Adventures in the Looking Glass

It being  sunny day I decided, after washing my kitchen floor, do the washing up, hoovering, doing the laundry and some yoga, that it would be a nice idea to leave the house and bask in what seem to be temperatures equivalent to an English summer, before it becomes impossible to open the windows for fear of bugs and death by heat suffocation.  Of course, I don't normally like to leave the house on a Sunday, unless it's to take on the swarming mass of Tokyo with other company.  So...I'd forgotten why I don't like leaving the house.  Within about 5 minutes some eijit on a bicycle tried to take me out on the pavement leading down to an underpass.  An underpass, that is, with designated cycle paths.  And he had a fully functioning bell on the front of that bike, too.  I've decided that if I must leave the house, I shall do it on my bike, and then at least I'm on an equal footing and only really need to worry about cars.  Eventually I found a quiet footpath between some houses and strolled down there before taking a hasty detour home, taking an underpass beneath the train tracks which also coincides with the small river nearby heading underground for a couple of blocks.  It was rather eerie under there so I took a photo...on my Holga.  You'll just have to wait for it.

Golden Week was rather lovely.  I went down to Gifu to stay at Rachel's house. I took the night bus, which was an exercise in torture I don't wish to repeat.  It would all be fine if my legs didn't decide to take on a life of their own whenever I'm on long journeys.  Having weird leg spasms while you're attempting to sleep is deeply uncomfortable and no doubt a little weird looking to the other passengers.  Next time I'll just suck it up and take the Shinkansen.

Here're some photos from Gifu:

     

The Other Laura and I posing in Nagoya.           Down by the river in Gifu after the BBQ.  I was sporting an 80s quiff and pink sunglasses.




Looking along the river to Mount Kinka, with Kinka castle at the top.
And this is me half way up it.

After Gifu, my friend Brooke visited for a couple of days.  We hit China town in Yokohama in the pouring rain, and spent the afternoon with jennarose  in a cafe discussing Dean Winchester and drinking coffee.  Dinner was at a cool little Mexican place (it being Cinqo de Mayo (spelling?)) which did great food in small portions and had a quite confused waiter.  I think it took three languages to get all our ordering done - Spanish, Japanese and English.  At the end of dinner the guy lifted up the apron on the little skeleton in the doorway and flashed us a stuffed willy whilst thanking us loudly and guffawing. 

Which also reminds me of the Moroccan restaurant we went to in Nagoya, which did fabulous cheese briwat, hummous and fish tagine.  And then there was belly-dancing!  I was dead impressed. 

Speaking of belly dancing, I shall be returning to the land of shimmy tomorrow after a month's break.  In the meantime I've been checking out various videos on youtube and have decided that I need to learn to do Tribal bellydance.  Watch this and you'll see why. The best bit is about halfway through.  You'll know which bit I mean.

Err, that's it for now.  Maybe some more ramblings later, after I've consoled myself with a chocolate Hobnob and a cup of tea.

I've been awake since 5.30am. Not sure why I had to wake up at that time. I spent the morning thinking about the milipede I found crawling across my ceiling the other night. On account of it being so tiny, I decided we'd agree that it could leave through the top window during the night. Which I hope it did. I will however, be investing in a cockroach bomb some point soon. I haven't seen a cockroach since the one I saw a few months ago, hopefully due to the traps I put down, but I'm going to gas the place at some point, just to make sure all the creepy-crawlies aren't walking across my face during the night. I was also told that some millipedes in Japan are capable of a very nasty bite, but I think we're talking about creatures significantly bigger than the one I saw. The advice is that if I see one, I drop something heavy on it.

I downloaded a tonne of music the other night, thanks to Andy at work who had been trawling through his download site and kindly let me have his password so I could pinch stuff he'd already picked. So I've got Jonny Greenwood's "Ether", DJ Shadow's "Live: In Tune and In Time", some Mogwai, Brian Eno and a few other bits. Quite the revelation is an artist called Burial, whose "Untrue" album has been on my iPod for the past 36 hours, and which is currently playing on iTunes as I write this. This is most definitely not the kind of thing I would normally pick up. However, it's billed as Electronic (but then Jonny Greenwood's "Ether" is categorised as Reggae...) which gets my first thumbs up; has nice, darkly titled songs (Night Bus, Archangel, Ghost Hardware); and has an element of garage music to it which I do not find unappealing. It is perfect night music, perfect early-morning-watching-the-rain-smash-down music. I highly recommend it.

The dancing on Monday was good fun. Belly dancing works so many muscles. I can still feel most of them. It appears that belly dancing may be a new craze in Japan, a bit like Billy's Boot Camp last year. Belly dancing, however, is ten times more fun that circling your arms and doing those quite painful squats. Plus, belly dancing muscles look better than bootcamp muscles, which look totally wrong on a woman. We also took a Latin class and tried out salsa, cuban, rumba, merengue and samba. My favourite was samba, as it is possibly the craziest dance in the world. I signed up for some more classes, which cost me more money than I has predicted. I plan on doing some more bellydancing, and then switching to Latin once I get some dance shoes, and then maybe alternating classes.

Right, more sometime. Today I will be eating the first tomato from my cherry tomato plant. I'm going to have half with some olive oil and pepper, and the other with some blue cheese. Yummy.