Cairns

The first thing me and Yang did was go to Woolworths. If you are from the UK then maybe you can imagine my surprise at seeing a shop with that name in Australia. The logo looks pretty similar to our own Woolworths but the Australian one is a large supermarket instead of… whatever the British Woolworths has become. I was feeling a bit of culture shock, seeing everything in English, looking like the UK indoors but with palm trees and impossibly bright sunshine outside. I was very happy to see reduced Easter Eggs on offer though, since in Japan there is just no such thing as a chocolate egg.

We caught the bus to where Yang lives, and then walked to his guesthouse. Much like where I live in Japan, it is a place for foreign and native people to stay for a few months. There is a shared kitchen, lounge, TV, Internet, toilets and showers. Yang lives in a two-person room but since there was no one else there at the time I could become that second person.

This is his room.

There is only one floor so from his room you can step right into the garden, and all of the ants can make the opposite journey. The place was clean, more or less, but a home only occupied by humans seems a bit impossible in Australia. There were lines of ants busily making their way up and down the wall and every so often a scared gecko would run from the floor to the ceiling with no regard for gravity.

I met a few of the other tenants; mostly Australian and English but there were a few Japanese people too. Yang speaks Korean and Japanese fluently, but he is in Australia to improve his English. Two of the Japanese tenants have the same name and Yang distinguishes them as Masa One and Masa Two. Masa One deserves his first position; he is a very friendly Japanese pharmacist who was really helpful when it came to Yang’s wisdom tooth pain. Masa Two keeps himself to himself, as do the other Japanese tenants who perhaps prefer their rooms to the rest of Australia.

He showed me around the house, introduced me to a few people and then I promptly fell asleep on my bed. I woke up to see a woman standing over me but I think I just ignored her. Not long after that someone was saying hello to me and I realised it was the female manager of the place, who was expecting some money to. Once on my feet she took my money and introduced me to her young daughter who was standing in the corridor, “Nick is from England,” she said. The girl, probably about ten years old, just walked away. “She’s not impressed,” I said.

Yang is now doing a Cyber University course in Japanese, English and Korean. This means that he has to do about eight lessons a week, each of which can take an hour or longer. Since the Internet in his home is so slow he has to pre-download all the videos and audio before he can actually do the lessons. This turned out to be a bit of a problem for our holiday as finding cheap Internet in some places was near enough impossible. While I was sleeping, he studied and then we went shopping.

We went to a even bigger Woolworths near this large swordfish.

I was very happy. For once I understood what was going on, this supermarket was just like Asda, it had Cadburys, it had big cucumbers and it had frozen pizzas. These three items were not my dinner plan, just things that aren’t really available in Japan. With this in mind I suggested we could have a pizza for dinner, Yang agreed but said he didn’t know if the oven in his guesthouse worked.

It did. That evening we ate cheap frozen pizza with some extra mushrooms and cheese sprinkled on top. Sitting on our beds with his small table between us we talked about old times and new. He had only been in Australia for less than a month and was feeling a bit lonely. The people in his guesthouse are friendly but some also have a hint of scariness. Yang was missing the people back in Japan, the people I had seen the day before yesterday, so I told them how they all were: “Fine.”

When it was time to sleep he asked if he could turn on the radio. I foolishly said yes and then he slept while I was stuck with Bon Jovi. The beds had two mattresses on top of each other, which might sound good but I carried on sinking into the middle and whenever I turned the top mattress would slide off the bottom one causing a mini earthquake. At some point I crept to the toilet and then crept back again. However, I woke Yang up. First I heard him say, “Hmm.” in a slightly alarmed way. Then he said, “Niku?” which is the pronunciation of my name in Japanese. I said yes, and he sighed and said, “Bikurishita” which meant he was surprised. I asked him in Japanese if we could turn off the radio, he said “Hai” and turned it off. With Annie Lennox silenced I drifted to sleep.