HAPPY 21st Helen! And Happy Birthday also to my tutor Kisako! :)

Japanese summer nights can be pretty noisy. As it's so hot I've really no choice but to sleep with the screen door open, which means I get to hear all the sounds of the night. On warm evenings, you can hear the hundreds of cicadas buzzing away (although there's not so many of them now), and the occasional cricket chirping. You can also sometimes hear choruses frogs croaking, something we never heard in winter and something I've never experienced in England either. As well as ordinary cars, you'll probably also hear ramen trucks go past, which play music like ice cream vans to entice people to go and get ramen.

If you're still awake in the small hours of the morning, you might hear the tanuki growling as they fight outside. And, later still, you'll probably hear the wildest creatures of all, the bouzuzoku (motorbike gang), as they roar past on their bikes that seem to be more designed for noise than for speed. Normally, you can hear police sirens coming slightly behind the gangs. Police sirens are much louder than they are in the UK, and normally have a loudspeaker on them telling other drivers to honourably get out of the way.

It's little things like that remind me I'm in a foreign country.

Japanese of the Day: 尿 - nyou - Pee (learnt in the same lesson we learned "snot!")