Colonel Sanders has Yellow Fever

I just love this picture. This is the statue in front of the KFC near the school. Juxtaposed with the sign in Japanese characters. They love their fried chicken here, and their American southern dixiecrats. We salute you Colonel. The secret ingredient is Japanese tears.

The photo to the right is at El's Ditch, Ben has no idea that I'm taking the picture apparently and the other two are the Austrian's you'll read about in a few paragraphs.


So I’m skipping the rest of my work week and moving on to last night. To sum it up, the classes are usually younger with older ones mixed in. I ended one lesson to a bunch of Japanese housewives explaining the difference between heterosexual, homosexual, transsexual, bi-sexual, and cross dresser for some reason, I don’t know why it came up. Also for some reason I taught a high school girl about plate tectonics.
Anyway, last night started as I think many nights here will start. Ben came over with beer and I cooked dinner. Yes, I’m easily bought and very domesticated. So I was going to cook chicken Katsu, which is essentially the Japanese version of chicken cutlets, the problem was I superheated the oil, so the first batch of chicken was flash-fried almost instantly. I put them in the oil and thirty seconds later they were black and the chicken was completely cooked. I remedied the situation, but there were, literally, massive clouds of smoke hovering throughout the apartment. So we opened the backdoor, the front door, turned on the hood over the burners, and the fan in the bathroom, and the smoke still lingered for about ten minutes. However, though I don’t like to toot my own horn, or at least admit the fact that I like to toot my own horn, the food was awesome. If Ben were a petite Japanese girl, I’d probably still be in bed right now. So we ate and polished off a six pack of 24 ounce Asahi’s (Bieru) ((Beer)) and headed off to meet some of the other Gaijin (Whitey’s) at the only Irish Pub in town called El’s Ditch.
On the way to the bar we bought a beer at the nearby 7-11, because one of the only laws more liberal here than the US is that you can drink in the streets, thank god. So we make our way down the hub, the nerve center of Tokuyama, a city of 120,000 people, at midnight, on a Friday, and there is no one on the streets. It’s like a gold rush city after the veins have all dried up. When we get to the bar ( I have pictures but I think Cathy stole my cable when she was using her camera) there are 4 other teachers there, and a few Nihonjin (Japanese folk). There were also two Austrians at the bar, from a tiny town nearby called Hikari, they work for a silicon company called Siltronics. I remember this because on the card the company’s motto was “perfect silicon solutions,” and I commented to Martina that in the US the only people who use that phrase to describe their business were plastic surgeons.

So the Austrian dude was 25 and the extraordinarily hot Austrian girl’s name was (deleted to protect the author from Blitzkriegs). This young lady, who is 23 is just drop-dead knock down gorgeous, so naturally I made it a point in a small bar, to engage her in a very long, I am clearly hitting on you, conversation. We spoke for the better part of a couple of hours maybe. When they two Austrian’s left the bar, after I gave her a hug, and got her card with her e-mail etc…The other Steve turns to me and says, you know the Austrian dude is her boyfriend right. I laughed my ass off, literally, the two lobes of my gluteus maximus disengaged themselves from my tail-bone. In America if you hit on a girl in a bar, she will almost always work in a way to mention, “oh, my boyfriend” etc, and this girl didn’t drop the old routine once. So despite the fact that I made a huge ass of myself, and apparently Ben did the same thing a week ago, for much the same reason, it’s become pretty apparent that this girl is not very happy with her relationship, or she’s just a massive flirt.
So the other people at the bar were Rob (the x-factor) the other Steve and wife, I only call her that because I have no idea what her name is, but she is very attractive and has a lot of personality, and a Japanese teacher Rieko. There was also this Japanese character who spoke broken English, slurred, because he was fall on the floor drunk, and the source of quite a bit of amusement. At one point he was claiming Rieko as his girlfriend, so I asked him why he had a ring on his finger and she didn’t, at which point he yanked his wedding ring off of his hand and gave it to Rieko. He also tried to set me up with the Austrian guy, who I said was very handsome but not my type. Just your typical drunk who’s very personal with a lot of people he doesn’t know, and doesn’t realize both how uncomfortable he makes people, and why he was so damn funny in the first place.
So when we left, Steve and Wife, and X-Factor hopped on the bicycles. Steve saw the look we gave him and made a point of telling us he ripped the Dorothy basket off the front of the bike, but then he made a point of ringing the little bell on the bike. Nobody can escape looking lame here, but it’s refreshing that it’s accepted.
So Ben Rieko and I went to my favorite place in Tokoyama, OPA (The Elvis themed Karaoke bar where the owner performs) So when we walk in at 2:30 or so I greet the owner, who I had forgotten I taught the old college handshake too (regular shake, then up a little to lock at the thumb and then use the edge of your fingers to make a snapping sound at the end). He’s a cool guy, there’s no way around it. So we order two beers, which were horribly poured, so I had to get behind the bar and show the kid bartending, again, how to pour a beer without too much head. I don’t think the owner had any intention of playing that late, since there were only the three of us and two other patrons sitting in the bar, but when I asked him he got right up there and played, Country Roads, and we requested Blue Suede shoes.
After that I finally did it, I sang at OPA with the guy, I looked at the book and picked out Come Together (Beatles tune) and rocked it out, to much applause from the two Japanese people. But I’ll be honest, I did the song a little justice, it wasn’t horrible, one might almost call it…ok? We were probably in OPA a little past closing, around 4:30 or so, still pounding beers and carrying on as young people in Elvis themed Karaoke bars in a small city in Japan do, when we said our good byes and left. On the way back to Rieko’s car we stopped at a 7-11 for some beer and microwaved meat products. When we got back to my apartment complex it was past dawn, so Ben and I sat in the grass and chatted near the three really beautiful cherry blossom trees in the parking lot, it was our own private Hanami (the Japanese verb for watching cherry blossoms). We came back to the apartment, I cooked some rice and then crashed until 3 PM or so today.
Apparently Ben parked in someone’s spot though. Which is a huge fucking deal here, and he had an e-mail from another teacher that the head of the school wanted to talk to him. Because luckily for us, the company cars have the telephone number of the school plastered on the back of them in huge fucking numbers, so Ben returned to the tenant who complained and brought her some candy and apologized. Tonight we are going to a huge rave on top of a mountain around here which apparently ends sometime after dawn when you can look down on the surrounding cities near all of the mountain cherry blossoms. I expect no short story to come from it.

Wheat Out