Hi everyone! Sorry for the recent radio silence. Not a lot has been happening on my end so there hasn’t been much point in putting pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard even.

Tokyo is now five and a half weeks into its state of emergency and I am rapidly dropping all of my new exciting habits that I bragged about in the last blog post. I gave up cooking a new recipe every day around the end of week one and the fifty sit-ups now seem like a distant memory. One habit I have picked up is drinking alone. I didn’t think I liked beer pre-quarantine, however, no evening is complete now unless I’ve sat on my balcony, eaten a katsu curry and sipped some Asahi as the sun sets. I’m also unpleasantly surprised by how much of a lightweight I am as one can is now enough for me to stumble around my room red-faced and hammered.

I still occasionally traipse around the park but usually in search of a place to sunbathe rather than to exercise. In other news, I have made some new friends in the park–two old men whose names I don’t know. New Friend Number 1 is always wandering around the park and with a very aggressive cat on his shoulders. He’s normally on his own so I think he found a kindred spirit in me. We struck up a conversation when he, along with a surprisingly high number of other people in the park, were looking for four-leaf clovers. He brought me one, which I awkwardly thanked him for, before he wandered off and came back over with a five-leaf clover for me. [Sidenote: this has happened quite a lot to me recently. Yesterday, a woman started asking me questions in English and we chatted for a while before she gave me three four-leaf clovers out of the fistful she was carrying around]. Despite my inability to communicate with New Friend Number 1, he often comes over for a chat where we both have one-sided conversations in our own languages, kind of like Colin Firth and the Portuguese girl in Love Actually but obviously less romantic.

New Friend Number 2 is another man whom I see every day walking his tortoise in the park. He’s there for hours, slowly following his tortoise around holding his pyrex box and collecting leaves for it to munch. Communication is once again limited. I wanted to know how long he’d had the tortoise for and he gave me the numbers 42 and 61, which I think might have been the tortoise’s age and his age respectively but I don’t really know. Anyway here’s some pics of New Friend Number 2 and his tortoise, Miki.

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Last week, we went to the park as a house and played frisbee for a few hours. I was hoping Reishiro would be able to translate for me so I could finally converse with my new friends. Unfortunately neither were there that day but another old man came over to us and spoke Japanese to Reishiro before asking me if I recognised him. I thought maybe he was the companion of the crazy lady who forced me to do crunches (see previous post) but turns out he and his friends had pointed out Mount Fuji to me a few weeks before. I’m not making much progress with exploring Japan or my job but at least I’m making a name for myself at Heiwa-no-mori Park.

With any luck, I will be back to work on the 1st of June although it’s likely I’ll be teaching over a webcam at work. Restrictions are supposedly set to ease in certain parts of Japan but unfortunately not in Tokyo. I don’t know when I’ll next be able to get up and out but for the purposes of making this an interesting read, here are some pictures of a beach trip I went on two months ago and forgot to blog about.

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I took an hour-long train from Shinjuku and then a tram along the coastline to reach my destination of Kamakura, which is a town in the Kanagawa Prefecture. First up, I walked around a shrine near the station before making my way over to Kamakura’s prize possession, which is Kotoku-in Temple’s Great Buddha, a 13m-high bronze statue still standing after a 15th-century tsunami. For just 20 yen (15p), I was able to clamber inside the buddha’s head, which provided a nice cool escape from the sun.

Lunch was some ¥500 takoyaki (deep fried octopus balls) on the go followed by a stroll on the beach. Afterwards, I got back on the tram and walked across a bridge to Enoshima Island where I explored another shrine and enjoyed some more views. I can’t really remember the fine details of this excursion given that this was back in early March, but eventually I took the train back to Tokyo and ended up going to karaoke with my coworkers so all in all a fun day.

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Thanks for reading!