But first! A long meandering discussion about Fate. Or Coincidence, if you prefer. For last night, on our way back from the Mountain, we stopped in Yokohama for some Chinese food. This is a good thing to do. Not only was the food good, but it was complemented by the appearance of Yoko-san, who works at the company I did my thesis at. Said company is abour 20 miles away from Yokohama. This got me thinking about other chance meetings I’ve had the pleasure to experience in the past - queue flashback music and blurred picture:
1) Last night, on our way back from... Ok, did this one already.
2) One week ago, in Shibuya, at the Hachiko-crossing (“The busiest intersection in the world”, according to those who want it to be the busiest intersection in the world), I’m out with a couple of friends when I am distracted by someone actually pronuncing my name correctly, at very high volume, nonetheless. Queue Norwegian friend Sigrid, who is back in Japan for a month, training with MTV to present a show on Norweigian TV3. So a celebrity, no less!
3) Back in July, I was having dinner with some friends from work near Tokyo station, when Aya-chan, whom I am on a sort of friend-of-a-friend status with passes by and waves enthusiastically. She was moving to Osaka in a couple of weeks, just a little FYI.
4) Then we have the work-people: I’ve run into one guy both in Nakameguro and in Shibuya, and another time I’ve run into Ie-chan from work, also at Nakameguro, this time at the station. So 4) should really count as 4-5-6).
7) The really freaky one happened in December 2003. Tomo, Caroline, Alexandra and I thought it would be a good idea to spend three weeks travelling three thousand miles across Australia. And it was! At the start, when we camped on the World’s Largest Sand Island (Fraser) by night and bumped around in a landrover by day; a couple of Germans, an English guy and two girls of the same nationality also joined in. This was around December 20th. Our group split up on reaching the terra firma of Australia proper a day later, and we thought that would be the end of it. Ten days and 1500 miles later, without any communication of any kind, we’re celebrating New Year’s at Mrs Mcquarie’s Point in Sydney, when English girl #1 show up and happily greets us with a fairly gorgeous "Hello!"
8) Ok, I have one more, about running into a Korean guy I met in Gifu in Tokyo two weeks later, but after the Australia-story, it’s kinda hard to work up the enthusiasm. Never mind.
Now that that’s all taken care of, lets get down to the triple mentioned at the start of this post, before it got all verbose. The Concert:
Ah, the Sound of Music.If you think Japanese people are mild-mannered, polite, and just people who don’t indulge in crowd-surfing and thereby shoving their feet and other even less preferable body-parts in your face, then you obviously weren’t at this shindig. Which is a shame, because it was what the early ninties would refer to as a blast. Did you see the purple lights, well, did ya?!
Next up: Trade Show! This was not the first time I’d made the trek (by train) out to Chiba, but it was the first time that crowd-control had gotten it into their collective hive mind that it would be a good idea to make 70 000 people walk around the entire building (a one-mile walk, thank you Google Earth) before allowing them to gain entry to the show proper. The length of the queue at it’s peak? Estimated at a mile and a half, which, yes, is almost an entire mile longer than the shoddy half-mile deal H&M managed to pull together when they opened in Ginza last month. Also, here’s what it looked like, from back-stage:
Look ma, people!Then the triple to complete the crown. Nothing quite like a show about cars to make you more interested in Nature. A while back, I’d seen an episode of Top Gear (look it up!) where three English gentlemen travel to Japan to see what can get them from point a (Sea of Japan) to point b (Mt Nokogiri in Chiba) the fastest: a Nissan with more bhp than the spaceshuttle, or public transportation - bullet trains, that sort of thing. A story of sat-nav failiures and getting-on-the-wrong-train-’cause-the-signs-are-in-Japanese hilarity ensues. Eventually, the car option wins, by about three minutes.
But that’s not the point. The point is that Mt Nokogiri is a gorgeous place. I shall demonstrate this now:
A gorgeous place.So a mere one hour on different trains, a 40-minute ferry, a 15 minute hike to the ropeway station an hour-long hike to the top, and we were there! Which was very much the prefered option to “here”, at least at the time.
The “we” who were “there”.Also there? Japan’s biggest stone Buddha, a cliff sticking straight out of the (other-) rock with just a neat-o 100 foot drop straight down (“peaking into purgatory”, they called it, and yes, going up there was not completely un-scary), and a sunset.
You guessed it.Final note: the thing that will stay with me from this trip, possibly more than any other? Two Japanese guys, who going up the trail as we were going down, went “Ninja! Ninja! Ninja!” to... get in to the spirit of things? Whenever you need a little extra energy to keep going, just exclaim that quietly to yourself. And no, I don’t know why.
Beverage of the Week #14Name: Sprite 3G
Catchphrase: "Look at us, we've named our new softdrink after that next-gen mobile phone tech that was so hot four years ago"
Price/volume: 147 yen for 500ml
Place/time of purchase: Circle K, somewhere, 09:55
Particular Point of Interest: The 3G’s are: Glucose, Green-Tea-Caffieine, and Guarana. And yes, they call it Glucose because a) “Sugar” doesn’t have the ring it used to, and 2) calling it “Sugar and 2G” or possibly “SGG” was just not an option.
Taste: Like Sprite. Or maybe 7-up, I can never tell those apart.
Overall score (package/taste): 5/B
