Carbonara and Chopsticks

Friday 16th October 2009

AM

Least: At about 9:35am, I was again forces to rise because of garbage responibilities to find that it was already Friday. I found it difficult to believe, despite monitoring every day, that a full week had come and gone. I could almost understand the time-fly during a routine week, however the last seven days were odd with Rosie away and the flu lurking and should've dragged. The weeks are jetting by and turning into months. With the cold weather approaching, I sometimes get hints of the smells that greeted us on arrival in February - I think it's kerosine heating - and it feels like there's been no time in between.

Most: At close to 10:00am, I depostited the big bag of garbage on the road downstairs and noticied that as usual the housewives had been up early washing the road. As I looked up the street, I could clearly see that a large patch of road outside every house had been drenched in water. I remember one student telling me it was to cool the air, and another telling me that it was to subdue dusts - but I think it's probably another neurotic habit with little purpose. It is interesting for me, being from too-dry Victoria to see people just washing water down the drain with little reason, other than to satisfy some mysterious urge to clean. Looking at some of the housewives, reminds me of elderly people who have clearly run out of chores to do - watering the road is one solution.


PM

Least: Sometime around 2:00pm, I began playing a co-operative version of the Playstation game 'Resistance 2' with the guy next door. The game looked incredibly, with excellent graphics and fantastic blood splatter. The alarming thing though was the darkness of the game made my eyes spin in such a way to make me think that I was losing control of my brain. Many of the games actually have warnings about epilepsy and I wonder if today I experienced some of the side effects of staring at a quickly moving image on a big screen. Maybe a walk in the park is safer.

Most: Just after 7:30pm, we walked with our neighbours into a local Italian restaurant called Il Bigotto. The restaurant resembled most other Italian places, except for the menus in Japanaese and the lack of Parmasean cheese. I ordered a capriccosia pizza, which was very good but for a too-thin base and the others ordered pasta which admittedly gave me slight food envy. Our food came out very slowly, one dish after the other, and it wasn't until I studied the Japanese diners eating their meal that I realised why. As each small dish of pasta arrived at the table, the Japanese would take a small portion each, then proceed to eat the morsels. They would then wait patiently for the next bowl of pasta, or a pizza to arrive then go through the same process. It was very odd to see the ritual of Japansese eating going on in an Italian restaurant, and even stranger to see that some of the guests still insisted on using chopsticks. Japanese habits die hard.