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Every now and then I meet someone who hasn’t become all jaded and still has lots of ideas about what opportunities Tokyo holds. I don’t mean to say that I personally have become (entirely) bitter and grumpy (yet), just that it is rare to meet others that haven’t.

I do have to admit though, there are some things I was a little disappointed by. I had images of eating ramen in the evenings in little ramen bars, in little alleyways, with little red lanterns out the front. My first disappointment came when I realised the ramen here are greasy and heavy, not at all like those at home. I have heard people who come to Tokyo from other cities comment that they don’t like the ramen either, so possibly we just chose the wrong town.

My second disappointment was the plastic fast food style of so many of the eateries here, not quite the little wood-lined restaurants of my dreams. At least the positive side of these places with their vending machine ticket service system is that they are very non-Japanese speaker friendly.

I have been irritated numerous times by the in-your-face discrimination here too, but don’t feel like writing too much about it.

My original point was that when I do meet one of the un-jaded people, with all their ideas of cultural activities to be partaken, and friends to be made, and places to be travelled… I tend to feel I should be doing all these things I had originally planned to do myself.

I wanted to take a cooking course, study painting or calligraphy, do flower arranging, find craft markets, learn the language,… and a million other things.

Now I find myself having lived here for over three months already, having learnt little more than how to say “shit” a number of different ways in French. (Not that I am not very proud of this effort mind you, I have been told I swear very convincingly.)

I could make lots of excuses about having a sub-standard pay check, a difficult schedule… blahh… but really they are all just excuses. Possibly I am just lazy, maybe too shy to go out there and get involved, I expect I am taking Tokyo for granted, or simply too busy dreaming up the next big idea to notice time is passing me by.

Even so, if I dont get around to spending a few evenings sitting on the veranda of an old tea house overlooking a moonlit Japanese garden, I’ve still had a bloody good holiday.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 6th, 2007 at 9:48 pm and is filed under Tokyo, life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.