that’s whacked

completely random thoughts

Thursday, Oct 14. 2004  –  Category: ChinaBlog

i’m about 30 minutes into a 5 hour layover in Narita (Tokyo). it’s such a long layover, the departure board doesn’t even go up to 17:55 for our departure flight. warning: i’m a man stuck in an airport with nothing to do….the rest of this blog entry is going to be the bane of the web: product of a bored man, with web access.

i’ve been sent on a mission for duty free items and Japanese snacks by wendy. except duty free sucks. witness Creme De La Mer, which sells at Saks for $195. factor in local sales tax of 8.25% and we can pick it up in Cali for $211. but here, at duty free, WITHOUT tax (!!!) we can get it for the low low price of…. $247. as Jon Stewart would say (and I really can’t mimic it over a blog)… “WHA!!?!?!?”

on the plus side, there is a Yahoo! Cafe with free Internet. on the down side, the Japanese keyboard is killing me. i memorise my passwords as “actions” rather than the actual characters. this lets me type my password on my crazy keyboard at work. on the downside, when the actual keyboard map is different, this screws me up considerably. the Roman alphabet characters are the same, but all the punctuation marks and special symbols are different. also, Yahoo has managed to find quite possibly the world’s smallest mousepad. the length of the pad is such that there is about 3cm above or below the mouse. whine whine whine. bitch bitch bitch. i’m starting to sound like poorna (kidding dude)

i wish i’d bought my token card in my carryon. i could be productive and actually doing stuff rather than rambling in a blog with four and a half hours left to kill.

one thing i immediately notice upon landing in Tokyo. dental hygiene. [huge generalisation on] the Japanese brush their teeth. the Chinese don’t. [huge generalisation off]. i know this is a clear sign i hang around with dentists too often, but i still can’t help wondering what a graph of a nation’s average oral hygiene condition would look like overlaid on top of a nation’s economic status. at what point in a country/culture’s economic economic development do they start to brush their teeth? maybe this is my western-egocentric view, but do they start brushing their teeth in order to emulate the western world? clearly looking after one’s oral hygiene is important, but i wonder when it started to become important….. a long time ago being fat was considered beautiful. i wonder if brown teeth and bloody gums was ever considered beautiful. probably not…but still, a bored man with 4 hours left to kill wonders.

in Mandarin Chinese, Japan is called “ri ben” in pingying (Romanisation of the Chinese language). the very first time i saw this in college, my immediate thought was “i wonder if Japanese people drink Ribena.” and now everytime i hear someone say Japan or describe something as Japanese in Chinese, that thought flashes in my head. on our Japan Airlines flight from Beijing to Tokyo, when they kept saying everything in Japanese, then English, and lastly Chinese… i would tune out the Japanese, listen to the English, and then try to listen to the Chinese as i thought about random things Ribena related like “when was the last time i had a Ribena?” and remembering fond first memories like my first Ribena and Vodka.

i suppose i should file this as random ramblings and retire the “China Experiences” category i made to blog my thoughts while in China…but i think this is still an extension of my China Experiences. in order to make it more related, i’ll mention how Poorna and I had fun trying to leave the apartment this morning. we needed to come to the airport early so Poorna could pick up his tickets at the ticket counter (he’d made a change a few weeks ago in his flight). so the driver picked us up at 5:30… but the security guards wouldn’t let us leave. at first, Poorna and I couldn’t figure out what the hell they were saying. they kept pointing at our luggage, and all i could pick up was “tai duo” as in ‘too much’. this confused me to no end… are they saying we have too much luggage? what problem is it of theirs if i’ve got a lot of luggage. it turns out they thought we were moving out (which we obviously were), and that we were running out without paying this month’s rent (which we weren’t). thankfully the driver understood what was going on and kept saying the apartment belongs to the company, and that it’s all taken care of. they kept us detained for a little while still though while they tried to figure out what to do with us. we ended up not leaving for about 20 minutes.

okay, that’s all i can think of to write at this moment. i’m going to see if i can find some japanese snacks to eat, fluff my (free!) japanese Yahoooooo! pillow, push my tiny little japanese baggage cart around, find a (hopefully not tiny) japanese chair to park my english-american-chinese ass on, and try to finish my epic chinese novel/poem (on the third and last volume of Journey to the West!)