Pick It and Flick It, Just Don’t Lick It
Over the past two years I’ve been lucky enough to have two fantastic jobs and as a result, the opportunity to travel to some wonderful places. In my previous post, I mentioned one of those places – Japan. I’ve wanted to go to Japan for a few years now, so when I got the opportunity to go at last minutes notice, it was a chance I jumped at. My time in Shanghai, whilst reasonably pleasant, was hotter and stickier than a Tusken Raider’s G-string. I knew this feeling would accompany me in the majority of places I was open to going to China, so I booked a flight and 12 hours later I was on the plane to Tokyo, swapping chicken feet for sushi and delicious, breaded pork cutlets.
The first thing that struck me about Japan was that I was, in fact, lost. I assumed, like every other major city I’ve been to, there’d be a direct metro link to the city centre where I could easily transfer to find my hotel’s nearest metro station. There wasn’t. There were multiple options to get out of the airport but nothing clear or concise to the point that I may as well have been looking at multiple quadratic equations – something I never really mastered at school. It turns out that some of Japan’s transportation system seems to be publicly owned, whilst some publicly which leads to what is known as an utter mind-fuck. By the time I found my hotel, it was almost twelve hours after leaving Shanghai and I was suitably shagged. For reference, the flight time between Shanghai and Tokyo is only two and a half hours, making a twelve hour turnaround quite ludicrous, on my part.
Spending a lot of time on public transport however, gives you time to observe those very people – the public. The comparisons between the Chinese and Japanese couldn’t be more stark. Firstly, on the trains themselves, you’re not allowed to speak on the phone or loudly for that matter. Everything is eerily quiet, at times and it’s noticeable that many people tend to travel individually rather than as a family or with colleagues. In China, while the metro is probably the more civilised of the public transport modes on offer, it can sometimes feel like you’re at a public auction, with eyes often on you, being sold to the latest, nouveaux-riche entrepreneur. Getting on and off the train can also feel like sparring with gladiators until the death, as people battle past each other both getting on and off the train. Before getting accustomed to Chinese public transport in my early days, only my sheer size prevented me getting eaten alive by hunched grandmothers with better clearing skills than NFL linebackers. By contrast, in Japan, the patience and respect shown to others came like orgasmic relief, being able to board a train without using my elbows as makeshift tridents. Queuing is very orderly and clearly set out wherever you go, whether that be a convenience store, train station or bus stop.
Flashback to just last week, whilst riding the bus, I was fortunate enough to sit next to China’s equivalent of Posh and Becks. Whilst Becks was clipping his nails and firing them here, there and everywhere, his wife was picking her nose so violently there was danger of her self-lobotomising. She was picking so viciously that I concluded she must have been searching for some form of benign tumour, lodged on the inside of her skull. To finish, she looked at it and hurled it, landing like a javelin in the middle of the aisle.
