A few more random pics for any punter that's interested.

A view of some typical houses with partially shrouded mountains in the background:



Water sumo in the summer:



A picture we took last weekend at a dam on the island, you can get an idea of the status of my doo:



Caroline as a 'Shrine hund':



Last weekend at the Kodo Concert:


Aikawa festival:


Here's a picture of an aerial picture of one of the Junior High Schools that I work in. Believe it or not this school has 19 students. The facilities that they have is unbelievable:

The Cabin

Here's some picks of the cabin:



Mayhem unfolds:


The morning after the night before:


Getting rid of the evidence:


Last 3 pictures courtesy of Thea Bracewell


I'll have to give a decent account of this party as it was, from what I can remember, a lot of fun. But I'll update this post later.

Balls to the history, here's some pictures.

From left to right, top to bottom:

Here's our apartment. It's above a fishing tackle shop. That massive aerial actually fell off our roof in a storm.

This is Caroline's motor. It's a micro Daihatsu 4x4.

Here's my shed. It's a wee Honda 650cc that's been slightly boy raced with a spoiler and tinted back windows.

Check this beastie out.




I was just picking up some momentum there and the website that I host my pics isn't responding. Pile of mince.

Here's the last batch from the Earth Celebration in August:

Cannibal Run 7 - A tale of the three f's.

As you can see, both myself and Caroline are setup to contribute to this blog, that's 21st century married life for you.

Condensed history (a la MJ the supposed fiddy kiddler), part ii:
Caroline skipped over what happened in Tokyo (remember two silly bulls) though we were there for most of Sunday, all of Monday and Tuesday and departed on Wednesday. I can't actually remember that much about these few days as most of them were spent in a jet slagged stupor, I'll have a go though. We went to our scratcher on Sunday after noon and forced ourselves to wake on Sunday evening at about 7pm, I was as grumpy as a giraffe with a pain in the neck. We then went down the lift to the hotel lobby (or Robby as they have affectionately named it in Japan) whereupon we noticed that this ginormous hotel had been taken over by thousands of fellow ALTs from the other English speaking nations of the world and the USA. This was ok, most were friendly and we spotted many faces from the Edinburgh post departure orientation. This program, it has to be said, is a bit of an orientation-fest, which is ok though I'm not sure how useful some of it is. Anyhoo, Caroline and I made it out ourselves and decided to see what was in the immediate vicinity of the hotel other than other large hotels. Heading towards Shinjuku station there were a few narrow streets that were brightly lit with neon, flags and other devices to get your attention though nothing phallic, flacid or fleshy. These are the three f's that Tony Blair is going to concentrate on once the three r's are in the bag. Japan is still trying to manage one r (they keep on pronouncing l), chances are they'll nail it on exactly the same day as New Labour lands the three r's (ooh, political). There were all sorts of crap getting sold here, some electronics, camera paraphernalia and other guff in amongst restaurants and the odd Japanese Inn - called Izakaya. We had a deco at what was on offer. I was keen to get a kosher Japanese meal rather than some foreign muck, so we ended up going in to a small place which only appeared to be full of Japanese and sat down. Fortunately, this place had pictures on the menu and we both ordered a ramen set. Ramen is something that we have had in Japanese restaurants in the UK so we thought that we were getting the full Japanese experience in the heart of Tokyo. The restaurant however turned out to be Chinese; ramen is an imported dish from China so that blew my authentic start to Japanese life. I wasn't that bothered. We both had a nama biru, draught beer, and toasted our first meal as a married couple in Japan. The food was ok, and I ate the whole shooting match. Caroline ate most of hers but this was an introduction of a veggie meal in Japan which almost always includes some form of meat. This doesn't bother Caroline too much now as she actually eats chicken and the Japanese grub is slowly whittling away the last foundation stones of her previously veggie constitution (even though she was previously partial to the odd sausage - steady). It wouldn't surprise me if she comes back as a cannibal as they eat any old guff in Japan, more on this later, though I just thought of a great concept for a reality game show 'Cannibal Run'. It's like big brother but rather than vote people out, they just eat them. Burt Reynolds is doing that badly these days that we could probably get him for it though that moustache would take some eating. We ended up having a couple of beers in this joint and then hit the road. On the way out we bumped into another ALT from Canada called Maine (not sure of the spelling). We had a quick chat with Maine Man and arranged to meet up with him later after he'd had something to eat. Caroline and I mooched around for a bit, met another couple of lassies that we'd been gassing to previously, we then met up with the Canadian geezer and all had a couple of ales. That was about it on the first night as we were still bouncing off the ropes following the flight. I hadn't had much kip on the night before we left either as I was frantically ripping CDs onto a recently purchased mp3 player. I didn't realize that it took so long and only managed to get a fraction of our CDs copied which has since been a kick in the stones. This, coincidentally, should be the title of the latest Rolling Stones album which a Japanese English teacher recently lent me. My first nights sleep in Tokyo was bloody hopeless. I woke up at about 3am after going to bed at about midnight and didn't really get back to sleep. I read all of the bumph detailing the schedule of the next two days of orientation which should have been as potent as a pound of poisoned apples that snow white ate, but I was still bright eyed. I then started rereading James Clavell's excellent novel 'Shogun', where the main character John Blackthorne's life paralleled mine as we both wound up on the shores of Japan. Albeit by different vehicles and in different centuries however there were many parallels that I sympothised with, random beheadings for example. I seem to always bug the hell out of Caroline when I'm laying awake and she's sleeping. I try to stay quiet and not do anything disturbing, as it were, though I always get complaints, even about breathing (that's one mean woman...). Caroline reckons it's heavy breathing, like I need to do heavy breathing now that I'm married, not that I did it before I was married unless I'd been vigorously exercising of course. The funny thing is when Caroline is getting annoyed she doesn't just tell me to shut up she uses one of the modern women's secret weapons, the old aggressive barrel roll. Aggressive barrel rolls are a women’s choice of man management in the kip domain. You can tell just exactly how upset they are by the degree of rotation and how much bedding is accumulated by the woman in the movement. The worst I've seen was 7.2 on the slumbalux scale when I rolled into our old flat in Glasgow in the wee hours, completely reeking, after saying that I was only going out for one or two after work. It was fully justified. Post barrel role I spent the rest of the night without any covers, which at the time, due to the booze, I wasn't too bothered, but woke I up in the morning like an icicle, which wasn't pleasant. Back to the beaten path, the next day of orientation wasn't much kop, but I'm beat and will blab on in the next installment. Yahoo...

Here's a couple of rather poor pictures that we took in Tokyo from the Keio Plaze.

This is from our room on the 17th floor:


This is from the top which is 40 odd floors:

Return of the McFizzles, Cabbies and other such phenomenon.

I just lost my first real post when I tried to use the blogger spell check and the pop up blocker threw the browser. I lost a fair bit of text, which I tried to recover using all known means. I'm not a computer spastic and I'm usually careful when writing big blocks of text to save things etc. but there you go. I've not been so angry in years, though I know that it will still be fresh in my mind and my blubbing will not stop until this is done. With that in mind I'm going to attempt to rewrite my first entry into this blog. Also any other newbie bloggers take heed, type it up on textpad or something, saving regularly and then copy and paste it into the poxy browser.

This blog almost fizzled out before it started. Nothing worse, but we're now fizzling again.

Ok, the idea of this blog was to keep a journal of all our goings on in Japan but it's taken us a while to settle and get enough time to do this. We've been here for two and a half months now and it's about time I did something. I have been writing an actual journal that we received as a Wedding gift that I was intending to publish on this web site. I'm not going to bother typing that up as it's a bit verbose and personal. Instead I'm going to try and give a condensed history, in installments, until up to date and then I may lift from the journal in the future:

Condensed History, part i:
Caroline and I were married on the sixteenth of July of this year and exactly one week later we flew to Japan on our working honeymoon as ALTs (Assistant Language Teachers). The flight from London Heathrow to Tokyo Narita took around thirteen hours. Tokyo, as it happens is pronounced as two syllables in Japanese - 'To' and 'Kyo', just one example of billions of differences between our languages. The flight was as bad as expected and neither of us got a wink of sleep, probably because we had lousy seats and were slightly excited at the prospect of moving our lives six thousand miles to a very different part of the world. Caroline was sitting next to an interesting character called Ghazi from somewhere in Africa. Ghazi was on a whistle stop tour of the UK and was returning to his post as a Dr of something at a University in Toyama in Japan. When he pronounced his name it sounded like Khazi, which I found mildly amusing and used as an aide memoire. Who knows maybe Cameron, pronounced in a Scottish accent, sounds like the Swahili equivalent of bog. I suppose Ghazi could be the Christopher Lilycrap of Africa minus the children's tv experience. Anyway, he'd brought an absolute stack of UK souvenir guff onto the flight and had to stuff a lot of it between his legs which ended up encroaching on Caroline's already limited leg space though I don't think that made too much difference to Caroline's lack of sleep. He also kindly shared his snaps of the UK with us and ended with some pictures of rats that he'd been testing on in the labs in Toyama, not sure if he intended for a theme to run right through his pictures. The jumbo flew right over Siberia which didn't appear too interesting, mainly ice and water, before landing in Japan. I was whistling Elton 'The Bandit' John all the way through immigration of Narita Airport and then we were on our way, with a bus load of other ALTs to our hotel in Shinjuku, Tokyo (two syllabubs). I always have the same general impression when I get out and about in a new country - 'it's not that different from home'. Then little things start to emerge. For me the first difference that I noticed was the taxis. Almost all of the taxis in and around Narita were Lexi (plural of Lexus) as we know them in the UK but were actually Toyotas. Every single one of them that I saw had lace headrest covers in the front and back, just like the ones that my Gran has on here chairs and sofa to protect the upholstery from geezers hair oil and other soilables that are liable to be in contact with that area of furniture. That's one way to spoil a decent motor, they looked crappy. I don't know it's maybe the law over here or required for the MOT or something, where the degree of whiteness of the lace is measured against a chart and a qualified specialist load tests any 'lace'rations. As it happens, the MOT in Japan is called 'Sha-Ken'. On my to do list, I've still got a dedication of 'Shaken all over' to Japanese Motor Mechanics at karaoke, or possibly something by Shaken Stevens. I've other karaoke dedications on my to do list including Frank Sinatra's 'Under my skin' (substituting bin for skin) which would go out to Fred and Rose West. The taxi drivers also differed greatly in that they are very smartly turned out, wear white gloves and a sea captain type cap. Compared to most cabbies in Glasgow, who are generally a rum lot that give the tramps and hobos are run for their money in the style and stink olympics, these guys look the business. The other thing that I noticed on my bus trip into Shinjuku was that when we were getting into the centre of the city it was the first time that I felt that I was entering a city of the future. This was because of the roads which are actually elevated and go up and down and round and round a bit like a hot wheels track. I don't remember any loop the loops but I was getting pretty tired and may have occasionally nodded off. After about an hour and a half we made it into Shinjuku which is a wealthy business district where most of the big hotels are. We stayed at the Keio plaza (see http://www.keioplaza.com/index.html ) which was classy. As soon as Caroline and I got to the hotel we hit the hay as the baw had well and truly burst for us by them.