Here's to being bloody awkward

It’s warming up. Spring is here. On my journey to work I go across a thin pedestrian bridge over the Asahi river. A month ago, the grass on the river bank was patched with yellow and black. The yellow was caused by the months of cold and lack of rain. The black was from where the turf had been burnt away in its annual maintenance. Meanwhile, the rice fields consisted of mud with little lumps of brown at intermittent intervals.

It won’t be long before the cherry blossoms start to open and people are sitting out on the grass drinking sake. Not quite hipsters with BBQs on London Fields, but nonetheless a relatively relaxed way to enjoy pretty outdoor Japan. What I am most looking forward to is being able to interact with the parks and gardens that often feel more decorative than functional.

It looks as if we are going to head south to the island of Yakushima next week. This is a truly budget-breaking trip, but the pressure of our forthcoming departure is pushing us to stretch ourselves in terms of what we are willing to break the bank for. Travelling has become an increasingly important part of my life here as the satisfaction I get from the job has slowly decreased.

You know when you watch a TV series and it just infiltrates your head completely? Well I’ve been watching a lot of Curb Your Enthusiasm lately and the effect of this is that I increasingly find myself thinking “This is a Larry situation”. In Curb Your Enthusiasm, you sometimes get the impression that a whole episode has basically been built around one idea (e.g. Larry has to use a toilet at someone’s house, but the toilet doesn’t have a lock or Larry phones in an obituary to the newspaper but they make an embarrassing misprint). From that idea, 28 minutes of awkwardness is derived, with 25 minutes of awkward grimacing and 3 minutes of laughing out loud at the end when everything comes together.

Well anyway, our friend is staying with us at the moment and was sleeping at the foot of our bed this morning. I had to get out of bed before both K and her friend who didn’t need to wake up until much later. So I needed to get up, wash, get dressed, get my things together and leave without waking or disturbing anyone, preferably without turning the lights on. My attempts to do this increasingly felt like a Larry David routine as I conspicuously struggled to dress myself in the darkness, tripped over people and eventually had to wake the friend up in order to retrieve something from a cupboard, whilst being berated by a clearly irritated K-chan. The whole time, I was imagining that trumpet background music in the background as I awkwardly fumbled my way to the front door.

Finally, I’ve discovered that Okayama’s 24 hour Mcdonalds, across the road from the station is the equivalent of London’s Bar Italia (*hums the Pulp song*). At 6.30 in the morning it is basically full of casualties and people who have clearly stayed up all night and can’t go home yet. This made me happy as I shuffled my way through the muzak-playing mall under the station and got laughed at by my students for not having enough money on my ICOCA card.