Monthly Archives: November 2009

All I Want For Christmas

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We are coming up to that time of year again and that can only mean one thing. As the Andy Williams lyric goes, “it’s the most wonderful time of the year…” No, parents, it’s not the end of the school summer holidays…

For those of you who can’t decide what they want for Christmas, I’ve come up with a helpful list of ideas. However, so-as not to be labelled ‘boring’, I’ve made things a bit more fun. I have taken all of my ideas from the first few pages of Google’s search engine results for “All I Want For Christmas Is…” So, here’s the list to choose from – take your pick… Continue reading →

The Humorous Side Of Japanese People

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“If I was to punch that rich looking guy, would he sue me?” That was the question I put to my brother whilst we were walking around our Onsen Hotel in Kotohira, Japan. His response was quick: “No, he’d probably apologise for walking into your fist.”

It’s funny, but it does actually make an interesting point about how friendly Japanese people are. My brother is right – the man would probably stand there and apologise and bow profusely. To get him to stop bowing, I’d probably have to punch him again… harder… somewhere in the chest cavity… with some knuckle dusters… Continue reading →

Woman Diagnosed With Vegetable Phobia

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Vicki Larrieux, a 22-year-old student from Portsmouth, claims she is unable to keep to a healthy diet because she is frightened of vegetables. She suffers from a fear known as lachanophobia, which leaves her sweating and stricken with panic attacks at the merest sight of a sprout or a pea.

Miss Larrieux survives on a diet of meat, potatoes, cereals and an occasional apple but refuses even a single slice of carrot on her dinner plate. ”I have always had an irrational fear of vegetables even as a child I used to properly freak out if some carrots or a few peas were on my plate,” she said. ”But as it continued into adult life I started to think it might not just be a dislike for vegetables but an actual phobia.

“Every time I would see vegetables not just on my plate, but anywhere I would get feelings of panic, start sweating and my heart rate would shoot up.

Read the full article on the Telegraph website

Vegetables

Old People Watching

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Those who know me well will know that I’ve recently become very interested in psychology and body language. I enjoy people watching. Interestingly, I looked up the description of ‘people watching’ in Wikipedia and it says:

People watching “is the act of observing people and their interactions, usually without their knowledge.” Perfecto! It then goes on to point out that “this differs from voyeurism in that it does not relate to sex or sexual gratification“…. well, thank goodness for that – it isn’t a fetish afterall. Supposing I were to do it whilst wearing a latex suit? Continue reading →

The Tokyo Bike Tree

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Having just returned from Japan, I can appreciate how well the Japanese use their creativity in inventing ways of maximising the small amounts of space that they have. You may remember that I blogged about the vertical car parks, where people park their car inside a lift and the mechanism takes it upwards and stores it in a tower (it also turns the car around for you when it brings it back down). Well, they have invented a similar system for the storage of bikes, which was previously a big problem in urban areas. So, I give you, the Tokyo Bike Tree…

(The full blog article about it is available on the Guardian website.)

Sayonara And Thanks For All The Fish

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This will be my last blog from within Japan. I still have a few experiences to blog about (Japanese Archery, Onsens, funny photos and my overall reflections of a great experience), which I will do from back home. I am sitting here typing this blog post in a hotel just outside Narita Airport. I’ve had my last Japanese meal. Not wanting to go out with a whimper, I made sure I ate something a bit usual – shark fin roll – to go along with my noodles. Early in the morning, I leave for the airport.

So, what will happen tomorrow? Will the fortune given to me by the ‘wooden lion dancing robot mask thing’ come true? There is actually a little update on this story. I now have two things in my favour, to counteract the bowing wooden lion’s fortune of “something bad will happen on your way home“:

1) Two days ago we visited a burger shop in Kobe and Sayaka was given a ‘fortune stirrer’ (honestly, what next? Fortune pants?) to go with her coffee. The message on the stirrer was exactly this: “he might be wrong.”

2) Fearing my bad fortune might come true, Sayaka bought me a tiny frog, which is supposed to be a good luck charm. Frogs obviously out-trump dragons in the same way that rock beats scissors (I’m not going to go into the ‘paper beats rock’ point right now). The frog is pictured below. Will it work or won’t it? In the words of the Channel 4 Japanese Show, Banzai, – “place your bets…”

The tiny Japanese frog

The tiny Japanese frog