8 seconds

japan rail recently did an audit of the punctuality of its shinkansen (bullet trains) - the ones that run the length and breadth of the country. it found after examining 160,000 individual train journeys, that the average delay in arrival for a shinkansen was 8 seconds.

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8 seconds?! can you imagine if such rampant punctuality was introduced into australia? people would go wild - run screaming from train stations frothing at the mouth. attendants would tell you that the train was coming in 5 minutes whilst looking you right in the eye. the loudspeakers would announce: "good afternoon passengers: the train to dandenong has been delayed, and is now expected in 8 seconds. connex apologises for any inconvenience caused". it would all be too much.
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but not in japan. if you catch a train 6 hours up the east coast and have only 3 minutes to change over to another train upon arrival, there's no more shitting yourself with fear that you won't make the connection - you can sit back and relax with the knowledge wthat you will have a full 180 seconds to change at the station.
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in fact, when travelling on local trains, you can go to the front carriage and gaze through the window at the driver with all the other window lickers (or did pottsie say that they were headbangers? i was too busy drooling on the plexiglass for it to register). these drivers (who all have autistic spectrum disorder) have a timetable (see the arrow on the photo above!), and this timetable tells them what time they need to arrive and leave each train station to the second. fetch the smelling salts!
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the shinkansen themselves are just awesome. on our first ride, i looked out the window at the blurred vegetation by the tracks, and felt like i was in free-fall - SIDEWAYS. in fact, when i later googled it, i found that the trains do indeed travel faster than the terminal velocity of a human being - still alive, but bound and gagged - who has been tossed into the sky over bass strait from an unidentified aeroplane. it was fast.
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the seats were a blessing too. with my buggered back, we couldn't have spent a lot of time on a train with normal seats - but in japan, even the dregs of society (like us) travel first class when they're travelling last class, as all seats recline to about 45 degrees.
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it meant that we could literally leave tokyo in the morning, pop over to a mid-western japanese city for a bit of breakfast and sightseeing, move on somewhere else for a late afternoon stretch in a world heritage garden, and then get back on the train and be home in tokyo for dinner with my sister. and that's exactly the sort of thing we did and the sort of thing you can do when you free-fall toward your destinations.
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special mention must be made of the JR pass - one of the worlds true travel bargains. for an amount that initially seems extortional, g and i bought three weeks of limitless travel on almost all the trains in japan - from metros to local lines to the glorious shinkansen. i reckon we saved about $1000 each as a result. cha-ching.
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the eastern capital

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of course my sister and her partner live in tokyo - that's the reason we came to japan in the first place. and seeing them was always going to be the best thing about coming to japan anyway. but there were other things to see and do in tokyo...
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even though i would go so far as to classify myself as a semi-professional tourist, more often than not the actual visiting of tourist sites has me wanting to put a knife in the nearest child. g and i are similar in that respect, and rather than suffer the nausea of looking at temples, we prefer to toss ourselves into the river of 'let's see what happens' and float on down.

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so what did we do in this massive alpha-plus megamegamegalopolis of over 33 million people all crammed into one pulsating, never-ending crowd? well...when i was able to pry gerard away from the japanese equivalent of the $2 shop (literally the 'hundred yen shop', where we spent countless hours, one of us with a dead and bored look in his eye, the other with eyes alight, arms full of copper and aluminium wiring, asking "but mon cheri, what do you mean we don't need a full body lyrca suit or a mini soldering iron?")...we did a few things.

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in a departure from previous blogs, i thought i could create some links to galleries if you're interested in seeing more. so...click on the picture below if you want to check out tokyo parks and gardens.

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click the pic below for tokyo streets.

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click the one below for temples (bleaughh) and tokyo castle

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or finally, click the shot below to see what we got up to when we met up with nicky in tokyo for her birthday!

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a city for people

hands up like astroboy if you're massively frustrated and angry about the state of affairs with regards to cars cars cars in melbourne?

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consensus.

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you ring up the local fishmonger to find out how to get there, and she'll tell you where to park, but she won't tell you which tram to take - even though there's a fucking tram stop right outside her fishmongery! what's wrong with this picture?

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living next to the freeway, i have spent many a choking minute gazing down from above upon the endless tide of cars flowing into and out of our great city, wondering what life could be like in a modern metropolis built for people - not for cars. and then: tokyo!
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what boundless joy to be in a city with public transport infrastructure! where humans dominate the landscape, and suburban roads are so narrow and inconvenient that cars are too frightened to come out, and only do so under exceptional circumstances, blushing with irrelevance. c'mon melbourne - we can do it! let's build up some density and make our reliance on private vehicles a dirty joke from the past!

i'd rather die than have a fat arse

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what better characterises japan than the toilet? clean, convenient, modern, efficient. the most advanced version we encountered sensed your presence and lifted its lid when you were near, only to reveal a heated seat for your pampered bottom. when the excitement of voiding was over, there was one button to squirt your bumhole, another to squirt your fannyhole if you had one (or jet your balls if you didn't have one but wanted to know what happened when you pressed that button), another button to massage your arse with rhythmic squirts of water, and a final button to fan dry your pudendum, dripping wet after all that fun. when it was all over, you simply had to walk away - no need to even look back - the toilet flushed and closed automatically. before leaving, one could wash their hands under the automatic tap - not that you've touched anything but a few laminated buttons anyway.
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and that was basically our experience of japan - convenient, clean, efficient and modern, but slightly distanced from reality and not particularly interactive.
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6 weeks on from our holiday, it's time to refocus the retrospectoscope back on the land of the rising sun. join me as i reminisce! expect multiple small entries - and feel free to leave a comment/not leave a comment/get fucked/eat 4 king size cherry ripes in one sitting like i did last week and arrive at a higher level of existence. the choice is quite simply yours :)

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and by opposing, end them (the twisted girl)

as many of you know, it has not been smooth psychological sailing for me over the last few years. when i consider myself at the age of 29 with a weak leg that's been getting gradually weaker since before my 26th birthday, and a fucked back that won't let me sit for more than 10 minutes without making itself felt, i have experienced deep feelings of disappointment with my lot. the recent addition of a C-spine disc prolapse has had me wallowing in self-pity - the brunt being graciously borne by the love of my life.
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but i know that my lot is infinitely better than that of most people in the world, and i am always brought back to this by the memory of a girl i once saw as i was waiting at an overpriced physiotherapist for an ultimately useless session of pilates. this girl was twisted - her legs were different lengths, her spine was folded back on itself twice over, and every movement was clearly agony as she staggered from one side of the room to the next. and yet as she talked to her carer, she laughed, and it was the quality of this laugh that left me awe-struck. it was not the laugh of someone who was tolerating her pain, or laughing politely, or laughing despite herself. this girl was laughing with complete abandon. the girl with the twisted body - in pain, disabled, dependent - was giving herself up to the joy in her life.
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it's impossible to feel positive 24/7, but life is a joy regardless. i am inspired by the twisted girl, and my desire is to be able to live the joys of my life with the same abandon that she lives the joys of hers - whether i get better, stay the same, or get worse. anything less than this sort of life is a life half lived, and grounds for taking arms against a sea of troubles. peace!

your money or your life

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when i was leaving H+R block last year, the fat accountant - who hadn't been able to stop shifting uncomfortably on his seat the whole time we'd been talking - turned to me, gazed over his glasses so that his meaning could not be adulterated by a high refractive index, and said in a tone of voice 1/3 serious, 1/3 dripping with sarcasm and 1/3 charged with disgust: "other doctors in your place would have claimed much much more..."

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i suspected that i had been reprimanded, but wasn't quite sure. what exactly had he been trying to say?

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i've just come away from this year's visit. different accountant, same old same old. again, words of wisdom, but this time in earnest: "ondrej - in the next 12 months you need to spend a lot more so that you can claim".

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the funny thing was, he actually meant it. i opened my mouth and uttered a few words about materialism, society and true happiness, but he had already turned away to plug himself back into the wall.

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one thing's for sure - if you cut them, they do not bleed.

the christian guide to felching

i recently had the most unpleasant and provocative experience of being asked a question laced with historical resentment: 'why did you hate us so much?'

i, a young australian, had been transformed and held to answer for the eastern european peasants that had made life so unpleasant for the grandparents of my young australian questioner - jews that had left eastern european in the 1920s.

though it was said slightly tongue in cheek, i found myself upset to the point of fury. a fury not about history, but about the inheritance of history. rather than feel angry with the implication that i inherited the guilt of one group of people, i was angry with the implication that i had not inherited the suffering of the other. the dirty issue of ethnic association (or nationalism, which is essentially the same thing) had reared its ugly head, and allowed me to ponder the matter.

i'm not sure that i quite believe in ethnicity, and i reject the idea of inherited guilt, inherited suffering, inherited thoughts and even inherited proprietorship of culture and cultural properties. after a few generations, so little is truly known and even less is truly understood about our backgrounds that they meld into a common background, and our collective achievement as human beings and our similarity as a species means that all history is our own. the suffering of prisoners on the slave ships bound for the americas in the 1600s and the hopes and fears of those who survived the atomic bombs in japan are as much my own personal inheritance as the tribulation of those involved in the prague spring or the eureka stockade. ultimately, it comes down to which stories are told and which stories we listen to. perhaps this is what ethnicity really is.

it saddens me that with such a wealth of human history, some stories are told over and over again, whilst others are simply forgotten, as if all people were not equal. i note with mispleasure that yet another film about the 2nd world war is currently in theatres - one of thousands in recent memory, all seemingly told from the same perspectives. the gypsies of europe were almost wiped out in the nazi concentration camps in the 2nd world war - why haven't i heard their stories (my stories)? is it because this group lack political power or organisation that their stories (my stories) are less important? no - just less told, and thus less remembered. english, french, jewish, german, and (especially) american perspectives of WW2? yes thanks i've heard those ad nauseum and now i've grown bored. i want some new perspectives and new chapters from our collective history from which i can learn something about myself and the human condition. please tell, because i'm listening.

coming back to the initial question that upset me. imagine for an instant that my questioner and i had DNA tests proving that we had been accidentally swapped at birth. would i now be any more or less jewish than i already am? would he? would i have a deeper anger (or of more concern, a right to a deeper anger) about the treatment of eastern european jews by eastern european gentile peasants 100 years ago? my answer is of course no - how could superficial regard for labels affect your own lifetime of real experiences, and the significance of our collective human history - whichever arbitrary part of it you may have listened to over the course of your life? i'm not saying that i would or wouldn't feel more or less jewish or gentile - that's beside the point. i'm saying that these labels are counter-productive. we as individuals and societies are a product of our stories - and in realising that we share in common with all other people the human experience, we take ownership of all human history and are enriched by it because it is our own personal history too. my people built the great wall of china, the pyramids, and the sydney harbour bridge. my people built the burma railway and they forced people to build the burma railway. my people executed people in death camps and were executed. my people enslaved others in africa and were enslaved in africa.

and yet...! young australian men, born in australia and speaking english as their first and often only language can still beat each other to a pulp in the street for reasons they're not really sure of, claiming an anger inherited from their supposed serbian/croatian/greek/turkish/insert-ethnicity-here background (one sided stories that they have been told). i once met a man who introduced himself as 'czech' and even had a tattoo of the czech republic on his arm, but when i started speaking czech he admitted to not understanding a word and having never been there - in fact on further questioning it was his great grandfather that had emigrated to new zealand and married a maori woman a century ago, so that not even his own grandfather spoke the language. i was amused, and then deeply saddened and finally frightened by this display, as it spoke of the need in our weak psychology to feel a sense of belonging to a special group that is somehow better or different to everyone else, even where there is no rational basis for that association. perhaps this void can be filled with nationalism or a strong sense of ethnic association and lead to anger and violence. but perhaps it can be filled with a sense that we are all part of the same group - an amazing group of human beings with a common history that binds us together. and perhaps this sense of unity will give us a basis for moving forward in a world where we really are all part of the same big family.

she looks like my uncle

our first impression of canberra was that it was closed. our second impression was that we had arrived in the middle of a fucking nuclear winter. even after our 4.5 days there, we were still left with the vague feeling that the weather reports were wrong (sexed up for the politicians perhaps?) and that the city was in the process of being abandoned.
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but first thing's first: the best thing about visiting our nation's capital was seeing sarah! we spent a day with sarah, carla and sarah's dad eric wandering around the national gallery and the national portrait gallery (damn good galleries, people), and munching on the fattest pizza you'd ever have the nauseating pleasure of getting your teeth into, but needed a follow-up vanderwal hit, so jumped on a bus the following day to get out to the sticks where sarah lives for a night of munch and drink and nerdily indulgent trivial pursuit. it was wonderwall. so many of us have been thinking of sarah over the past months, and it was good to see and touch and hear her again after so long. i carry back all her love and hugs and kisses to the good people of melbourne. come and get 'em.
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incidentally, the bus terminal near sarah's place is to be avoided at all costs. classical music was being blasted over the speakers at a feverish pitch, the lighting was dim and unflattering, and at any given moment we were expecting the boys from a clockwork orange to round the corner and break our heads with a baseball bat.
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despite her generous offer, we didn't stay with sarah, but near the centre of town - in easy distance of all our objectives. our accommodation situation was both wonderful and wonderfully dodgy, and we bartered for it accordingly.
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so back to the stuff we saw. the new parliament house was stunning. it is a proud structure and i was overwhelmed with pride while in front of it, on top of it, and especially within it. while i do not consider myself patriotic - a term that rings for me of a willingness to kill for small ideas - i am very, very proud of being australian, and that pride gushed out in a staggered series of weeping episodes at various locations throughout the building.
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on a tour i was distressed to find that sessions of parliament open with the lord's prayer! can anyone believe it? i couldn't. i'm still quite upset about it. instead of the lord's prayer, i have devised a 'parliament dance', which i demonstrated in the house of representatives while we were there (check it out in the background). click below and tell me whether you would prefer to do the parliament dance or say the lord's prayer before work if you were an MP. which is in the public's greater interest?
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parliament sat on the monday that we were there, so we booked a couple of tickets and went and sat in with them. i wanted to see what was happening on the other end of my vote. we got to see kevin and julia and malcolm and peter and all their friends come to the microphone to spin their shit. we even saw the big costello good-bye, which was a small moment in history (i suppose). the irony is that the people who lead our country - grown men and women - seemingly have no respect for each other as they interject and guffaw while others are trying to speak, and yet the people who employ them (in this case just me, as g doesn't really pay taxes) had to sit like statues and indulge the rabble. i put my hoodie on because the aircon was blowing on the back of my head, and within a few seconds an aggressive guard appeared and ordered me to take it off. perhaps he was concerned that my daring grey knitted cardigan would be too much of a distraction for the PM. when i told him that i wouldn't take it off because my ears were too cold, he grunted "take off the hood" and looked at me with a threatening look in his eye, as if it were a national security issue. i thought to myself 'what the fuck is going on here?'
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the other cultural highlight of canberra was the war memorial. people had raved about it, but i was skeptical until we went there, especially because i have a vague distaste for celebration/commemoration/focus on the world wars, which i believe distracts from the fact that we still do not have peace in our time. sarah had described it as "the best museum i've ever been to, and i've been to a lot of museums", and now having been there, i can't say i disagree. here again i felt proud of being an australian, and even had a little cry when i was explaining to g what had happened at gallipoli. australian nationhood was born, g! the presentations were just so tasteful and well researched that you couldn't help being really engrossed.
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and that's about it. g and i are heading off the land of the rising sun in a few days for almost 6 weeks (how excitement!!!), so watch out for a massacred endangered whale caught for scientific research-sized blog entry at the end of that one. in the meantime, ではまた!
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Van Diemen's Land

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a map of tassie with our travel route in thick pink. there's the spirit of tassie in bass strait!

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the exams out of the way, it was time to show g around australia a bit more, and see it for myself too. where better to immerse ourselves in nature's beauty than the capital of consanguinity: our southern friend tasmania? have you ever caught the spirit of tasmania? it's like a massive floating pokies machine, filled with single hairy men driving trucks, and families whose conjoined pets simply cannot be left behind. the ship is enormous, so we thought it would be unaffected by any waves or currents - we were wrong. as soon as we left shallow port phillip bay, the boat started lurching from side to side, with loud smashing noises with every heave. i was convinced that i had forgotten to put the handbrake on and that the smashing noises were the car ploughing into the truck infront, with each subsequent smash the sound of the car ploughing into the volvo behind. i actually had to grip the sides of the bed to stop myself from moving (or was that the beer?). in any case, we didn't sleep a wink!

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g having a snooze in our cabin

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the following morning, car intact, we sped out of devonport to cradle mountain. just before entering the park, we stopped at an information board but passed out from fatigue in the front seats and woke up an hour later feeling right as rain. and just as well - it rained non-stop for the first 2.5 days. there were so many different types of rain on that island - i'm sure the tasmanian aboriginal languages contain as many words for rain as the inuit languages famously do for snow. for our walk around the gorgeous dove lake, we experienced 'it's drizzling down and you are wet but not cold for some reason despite gale-force winds and incidentally you can't see anything' rain. the rain gave the whole area added dimension, and was simply stunning.

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wet boys

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this is dove lake, with cradle mountain hidden in the mist behind

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that night we parked behind some gigantic sand dunes on the west coast and had a restless night with 'gravity is pulling the fat drops of water towards the ground, but somehow they are doing 90 degree turns and coming in through the 1mm crack in the window like heat-seeking missiles' rain. we scaled the dunes the following morning, but were caught in a fresh onslaught of water and wind, which whipped the sand up to paint-stripper speed and soaked us to our undies before we could even say 'i can't feel my legs'. when we had regained consciousness, we found that we had indeed been sandblasted, but the wrinkles remained.

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our camping/sleeping in the back of a car area

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the sandstorm hits

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the horror...the horror...30 years after the cessation of mining, the mountains around queenstown in the west of tassie are still barren and eroded - nature destroyed

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we crossed the state to my auntie and her partner's little holiday house on the shores of the huon river 50km south of hobart. a little heated bunker a few metres away from a wide river surrounded by mountains and vineyards - it was a paradise! we ended up staying three nights.

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the little brick cottage in the foreground was where we stayed - right on the banks of this gorgeous river!

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the first night (a friday) we tried to go out in hobart, but the only thing we could find was a cave-like drag club in which they refused to close the door despite the fact that it was snowing around town and everyone was dressed like they had just come off a ski-lift. the freeze lessened my appreciation for the crass dragqueens which made comments so offensive i thought i would end up with both of my eyes in the same socket. we fled.

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the following morning we returned to hole-bart - now surrounded by snow-capped peaks - for the salamanca markets. it's the only time in my life where i have experiened 'i can see with my own eyes that the only clouds in the sky are over that mountain in the distance there and yet for some reason we are still getting wet' rain. a tasmanian specialty perhaps. the highlight was a trip to the museum/art gallery where we saw patricia piccinini's exhibit 'evolution'. we'd seen some of here work somewhere else - was it at the bienalle last year? but this exhibit just blew our minds. don't miss patricia if she comes to you!

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here's g at salamanca market, with a close-up of the snow-covered hills around hobart!

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as if we were all moving along the same pink-tinged celestial orbit (or perhaps just tourist trail), the same cattle-call of cute boys at whom we had been perving at the salamanca markets all turned up to port arthur the following day for some kulcha.

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your boys in shackles. woof.

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the site was beautiful, the guides were passionate, and the intelligent introductory set-up was such that you were drawn in to follow the story of a single convict, helping you understand the site rather than be overwhelmed by it. australian history had never been so interesting! in particular the separate prison for naughty convicts was quite shocking, where prisoners were taken and subjected to complete sensory deprivation for days or even weeks on end in order to crush whatever was human out of them.

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the church crafted by children

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the penitentiary from across the harbour.

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g looking too cute among the ruins

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port arthur with a touch of abu ghraib...sexy convict men had to wear masks in jail in order to prevent any contact whatsoever with other human beings. guards wore slippers so that their footsteps would not be heard...

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i cannot mention port arthur without a word about that awful day in 1996 that we all remember when 35 people were murdered at or around the site. i think we all felt personally affected by it. it was quite emotional to go to the shell of the cafe where much of it occurred, which has now been converted into a powerful open-air memorial site.

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a few views

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we stopped at a few clifftops and sea-side-sights on the way back to holebart where we packed in some oysters before rushing home to watch eurovision! russia should have won again! what are your thoughts? i hated norway's entry until i realised that i had become addicted and now i've downloaded it and am playing it on repeat. i'm so in love with a fairytale!

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the second last day was the crowning highlight in our wonderful holiday. everything from the home made pies for breakfast to the oysters and beer we consumed while watching sunset from freycinet national park at night were winners :)

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we did the hike (the shit strapped out of my ankle) from coles bay to wineglass bay under a cloudless, ceramic blue sky, to find ourselves undisappointed by all the hype surrounding that famous white-sanded beach. the views were great, the water was crystal blue, and the animals were ridiculously tame. gerard had a love-in with a wallaby on the beach, but expressed disappointment that so many of his brothers were so lazily sleeping on the roads into and out of the park. what can you do?

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an animal indentured to pose in photographs with tourists.

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wineglass bay in the background

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your boys on a funky wooden bench high in the freycinet mountains :)

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after the aforementioned straight-out-of-a-romance-novel oysters and beer at sunset experience, we parked on the 'friendly beaches' for our final night in the apple isle. perfect everything. further wallabies even came to play the following morning.

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the friendly beaches - where initial interaction between aborigines and europeans was friendly. later, the europeans hunted down and murdered the aborigines as if they were animals.

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a friendly wallaby comes to visit at the friendly beaches

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sexy

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our final day took us through launceston which was a bit of a non-event, and though the nearby gorge was still as nice as was as the last time i visited with mum, the only real attraction was the somewhat dubiously rio-tinto sponsored science exhibit at the local museum, where i felt like a child in a candy store - or perhaps myself in a candy store, as i still love lollies. on the way there we passed the 150 year customs house and gerard pointed out that the french on their renovated crest over the main entrance was misspelt. i felt it to be a national disgrace, so we entered the building to inform the authorities. the staff there thanked us with the biggest fuck-you expressions on their faces you could imagine as we slid off our high horses and crawled back out the door. when we looked up the phrase on the internet later it turns out the sign was actually correct. damn french boyfriend can't even speak his own language.

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i almost disloated my shoulder ensuring the hand-brake was on for the trip home. we slept like babies as we sailed home to marvelous melbourne over smooth seas :)

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returning to melbs - dawn over port melbourne.
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see you next time in canberra!

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