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Sake slammers & Waiting-lounge poetry

The whole process of boarding the plane from the first welcoming utterance of 'irashiamase' through to the inflight entertainment system felt like a refresher course for my sadly neglected Japanese. Words, characters and phrases presented themselves to me with the odd familiarity of faces from an old school photo album.

What was a comparatively long flight passed quickly. Just at the point when I had tired of the card games on the in-seat games console (I've never been great at cards, and was determined to improve without losing my shirt or my patience this time), some surprisingly fresh-tasting Japanese food was pushed under my grateful nose.

I also managed to knock off quite a few pages of the two books I'm reading, David Copperfield (Dickens) and 'DNA Sequencing Protocols & Molecular Systematics' (ahem). Just when I was really getting into the intermolecular forces between certain nucleotide sequences, about three Japanese college girls from a horde at the back of the plane came and took the seats next to me and proceeeded to instruct the stewards sweetly to bring us booze while giggling at anything I said in English and ever harder at anything I said in my broken attempts to communicate in Japanese. I was doing my best to hide it, but I really just wanted them to piss off and leave me to be a grinch with my books, so once I had promised Akiko, Yuko and some girl whose name I've forgotten several times that I would email and send photos of my trip, I managed to feign enough sleepiness that they beat a hasty retreat to giggle and swap stories with their numerous cohorts at the derriere of the plane.

I decided not to risk putting on the reading light and amused myself instead by spreading out into the seats beside me and doodling and writing ideas for stories and scraps of poetry on a puke-bag that was conveniently placed in the seat pocket in front of me.

At some stage I must have snoozed off to the alien tones of a Kabuki theatre show that on my headphones because I woke feeling startled and staring straight at some old guy who had switched on his lamp to practice caligraphy with a small brush. He noticed my interest and gave me some lessons in it. It was fun.

Osaka airport sucked. The details would bore you stiff, so I won't give you any.

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