Sunday, July 29, 2012

I have a phone with a 16.1 megapixel camera. It's pretty pointless as it doesn't really take great photos, but it is useful if you want to use up all of the internal memory in a couple of shots. So I have mostly stopped trying to take pretty photos, and instead just snap pictures of stupid stuff I see on my daily travails that I can crack wise about later.


 The example sentence in this entry in my electronic dictionary made me laff for some reason. It sounds like something a nerd comedian would say (specifically Dmitri Martin)

No cracking wise necessary for this next one.

 This poster says "Bicycle Accidents. Increase Dramatically!". I don't know if this is a statment or an encouragement to automobilists. By the stae of the roads sometimes, as a cylcist, I lean towards the latter.


 This was a traditional Japanese "water magic" show where this woman made water squirt from different objects. About halfway through I had the sudden thought: "Why am I turned on?"

This here is possibly the saddest photograph of all time. It is a long run down pachinko parlour, that is rusting and literally being overgrown by weeds.


This is a picture of the famous sculpture at Nikko of the See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil. Surely it has been done before by somebody, but I couldn't pass up the opportunity to pose in front of it for a "F*ck no Evil" pose. 
 Japanese dramas often have scenes where the main character skips school to lie down on the riverbank. I thought this was so cliche, but once I tried it myself, I was hooked. I often bike into Tokyo, and there is a long stretch (about 30 minutes) along the Edo-gawa river. Recently, I have been taking small breaks there to have a drink, some lunch, listen to my MP3 player, watch the sun set over the golf course and river and strengthen a cliche.

 This also needs no cracking wise, although I will say that the rabbit looks about right.


 This is a small shrine/grave right by my dorm. There are often offerings in front of it. Usually it is a piece of fruit which over the course of a couple of weeks turns brown and powdery, but this time there are three perfectly good cans of beer there. And I'm not talking about the cheap stuff - this is Kirin Beer. Every time I pass by, I want to re-enact that scene from 7 Years in Tibet where Brad Pitt raids a shrine for the food. 3 beers! At my current state, that's enough to get me well-trollied.

This was a floor map at a museum, and I just had to laugh when I saw the key for what the green section is. This is one of those words I would love to use in a conversation, but I can't bring myself to do it without laughing.

 You know how fat chicks often stand in a circle and take pictures of their feet to show how great friends they are? Well, I was on the train with three guy friends and couldn't help notice this photo-op of gender role reversals. I didn't mention that I took this photo, because it would have seemed a little gay/predatory, and because they would never have agreed to it.


This is at a festival, and my friend is just casually strolling by a table full of robotic dildoes.



A "Dramatic Hotel". This is obviously a euphemism for a "love hotel", but I love it when people try so hard to be euphemistically sexy that it just sounds ridiculous. Besides, it's not dramatic if you do "it" in a healthy Christian way: Get married, shake hands firmly, and then roll over to sleep.


Japan loves two things: fireworks and cartoons. Recently fireworks have become more advanced to include things like disney characters and here: a smily face. It's pretty hard to photograph on my phone camera, and it kind of looks like the smily face is bleeding from the eyes, but you get the idea.


Lastly, here is probably the most disgusting photo I've ever taken. Be cautioned if you don't want to see it. The story is, I was taking the last train home after drinking, so once the train finally arrived at my station I was buting to offload the beer and gin from 90 minutes earlier. On the way to the urinal at the station, I saw this scene by the squatter toilet.... Someone had taken a dump and missed the middle the porcelain, and there was a pair of discarded boxers. Now, you just know there has to be a hilarious story behind this scene, and I would give anything to hear it. However, we will never know. All we have is this picture of immesuarble vileness. And this is why having a camera on your phone is not a great idea. Anyway, that's all I have for now. Scroll down if you want to see this terrible photo and possibly imagine a story of your own.

-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-


Wednesday, July 11, 2012

What's the Deal With Basketball and Enormous Clothing?

I'm pissed. This has simply gone too far. You may have seen my previous post of me in my new basketball uniform. It looks okay because I was tucked in, and also the fabric was thick and double-layered because it was reversable. However, last week we got our uniform replaced with a light micro-fibre version. A teammate gave me my singlet still in its wrapper, and I noticed the sticker which said XXXL. You have got to be fucking kidding me.

 This is me wearing the singlet face-on. I am wearing my boxer shorts, but the singlet is so large that it's basicaly a one-piece miniskirt.
 This is me faith-hilling in the singlet so show you the kind of room I'm working with. How the hell am I supposed to play basketball in this thing?

See, I am what I call a "lean build". Other people call me skinny, which pissed me off. They tell me I should eat more, and all I can think is that they should die more. Fuck you. I eat like a racehorse with a tapeworm - I just make sure I eat good food, and I have always excercised and played sport. Don't insult me because you're a lazy piece of crap. Sure, I don't have a lot of muscle bulk - several times I thought I should drink protein shakes and lift weights, but the problem with that is if I ever stopped, I would simply go back to my current physique only with extra skin like a lipo-suction patient.

And really, I'm super-stoked about my body. I'm fit, strong enough for anything I need to do, and I have a feeling that the reason I have hardly ever been injured is because I don't weigh so much. The only thing I have to be careful of is my selection of clothing. The last thing I want to do is accentuate my ganglyness so I often wear ball-hugging jeans with flares, and I buy my t-shirts several sizes too small. This is because sizes are generally calibrated by height, which as a realtively tall person doesn't work for me. I usually spring for size M. I don't need the sleeves to come down to my elbows anyway. This worked out pretty well for me in the past since much of my clothing were hand-me-downs from my older brother who was shorter than me.

Basketball has always been an issue for me. For some reason (probably black people), basketball clothing is always in super-large sizes. This fashion quickly made its way to my small town in New Zealand. I still have a singlet for my team when I was 11 years old, and it still fits me.Hell, I'm still growing into it. I still have memories of going up the court on a fast break, dribbling with my right hand while using my left hand to lift the shoulder part of the singlet back onto my shoulder.

So when I got my new XXXL singlet, my heart dropped. I put it on, and it looked more like curtains than a singlet. Seriously, a singlet should never "drape". I've watched enough Project Runway to know this. The armholes were so huge that I could fit three of my arms through each one, which would be great if I were Vishnu. I feel like the "after" picture of an advert for a diet programme. This singlet has so much fabric that I felt like a hippy lady who decided to go from hemp to microfibre. Worst of all, I felt like that little kid again running up the court worrying more about the singlet falling off his frame more than scoring the ball - the kid that has been called skinny his whole life.

You may think that I am exaggerating, but I could seriously fit two people inside this singlet. You don't believe me? Here is a visual representation. I put my pillow in the front, and photoshopped myself again into the singlet. Note that the fabric is not being stretched, and there is still room for another arm. [Note: try not to get too turned on at the image of me spooning myself.]


(Never mind the fact that a double Mad-Dog would undoubtedly be the greatest basketball player of all time)


What is even more annoying is that I specifically asked for a size L. Well, I asked for an M, but my Japanese teammates kept saying that I was the tallest player on the team (not entirely true) so I should go up a few sizes. Eventally I settled on an L, which became this comically large XXXL. Now, I don't entirely blame my teammates. Japanese people - and expecially those who play basketball - are conditioned to think that "American Fashion" is cool. The thing is, it's cool on black people, not white guys who get pissed off when people call him skinny - which everyone will continue to do if I'm wearing these drapes. 

Look, I'm not asking for a return to the short-shorts of the 80s or skintight cycling uniforms, but can we please stop trying to put me in these ridiculous clothes? Thank you.






Wednesday, May 23, 2012

The Return of Mad Dog

Go Geisai

So one of the first things I did when arriving to Tokyo Geidai was to try join the basketball team. And In fact, I asked around without getting a proper answer when I was randomly asked by a member who I chanced across if I played basketball. It's not that I'm really that tall, but maybe I just give off a scent of basketball ability. It's always just below the surface. It can't be tamed. Many people know this phenomenom as Mad Dogness.



Yes, Mad Dog has returned. Japanese basketball teams usually have their nickname on the back of their shirts. I didn't want to have my last name on there because Japanese people can't pronounce it, and having my first name on the back of my shirt would make me feel like a r... er... special needs person. That, and I already have the perfect basketball nickname. Oh, and what a sexy basketball uniform. Sure, it cost a bit, but it's like having a Leaver's Jersey - only the exact opposite (Leavers Pants?)

We only had a few weeks of practice before the year's main event. It's a sports tournament of the five main Arts Universities in Japan - Aichi, Kanazawa, Kyoto and Okinawa.

I'm not going to talk too much about the actual basketball because I want to avoid bragging (whoops...). But it was hilarious fun, and decent basketball. The only problem was that in the first game, I took a series of elbows by Kyoto Art Univerity's Number 4. I played through the pain for the rest of the game, and the next two (all victories) with increading pain. By the end of the day, I had forgotten the pleasure of being able to breathe without wincing pain.

The next morning was insane. I tried playing about 10 minutes over a couple of games, but basketball is significantly more difficult when you can't really breathe properly or raise your right arm above 90 degrees. Tha's when I was I so happy for my great teammates. They pulled through and got us the big victory, which set up the most ridiculously fun night of drinking. It involved an all-you-can-drink evening and a big prizegiving. I was awarded the 'best newcomer' award and was the third overall top scorer. My teammates also picked up the MVPs (both Men and Women), the 3 Point Contest (Both Men and Women) and of course the main prize. So, it still wasn't a bad outing after all. 



Here you can see me completing the putback after an offensive rebound. (called a "roo-bound"). Notice my classic fundamental technique of keeping the ball high, shielding it with my off-hand, and leaning backwards incase the defender gets physical. Either that, or I'm taking it easy because it feels like there is a 10 inch blade through my right boob and out the back of my ribcage.


Here is the championship cup. It may look large, but we had quite a large team, so we got it refilled at the bar. It tasted like victory and anasthetic.

After taking a night-bus home the next day, I went straight to the hospital. A teammate told me of his injury 6 months ago caused from an elbow with the exact same symptoms and circumstances, and he eventually went to the hospital to find out he had broken a rib. By now I was certain I had the same. Luckily I haven't broken anything. On the one hand, it would have been a pretty great story if I had of played through a broken rib, but on the other hand Mad Dog doesn't get injured.

I'm supposed to rest for two weeks while taking patch medicine and wearing a 'corset'. It still hurts like crazy, but it was all part of the fun. I'll be playing plenty more ball this year, sharpening my elbows for the rematch with Kyoto's Number 4, and I'll be back at this tournament next year. A Mad Dog never forgets, and is never forgotten.



Tuesday, April 10, 2012

The New Me

Japan can change a man. And by "man" I mean the masculine version of humans. Japan can change women too, but they usually just gain a few kilos and lose some self esteem because Japanese girls make them feel much fatter than they are. For guys, Japan is like being a star basketball prodigy and having people coddle you because you're their cash cow and they just desperately want to become part of your possy, and so you risk having a totally inflated sense of self-worth. It happens all the time. I know this because I am awesome.

Within a few days of re-arriving, I decided to go for a totally new look. Here's the first photo I took of myself.

In the distant past I have obliquely referenced Mr Donuts, but basically, it is a cafe/doughnut shop that prides itself on being exceptionally average. I love it because they have "American Coffee" which just means "crappy coffee with free re-fills." Also, it rewards repeat patronage with a points card that allows you to get a soft toy after about 160 donuts. That's a lot of doughnuts. Because of the refill policy, this was the best place for me to sit, write and study for several hours, and that's how I became indoctrinated.

So imagine my delight when I got off the train at my new city and began walking towards my dormitory and see a Mr Donuts on the way. "I'm home" I said, in a scarily cult-like manner. But seriously, I'm on a scholarship and it would be much simpler if the university just wired my salary directly to Mr Donut.

I just wanted to inform you all that I have safely arrived - even if you wouldn't recognise me anymore. But I just had to get a mane made out of a doughnut to show how awesome I am, and my platonic love for Mr Donut. Coming soon will be some more great stories - and perhaps photos - about how awesome I am.

Sunday, April 01, 2012

The Even Greater Tokyo Region




This brings us to the end of the Great Re-Migration, and onto a newer - or at least 'other' things. The "greater Tokyo region/area" is the most populated part of this broad green earth with a population of around 35 million people. Make that 35 million-and-one. I'm the cherry on top of 35 million other cherries. Or the bottom. Or somewhere in the middle. We don't even have to be cherries. To be honest, I didn't completely think this analogy through.

Anyway, I hope to relatively occasionally write up some silly stories, which I hopefully won't have to work to hard to find. Also, I have started up a new love-project http://jdoramarapehugs.blogspot.co.nz/ where I am whistleblowing about the disturbing prevalence of rape-hugs in Japanese doramas, and my contribution to the extreme-niche humour consumerism on the internet. If you're not too offended by it, please add it to your list of websites to entertain you until the coffee is ready - and tell your friends!

Anyway, I hope you'll enjoy my occasional stupid stories, and if you want to know how I really am you'll just have to contact me the old fashioned way. Take care, but at what cost?

いってきます!

Friday, March 30, 2012

Living in Wellington

I have a friend who once said "I lived in Sendai for two weeks", and I have never stopped making fun of him (i.e. when he went to the toilet and someone asked me where he was, I replied "He's living in the toilet"). To me, two weeks is a holiday. But then, where do we draw the line? My friend says that he went to Sendai to work, and was given an apartment for the duration. But two weeks? I've had a holiday for two weeks where I rented a small apartment.

I thought of this quote today when I was moving out of my flat in Wellington and counted back how long I had been there. It was only ten weeks. Ten weeks? That could be a holiday for some people, so I wondered if I really could say if I lived in Wellington. Here are my thoughts about whether I did:

Yay: It was more than two months
Nay: It was only ten weeks

Yay: I paid regular rent, power and other expenses
Nay: I didn't own a single piece of furniture in my bedroom and I used a shoebox as a coffee table

Yay: I earnestly went job hunting and took on student jobs to make ends meet
Nay: I knew it wasn't permanent

Yay: I helped friends move house
Nay: I never really bothered making new friends knowing it wasn't permanent

Yay: I had all my details changed to Wellington, including my postal address
Nay: I never got letters anyway (not always my fault, remember)

But then I look back over my Wellington era, and back at the question of whether I lived in Wellington.

From moving here without a real plan or any certainty about the next few months, to some great cameos from friends (and family), the ridiculous flat situation, doing stupid student jobs and enjoying them more than I should, the Saturday vege markets, and beautiful days like these biking along the waterfront:
Well, that and the cameos from friends (and family).

So back to the start of this post, I can confidently look that friend in the eye and say "I lived in Wellington for 10 weeks."



This brings me to the end of the Great Re-Migration, as soon I'll be back in Japanland. It has been a Carrot-top-like year and a bit - you don't expect it to be very good, but when you get dragged along to go because all the other Vegas shows are sold out, you really do enjoy it and wonder why you doubted you would.

I'll keep up the weblog, under a new (yet to be decided Banner), but thanks for keeping up with me and my occasional and erratic brain droppings. Don't expect much to change in the next phase of ruvaman.blogspot.com, apart from perhaps more stories that happened because of plum-wine hallucinations. Because location is really the weakest excuse for anything - like a stoner wanting to try every possible situation while high, until eventually he's just incredibly more stupid than he incredibly already was.

Stay safe and have an amazing week!

Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Show us your Beans

It may sound odd, but one of my most lasting childhood memories has to do with coffee. I have Dutch parents, so this makes it a little less odd. Sometimes from the age of 4-ish I would ask my parents for a 'kinder-koffie' which looking back was just warm sugary milk with just enough coffee to make it taste terrible.

But although I myself didn't actively start drinking coffee till I was 16 1/2, coffee was a huge part of my childhood. Several times per day, I'd make my parents a coffee and myself a hot chocolate. It was just the way things were. However, we almost never had real coffee - it would pretty much always be instant coffee - and it would always be Nescafe Classic.

Being a devoted coffee drinker now, I get it now too. Instant coffee in general taste like crap. The cheaper brands remind me of cheap rum, and even the more expensive brands don't give that satisfying coffee feeling. But when you open a pack of Nescafe, the real coffee smell wafts through the air and it makes me feel happy to be alive.

My parents would always collect the Nescafe Beans, and we had a vast collection of classic red Nescafe mugs as a result, so when I returned back to New Zealand last year I also began collecting the beans. After drinking one kilo of instant coffee I decided to cash them in. Surely my efforts would have paid off. What could I get? Mugs? Towels? More coffee?

I signed onto the website. It is a bit disappointing that the beans reward system is all done online now, and you don't even have to cut out those little beans anymore either. This should have been a sign of things to come. It was a flashy website that took forever to load, but eventually I was signed up and I entered in all my beans. 1000 bean points! That sounded promising. However, when I went to cash them in, the only rewards you could get were a video store voucher for 50 bean points, a discount for an AA membership for 50 points, a discount for a Navi for 50 points, or something to do with Ezibuy - whatever the hell that is - for 50 points. They don't even do mugs anymore. Nescafe points are basically now an alternative for advertising on the back of grocery receipts. I was deeply disappointed, I would get nothing for all my coffee-drinking efforts.



The only other option was to donate the points to charity - 500 points for 5 dollars.


So in the end, I pretty much drank a kilo of coffee to help children... children with diseases. I am not the charitable type, primarily because I am poor. But it would have been nice if I had of known last year that each time I drank a cup of coffee I was curing a sick child. Not only would each coffee have been delicious and relaxing, I could have improved the experience with the smugness you get when you donate to charity.

It would be nice if other vices had charitable incentives. For example, if you eat 20 kilos of butter, you can donate to saving the rain forests. Or for each carton of cigarettes Camel gives prophylactics to hookers in Thailand. Or for season of Jersey Shore you watch, they offer to remove neck tattoos of released convicts so they can re-enter society without reoffending. It's just a thought. Either that or give me a stupid mug, Nescafe!

Monday, March 19, 2012

Stupid Bike Ride

As a form of commuting, biking is the best. I thought this even before I lived in Holland. Besides the fact that it's cheap and good for self-righteous tree-humpers, as long as you have a bit of fitness and a decent bike it's faster to bike than to use the car or bus. The problem with cycling in New Zealand is that New Zealanders are so ignorant to the cyclist-cause. Yes, this means that automobilists simply don't realise that you might be there. They'll change lanes in front of you without indicating, they'll turn left into a sidestreet while you are on their left, parallel-parked car doors are like a giant game of whack-a-mole. As a result, I'm one of those agressive cyclists who won't hesitate for a moment to slap the side of a car that nearly kills me. I won't try to dent or scratch the car, but I just want to make a loud a noise as possible so get the driver's heart-rate to go up as much as mine just did. It's only fair.

But this is old news, complaining about drivers not looking out for cyclists. What it also bad is pedestrians crossing the road. I was once biking down a road alongside a long trail of traffic-jammed cars when suddenly a stupid bitch steps out right in front of me. She looked at me like a near-future roadkill and thrust both the palms of her hands at me. I couldn't stop in time, so I swerved slightly and ended up ramming my shoulder into her double-hand punch. I didn't fall, but the stupid whore gave me a dead arm for more than a day.


But stupid people happen everywhere. It's when stupid reaches the govermnent level that it becomes truly scary. There is a section of road here in Wellington that I have biked every day for the last few weeks, as it is the main road from Newtown to the central city. This small stretch of road would be hilarious if it wasn't so ridiculously dangerous. So today I brought my camera along for the ride to break down this cyclist death-row.

This section of road has a bus-lane, which doubles as a parallel car-park. Often at times like this, you need to swing onto the main road. Luckily it is downhill, so it is easy enough to get up to about 40kmph so you can slip between the cars.

Suddenly at the end of this section of road, they kindly decide to introduce a cycle path. Well, it's not so much as a cycle path as a regular footpath with a picture of a bicycle on it. This is quite a busy pedestrian crossing, so it's really quite pointless.


Then, the footpath takes a 90 degree left turn around the corner of a building. It's quite exciting because who knows what is around the corner? Is it a person?


No, there is a damn telephone pole. If you are cylcling with any speed faster than walking-pace, you will have to take the corner wide, which will lead you right into this pole. So you have to break, and continue up the footpath.

Now we come to the end of this footpath/cycle path. Note that there is no picture of a bicycle on this end. From this end, this would appear to be a regular footpath, which according to New Zealand traffic laws, you aren't allowed to cycle on. But it gets worse here. The road from the left is a blind street where cars or people could step in front of you. And the road on the right is a major one-way two-lane street with the left lane possibly being used for cars going in the street straight up ahead. This means that most cars don't bother indicating, and I have to either wait for a gap in traffic, or try and merge which is almost impossible since I can't get up to speed since there is only 10-20 metres of road and this section goes uphill.

This is the shoulder of the two-lane road, which is the closest I've seen to a cycle lane. This lasts for about 20 metres of road.


Soon, there are more parallel parks, and this stupid trailor billboard advertising mini doughnuts. You can see how little room there is for a cyclist - and remember that the taxi is travelling at about 50 kmph. Can you imagine how pissed off you'd be if you died because of somebody wanting to advertise sugar-coated dough?

Then the roadworks begins, with no regard for cyclists. I personally think sacrificing a few parallel parks and making a few people walk a little bit further to work is less effort than scraping a human off the tarseal.

You see here, the dotted yellow lines are just wide enough to bike on. But these are also sacrificed, for as far as I can tell, no apparent reason other to advertise the fact that further up ahead are some road workers waiting for their turn to ride the tractor or hold the stop-go sign.


As of yet, there were no road works going on. But here we have a set of traffic lights. There's nothing wrong with this persee, but read on.


So as soon as you pass the intersection, there are more supid cones, but not only that, you see a sign on the footpath on the other side of the road.

Yes, magically, the cycle path makes a return, but on the wrong side of the road with three lanes of one-way traffic between you and it. Also, remember that you were just at an intersection, which means that most of the time there is a lot of traffic and you have to basically wait until the next red light.

This is the "cycle path" which also looks suspiciously like a footpath. The problem with these is, when there are real footpath users, they don't expect cyclists to be coming up behind them.

Then the cycle path ends after a hundred or so metres, and you need to cross the road like a regular pedestrian.

Now tell me that this isn't the stupidest section of road for a cyclist in existence? Obviously, after a few days of commuting this, I began hogging the road, trying to get my speed up so I could bike in the left lane of traffic as if I were a regular vehicle. I also ran red lights and weaved through cars, because this was not only much faster, but much safer.

New Zealand apparently has one of the highest cars per capita ratio, and you sometimes hear about policies to try increase the amount of cyclists. Everyone knows the benefits of cycling for the individual, the environment and for traffic congestion, but I now understand why so few people commute by bike. You have to be fit and a bit of an adrenalie junkie, as well as an asshole that is always looking out just for yourself. I understand why automobilists often get pissed off at cyclists, but they don't understand that to be a cyclist and not die that you need to be an asshole. I think that all public workers, city planners, road-workers and policemen should be forced to bike around cities for a week every year, and maybe the roads can get a little less stupid for cyclists. I don't think we will ever get dedicated cycle lanes in New Zealand, but things could be improved so much by a few simple non-stupid steps:
  1. No half-assed cycle lanes. You know that councils want to address the problem, because there are sometimes sections of green painted cycle lanes, or those pictures of a bike on the footpath. However these are completely useless if they stop after a only a few hundred metres or less. It would be like cutting out sections of powerlines every few hundred metres - we'd all be living in the dark
  2. Widen the shoulders. If a cyclist is having to tread the dotten yellow line like a tight-rope walker, then something is wrong.
  3. Clear the shoulders. People are shit at paralell parking anyway, and they're pretty terrifying.
  4. Again, force automobilists to bike around a city a few days a year so they realise how incredibly dangerous it can be.
  5. Non-asian tattoo artists should not be allowed to tattoo Chinese characters. This has nothing to do with cycling, but I think we can all agree than this is a good idea.

Thursday, March 15, 2012

Street Art

On request, here is a post without immature (poop) jokes. Instead I am going to encourage criminal behaviour by praising the graffiti that you (I) can find around where I (probably not you) live. Newtown is known to be an artsy place, and this is often expressed in graffiti and peeling posters.

Generally I am no fan of graffiti as it encourages idiots to scribble their name illegibly, or people who think they are artists writing things in a stupid font that noone can really read. Basically, I'm just against bad handwriting. However, I always enjoy a clever civil obedience which you often see on the internets, and now also on my walks around my house. They aren't top quality, but I do enjoy them and maybe you will too.


I don't know what this is supposed to be (my best guess is this is what you'd get if a llama humped a plesiosaurus), but like many of these graffitis, it is small enough to not offend too much. If this was a few metres tall, you'd probably want to swear at the offender, but as is, this is nice detail.


One of my favourites, this is right outside a dairy (a NZ convenience store). I don't think the Indian owner probably asked this to be here, but I also doubt that he would want to have it removed or painted over.

Artistically this is not the most technical painting, but it is definitely an improvement on the building.

Nice stencilwork here, but poor application as seen in the runny face. The thing about most of these is that they are alongside a amain road, so the artist would need steel balls to complete each work.
Some paintings are painted over, like this pavement octopus.

This is probably somebody's first attempt at a stencil (or maybe it is a pre-fab from the 2$ store). Still, I appreciate stencilwork, and you need to start with the basics.

It seems that someone is a real pokemon fan.

And it seems like someone fancies themself as a new pokemon creator. See?


Somehow I think this is a politically charged work, but I don't get it. Still very nice though.

This one popped up a few weeks ago. This was appropriate because a while back I applied for a job at the zoo. I was appliying to be a giraffe, because apparently I look like one. Very good work on this though, and especially making it that extra size larger.

And lastly, one of the best ones. A brilliant, expressive work with good use of wall as the third colour. Class-act lawlessness.

So everyone get out there and leave your mark. Just no bad handwriting, okay? Thanks in advance.