Friday, 6 May 2005

It was time for a little monosodium glutamate and I visited the Cairns Night Market which was just a few steps along the footpath from my "hotel" for a bowl of some undefinable chinese chow. Cairns by night is full of adolescent Japanese tourists and karaoke bars. If ever we needed proof of the cruelty of the Japanese nation, surely we need look no further than the pursuit of karaoke singing. Incidentally, the word 'karaoke' is derived from two quite obscure fourteenth-century Japanese words, 'karao,' meaning 'a young male singer with dreadful acne,' and 'oke,' meaning 'wearing white socks.'

Returning to the BELLVIEW, I ran into the same elderly Englishman again who spent his days sitting in the TV lounge or at a small table on the footpath for several months at a time. As he had proudly told me, he came out from England every year to spend several months at the BELLVIEW doing just that: sitting in the TV lounge or at a small table on the footpath. If all Englishmen were like him they wouldn't have colonised the Isle of Wight yet!