gaijin outfit

the summer holiday has officially started, and i spent the first day of it at school. but just for swimming practice. the pool feels amazingly nice in this stupidly hot weather.

nikolai's nice host mother rang the school and told them that he would come and help the teacher paint one of the classrooms during the summer holiday, without telling nikolai. he wasn't too happy about this, so out of pity, i went and helped him. apart from the classroom that felt like a sauna, it wasn't so bad. but the paint job that we did was unbelievably shitty. we dripped paint all over the floor, and painted 'over the lines' into the all the wrong spots. but the teacher seemed to think we did a superb job. that was cool. she also shouted us lunch at the fast food shop in front of school. it's called First Kitchen, but in japan they shorten it to Fa Kin. i imagine any english-speaking gaijin bloke would be surprised when a cute japanese schoolgirl says in broken english - 'let's go fucking!'

it was a pretty bad idea to paint walls in my school uniform because, naturally, i got paint all over it. but i'm sure it's in tune with some obscure new japanese fashion, so there's nothing to worry about. nikolai came prepared, his host family bought him a new pair of 3-sizes-too-small shorts and he borrowed an old shirt off his host dad. the shorts he got were exactly the same style that we have dubbed 'the gaijin outfit.' for some stupid reason, 99% of all foreigners we see around kamakura wear these khaki cargo pants. i have seen about 10 foreign tourists on my stay here that weren't wearing these shorts.

nikolai and i like to think we are a new breed of 'supreme gaijin.' we take precedence over these cargo pant-wearing peasants, simply due to the fact that we have superb japanese skills, attend japanese high school and wear cool high school uniforms. not because we have big egos.

oh, the photo is of nikolai in his gaijin outfit trying to make a stupid gaijin tourist face admiring a stupid telephone box in front of a stupid bike.