I apologize for the recent lack of stories, but these past few days have had me mostly confined to my room completing application packets of various kinds. Since all the materials have to be painstakingly handwritten in Japanese, you can imagine how long the process takes.
Another big pain in the shiri (ass) is that I have to make trips to a nearby internet café to print all of the requisite PDFs and such. A plus is that once you’ve paid the flat rate admission fee at the café, you can get all the free drink refills you want. Hooray for drinking iced cocoa till you puke!!!
Here are two interesting transportation related items from today.
The first is that I fell asleep on the subway and missed my station. While I’ve had bouts of head nodding during rides, I’ve never completely conked out before. I must be turning into an elderly Japanese man. I’ve already got the glasses, all I need now are black socks up to my knees and a khaki fishing hat.
One of my Japanese teachers from college told me that she always falls asleep immediately after boarding the train. However, she said that her body always automatically wakes up at the stop before she needs to get off. I think in my case it was the screeching brakes that jolted me back into consciousness. I was completely disoriented when I woke up and it took me a few minutes to figure out how far I had overshot my target station.
In other news, I watched a little Japanese kid get his arm stuck in the train car door this afternoon. We had arrived at the station and the doors began to open automatically to let the passengers out. Only, our door got jammed and wouldn’t open fully. It soon became clear from the whimpering Japanese kid that something had gone wrong.
People from the train car started swarming around and someone hit the panic button which opened all the doors in our car and started an advisory warning over the intercom. A few seconds later about five station attendants swarmed the area.
I was all prepared for the Jaws of Life to come out. I was envisioning them cutting the train door off in order to free the child. The gushing fountain of warm blood spewing from the kid’s stump would soak the nearby passengers as he was wrenched free. Seeing her deformed son convulsing on the cold train car floor, the mom would fall to her knees screaming “TASUKETTE!!!!!”
Too bad it was only the excess fabric from the kid’s shirt sleeve that got caught in the door. The train attendants reached under the seats and pulled some lever to manually disengage the door, and within moments, the kid was free. A little rattled, but not even a scratch. I had my camera with me, but I figured snapping pictures of the kid pinned against the door would have been too cruel.
Tomorrow I’m rewarding myself for my hard work on applications with a trip to Yokohama to visit my friend Izumi. Then, this Friday, I’m off to visit my favorite pornography company SOFT ON DEMAND!
Stay tuned…
B.E.W.
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