Pringle made me do it

Hello humans

My story starts in Melbourne. then Cairns, Narita Japan, then fukuoka airport, then a bus ride for 2 hours. so somehow i actually didn’t end up in Syria. however i did have the pleasure of sleeping in narita airport for my 13 hour transit.

on my way to tokyo i met a human from Brisbane. A chef, a few years back he was a small business owner with a business worth 1.5mil making him 300k a year with a Japanese wife and 2 kids. then his wife’s mental illness got worse and he slowly but surely lost everything. now he is 33 with 500$ total travailing to Japan, probably for the last time, to pick up his kids from her parents place because she is not going to recover. Also he now works in a CSG mine in Queensland feeding construction workers that are “animals” and apparently not very nice to girls.   on that optimistic note i continued into a strange land. and i do mean strange. there was a bloody hologram of a girl greeting me into narita airport.

did a lot of reading on the way (refer to facebookposts for best of) . got picked up at every security checkpoint in Melbourne and Cairns. “Totally by chance” the middle eastern looking male travelling alone thought to himself. Food in narita was horrible. Tentacles from a MRE looking bag. Yay. Ran around for a bit trying to recover my hard drive that I thought I left on the plane – it was in my bag the whole time.

enjoying  being tall and i can’t stop saying “cheers”. Did some super weak and PC friendship intro activities. met some Americans, Indians, sri Lankans and Koreans on my to uni and in uni. yet to meet any Australians or middle eastern people.  Realized how only the Americans are laughing at any of my jokes. For example: We walk up to a water fountain on the tour and she says: “this is our water fountain, it is the symbol of our uni, it not working atm.” So i said “i hope its not symbolic” – Americans got it. later enjoyed 1.5hours and a broken wire setting up internet.

strange things about said uni: all carrots sold are wrapped in plastic, milk cartons are to be washed after use, cut up and hung on a cloth line in the communal kitchen to dry out – for recycling, floor 1 is only for boys and floor five is only for girls and the other 3 are mixed. This is to accommodate people “who not want girls or boys on their floor”, to get in to dorm one needs a card. You swipe it and it lets you in by unlocking the door for 30 seconds – plenty of time for some else to waltz in – silly small people don’t get security. Big sign in the showers saying “pls do not cut hair here” – apparently thats a problem here cause barbers are expensive.

in-between contemplating what random groups in society i want off MY floor I realised that what we consider to be food and what they consider to be food can be expressed in a ven diagram of two circles kissing. I will attempt to address this later when i travel to the city to get meat. – can’t now because of a thunder warning which means everyone needs to be indoors.

lots of rules. Lots of validation of national Japanese stereotypes. OH. And i asked guide person about any problems i should be aware of. After some pressing she told me the westerners tend to think its ok to walk around with no shirt in the dorms. It is not.

feel free to post questions about my life in the middle of rural (and mountainous and foggy) japan on my facebook timeline.