Engrish

I read Engrish every day, and don't usually feel the need to blog about it. But today's is just brilliant.
Glad we got that all cleared up then.

Catch-up Marathon Part I

There are two reasons for lack of activity on my blog - either excess of activity in my life, or lack of activity in my brain.
The last few weeks have mostly been the former, although the few times that I probably would have had time to blog, I think I was suffering the latter.
Here's a quick run down of a couple of things I did last week. Not everything, but hopefully this post will have a part II to get through the rest of the week.

1. Work (the boring one first) - it's been crazy, but the office is now moved, we've escaped from the Greek Mafia and have possibly probably found a replacement for me (just as well as I leave here next Wednesday, and have no intention of working after Friday!)

2. Meow Mix. I know I blogged about this already, but I've put up a heap more little videos of the other acts from the night on flickr. Click on the photo here to see the names of the acts we were on with. It was a most entertaining set of acts! My videos are not the full acts, just little snippets of them, flickr style. Including my favourite from Big Moves, which I like so much I think I will post part of it here.

I'm always impressed when people actually sing. And I can't believe that I leave here the day before their show in the Montreal Fringe Festival opens - it's called "Lard" because it's like grease, but thicker...

3. On Monday Emma showed up all of a sudden, so I got to play tourist for a few days! It was good - I managed to see the Basilica and climb the Olympic tower and go up the mountain again, so I sort of feel I have done the vital tourist things in Montreal.

4. Last Tuesday the wonderful Elvi (Hi Elvi!) threw me and Aideen (who is also leaving) a Choeur Maha going away party. We made use of the huge pile of sweaters she provided and braved the freezing weather (it got to 4 degrees that night - ridiculous! This is supposed to be *summer*!) to sit in her beautiful backyard, over in NDG, a part of town I hadn't been to before (another thing ticked of the 'must do before I leave' list!). To get there Emma and I caught a metro across town and then a bus even further west. On the bus I had this weird experience where I looked around and no one I could see looked french. And I couldn't hear any french being spoken. And all the books I could see were in English. It was like being in another city or country or something. But then I looked out the window and was reassured by all the french signage. Thank goodness for Quebec language laws!

Anyway, the party was great, the food was good, it was nice to see all the Maha people again. And I got to play Guitar Hero, which very kindly informed me at the end of my song "You Rock!". I was most chuffed. I also got wonderful presents! A luggage tag! A real one, made of plastic, and not the cardboard freebies I have to replace all the time! And it has the Quebec flag on it! And I got pencils patterned with the fleur de lis (they only write in french...) and the most wonderful maple butter, and some tissues with the Canadiens logo (it's a hockey thing). AND, Elvi (having obviously had far too much free time in the last few months) had read enough of my blog to notice my Engrish fetish, and, remembering this photo, presented me with two cans of coffee:

The only thing we failed to do was sing! A whole bunch of women from choir, and we failed to sing. Well, except for Auld Lang Syne, which shouldn't count.


And just because it's been stuck in my head all week (thanks to Rosemary and Mel), here's a version of "Farewell to Nova Scotia" I rather like. Very Living End, really. And more interesting than the traditional version.

The Last of the Japanalia

I promise this is the end of the Japanalia.
This is the entrance to what is known as "restaurant street". The place to go for all your restaurant and plastic sushi needs.
The whole street has a certain resauranty feel to it, as evidenced by these innovative balconies:
This is a pet shop. Well, a stuffed pet shop, but still. This was one small part of the window display.

And this is the famous Golden Turd of Asakusa. No, I don't know why either. (Although apparently it's supposed to be flame or beer foam on the top of the Asahi breweries headquarters)

Leftover Engrish

I was just doing some photo sorting and discovered a whole heap of Engrish I never posted. Obviously, by the time I left Japan, I was failing to keep up with the number of examples I was finding. Here they are. All in just a couple of enormous posts. Enjoy.

First: The Smoking Signs. It's not a "Don't Smoke" campaign. More a "Smoke Considerately" campaign. This is only a few of them that I managed to photograph, mostly from a montage that seemed to be portable-ashtray themed. There were also "where does your smoke go" type ones, and others. None of them seemed to mention health, really. I find them hilarious. Many of them are just so Zen!















And now everything else:
There was another sign for the same pub just near this one that said "Marry Jane". I tried to get a photo, but a drunk idiot saw the camera and wouldn't stop posing in front of it. Typical Japanese...

This was on a soft case I bought for my computer:
My favourite icecream!
You'd think this would be one word they could spell... This was at the airport too. It's possible the shop people were from some other part of asia, but I still think it's no excuse:

I seriously considered these glasses. Afterall, I don't want any flame around my eyes, do I?
The hotel I stayed in in Hakone provided such lovely shampoo and body soap. They made me feel like a sentimental snow crystal...





These two are from Korea. I think this one is a great idea, and we should all be as mild as we can, really. Or as this can:

I didn't eat at this restaurant. I just couldn't get past the menu on the door...

And this is a skipping rope I bought in Sydney, would you believe!

Black Eggs (Weekend pics, part 3)

Owakudani is famous for black eggs that are cooked in the boiling hot sulfuric spring water here. But apparently they don't always have them available. At least, that's what I think they're saying here.
The sulfuric gases that fuel the tourist industry here are apparently not all that healthy for you. I decided I didn't have a dedicate bronchus and went on regardless!

The gases and spring water here might not be so good for you, but the eggs they cook in them are apparently very healthy for you.

And this one, I just can't work out. Ok, point 1 refers to the fact that you can only buy 6 eggs at a time, I understand that. And point 4 is obvious. And 2 might just mean that you have to eat the eggs within 2 days. But point 3 really gets me. Can anyone read the japanese and provide a better translation? Or anyone, any suggestions as to what it might mean? Prizes for the most creative responses...

more from last weekend

More from my weekend in the Hakone region!
This isn't some google earth image, but a shot from the cable car over the valley at Owakudani. I don't know what they were doing, but it was something they were doing with the sulfuric gases and steam that shoots out of the ground all over this volcanic region. If anyone has any idea what exactly they are doing, do let me know!
And at Gora station, you can eat hot sands!

And at Chokoku mori station, you put your rubbish in a "dust port". It sounds so high-tech. Like something you would find in a spaceship.
The cable car that took us to Owakudani was keen for us not to open the door of the capsule and tumble to our deaths hundreds of metres below: "A door is automatic and opens and closes it. Please do not hit a handle here"

Today's crop

This is from my outing to Ueno in Tokyo today. My travel blog has more info. These green signs seem to be approaching the issues of smoking and littering from intersesting angles. In case you can't read them, the first one says "Cigarette smoke is wider than a human body" and the other one says "Some people throw trash in the street. Other people have to clean it up" The first person in the trash picture is labelled "Bad Smoker" and the other three are labelled "Street Cleaner", just in case you didn't get the message!


And this is a snack I bought at the 99yen shop that was slightly disappointing. They didn't provide nearly as much joy as promised!


And another one I couldn't get a picture of was a girl's shirt that said in large letters "ABSOLUTELY" and underneath it said "Be Pleased to Do". "Do what?" I ask!

Another shirt last week: "Orange Peel". No idea why. It was an orange shirt though.

And the Turkish restaurant I went to tonight had a tri-lingual menu, and the english was full of cuteness. For a main course we had a choice of, among others, "Lattatouille" or "Raviori". Other than that, they'd done a pretty good job, really, and the food was lovely - very authentic, I think.

More engrish pics.

Look a second post in a day! I've been sorting photos, and thought I'd better blog them while I knew which ones were which!

My favourite nut mix for my relax time:

And this (from Meiji Shrine in Harajuku) made me feel there was something lost in the translation. It's like the opposite of Chinese. I remember when I went to the Imperial City, there would be three chinese characters, and the english translation would be about a page long!

This isn't Engrish. The sausage-y thing just looked disgusting, somehow!

And this is the most elaborate pocky I've ever seen. I'm wondering if "decorer" has something to do with the french. Not with shampoo. Either way, they were yummy!

I like Japaneeeese

I've been going to Free Japanese Lessons at something called the Sagamihara International Lounge since about the first week I arrived here. It's a great system. They have 4 or 5 sessions each week of these free lessons, taught by volunteer teachers, and the only thing they ask is 200yen (about AU$2.30) per month as a photocopying fee. Well worth it. There mut be about 10 or 15 little groups all working at different levels each session, all in one room. I've been lucky enough to nearly always have a teacher to myself, as I was sort of adopted by one teacher on my first saturday session. Unfortunately I started finding saturdays too hard (there's too much else to do on the weekends!) and started coming on wednesdays, even though I'm permanently an hour late for the two hour session! I joined a group that was only slightly behind where I was, but, due to doing some extra work in my free time at school and going to this Saturday's session as well (not to mention my natural ability to pick up languages), I'm going to be way too far ahead for that group next time, so I'll have to ask to change, and that's going to be a pain! But it does show the fliexibility of the many-small-groups system. If one person progresses faster than the others they can be promoted to a group already working on the next chapter of the book (we all use the same book, which makes it easier to know exactly where you're up to). I wonder if this could be made to work in an english school at any point. hmm.

Oh, and the lessons are held in a building called the "Fuchinobe Promity Building" whatever that means!

And, because I can't do anything so boring as a post without a picture, here are a couple I took in Harajuku a couple of weeks ago. I had forgotten about them!

A Classy Jewelers:

And a 100yen belt:

Trains, bars and arabian rock.

First of all, this from Enoshima last week (actually at Fujisawa station):

And a very popular platform it was too.


Then I noticed this at one of the stations on the odakyu line as I was coming home this evening.

Do you think they mean "REquest"? or seek? Is it an ad for a modelling agency? Or a salon that does scary things to you to try to expose your beauty within?

Then there was this. But I'm not so sure about it. It's either a hilarious instance of the oh so common l/r mixup, or someone actually thought they were being funny, in which case, er, it isn't.
This place isn't actually Engrish, but I think it fits here anyway. It really needs the audio, but I decided to save everyone and not record it. It's easy enough to imagine though. It was playing "Arabian" music. By which I mean Arabian Nights from the Disney Aladdin movie. Then it moved on to A Whole New World from the same film. I didn't hang around to see if it had the whole soundtrack going!

And this just sounds messy: