New Years

New Years was an interesting time for me as I was still feeling a little raw from Christmas yet thoroughly excited to go on holidays. It's an unwritten tradition that every Christmas all the volunteers in Japan go to Hokkaido, however it's also tradition for them to all go down to Tokyo afterwards for New Years. From my time in Tokyo so far, I've noticed that one of the biggest differences in between the Tokyo and other Japan projects is that, obviously enough, it's located in the middle of a huge city. This has positives like a vibrant social scene and fast pace of living but draw backs such as the fact that you are in a city so unbelievably condensed you feel like your drowning in concrete. Regardless of these things though, I was dying to get back to a big city and taste the delights of urban sophistication and/or arrogance.

I just realised that absolutely none of us have any pictures from New Years 

so I'm just going to use one from when we we're in Tokyo at the beginning of the year. 

If you look very closely you can see the fire in my eyes which is a tell tale sign of someone 

whose soul consists solely of hellfire, malevolence and marmite. 

Unfortunately, while the girls from Kyoto were allowed to stay in the Tokyo volunteers apartment, we being men, were not. This was primarily because we are not considered adults by law here (more on that later) and also because our superiors aren't the most liberal when it comes to things like this. However the people whom the Tokyo volunteers work for were kind enough to put us up in a Hotel...on the opposite fucking side of Tokyo, but free accommodation was not something I was prepared to turn down. So after a plane, a train and a lot of wandering around lost, we managed to get settled into our hotel and meet up with the girls. We soon found ourselves in an Izakaiya (Japanese style bar) with some of the Tokyo volunteers co-workers. One who stood out to me in particular was a man named Paul who for some strange reason struck me as being an odd half way point in between Gandalf and grounds keeper Willie. As you may have discerned from that statement, he is unimaginably Scottish. Soon after this we headed to a Irish/Scottish themed bar called "The Celt". Now normally I have nothing to do these kinds of places as me being Irish already, I go abroad to get away from Irish bars. Furthermore there is just something so nauseating about "ye olden Irish" themed pubs but on that night I wasn't aiming to be cultured, I was aiming to get rat faced and I achieved that goal magnificently. I do admit though, it was very decent place and there was just something so climatic about bursting through to doors to hear "8!..7!..6!" after having to run from the local train station in order to make the countdown.

Came across this while wandering around Tokyo 

and yet I'm not surprised in the slightest

One thing in particular that I remember from New Years was a discovery of one of my own preconceived snobberies. I am not what one would call a "club person". Generally speaking when I go out to clubs or bars I find my self surrounded by people with gelled up hair and extra tight t-shirts to highlight the fruits of their gym attendance having conversations about fucking lots of apparently "sexy bitches". Now this is not always the case, however it gets me into apathetic mind set where I often find myself thinking  "ugh, fucking idiots...".  This however was not the case for me on New Years. Anybody that I got talking to was like me a foreigner in the midst of their own traveling. Unlike me though they didn't all come from the English speaking world, they had become fluent in English during their childhood. Many more had not only become fluent in English but we're also speaking Japanese as well as a few other languages. I had just figured out that this random man I was talking to was quad lingual when it dawned on me "I may actually be the stupidest person in this bar", and that was a deliciously humbling experience. 

 One day James decided to take a walk in the most Yakuzza ridden part of Tokyo,

 Kabukicho...Doesn't seem to bad.

For the rest of our time in Tokyo we followed a pattern of shopping and sightseeing during the day and going out to Izakaiyas at night. This was great fun and it allowed me to witness some of the weirder aspects of Japan and believe me, there are many. But I will save these for another post.