DIRTY MIND

At least I knew which city I was in when I woke at 3am this morning. I knew this because as I gained consciousness my brain was already deeply involved in working out the answer to a very Manhattan-specific question - 'where is my nearest soil?'. (Clearly if I'd still been in Tokyo, the question would have been totally different, and something along the lines of 'which bits of this plate of soil sitting in front of me is it safe to eat?')

I've no idea why I was so concerned about finding soil at 3am, but it seemed pretty important at the time, in the cold dark of night, so I figured the sooner I'd worked out the answer, the sooner I could get back to sleep. It was actually more complicated than I thought. Strictly speaking my nearest soil is in a small square garden a mere 2 long blocks from here. But that doesn't really count, as the garden is only accessible to residents and I don't have a key - 'private' soil, in other words. A breaking and entering situation seems a bit of a risky venture just to get hold of some soil, particularly when you don't even know what you want it for.

My nearest 'public' soil therefore must be 6 blocks south or 5 long blocks west. Which seems an awful long way when you come from London, where even in the centre of the city there are bits of grass or garden pretty much around every corner.

It's dangerous to get into any sort of 3.30am panic when you're suffering from insomnia, so even though I don't need any soil, I vowed to go out and buy some in the morning, just so as it'll be around, and I can stop worrying about it and go back to sleep. Except I have no idea where my nearest garden centre is, so now it is 4.10am and I am googling Manhattan garden centres for some soil I don't want or need, and I am very much awake.........

JETLAG

1pm. I sit upright in bed, in Japan and in a panic. 'What time do we have to check out of the room?!"
The TH 'We don't have to check out of the room - you're at home......'

For three consecutive mornings (between the hours of 6am and 8am) I've had a recurring claustrophobic nightmare about lying underneath a car, (where I am retrieving someone else's mail, obviously?). My clothes get caught on the car underside, thereby trapping me. I wake up exhausted, fighting my Japanese duvet.

It is 3.44am and our nightly insomniacs party is kicking off. The TH is choosing movies and I rummage through cupboards looking for exciting ingredients to add to camomile tea.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

The TH has been having a kind of mid-life crisis, brought about by his 40th birthday a couple of weeks ago. The crisis is manifesting itself in a strong desire to do dangerous things, such as bungee jumping, diving with sharks, white water rafting and eating 5-course traditional Japanese meals. I have managed to talk him out of most of these things, but yesterday failed miserably to prevent him dragging me into a Japanese restaurant. It was totally empty and nobody could speak English - never good signs in any restaurant anywhere in my book, but the TH was determined. Between bows we were muttering at each other under our breath 'It's okay I'll let you do the bungee jump, just don't make me eat here!' 'You said we're not insured for sports'. 'We're not insured for anything since Thursday. Including food!'

It was just as I'd feared. For starters the appetisers looked far from appetising. There was a solitary prawn in a lump of jelly, some raw eel and a couple of totally unidentifiable things. I ate the tiny asparagus decoration, put the eel on the TH's plate and made an attempt at the jellied prawn. Totally disgusting. Then there was a sashimi course - raw tuna and something else unidentifiable. Definitely not for me. I'll say something for Japanese food - at least it comes in really tiny portions so it can be easily disposed of in a serviette. Managed to eat the tiny piece of cooked fish which was the third course, but it was really bland ('not bland - 'subtle' the TH insisted). Then the raw beef course, by which time I was getting really hungry and my serviette was getting really full. Some rice, miso and green tea appeared, but even the rice had unidentifiable fishy things in it. The tea was murky, like a garden pond.
Dessert though, was the creme de la creme. Yum - a pot of totally tasteless white slimy things in brown sludge.



One mouthful of this and I really thought I was going to puke. It was really really really gross. It was so gross I became convinced that the chef was watching us from somewhere having a good laugh 'look at those silly English people eating the stuff I just scraped up from the plughole'.

I have not seen one overweight person since I've been in Japan. I wonder why.

TOKYO

It was a long haul into Tokyo.
Contrary to expectation the Japanese hardly use (or accept) credit cards, so having cash is pretty essential. Unfortunately they don't seem to use ATM's very much either, and the ones they do use don't like USA or UK cards. It took ages to find the one machine in the whole of Narita that would give us any money, and then we went slightly mad, drawing out millions of yen in a sort of cashpoint panic.

A 70 minute fast-train into Ueno, Tokyo and there we had to switch onto the subway.
The Tokyo subway map looks like a 2-year old sat down with 24 coloured crayons and scribbled for an hour. Then some really clever calligrapher with amazing eyesight added hundreds of really tiny Kanji symbols. Errr.......?



The big subway map on the wall and all the ticket price charts were in Kanji. So were the ticket machines. On top of which, the TH kept almost knocking himself out because the entire subway system is built for people under 5 foot 8". Oh and there were hundreds and hundreds of people running around madly, trying to get to work, (or to who knows where, 'cos we couldn't read any place names.)

A long time later (ie. when we'd had time to learn the Japanese language) we managed to work out the Kanji symbol for the station we were going to, and then with much trial and error, make the ticket machine understand that too. The TH has lived in Japan for a year before now, so we were clearly at an advantage (though I failed to see what advantage exactly).

Finally we arrived at Shibuya and crossed over the famous 4-way crossing, as seen in Lost in Translation, and doubtless countless other movies.



First impressions of Tokyo.
The noise is extraordinary. All the huge billboard videos on the sides of buildings have a soundtrack and every shop has music spilling outside. It is overwhelmingly loud.

It is fast. A fast that makes New York look like a bunch of English Sunday drivers. We stopped for a coffee at Starbucks and a queue of around 20 people was served in less than a minute - scary fast. In Starbucks, as almost everywhere else, people are employed specifically to organise other people, so two people were simply organising the queue. Later that day we glimpsed the subway marshals in action, employed literally to push people on and off the overcrowded trains, and clear the platforms. I stopped on the platform for a moment to get my bearings and got ushered towards an exit quite aggressively. When a train empties, the platform is cleared within seconds.

Consequently everything at least gives the outward appearance of being super-efficient. But sometimes it feels like Big Brother. For instance, there appear to be two traffic police at each traffic light later in the day, who march into the road hands in the air at every red light. Why does a red traffic light also need two people to stop the traffic one has to ask?

We walked around the area and up to Takeshita Street - which I guess is Tokyo's Camden. The pavements are spotlessly clean - not a cigarette butt in sight. Then I realise that there are 'no smoking' signs along the actual streets and smoking areas with ashtrays at street corners. The few people who are smoking as they walk are carrying portable ashtrays.

Yes it's true that Japanese schoolgirls wear ridiculously short mini-skirts. And yes it's true that you can buy almost anything from a myriad of vending machines. It also seems to be true that Japanese females wear shoes at least 2 sizes too big for them, making it very difficult for them to walk and almost impossible to run as they drag their hanging-off-footwear after them. I can only presume this is some sort of weird fashion statement?



Then the subway to Roppongi. Tokyo is vast and sprawling, which you start to understand when you realise you can spend 40 minutes on a subway and still exit somewhere as central as when you went in. First to the new Ritz-Carlton hotel to check out the venue Tessa will be playing in all Summer. We sneaked past a 'residents only' sign and had a couple of drinks in the gorgeous 45th floor lounge, taking sneaky photos to show T. That'll be a nice gig. Then to a bar Bryan had mentioned to us the previous evening - 'Geronimo's'. It's extraordinary how bars here can be up in a tiny elevator to the second floor, like you're going to someone's apartment, with no clue whatsoever on the outside as to where the place is. The bar was full of English-speaking residents and within the hour we were all MySpace friends because they're musicians really. It's a shot bar so we left before we were forced to buy the whole bar a round and donate a tie of the TH's to the trader's 'wall of ties'.......

The last train to Narita.

NARITA

Narita airport is something between 60 and 90km from downtown Tokyo, depending which guide book you're reading, but either way it's a very long train journey or apparently 300 dollars in a cab. So, as we only expected to be here for one night, we're staying at the Narita Hilton, near the airport.

In the bar yesterday evening, I had my first lesson in Japanese culture. The waiters first bowing, then crouching down below my eye-level to talk to me or serve my drink. The seats are pretty low anyway, so this is some big crouch thing going on. I wonder how I could ever strike up any kind of meaningful conversation or relationship with a bartender under these circumstances (which disturbs me.) On top of which, I am feeling for their knees.....

Then this morning I had to become familiar with the ritual at the swimming pool. First there's the bowing, then establishing that I want to swim when the receptionist understands no English, so a bit of swimming miming followed by some more bowing. Then I get a locker key in exchange for my room key and a bow, then some form filling in exchange for some towels and some bowing. Wow. I'd pretty much had a workout by the time I got to the entrance. Then you have to take your shoes off and swap them for some slippers to walk to the changing room, where you take them off again (?) and put them in the slipper basket. Then before getting into the pool you have to walk through a series of about 3 showers and paddling pools until you're really really clean. And only then can you go swimming, but only if you're wearing compulsory swimming cap and goggles. I have to say though, it's all worth it. This is the best pool ever in a hotel, and possibly the best pool ever. Period.

To Narita City. Disguised as a village. Narita is a quaint little place, with two very contrasting main purposes - the Naritasan Shinshoji Temple complex, and the fact that it's an airport City. The former wins out, so despite the fact that hundreds of airline crew are passing through each week, there are still only a couple of English speaking bars and the more traditional shops, restaurants and drinking places are much more predominant. We got incredibly stared at of course. (Not only is there an Afro-Caribbean person in town, but he's with a white person in strange clothes. And they're both really really tall.)



The traditional food was freaking me out. Old men were cooking what looked like large long caterpillars in the front of tiny dark restaurants. Big maggoty things were swimming in buckets before being fried. I was particularly alarmed by all this on account of the fact that our holiday insurance ran out today. The TH was up for it, but I stuck with the only food in the whole City that I recognised.



The Naritasan Shinshoji Temple area is huge and impressive and consists of many different buildings all having a different purpose. This one for instance - the Issai-Kyouzou (House of all Sutras), houses a complete set of the Buddhist scriptures.







Feeling suitably karmic after a long walk around the temples, we headed for the English speaking bar - the Barge Inn. Here we met the wonderful, witty and sharp bartender Bryan. All karmic feelings went swiftly out of the window when the freight pilots came in. A true boys club. After a couple of pints the conversation turned to women and one of them stated pointedly in my direction 'It's our fault - we should never have given women the vote'. Bryan leapt in with a 'Come on guys, there's a lady present', so Mr Pilot added 'no offence - we're simple creatures - all we need from women is a bit of rubby-rubby and a cold beer'.

Eeewwww. Nice guys. Not. Haha. After a couple more happy hour drinks and moans about their ex (quel surpris) wives, they left (as Bryan had predicted - apparently freight pilots don't like to pay full price), and we had a good long chat with B about how to get to Tokyo the following day and what to do there....

HOTEL LOO

It strikes me that this loo would be an excellent management training tool to demonstrate the importance of attention to detail. You really don't want to be sitting on it until you've read the small print and located the 'stop' button. Believe me.
(Although one has to wonder why 'splashing the lid with water' might cause 'fire or trouble' ?)

LOST IN TRANSLATION

Very conscious that we didn't spend long enough in Sydney to experience it properly. On Tuesday morning Easter was over, the sun came out and the City felt like a different place entirely. In the meantime, we managed a road trip to the Blue Mountains (which aren't blue, incidentally), and lunch at a gorgeous secret Italian place - Sopra (shhhhhhh), with Tessa's wonderful friends Nick and Jules. Tessa is much better connected in Australia than the internet is, and that's a fact.

Horrible day of travel to Tokyo via practically every other city we hadn't visited in Australia, and seemingly the world. The plane kept errrr ....landing, rather than actually flying. So we went via Brisbane, Cairns, Ramsay Street, Coronation Street etc etc. On top of which we'd been given the exit seats on the plane (as like a 'favour' for our extensive travel status and because the TH is tall,) and found out on boarding that said exit seats were in fact worse than normal seats on account of the great-wall-of-china-bulkhead situated about 4 inches in front of them. So on-off on-off on-off the same plane all day long to the same rubbish seats, learning three times the same way to open the same exit door, till it got to the point that when a new crew got onboard at Cairns I was so grumpy that I greeted them with an unamused 'welcome onboard'. Of course that really helped endear me to them for the longest leg of the journey. Not.

12 miserable hours later - Tokyo. Wow. I have never been to a country before where I don't understand a single word of the language, and what's more, nobody seems to understand any English either. I have never been to an airport before where there is no sign of a cashpoint machine or a taxi, just hundreds of buses with Kanji symbols on them.
We got to the hotel. (Somehow.) And in front of us a group of Japanese businessmen are checking in, greeting each other with an extraordinary and extensive head- nodding ritual. This goes on for so long I feel I must be in an episode of Fawlty Towers.

And then I see the hotel pool. Oh my God! A 4-lane 25 metre empty swimming pool. We can't possibly stay in Tokyo for just one night then leave........how silly would that be?!

HARBOURING DOUBTS

The TH insists that this is a holiday not a moving recce, but just for the record, I think I could probably live in Melbourne. The architecture is beautiful, the natives are friendly, the toilet paper is scented and the whole place is a manageable size, seemingly without the danger of boredom. Oh and they have the most random signs I have ever seen, which is always a plus in a City.



And so to Sydney.
By the time we'd had lunch, booked a guided tour of the opera house and the TH had satisfied his boyish urge to ride on a very fast thunderjet boat for half an hour, we had only been in town for a couple of hours and had said goodbye to over 150 quid. This was clearly going to be unsustainable over 5 days....

The (26 dollar) opera house tour only consisted of the largest auditorium, the foyer and a recently redeveloped room used for functions, which looked like an incomplete loft conversion. There was apparently another tour which takes you backstage, so I went to the information desk to investigate.
'It's at 7am each day and costs 140 dollars.'
'You what?!!!'
They must be having a laugh! 140 dollars to see a few dressing rooms and an orchestral warm-up area, when I used to take backstage tours of the Festival Hall for one pound!! (That's 2.4015 dollars to you, Mr Information Desk.) Hell, you can probably buy a named seat for 140 dollars at the RFH! I think, under the circumstances, I can probably manage to live without seeing another dressing room.

I guess on the upside for the opera house, with the number of tours which were pouring in and out and crashing into each other just in the short time we were there, I think they'll probably have raised their 1 billion dollars for refurbishment by the end of next week.

By the time we got out of there, I was 'outraged of 10010', and kept muttering '140 dollars!' incredulously. And it was raining. A lot. On top of which I was starting to worry that since being in Sydney I'd not heard the phrase 'no worries'. Not even once...



We decided to splash out and buy an umbrella with the remains of the kids inheritance. Luckily for the kids, we've got no kids. We then spent the rest of the day wandering around a selection of very similar-looking bays in search of a place where we could afford a coffee.
Julian Joseph used to have an excellent phrase for times like this, 'I'm not feeling it'. And I definitely wasn't 'feeling' Sydney that day.

Last night to Rose Bay to visit friends of T's, who'd kindly invited us round for drinks. There things definitely started to look up. Shona and Chris are totally adorable people, and drinks turned into much gorgeous wine and Thai food whilst sitting on their picuresque candlelit balcony with their lovely friends, bats, and a huge spider for company. Much entertaining conversation above the torrential rain. Lots of fun.....

This morning the TH was that person being breathalised at 8am before being allowed to do the (189 dollar) Sydney Bridge climb. He was also that person who was failing his breathaliser test at 8am. His second test was borderline, so he was allowed to do the climb, which is just as well, or we wouldn't now have an excellent 60 dollar photograph of him doing a Mexican wave 134 metres above some outrageously expensive restaurants.

Not that this City is making us totally bankrupt or anything, but tomorrow we are hiring a car and driving somewhere else, because we figured it would be cheaper to eat that way. Or we might just eat the car.

This blog was brought to you by 'rooms online broadband' (24 dollars 99 cents).

URBAN WORRIES

Melbourne since Friday. Freo was relaxing and lovely, but ah the relief to be back amongst skyscrapers, neon and ambiguous graffiti.
The holiday has turned into a series of babies and meals. On Sunday to visit the lovely Anna and Laurence and their (on this trip compulsory) cute children. Had lunch and dinner with them and much catching-up time - I've only seen Anna once in the last 14 years, since she left London, so the who's who of our lives since then took care of the best part of the day.



I ended up putting the second Australian under 2-yr-old in 3 days to bed (the adorable Max), and realised I was becoming horrifyingly familiar with the routine, not to mention the Wiggles (don't ask) and Elmo.

Yesterday for lunch with Lynette, who we'd met in NY last year, then dinner with Andre et famille at his gorgeous family home in Brighton beach. Andre has a 6 month old, so my super-nanny skills are getting more impressive by the day. Baby wipes are now a permanent feature in my handbag.

Meal of the holiday (and possibly the year) award goes to the Flower Drum, where we had lunch today. I have no idea how we got in, as there's supposed to be a waiting list of at least 6 weeks and folks such as Madonna dine there. Not only did we get in but we were sat a fair way from the door, where apparently they put the celebs. I can only pesume that the TH was mistaken for Frank Bruno again. Stuff happens, and sometimes good stuff. Entirely perfect food and service.

You will gather from this that I am veritably eating and drinking my way through Australia state by state and am therefore becoming HUGE. There's only one solution as I see it - to burn the extra 4,000 calories per day that I'm consuming, I'll have to become a wet nurse and start breast feeding too......