Daily Archive for July 12th, 2008

Going dark

Now I’m back home I’m going to take a couple of weeks to get used to the idea of actually working again. I can kind of still type thanks to keeping this blog but coding may be something else entirely.

I’ll be using the time to visit relatives and catch up with friends before heading back to Edinburgh so blog posts will be far less frequent than of late. I’ll be back with my thoughts and reminiscings from the last few months soon though!

Sayonara Nippon

Let me get this straight. Blowing my nose or eating while walking is considered to be extremely rude but apparently you can cough up a huge gob of phlegm and spit without anyone batting an eyelid?

Welcome to Japan: land of contradictions. It was supposed to be the rainy season while I was here but I didn’t see a drop of rain all week. I also didn’t experience an earthquake which I’m delighted about.

Here you can still smoke in restaurants but signs try to dissuade you from smoking while you are walking down the street.

I learned that those masks you see people wearing aren’t due to worries over pollution. They’ve for combating the spread of germs. Specifically, your germs. You know, so if you’re ill you can still go into the office and not contaminate anybody else. Surely, any culture that has a specific word set aside for death from overwork can’t be all that healthy. On the other hand, in the longevity stakes, Australia (even with its new-found fattest nation status) is number two to Japan.

It does kind of make me wonder what age people would live to here if everybody did suddenly stop smoking.