Osaka at dawn

What a wonderful night. I lied in my last post when I said I was going out to a club with 'friends' - friends would imply previous meetings and some kind of shared history. This, on the other hand, was a night straight out of leftfield, courtesy of a simple, free language exchange ad and Japanese hospitality. "Why not just come out clubbing with my and my friends," wrote K, and indeed, why not? New country, new rules.

So I ventured out and made contact at Umeda's Bigman, the Osakan equivalent of meeting under the clocks at Flinders St. The Bigman is a giant television screen, which entertains those waiting - another Japanese innovation. All you can do at Flinders St is watch the clocks impatiently. So we met - K, T and F - and ran smack bang into a swamp of language difficulties and an awkward night appeared imminent, when my saviour appeared, another of Kiyono's friends, D, who was thankfully American. We made our way to an izakaya and attempted conversation. I made miming small talk about tattoos - both K and T were masters of self-tattooing, a practice which has always made me wince and then the table broke into animated Japanese. I could pick up words occasionally, but it was mostly a wash of sound. While the language is resolving itself into components a little now, it's still so fast and fluid. After each burst of conversation, D would translate. It was like having delayed subtitles on a movie, one in which the pictures didn't want anything to do with the audio. The food was great - fried chicken skin, raw octopus, slivers of pickled vegetables. As expected, my planned evening budget blew out wildly; food and drinks at the izakaya led to a taxi which led to a 2000 yen entry fee to the first club and many more drinks which in turn gave way to a stumbling walk to a second club and another thousand yen entry fee before another taxi and then dawn ramen (noodles) and a very early train. Now I really am broke. But it was well worth penury; after a dose of bonding and grinning at the izakaya, the night seamlessly moved on to a fumbling seduction of the teenage kind; dancing was followed by drunken close dancing which was followed by drunken kissing which was followed by K falling asleep on my shoulder in the second club which was followed by slurping noodles and an early hangover, while the ramen cook bedevilled K with questions about her weakness for foreign men, which was followed by a yawning farewell at dawn. How decadent.

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Yesterday was the last day of the year at my kindergarten and the parents came in to see their child in action. This meant we had to jump, sing and dance for a solid hour to keep the tots (and their paying parents) amused. I'd been selected as the Story Teller of the day, a job which is usually quite easy. But with the parents there, I was suddenly enormously nervous. So I practiced the story, 'My Pet' in a room, and then deciding in a panic that spicing up was required, I collared D and got him to act out each pet action. The kids loved the new version, except for D's lion impersonation, which made several children cry, and his depiction of an eagle, which nearly ended in tragedy as the children imitated him at high speed. It was like a real performance - terrifying.

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