Sumimasen, gomen nasai, wakarimasen

Is it unreasonable to suggest that the Japanese and the English are similar? I rather think they are in certain ways, and I suspect that this is borne of both being island nations. Both cultures developed independently on relatively small, crowded islands, and this resulted in cultures that are desperate not to offend. Kate Fox, anthropologist, in her book Watching the English, noted the frankly bizarre way in which English people will immediately apologise after being bumped into. Most other cultures would respond with some variant on a theme of “Oi! Watch your step, buddy!” but not the English. Nor the Japanese. “Gomen nasai,” (“I am so sorry…”) is very common in Japan.

It’s a consequence of living on a small and overcrowded island. To fail to defuse tensions after offending someone is a great way for fights to break out. The Japanese were rather better at that, with an entire level of society devoted to wielding murderously sharp swords at anyone who wasn’t sufficiently apologetic.

The other ‘Englishness” of the Japanese is the resistance to learning foreign languages. English language is pretty widespread, but it was extremely easy to encounter people who had no English, or French, or German. My absolute inability with the writing system didn’t help either. I can now identify “Tokyo”, “Ladies”, “Gents”, “Kyoto”, “Fire”, “Forest”, and “Forbidden”. And that’s about my lot. How useful, provided I only want to write a note about how smoking in forests in Tokyo is not allowed. We were able to get by, through a mixture of very broken Japanese, apologising, sign language, bowing, and apologising.

Ah, the bowing. Everybody bows. I greeted the chambermaid as we checked out of one of the hotels, bowed, and she returned by almost prostrating herself, much to my embarrassment.

Left-handed chopsticks actually do exist

In other respects, I found Japan and the Japanese extremely foreign unto the point of being almost alien.

Beloved Wife was in Japan a year or so ago, and she’d reported to me that in Tokyo's Electricity Street there was a multi-storey adult store. Now returned with her lawfully-wedded husband, we could explore all the floors. Basement and ground were merely videos and books, with selected movies shown on small screens to tempt the purchaser. Presumably, the purchased product would not feature pixelated images. Higher floors got progressively kinkier. Marital aids were followed by costumes, and then the S and M stuff. I spotted these, that might provide an amusing diversion on St George’s Day.

Fun and games on St George's Day

Muggins was blundering around this small but rather crowded emporium wearing a backpack. And being a bit of a lardarse, I kept blundering into the shelves and sending stock asunder. I can confirm that I was nearly thrown out of a sex shop for being too big. "Gomen nasai..."

Back outside, and  another Tokyo delight is the vending machines. Almost anything can be and is dispensed by a vending machine, including change so there’s no worry about not having the right money. Hot and cold drinks, chocolate bars, and crisps are easy. Rail tickets similarly. Used undergarments are now a memory following government efforts to clean up the industry. But what about the coin-op restaurant? That’s just beyond weird. 

And now we get on to the main point of this blog post: the food.

A proper restaurant. Order food and drink by referring to
the useful labels hanging around

In a normal restaurant, you enter and sit, and the waitress takes your order. You eat; you pay; you leave. Sometimes it was a culinary mystery tour of wondering what we’d just ordered. Al least “Birru” sounds like “Beer”, so that’s easy to remember, and I like “Sake”. In MuckDonalds (where I never eat), you order; you pay; you eat.

Cooked to order

In a coin-op, you make your selection from a vending machine. It takes your dosh, spits out a ticket, and you hand this over the counter and receive food from an actual person. Except that each of the fifty or so buttons on the machine only has a Japanese character (no, not Ponyo nor a Power Ranger).

Comprehensive choice of, erm, food

Vending machine in the corner, and food cooked to order

Time to accost a restaurant patron: “Sumimasen, gomen nasai, erm…breaded pork cutlet?” (Bow, apologise some more, etc). The only really important thing was to avoid seafood. Beloved Wife even set her husband up with a traditional Japanese breakfast one morning. A big rectangular room with tatami mats, low tables, and a whole selection of pickles, tofu, soup, vegetables, and fruit. The raw fish fillet was easy to identify and avoid. “Fish are friends; not food.”

Street food. Steamed, stuffed buns offer something that is
not entirely unlike steak and kidney pudding

Not that any of this put us off eating the local food. I recall the only really non-Japanese meal we ate was on the last day. We were waiting for our train to the airport, and a German-style restaurant was offering Bavarian lager and a big pile of assorted sausages.

Okonomiyaki. Anything you want here,
provided it's this one thing

My final Parthian shot was to buy a box of wacky Japanese sweeties to treat my colleagues back in Doha. When I got back, I was reliably informed that mochigashi are easily available from trendy shops in Doha.

]}:-{>

T'weekend is comin' an' it's time for a bath

Last weekend was exhausting.

Dubai St George’s Society Ball was postponed from its traditional 23rd April, presumably to avoid clashing with the Royal Wedding, and to ensure that the Band of Her Majesty’s Royal Marines would be able to come. On the run up to the event, the Goat was chasing around for jobs, passports, visas and so forth, and with less than one week to go, it at last became apparent that You Shall Go To The Ball!

Beloved Wife’s Aunt in Abu Dhabi has a colleague who wanted to attend the Ball with his wife, but the couple didn’t wish to leave their son Kay home alone. A plot hatched that entailed the Aunt and teenager being dropped off at the Crumbling Villa on Friday morning, shopping, errands and entertaining Kay all afternoon, and then Beloved Wife and Goat heading off for a riotous evening including Roast Beef of Old England, unlimited special beverages, a military band, patriotic singing and then dancing the night away to the Royal Marines’ Dance Band. Another task was to find enough gear in the Crumbling Villa’s emporium of dive kit, tools and bicycles for four snorkellers. That was part of Saturday’s plan.

Kay, who is thirteen, spent Friday afternoon ably demonstrating how Beloved Wife’s latest toy, an X-Box Kinect, should be used. Naturally, he has set the bar so high that certain middle-aged owners of said X-Box are going to have to reset the unit or else become unbelievably fit. No prizes for guessing which is more likely.

The Ball was huge fun, with the added bonus of the Goat actually winning a spot prize. Turning the voucher into the actual prize will entail a trip behind the Red Door in Ras Al Khaimah.

So we got home at 2am, dirty stop-outs that we were, and were up again at 6am to go snorkelling.

Any excuse for the Goat to get the bike out and head off to the mountain roads and the east coast.

Kay had allegedly never snorkelled before. Fortuitously, the Goat is a snorkel instructor, and because Kay took to snorkelling like a duck to water, the pool session took about ten minutes and then everybody headed for the sea.

There were the usual tropical fish, large shoals of juvenile barracuda, but no reef sharks or turtles, and the water was a bit murky. It was very smooth though, and there was no current, so the underwater Goat with snorkel and flippers set off with Kay around the seaward side of Snoopy Island. Aargh! Oil slick!! As soon as he realised, the Goat dived below the surface and made a U-turn into clearer water, dragging Kay along. Generally a lucky escape, although the Goat needed to find some olive oil and Fairy Liquid to get the noisome sticky bituminous mess out of his hair. Due thanks to the beach-bar staff at Sandy Beach for being helpful with detergents.

After lunch, the whole party had time to flop in the pool before heading back to Dubai to drop off Aunt and Kay for their trip back to Abu Dhabi. The Goat got back on the bike, and headed south through Fujairah to Kalba. He’d not been in that area for a year or so, and was amazed by the amount of recent construction in Fujairah. It was better to refuel at Al Ghayl before hitting the mountains. The Goat once ran out of petrol on the Sharjah-Kalba road; an embarrassing exercise he doesn’t intend to repeat. A very therapeutic ride on the bendy Kalba to Sharjah road, included entertainment provided by persons unknown piloting black-windowed sports cars. They vanished beyond the horizon upon hitting the monotonous straight bit at Shawka (N 25°04.9' E056°01.6').

Meeting back at the Crumbling Villa, the Goat had changed out of his sweaty biking gear. Everyone piled into the Goatmobile to drop off Aunt and Kay for their trip back to Abu Dhabi, and retrieve Beloved Wife’s car from the Grand Hyatt’s valet parking.

]}:-{>

Who wants to be a milliner?

The Goat’s recent silence on the InterTubes of late has been because of other rather more pressing engagements. One of these involved the Goat’s almost full passport. Others involved beer.

According to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, a British UAE resident has to send his applications for a replacement passport to Düsseldorf rather than the previous system that involved having it done at the local British Embassy. First pay £15 to PayPal to obtain permission to download the application form, then send off the form, old passport and nearly €300. “Up to” six weeks later, the new passport would arrive.

Unfortunately, having his residence visa cancelled upon termination of employment would give the Goat four weeks to leave the country. The potential for being trapped without a passport and incurring fines for illegally remaining in the UAE rather encouraged a holiday in Blighty.

So the Goat applied for a same-day appointment at Nanny Goat’s local passport office, picked up the application form for free from the local post office, and now has a new biometric passport. Huzzah! Visits to the in-laws in the USA without all that pesky form-filling to get a visa are now possible.

The Immigration and Passport Service has to be self-funding. It is, of course, completely unreasonable that the British taxpayer subsidises Mrs Trellis’ holiday from North Wales to Benidorm; arguably more so when the travel involves a tax-free job in Dubai. Thus a standard UK passport currently costs around £78. Same-day service by special appointment and a jumbo 48-page document is £140ish. As £78 apparently covers all the costs of the IPS, the Goat idly speculates as to the justification of nearly €300 for Brits abroad.

Travel costs didn’t count in the Goat’s case because he was going anyway.

Visiting family and friends, the Goat borrowed Nanny Goat’s car and gave it the sort of thrashing that the old rented Yaris received between Dubai and Abu Dhabi, and achieved the same result: 40mpig, or 7l/100km for the rest of the planet. Poor little City Rover.

Thank you to Mr and Mrs Thrash, the Gnomad and Gnomadette, and the Lawful Goods of Cowplain for their hospitality, food and the opportunity for boating on the Thames.

The weather on the run up to Easter was gloriously sunny, even resulting in the Goat getting slightly sunburned in the open cockpit of the MV Jedi between Sunbury-upon-Thames and Windsor. Next time, wear some form of hat. A new record for possibly the slowest passage was caused by repeatedly having the river locks slammed shut in our faces because they were full of other boaters who had had the same idea involving sunny weather and messing about in boats. By the time we arrived, all mooring spots were taken and the Good Ship Jedi had to be rafted three out. This made getting small children ashore an entertaining experience; just as well they’re used to this sort of thing.

Incidentally, the Goat was appalled when his host produced a French flag. In England. On St George’s Day. And Bill Shakespeare’s birthday. There was some feeble excuse about it being an unused courtesy flag for a boat trip over the Channel that was postponed because of foul weather.

Moored in a very busy Windsor, it was noted that Her Maj., Mrs Liz Windsor was in residence up at the local castle. Witness the Royal Standard flying from the topmost tower. The Goat shared his speculation that, because of her grandson’s upcoming wedding, she might have actually been down the hat shop. (Although in Soviet Russia, as the ancient memes say, the hat shop comes to you.) Nanny Goat, who was in London on a coach trip at the time, reports that Her Maj.’s car was actually parked outside Westminster Abbey on Thursday while the monarch was inside doling out Maundy money.

Now back chez Nanny Goat, her offspring is bemoaning the fact that the display on his new mobile phone has died. A fully-functional phone, but no access to any menus, is worse than useless except for receiving voice calls. Imagine being unable to read all the texts that can be heard arriving. And it can’t even be backed up. The Goat has tried and failed to switch on Bluetooth by Braille, and suspects another new handset may be in order.

]}:-{>

23rd April Calloo, callay!

Happy birthday, William Shakespeare. 444 years old today. Probably. Also happy birthday to Max 'E=hν' Planck (150), Shirley 'Good Ship Lollipop' Temple (80),'jogging' Jim Fixx (76) and Lee '$6M' Majors (69).

Happy St George's Day. St. George is the patron saint of inter alia Aragon (who isn't called Strider nor is Isildur's heir), Canada, Catalonia, China, England, Ethiopia, Georgia, Gozo, Greece, Malta, Montenegro, Palestine, Portugal, Russia, and Serbia. Also the cities of Amersfoort, Beirut, Ferrara, Freiburg, Genoa, Ljubljana, and Moscow, as well as a wide range of professions, organisations and disease sufferers including the Scouts, the Freemasons, the Hellenic army, farmers, shepherds, syphilis, and leprosy. I do hope those last few aren't connected.

And today is more or less the first anniversary of Beloved Wife and my engagement.

Finally, today is the day I thought I'd figured out how to get an animated GIF to display on my blog. The image itself is free, and may be found, along with a plethora of other stuff, here. Unfortunately, although it displayed fine in draft, I now find that access is 'forbidden on this server'. So I went along to PicAttic.

Dragon slayer

St George is the patron saint of England, and also Moscow, Portugal and Palestine, among others. And today, 23rd April is his day. It is also probably William Shakespeare's 443rd birthday.

Being English, I should make a special effort at Englishness today. I'll apologise to people who bump into me. I'll indulge in self deprecation. And I'll form orderly queues.

It's ironic, isn't it, that only in England is a queue-jumper likely to get away with it? The rest of the queue will mumble "How rude!" without engaging in the social taboo of "Oi! The back of the queue is over there!"

Typical!

St George's Day

He's the patron saint of England. April 23rd is the closest England gets to a National Day so here goes with some commemoration.

I read here that The English share St George with several other places, including Georgia (no surprises there), Lithuania, Germany and Palestine.

I hope to indulge in some roast beef and Yorkshire pudding before the day is out.