Please do it at home

The train companies are cracking down on antisocial behaviour on trains. What might that be? Well, one thing is putting on make-up. Below is one of the posters for the campaign that I spotted at Hatchobori subway station. I always find it entertaining to watch already over-made-up girls looking at themselves in a portable mirror on the trains as they reapply mascara and lipstick and even curl their (fake) eyelashes with one of those torture instruments. It must take a lot of skill. You could take your eye out with one good bump. Actually, I don't see many mobile beauty workshops in Tokyo as I did in Nagoya. I sort of miss it.

















If you think I'm a geek for writing about Tokyo trains, there's a guy out there who writes about his morning commute on the Chuo line (or the "Sardine Express" as he calls it): http://tokyoexpatlife.blogspot.com/. This is one of the lines David takes and he comes home with entertaining stories everyday.

Another guy collects and posts pictures of Japanese people asleep in public places: http://www.kirainet.com/english/japanese-sleeping/

Wild Flower Festival

Next weekend at Odaiba there will be a Wild Flower Festival. We beat the crowds and went today instead. I love poppies and I never imagined I would see so many of them down at one of my favourite sci-fi spots, Odaiba.

Lovely wild flower pictures here http://picasaweb.google.com/jomynard/WildFlowers

New Japanese Class

Good news: I got kicked out of the beginner’s Japanese class! I took Nancy’s advice and showed off what I knew. The teacher asked me why I was there and I ended up leaving before we got started on lesson one of “Japanese for Busy People”. I am trying class 3 instead on Monday. I hope I don’t disgrace myself.

Tokyo Nightlife

I often read ridiculous things in Tokyo guidebooks about how bars, restaurants and shops change over so quickly. I thought it was an exaggeration. One of our favourite places around the Tokyo station area is the New Maronouchi Building or “Shin Maru Biru” to locals. It took a while to find as Tokyo station has dozens exits, but it is worth hunting down as there are some seriously chic restaurants, not to mention 2 of my fave shops - Banana Republic and Molton Brown. We had dinner had a trendy Italian place and then went a place called Bar 120 afterwards. We were lured in by the sounds of Elvis and didn’t realize until we had ordered a drink that we had become part of the music-art-installation. On the wall were displayed about a hundred album covers representing the best of Western rock dating from the 1950s up until the birth of the CD. We were part of the installation as we were invited to choose one of the albums to play. What would you have gone with? Led Zeppelin? Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars? Blondie? U2? Simon and Garfunkle? The Beachboys? The Beatles? Supertramp? We chose The Clash (written as The Crash on the pamphlet, but we knew what they meant….). Being in Bar 120 was like being at a friend’s house and flicking through his (let’s face it, it would be a guy) albums. I’d love to go back, but being Tokyo this place will only exist for another week. Akiko, our musician waitress, told us that the new exhibition/bar will be something to do with Sinatra. We’ll be back.

Darts

I am on holiday! It has been a good time to get to know Tokyo better and meet up with friends. Chantal showed us some off the beaten track places around Harajuku one night. We played darts in a bar in Kabukui-cho with Naho another. That was quite an experience. I haven’t played darts for 20 years and things have changed a lot. The darts are plastic and the board automatically calculates your score. Naho didn’t know what we were talking about when we asked her where the backboard was. I found I was rather good at darts. I missed the board completely a few times (good job the darts were plastic), but I also managed to get 4 bull’s eyes!