The Daily Grind

Don't get me wrong, it's great being in Tokyo, but Monday to Friday my life is a set routine. Up at quarter past seven, on the train at 8.39, in class forty minutes later. I teach from twenty past ten to six. In my three allotted breaks I walk in circles round the campus. For lunch I have Power Donburi (a bowl of boiled rice and pork strips topped with fried egg yolk that hits your stomach likes a hammer) or whatever I can grab from the shop by the classroom (yesterday was a white rice triangle wrapped in dried, salted seaweed, a passable approximation of a Danish pastry with caramel in the middle, and a pack of three thinly-sliced sandwiches with ham and processed cheese). The air conditioning flits between 22 and 24 degrees. I make the same jokes six times a day, five on Mondays.

I'm home by half seven, cook, go jogging along a cycle path, sit on the computer, read for thirty minutes, and fall into bed by midnight. Fridays a bunch of us hit an izakaya (a Japanese pub that serves snack food as well as alcohol) by the station where everything on the menu is 300 yen.

Pretty much, we live for weekends.