The View From the Afternoon

Today I am too hungover for words. Went out to an izakaya last night with a few friends from Gaidai. Walking home, we ran into a pair of absolutely charmless foreign students, one American and the other Australian - the kind of people that give rise to the negative stereotypes of their countries. The American in particular was a real idiot, who talked about nothing but how much he hated Japan, and started play-fighting with me and James. To think I almost ruined my nicest pair of trousers grappling with some drunken oaf on a bridge. This is the kind of dissolute debauchery that would seem fun back in Leeds, but in Japan it is quite beyond the pale.

I woke up late. Staggered downstairs to the kitchen. On TV they were showing the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Torino. To my impeded brain, the costumed antics appeared strange and disturbing, and I escaped to the shops. On my way back to the dorms, I found someone's bike parked right in of the single ramp leading up to the bike racks, blocking anyone else from getting their bike in or out. Who could be so inconsiderate, I thought. A clue was provided by the clog keyring dangling from his bike lock...



The pernicious Dutch were to blame, of course. The tenor of international interaction round here has suddenly sunk. And those bizarre Olympic celebrations didn't help much, either.