I said, Effortless Segue!

(just forget about the last paragraph in the previous post, ok?)

Speaking of small, I have seen a glimpse of hell. The walls of the subway stations are covered in tiny tiles, maybe 9" tall by 3" wide. They line the cavernous stairwells and cover the hundreds of metres of hallway and platform. What's so hellish about tiles, you may ask.

Some poor bugger had to grout them all.

There must be at least fifty kilometres of grouting in each station. There are about twenty stations on the Sendai subway line.

There are some larger grout lines which at first led me to speculate that massive sheets of tiles had been prefabricated and then just rolled out and glued into place, held together by some kind of vulcanising agent. However, closer inspection revealed not rubber but actual ceramic cement. It was indeed all done by hand. Centuries of Buddhism paid off as teams of Zen artisans prepared to grout the distance between Auckland and Christchurch.

You might be thinking that the technologically-minded Japanese had some kind of Grouting Robot designed and constructed for the purpose of tiling their subway stations. You may be harbouring notions that Japan is filled with glittering machines of wondrous design and barely-fathomable purpose, making the lives of their masters easy and leisure-filled.

This is not the case. Japanese high technology is retarded.

My Internet connection has to be confirmed every time I wake up my computer. It constantly suffers little glitches because it is PPP (Point-to-Point Protocol) rather than DHCP (Doesn't Hack off Customers Persistently). Today, for no reason, it decided that my flatmate and I couldn't both use the Internet. Tomorrow, who knows? Maybe we'll have to build a small shrine on top of our network router.

The largest purveyor of technology in Sendai is a place called Yodobashi Camera. It is a truly monstrous department store, surrounded by tales of adventure in its labyrinthine pathways. It sells all manner of shiny electronic wizardry. Except, of course, for the device I needed to actually make my computer go. Japanese power sockets are two-slot affairs, completely incompatible with our three pins. In the store there was a huge wall of power adaptors. Surely among them was the one I needed? Well, no. A million adapters for Japanese power-users to take with them to other countries; the reverse situation isn't even considered. I had to go to the Apple Store and buy a part, only half of which I actually needed. Yeesh.

Our shower gives us unconditional hot-water affection. Our sink, on the other hand, is like some high-maintenance lover who leads you on and then abruptly gives you the cold shoulder. It's connected to some arcane heating device of dubious pedigree; there's no telling when hot water may be available. Running the tap for a while may or may not have any effect. My solution is to leave it for half and hour; if I'm ever reduced to burning incense in its honour, I'm just gonna tear it off the wall and put in a wood fire instead.

It's not all doom and gloom, though. Technology is applied in interesting ways that wouldn't occur to us in the West. Until next time, imagine this: full-suspension Raleigh 20

Size Matters

I had my first Kids lesson today. I was reasonably terrified; we only got a single day's Kids training and no practice. Things went very smoothly, though. All you need to survive is a vague idea of what the lesson's about and a good imagination. Oh, and energy. Some of the older kids can be a bit shy, and we have to get them up and rocking with all manner of games. This lot thought my dancing across the room was reasonably hilarious; they gave me that small allowance.

On my way back to the staffroom I was assailed by a jazzed-up two-year-old who mimed fangs and went "Raaaaargh!" at me. Of course I grinned and went "Raargh!" back at her. It was incredibly cute. Poor Natalie had that child in her next class...she came back drenched in sweat. Such is the crucible that is the Chibiko course.

The best kind of classes so far are the 2-student ones where they both tear the lesson to shreds and stand dominant atop its ruined corpse. A lesson like that can turn a lacklustre day into a really good time.

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If you plan on being in Japan for any length of time, be prepared for one terribly important thing: SMALL. All the little things in life are exactly that, little. Doorways, rooms and most significantly: food. Oh. My. God.

I go through a box of cereal in three days with modest portions. The bread comes in 8-slice bags (and it's all white...bowel cancer ahoy!). Want some fast food? You get maybe 10 chips in a pack. Delicious liquids in containers larger than one litre are unheard-of. Cheese is both rare and only 500g tops.

There is one saving grace in all of this (besides the really cool noodle packs): a place called Jupiter. It sells foreign foods. As soon as I get paid I am going in there to buy a packet of Tim-Tams and a big jar of Vegemite. I may eat it, or I may just smear it all over my body. I've yet to decide.

I had a really smart segue into another discussion, lined up and ready to go. Blowed if I can remember what it is, though.

Off the rails

This should have been in the training manual: get a good night’s sleep. This is the kind of job where failure do so results in a day filled with wishes for death, whereas compliance leads to a day of joy and sparkles. Am I exaggerating? You decide!

There are no insects here. OK, that’s not strictly true…I think I saw one yesterday. Come on, this is spring! There should be squillions of insects! But no…not even in the apartment’s nooks and crannies. What’s going on?

In other news, I saw the sky today. As in blue sky. Normally the sky is white and the sunlight is just this diffuse glare that is everywhere at once, reflecting off every surface and making it basically impossible to keep your eyes open. There was a high wind, so I guess all the air pollution got blown away.

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My first real panic was not long in coming. I’d been really proud of the way I’d negotiated the Tokyo transport network: Narita to Shinjuku; found the Nova office in Shinjuku; Shinjuku to Tokyo (even if it took me 20 minutes to figure out how to buy a train ticket). Tokyo, however, required me to catch the Shinkansen.

The Shinkansen will totally kick your ass. The literal translation is “New Trunk Line,” which is rather startlingly unpoetic, but from the moment you glimpse its icon in the train station, you are left in no doubt as to its nature. While buses and regular trains have somewhat pedestrian (haw haw!) icons, the Shinkansen one looks like a spaceship. It’s a circular front-on view that says “I mean business.” Long before you see the train, you know it’s coming; there’s a rush of displaced air that howls through the tunnel. Finally the beast arrives, slamming in to the station at 80 km/h, and what do you know, it even looks like a spaceship. You could go to Mars in one of these things.

Shinkansen trains have the punctuality of the Grim Reaper itself. Two minutes before time, BAM, it arrives, and then right on the minute, BAM, it roars off again. Woe betide the poor schmoe who doesn’t know exactly which train he wants or where it is arriving.

In other words, woe betide me.

There was absolutely no indication that this train was the right one beyond the fact that it was occupying that track at that time (this is good enough for the Japanese). There was every indication that it was the wrong one: the little LED sign on the carriage said “Sendai” when I wanted “Yamagata.” I got on board and sought out someone official. The nice girl at the canteen informed me that yes, this train was bound for Sendai and I should get on the one further up the platform. This was a sound plan for the 5 seconds before the doors hissed shut in my face and the train started moving.

Mild terror ensued.

A captain’s attention was attracted, and he explained that I should get off at the next station, scoot up the side of the train, and get in the right carriages; apparently in Japan they stick two trains together and split them up at a later point. So the train stops, I bail out and head up the platform, seeking my carriages. Ah, there they are! I’ll just get on this – BAM! Doors close, train gone. Frantic gestures to the elderly but stern platform guy are to no avail; the Shinkansen waits for no-one, least of all some poor fool gai-jin who doesn’t know what he’s doing.

At this point I entered light catatonia.

I thrashed round the station for a bit, panic rising, but after a minute I settled down and asked about the next train to Yamagata. The thirty minute interval passed quickly as I checked trains off the “Next Train” board. This time there would be no mistakes. This time I would stand in the right place and be on board in seconds.

The train, and more importantly the carriages I had to be on, blew by me without even slowing down. Um, what? Oh, I see, the Track # that I have to wait by actually extends for three platforms, and I need to be on the one waaaaay down there, where the train is stopping. Nice. One flat-out sprint later and I made it with a full sixty seconds to spare.

Efficiency is a hard task-master.

Getting there is only half the battle

Something I tell my new students, the ones I haven’t met before (which at this stage is all of them), is that I’ve never previously been overseas. That’s right, never even been to Australia. So bear that in mind as you read these pages; there’s going to be a lot of “gosh golly gee-whiz wow” about things that you might well think are old hat. Just bear with me on that. This, as the title suggests, is about the travels of a monkeyman. Monkey see, monkey report.

Takeoff is my favourite part of flying. The way the acceleration mashes you back in your seat, that feeling of being subject to extraordinary forces…I have to remember to relax and just let the hand of physics have its way. If I resist the effect is spoiled. Unfortunately it would seem that the larger the plane, the more this feeling is diminished. A 747 is so monstrous that you’re barely aware you’re accelerating at all. So my departure from familiar shores was not with a bang and a rush, but with a whisper. I would have liked a little more drama.

Flying internationally is, essentially, just like staying on the ground. You’re trapped in a noisy room with a whole load of other people for half a day, people with whom it’s quite hard to talk. You watch your plane magically traverse the face of the world on the big screen at the front of the cabin (at some point, after some brief geometry, I had the “Sam Gamgee in the cornfield” moment) . The giveaway that you’re actually flying is that at the end of the half day you step out and you’re somewhere else on the planet.

The single coolest thing about big international airports is the travelators. These are horizontal escalators; moving footpaths if you will. You walk on these as they themselves propel you forward; your velocity relative to the scenery is thus greatly increased. It must have been a kilometre or so from the exit gate at Changi to the main terminal, but my fellow passengers and I traversed this distance in just a few minutes. I wanted to go back and ride them again…and given that I had an extra hour to kill, thanks to a delay, I probably could have had I been thinking clearly.
I never had the impression, in Singapore, that I was in a place far distant from New Zealand. It was dark; the lights outside could have been any city. The terminal’s population was very diverse; I passed people from all over the world. I’d never seen anything like it except on TV, so since I was seeing it with my own eyes for the first time, I still couldn’t see it as proof that I was in Singapore.
The shops were all the same as in Auckland. I paid for things with dollars. The beer was familiar (even if the extortionate price was not). I would have to wait for dawn to get a sense of being somewhere else.

The approach to Japan could have been an approach to New Zealand, albeit from an odd angle. Volcanic peak with snow-capped mountains in the distance…hmmm, I find this strangely familiar. It wasn’t until I got closer that things began to look different, in a “gigantic neverending city with lots of air-pollution” kind of way. That was just a brief interlude however. Huge topiary bushes saying “Narita” notwithstanding, the place looked like the land around Taupo. Minus lake, of course. So that’s it, huh? Ladies and gentlemen, we have arrived.