Simple drunken fun
This is what being in Japan is about. Ignore the bureaucracy, the stilted lessons straight out of a textbook, the laundry drill, the screaming kindergarteners, the crap tv, the fact that you don’t know what the friendly old woman is saying to you when you meet at the grocery store and so on. Ignore. Have simple fun like the events of last night.
Last night I met with the JET in the village next to me. We meet once a week to have a drunken bitching session in a restaurant of our discretion. These meetings usually involve:
a) bitching b) drinking c) bitching and drinking
It is our chance to vent to each other in English what has been getting up our nose in the last week. Names are dropped, gossip exchanged and arse-poke evasion tips discussed. It is highly enjoyable, therapeutic fun.
This time we decided to go to a restaurant that was vaguely close to us, so instead of getting a cab, we decided to ride bikes. After getting suitably inebriated we chose to head off home, only semi-surprised that our crap granny bikes hadn’t been stolen whilst left un-tethered outside the restaurant*. Riding the bikes whilst drunk was much more difficult and felt like I had an invisible 20-stone ET in my front basket. Through the town we meandered along in a criss-cross fashion, occasionally colliding with the pavement, or drifting into the path of traffic. Leaving the bright, quasi-navigable streets of the town, we departed for our respective villages and were plunged into darkness. I sluggishly zig-zagged my way along the narrow roads, teetering dangerously close to the edges of water-filled paddy fields and being followed by a mist of mosquitoes. The world 6 feet infront of my face was an illogical blur of mountains and rivers. Somehow I made it home. I flicked on the air conditioning and collapsed onto the futon, forgetting about my key which I had left dangling in the lock of my front door.
*Although theft is generally uncommon in Japan, having your bike nicked by a drunken salaryman to aid his passage home actually happens quite often.
