I love eating many types of Japanese food and so it’s about time I learned how to cook these things myself. Since today is Pancake Day in the UK, I decided to try my hand at okonomiyaki. I ate a few of these when I was in Osaka, where they were first invented. I also [...]
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Practice article-writing 2: Cat got your tongue?
Talking cats are more common than you might think: many a proud cat owner will claim their kitty can speak, but Duncan ‘RJ’ Robert from Melbourne, Australia claims his cat Mischief can swear. Duncan, 34, and his wife Sandra, 32, have heard their 2-year-old cat say seven different words including no, mum, now, what, why, [...]
Practice article-writing: Honeymoons with a difference
Honeymoons are generally once-in-a-lifetime holidays on which couples celebrate their newly married status in style and share some fun, relaxation and excitement before settling back into the real world, and not experiencing those things again for a while. Most couples like to spend their honeymoon in luxurious hotels in warm climates, enjoying each other’s company [...]
Maya the geisha girl
I think in the West there is a general misconception that Japan’s geisha are rather sordid, like high-class hookers, or at least that was the case until the film version of Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of A Geisha was released in 2005 (in which, interestingly, all the main female characters were played by Chinese actresses). Both [...]
Lexiphiles
I was told about a website where you can adopt a word. It sounded like a lovely idea. I imagined a fusty, decrepit library with a host of lonely words, hangdog and underused, desperate to be voiced and brought back into common parlance. It wasn’t exactly like that.
An enlightening experience in Nimbin
While driving up the east coast of Australia from Sydney to Brisbane, my friends and I, like many other backpackers before us, decided to stop by a village called Nimbin, which is about 40 miles inland from Byron Bay. It’s a tiny village (population 352!) but famous in certain circles for its relaxed attitude towards [...]
Mazeophobia
Getting lost while travelling is arguably part of the fun. When you’ve got time on your hands, getting lost in an unknown city can be a form of impromptu sightseeing: you can find yourself ‘off the beaten track’, stumbling upon weird and wonderful things that you might otherwise never have discovered had you stuck to [...]
Row-day-oh
I went to my first ever rodeo, in Australia. I had no idea that rodeos took place in Australia: I had always assumed it was just like England except hotter and with weirder creepycrawlies. But after arriving in Adelaide, I soon realised my assumptions about the country had been completely wrong. Unlike England, in many parts [...]
Things I shall miss about Japan
After practically complaining about Japan in my previous post listing Japanese oddities, I decided I should remind myself of the things that left a positive impression on me. I encountered a lot of cool and interesting stuff during my stay in Japan and while there was a lot that I found weird and alien, there [...]
Ganbaru!
So I’ve been in Tokyo now for a month. Today is my last Japanese class and then I’m free to be a bum and travel round the country. It’s going to be a very different experience from the last four weeks. It’s been pretty tough and there have been many times when I really didn’t [...]
