Dinner, delayed

Tonight we had our second attempt to meet my wife's friends for dinner; once again, we were sat on our own for an hour, but eventually they materialised, escaped from a train that had been a non-starter, and (eventually) a taxi.

Disappointed by machines

One of the many wonderful things about the Tokyo metro is the ticket machines' ability to take pretty much any money you want to feed them. If you have a 5000 yen note and you want a 160 yen ticket, no problem. Plus, the machine will give you change in the most convenient way possible: 4 1000 yen bills, and the rest in coins.

To get some perspective on how amazing that is, you have to have dealt with British ticket machines for some time. They're mostly good at swallowing money and then pretending they never saw anything, or not giving you any change, or making strange grinding noises before giving you the wrong ticket. And the most you can put in them is a twenty pound note.

Anticlimactic

Monday, the day after the marathon, dawned fresh and bright, and I wheezed and groaned and gradually extricated myself from my bed. Although we have a very nice room in the hotel, with a bed, and an internet connection, and some semblance of a wardrobe, the only view from our window is of three metal-clad walls, which gave us no clue as to the weather outside. The internet, too, was a unhelpful servant, as it turns out that the BBC's view of the weather in Osaka (raining) and the Weather Channel's forecast (raining all morning, sort of sunny later) were both way off: it was a lovely, sunny day, the kind that makes you regret tooling outside in a corduroy jacket and thick jeans.

Confused by the MTR

Today I have been baffled by the MTR; in particular, why is the train going to Sheung Wan from Tin Hau below the train going in the opposite direction, when if you go five stops east to Sai Wan Ho, it's *above* the train going away from Sheung Wan. It doesn't make sense to me, unless the MTR engineers studied under MC Escher (stalwart of the south-west London breakbeat scene, and also the guy who drew those staircases going up to nowhere), and they thought it was a good idea for the tunnels to constantly be moving around one another.

Hungover in Taipei

Unwisely, instead of staying in bed all evening and reading trashy novels, I stayed in bed until 5:30, when I finished The Serialist, which was not only terrible but referenced its own terribleness, as if knowing that it was trash made up for it being trash. It didn't. A compost heap that can speak and tell you it's a compost heap is still a mound of decaying organic material, and despite the recommendations on the cover and the fairly snide pastiche of Stephanie Meyers' Twilight novels (which seem an easy target these days), it didn't fill me with any sense of joy, excitement or interest.

I suppose this was a good thing, because it ensured that I went out to enjoy Taipei's nightlife.

A joke about martial arts

Here's my new joke:

There's so many kinds of kung fu; white crane, crouching tiger, drunken monkey, cherry garcia, ugly stepchild.  Sorry, I got confused.  That last one was actually a flavour of Ben & Jerry's ice-cream.  It didn't sell well; only slightly better than the vanilla with tiny lumps of fudge in it endorsed by Louis Armstrong: Blowin' Chunks.

Ahem.

Public Transport

I discovered today that a small notebook PC and a rattling tram are not the best of friends. I was planning on writing up the start of the Great Hong Kong novel on the way to work, but unlike my blackberry, my notebook just kept sliding all over the shop. It's hard to touch type if you're using both hands to stop your precious possession skimming off to its doom.

Angry

The Ugandan president is apparently angry that Gordon Brown, Hillary Clinton and any other politician that phones him up only wants to talk about 'the gays'. I feel sorry for the poor chap. It must be hard trying to pass homophobic legislation when you have the diplomatic equivalent of a homosexual partyline ringing you every five minutes with salacious details on what 'the gays' are doing. Yes, it must be really ... Hard.

Random encounters with strangers

I took the MTR to Sai Wan Ho last night, and for only the third time this year wasted time playing patience on my ipod. Although for some reason Apple call it 'Klondike'. Is this because they have no patience? Ha, ha, and indeed ha.

Going out in style

I went to see Avatar last night; it was all I could have hoped for; computer generated images galore, realistic looking hair (how far we've moved on since Toy Story and the unpleasantly unrealistic looking dog) and no script whatsoever. It was certainly nice to watch various exotic animals swooping around through imaginary landscapes, but I could help but pause occasionally, noticing that the plot made. No. Sense. At. All.

But it was two hours of mindless escapism, and another forty minutes of Stuff Blowing Up. I enjoyed it a lot.

What do they *do* all day?

Every so often, the tram at Happy Valley is filled with Japanese tourists. I wish I had been more diligent in learning Japanese, so I could have asked them what they were doing on it. It seems a little bit of a strange way to spend a holiday - up at 8am and bouncing out of your seat on a ramshackle tram - but they seem happy enough with it. Usually it's a bunch of middle-aged or elderly Japanese, but today there was one in full kawaii-regalia; a little fur jacket round her shoulders, a short white dress that looked like she was a bridesmaid, and her face made up with huge eyelashes and all the other warpaint you might expect for a night out.

This was preferable to the bored businessman in a suit who is now sitting opposite me, but really I'm a bit confused, not so much because she must have chosen to get up early to prepare her face. It's more to do with where they disembarked the tram; right in a filthy part of Wan Chai. What attraction can that hold? Perhaps there's something of historical significance that Japanese people, young and old, want to see. Perhaps they're on an excursion to Dusk Til Dawn. (If that's the case, I'm both impressed and intimidated: what kind of person can manage to start partying at 8:30 on a Monday morning?) Or maybe there's a ferry crossing, although that last, most prosaic possibility seems far too rational to explore.

I think one of these days I'll follow them when they get off the tram and find out where they go. Or be mistaken for some sort of stalker (who only stalks groups of Japanese tourists) and then I'll get beaten off with a tourguide's umbrella. Sometimes research is tough, you know.