is it a flag? - no they're my pants! a laundry dilemma

... to fill you in. japan has very strict (but usefully, unspoken) rules about etiquette. i've been doing some thinking and i've come to the conclusion that this is why they've remained so culturally homogeneous for so long. i'm not talking bowing, or tea ceremony stuff here, i'm talking pants.

pants. or panties if you don't speak brit, trousers are fine. its not the done thing to hang out your pants to dry (or bras for that matter) in a place where people can see them. as balconies are primarily used for drying clothes and airing futons and ours is on the first floor (2nd floor if you don't speak brit - keep up for christ's sake) this naturally causes me a problem when i need to dry my laundry. it seems blokes pants are fair game, which led me to wonder, how far can you take it? are girls' boxers ok? i'm thinking probably.

this strange train of thought first started chugging this morning as i was doing what seemed like a year's worth of handwashing and was pondering this drying dilemma with regards to tights. normally i'd be blissfully unaware of what anyone else was thinking at any given moment, but for two things. firstly i stick out like a sore thumb here and i still feel quite bad that our alarm clock was set for 11pm the other day instead of am, the problem being that we rolled in at one in the morning to find it'd been bleeping solidly for two hours (there are small children living everywhere around here) and secondly, when i decided that tights were in fact fair game, the three people working on the field/garden/allotment stopped what they were doing and stared.

at this point i did what any upstanding brit would do, went inside, drew the curtains, made a cup of tea, and pretended they were trousers. bollocks to diplomacy, i need dry tights by 5 this afternoon.

Rumble in the Jungle...?

so apparently the big news of the week so far (bear in mind that today is Tuesday) is that we had an earthquake here in Nakatsu yesterday. Ooh-eer. 2 or 3 on the richter scale, which is quite significant for these parts. of course I was asleep so didn't hear, see or indeed feel a thing...

in other news, plans to cycle to the onsen scuppered this morning because of piss poor weather. thought it was going to do something when i put the rubbish out this morning; it was very warm (too warm some might say) and the sky was black. not rocket science, you understand. it's pissing with rain now, big fat splodges. i'm thinking my bath might substitute well for natural hot springs...

There's something crawling up my wall...

Yes, there is. Turns out to be nothing more than a mere beetle. Thought for a moment it may have been a cockroach... far too small you see....

still, am slightly baffled that this wee thing should find its way into our flat, when there are no signs of spiders yet. Are there spiders here? They're bloody everywhere everywhere I've lived, so much so, that some of them even had names, so entrenched they were in their habitat.

Well, with the whole blog thing, better late than never I suppose, though there's late and five years after I meant to sort this thing out, so I'm not sure which is worse.

Anyway, I'm in Japan now, so it seemed a good enough reason to start waffling.

I'm not going to write any more here, as I've no idea how to get this up onto the screen. More when I know it works.