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.