Do the Ladder! - Drinking in Japan

This week at work I taught the meaning of the term "pub crawl" to students. See the books we use to teach over here are packed with lots of words, idioms and phrases that students will find useful for interacting with any English speaking natives they encounter. Be it here in Japan or overseas. "Pub Crawl" as it turns out is one of those necessary words. Awesome!

One student I taught had actually spent about a number of months travelling in New Zealand, so he understood perfectly what a pub crawl was all about and informed me that in fact the Japanese had their own turn of phrase for this delightful pastime. "Hashigo-suru", which translates approximately to "Doing the Ladder", is used to describe an evening of drinking in as many different bars as possible. With each bar visited representing another rung/bar on the ladder.

Also, speaking of beer, here are some 130ml beer cans I bought, because well... they're tiny! I must say though the novelty of tiny beer soon wears off when you finish the beer after about three or four mouthfuls. Regular beers cans are shown here for scale.

Word Of The Week: Unagi

Those of you who are familiar with Japanese language or food will probably know that 'unagi' is the Japanese word for eel. But did you know that is also means 'double ended dildo'? Well, now you do.

Soo... we've been in teacher training for a week and a half, and it's been very educational, as you can see :D It's been kinda intense, actually. There's lots to take in and by the end of the day I'm usually going 'Ohh, my head...'. In the back of my mind, there's always the thought that I'm going to have to 'perform' this teacher role quite soon, too, and that's kinda scary. But meh... I'm sure it'll go fine. Or rather, I'm sure it'll go horribly the first few times, but it won't be the end of the world.

Our fellow trainees are a pretty good mob. We're a mixed bag, but everyone is willing to get along. On Friday night, we went out to karaoke (no photos I'm afraid - forgot my camera, and my phone camera has no flash :( ). Massive, massive fun times. Oh, the cheese... The highlight was my marvellous rendition of 'I Would Do Anything For Love', accompanied by Sahar, our group's token American. Man, you know that thing where Americans apparently can't read subtitles in movies so they have to dub everything? They can't read karaoke subs either, apparently :P

We were out so late, we had to take a taxi home (I was herding not only Clinton, but also Chris from upstairs). After two or three taxis snobbed us, the boys decided to put the sober person in the front of the group, and we finally found a lovely taxi driver who was happy to take three gaijin home. The Osaka taxi experience is quite a change from getting a cab in Melbourne. The taxi drivers here are all nicely dressed and wear bowties, and the taxis are black and shiny, and have automatic doors. It feels more like rent-a-chauffer.

I'd like to end this post with a very important piece of advice one of the teacher trainers gave the group this week. I think it's something we can all learn from, whatever job we're doing and whatever country we're in:

"Don't put family members into peoples' mouths."



PS I'm sorry, there are still no photos because I thought I'd copied them to my memory stick, but apparently I didn't. Fingers crossed for next time...