light vessel automatic

It’s the summer holidays, I’m on a tropical island, the sea is the temperature of a warm bath, and… I have to come into school and sit at my desk every day. Drinking coffee from a tin cup. Argh! I just want to go snorkelling!

So. Xi’an.

Thirteen sleepless hours later, at about half six in the morning, we arrived in Xi’an. First stop was the Youth Hostel, where we sat in the darkened bar and drank black coffee until our blood was circulating again and we were ready to go back out into the light.

On the way to Xi’an, I had been bugged by a niggling memory from when I went to the Miho Museum, near Kyoto, and saw an exhibition of pottery from Xi’an – I remembered seeing a photo of something beautiful and thinking “I have to see that at some point”. So when Jess suggested going to Xi’an, my reaction was “Yes! Definitely! Because then we can see the… the… um… the beautiful thing of Xi’an.” For the weeks leading up to going to China, I wrestled with my brain, trying to beat a more detailed memory out of it. By the time we got there, I’d managed to add only one detail: the Beautiful Thing of Xi’an had lots of blue tiles on it. Probably.

Despite the fact that we were only there for two days, I felt like a pretty hardcore traveller: partly because of sleep-deprivation – the air conditioning in the room in the (otherwise splendid) Youth Hostel wasn’t working so the room was stiflingly hot – partly because my luggage consisted of only a pair of pants and socks, a small towel, and Jess’ acoustic guitar, and partly because of the huge amount we managed to see in such a short space of time (and not having slept for two nights)… The Small Wild Goose Pagoda (pictured, top) is one of the strangest, most beautiful buildings I’ve seen. I was very glad we went despite the Rough Guide’s lack of enthusiasm for it – I’ll be less of a slave to the travel guide in future. The grounds of the Great Mosque were beautiful and incredibly peaceful, and when I passed through its grounds and saw the mosque itself, with its big, blue-tiled roof, I realised that it was none other than the Beautiful Thing of Xi’an itself.

Right. Although I haven’t even mentioned the Terracotta Warriors, life is pleasantly hectic at the moment, and so I have to go: it’s festival season on my island, so I’ve got to go to Eisa (Okinawan drumming dance) practice, and after that my friend Y-san is doing a Sanshin (Okinawan banjo) performance and workshop on the beach (picture below, taken with my mobile phone this afternoon) for a bunch of kids, so I’m going to that, and afterwards I fully intend to sleep on the beach. But before all that, I need a shower and something to eat. So…

Guess where I’ve been? Only China, is what!

I went there to visit Jess who was living in Beijing and is now, as we speak, probably hurtling towards Europe across the icy tundra on the trans-Siberian express. Wearing, I would like to think, a (vegetarian) mink coat. To be honest, China is so big and exciting that my head hurts when I try and think what to tell you about it.

I spent the first few days seeing the sights of Beijing (北京). I hired a bike, which makes getting round Beijing much more fun – partly because the main streets are all outrageously, imposingly wide and long (which makes for boring walking), and partly for the edge that the threat of imminent death lends to sightseeing. There’s something thrilling about being in the middle of a flock of bicycles weaving like fish through traffic on a busy intersection.

I’m not going to do my usual thing of trying to describe how amazing the places I saw were. What can I really say about the Great Wall of China? It’s more than six thousand kilometres long, dammit. What can you say to that? Nothing, because words are very small things, and they would just bounce harmlessly off it, as its builders intended. All I can say is that you should go there without fail, and while you’re at it, the Temple of Heaven is also outrageously spectacular and excellent.

After Beijing, we travelled on the overnight train to Xi’an (西安). Thirteen hours in ‘Hard Seat’ class – from the ominous name (and my assumptions about trains in developing countries), I expected narrow wooden benches. In fact, ‘Hard Seat’ is very similar to Standard Class on a GNER train from London to Edinburgh. But still, thirteen hours is hard on the buttocks, and also on the mind (chances of sleep are minimal). We whiled away the night eating tomato omelette and fried rice in the buffet car (which is actually a lot better than GNER), and inventing a range of radical new metaphors and similes. There was a lovely community atmosphere in the carriage, and I gathered a crowd by trying to learn to count to ten in Chinese.

…Wait! This is really exciting – I just typed “counting to ten in Chinese” into Google, because I tried writing how the numbers sound to me (“ii, ar, san, su…”), and then thought ‘wait! there must be a proper way of writing them in roman script! I know—I’ll check the internet’. And it turns out that there is only one occurrence of “counting to ten in Chinese” on the whole internet, which makes that a Googlewhack, which is a rare and beautiful thing, even if it does link you into Chapter 14 of a story called ‘The Wedding’, which begins:

Meilin, unlike her cousin and most of her family, had no magic. She could not sense nearby sources of power, nor could she manipulate the elements to aid her in battle. Nevertheless, her spine tingled with a sense of danger.

Right. Since (a) I’ve sidetracked myself, (b) I’ve written more than enough anyway, and (c) it’s past home-time and I need a coffee … I’m going to stop writing now. I’ll tell you about why Xi’an is interesting next time. Goodbye.

Nothing to do with China, this. Or Japan, for that matter. For anyone using Windows XP: I found an interesting little feature yesterday. Try going to control panel > display > appearance, clicking on effects…, and then selecting ‘cleartype’ (from the drop-down menu) as the method to smooth screen fonts. Look at that! A lot of the fonts become a lot more pretty-looking and legible. It’s a bit hit and miss: certain fonts become blurry, but others (like boring old Arial and Times New Roman) become much prettier. That this nice little feature is so tucked away as to be almost impossible to find is so typical of Windows’ bad design (I still can’t get my head round why you press a button labelled ‘Start’ to turn the computer off…), but it’s worth knowing about. Oh, by the way, I think it might only work for lcd screens.

I had a taiko performance on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. The biggest & best was the one on Saturday evening, at a plush hotel in Naha, for the annual meeting of an organisation that takes disabled people scuba-diving. The taiko group rocked, and performed a pretty mixed set. A lot of the members of the group play other instruments, and one member – Teru – plays guitar in an Okinawan metal band. So the taiko performance was interspersed with various cross-overs: an original (and pretty good!) pop song, with guitars and sanshin (Okinawan banjo), and a taiko-metal cross-over, which worked quite well because both taiko and metal rock hard.

The best bit was the final piece, which suddenly turned into a kachashi (very jolly Okinawan dance) half way through. The plan had been for us to all dance about with the crowd for a bit, then get back onto the stage and resume the piece, but the crowd went so beserk that there was no resuming: we just started banging the drums 1-2-3-4 and shouting along with the kachashi (people shout things like ‘iyasasa! Hai-i-ya! Hai-i-ya!‘ in Okinawan songs – sort of the Okinawan equivalent of olé, I think….). After a bit of that I just handed my sticks to a nearby man and started dancing while he & others took turns at beating the drum. When we stopped, everyone screamed ‘more! more!’, so we just started banging the drums and shouting again, while everyone danced about.

Bonus: I didn’t make as many mistakes as last time, either!

Once again, the typhoon was a bit of a let-down, although at least this time it lasted over twelve hours, rather than the previous one’s feeble three. Apparently it veered off to the east at the last minute, and we only caught the edge of it. Which is lucky, because it was about the same size as mainland Japan. On Sunday evening the wind died down and I, not having left my house house since the previous afternoon, decided to go out for a walk down to the sea, to see if it was still typhoon-rough. The dying typhoon made the sky go a strange deep yellow colour. The sea was disappointingly calm.

Have to go now – got to get the 12:30 plane to the city to get to the immigration office and get a re-entry permit, because next Friday I’m going to China for a week to visit Jess. It’s been a busy week, because I’ve got a taiko concert every day for the next three days – Naha tomorrow, on the beach on Sunday, and at school on Monday – so have been practicing every evening this week.

There’s another typhoon coming. The last one was fairly mediocre as typhoons go – two or three hours of howling, and then it just suddenly stopped. This one, though, is scheduled to hit tomorrow, and it’s so huge and slow moving it might last twenty-four hours. So far, the typhoons I’ve experienced, while noisy, have failed (sometimes laughably) to live up to people’s predictions. This time, though, a lot of people seem genuinely nervous. This is an especially big, powerful one, they say. Wind speeds of 50 metres per second, which (if my maths is right) translates to 180km/h (about 112mph). Might not be able to leave the house for most of the weekend. Might lose electricity. Hoping my windows hold out, because horizontal rain whipping through the house would be a real pain in the leg.

Incidentally (and nothing to do with typhoons), in Kobe I was using a pretty new Apple Macintosh in an internet cafe, and so I checked this website to make sure it looks ok – and I found that it’s a bit screwed-up in Mac Internet Explorer. Readable, but messy. However, since this is IE’s fault (this website rigorously complies with web standards, I’ll have you know!), and since I don’t have a Macintosh, there’s nothing I can do to fix that. To anyone reading this using IE on a Mac, sorry is all I can say. But since Microsoft is no longer developing IE for the Mac, and since IE is a pretty terrible browser on any computer, you’d probably do well to use a different browser anyway – Opera or Mozilla Firefox, for instance. If you want to know why I keep going on about what a bad thing IE is, then have a look at this article.

While I’m on the subject, several very serious bugs in Internet Explorer have been discovered this week. To quote the afore-linked article’s self-summary:

What this means in reality is that if you click on a malicious link in an email or on the Internet, a malicious user can very quickly have complete control of your PC. And there is no patch available.

Which would also make it a very good idea to get hold of a different browser as quickly as possible.

Incidentally, I found that story through today’spapers, which looks like a rather interesting news-amalgamation thingy (and which I found, in turn, through metafilter)

The morning after the Kobe conference finished, I went across to Kyoto – only about an hour by local train – to meet Ryoko sensei, who was my first Japanese teacher in Edinburgh. Although we’ve stayed in touch by email and postcard in the meantime, the last time I saw her was just before she left Edinburgh, about four years ago. We managed to meet up in Kyoto station by means of mobile phones (“Where are you? What can you see?”, “I’m… standing by a pillar, and I can see… what can I see? Taxis. Kyoto Tower Hotel… erm…”, and so on…). Very 久しぶり (hisashiburi), which means “long time no see” in Japanese. It was strange to think that last time we met, Japan was still just a sort-of imaginary place that I’d heard about and sometimes seen on tv, and now here we are, walking round actual Kyoto.

In fact, to make the most of being in Kyoto, we went for a wander around the grounds of Fushimi-inari Shrine (伏見稲荷大社). “Inari” (稲荷) means that it’s a fox shrine – dedicated to Inari, the deity of foxes, harvest, and prosperity. Unlike a lot of Kyoto’s other temples and shrines, Fushimi-inari isn’t particularly impressive on first sight. The interesting thing is not the shrine itself, so much as the torii (shinto gate) lined paths that wind through its grounds (as in the photo). Since Inari is a god of prosperity, lots of businesses pay to have one of these large, bright red gates built on the grounds of the shrine as an offering, and consequently the paths through the woods around it are lined with thousands upon thousands of gates, of various ages. Fushimi-inari’s amazingness creeps up on you gradually as you walk through the woods, and you begin to realise that the rows of torii just keep going and going. The day that I went there with Ryoko sensei, the weather was perfect: cloudless blue sky, bright sunshine, and just this side of too hot. The woods around the shrine were cool, with patches of bright sunlight scattered about, and the bright orange-red gates stood out beautifully against the bright green of the trees. I suppose Fushimi-inari (like other places in Kyoto) would be quite a different experience with each season – the constant orange of the gates set against a changing background of green summer leaves, red autumn leaves, snow, and then blossom. Have to go back to find out. The other thing I liked about Fushimi-inari is the feeling that it’s still alive: so many tourist attractions feel almost hermetically-sealed for posterity, but torii continue to be built, and further into the woods, they become more widely spaced out. So Fushimi-inari will presumably just keep growing out into the woods for a long time to come.

This evening I went cycling round the island, to make up for having spent most of the day indoors, and to drive off the caffeine shakes. Today was a particularly hazy day, and when it gets hazy, the Okinawan mainland – usually clearly visible on the horizon – disappears, and the island seems much more remote than usual. Often when the haze comes it’s uncomfortably humid, but today it was more like a mist, and the temperature was just right – cooler than the afternoon, but still warm. The kind of warmth that leaves you with a thin layer of sweat that’s pleasantly cooling but doesn’t soak into your clothes. The haze amplified the smell of damp vegetation, turned the setting sun into a warm red disc, and smudged all the hills smooth and pastel blue. I cycled down empty roads, past typhoon-battered sugar cane, and apart from a single car in the distance, all I heard were insects and birds. When I got to the sea, it was as pond-still as I’ve ever seen it, and there was no horizon – just haze and grey silhouetted rocks a few hundred metres out, at the edge of the reef.

The first and longest stop on my one-week tour of mainland Japan was Kobe, which is a largish city right in the center of Japan’s largest island, Honshu, close to both Osaka and Kyoto, and probably most famous outside Japan for the earthquake that devastated it in 1995. Nowadays, it’s a bustling, modern Japanese city, but with few tourist attractions or even distinguishing features apart from the large, man-made Port Island, on which my hotel was located, and the pretty hills that are its backdrop.

… Argh. I could have just torn that out of a tourist guide, couldn’t I? Let’s start again, because I wasn’t there as a tourist – I was there for a three-day recontracting conference, along with a thousand or so other JET teachers who, like me, are staying on for a second year. Three days of workshops, in which unqualified teachers try to teach other unqualified teachers to teach (actually, that’s unnecessarily cynical – some of them were actually quite useful, and there are a lot of JET teachers who, although they might not be any more qualified than me, are clearly better teachers who I can learn from), and three nights drinking in central Kobe, because it’s pretty rare nowadays that I get the chance to sit in a pub and chat in fluent, rambling English. And even rarer that I get the chance to drink a pint of decent Guiness or Hoegaarden (the price of a pint of which is so obscenely astronomical here that I don’t even want to think about how much bad karma I got from buying it anyway…)

A couple of memory fragments:

• Getting into a taxi with a couple of other JETs, which contained a huge liquid crystal tv screen in the front. As we drove off, the taxi driver inserted a DVD, and turned the resulting orchestral music up to a crazy volume. While the sound quality was excellent, it did make it almost impossible to talk, so I asked him (the only way I could think of in Japanese) if he could make it a little quieter. He did, but was a little put out and told me that what I should have said was something like ‘although I don’t hate this music, it is a little loud…’

• Learning a useful lesson about the dangers of theorising about Japan (which seems to be a popular pastime with foreigners here). I was sitting in a very nice, dark little bar with Graeme, another JET, and we were talking about something we’d both noticed in Kobe: people cross the road on a red light. This is very unusual in Japan – in Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, and everywhere else I’ve been, people generally wait patiently for the green man. I’ve got so used to stopping at the crossing like everyone else that I was shocked to see people everywhere walking straight out while the man’s still red. I wondered what’s special about Kobe, and Graeme wondered if it could be to do with the earthquake – a ‘life’s-too-short’ sort of attitude particular to Kobe. Wow, I thought. That could be right: 5000 people died in the Kobe earthquake, which means that probably most of the city’s residents lost someone they knew. So we asked the barmaid, tactfully: Is there something special about Kobe? Why does everyone cross on the red light here? Oh, I cross the road out there on the red the whole time, she says: the roads in central Kobe are almost all one-way, see, so they’re easy to cross. There we were, looking for historical, socio-psychological explanations for something that is actually explained by a difference in the city’s traffic system…

I’ve visited seven cities in the last week, and stopped long enough to look round five of them. The first was Kobe, for work, followed by Kyoto, Hiroshima, Kumamoto, and Fukuoka. I had to pass through Naha (Okinawa) and Osaka for the purpose of catching or disembarking from planes. Of the five cities that I visited, all but Kyoto were new to me, all were different, and I would like to tell you about them, but… there’s a typhoon coming. Typhoon number 4. The previous three missed, but this one looks like it’s going to hit. I’m sitting in the elementary school writing this at 12:30pm, and the rain is lashing down outside and the wind is picking up. The teachers had to come to school today, but the kids got the day off. Usually elementary school is much harder work than junior high, but today I just sat about drinking coffee and playing badminton in the gym with some of the other teachers. So anyway, the typhoon isn’t due to hit for another couple of hours, but I’ve got to get home and put my picnic table and chairs somewhere where they won’t get hurled through someone’s window. If I can be bothered to go out in the rain, I should also go to the supermarket, too. To stock up, like. So, Kobe (etc) will have to wait.

Better go.

This is lightvesselautomatic 2.0. New, improved, with sharper teeth and a glossier snout. Please do not be alarmed.

Here are some facts:

• lightvesselautomatic now has nice, friendly URLs – because you are not a computer. So, /diary.html is now /diary/. So: please update any bookmarks or links you might have. I promise to keep the new URLs intact for as long as lightvesselautomatic is active. I don’t, however, promise that the old version’s URLs will still work. That is bad of me, and I am sorry. From here on, though, everything is future-proof.
• I have tried to make sure it looks ok in as many browsers as possible. However, it will look nicer in various ways in a good browser like Opera or Mozilla Firefox than in Microsoft Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer’s support for modern web standards is extremely poor, and increasingly, other websites will look better in other browsers, too. Opera and Mozilla are also both faster than Internet Explorer, nicer to use, and downloadable for free if you follow the above links. Fight the power. And if it looks wonky in your browser, please let me know
• There is now an ‘rss 2.0 feed’ – up there at the top of the page – for those of you who know or care about these things. God knows I don’t: I just made it because I can, because I know how, and that makes me feel powerful. What ‘rss’ means is that, if you have the right software, you can subscribe to this site, and when I put something new up – so long as I also remember to update the feed – then you will be notified, because your software will check the site regularly and automatically so you don’t have to. The latest version of Opera, for example, can do this.

and now: I’m going away for a week or so, to Kobe, Kyoto, Hiroshima, and Fukuoka. Kobe is for work, the rest is for fun. that’s no excuse not to email me, though…