Little Earthquakes

I bought a bike - rawr! But I have been too embarrassed to get on it in case my students see me - doh!

Seriously, I'm so dumb.

The thing is, everyone uses bikes here. Outside the stations there are veritable forests of them. It would make my life easier if I had one, and being surrounded by them seduced me, kind of like when I got my iPod, only I actually like my iPod. I've had it for nearly a week and the closest I've got to it is when I sat on it earlier today. I was going to give it a try but there was a guy standing in his kitchen window right there and I didn't want him to see me make my pathetic little concrete circles.

Bikes and I have a sad history; I learnt to ride one against my will when I was ten. By 'against my will' I mean that my mother decided I was going to learn whether I whined about it or not, and locked me out of the house with my uncle until he had taught me how. No, seriously. It wasn't a particularly auspicious start and I've kept away from them since.

Now that I've got one I just need somewhere to practice a little bit until I'm comfortable (err...well, stable anyway) again. Until I know I'm not going to fall straight into one of the open drainage systems at the side of the road. I live quite close to school though and lots of students bike past where my house is.

I'm ridiculously embarrassed about this.

I went to Kyoto the other week and managed to lose my front door key at a shrine somewhere. My school had a spare but it was the weekend, so I had to spend the night at my friends house in the next city and get a stupidly early train to get to work on time the next day, while lugging all my luggage from said weekend with my because I didn't have a key to leave it at my apartment.

Piece by piece things are coming back together. My apartment got into a Terrible State as I've been busy the last few weekends (when I usually do my Big clean), from which I am still trying to rescue it. I'm working on the theory of cleaning one room a day, and hoping that by the time the whole place is finished the first room won't be messy again. So far I have the living room and the kitchen under control, bathroom and bedroom to go. Last weekend I decided to have a proper clear out of my kitchen shelves and get rid of all the old cutlery/glasses my predecessor left me and rearrange it to look nicer. There is a severe lack of surface space in my (and indeed in all) Japanese kitchens, so the things I don't use had to be done away with.

Have I mentioned the hatred I feel for the Japanese trash sorting system? If not I have been sadly neglecting my duties. They have 12 different categories for sorting out your rubbish, and then four different types of collection days. I have several issues with this ridiculously complicated system (seriously, Britain only introduced compulsory recycling a few years ago, and it took me long enough to get to grips with what was going where then) my biggest one being that I have trouble figuring out which items to put in which type of rubbish, and when to leave it out. I have a list, but there are so many things that aren't on it. Cutlery, for example, has no section. Knives do, but all other kitchen utensils apparently don't exist. Also, I know that regular (burnable) trash goes out Mondays and Thursdays, but the other three types have completely different dates. Some of them seem to come the first Tuesday of the month, but then the first Tuesday this month was April 1st, so they didn't (maybe they will next Tuesday?), and I thought 'recyclable resources' came on Fridays but my cardboard boxes were still there on Friday afternoon, even though they (should of?) been picked up Friday morning.

I asked one of the teachers in the staffroom. "I don't live in the city so I have different days. It is a little bit of a serious problem for you". Truer words were never spoken.

I have now come up with a very good system. I put any rubbish I have in bags, and put everything out on the regular Monday/Thursday pick up day. I ensure that any items with my name or address are thoroughly destroyed before throwing them away. The bin men then take the bags because they have no way of knowing who left it at the pick up point and therefore cannot track me down to give it back for resorting, and they cannot leave the bags there because the weather is getting warmer and it will attract bugs.

The system works.