清明節 fell on 5 April this year. Since that was a Tuesday, both it and Monday were public holidays. We get few holidays off where I work, but Tomb Sweeping Day is always one of them. Boss Lady II has recently deceased relatives whose tombs are not about to sweep themselves.
Tomb Sweeping Day is a day set aside for, not surprisingly, sweeping tombs. About a million years ago the rulers of China decided to create an opiate for the lazier amongst the masses to clean up their family grave sites. Since there is no way in hell people are going to do such a thing on anything resembling a frequent basis, one day each year was deemed good enough. Those who do not clean 祖父的 grave risk losing serious face. Since the Wife has no recently dead in her family, I have never had the opportunity to burn incense and light firecrackers at anyone’s grave to keep away the unlucky spirits. At least not legally.
Having an extra Monday and Tuesday off gave me five days in a row where I did not have to drive amongst suicidal assbags. But the Wife had a conference in 彰化 so a trip to somewhere interesting was out of the question. I could have gone with her to 彰化 but that is where her oldest sister lives, which means that she will always stay in the sister’s house rather than a hotel, which means that I would rather stay home. I have absolutely nothing against the sister, her husband or their loud, immune to impulse control children. But given a choice, I would prefer to sleep in my own bed or at least in a hotel bed where there are no screaming children within sight.
Five days at home mostly alone is far from the worst thing in the world. I was looking forward to playing music without anyone turning on the television and having five days without the phone ringing. For reasons I have yet to understand, the in-laws always call the Wife on the house phone, even though she has two or three cell phones. I would think that calling one of her cell phones is best since she has them with her at all times. The house phone is only effective when she is actually home. But I am not Chinese. And they always know not to call when she is out of town. This is not much of a mystery as she always lets everyone know where and when she is going. One of the best ways I can tell that she has come back, other than her physical presence and the higher noise levels, is that the house phone will begin ringing almost immediately and will not stop until every one of her sisters and brother has called. I understand the concept if the not the practice of a close family, but when one of them is only a few cities away for a day it is not like they just got back from a Peace Corps mission to Urucurituba.
When anyone wants to reach me they call my cell phone. That is the phone I answer. I do not give out the house phone number. I do not know the house phone number.
At the last minute the Wife decided not to go to the conference in 彰化. This is not so unusual. Most of her final decisions are made far after they should have been. The rest of the time is spent changing her mind so often that I completely ignore whatever decision she has made since I know it will only change. I have learned not to trust anything she says where it concerns actions or inaction that are not immediately happening. If she says she is going to sit down I will believe it when I see it.
Instead of five days of peace and quiet at home I was faced with five days with a restless wife who needs the living room television on regardless of what room she is in and who could not make up her mind if my calm depended on it. When I woke up that Saturday morning I decided that I should take a trip. She was free to come, but I knew that there was not enough time for her to change her mind a million times and that she is not too terribly keen on taking trips for which she did not have a week to pack. Unfortunately for me, last minute trips are rarely as cheap as I am. Fortunately for me, though not so much for the people of Japan, one of the greatest earthquakes ever known struck their tiny island and brought massive tsunami damage just three weeks earlier. This made travel to Japan far cheaper than usual. Though only a three hour flight, tickets to Tokyo are ordinarily more expensive than they need to be. I can fly to Indonesia for less, even though it is twice the distance, as the Boeing flies.
But I chose not to go. The Wife destroyed my plans, but a last minute trip to a land with little electricity and intermittent train service was not going to bring me a week of quiet. I was not so concerned with the radiation. I am already invisible when I drive around here, and most people are pretty easy to see through without x-ray vision.
Two months later was 龍船節. This fell on 6 June, giving us only Monday off. My school rarely takes Dragon Boat Day off, but we did this year.
Dragon Boat Day is an ancient Chinese festival of which no one knows the origins. There are a million stories that probably have nothing to do with anything, including the story of a poet who killed himself because the emperor did not pay enough attention to him. This poet is now a folk hero throughout the Chinese world, as suicide is a popular extracurricular activity to the Chinese. To honor his death, people race dragon boats on the nearest river or lake, eat rice (since eating rice is such a rare treat around here) and light firecrackers to keep away the unlucky spirits. Dragon boat races are about as exciting as one might imagine, if slow moving canoes on dirty water is your thing, and a fitting way to memorialize some attention whore who is to Chinese poetry what Louis B Mayer is to the studio system.
Faced with a three day weekend followed by one day of work and one day off, I decided to actually go somewhere this time. The Wife would have to take off more time than I, but that is always the case. It took about a minute to figure out that flying to Japan would be much cheaper than flying anywhere else. This is almost never the case. Tickets to Tokyo were even cheaper than Bangkok. I would almost always prefer going to Tokyo since Japan is a fairly large country with plenty more to see than Tokyo. Thailand is basically one large city, a few expensive resorts and lots of tiny dirt villages. I have nothing against tiny dirt villages, but I have already lived in one, so there is little novelty, and they are usually difficult to get to and not the best places to find public toilets. Thailand’s slow and dilapidated rail system does not help. Japan, on the other hand, has modern bullet trains that shoot past the tiny dirt villages and go straight to the other happening towns. But when faced with a very short trip I would rather simply stay in Tokyo or Bangkok and avoid long train rides altogether.
The Wife was originally going to go with me to Japan but changed her mind once or twice before I finally booked the trip. The plane tickets would have been cheaper earlier, but I had to wait for her to give her final answer. If this is the kind of thing that would bother you, do not marry my wife. It happens every single time.
About a week before the trip, I got a vague e-mail telling me that JAL had made changes and that I should probably call the American company from which I had bought the tickets. There was no useful information other than an American phone number. I only used an American company to avoid the endless bullshit of booking a trip with a Chinese company. The American company was always reliable and efficient, up to this point. Comparable Chinese companies are nothing close to reliable and always require lengthy and baffling phone conversations for days on end until the deed is done. All transactions with the American company were always online.
Until I had to call them.
As much as I hate calling Chinese businesses, I absolutely loathe calling American businesses. Chinese transactions are never quick or straightforward, but at least they answer the phone, and the person answering the phone is often the person you need to talk to. American corporations have no idea how to answer a phone call. After a machine told me how important my call was to them, what sounded like death metal played. I have known that I am too old and it is too loud for some time, but has heavy metal really become appropriate corporate elevator music? In another generation, old people will call in and hear, “
Don’t you get it, bitch. No one can hear you. Now shut the fuck up and get what’s comin’ to you. You were supposed to love me. Now bleed, bitch, bleed.”
After a solid thirty minutes on hold, a person who may or may not have been speaking English answered the phone. I rarely speak to people in English whose accents do not make them difficult to understand, so what I thought was a woman speaking to me in Spanish that was unlike any Spanish I have ever heard left me not entirely plussed. When I asked her whether she was a person or a machine, I was met with silence. This often happens, and I should probably stop asking such questions, but I would rather confuse someone who is just biding their time until the sound of five than have a ten minute conversation with a recording.
As it happened, the woman was indeed a person and was speaking English, although I never really understood what she said. When I told her about the vague e-mail, she may have said that she was going to transfer me to some other department. The next thing I heard was Dan Fogelberg telling me how long fishes had lived in the ocean, ironically. While I appreciated the juxtaposition of gothic speed metal and adult contemporary soft rock, I did not so much enjoy waiting another twenty minutes on hold.
Eventually another woman, who sounded very much like the first woman, asked me the same question and I gave the same answer. The only difference was that while she was talking I could hear the laughter of her amigos and the radio on her desk more than I could hear her. I have no special objection to a slacker attitude in the dead end job workplace, but after almost an hour on hold while calling from the other side of the world to clear up some problem that I know nothing about, I would like at least some of the slacker’s attention. As has been mentioned previously, I am old. So I did what old people do and asked to speak to her supervisor. She tried to steer me in a different direction, and even turned off her radio. Or at least turned it down. But I was ready to end our relationship and used my authoritative voice, which is enough to get Chinese children to sit down and shut up, so it can certainly handle a corporate peon.
After the third holding pattern, this time with no music, a third woman who sounded very much like the first two answered. Though she sounded exactly the same, I could tell she was a different person. She did not seem like it was her first or last day on the job and I could hear no background noise. Anyone with an office rather than a partition should be able to answer my question. She also said her name was Miskpa or something sounding similar. The others did not. The e-mail situation confused her, as she probably had no magical powers that told her what every vague e-mail sent from her company was about, but after a few minutes fumbling with her computer she was able to tell me that JAL had made changes and that calling was the thing to do. This brought me exactly to where I was before making this expensive, tedious and rather loud phone call. After more computing she told me that JAL moved the flights to different airports.
Miscpah told me that my return flight from Tokyo would leave HND instead of NRT, but rather than say HND and NRT she said Anita and Narita. The Spanish pronunciation of Narita is pretty much like the Japanese, and it is the primary international airport in Tokyo, causing no confusion. But I had no idea where Anita Airport was. I knew there was a Haneda Airport in Tokyo, but it is pronounced the way a British person would say Canada, and nothing like Anita. When we cleared that up she told me that the flight would leave at a different time. I was originally supposed to leave NRT at 1855. After she told me that the flight out of HND left thirty minutes sooner she paused, trying to figure out the new time, “So that would be…”. When I told her that it would be 1825 she said, baffled, “How did you know?” Since I was raised to only call people stupid dipshits behind their backs I refrained from responding and continued my quest for more information.
My return flight would now land at “Fungshan” airport. I know of no Fungshan Airport anywhere in the world, but there is a 鳳山, which can be spelled Fongshan or Fengshan, very near where I live. But it has no airport of any size. Flying there would be terribly convenient, were it physically possible. I asked Miss K’Pah the airport code, but she had no idea what I was talking about. This is not ideal from a customer service supervisor at a travel-related company. I asked her how it was spelled since Fungshan, Fongshan, Fengshan could be common place names for all I know. The problem with spelling Chinese is that there are usually a variety of options. 中, 證, 蒸, 珫 can all be spelled zhong, zheng, chung, chong, cheng, but all have very different meanings.
When the dust finally settled and I was optimistically cautious that I might receive some kind of e-mail with some kind of information sooner or later, I asked Pah if I could give her some advice. I then politely but sarcastically pointed out that while dead end shit jobs are not the most exciting in the world, it is generally helpful if people on the communication side of things are able to communicate with their customers. The only reason I was speaking to her and not the second person was because of all the music and laughing. Pah then gave me the requisite bullshit speech about her future talk with #2 and I asked her what time it was. My concern was that I was calling at 2am Washington time (where the company is located) and yet I had to wait on hold for an hour. If it is that busy in the middle of the night, what is it like in the middle of the day? Or, more likely, am I going to have to pay a large phone bill just because their customer service office likes to party? She reluctantly told me that they were in Manila.
This just pissed me off.
I have no problem with American companies outsourcing jobs to countries where people are willing to work for pennies and not demand unreasonable extravagances like restrooms and fewer beatings, but had I known that I would be calling Manila I could have called them directly and saved my own pennies. The American companies assume that since their customer service line is a toll free number that it is toll free to everyone. It is not. I did not call from within the United States and, as such, such is not the case. Manila is much closer than Washington, making an hour long phone call much cheaper.
Within a day I had received an e-mail confirming everything which I will have to pay a small fortune to have reluctantly changed. I also got an e-mail asking me if I would like to take a survey about my recent customer service experience. Boy, would I. I really went to town on that survey, so it is only a matter of time before they make vast improvements to their corporate ideology. Mankind can thank me later.
My least favorite aspect of traveling to Japan, and international travel in general, is how long everything takes. The flight to Tokyo is just over three hours. It took thirteen hours to get from my apartment to the hotel room. The taxi to the train station took about twenty minutes. Had I taken the airport I had originally wanted to take, that taxi ride would have also taken about twenty minutes. The train to the airport took two hours. I took an earlier train than I normally would have because the Wife went to a conference in the same general direction and we went together. The shuttle bus from the train station to the airport took thirty minutes.
I assumed that it would take at least half an hour to check in, as it normally does at this airport. But for reasons unknown to me there was absolutely no line and several clerks were just sitting there waiting. I have never experienced such a thing outside of tiny regional airports. At security, there was only one person ahead of me and no one behind me to get radiated, but I was still on the Chinese side of things, so a mother with three children felt it was vital that she ram her way in front of me. This is a daily event around here. No matter where you are, no matter what you are doing, these people will jump in front of you. I could have walked through in half a second, as I eventually did, and it would not have hurt her at all to wait her rightful turn, but it was the most important thing in the world that the mother not be behind anyone since she and her children had to fumble more than anyone really should with more bags than three people should have and give in to any and all distractions. The slower the Chinese move, the more they have to be first. I had a little over three hours before my flight started boarding, so I watched with insouciance, but she had no way of knowing this, nor did she care. The Chinese me-first selfishness in all things disturbs me in practice more often than not and in principle always.
The last time the Wife and I went to Tokyo we stayed at a nice little hotel in a quiet little neighborhood. There is little within walking distance, other than the Imperial Palace and National Diet, but there is a JR station across the street. The rest of the city is never very far away as long as you are near a station.
But Tokyo is a very large city with somewhere around 13 million people. The three subway systems are easy to navigate (although someone in charge of such things might want to consider that the English names Tokyo Metro and Tokyo Metropolitan Bureau are fairly similar), but they are always crowded. Since I was traveling alone on this trip and had no particular agenda, I wanted to spend as little time and money as possible packed like a lemming into a tiny metal box.
Within an easy walk of the Shibuya station is a wider variety of more food than I could ever have anything to do with and enough tourist crap to find the requisite postcards and something to bring home to placate the Wife. It is probably one of the better neighborhoods to stay in if you want to spend most of your time in a single neighborhood. Most gaijin will tell you that Roppongi or Akihabara are better, but I have little interest in the things in which most foreigners in Japan are interested.
What I liked about Shibuya the last time I was in Tokyo was the fact that the train station, Krispy Kreme, Shakey’s and the coldest Pepsi vending machine in the country were all within walking distance of each other. Cold drinks can be difficult to find in East Asia. The Asian definition of cold is not much lower than room temperature. I like drinks that are this side of forming ice crystals. While vending machines are everywhere in Tokyo, the only cold one that I know of is under that metallic elephant horn thing at the famous Shibuya crosswalk. Unfortunately, it no longer has Pepsi. Nor does any other vending machine, grocery store or convenience store that I saw. There is plenty of Pepsi NEX (the artificial sugar version) and Pepsi Dry (the sugar-free, sweetener-free version). I like sugar in my Pepsi. I do not like saccharin or aspartame or whatever they use now. I tried Pepsi Dry, which has neither sugar nor any artificial sweeteners. It is absolutely horrible. Imagine pouring a drink onto a public sidewalk and then coming back the next day to lick it up. That would probably taste better.
Fortunately, Krispy Kreme had cold Pepsi. Real Pepsi. I assumed before the trip that I would be going to Krispy Kreme every day because Krispy Kreme is miles ahead of any other donut and they are all over Tokyo. Mr Donut used to be everywhere, but I have not seen any since Krispy Kreme took over. The Japanese would not know a cold drink from an open sewer, but they know which way the donuts blow. The irony is that Mr Donut, an American company, used to have more stores in Japan than anywhere else while there are more Krispy Kremes in the United States than in every other nation combined. On this trip I went to Krispy Kreme every day for the cold Pepsi alone.
There are several Shakey’s throughout the city, though I never noticed any the first time I went to Tokyo. The Shinjuku Sanchome Shakey’s is just like any California Shakey’s, other than all the Japanese. The Shibuya Shakey’s is flawed. It still tastes like Shakey’s, which is really all that matters, but the shop itself does not look and sound like Shakey’s. The interior is more Japanese than olde tyme and the Dixieland jazz is replaced with Super Junior or any number of J-Pop and K-Pop bands that all sound like Super Junior. The managers and/or owners of both restaurants are Arab. This makes sense to me since my favorite pizza places in Brussels, Long Beach and Paris are run by Arabs. The Shinjuku Shakey’s Arab spoke terrible English, but he was friendly, gave us free drinks and made a very good pizza. The Shibuya Shakey’s Arab spoke better English, but he seemed annoyed that I wanted to order a pizza rather than get the Viking. When I tried to order a pizza with olives, he said they were out of olives. When I tried to order a pizza with mushrooms, he said they were out of mushrooms. I asked him what they had and he pointed to the wacky Japanese variations on the menu. When I tried to get just cheese, he said they were out of cheese, even though all the Japanese styles have cheese. And, really, how do you run a pizza place without cheese? I went in on a different day when he was not there and the Japanese clerk did not want to show me a menu. I knew what I wanted, but without the ability to order in Japanese, pictures on a menu are essential. It seemed like a battle just to get them to sell me their merchandise. But when I left they bowed and thanked me profusely, as is usually the case in most Japanese businesses.
If I were 16 years old I could eat Shakey’s and Krispy Kreme every day. But I am ever so slightly older than that and, while gaining weight is still not much of an issue, vomiting all night likely is. So the good people of Japan were kind enough to invent Japanese food, which is an excellent buffer in between pizzas. Shibuya also has Outback, TGI Friday’s, Sizzler, Denny’s, McDonald’s, Burger King, Lotteria, Royal Host, MOS and Freshness Burger, but I am not about to eat any of that crap.
What is odd about Tokyo, to me at least, is that I have no idea where any good, world class grocery stores are. I know exactly where to find excellent markets in most of the large cities I have ever visited, but I can only find average stores in Tokyo. I had heard that there was a Dean & DeLuca inside the Shibuya station, which would have been terribly convenient, but it turned out to be only a tiny stall selling only a tiny fraction of what the SoHo store sells. Most Americans seek out tourist traps and whores when they travel. I look for grocery stores.
I was originally going to fly out of Narita, but JAL changed it to Haneda for some reason. I had always flown out of Narita. It is the primary international airport in Tokyo. I know how to get there from the city. I know how long it takes and how much money it costs. I know how much time I need to get from check-in through immigration to the gate. All I knew about Haneda was that it is south of the city.
But Haneda is so much more convenient. A trip to Narita can easily set you back an hour and ¥2000, depending on which mode of transportation you choose. It took me about twenty minuntes and ¥480 to get to Haneda. Where Narita is always crowded, Haneda was practically empty. I liked it for the simplicity and speed with which all transactions were accomplished. I would have arrived much later had I known. The Wife would hate it for the lack of shopping and a food court with a single small restaurant.
I sat next to an Australian on the flight home. Several things are unusual about this. Ordinarily I end up next to a tiny Chinese person who has to take up far more space than tiny people need, unless I fly with the Wife. She takes up plenty of space, but I would rather have her than some sweaty betel nut dude invading my personal buffer zone, such that it is. The longer or later in the day the flight is the more likely the tiny Chinese person next to me will sleep. This leads to loud snoring, lots of guttural noises and clearing of nasal passages. And the sleep of the Chinese always leads to the infamous dragon breath. The inhumane amount of space given to paying customers on commercial airlines only amplifies Asian strains of halitosis.
Sometimes the tiny Chinese dudes will try to strike up a conversation. This does not bother me in principle. I rarely have better things to do on a plane, unless I am sitting next to the Wife. Then I would rather talk to her. But the tiny Chinese dudes always want to speak English. Any English speaking foreigner who has spent more than an hour on this side of the world can tell you how excited Chinese/Korean/Thai/Malaysian/Japanese people get when they spy a free English lesson. The enthusiasm of people learning English seems endless, outside of the classroom. It is a completely different story with far more disturbing use of mise-en-scène in class.
The Australian next to me did not need any English lessons. It is probably her native language. But like most Australians, she does not seem to know how to pronounce vowels.
She was also female. The airlines are usually kind enough to keep me away from lingerie models and staid librarians with a smoldering sexuality lingering just below the surface. They almost always put me next to some tiny Chinese dude or big fat sweaty dude. This Australian was none of the above. She was an English teacher in Japan heading off on holiday. We had the usual comparative country conversation, but she spent most of her time playing with electronic toys that were to me what color televisions and video cassette recorders were to my grandmother. I realize that I have been out of touch with the modern world for a few years, but this woman had gadgets that James Bond would love, if only they had a killing capability and could be used once and never be seen again. I have yet to figure out how to access the voice mail on my cell phone.
This was also the first time I flew into 松山, which was an international airport until something bigger and better came along. But the real airport is not connected to any metro system and requires a shuttle bus to get to the nearest train station. It can easily take ninety minutes from plane to train. 松山 has an MRT station which connects directly with the high speed train station. This was all fairly important as my flight got in at 9pm and the last high speed train left at 10pm. There is no way I would have caught the last train had I landed at the real international airport. Even from the fake international airport it was unlikely. None of this would have been an issue had JAL honored my original itinerary, which included leaving from and returning to an airport much closer to home. I would never have purposely planned to give myself such little time.
There were two immigration lines at 松山; one for locals and one for foreigners. As always, the foreigner line was considerably longer than the citizen line. Had I waited in that line I never would have caught the last train. But the bureaucrats who are in charge of changing the rules every six months actually made a change for the better. Those of us with alien residency can now take the citizen line at immigration. This new rule was in place the last two times I entered the country, but no one said anything the first time and I was only told about it the second time. Having been here long enough to know that what I am told one week might no longer apply the next, I was not entirely confident about using the citizen line, but I had little to lose. The only risk was that I would get to the front of the line and be told to go back to the foreigner line. Then I would surely miss the last train. But I was never going to catch that train if I went into the foreigner line anyway. I was surprised to find that not only was the new rule still in force, but that the immigration clerk at this tiny airport knew about it and was completely unfazed to see someone who is clearly not at all Chinese in the Chinese line. I was out of that airport faster than a speeding scooter driving on the wrong side of the road at night without headlights.
The great thing about any large Chinese city is that you always know you are in a large Chinese city by the large volume of Chinese people who all have to be first all the time. I ordinarily let the babies have their bottles, but in this case I was in a bit of a hurry. Missing that last train would have meant spending the night in a large, dirty, crowded Chinese city that I do not particularly care for rather than sleeping in the large, dirty, crowded Chinese city that I call home. In a city like Amsterdam or Cape Town I would never consider acting like a selfish Chinese on the metro, but since I was surrounded by selfish Chinese I went ahead and did as the Romans do. It is almost impressive how quickly I got to the train from the airport. I can see why the Chinese are such selfish assholes in public. It really saves time. I might have pushed a few old ladies to the ground and stepped on a baby or two, but fuck them. I was first. Chinese style. Had I let all the Chinese people who tried to push their way in front of me push their way in front of me, it would have taken hours. By doing things the Chinese way I was able to get a ticket for the last train with enough time to call the Wife and tell her when to pick me up. And I did not lose face by being a selfish asshole because no act of selfishness causes one to lose face. Not cleaning a tomb is a far graver offense than acting like an assmonkey.
But I still wish these dipshits would drive like human beings. Driving your elbow into me to be first on the MRT is not nearly as bad as driving your car into me at 100km/h to be first at the red light that you are going to run anyway.
The changes also sped up the entire process. It took thirteen hours to get from my apartment to the hotel room in Tokyo but only eleven hours from the hotel to my apartment. Just to take a three hour flight. If we followed TSA rules it would take days.
I am still waiting to see what superpowers all that radiation gave me.
