It's all getting a bit final now. Tomorrow morning I'm getting on the train down to Kobe, and on friday morning I say goodbye to Japan and set sail on the first leg of my trip home. I'm sort of excited - lots of goodbyes recently though which I never really like, particularly when having to say it to Emma. It's either very final - I may well never see you again final - or a bit surreal, saying goodbye to people I'll probably email next week from Beijing. Hmmm. Anyway.
I've finally sorted out the visa stuff which was boring and was worrying me for a bit. The bloke at the Russian Consulate was quite a sight to see. Apparently, and this is a second-hand generalisation, in Russia, customer service is something of an alien concept - the fact that someone is buying something from you doesn't mean you have any reason to be nice to them. While serving me, he picked the phone up and just hung up about three times, and several times just stood up and wandered into another room without saying anything. The weirdest bit was at the end, where he just said 'Ok. You can pick up on wednesday' and just kept scribbling and then wandered off again - there was nothing to suggest that we were finished. I sat there for a about a minute and then left.
I think I've told pretty much everyone this but I'm going to write about it anyway - why I'm doing this completely over land. I've lived in Japan for two years now and feel I know it quite well, and of course I know England as well. However, I've next to no idea what lies in between the two, and I am quite genuinely shocked by my ignorance. Before I started researching this trip, I didn't even know what Mongolia looked like - grassy? Sandy? Snowy? They are famous for horses, but also have a big desert - so there must be camels as well, surely? What other animals? Are there snakes? Bears? Not a clue. So, to rectify this, the only thing to do is to go and see for myself.
We have four days in Beijing, and then three nights in Mongolia (in a yurt!) and three nights at Lake Baikal. After that, we go straight to Moscow, and on to St Petersburg and Tallinn. Now I was quite worried about this next part, because I was envisaging a total trek through Eurovision Europe - Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and so on. I'm sure they are great places, but after a fortnight on Russian trains I think I will have had enough, so I was really relieved when I found this alternative route. You can get from Tallinn to London in three nights - night one on the ferry from Tallinn to Stockholm, night two in Gothenburg, and night three on the ferry from Gothenburg to Newcastle.
Right, last few things and then I'm out of here. This is a bit weird. + 0 - 0 | § ¶The Four Elementary School Students of the Apocalypse
Lance told me this story the other day.
Almost always with the lower graders at Elementary we do a lot of 'first greetings' lessons - 'Hello, My name is ~, Nice to meet you' + handshake. In the course of the introductions, he was approached by a boy called Shin. Nothing strange about that - very common name. Now, in phonetic Japanese writing, the basic idea is that one symbol denotes the sound of what in English we would think of as a consonant plus a vowel. For example, there are different symbols for Ka, Ki, Ku, Ke, Ko, and this continues through all the consonants that they use. To write Japanese words in English letters then, they simply do this backwards: for every Ka symbol, they write a K followed by an a, and so on and so forth. However, it's not quite that simple. In Japanese, the S series of sounds actually goes Sa Shi Su Se So - there is no sound for Si, it always gets turned into a Shi (one two three four five shix, please shit down etc). Now you might start to picture the scene: small boy running up to him, about seven years old, great big smile on his face, massive name tag pinned to his chest, huge pink letters: SIN
Here's what I did at work today:
Two crowns and a pair of pig ears. The real world is going to be quite a shock to return to... + 0 - 0 | § ¶Some Cracking Links
Evolution of Dance
The Armageddon Flowchart
Physics Limerics
What a git. Apparently some cameras caught him winking towards the Portugal bench just after Rooney was sent off. I give him about a week in Manchester before someone smacks him in the mouth.
EDIT: Kat found a link to it