The Smells of Friday

 Friday 9th October 2009

AM

Least: At close to 9:00am, I was forced to end my slumber for the sole purpose of lugging a stinking bag of household waste down the stairs. Even though I probably could've waited another hour, I couldn't risk missing the musical blue truck. Missing a rubbish day can have dire consequences in Japan. There are no wheelie bins and rubbish that fails to make the disposal deadline must hang around the house for a few days and putting it out the night before is out of the question. A slave to rubbish.

Most: At about 9:05am, as I dumped a huge pile of garbage in the street, I once again wondered what the sickly post-typhoon smell of rotting fruit was, and why it was there. Initially, I had theorised that it may have been some elaborate after disaster dessert eaten after Melor because it smelled exactly the same as a plum that I met while eating an onigiri a few days ago. A brief look around gave me an east answer, it was all the fruit that had been blow off its branches durng the strong winds. Vaguely interesting.

PM

Least: Somewhere around 5:20pm, I detected a strange and awful odour, attacking my senses. Assuming it was just the fermenting guano pile next door I groaned and went on with my zombie-like participation in an online shoot-em-up. About five minutes later, I had a knock at the door and spoke to my neighbours who were literally being stunk out of their apartment. Despite sniffing the air like a bloodhound, I could only summise that the stench was coming from some malfunctioning factory working overtime to make up for the day off on Thursday.  Within an hour the stink had left as suddenly as it had arrived, though it left a note of rotting onions and decomposing cabbage.

Most: At about 2:20pm, I was riding my gutful of sushi home from Namba when I saw a 30-ish something man being man-handled by police into their car. Not surprisingly it was, about 100 metres from the police station in Nishinari. There seemed to be an awful lot of police patrolling the area on bicycles - maybe something was up or an important visitor was coming to town. I wonder what the man being bundled into the little police car did?