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 [...]
Tag Archive > Maya Driver
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 [...]
But that’s three things all in one, chocolate, a toy and a surprise!
I like Kinder Eggs or, as they’re officially known, Kinder Surprises, although that seems a bit of a misnomer to me since there’s nothing surprising about the crappy toy you’re bound to find inside. I have a lot of complaints about Kinder Eggs in fact, or perhaps I should say disappointments, but despite them, I [...]
Shh!
Recently, with increasing regularity, I’ve found that people just aren’t comfortable with silence. Not a groundbreaking revelation I admit, but it seems to have cropped up an awful lot. Only yesterday when I was helping my boyfriend make dinner, his flatmate (who I’ve met just a few times) and I were the sole occupants of [...]
eBay: the commercial siren
She beckons to me, enticing with her promise of amazing bargains and impossibly good value for money. She lays her bait and I think to myself, ‘It’s only 99p. What difference would it make?’ And that is when she knows she has snared me, that all she need do is reel me in, gently at [...]
To sleep, perchance to dream
I had a bizarre, protracted dream last night. I had to go in a great hurry to meet some friends and so began packing necessary items into a bag. Despite not finding everything I needed, I left to catch a bus. The bus was slow and was going in the wrong direction so I got [...]
Me and my not-so-Japanese face
お 早うございます O-hayo gozaimasu!This morning on my way to work I remembered it was my mum’s birthday and for some reason this got me to thinking about me being half-Japanese. Being a halvsey in the past twenty or so years has ceased to be such a rare thing. There are so many different races living [...]
Slut boots. Or, Maya makes appearance-based assumptions.
It’s late Sunday afternoon at Sudbury Hill – not exactly the social hub of London: it’s more of a greasy hole lurking at the periphery of ‘Greater’ London. Waiting for a bus, my wandering attention is assaulted by a violent splash of colour on the other side of the road. A girl strides along the [...]
Samurai 7
Japanimation is a series of talks and screenings of anime taking place at the Barbican centre as part of the City of London Festival. Last night’s seminar was about the anime series Samurai 7 – based on Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. The speaker looked in detail at the significance of Kurosawa’s work and the impact [...]
Pachinko & Paddy Fields
Something of an enigma to the uninitiated, Japan was no less of a mystery to me despite this being my third visit. It felt more like my first, since my previous visits were made when I was less than seven years old. This time I was old enough to appreciate the history and culture of [...]
