The new tattoo
My friend and super-tattooist, Ms Aureole McAlpine came to visit me in Tokyo on her way back from various tattoo conventions in Europe. She gave me my second tattoo – a follow up to the foot tattoo she gave me last year. We used a similar design idea, something that blends Japanese and Australian culture – using stylised water-designs with sakura flowers arranged in a Southern Cross constellation (as seen in the sky only in the Southern Hemisphere)… It hurt a little more than the foot tattoo, mainly because it took twice as long and used twice as much more colour and ink.
Charlene, Tyler and Steve were the support team…. they fed me some much needed beer afterwards. It was an intense experience and I was quite exhausted by the whole thing but gawd, I do love the final result. It’s quite beautiful and the colours are just gorgeous.
I made a flickr set of the proceedings…
Fucking laugh big loud on train
Sometimes communicating with the locals can be a little mind-altering. Between my bad (but improving, to be sure to be sure) Japanese and their bad English, though, we somehow manage to make ourselves understood. And it’s a fun, creative process, one that has endeared itself to me. The art of communication, with all it’s cultural and personal eccentricities, brings me great delight (and regular frustration)… Not content to just sit back, soak up and correct the dodgy Engrish we hear and read all around us all day, every day as English teachers, MissSin & I have chosen to celebrate – with a full embrace, everything we love about Engrish.
How do we do this? Read on, read on. I hope you laugh a lot.
Technorati Tags: friends, funny, japan, life, teachingenglish
The latest Music Meme: The iTunes shuffle interview
Looking out a late night Chuo train window at another late night Chuo train….
I’ve been tagged for a meme which I first saw on sushizume and then on sigsy in tokyo and then – where the actual baton-passing happened, on J-Sters fabbo new look (and new link?) threads of gold.
The task?:
1. Put your music player on shuffle.
2. Press forward for each question.
3. Use the song title as the answer to the question.
No cheating! (anyone else wanna have a go?)
This week in pic’s
Haku is a hilariously cheeky Chinese boy I know. I’m photographing the boogers up his nose here. No actually, I was trying to catch his beautiful brown eyes but failed miserably. Still, I like this photo a lot.
I stumbled upon this scene in Kichijoji last weekend.
Charlene at our fave kichijoji bar
!Beatdown! punks getting drunk
Add a couple of other late nights with J-buddies, an all-nighter in a colour-developing photo darkroom in Shinjuku (with no heating), and then visualize about 32 English lessons (and their preparation) in various school rooms, community centres and cafe’s around Tokyo…. and you will understand why I slept 12 hours last night. Really gotta settle down on the burning-the-candle-at-both-ends-thing. Ha! Off to the pool, need to de-calcify my back. Have a great weekend ya’ll.
Technorati Tags: friends, funny, japan, kichijoji, parties, photography, streets
