Turkey High

The students and (especially) Dave are all laughing at me today because I’m wearing pants that finish about halfway up my shins, a business shirt in a colour I think is described as Jonquil and have hair that looks like I’ve just stepped off the set of a (low budget) Romanian student production of Grease. While I am quite aware that 90% percent of Japan’s population make laughing at foreigners a life-long hobby, I do actually have a reason for looking like a pre-face paint and nose clown today.

It all started with the turkey.

Wednesday was a public holiday in Japan (there’s been a spate of them recently) and Glebe and I headed into Kobe to catch a couple of hours of Resfest (which I’ll write up later). After that it was onto a train back to Himeji where Susanne had organised a big Thanksgiving dinner at a place called the Blue Plate she eats at regularly. It’s a homey little Italian restaurant just off the main drag with very reasonably priced dishes. The chef wanted to have a crack at cooking a traditional Thanksgiving feast and asked Susanne if she knew any gaijin who’d be willing to come along. Susanne pretty much confirmed on the spot that any event with large mountains of turkey would attract stuffing-starved gaijin like flies to a barbie.

I think the owner may have got a little over-excited at the prospect of cooking for a bunch of foreigners because there was so much food it began to border on ridiculous. Every time a dish of something was finished it was quickly replaced with a full steaming plate of some other delicious delicacy. And the turkey. Oh god, the turkey. Moist and delicious and with sweet, sweet mountains of cranberry sauce and piles of cornbread on the side, this was a feast Obelix would have had trouble complaining about.

By the time we’d finished up I was stuffed to the brim, ready to burst, and the mere thought of trying to fit any more turkey down my gullet near sent me running for the bathroom. So with belly distended, the choice between trucking for over two hours home in the freezing cold or heading 30 minutes in the opposite direction and crashing at Glebe’s was an easy one.

This plan had two downsides. One, I was going to need some clothes for work tomorrow and sadly my chocolate-stained jeans (toblerone mishap) and grubby t-shirt (it was a big toblerone) weren’t going to cut it. Two, I was going to have to get up at an obscene hour of the morning in order to get to work on time. Sleep (and sex) won out over sensibility this time and off to Ako I shot.

The clothes weren’t a problem, I managed to catch Nick before he hit the sack and managed to negotiate a settlement involving chocolate, a sack full of kittens and a signed Matisse in exchange for a plastic bag of clothes to be left outside his door. It was only the next morning, as I was stumbling blearily around the death-trap laden ground floor of Glebe’s apartment in the pre-dawn darkness, that the apparent disparity in Nick and my respective heights became apparent. These pants were really quite short on me. Really short. I look like a fucking spanner. A tool. And I didn’t care one little bit.

So I packed onto the train with all the salarymen in their immaculate suits and morning papers, fell asleep against the window and dribbled at them ferociously. The look of shock, followed by amusement, followed by unmasked hilarity that Dave gave me as I walked into the staffroom should have been captured on film and handed down to future generations.

Thank fuck I was wearing dark socks yesterday. Really.

Posted in Mwah on Thursday November 24, 2005.