The best week on anti-biotics...ever...continued
My Birthday – Part I
Well Tuesday began much like every other blog entry thus far, at around the crack of noon. We staggered around our two hotel rooms for a little while, and went through the morning routine of wondering if we should eat or vomit to make ourselves feel whole again. I felt the urge to get started on anti-biotics sooner than later, because we all know exactly what lies in store for me the rest of the week. So El Charro and El angel solo decided to go to some museum or art gallery or park or other non-alcoholic pursuit, and I would go to the international medical clinic seeking drugs. We were set to meet up around 3:30 back at the hotel.
I got on the subway, and wandered around for about ten minutes before I found the clinic. Being an international clinic the staff spoke English, which made things easier, I gave them my alien card (lovingly referred to as the gaijin card) and my Japanese National Healthcare card, and filled out some forms. I waited no more than ten minutes before I was called into the office of my boy, Doc Schempler.
Doctor Schempler is a native Dutchman. Every European without exception can be placed into two categories “Cool as shit” or “Goofy as shit.” These two groups have obviously splintered into many sub-categories for both persuasions, but the good doctor would without question fall into the “Goofy as shit” category. The first indicator is that his English accent is two to three octaves higher that it should be for a person of their build, secondly they can’t help but smile like the handicapped kid who just figured out he can get in front of the line for all the rides in Disneyworld. Their wardrobe is also almost always decidedly two decades too old for any given social or professional situation.
The diagnoses took all of 30 seconds, I’m coughing up green mucus, I have no headache, no fever, no nausea, or diarrhea. I have nasal congestion and a cough. He writes a prescription for anti-biotics, and then enlightens me with a 15 minute diatribe about the sorry state of Japanese healthcare.
Almost all anti-biotics have been tested and developed in the Western World. There is an unbelievable amount of documentation as to the correct dosage, length of use, and situations in which they are to be prescribed. Japanese doctors look at all of this information and then proceed to immediately cut the dosage in half, so that it’s rarely ever effective. That is on the rare occasion that they prescribe Western medicines. There is one anti-biotic that has been developed in Japan, and since the doctors tend to be very patriotic, they have over-prescribed said medicine to the point where 60 percent of infectious bacteria simply laugh at it like a hall monitor and proceed to smoke in the bathroom of your alveoli. The other 40 percent, tip-toe around it, turn the corner and gang bang your lung cells.
So this particular anti-biotic is more like the concierge at hotel lung than the germ slaying robo-cop it’s supposed to be. We could consider the bacteria a guest in Hotel Lung, a really bad guest, like a redneck with much more money than sense. We could call the disease Kid Rock, let’s say, and the typical interaction between Kid Rock disease and the Japanese concierge anti-biotic at the front desk might go something like this.
KR: (Arriving in his pimped out Ford F-150, his mulleted posse jumping out of the cab) Whoooo! I am gonna @#$! this place up! (Some Jack Daniels spills out of the open bottle in his hand onto the desk)
Anti-Biotic: Sir, do you have a reservation?
KR: Yeah mother$&*er here it is! (Kid rock pulls out a bottle of 151 pours it all over the concierge and lights him on fire with a zippo, he then kicks him in the balls, twice)
Kid Rock disease then decides to slam dance all over hotel lung, have syphilitic unprotected sex with the entire staff, break every window, burn the furniture, drink all the booze at the bar, and urinate on your wife.
Doctor Schempler writes me an additional prescription for a stronger anti-biotic and dates it for the day after the useless medication would run its course. The reason the first medicine wouldn’t work is because with National Japanese Healthcare he’s forced to prescribe a Japanese dosage.
Afterwards I decided I was going to get a hair cut, and pamper myself. So I took a half hour walk around the hotel, where the scissored establishments congregate at a questionable level, and spotted a place called the Rose Lounge. My real goal was to find a place that looked like a trendy young gay man could make me look appealing. The hairstyles in Japan are probably the best I’ve ever seen, it’s one of the few aspects of Japanese culture that have bounded far ahead of their western counterparts. I showed up and signed my name in the customer book, and made hand motions of scissors to my head and they seemed to get the idea. The woman behind the counter then dropped two 3 inch thick books in front of me, filled with nothing but men’s hairstyles. I picked a slightly more Japanesey spiked haircut, my options were fairly limited by the length of my hair. She then barraged me with a series of questions.
Her: Do you want shampoo?
Me: Hai (yeah)
Her: And a shave?
Me: Hai (yes)
Her: And a massage?
Me: Onegeishimasu (&%$ yeah!)
At this point I was wondering what else they could possible throw in. Is there a backroom with a naked woman waiting for me? Or maybe you could feed me pureed bacon cheeseburgers intravenously while I was getting my haircut.
I was only slightly disappointed when I got an attractive Japanese girl instead of a flamboyant red haired haircutting machine. When they give you a shampoo they don’t mess around either, she was massaging my scalp with shampoo for a good 20 minutes. It was bliss. But men I will tell you this, drop a little knowledge on you, never let a bitch shave your face. She didn’t so much butcher my skin as miss a lot, she’s not a man, she doesn’t know what she’s doing. A woman will never ask you to shave her legs, so don’t expect them to give you a close straight razor shave. After the shave came the massage, while hot towels were draped on my neck or my face. I don’t remember much of the massage because I think my brain shut down for a half hour from pleasure being set to 11.
Then came the haircut, which looked awesome, I was really happy with the way it came out. Then…she washed my hair again, which was nice, but I left the establishment without any gel, just flat, shorter hair. I’ve never been able to recreate the look in the shop again with my own gel. I don’t really get it, but seeing as I don’t speak any Japanese and was able to get a good haircut and pampered in a salon for a couple hours borders on amazing.
I returned to the hotel a half hour late for our rendezvous, but it wasn’t much of a problem since they were both sleeping. We hadn’t slept all that much considering that we came home two hours after dawn the night before.
We had heard there was a lot of good shopping in Fukuoka, and that sounded like a good cultural wasteland to spend some time in. I’m sure there are shrines and museums and a bevy of quality cultural offerings, but that’s not what this vacation was about. So we went to the…mall.
Malls are laid out a little differently here, none of the stores are separated by walls, so much as by invisible boundaries of the wares offered seamlessly shifting in the next aisle, their could be a moo-moo shop four feet from the gap let’s say, and the only way you’d know you walked into a new store was by realizing that the gap does not in fact offer moo-moos…yet. There was the obligatory overpriced head shop, next to the obligatory over-priced west coast obsessed tee-shirt shop, next to the obligatory orgy of Hello Kitty sex toys, and the obligatory Mcdonalds. Malls are worthless everywhere.
We were treated to a free show however. And with the picture to accompany the description you can feel like you were there. As we strolled into the “hip” mall, on the ground floor in front of us, a stage rose from the concrete, a throng of shoppers congregated and two very smartly dressed Japanese men wooed and crooned to the crowd.
Essentially, they were a two man Jap-Street Boyz, singing songs in very poor English accents, and the crowd was eating it up. Not only that, but they were wearing sunglasses, indoors, in Japan. The only Japanese that wear sunglasses are the mafia (Yakuza). Since I have a healthy fear of the Yakuza, and had no such fear emanating from these two guys, my assumption is they were not in fact Yakuza Karaoke superstars. But wearing sunglasses did make them bad-asses. In fact these guys were basically the Japanese bad-ass equivalent of James Dean cauterizing a stab wound with bootlegged moonshine while speeding drunkenly down the wrong side of a highway tossing dead hookers out of his stolen convertible and running over handicapped children while waving his middle finger at the cops. An activity James Dean would refer to as “Wednesday night.”
After we left the mall El Charro and El angel solo were fiending for a mocha, or a latte or a frapuchino or something…I’m not a coffee drinker so it’s not my area of expertise. So we decided to play one of our favorite games in Japan, which is to randomly question people on the street on the whereabouts of some extremely American place of business by adding a “u” to the end of the name. Let me explain: in Japanese almost all nouns end with a vowel sound, so they have a lot of trouble with English words that end on a low consonant. In fact there are a lot of words that they will not understand if you pronounce them without a vowel sound at the end. So we would stand on a street corner, and try to pick out the perfect passerby to target. Generally we single out people who look very hip, people who by Japanese standards radiate “cool.” So we found one young couple and I approached them:
Me: Sumemasen (excuse me, I’m sorry, thankyou – this word has about 12 different meanings)
Me: (Pointing in random directions) Starbucsu? (Starbucs)
The first look on their face is usually the most entertaining part of the interaction. The immediate change to the pose of Rodan’s thinker is usually the second stage reaction. The inevitable arguing with the girlfriend about where it is usually ensues. And then finally being a culture of calculus and physics, the string of directions would most likely be incomprehensible even if I spoke Japanese.
Japanese couple: (pointing) Masugi ichi hidari masugi mige roku masugi nana
Translation: Consider this area as a trapezoid, you need to follow the hypotenuse 1 block, then going toward the southeast corner of the trapezoid make a left, go three blocks, the starbucs will be floating 6 feet above the ground operating in a separate membrane of space time in which you will have to ride a symmetrical string of light particles through a rift in the membrane, once you get to the starbucs though, it will be slightly cheaper than our terrestrial coffee.
Me: Wakata (I understand)
Me: Arrigato Gozeimosshta (thanks!)
It might not be that funny to the folks at home, but El Charro has compared it to a Mexican guy in LA walking up to a couple of prototypical Americans (overweight and brainless most likely) and asking, “Tacos?” Or maybe a Pakistani man walking up to you in the middle of Times Square and asking, “Taxi?”
You know what the hell with you, it’s funny because I say it is damn it.
After the mocha frenzy ended we wandered the streets like the travelers we are. Travelers don’t get lost, they just never know where they are. During the course of our slow meander during this, the year of the Wheat, on it’s most holy day, my birthday, May 2nd, I was getting pissy. I was getting pissy because I hadn’t eaten anything today and I was almost 6 PM. As usual we went through the motions of disagreeing, I wanted to eat anything that wasn’t moving too fast for me to put in my mouth, and they wanted “food.” After a series of restaurants with no English or picture menu, I basically threw a tantrum, pulled the birthday card and ushered us into a restaurant that had a few pictures scattered around Japanese calligraphy that looked enticing. We asked them for an English or picture menu and they could not comply, so I just started pointing at everything on the menu that had a picture and looked good.
Then either the owner or a cook came over to our table with a printout 6 pages long, it was essentially a catalogue of every single Japanese food with an English translation next to eat. It wasn’t the restaurant’s official menu so most of it wasn’t actually cooked there, but we ordered a solid three pages worth of food.
The only decision we really had to make was whether to begin drinking at the restaurant at 6, knowing full well it would be 12 hours before we went home, and our check out was abysmally early, or whether to just get a coke and ease into the drinking when we get back to Oya Fukadori. What kind of hotel kicks its guests out at 11 AM anyway?
Two beers and two whiskey and coke’s later, after we finished a few drinking games at the table, we got up and paid our massive tab. The night had officially begun.
Well Tuesday began much like every other blog entry thus far, at around the crack of noon. We staggered around our two hotel rooms for a little while, and went through the morning routine of wondering if we should eat or vomit to make ourselves feel whole again. I felt the urge to get started on anti-biotics sooner than later, because we all know exactly what lies in store for me the rest of the week. So El Charro and El angel solo decided to go to some museum or art gallery or park or other non-alcoholic pursuit, and I would go to the international medical clinic seeking drugs. We were set to meet up around 3:30 back at the hotel.
I got on the subway, and wandered around for about ten minutes before I found the clinic. Being an international clinic the staff spoke English, which made things easier, I gave them my alien card (lovingly referred to as the gaijin card) and my Japanese National Healthcare card, and filled out some forms. I waited no more than ten minutes before I was called into the office of my boy, Doc Schempler.
Doctor Schempler is a native Dutchman. Every European without exception can be placed into two categories “Cool as shit” or “Goofy as shit.” These two groups have obviously splintered into many sub-categories for both persuasions, but the good doctor would without question fall into the “Goofy as shit” category. The first indicator is that his English accent is two to three octaves higher that it should be for a person of their build, secondly they can’t help but smile like the handicapped kid who just figured out he can get in front of the line for all the rides in Disneyworld. Their wardrobe is also almost always decidedly two decades too old for any given social or professional situation.
The diagnoses took all of 30 seconds, I’m coughing up green mucus, I have no headache, no fever, no nausea, or diarrhea. I have nasal congestion and a cough. He writes a prescription for anti-biotics, and then enlightens me with a 15 minute diatribe about the sorry state of Japanese healthcare.
Almost all anti-biotics have been tested and developed in the Western World. There is an unbelievable amount of documentation as to the correct dosage, length of use, and situations in which they are to be prescribed. Japanese doctors look at all of this information and then proceed to immediately cut the dosage in half, so that it’s rarely ever effective. That is on the rare occasion that they prescribe Western medicines. There is one anti-biotic that has been developed in Japan, and since the doctors tend to be very patriotic, they have over-prescribed said medicine to the point where 60 percent of infectious bacteria simply laugh at it like a hall monitor and proceed to smoke in the bathroom of your alveoli. The other 40 percent, tip-toe around it, turn the corner and gang bang your lung cells.
So this particular anti-biotic is more like the concierge at hotel lung than the germ slaying robo-cop it’s supposed to be. We could consider the bacteria a guest in Hotel Lung, a really bad guest, like a redneck with much more money than sense. We could call the disease Kid Rock, let’s say, and the typical interaction between Kid Rock disease and the Japanese concierge anti-biotic at the front desk might go something like this.
KR: (Arriving in his pimped out Ford F-150, his mulleted posse jumping out of the cab) Whoooo! I am gonna @#$! this place up! (Some Jack Daniels spills out of the open bottle in his hand onto the desk)
Anti-Biotic: Sir, do you have a reservation?
KR: Yeah mother$&*er here it is! (Kid rock pulls out a bottle of 151 pours it all over the concierge and lights him on fire with a zippo, he then kicks him in the balls, twice)
Kid Rock disease then decides to slam dance all over hotel lung, have syphilitic unprotected sex with the entire staff, break every window, burn the furniture, drink all the booze at the bar, and urinate on your wife.
Doctor Schempler writes me an additional prescription for a stronger anti-biotic and dates it for the day after the useless medication would run its course. The reason the first medicine wouldn’t work is because with National Japanese Healthcare he’s forced to prescribe a Japanese dosage.
Afterwards I decided I was going to get a hair cut, and pamper myself. So I took a half hour walk around the hotel, where the scissored establishments congregate at a questionable level, and spotted a place called the Rose Lounge. My real goal was to find a place that looked like a trendy young gay man could make me look appealing. The hairstyles in Japan are probably the best I’ve ever seen, it’s one of the few aspects of Japanese culture that have bounded far ahead of their western counterparts. I showed up and signed my name in the customer book, and made hand motions of scissors to my head and they seemed to get the idea. The woman behind the counter then dropped two 3 inch thick books in front of me, filled with nothing but men’s hairstyles. I picked a slightly more Japanesey spiked haircut, my options were fairly limited by the length of my hair. She then barraged me with a series of questions.
Her: Do you want shampoo?
Me: Hai (yeah)
Her: And a shave?
Me: Hai (yes)
Her: And a massage?
Me: Onegeishimasu (&%$ yeah!)
At this point I was wondering what else they could possible throw in. Is there a backroom with a naked woman waiting for me? Or maybe you could feed me pureed bacon cheeseburgers intravenously while I was getting my haircut.
I was only slightly disappointed when I got an attractive Japanese girl instead of a flamboyant red haired haircutting machine. When they give you a shampoo they don’t mess around either, she was massaging my scalp with shampoo for a good 20 minutes. It was bliss. But men I will tell you this, drop a little knowledge on you, never let a bitch shave your face. She didn’t so much butcher my skin as miss a lot, she’s not a man, she doesn’t know what she’s doing. A woman will never ask you to shave her legs, so don’t expect them to give you a close straight razor shave. After the shave came the massage, while hot towels were draped on my neck or my face. I don’t remember much of the massage because I think my brain shut down for a half hour from pleasure being set to 11.
Then came the haircut, which looked awesome, I was really happy with the way it came out. Then…she washed my hair again, which was nice, but I left the establishment without any gel, just flat, shorter hair. I’ve never been able to recreate the look in the shop again with my own gel. I don’t really get it, but seeing as I don’t speak any Japanese and was able to get a good haircut and pampered in a salon for a couple hours borders on amazing.
I returned to the hotel a half hour late for our rendezvous, but it wasn’t much of a problem since they were both sleeping. We hadn’t slept all that much considering that we came home two hours after dawn the night before.
We had heard there was a lot of good shopping in Fukuoka, and that sounded like a good cultural wasteland to spend some time in. I’m sure there are shrines and museums and a bevy of quality cultural offerings, but that’s not what this vacation was about. So we went to the…mall.
Malls are laid out a little differently here, none of the stores are separated by walls, so much as by invisible boundaries of the wares offered seamlessly shifting in the next aisle, their could be a moo-moo shop four feet from the gap let’s say, and the only way you’d know you walked into a new store was by realizing that the gap does not in fact offer moo-moos…yet. There was the obligatory overpriced head shop, next to the obligatory over-priced west coast obsessed tee-shirt shop, next to the obligatory orgy of Hello Kitty sex toys, and the obligatory Mcdonalds. Malls are worthless everywhere.
We were treated to a free show however. And with the picture to accompany the description you can feel like you were there. As we strolled into the “hip” mall, on the ground floor in front of us, a stage rose from the concrete, a throng of shoppers congregated and two very smartly dressed Japanese men wooed and crooned to the crowd.
Essentially, they were a two man Jap-Street Boyz, singing songs in very poor English accents, and the crowd was eating it up. Not only that, but they were wearing sunglasses, indoors, in Japan. The only Japanese that wear sunglasses are the mafia (Yakuza). Since I have a healthy fear of the Yakuza, and had no such fear emanating from these two guys, my assumption is they were not in fact Yakuza Karaoke superstars. But wearing sunglasses did make them bad-asses. In fact these guys were basically the Japanese bad-ass equivalent of James Dean cauterizing a stab wound with bootlegged moonshine while speeding drunkenly down the wrong side of a highway tossing dead hookers out of his stolen convertible and running over handicapped children while waving his middle finger at the cops. An activity James Dean would refer to as “Wednesday night.” After we left the mall El Charro and El angel solo were fiending for a mocha, or a latte or a frapuchino or something…I’m not a coffee drinker so it’s not my area of expertise. So we decided to play one of our favorite games in Japan, which is to randomly question people on the street on the whereabouts of some extremely American place of business by adding a “u” to the end of the name. Let me explain: in Japanese almost all nouns end with a vowel sound, so they have a lot of trouble with English words that end on a low consonant. In fact there are a lot of words that they will not understand if you pronounce them without a vowel sound at the end. So we would stand on a street corner, and try to pick out the perfect passerby to target. Generally we single out people who look very hip, people who by Japanese standards radiate “cool.” So we found one young couple and I approached them:
Me: Sumemasen (excuse me, I’m sorry, thankyou – this word has about 12 different meanings)
Me: (Pointing in random directions) Starbucsu? (Starbucs)
The first look on their face is usually the most entertaining part of the interaction. The immediate change to the pose of Rodan’s thinker is usually the second stage reaction. The inevitable arguing with the girlfriend about where it is usually ensues. And then finally being a culture of calculus and physics, the string of directions would most likely be incomprehensible even if I spoke Japanese.
Japanese couple: (pointing) Masugi ichi hidari masugi mige roku masugi nana
Translation: Consider this area as a trapezoid, you need to follow the hypotenuse 1 block, then going toward the southeast corner of the trapezoid make a left, go three blocks, the starbucs will be floating 6 feet above the ground operating in a separate membrane of space time in which you will have to ride a symmetrical string of light particles through a rift in the membrane, once you get to the starbucs though, it will be slightly cheaper than our terrestrial coffee.
Me: Wakata (I understand)
Me: Arrigato Gozeimosshta (thanks!)
It might not be that funny to the folks at home, but El Charro has compared it to a Mexican guy in LA walking up to a couple of prototypical Americans (overweight and brainless most likely) and asking, “Tacos?” Or maybe a Pakistani man walking up to you in the middle of Times Square and asking, “Taxi?”
You know what the hell with you, it’s funny because I say it is damn it.
After the mocha frenzy ended we wandered the streets like the travelers we are. Travelers don’t get lost, they just never know where they are. During the course of our slow meander during this, the year of the Wheat, on it’s most holy day, my birthday, May 2nd, I was getting pissy. I was getting pissy because I hadn’t eaten anything today and I was almost 6 PM. As usual we went through the motions of disagreeing, I wanted to eat anything that wasn’t moving too fast for me to put in my mouth, and they wanted “food.” After a series of restaurants with no English or picture menu, I basically threw a tantrum, pulled the birthday card and ushered us into a restaurant that had a few pictures scattered around Japanese calligraphy that looked enticing. We asked them for an English or picture menu and they could not comply, so I just started pointing at everything on the menu that had a picture and looked good.
Then either the owner or a cook came over to our table with a printout 6 pages long, it was essentially a catalogue of every single Japanese food with an English translation next to eat. It wasn’t the restaurant’s official menu so most of it wasn’t actually cooked there, but we ordered a solid three pages worth of food.
The only decision we really had to make was whether to begin drinking at the restaurant at 6, knowing full well it would be 12 hours before we went home, and our check out was abysmally early, or whether to just get a coke and ease into the drinking when we get back to Oya Fukadori. What kind of hotel kicks its guests out at 11 AM anyway?
Two beers and two whiskey and coke’s later, after we finished a few drinking games at the table, we got up and paid our massive tab. The night had officially begun.
posted by Just1Wheat at
11:29 PM
