michael lambe Blog

Some bright spark came up with the idea of a cola drink flavored with Shiso. Shiso is a herb commonly used in Japanese cuisine. It is a member of the mint family but has a very, very strong flavor.  Seeing a bottle of Pepsi Shiso on the shelf in my local Fresco, I was intrigued. How would this strong savory taste combine with the crass sweetness of a Pepsi Cola? The blurb on the bottle claims this new soft drink is “sawayaka” or refreshing. A perfect pick me up for the hot and muggy rainy season perhaps?

Mewby and I gingerly took a sip tonight. Here’s Mewby’s reaction before thrusting her glass of fluorescent green soda away:

“Ya! Pass!”

She also described it variously as “mazui” (nasty), “mecha mazui” (really nasty) and “egui” (acrid). My own reaction? Well, you can certainly taste that shiso! And you can taste the saccharine sweetness too! Do they combine well? No, they do not! On my initial taste I thought it might be almost drinkable. But then the chemical aftertaste flooded back at me from the back of my tongue and I have to admit Pepsi Cola have outdone themselves in creating something borderline disgusting.  I’m sticking to ramune in future.

For the last four years I have taught Business English off and on at the Sumitomo building in Yodoyabashi. Thursday was my last lesson and my students took me out for dinner to celebrate. Here are Mr. Ohta and Mr. Iwasaki.

And here is Mr. Yokoyama and myself.

The food at Girond’s Jr. was excellent. It not only looks great but it tastes good too.

Unfortunately Mr. Sato couldn’t make it but hopefully we’ll all meet up again someday soon… Many thanks to all, especially Mr. Ohta for arranging everything. He is the entertainment maestro.

I don’t think I have mentioned it before but my old college buddy, Craig Meulen, is currently teaching and studying at a renowned Buddhist monastical institute in Himachal Pradesh, India. He has a blog about his experiences there and it is worth checking out.

The ‘real’ Dharamsala is not so high and is very Indian. The place that the world has come to know is actually called McLeod Ganj – a connected town high up on the hill. It was here that the Indian government offered the Tibetans some land and in the last fifty years the Tibetan colony here has grown and grown and taken over the hillside. …I have to say that I was very disappointed with the town itself. It is a real tourist trap. Very crowded and not really a place where you would hope to experience Tibetans being Tibetan – here they just seem to be selling Tibet on T-shirts and every other type of souvenir imaginable. LINK

A little while ago Craig posted a youtube video of a BBC documentary “The Life of Buddha”. This too is worth checking out. What struck me is that whereas for Christians, the literal existence of the Christ and the sequence of events that make-up his lifestory is all important, this is not so true of Buddhism. The traditional tale of Buddha’s life is clearly in large part a fairy-tale deliberately constructed to dramatically illustrate his teachings about the right way to live. Whereas Jesus’s teachings are clearly secondary to the cult surrounding his Christ persona, in Buddhism the teachings are everything. Doesn’t stop it from being a good story though. Watch and enjoy!

I  got kicked in the face today!

It was entirely my own fault as I wasn’t holding the kick pads properly. I should have been especially careful as my rather large co-worker was kicking with extreme enthusiasm (he was all happy about his new kick-pads see?). He did manage to pull his kick a little bit at the last minute though… so I don’t have a broken nose. Just a rather intriguing marbling effect on the right side of my nose. Top marks to Chris who took one look at me when I came back to the teachers’ room and in perfect deadpan said “Tough job - TEFL”. And to Mewby also, who after the initial required concern: “Ah poor you” expressed the inevitable mirth: “Pretty funny though, really, eh?” Now, (just for fun) I have to think of a different yet sufficiently dramatic story to tell in each class this week to explain away my bruisyness (and to give myself some totally undeserved macho street cred).

Let’s see. It was my work friend Matt’s last night of drinking before he becomes a poppa last Friday. So I ended up pretty wasted (naturally) and even after Matt had gone, continued drinking with Andrew and his friend Mike. The booze (among other things… but mainly the booze) having made us all emotional we sat by the Kamogawa watching the fireflies (pretty amazing up by Demachiyanagi this time of year) and telling each other mutually appreciative things… I eventually got home at 4 - which was unfortunate as I had the clinic at ten. But I made it on time and it was a good session too…

Saturday was funny. Spent most of the afternoon wrestling with Mewby’s dog Rui (actually…  not that hard to do… seeing as she’s a Maltese). Leaving Mewby’s place we passed Tofukuji so I took a picture.

Then in the evening we met up with Ted and Miki and her brother and sister-in-law (”yome desu!”)  at Shimogamo. We had heard there was a fire-fly festival and that 500 of our wee glowing bretheren would be released at the stream. There was a large crowd waiting around the stream at the front of the shrine, staring intently at the waters so we waited there and stared intently too… and the minutes ticked by and nothing happened… till suddenly everyone just upped and left. It seemed there was another stream inside the shrine and that was where all the action had happened and we’d missed it already. However, although I had images of hundreds of the poor wee twinkly beasties being released all in one glowing go (and Ted had had Larsen-esque images of them all being instantly caught in a giant spider web) it appears they were all released boringly one-by-one. No show-manship these people. They like to dress up though.

I don’t know what this lady was doing but lots of people were watching her very intently so I’m sure it was very cultural and important.

Later though going home by the river, Mewby kept stopping and insistently shouting “Look! Look! There’s another one! Look! LOOOK!” very excitedly because there so many fireflies out among the river grasses… Very exciting, fireflies. If you get the chance - get yourself up to Demachiyanagi and watch them floating about. It’s like watching fairies. It really is.

View from the Sumitomo Building, Yodoyabashi, Osaka.

Happy moment: This evening, I’m sitting in Shichijo station waiting for my train and three girls I taught last year at my old school came through the gates. “Hello!” says I, and they said “OOOOHHHH!” and ran up to me in an obviously delighted fashion. I was delighted too. How nice of them to remember me and to chat with me for a while…

Later, in Osaka, I had a few minutes before my class arrived so I took the opportunity to snap the picture above. I’ve been teaching at the Sumitomo building off and on for about 4 years now. Those business classes have certainly helped me pay my way… But soon I’ll be finished for good. Only two more classes to go in fact. The students are nice enough. We are all around the same age and on pretty much the same wavelength. But I’ve had it with working evenings. And the paperwork.

I won’t miss that at all.

In no particular order…

1. I work with good people. Stirling people. They are not only fun to hang out with but they work hard and are keen to share ideas and to help each other out. They are totally awesome.

2. The school generally treats us pretty well. We all get our own computers for example. And the pay is pretty good. And then I get a twice yearly bonus on top of that. Just like a regular Japanese employee! This is the first time I’ve experienced this in 12 years of living and working in Japan. That’s awesome.

3. My students are friendly and interested in their subject. I cannot even begin to tell you how awesome that is.

4. I can get to work by bicycle in ten minutes from my house. (You see I live in an awesome area).

5. I work a long day and I’m really busy but it’s fulfilling. I actually look forward to getting to work in the morning. Even Monday mornings! And I have a lot of opportunity to think and create and do a good job. I really enjoy that.  Being paid to make stuff is awesome.

6. I have a free period at the end of the day, four days out of five. I go into the gym with a couple of my fellow teachers and they show me how to use the machines and are now teaching me kick boxing too. And they are all nice and encouraging about it too. This job is good for my health and… it’s like I’m getting paid to train! How awesome is that?

7. Yesterday I learned that on top of the two weeks we get off at Xmas and the two we get off in the spring, we will be getting two months off in the summer - and (!) we have a two week autumn break!

Awesome.

Apropos of nothing, here are some pictures from a fun night we had out at Gnome at the weekend. Felicity Greenland and Tomoko Saito conducted a singalong style workshop of British and Irish songs. And sing we did! Here are the two musicians:

Here are (villainous) Ted and Mewby:

David and Yuki:

Myself and Mewby too:

Why Ted kept pointing at me and singing “Dirty Old Man” instead of “Town” I have no idea… There’s a video of a nice Gaelic song Siúil a Rúin up on Deep Kyoto here.

At the weekend I went to the National Museum of Art in Osaka to see an exhibition by Hiroshi Sugimoto entitled “The History of History“. If you’re interested this is what the museum looks like (I don’t know why it has rabbit ears):

And here is a close up entitled “Girl Eating a Sandwich”.

But anyway, back to the exhibition - wonderful! The artist has displayed his artwork alongside his collection of fossils and historical artifacts, forming all kinds of thought provoking juxtapositions between the worlds of history and art of course. But also following his concerns with religion, architecture, science, medicine, the exploration of space… in a nut-shell: life, humanity and the world! Anyway, I’d recommend visiting this exhibition, it’s on until June 7th, but give yourself a few hours to see everything because there is a lot and everything is just too fascinating! After that we strolled back along the river towards Yodoyabashi Station and Mewby noticed this lovely old building sandwiched in between all the modern high rises. One word caught our attention on the signage: Organic.

Turns out it was a Solviva Organic Cafe and whole grain rice restaurant. So naturally we stopped and had a bite to eat. I had a cream croquette and Mewby had a tofu stew:

Very nice! Here’s a glimpse of the interior:

And of the exterior:

Satoyama No Shokutaku by Solviva is located here: MAP. Tel: 06-6241-5757 Open: 10:30 - 20:00. We recommend it!

Finally here we are on the train home having fun with reflections:

Tuesday 19th of May: I receive a mail from the company that hires me part time to teach business classes. During Golden Week they effectively forbade me from travelling abroad. I ignored it as I had no plans to travel anyway and do plan to quit the job after my classes end in June. This mail though, kind of wound me up (company and personal names removed):

> All,
> Due to deterioration of pandemic flu situation,
> many customers are now requiring us to wear
> a flu mask when we teach at classes.
> Of course, attendees are also required to wear it.
> Please note that all instructors who teach at XXXCOMPANY and
> its subsidiary companies must wear flu masks.
> And also other companies may require us to do same thing.
> If you have any problem with this, please let me know.
> Thank you for your understanding and cooperation.
>
> XXX and YYY
> Please let part time teachers recognize this requirement.
>
> Regards,
>
> XYXY XYXY

No way are they going to make me do that, I thought. I considered raising a ruckus and using it as an excuse to quit the job early, but when I wrote to my manager about it (ever so slightly pompously with annotations, references and links to WHO and CDC recommendations) he ….totally agreed with me, so that was a leetle bit of an anti-climax… This kind of thing does make one wonder what would happen if there really was a national emergency though…

Thursday 21st May: I didn’t wear a mask and no-one in my class did either and I had no problem entering the building and my students thought the whole thing was completely ridiculous. Actually there was no such rule from XXXCOMPANY but they had been instructed to wear a mask out of doors (seems kind of random). Still there were a heck of a lot of people in Osaka wearing facemasks - thus marking themselves out as complete buffons. My favorite moment: I’m in a convenience store in Yodoyabashi station, (all employees have to wear masks there now), I ask a nice young man working there if they have a particular product and in order to hear me better he pulls his facemask down around his chin and then leans forward to communicate with me more effectively. Maybe I should sue him for reckless endangerment?

Friday 22nd May: I arrived at work today to find that school is cancelled. Woot!  I pass a Japanese colleague on the way out and compliment him on his mask:

Me: Nice mask.
He: Thank you. You know you can get them from the school nurse.
Me: Ah, that’s ok. Actually, (still small quiet voice telling me not to bother but I say it anyway) they’re actually potentially quite bad for you.
He: Eh?
Me: That’s right. The World Health Organization recommends we don’t wear them unless we know we are already sick.
He: What? Why?
Me: Well, think about it, it’s a nice warm damp place next to your nose and mouth. If you wear it for long periods you will increase the risk of infection.
He: Well, maybe but you know… one good thing about it is, it keeps my throat moist. If my throat is dry then a virus can enter easily I think. So it’s good because it keeps my throat moist. (as he said this he touched his mask with his hand thus rendering it entirely ineffective.)
Me: Uh-huh. OK. Well, see you next week then. (what else can one say when faced with such infallible logic?)

So I am free till next Thursday by which time the “deterioration of pandemic flu situation” or Zombocalpse as we like to call it, will be all over. So that’s nice then.

Here’s a couple of random things that amused me recently:
Mr. T says get some nuts.

And (courtesy of Graham Chave who posted this on facebook) an entirely spot-on analysis of facebook applications.

Wind farm kills Taiwanese goats