The spatula's melting
into my pasta sauce;
The plastic comes dribbling down*.
It's snowing in Youkaichi,
many miles north,
where I shouldn't be �
no gaijins around.
I need a butter knife�
The strained conversations
are drivin' me mad:
(Japanese accent) Doooooo yooouuuuu habbu�.. raisu (rice)�.. in�.. Osutoraria?
(Australian accent, wearily) Yes!**
But I've got nothing better to do,
And everything's so expensive, I just found out,
my month's salary couldn't buy me a shoe.
I need a butter knife�..
I need a flat plate��
I need a street map!***
There're things I remembered
and things I forgot:
Spare Vegemite, I guess I miss most.
Three thousand five hundred billion GDP,
but there's fuck all to spread on your toast.
I need a butter knife��
Really, really need a butter knife�.
Really, really need a butter knife�. (fade out)
* The scant cooking utensils left in my apartment left by the last resident were (I found out later) purchased from the hyakuen shoppu (equivalent to our $2 shops, i.e. they only sell really cheap, nasty crap). My first home-cooked meal was pasta flavoured with tinned tomatos, ridiculously expensive eggplant and melted plastic spatula. I almost dropped the whole lot on the floor because the frypan handle melted too.
** Japanese people just couldn't get it into their heads that we from overseas had, or had knowledge of, anything even barely related to their country or Asia in general (e.g. rice, o-hashi (chopsticks), sake, etc). This made for an abundance of stupid questions and increasingly terse replies.
*** These were the main things which I lacked during my first two weeks in Japan. I was given a (hand-drawn) street map, which covered a two street radius around my apartment and workplace. Unfortunately there was nothing useful within this area except for a konbini (convenience store, only the basic essentials at hideously inflated prices) and lots of rice paddies. As it was pitch dark by the time i returned home from work, there were no buses nearby and no sidewalks on the road (i.e. you had to dive into the muddy rice fields every time a car came), it took me a long time to locate the nearest supermarket, 1.5 hours walk away. In the meantime, I spread my toast with a spoon and balanced it on the rim of a bowl while I ate.
**** Supermarket (see above). Even here, it was difficult to find anything which was not directly applicable to the Japanese way of life (e.g. I still couldn't find a fork until I went back to Kobe three weeks later).