Jet lagged of Japan
Perhaps it is a very standard response to being somewhere entirely new and definitely far from home – or perhaps it is just me. In the rush of all the things that are so very different, I grasp on to the things that are the same. Though I disapprove, verging on hate MacDonalds, seeing their M on a sign brings a smile to my face. So much else is indecipherable. I am not planning on purchasing a coca cola, especially as the taste would transport me back to aged eight, glass bottle in one hand, scampi fries in the other in Badachro Inn – a long time and a long way away – yet the known brands on the supermarket shelves leap out like long lost friends. “Everything is so different” is at once true and false. Like someone who is depressed and counselled to look for the light in all the blackness, because it is there, it’s just you can’t or don’t want to see it just now, I feel it is right or proper to reach for the things that are familiar and safe.
But it’s not right. I am not depressed, I am just somewhere new and feeling it. Feeling it in my strange ability to wake up at exactly 3.04 am every morning, awake and needing a meal – but is it breakfast, lunch or dinner? The fact that there are no familiar smells at all. The fact that the clouds seem different and the weather is just weird – a hot sun and a cold wind but with the sun too low in the sky for it to be early summer in the Highlands. A trip to the supermarket involves more changes of dress than a Christmas pantomime. And speaking of Christmas, which the other half had been so joyous and gleeful at the prospect of leaving behind – I think not. There are trees in every store (familiar) and quite disconcerting small deer made out of lights which move in a very non-mechanical way (different). So I try and focus on different and understand it. I didn’t come to the other side of the world to cocoon myself in a warm fleecy of familiar things.
Heavy rock at a fairly high volume is played in the shops and stores (an attempt to make the task even less pleasant?) and the school bells are actually tinkly ice-cream type music taking up, I would think, the first five minutes of the class. Unless it is like musical chairs and it’s used as an incentive to hurry the pupils along to their next class – get there before the music stops, or else … . The supermarket shelves are low enough for me (no giant) to see over the top of. Everyone is so quiet the town has a half deserted feel to it – though at least 100 people pass me on bikes as I accompany the other half into his work to get my bearings, there is no rammy of noise or shouted conversation. Only the occasional quick tte-ring of a bell to let me know someone is approaching from the rear and would prefer not to knock me over … or vice-versa.
People are people the world over, but it took longer than it should have to realise I didn’t have toothpaste on my face or an odd bit of food nestling in my hair – I am different. Among the hundreds of people I pass on my wanders I am the only white face. I am not exotic or alien, just found to be different. The lingering glances - actually they are looks, a glance is a quick and furtive thing, these are looks – have precipitated an immense level of self awareness.
Normally my primary concern or fear for myself is that I am thought dull or uninteresting. Here, it is that I am doing something wrong or rude. I have only the vaguest ideas of what the social norms are and there is no way of knowing if my actions are causing offence or embaressment, or may even just be wrong. I know to take my shoes of in a house or restaurant. I know to put money in the tray not try and hand it to the cashier. I know not to tip. I know to take a business card – or anything proffered - with two hands not one. I know that I suspect if I were writing a travel guide I would definitely include things that aren’t necessary but would be highly entertaining to think of folk doing in a foreign land.
So I crippelingly wonder if the folk writing my one can be trusted . . . . I find myself as about as decisive as the UV needle on an old sound system. I almost don’t hang the laundry out, because I worry it is wrong to put your smalls on the line. Though the green man is showing, a car turning right just went over the zebra crossing – maybe it isn’t all right to cross at all … people don’t put their bags on the seats next to them in the train. This must be some code of conduct for a heavily populated country where you don’t take up more space than is necessary for yourself even when the train is nearly empty. Or is it just that at home we won’t put our bags on the floor because it is less than clean, whereas here it is spotless? You could literally eat your dinner of it. I’m all over the place and despite all the lovely smiles and “konnechewas” I am sure I am getting it all wrong. I want to fit in, but I can’t. Or as the person in a sad state is told – not yet. You can’t fit in yet.
