Travelling: Kobe

Kobe was always on my list of places to visit in Japan. I'd heard good things about it before coming to Japan, and then more good things from other people while in the country. It seemed to be just a nice place - a large city (not unusual in Japan), fairly vibrant, good to walk around and not too far from Osaka if you want some more travelling. It was almost chance then, that the woman (friend of a friend) who kindly showed my family and I around Kyoto when they came to visit lives in Kobe, and kindy offered to give me a tour of the place for one weekend in June. So I took some time out of studying (or cramming if you prefer) for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test the following weekend and paid the city a visit.

Once off the shinkansen, I met up with Mrs Ketano and her daughter, Ikuko, who would kindly show me around. The first place they took me to was the nearby Ijinkan ("Different-People's Homes"). Kobe was one of the first places in Japan to attempt to integrate with foreigners, and it was only in Kobe that foreigners were allowed to own property and businesses outside of a strictly controlled "foreign zone" found in most other cities. Kobe still holds that reputation for being both well integrated and fairly multicultural as a result, and also home to a large number of foreign tourists and residents. Naturally the first Ijinkan we looked at was the British one, which even had a lawn (grass for the sake of it is rare in Japan), even if the inside had been transformed into some sort of Sherlock Holmes museum.

Next stop was a trek up Kobe's mountain, to see what we could see. It was a good location - it was close enough to the city to not be inaccessible and it was not far enough that it felt removed. The mountain ended up being a place just to go to look over the city and maybe get some peace and quiet for a short while, before heading back down. At the top are various rose gardens and scenic spots, all making for good views of the surrounding city/countryside.

Off the mountain I was taken to Kobe's Disaster Reduction Museum to learn about the large and devastating earthquake that happened there not much more than a decade ago. It then hit home that my guides were alive and living in Kobe at that time, and while a bit of a sensative subject, to hear their own experiences of what happened was actually more valuable than wondering around the museum. Japan is prone to this kind of natural disaster though, and will probably suffer even worse in future, despite the museum's best efforts to convince and educate architects to rethink their designs. When I first came to Japan we were given huge amounts of information on the upcoming Tokai earthquake, a big one that's been overdue for a couple of years, and that some of the recent extreme weather has made people worry might not be too far away.

The museum itself was on the harbour, and we drove a bit further out onto the chains of artificial islands to get a shot of Kobe from the harbour. So I managed to get to see the city from both sides, land and sea.

The next day was a day trip to go and see Himeji Castle, probably Japan's most famous castle due to its "fairy-tale castle" kind of image. This was another big travelling checkmark for me, because I knew that in the very near future (maybe next couple of months) the entire castle will be covered in one giant tent for restoration works, and will be closed to the public for approximately 5 years. I figured I should get to see it before then at least, and very luckily that's what I got.

The castle is very well preserved, I suppose because it takes so long to service. It was designed for big and imposing-ness points, and for sheer defensibility.

I ended up wondering around it imagining myself as some invading army. I'd forgotten all my seige engines else I'd have trebuche'd my way in. And I also forget it's completely made of wood, so I left my vats of boiling oil with the babysitter. The basic formulae is you end up battering your way through a gate, being shot at from all sides from small slits in the walls with arrows and guns (yes, they had gunpowder by that time, however people don't like the idea of samurai with guns), then charging up another uphill narrow corridor only to hit another death-zone gate. If the hills don't get you the projectiles will. And all the time you can see the main castle and you keep believing you're getting closer when in fact even after getting all the way around the outer walls you're still nowhere near, and the way in can even be entirely hidden so you end up where you started. Hats off to the strategic genius.

When you finally got inside, there was still no guarantee of success. Ridiculously steep staircases topped with trapdoors, and more slits in the floor for more shooting people as they climb. And about five floors of that, with supposedly Chief Bloke sitting at the top. Goodness knows what would happen if he decided to order pizza or nip to the nearest supermarket or something, take him hours to get back in.

Coming back out of the castle was the end of the weekend and of my travels around Kobe. It was amazing that I had had the chance to look around both the castle and the city of Kobe, and in the hands of expert guides.

How Not to Mend Your Shoes

One small ideal that I always try to cling to is that, when things break, it is better to fix the old one than immediately go out and buy a new one. In the same vein however, it does mean that I am terrible at buying new clothes until they literally fall to pieces, which ironically has been the fate of my sandals, leaving strange black powder/lumps of sole in the corridor between my room and the kitchen. Unfortunately, as maybe some of you worked out from my ExtremeShoeEngineering(tm) in Hokkaido, where I resorted to wearing a sock-bag-sock combo to keep dry, there was a small waterproofing problem with my shoes. July/August in Japan is well known as the Rainy Season, and after a number of soaked feet incidents I have been prompted to properly repair my shoes.

(NB. Without really checking, I just assumed that the chance of me finding new shoes in my size, in a style that I liked, and within a reasonable price while in Japan would be small enough to discount. Ah well.)

So, my shoes and I made trips to a small shoe-repair shop near the main station, and were promptly told that they couldn't repair them directly, and whatever they did probably wouldn't solve the waterproofing problem. When I went to a larger "Shoe/Leather Expert" shop, they explained that they couldn't do much for it either because the sole was one whole set piece, and they couldn't slice it up well enough to make a repair. The leather on the sole was pretty thin anyway, and wouldn't really have sliced at all. So, no real chance of professional help with solving the footwear problem.

This was about the extent of the problem. Although in the background you can see the strawberry plants - having wielded no more than four strawberries, I figured there must be something wrong with how I was keeping them (or that the season had changed...), so I adopted the strategy of just leaving them to take over the balcony. It works very well for growing the plant, but still no strawberries...

Anyway, back to shoes.Then I remembered I saw some sort of liquid plastic something in Tokyu Hands the last time I was there, so went off to investigate. I found this.

Not only did it have a fun name, but the rear instructions were fantasically optimistic as to how well it would work.

So, application. Squeeze out of tube, spread on with ice lolly stick. The kit also came with a nail file, but my nails were ok so ended up not needing it.

It went on pretty well, staying liquid long enough for me to contort the shoe a bit and get it well into the hole(s).

Both shoes done, just a matter of waiting. The weather was still hot enough to dry it pretty quickly, and it was well done within about two days, though I decided to do a second layer to cement things a bit more.

They sealed pretty much perfectly, and thanks to the new insoles I had sent from home they were back to fully weather proof again. Hurray!

PS. After about a month and a half of wear, and the tsuyu (rainy season) showing no sign of stopping, they eventually split along the hole again. It was easy enough to use Shoe Goo to fix them again though.

PPS. By the end of the year, they're almost back to their original state of holiness. Ah well. Time for more goo...

My Experience of Contact Bridge

That might seem an odd title, but there's a story attached to this. The story actually took place yesterday evening, so this might be the most up to date blog entry I've posted yet, a fact which is both a source of pride and embarrassment, but hey-ho.

Mondays are swimming days, that is, the university's elite swimming team finally have an evening off and they open the floodgates of the pool for free to the rest of the unwashed who can't splash out on a public one. I tend to turn up, swim a kilometre or so trying not to notice how many times I'm being lapped by everyone else, then decide that that is fair exercise and cycle home. Yesterday, this bit went fairly normally, save that temperatures in Nagoya are now consistently over 25ºC and so the pool was pretty full of people escaping the heat.

Also, I've been trying to get back into piano, and have managed to stick at it by teaching myself bits and bobs of music on the free-to-use digital piano at the back of the Foreign Students' Centre. One of the tricks is I think to play what you want, not what you have to, and I've been away from learning the instrument long enough to have a good desire to be fluent in a couple of pieces, so things will all go well hopefully and I'll be able to bang something respectable out before I return to the UK. The best time to practice is of course when everybody has already gone home, and so on Mondays I usually make it after swimming.

Wandering in to the centre and seeing the piano already taken, I figured I could just wait 10 minutes or so and then it would become free. I had barely sat down when I women came around the corner and asked if I'd be interested in joining in her card game. I said why not, and went around the corner to discover a mysterious board (North South East West and other arcane looking coloured markings), a plastic cage of playing cards and four stands full of strangely marked cards that would put the average Taro artist to shame. The other players included two Indian-looking guys, and a petite Japanese girl, all of whom had already heard the rules and understood them several years ago so I was fairly behind from the go.

The woman then helpfully proceded to try and explain it all by means of a printed piece of paper with a grid of numbers and suits on it. This would have been ok, except there were also odd tetris-shaped lines running around and over those number/suit combos, dividing them into strange areas I didn't grasp the importance of. One of the "y axis" resembling bits of the table as it were was the "points", which I think I wanted to get as much of as possible, but there was no obvious way to climb up the table through the tetris to get to the "ultimate trump" or "7 no-trump" or "7 spade" or whichever was the goal of the whole thing.

We each got 13 cards, which we were meant to count and then arrange in some certain order, and even my card-holding posture was sternly corrected. From 13 cards, you were then meant to work out how many points you had, from the system Ace is 4, King 3, Queen 2, Jack 1. Once you'd worked that out, the game would begin from the person whose direction on the board or coloured markings had "dealer" next to it on the cage with the cards in. Hm. With no real goal in sight and no real actual playing strategy, we moved on to the "Bitting Stage", which I couldn't tell if it was a misspelling of biting or betting.

This was the start of my doubts as to my proficiency for the game. If you didn't have 13 points, then you would take from your card-holder the triangular green "pass" card and put it in front of you, this was simple, and all three other players did so. However, if you did have 13 points (I had 14) then you counted the number of cards of any one suit that you held, and then if you had 5 or more of some then you could take a "1" card of that suit from your card holder thing instead. I did so, having plenty of spades and I declared "1 spade", whatever that was meant to mean. At least I was somewhere on the mythical tetris-based score card.

My partner then put down a "2 spade", which I was told meant he had anything from 6-9 points. I failed to see the relevance of that, along with the relevance of the NSEW directional thing, the card cage and the still baffling stand full of different tokens. And how on earth he'd got 2 and I'd only had 1 befuddled me, especially seeing as he didn't have 13 to begin with. I was assured this was good (I still didn't really know what I was aiming for) and we did two more goes around where everybody passed. "This is defensive play" I was assured, though defending from what exactly I had no idea.

At that point my partner (I keep saying partner, the guy directly across from me who I didn't know) then lay down all his cards neatly on the table and we had to put all the strange tokens from the first bit back in the holder, as if it had all been for nothing. The game then basically became Hearts, with some arbitrary card being trumps, and I had to play both for myself and also tell the guy across from me exactly what to do. Also, for some unexplained reason you consult the colours on the card cage and decide who gets the honour of putting a card face down on the table and then being told to turn it over (eh?). Every time I tried to play Hearts the woman corrected me, saying that I should already know what cards everybody has because of the first round, which I couldn't remember. How that helps you win at Hearts was even more confusing, and thankfully soon all the cards were used and the wins/losses for the rounds where counted.

At that point, it was revealed that although I'd declared "1 spade" I was actually up somewhere in 4 spade, and in a different tetris area on the scoring card, but because I'd done badly at the Hearts bit I was back down to 2 spades. This failed to strike me as in any way significant because I still didn't know what the hell that meant. Regardless, the card cage was replaced with a different one with different colours and the game began anew. I was then asked how I was faring - I said I didn't understand and I didn't really know what the blazes was going on. She made the point that it was like a novel - you start off reading and don't know how it goes but the pieces fall together later on, and why shouldn't I play it because the Royal Family Windsor do. She thus invited me with a flyer to the rest of her group's recruitment drive about the university campus, and it was only at this point that I discovered that the game I was trying to play was called Contact Bridge, something I'd seen next to the chess puzzles in the Times and paid very little attention to. It wasn't looking likely I would in future much either - one game had been far too confusing for me, and it seemed to have not only kicked down the "Keep It Simple Stupid" rule as far as steamrollering it then pegging it out over a termites' nest.

In the next game, I didn't have 13 points, so I passed, as did my partner. However, on the second round he said "Oblivion" or something I didn't quite catch which suddenly meant his cards were worth something different and the 13+ rule didn't apply. This also meant I had to do something they assumed I'd know, but by this point the piano was gathering cobwebs with lack of use and I made my excuses and left before my head exploded.

Thank you kind woman for trying, it was a valuable experience, and I'm sure my misunderstanding of your world-class explanation at the start let me down. Thank you for bearing with my faulterings and misunderstandings at every turn, but I must turn down your offer, and leave Bridge to the readers of the Times and people who might actually stand a chance of understanding the multi-tiered rule system.

The cost of the incomprehensible cards, cage and taro-esque card rack would probably be prohibitive too.

Plan B Review

Thought it might be a good idea to let you know how things have changed since the "Half Time" post and see if I can check off a few of the goals I set myself at that time.

Now that the project is done and my timetable isn't being disrupted with intermittent quarantining, the past two weeks have actually been fairly normal, or as close as things can possibly get to that. The timetabling is much much better this time around - only one late afternoon lesson Tuesdays Wednesdays and Fridays, and a large wodge on Mondays and Thursdays. The timetable is now entirely taught in Japanese, which while being horrendously difficult I'm sure is healthy somehow, the language equivalent of eating broccoli or something. That said the classes are actually interesting - one about comparing Korean culture to Japan's, one about the place of kanji in Japan and why you only really need to know around 1,500, and one about globalisation and the "McWorld" phenomenon. So basically lots more free time, lots more interesting and useful lessons and much more language. Timetable gets a tick.

Let's see if the rest of the list has come to fruition...

1) Escape university.
Well, um, not really. One or two other students have managed to join the Nagoya Frisbee team I think, but I still don't have much hopes for much proper engagement with the city. I spend as little time as I have to at university now anyway, and that's about it.
2) Get a job.
Big success. I teach English to one student for ¥3000/hour (about £19/hour) twice a week, and could probably find another student if I felt like it. I've also secured a translation postition with the university online course department - they wanted someone to go through their syllabi and course descriptions and things to put them in English. That one goes at 60 words to an hour paid (an hour roughly ¥1000). It's good for me both for my Japanese and by wallet. So yes, earning lots, feeling more like I'm actually working towards something rather than just wasting time around Nagoya.
3) More self-study.
This too a success. I've started studying at least half an hour every day, and also the translation job pushes more Japanese my way. Having a completely Japanese timetable also works wonders too, so happy with this one.
4) Write a Japanese sakubun at least once every two weeks.
Kind of. I've signed up to an online writing course that has one small piece to write every week, but only about 400 characters. If I ever meet my tutor I'll ask her to check through them before I put them online, but there's really not a lot you can say in 400 characters. Will have to expand them or something.
5) Move to the JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test) Level 1 kanji.
Aha, no. This is oddly conflicting with the next goal, in that I'm not going to change kanji lists while I'm studying for a different test. I'm going to make JLPT2 as good as it can be before July 5th.
6) Take the JLPT Level 2 test this year in July.
All signed up and rearing to go. Studying specifically for this one now in my own time. Haven't received any confirmation for it yet though, hope that's not a bad sign.
7) Try and join a theatre club.
Hmm, not really. Would have liked to, but I think I've just resigned myself to the fact that I might as well just spend all my free time either wasting time on the computer, earning money for translating or studying for the JLPT. Variety was fantastic in Sheffield last year, and I do very much miss it now, but I think that I have two months or so left in this country and the more work I can do now the less I have to do in 4th year.


Overall then things have improved around here. It's still not great or anything half as good as the fun I was having this time last year, but it's better. Having my head down and working towards things is maybe not exciting or riveting but it's better than wandering around with nothing really to latch on to to call your purpose. On top of that more travelling planned - I'd like to finish Japan off with a visit to Kobe and a visit to Okinawa, and then back to the dormitory for some frantic packing and boxing of things before leaving Nagoya for the last time.

I'm both looking and not looking forward to it though. It's something that's difficult to describe - Japan is quite a marvellous place in a number of ways, and it's great to wander around it and just be in its bizarreness and difference of everything. I can easily see how people could make a life out here, however hard that would be to begin with. However, I miss the "extra-ordinarity" of what I had in the UK. I once thought that what I had encountered here in Nagoya was "the Normal". There are people, there are jobs, there are restaurants etc but nothing really special leaps out at you apart from what you yourself find special. Back in England with my friends and family there something extraordinary was always happening, no matter how insignificant, it was extraordinary and outside "the Normal". Perhaps this is therefore a good thing, that I get to both experience the blandness of normality in a country which is by nature intriguing, and that I get to understand what it is that I left behind in the UK and how special it actually is.


PS. Having got bored one day I decided to get a bag of compost and some strawberry plants from the garden-centre and see if I could create anything. The original plan was tomato plants because they're effectively foolproof but they weren't selling any, so I figured strawberries were still red and a fruit and worth having a go at.

They're well developed now, even spilling over into another small container of earth I had lying around and they even managed to produce four strawberries! Although one was bad and I ate the other three to see if they were bad as well. Since the plants seem determined to grow in all directions I'm nudging them towards the balcony wall bit to see if I can get some vine-action in them growing in and out of the holes.

Also, there're loads of little white spidery things all over some of the leaves - they're not making holes or anything and they wash off very easily, but I'm pretty sure they shouldn't be there. Any suggestions on a postcard to the usual address.

April and May

Hello blog followers. You may have been it's been a bit of a while since I haven't been posting anything, and nothing at all in April or May. That's because things here have been busy. That's my excuse anyway. You'd have thought 5 days in quarantine would have made me write something at least...

April - Project project project
Having come back from Singapore, I had two weeks working on my Year Abroad Research Project (tm), which was fairly pointless because I needed term to start on the 13th April before I could really do any of the research side of things. The family came over on the 4th for 16 days, and I spent the time I had before term travelling around Japan with them, seeing some new places and revisiting others. Since I'm feeling lazy, I was going to invite one of them to write something about the occasion, especially since I wasn't with them for half of their time, but I might end up doing it myself after all ;)

April was incredibly busy trying to get enough research done to warrant a pass. Students on the year abroad aren't required to actually pass anything at their host university, and so long as they turn up to lessons then everything is fine - the only caveat is that we have to write a 6000-word research project on a subject of our choosing. Not really wanting to write anything serious, and not being too keen on handing out opinion polls about women's working rights or economic conditions or something else doable but dull, I chose (back in Sheffield this time last year) to base my research project on the topic of Japanese Humour.

Ah, blissful ignorance. What have I learnt from doing this research? Humour is the absolutely worst thing you could ever write about academically. Reading the available literature, which already is incredibly difficult to find (especially about such a specific topic as Japanese humour) is simply boredom grating at your eyeballs, jokes have no meaning when written down, and I even found a chapter where the hilarious Yes Minister was pared down to an incredibly dreary explicative text. Taking such material and then trying to write something meaningful from it was not easy at all, especially when the vast majority of it was completely irrelevant. On top of that, the majority of Japanese humour comes from the discourse of a comedy duo, the clever tsukkomi berating the hapless boke for his errant thoughts. You can't even record that sort of thing in words. The Japanese idea of a funny television show is to gather a random handful of celebrities, maybe bring in an expert of something for educational purposes, and then get them all to do something bizarre or impossible like eating scorpions or playing Human Tetris. This is equally difficult to really write about or describe, so I eventually had to write about the place of humour within society rather than about the humour itself. Ah well.

May - Quarantined
The big plan was to finish it off before going to Korea for Golden Week (a group of holidays in the first week of May) but I didn't quite manage that. This was ok though, because something fairly big happened while I was busy scribbling away. Swine Flu came to the Far East.

It was only a tiny amount of cases, but Nagoya University insisted that, since I wasn't going to cancel the £200 odd flight to Korea with only three days' notice, I would have to be quarantined on my return to the country for 10 days. I wasn't exactly explained the rules, just that I would have to stay in my room as much as possible, avoid places people gather etc. The idea of it was completely without meaning - if I wanted to cook I'd have to visit a shop to get ingredients, and then use the communal kitchen down the corridor. I'd have to get back home from the airport using the underground. If I was infected they'd find out very quickly when I took the whole dormitory out. But of course, the death rate for swine flu outside Mexico is less than 0.1%, so of course the Japanese government has gone absolutely nuts in suggesting such quarantines.

When I got back I found that the number of cases in Japan was roughly 200 more than Korea's anyway. It had managed to infect a school or two in the Osaka area.

So, I spent (a fortunately shortened) 5 days in my room with just the research project and the bi-daily temperature measuring to do. This was where I discovered the disadvantage to my do-everything laptop - I ended up doing everything on it. If I wanted to work, laptop. If I wanted to play games, laptop. If I wanted a film or music, laptop. I even use a couple of Japanese study programs on the thing. If I wanted any variety from sitting at my desk I could read a book for a bit or read through a textbook but aside from that there was remarkably little to stop me going incredibly stir-fever. Never mind swine flu, cabin fever would end up killing me.

On the last day (Thursday) I emailed in my health/temperature sheet and looked forward to freedom. Turning up at university, I was quickly surrounded by teachers on all sides wondering why I had come in. Apparently they as in the department had no problems with me being there, but they hadn't cleared it with Nagoya University's Beurocracy Central. I was allowed to go to the one lesson that day, and then asked to carry on taking my temperature over the weekend too.

I'm sorry to say that Boots' Feverscan(tm) was either inaccurate or Nagoya Uni had its paranoia hat on again, but having emailed in the weekend's results I got a phone call early on Monday saying that a temperature of mostly 37 with occasional 38s classifies as a fever, and would I be so kind as to go to hospital to be checked. Hm.

Hospital was a way away, and a fairly small drab kind of building in which I waited for a fair bit, was talked to, waited for another bit, had some long stick thing wodged up my nose, waited some more and then eventually charged about £25 for the bit of paper on which the doctor had scribbled "no problems".

With my health now financially secured on paper I could get back into the swing of things at uni, and with no more project to worry about I could actually try and get back into some sort of normal schedule. Hooray!

Travelling: Korea II

Seoul
This was my second time in Korea, for about the same duration (10 days-ish), a trip mostly just to get to see Lianne again, but this time we also decided we would try travelling around to see more of the country. Lianne didn't have a great deal of time off work so the travel would be slightly rushed, but it ended up being very worthwhile and we got to see a lot of the country that I didn't see much of the first time.

Firstly was off to the captial of South Korea, Seoul. Having talked a lot with the Korean students in Nagoya, asking them for their ideas of what to see/where to go etc, one of the students (who had ambitions to work for the Seoul tourist industry) supplied me with a very comprehensive list of things to see and do in Seoul, including her favourite chicken soup restaurant. Which is where we went first.

It was very tasty - a whole chicken floating in soup stuffed with rice and ginger. Perfect for the slightly chilly and rainy day we were exploring the streets.

Nearby was the National Museum, and a palace. The museum was no-photos, but contained a lot of ancient Korean relics, mostly from its various royal families, along with various traditional possessions and robes still used during various festivals and ceremonies.

The palace was only one part of a large complex, but one which apparently had been destroyed and rebuilt more times than was really fair. It was still able to accept tourists though, so we went in for a look.

The thing that struck me was the colours of it - a lot of work had gone into keeping the colours vibrant in the wood. Just a shame that the weather was a bit grey.

After the castle we wondered up the road to a nearby shopping street, full of clothes and trinkets. Here we discovered the only Starbucks in the world that is forced to write its horrible trademark name in the local alphabet. On the way we also passed by the remains of the Namdaemun, or the usually enormous Great South Gate, which had burnt down about a year and a half ago. Rebuilding work was underway though.

It was on this street that I managed to get myself a hanko (personal stamp) made. My new translation job required one to stamp off the time that I had worked so they could calculate my pay, and most Japanese people use a hanko in place of a signature, so I figured that it would be a good purchase. The trouble would be finding out how to represent my name in Japanese characters - the vast majority are impossible to convert ("Johnson" would have to be "Jon-son", and the characters don't exist in Japanese). I settled eventually for 砦門 (sai-mon), meaning "fort gate". People I've showed it to say that it's a good choice, with a slightly Chinese/old fashioned feel.

Moving from the shopping street, we began exploring the immediate city. In Seoul there's a very well decorated but small river running through some of the busier areas. It makes for good walks and almost separates you from the metropolis that towers above you, and which was a good place to explore. Further up the river there were some fantastic paper lanterns. The bridges were lined with a fair few police though.

It was around this time that we began to actually recognise the fact that there really were a lot of policemen around. I'd heard from the Korean students in Nagoya that all South Korean youths of 18 or over have to partake in some form of military service, and seeing as most don't want to join the army they instead serve in the police or fire service. Still I'd never seen so many concentrated in one place before, and the light and unworried atmosphere in the city didn't seem to warrant their presence. At any rate, there were plenty around, either lining the streets, marching out of subway entrances or forming ranks on bridges. Small worry that some form of martial law was silently being introduced. But no worry, back to touristing. The worst we were getting from the police was the odd blank stare.

From the end of the river (blocked by more rows of police - now noticably sporting riot gear) I spotted a spotlight, and thinking there might be some sort of festival I tried to get to the source to find out what was going on. All the direct streets were blocked by more rows of riot police, so going around the long way we were faced with this.

It's alright when they're just lining up to block passage, but not so much when they start marching in the streets shouting and banging their shields. I wondered if some sort of war had broken out, but at any rate it would probably be better to head back to a hotel than hang around. We later found out that earlier that day there was a parade, and that the police were expecting demonstrations due to the upcoming Labour day, but the show of force was well above what would have been required. I suppose it shocked people enough not to even try.

The next day we left the motel and in the street immediately adjacent to ours was a full blown parade.

Parade over, we set off to try and find one of Seoul's famous temples, close to the business district. There were some musical fountains around which Lianne managed to get a video of.

The temple was famous for having the largest statue of a Boddhisatva called Kannon, and when we found it it was also full of red lanterns.

That evening we thought we'd try for the Seoul tower, to see what we might see. There was terrible queuing though - about 45 mins just to get into the cable car to take us to the base of the thing, and even when we got up to that point, we had to buy a separate ticket just to enter the tower itself. It seemed some clever lock-maker had made up something about couples locking themselves together on the tower dias and made a mint.

When we eventually got into the tower, we then had about an hour and a half wait to even get into the queue for the elevator up. At the top, the windows were pretty thick with dust/grimy-ness and we didn't wait long to find out why - three small Korean girls burst out of the tower and immediately threw themselves at the glass. Wonder if they caught anything.

The view of Seoul was not particularly worth the wait - it was nice, but not two hours worth nice. Especially when there was another three quarters of an hour to get back out of the viewing gallery. Eesh.

By that point it was getting late, and we decided it would be easier travel-wise if we simply caught the night bus to our next destination rather than looked for a hotel for the night.

Busan
Busan is the "other" Korean city - in the same way that most foreigners to Britain have only really heard of London and Manchester. It's less touristy than Seoul, but contains (at least from what I saw) a lot more foreigners.

Arriving at 6am was not so great, but sitting on a beach in early morning having not slept so well was a new experience. It was more a question of finding some way of passing the time before we could even try and get a seat somewhere for breakfast to try and wake up a bit. We eventually managed to find a cafe called "Paris Baguette" (bonus points for originality) to grab some hot chocolate and bread, and as if by some sort of cultural magnet within half an hour there was a french couple chatting merrily behind us. Sort of makes me wonder why my pub or fish and chip shop detector wasn't working.

When we'd managed that, we made off for a large temple on the coast. This too was full of colourful lanterns, and was just a beautiful location to sit in the sun, slightly sleepy, but still taking in a foreign country.

Still sleepy, we decided to find a hotel and hit the sack for a few hours, before heading out that evening for the sea front for dinner and a couple of drinks. The beach itself had a strange laser show and a wonderfully lit bridge, all of which my camera refused to take pictures of. You'll have to put up with one I took the next day.

After those two days, we headed back to Ulsan. Lianne's short holiday was over, and I spend the rest of the time doing odd chores around the apartment and trying to be helpful where I could while she was working.

When I got back to Nagoya I was quarantined... (see next post)