Change of address

Hello all,

On Friday I moved out of my host family's house in Chiba, and into a student dormitory in Funabashi. This is great, as a) it's a 45 minute commute to school, rather than a 2 hour one; and b) I now have complete freedom to get up whenever I want, come home late if I want to, etc. I decided ages ago, based on Nicola's advice, that a host family would be a good idea initially but I would soon get sick of them and so I should move out after 4 weeks. It seems that they were sick of me too, so moving out is mutually beneficial.

I celebrated my new-found freedom by going out drinking last night, with the same Franco-Swedish crew as before. No cult beef this time, unfortunately. It was a very enjoyable night until we left the izakaya. I had only been to my dormitory once before, and my brain was rather addled by large quantities of nihonshu and cheap whisky, so I had no idea how to get home. Thus I spent the next 2 hours wandering the streets of Funabashi, pathetically whimpering to myself and becoming ever more convinced that I'd have to sleep on the street. I sought help at a koban (police box), and ended up with about 15 policeman trying to help the poor drunk gaijin get home. They scoured the map, while I did my bit by sitting in the corner and moaning, "I just want to go to bed" in broken Japanese, but all to no avail. Eventually, somehow, I managed to get home.

Just as I collapsed into bed, my mobile phone rang. On the other end of it was a certain Swede, who it seems had had an even more ridiculous adventure than me. He'd caught the last train to Chiba, but in his inebriated state had got off at the station before. "No problem," he'd thought, "I'll just walk the last stop." Unfortunately he'd walked in completely the wrong direction and wound up lost in the no-man's-land of the Tokyo suburbs. For some reason, he asked a passerby the way to Funabashi, even though he was trying to get to Chiba. She replied, "Umm... I'll show you the way," and then walked all the way to Funabashi with him, even though it took 90 minutes. Once she'd seen him safely to Funabashi station (it was 1am by this point), she said, "OK, I'll be going home now," and started the 90 minute walk back to where they'd met! He ended up sleeping on my extremely uncomfortable wooden floor.

Today, I went for a wander around Funabashi to see what's what. While the core of Tokyo is all a regular grid of streets, this place is a crazy jumble of exciting little alleys, so there's lots of exploring to be done. It seems like a pretty cool place, although the numbers of very old people and pachinko parlours (I think they go together) seem a bit excessive. At night, the very old people disappear and are replaced by drunk businessman doing karaoke. The nightlife here is really good - lots of cheap izakaya everywhere. Today there was a bit of a mini music festival going on in random places around the town. First I saw a rather mediocre pop-punk band, who were the smiliest group of people I've ever encountered. No rock'n'roll pouting and strutting for these guys. Next I watched a very impressive taiko drumming display. Taiko is just like normal drumming except that you wear orange jumpsuits and the drums are comically large (i.e. bigger than a person). Finally I saw a very cool folk-rock duo called Luck Lisence (sic). I didn't have the heart to tell them they'd misspelled their own name. I had a chat with them afterwards, and inadvertantly blagged a free CD out of them. I asked if they were playing any gigs soon, and from their incredibly speedy answer I deduced that the answer is: yes, they are. Sadly, I didn't catch the date or location of said gigs.

I've got an exciting Saturday night planned. I'm going to sit on my bed drinking a large beer and eating an unhealthy snack, and watch Scarface. Catch you later.

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Funabashi is
A truly labarinthine
Mess of alleyways.