Showers everywhere but the bathroom

Last week was what you would call a slow week, with four days taking a record-breaking 12 days to pass. The bathroom waterproofing men arrived on Tuesday and declared that part of the house off limits while they counted down the top ten stinkiest chemicals of all time; to try to stop the house smelling like a fibreglass boat factory, we had to leave all the windows open. And so, with the bathtub sitting in the middle of the kitchen and a precariously balanced pedestal fan drying the concrete, we dined with every insect in the world.

One of the most annoying bits of the whole thing was having to outsource our showers. Lisa was for the most part well taken care of at her gym, but I had to seek out a less civilised alternative. Two stops from our house sits an ancient little bathhouse called "Fuji Onsen", which seems to have forgotten it's not 1932 any more. Two of its outside walls are stacked to the gutters with firewood for the boiler and a silver chimney sits on the roof belching out huge amounts of black smoke. The one man inside who was under 87 had found himself a nice spot in the middle of the changeroom where he stood without a stitch of clothing, smoking a cigarette and looking like he wanted to put it out in someone's eye. Lisa went in the next day and said it was quite nice, but I prefer to remember the rough-as-guts image. In my mind, as I walk out the man pulls a bottle of milk from the vending machine, pours it out in the sink and then crunches up the glass, glaring at his reflection.

The "renovations" continued for most of the week and by Saturday our white tiles had been remorselessly sprayed over with a grey coating in the interests of function over form. It may be quite ugly, but water wants nothing to do with it whatsoever, so I think that's the last of our visits from neighbours complaining their roof is leaking.

On Friday night we went out to Himeji for a pub quiz, stopping on the way for a "snack" and ending up with a McDonald's "Mega Mac", essentially two Big Macs on the same bun. I can't remember much except really wanting another one, but we managed to resist and met Andy and Colm at the pub just in time for the bar opening. Throughout most of the night Colm had at least 3 gin and tonics sitting in front of him ("You don't want to get stuck waiting in line all night," he explained) and we managed to put away a fair amount of beer and wine as well. Despite a few drunken revelations, we were fairly useless in the quiz so there were no prizes for us other than picky fish and chips and a couple of rounds of pizza. We just made the last train and got home in the wee hours of the morning.

For the full effect, stand in the shower while viewing this


Sunday was the first event in our roll of tickets, an American Football charity match for the Tohoku earthquake appeal. As has been our luck of late, the heavens absolutely opened and we hit the peak of a typhoon off the coast of Japan. We weren't too confident that the game would be happening but we dressed for the weather and headed out to the stadium anyway. For better or worse, it turns out that things have to be on fire or under several metres of water for a gridiron match to be cancelled, so we joined the dribs and drabs of people huddled in the stands who had decided to brave monsoonal weather. It's a lovely spot with the mountains as a backdrop, but we were too busy trying to stop our umbrellas turning inside out to really enjoy it.

Bet they'd trade their pompoms for a cup of hot chocolate

Honourable mention has to go to the cheerleaders, who spent more than an hour being pelted with rain and wind wearing almost nothing and still made it look like they were having a great time. After about the third time the wind whipped all their signs halfway across the track, I started to wonder if their smiles were pinned in place. By the time half-time came around it was even wilder, so I suppose we can forgive the "half-time show" going about 30 seconds before they ran back inside. With about two minutes to go in the final quarter, all the marquees blew down and anything not nailed down or mostly muscle was tumbling across the ground, so I'm not sure who was most relieved when the final siren went. We joined most of the crowd in running for our lives as soon as it was polite to do so - I hope the players didn't interpret that as us not enjoying the game.

"Was it something we said?"

I'm hoping that the stormy weather has well and truly left us by the time our baseball game comes around - typhoons definitely don't go very well with sports games. They do make for awfully cozy Sunday movie nights, however. What did we do while we were in Japan? Ate banana cake and watched Die Hard, of course.