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| JET Adventures 80 billion and 4, where Alice discovers that camping + aquariums == yes |
| Sunday, July 01, 2007 |
Yeah so right, usually I spend my time at school either laughing at my students (Keisuke, name 4 feelings. "Hungry, sleepy, angry, and shit") or wanting my teachers to spontaneously explode ("Arisu, please plan all my lessons for me while I sit around telling you how hard I have to work", "Arisu, I know we have worked together for 2 years, but where in America do you come from?", "Arisu, why don't you tell the class why you're leaving them to go back to your country?"). But this week I have only love and affection for my beautiful darling teachers who took me to the aquarium-where-I-have-always-always-always-wanted-to-go-but-couldn't-because-it-is-bloody-miles-away as a special leaving present for me.
See how we are both coordinated nautically? SO hot right now.
Me and one of the "let's eat our own children" manta rays.
I am going to be a whale shark when I grow up.
And! They have booked my leaving party at this well swanky Italian restaurant, which means over the next two weeks (TWO WEEKS! THERE ARE TWO WEEKS BEFORE I COME HOME!) the total number of leaving parties I will be attending is 6. By the end of it I will have attained my whale-shark dream.
Also! I survived camping and didn't die from cold showers/sleeping on the ground with ants/sunburn/sharing a futon with Louise, aka the most psychotic JET in Okinawa ("If you snore I will stake your heart with tent pegs"). We had the whole beach to ourselves and there were sparklers and too much wine and no corkscrew but there really was pizza this time. |
posted by Alice @ 7:00 pm  |
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| 9, 10, 11 |
| Tuesday, June 26, 2007 |
It is hello summer. Five minutes after the official end of the rainy season and outside is now a DEFCON3 hazard zone comprised of a 37 degree radioactive haze. It is not conducive to my current "wow, look at all this stuff I must do" perspective, which is fast becoming more of a "wow, look at all this stuff I must do while lying facedown in a tub of Haagen Dahz" outlook.
Ahh icecream, is there nothing its magic meltiness cannot do? It makes me able to defy wilting and gives me enough of a sugar rush to be able to fly like the wind and do stuff like drink vats of tequila, marvel at Tokyo drag queens, yam Persian food, smoke 10 different flavours of hookah, squish my accumulated life in object form into cardboard boxes, ride the surprisingly good Himalamazon 4D rollercoaster, get a new tattoo, and visit saunas that not only make you lose weight but also cure cancer and AIDS.
I am going camping this weekend. That's how good icecream is. Especially that one from Baskin and Robbins called PopPop that goes PopPop in your mouth.
AND my teachers whom I previously wanted to destroy with fiery meteorites are taking me to the aquarium on Thursday! It is the second largest in the world and has THREE whale sharks and a whole tank of manta rays. AND a baby manta ray was born the other week and I was dancing around the staffroom because we would get to go and see it, except that it died. Its father killed it and ate it! I hope there is video footage of both these events.
9. A unicycle.
10. A friend for the unicycle. I don't know. How about a pogostick?
11. Or a space hopper? |
| posted by Alice @ 12:56 pm |
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| JET Adventures 79 - Snuff diving |
| Saturday, June 09, 2007 |
I have not been devoured by spider hordes! And! My gekko is alive and well, although I was tempted to sever its head last night when it scuttled above my bed and made its shrieking noises in my ears at 4am.
It didn't matter anyway because I had to get up at 5am to go scuba diving. After two years in a tropical diving paradise, I thought it was a good time to get my diving license. A *good* time, not a *stupid* time, at all. Even when everyone I talk to about diving in the UK falls over laughing.
So last weekend was the theory and the confined water dives in a swimming pool, and this weekend is all about the bad boy actual diving in the actual sea with actual decompression sickness. I am not a diving virgin - 10 years ago I tried it in Turkey where they showed us a nice video about how we'd ease into a swimming pool full of smiley people and take things slowly. Then they took us out on a boat and threw us over the edge. Out of 10 people, everyone except me had some kind of awful injury and my mental images of diving largely consist of blood, vomit, and being unconscious.
I should really have made the connection between Turkey and being buddied up with a Turkish friend of mine, Yasmine - her bloodline includes savage warlords and conquerors of empires so it shouldn't have been surprising that she checked my equipment and turned off my air just before we submerged. We laughed about it afterwards, AND THEN SHE DID IT AGAIN! I am going to get my revenge tomorrow when we finish the course, in the "harpoon gun" section.
Apart from that it was great. There were a million fish including the killer stone fish, poisonous sea snakes, ink spewing squid, and stripey ones that liked to headbutt me in the face. I am somewhat jealous of Craig though - he saw a shark and a lionfish the first time he dived last week.
Meanwhile on the southside of town, it has been gogo gadget gogo. I met my sucessor, Jose who will inherit my apartment, my stuff, my job, and my life. He is currently residing in Ishigaki, the "jewel of Okinawa" and no one can quite understand why he wants to give all that up to come to the "famous for its perverts and paedophiles", Nishihara. I like him though, largely because he is buying all my stuff. Other people who have taken me out to dinner recently include my blue-haired ex-student Chiharu who is working as a stripper in the bad part of town. And my private student Ryota, who I coerced into witnessing my blood-signed suicide pact made with captain dangerboy of brillianceland who also holds the title of captain brilliance of dangerboyland.
My birthday wishlist looks like this. Pay attention.
1. Machetes. Various sizes, colours and blades please.
2. Cold hard cash. I have Paypal!
3. A trip to somewhere cold where I can do my ice-diving qualification and a hammer to smash holes in the ice so I can surface and/or take on giant red underwater spiders.
4. A tiger suit. But not made from real tigers because that would be bad.
5. Retractable claws.
6. Some kind of job. Big quantities of cash for small quantities of responsibility/work.
7. A whole smoked salmon. Or a truckload of gravelax. Bad cravings for this one; please help before I'm forced to smoke my own feet.
8. An EMP generator capable of destroying Facebook and everyone on it because it is stupid. And also. Rubbish. Or maybe it is me who is stupid and rubbish for being suckered by it.
22 more items to follow, watch this space with your eyeballs. |
| posted by Alice @ 6:44 pm |
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| Foebyas |
| Saturday, May 19, 2007 |
There seems to be a trend in the dizzying spiral that is my social universe for people to be making lists of stuff. Lou has just completed her list of "101 things to do in 1000 days" (highlights: jam-making, getting her opus magnus published, and finding out where her grandparents are buried in case her unborn children, Raif and Alexandre express a desire to visit them), my friends who are turning 30 (the 8th of August should be marked in your diaries in huge red letters underlined in permanent marker several times: wishlist to follow) hurriedly compiling "I will do these things before I turn 30 or die a horrible and shamefaced death" lists (why is growing your own vegetables such a popular feature? Is that not what Felicity Kendal is for?), and all those fools on 43 things dot com.
I am so easily influenced by things (I am wearing 3D glasses while writing this because I just played Wishbringer and had points deducted for killing the cat in the torture machine) that I have jumped on the bandwagon and am going through my list of phobias to conquer before I escape Okinawa. Fire, needles, knives, heights, and public speaking have been crushed underfoot, and diving is next on the list (the last time I tried it I was surrounded by people bleeding, vomitting, and unconscious). No wait. Spiders is next on the list.
I didn't realise I had a spider phobia but I can see one now and I am very scared. It has just scuttled into the room and it's stopped and is looking at me.
It's huge. And green.
Okay, I got a glass and I ninja stealthed up to it and the glass is too small to contain the spider. God, it's really hairy. Green hair that's all spiky.
I am thinking of the time Daniel-san tried to catch a redback in a glass in Australia only it attacked him and made him 3 seconds away from death and in thingy shock. It is definitely looking at me.
Got a bigger glass. It ran with its giant legs up the paper doors and I got the spider in the glass and some card under it and now the thing is on the table in the glass looking at me while I type this. I am wondering what on earth to do with it now. Can it push the card off the glass and catapault itself into my jugular?
Ohgodohgodohgod. The glass is actually steaming up. Do spiders have lungs? How big can its lungs be? Are they green and hairy too?
Okay, this is what is going to happen. I am going to find courage and pick up the glass and take it outside and turn it upside down and the spider is going to fall out of the glass over the balcony and I will be rid of it forever. Or it is going to run out of the glass up the side of it over my paralysed arm and jump into my jugular.
YES! I WIN! SPIDER IS GONE! I AM VANQUISHER OF SPIDERS!
Except now scary words like "nest", "swarm", "crawly", and "thingy shock death" are stalking through my mind on big hairy green legs.
Also: Where is the gecko that lives in my apartment who I rely on to protect me from these kind of encounters? MAYBE THAT IS WHY THE SPIDER WAS GREEN. God rest your soul. |
| posted by Alice @ 10:59 pm |
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| Jet Adventures 78 - I HAVE HAMMERS FOR HANDS |
| Tuesday, May 15, 2007 |
I was seriously considering retiring this stupid blog but I have decided that to do so would make it like those books that you start reading but never finish like Ulysses or Harry Snothead 4 (HA! SEE HOW THE WORLD TIRES OF YOU ROWLING!). Given that I am being expunged from Okinawa in less than 9 weeks time, I reckon I can build this up to a brilliant twisty finale, culminating in everyone's death and some nice explosions - the whole thing is a fabrication anyway! I never really left London and instead imagined 2 years of my life while sitting in a damp empty flat in Stoke Newington.
So Alex came to see me for Golden Week and we yammed food and trashed my apartment and really it's a miracle that the paper doors are still intact and got lost and snorkelled on the monorail and got devoured by carnivourous fish and got spotted by my students EVERYWHERE even when we didn't see them and they're still coming up to me doing Alex impressions which are swaggery and stompy and spot on and took purikura photos and played arcade games that involved hitting things with sticks went on boats and buses and taxis that didn't know where they were going and got drenched in torrential rain and sunburned and discovered the hitherto hidden Nishihara beach and fought each other and watched awesome 80s action films and bought knocked off vodka from the yakuza shop and laughed at marines and saw fireworks and won a big red inflatable sword by being so incredibly bad at the knock the cans down game that they took pity on me and watched 829875912 episodes of Battletwat McSpactica and hit each other with hammers and stabbed colossuses in the head and a whole load of other things but these are the ones in my head right now.
Right now... the weather is all static electricity and brewing because the rainy season is coming. To make up for the sudden deprivation of rainbows, I've been playing some really beautiful games. They are:
Sprout
Samorost2
Makibishi |
| posted by Alice @ 6:15 pm |
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| JET Adventures 77 - Funerals, ghosts, ants, the explosion of my head into tiny nanoshards of AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA |
| Saturday, April 21, 2007 |
It has been a strange week. Since I have come back from China I have been inexplicably furious - there are no real justifications but rational citations might include:
a) the new teachers trying far too hard - power dressing and working visibly and noisily hard (WHY DO YOU ALL DO THAT RUN THAT IS NO FASTER THAN WALKING AND SOUNDS LIKE AN ELEPHANT? ALL THE TIME? EVEN TO THE COFFEE MACHINE?)
b) the expectation from my lazy teachers that I should plan and execute all their lessons for them, EVEN THE ONES I DON'T GO TO - who do they think I am, some kind of real teacher or something?
c) the replacement of the really rather good "international aisle" in my supermarket that used to sell lifesaving gems like tea, pesto, weetabix, cheddar, and sundried tomatoes with an "Okinawa aisle" that sells pottery lions, coloured glass, and dried melon,
d) the torrential rain that goes sideways and rips umbrellas to pieces,
e) the ongoing and seemingly endless fury at time itself for coming to a complete standstill 6 days (HOW CAN IT STILL BE SATURDAY, IT HAS BEEN SATURDAY FOR 6 BILLION YEARS) before my darling boyfriend materialises like a rainbow into my world of nocolour.
I have been given a new Japanese name, 蟻巣 (IF YOUR STUPID MACHINE CAN'T READ IT THEN IT LOOKS LIKE THIS: SQUIGGLE SQUIGGLE), "Arisu", which means "Ant's Nest". I am like yes.
Oh alright. It looks like this.
Anyway, so it was Wednesday, and it was raining, and I was furious, and I stormed into school only to find out that the mother of one of my teachers had passed away suddenly and that we were all going to the funeral that afternoon. I was really worried that I was going to do something awful like somehow desecrate the corpse or trip up the Buddhist priest but I was given careful instructions on how not to be a gaijin barbarian. Like everything here, it was superbly organised - there was a woman telling us where and how to queue and we filed into the temple and burned incense and bowed a lot and prayed and I found myself crying hysterically along with everyone else for this woman I had never even met. I burned the incense and as I was walking past her picture I felt this pair of hands on my shoulders, run down my arms, and hold my hand. Really. I went out and was presented with a funeral present (it was a teatowel and a packet of salt - random), and told my teachers what had happened and they were like "oh right yeah, that's what the salt is for" and they used the salt to purify me of the spirits that had decided to climb on my shoulders.
Actually I think the whole thing really sorted me out because since then the sky has been blue and I have taught some really lovely classes and my private uni student gave me tea and pesto out of the blue for no reason and I have amazing things to build out of lego and new 3D glasses. Having said all that though, it IS still Saturday. |
| posted by Alice @ 10:47 pm |
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| JET Adventures 76 - Icecream |
| Sunday, April 15, 2007 |
Just in case you're not OVER China by now, here is some more eyescream for you.
Incidentally, some of my students went to China just before I did and hated every second - highlights were a girl being reduced to tears over salad dressing and their 5-star hotel being "more like a minus-5 star hotel". Still, it must be gutting to study Chinese for 3 years only to go and despise the country and everything in it.
I saw the most amazing fireworks last night - my friend Kana lives close to where they were being set off and had a big party so that we could all watch them from her 6th floor apartment. She's a little bit older than me but I could see my future being the same as her now in that all her friends have little monkey children. While the adults were shouting and jumping up and down about the billions of fireworks, the kids elected to stay inside and stage a breathtakingly impressive coup by yamming three economy size tubs of icecream between them.
Meanwhile, I have been making easter lessons featuring bunnies and other animals dressed up as bunnies, and easter egg hunts featuring carnivourous eggs that will eat you if you don't eat them first. |
| posted by Alice @ 3:34 pm |
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