June 2005 Archives

The things you see when you don't have a camera...

Oh wait! We do have a camera.

I think sometimes my darling spouse is turning into somewhat of an absent-minded professor. This morning she knocked on the door of my crazy landlord's room. "Can I come in?" she asked.

"You can come in, but I'm naked," came the reply.

She knocked again.

"Come on in, but I'm completely buck-naked!" bellowed my crazy landlord.

Despite this grave warning, she opened the door, popped her head around the corner, and immediately shrieked like a tea kettle surprised by a couple of nested cocktail shakers.

My landlord was, indeed, naked.

Now, in her defence, I should point out that she could hear the crazy landlord and his consort doing diy-like things in the room. Furthermore, my crazy landlord often replies to knocks with statements such as, "Come on in, I'm naked," or "Come on in, I'm just sorting out the missus," or even "Come on in. I'm rogering a penguin." Usually, he is doing nothing of the kind. This time, however, he was telling the truth and shocked my poor innocent demure wife who immediately ran upstairs to grab the camera and take this lovely picture.

More London to Brighton Bike Ride Pics

This our team after cycling 60 miles from London to Brighton on the hottest day of the year. It was 33 degrees which was hot enough to melt the tarmac in places. On one section of road I saw great divots in the road where someone had been forced to walk their bike and the surface had stuck to their shoes.

27,000 people took part in the ride which made it a bit congested in spots, especially the first few miles trying to get out of London. Picture one of those Tokyo subway cars where they have big beefy guys specifically hired to shove people inside so the doors will close. Now drop in some sardines. Now have an infinite probability drive turn all the sardines into bicycles. And then have an enormous giant obsessed with dental hygiene squeeze the end of the subway car as if it was a tube of toothpaste. That should give you the general idea of the speed and closeness and jostling that was going on during sections of the ride.

The above picture was taken immediately after/during our celebratory swim. NB: a few people from the team are missing from this picture as they chose absolute prostrate exhaustion over swimming.

I've posted more pictures on Flickr of us during the London to Brighton Bike Ride, as well as pictures of (amongst other things) bicyling nuns, a pirate, a man with a monkey on his back, and a dragon. If you enjoy them, please remember to donate to the British Heart Foundation. Even one measely quid would be much appreciated. So stop being such a cheap bastard and get your credit card out. Oh, and thanks to everyone who has donated so far. As of the end of the race, combined, the 17 of us have raised more than £3600 so far.

Thanks.

My friend and colleague JoBell has thoughtfully crafted this lovely attire for the London 2 Brighton bike ride. The ride is next Sunday and is approximately 55 miles. If you approve of the look, please sponsor me at http://www.bhf.org.uk/sponsor/yanda/.

(more pix of Derrick and Chikako's Wedding)

I think everyone has a Vicarious Friend. Someone who lives a life you judge as more glamourous than your own. Someone who can live out your fantasies for you. This can be very valuable because it's often a bit of a pain to live an adventurous glamourous life. Changing countries as often as you change your socks takes some organisation and poses certain inconveniences. Will one's collection of porcelain ballerinas survive the journey? Who will look after the giraffe? Will they have toothpaste in the new country? It's nice when other people live that life for you and you can just listen to their stories and pretend to be them.

For me, Derrick was that Vicarious Friend. We've been friends since we were both 13. For most of our adult lives he has worked as doctor in various emergency departments around the world. He did a residency somewhere in Africa. He worked with Medecins sans Frontiers in Afghanistan. He's worked in the Middle East, the South Pacific, and, now, Beijing.

Even when he was in Canada he had a practice in Prince George which might not sound too exotic to anyone from B.C., but to the rest of the world you can sell it as the ragged frontier of the Canadian wilderness -- a romantic logging town filled with colourful characters, harsh weather, and beautiful landscapes. Just don't mention the smell from the pulp mills.

More importantly, he was my good-looking, charming, single, globe-trotting doctor friend. Whenever I encountered a lonely female who complained there were no worthwhile men in the world, I would hook them up via email with Derrick. Nothing tangible ever came of these liaisons. It's difficult to make a relationship work across several thousand miles when neither of the parties have actually met. But I do believe it provided a pleasant diversion for the people involved, and made me feel I was providing a useful service.

A couple of months ago, I received a terrible shock. Derrick was married! Not only that, he had married a woman I had never met before, AND he married her on my birthday. How heartless could the man be? Didn't he care about MY feelings? Didn't he worry how this would affect MY life? Apparently not. There was only one thing to do. Go meet the woman myself. Make sure it wasn't all a hideous mistake.

Her name is Chikako. She is Japanese and they decided to hold a proper Shinto wedding in Tokyo with family and friends. (They haven't said this out loud, but I'm pretty sure the reason for the second ceremony was to avoid future conflicts between their anniversary and the birthday of yours truly.) Anyway, whatever the reason, the wedding was planned and invitations were sent out, including (thankfully) one to me.

And so off I flew to Japan.

Fortunately, as soon as I arrived I saw the problem. Chikako is irresistible. She is more beautiful than Derrick. She is more organised than Derrick. She's sexier than Derrick. She is nicer than Derrick. She is funnier than Derrick. And she speaks far better Japanese than he ever will. The only thing he actually has on her is height. And, really, a pair of stilts would fix that.

It was also painfully obvious they were head over heels in love with each other. The give away was that they both wept like babies when they tried to read speeches to each other's parents at the reception.

So this presented a good news, bad news scenario for me. The good news was that 30 seconds after meeting Chikako I could see the whole thing was pre-ordained and the right decision for both of them. She is, after all, a good-looking, charming, single, globe-trotting, business analyst woman. So now I was free to relax and enjoy the wedding. The bad news was that it was obvious that Vicarious Derrick was gone. Well, in some ways he's still there, but now he is Married Derrick. And I'm already happily married. I don't need him to live that life for me. I'm perfectly happy with my own real-life version of marriage and conjugal relations and sharing breakfast in bed in front of a stargate dvd. I already have my own gorgeous charming wife and have had for years. In fact, I wonder if I was ever Vicarious Married Guy to his Lonely Bachelor Dude.

(more pix from the Ball Park)

"Swallows" is used as a noun here -- as in the "Yakult Swallows" baseball team. On the Sunday after the wedding, Naved, Derrick, Derrick's father Bill, and I went to see them play. They beat the Rakuten Eagles 3 to 2. I'm afraid I'm still not much of a baseball fan. Bill certainly enjoyed it though. I believe he used to play minor-league baseball (and hockey, I think) when he was a bit younger.

Me, I have to admit my favourite part of the game was the beer vendors. Just the whole concept of cute girls walking around with cold kegs of beer on their back struck me as fascinating. And the choreographed cheering sections were pretty cool. And it was a sunny, gorgeous day, and so I just sat back, relaxed, drank beer, and got burnt to a crisp. I guess there was a reason most people brought umbrellas.

(more pix of the Tsukiji Fish Market)

The day after going to Kamakura, Derrick, Chikako, Ian and I got up at 5am to go to the Tsukiji fish market. Derrick's father Bill almost came along but sadly just missed us. The night before the four of us tried to get some of the other wedding attendees fired up about going but bizarrely no one else wanted to get up at dawn to watch strangers buy and sell fish in a language they couldn't understand. Still, we thought there might be a chance they would change their minds so we told everyone if they wanted to go just to be downstairs at 5am in the lobby.

Apparently our arguments worked their magic on Bill's brain overnight. Or maybe he just couldn't sleep due to jet-lag. Anyway, he got up at just before 5 when he heard my door bang close (we were neighbours, Bill and I) and followed me down to the lobby a couple of minutes later. But to no avail; we had left seconds beforehand. Bill was quite despondent and while we enjoyed the hustle and bustle of the world's largest fish market and tuna auction, he meandered next door to the 24 hour convenience store and checked out the packages of dried fish snacks.

Actually, I have no idea if that's true or not, but that would have been the sensible thing to do.

(more pix of Kamakura)

I was in Japan for ten days but only spent one day outside of Tokyo. That day we went to Kamakura which has a number of beautiful shrines and temples. It also has the biggest non-lying-down Buddha I have ever seen. There is a much bigger Buddha in Bangkok called the sleeping Buddha, but that is plainly cheating. It's just so much easier to create a statue lying on the ground. Try this yourself next time you've got good snowman weather. What would be really tricky would be to create a giant Buddha balanced on one leg (possibly on the head of a pin, but that might be mixing religious stereotypes).

I fear I might be being disrespectful by judging a Buddha by its size so I'll just say that Kamakura was beautiful and peaceful and I was reminded once again just how much more fun Eastern religions are. You get to write poems and prayers on bits of wood, tie bits of paper to trees, bow, clap, bang drums, and spin huge wooden containers of scripture around.

And the best part about the huge wooden spinney library thing (it's called a sutra and contains a number of Buddhist scriptures) is that it if you turn it you get the equivalent in Karmic merit of having read the entire Buddhist canon. If only I could have taken similar shortcuts while studying Shakespeare in school.

(more pix of Tokyo)

Here are a smattering of pictures I took while I was in Tokyo. I was there for my friend Derrick's wedding to a delightful Japanese woman named Chikako. I'll be adding pictures of the actual wedding along with a few other groups of pictures over the next couple of days or so.

The most amazing thing for me about the trip was the food. I don't think I ever repeated a dish the entire time I was there and it was all fantastic. Amongst the oddities I ate were:
* Eel in various forms
* At least four different kinds of tofu served as a main dish
* Various sea creatures (mostly raw)
* Raw horse meat

We passed on the deep-fried kittens though.

I found these pictures on my camera when I went to pull the Japan pictures off of it. Just before I left, my crazy Irish landlord embarked on a series of home renovations. His crazy Scottish builder father drove over from Portugal to help out. And, of course, the ever-helpful James (pictured above) came over many times to lend a hand.

On this particular day we were working on a new deck in the back garden. I spent the afternoon smashing big rocks into gravel with a hammer while James played with the power tools. Sadly, many tulips where sacrificed to the new porch (not to mention James' twisted lust).

Derrick's friend, Norma (pictured above), sent along the url to her pics of the wedding.

Everyone has left except me. I was wandering the streets of Tokyo looking for that Lost in Translation feeling when I spotted this hotel gleaming in the night.

It looked like it could be the hotel that Bill Murray's character stayed in. In any case, I could tell it had a cocktail lounge perched in its stratosphere.

I am now on the 40th floor. The view is incredible. I've got a little dish of cashew nuts and a large glass of cognac. There is a sultry jazz singer accompanied by a tuxedo playing the piano. My God! She's singing As Time Goes By.

As every Frenchman knows, sometimes expensive cheese can be absolutely delightful.

I don't normally think of myself as much of a guy's guy sports kinda guy, but I'm at Jingu Stadium im Tokyo; it's a gorgeous sunny day.

And there are cute girls walking around with cold kegs of beer on their backs selling beer!

Sport is COOL!

This wedding has been fantastic. We're now in the bar after the reception and the ceremony.

The ceremony was held in a Shinto Shrine. The reception meal had twelve delicious courses and five different types of booze. There was bell-ringing and play acting and powerpoints and kareoke and moving speeches and tears. And I have been showered with gifts -- why, I am not entirely sure. But, what the heck, I'll take them.

Apart from my own wedding which I recall as a kind of euphoric blur, this has been the best wedding I have ever attended.

The only minor dip was my toast. I wasn't aware that I was supposed to do a toast until ten minutes beforehand and came up with a garbled analogy of single people being like uncooked rice and love being like adding water and marriage being like a cooking pot that brings it all together and creates fluffy delicious nourishing rice. I came up with this because I had just learned that the Japanese have different words for uncooked rice and cooked rice and I wanted to show off.

It wasn't a bad plan, but trying to do it in Japanese and English pretty much made it appear that I couldn't speak either language. I'm sure I just managed to confuse everyone. Immediately post-toast, however, I felt all right about it. But then Naved did his speech (which he also had not been warned about) and it was absolutely brilliant and heart-warming and brought the groom to tears.

He started with a dash of humour about his friendship with Derrick and then talked about how great it was that all of us from all these different countries could gather together to celebrate the marriage of two people from very different backgrounds and what a wonderful world it all was.

It doesn't sound all that great when I write it, but, trust me, out of his mouth it was brilliant. The bride even referred to the same sentiments in her own speech later on. That's the kind of impression it made!

If I didn't like Naved so much, I'd hate his guts.

Anyway, aside from being completely upstaged by a man who is normally an unsentimental conspiracy theorist, the entire thing was absolutely beautiful.

Derrick and Chikako in their traditional shinto wedding garb.

At 5am we went to the Tsukiji fish market. Every morning hundreds of tuna are auctioned off here. I ended up in a fierce bidding war for one of these frozen behemoths. lt started out as a gag but somehow I kind of got caught up in all the excitement and ended up buying the damn thing. They're expensive, these fish. Mine cost ￥2,489,000. I nick-named it Herbert.

Herbert was too big for us to carry and now that I had spent all my money, I knew there was no way I could afford to pay the excess baggage charges to get it home. Derrick had to loan me the money to buy a saw so we could cut it into small enough pieces to carry. He stayed with the bulk of the tuna stash while Chikako and I went around to all the sushi restaurants. She did the talking and I did the carrying. We managed to sell most of it, enough to recoup my costs anyway. I was left with about 20 pounds of frozen tuna which is now in the mini-fridge back at the hotel. I hope to God it doesn't thaw during the flight.

Adjacent to the auction floor is the largest fish market in the world where all manner of truly bizarre creatures are for sale. I'd learned my lesson with the tuna though, and managed to escape with only a small bag of dried minnows.

Afterwards, we went to a nearby sushi bar where we had a tasty breakfast of sea urchin, eel, and sake. All in all, a fantastic start to the day.