things that have gone wrong

Hello there boys and girls! One week of my Japanese adventure has passed and since I added a counter to this blog an astonishing 36 people have visited. Now although this is an impressive number (somewhat boosted by the amounts of times I have checked the total) I expect many more hits. Why not tell your boss? Forward the site to the mish? Let sammy kel know? If we get to a thousand I will have a prize for the thousandth hit*!!!!!

But seriously, its been a reasonably eventful week, I have started work, bought a little pushbike and done a number of things that werent supposed to happen. So lets recap on some of my little cultural boo-boo's in the first week.

1. Ate a fishhead by accident. It was a little sample thingy at a food place and I thought 'oh, this looks nice' and treated myself, only to get a strange taste in my mouth and a fish eye staring at me when I looked at the other samples. Delicious.
2. Bought some chewing gum called 'blackblack' which burnt my mouth. Why? Because it has nicotine and caffeine in it I found out later.
3. Ate raw horse mackerel for dinner last night.
4. Bought what I thought was chewing gum but was actually the strongest cough lolly in the world.
5. Wasted thousands of yen trying to beat those silly claw games in an arcade. I watched a guy put thousands in one machine to win a GI Joe and eventually got it. We cheered.
6. Unknowingly survived my first earthquake. Apparently there was a little baby one on Monday morning. These happen all the time I'm told. Not much more than a little grumble, but quite scary nonetheless.
7. Raped someone (apparently this is illegal in Japan)

So there you go. When I thought of this idea i think there were other funny things that have gone wrong but I have since forgotten about. Eating here is probably the biggest challenge. Its really trial and error at the moment with a very high level of error.

Its my birthday on sunday so please send me presents. Address them for tokyo and I'm sure they'll arrive.

Peace and love,
your new favourite asian (sorry xummy)




*prize not included