The ‘hospital’ I went to to get my arm de-ceased was almost exactly how I imaging American clinics to be, or perhaps how I imagine Japanese people imagine American clinics to be. It wasn’t much different to how they are in England either, but there were some subtle differences.
Cute Japanese nurses are definitely a plus, though probably not worth having a serious illness for, anyone got a recommendation for a long term, easily fakable, perhaps hard to diagnose condition that requires lots of nurses and not much doctor? They don’t make it worth the price though…I’ve got insurance but by the time I’ve phoned back to the UK three or four times and held on a ten minute queue I’m likely not to be able to claim as much as the phone bill so I shan’t bother.
The xray room was unlike those at home – much of the equipment was similar (not that I’ve been for that many xrays of bodyparts other than teeth), but when he’d taken a couple of shots of my shoulder he said “Stay there for a moment, I’ve got to make sure they came out OK”, and left me unattended in a room full of expensive high precision medical equipment.
On the way out I picked up my prescription at the pharmacy downstairs, again fairly similar to those at home (but I’m not exactly an expert on pharmacies) and spotted some yougat covered apricot pieces – fabulous! Why don’t we get them at home? Perhaps we do and I just don’t shop in the right sorts of places for it? Do they want a distributor in the UK?
Then I picked up my alien registration card on Thursday, which means I’m now official for what its worth. Now I don’t have to carry my passport with me everywhere – which is good, ‘cos if I continued to do that it’d be quite dogeared by the end of the year.
The autoteller machines really are autotellers, not just cash machines like we get. The let you do all sorts of things, but I don’t know the extent of their cleverness, all I did was deposit some money and try to transfer it – the poor bank worker who was helping me through the maze of kanji menus was very apologetic that it wouldn’t be possible to do the transfer until monday because the money wouldn’t have cleared into my account. The machine asks you simply to insert your bundle of notes, it then counts them for you. Barclays take two days or so to clear cash into my account, three if it goes in by the machine, four or five for a cheque. Then it’ll take at least a week before you can set up a transfer, and that’ll take twenty minutes of waiting in a queue to see an overwork ‘personal’ banker.
“Television rots your mind” “Thats exactly why I’m watching it”…this week I have found the following programs – ‘how to get on in Japanese’, ‘family of manequins’, ‘learn Spanish’, ‘Horse racing’. Obviously they have real names in the local tongue so this is a poor anglicisation… How to get on in Japanese was by far the most helpful, its a series about a couple running a gaijin house who are helping out their guests with learning their way around Japanese language and culture, this program inspired me to buy a video tape it was that good. Family of manequins was a little more peculiar, it seemed to be a story about a group of american (or at least western) wooden figures that had moved to a Tokyo suburb and were trying to integrate into society, something like a cross between ‘Meet the Applebys’ and ‘Pinocchio’.
At last I’ve dug out my mp3 ripper and started work on the growing pile of magazine coverdisks, they’re now on random play in the hope that some of them will get far enough in my head that I can match the symbols with those in the live listing, and then with those on a map…its a long shot, but it might just get me to go to places I wouldn’t otherwise bother with.
Part of the ripping session is a newly acquired copy of Noam chomskys “new war on terrorism” on CD – it should be interesting to hear some of his views on the current politcal climate in the US. Expect an embittered rant of some kind on the subject soon.
And now…I’m off to a club somewhere in Ikebukuro…if we can find it.
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