start as jokes. Silly, obvious jokes. But when Hirono says “Really?!” and I say “Yeah” and she believes me, they become lies. So it’s kind of her fault.

Hirono: Who is that?
Me: That’s Sum Big Dong. 
Hirono: Really?
Me: Yeah. He’s one of the founding fathers of Seoul. He had over 50 children.
Hirono: He must have had a lot of wives.
Me: He did.
Hirono: Which one do you reckon he loved the most?
Me: None of them.

I told Tony what I’d said, and he insisted that she didn’t believe me. Until she started telling him about Sum Big Dong. Yoyo brought a mirror with him (ha!), I told Hirono it’s because they don’t have mirrors in South Korea. “Really?” she asked. “Yeah. Maybe it’s a cultural thing” I replied. “Or perhaps because of the government” she suggested. “Yeah you might be right” I said. When we got our train tickets one morning, she got a yellow one and the three of us got a red one. I told her it was because the touch-screen machine can tell from the temperature of your fingers whether you’re a man or a woman. Red for men, yellow for women. Of course she believed me. Bless her.

The palaces were really nice, some of the buildings rival the temples in Kyoto. What I liked most what the nice stonework, on the buildings and the walls that surrounded many of them, something that you don’t get in Japan because of the earthquakes. I reckon they should use more stone in Japan, even if it needs repairing now and again. Find a temple in Japan and read about it and it’s probably been burned down at least twice anyway. Wood. For lunch I ate meat sushi, it’s raw and they cook it with a blowtorch at the table. It was tasty but there wasn’t enough of it. We took lots of photos but my battery ran out. Yoyo’s ran out soon after, before we got to the royal palace, so we cut the sightseeing short and went shopping. Hirono and Tony went off to do something together, so Yoyo and I strolled around the shops. When we got into the station to go home, we say the guys from the club two nights before. The ape walked over with the same annoying sneer on his face. “You wanna go again?” he asked me. I told him I didn’t want any trouble, and he asked me again. I sighed and called Yoyo over, while he did the same with his friend. “Are we cool?” Yoyo asked as he walked over. They shook hands. We had a slightly awkward conversation, the guy said he was drunk and we caught him at a bad time. I said I was too. Turns out they were from New York. Dicks. We said bye. That time I did get an adrenaline rush. I’m glad we saw them during the day, if we’d run into them again at night it probably wouldn’t have been so civil. That guy… Dick.

We went back to the hostel, and I think I stayed in that night as my kidney or liver or whatever it is was hurting and I didn’t want to drink again. A few of us watched a film called ‘The Chaser’ (spoiler alert!), it was pretty good. It’s about this man who murders callgirls with a hammer and chisel and buries them in the front garden. He takes a young mother back to his house and only half kills her before getting arrested and released on lack of evidence. The film unfolds against a backdrop of her trying to escape from his place, and she finally does, making it to the shop down the road. Just as the killer is returning home…he finds her in the shop and gets a hammer. The protagonist (current pimp and former policeman, having gone through some changes during the film and gradually becoming a better man), at the same time, is running through the streets somewhere nearby frantically looking for her. The hammer is raised…cut to our would-be hero running…back to the dim light in the backroom of the shop shining on the metal…expecting, hoping for our man to appear and save the day…the hand to appear from behind and grab the hammer, still the arm…but he doesn’t. The woman gets brutally murdered and when the would-have-been hero arrives at the scene there are police everywhere. The end. Actually there’s a bit more, but that’s the gist of it.

I’ll leave it there for now, more soon!

STILL TO COME: A trip to Nami Island, Christmas Day in Seoul, and a journey to the De-Militarised Zone between North and South Korea. And probably some tedious reflections on my life back at school at having to find another job come April. Can’t wait!