Prelude to a Binge
A friend from work back in New York was getting married over my summer vacation, in Brazil. As soon as I got the invitation I scrambled like a madman to find an affordable flight to Sao Paulo but unfortunately I’m on the exact other corner of the planet. The only flights within my price range were 500 dollars more than I could afford anyway, and had a flight time of about 30 hours each way, with multiple stops. So once I had officially given up on Brazilian bride’s maids…sigh…I made a last minute effort to secure a reasonable vacation here in Japan.
I brought Daphney over and we secured a hotel for ourselves for two nights in Osaka. I will tell anyone who comes to Japan, never to use the internet to get hotel reservations, it serves no purpose. All you have to do in Japan is call the hotel and make a reservation, and in most big cities they’ll have an English speaker on staff. You don’t even need to give them a credit card number, let alone pay some kind of deposit.
A day later I sat alone in my apartment, scouring every Youth Hostel website the internet had to offer looking for a hostel in Tokyo during one of the three busiest tourist weeks in the year, 3 days before I would arrive. After about two hours I hadn’t found anything. However, I had already purchased a 400$ Shinkansen (bullet train) ticket to Tokyo, passing through Osaka for the two days we would stay there. I would be going to Tokyo solo, and Daphney had to work for those days anyway.
Eventually I found a hostel for 25 bucks a night for 3 out of the 4 nights I needed, so I called them up. The girl at the desk spoke very good English, and had a very cute name which has already eluded me because she turned out to be rather ghastly, and was summarily erased from the important part of the memory which stores information about potential mates. So I made a reservation for the 12th, 13th, and 15th of August. I asked if the hostel could help me find accommodation for the remaining night, and she said they could, and put me to the top of the list for a room, if there were any cancellations. I hung up satisfied and called back El Charro, who had invited me out to dinner with himself and some other gaijin at The Hat’s place.
El Charro, his girlfriend: a lovely girl you won’t have much chance to hear about through this blog, due to some unfortunate circumstances, who we’ll call Madam President, for some notorious games of Asshole; and El Charro’s best friend from San Francisco, who we’ll call Shawshank, because he’s already escaped from prison, and El Charro’s brother Princess Jesus, who was here for vacation all jumbled their way through my house and demanded a ride. (Nobody tell the AP style guide about this last “sentence”)
Having told them previously I would not be going anywhere until I found accommodation in Tokyo, I reversed my decision to stay away and acquiesced, even going so far as to offer my services as DD for the evening. We had food and plenty of booze to bring to The Hat’s which was a solid 20 minute walk from my apartment, so we loaded up into Yama and drove a little out of the way to a grocery store where we knew we could park. This will be important later, remember that the car is approximately 4 kilometers from my apartment.
We hike a few minutes to The Hat’s place, and settle down as the salad is being mixed and the pasta is almost ready. We were naturally a little over a half hour late. We’re pretty much late for every meeting or gathering outside of work in Japan. We were joined by the other American teacher, who we’ll call Zen, and the new French teacher, Champagne. We ate, and everyone else drank, and general frivolity was the order of the evening. Madam President was leaving the country soon, so she wanted to make the most of the night, and as soon as they showed a willingness to take a cab home, I began catching up, released from my DD burden. Beer cans were stacked, and sake glasses rang for the next hour or so, and the divine saucing ended. El Angel Solo, also knowing we wouldn’t have too many more opportunities together decided Karaoke was in order.
The only member of the crew steadfastly against our present course of action was El Charro, who through repeated drunken episodes and multiple sessions of passing out on the floor had decided paying exorbitant amounts to hang out with his friends was no longer worth his trouble, he’d been Karaoke’d out. He threatened to charge straight home by himself in a taxi rather than go to a fun filled drunken sing along. While the rest of the group was trying to cheer him into it, I began trying on hats, and some hilarious photos resulted on somebody’s camera, somewhere in Japan.
Eventually most of us moved on down the street, having made a compromise of first going to Yatai (outdoor ramen and beer tent) and then going to Karaoke. Once we got to Yatai we met El Jesus Aviendo and his gorgeous wife Whacko. Once we got to Yatai though, nothing really happened, everybody was still throwing hissy-fits and mulling around with nobody committing to either destination. I chased some girls down the street to pass the time, my inability to speak coherent Japanese or English may have been the cause of their not so subtle rebuttals.
Eventually most of the group strolled into Karaoke, and proceeded to a room upstairs. We settled into the usual grooves, and ordered a few drinks, although I wasn’t set to kill tonight, only stun. The typical playlist had morphed slightly and some new favorites were emerging into the lexicon. These included: Rock the Casbah, Mr. Roboto, Bulls on Parade, Bullet with Butterfly Wings, Plush, and No Rain respectively.
The two hours passed without much of a fuss, there were those of the group that were past the sanity point, while I was held pretty much in check for the evening, which is ironic given tomorrow’s mishap. We exited Karaoke, and El Angel Solo and Madam President escaped into their little Husseinesque spider-hole under the stairwell, which they had dubbed their “clubhouse.” The funny thing is that one side of the clubhouse is totally exposed to the windows facing the street, so it wasn’t so much a private sanctuary as a kind of gaijin zoo cage. Both girls being incessantly drunk started banging on the window as I approached. Madam President attempted to press her previously covered breasts provocatively against the window and blatantly exposed pretty much both entire breasts con nipple to the passersby.
The passersby included an old Japanese man who upon seeing an exposed breast had the curious reaction of crossing his arms and yelling “Dama!” (no) Why he reacted this way I’m not entirely sure, half the town pays exorbitant amounts to watch Russian strippers with less adequate mammaries a block away. It is to be expected that I am the only one with any memory of this incident happening in the group. However, I am the only member of the group publishing to the rest of humanity, or at least my parents who check the blog daily. (Thanks for the hits mom)
I walked home after having maybe 6 or 7 drinks over the course of about the same amount of hours, I was by no means drunk, or incapacitated. So knowing I had to be at school around 11:30, I set my alarm for 10:30 AM and fell into a fitful slumber.
I woke up to the sound of someone opening the door and walking into my apartment, I jumped up in a spasm wearing only boxers and saw the husband of my boss charging into the apartment. He asked me if he knew if I had a class in a half hour, I shook my head and ran over to the wall above my desk, where I had clearly marked the class on my calendar and had a large note 3 inches above my computer screen reminding me of the extra kindergarten class I was supposed to teach in a half hour. I apologized for again having him have to come over to my apartment after I’d screwed up and he quickly left, seeing as I was visibly upset, and wearing only boxers.
In the euphoria of the day before an amazing vacation to two entirely new cities, and the success in staking out a claim at a cheap hostel in Tokyo last night, I hadn’t bothered to once look up at my wall to notice the giant note that I was supposed to teach an irregularly scheduled kindergarten class today. My boss had no doubt called to remind me, but ironically in following a memo posted at the school a few days earlier my phone was on “manner mode” and thus rang in silence while she called and left three messages in the preceeding half hour.
I quickly got dressed, brushed my teeth, and gargled with half of gallon of Listerine to get rid of any lingering alcohol stench on my breath, and peacefully, quietly walked out to my parking space to drive to the kindergarten. Now, do you remember where I parked my car last night? That’s right, 4 kilometers away. The stream of expletives I unleashed at that moment in time was Homeric in it’s prolific length. Birds and cicadas were silenced and flew to a new location, traffic came to a halt, and mothers covered their children’s ears.
I went into a dead sprint. I sprinted into town, tried to flag down 4 cabs unsuccessfully and continued sprinting, in the 90% humidity, and the 100 degree heat. I sprinted 4 kilometers in a little less than 15 minutes. I was going on pure fuck-up pride/shame adrenaline at that point. I ran into the supermarket the car was parked at, grabbed a 100 Yen bottle of water and dropped the hundred yen on the counter without stopping for the woman to even scan it.
I then blasted the a/c in the car while I chugged the water to make up for the massive amounts of sweat coating my entire body. I had to stop into the office to pick up my kindergarten supplies, I strolled in looking like I literally had just taken my first step out of the shower towards a towel. I stopped to profusely apologize to my boss and promise her she could chide me on the way back from class.
I arrived something like 20 minutes late to the class, and bullshitted three separate twenty minute lessons. It realistically made no difference to either the kids, or the teachers at the school, but in Japan it does look pretty bad. Sometime in the next few months we will get into why I didn’t really have anymore room to screw up with forgetting or being late or missing classes.
When I got back to the office, the boss was disappointed but understanding when I explained that after having 3 drinks (yeah, maybe she believed that) that I would have been perfectly legal and capable of driving the car home, but that I respected Japanese laws (zero tolerance, 1 beer = 300,000 yen fine) and that because Madam President was going home I wanted to share a drink with her and send her off in a good fashion, but admitted it was 100% my fault for forgetting the class. She charged me 3,000 Yen for being late to buy sweets for the teachers to apologize during the next class. This is ridiculous and exorbitant considering that I only make 2,500 Yen and hour for teaching, but vacation started tomorrow and I didn’t mind throwing her a bone once and a while, so she could maintain her ideas that she had rigid control measures over all of her employees.
The next day I went to Osaka, and did not come back to my hotel before dawn for 7 straight nights of going out. Stay tuned blog monkeys.
Wheat Out
I brought Daphney over and we secured a hotel for ourselves for two nights in Osaka. I will tell anyone who comes to Japan, never to use the internet to get hotel reservations, it serves no purpose. All you have to do in Japan is call the hotel and make a reservation, and in most big cities they’ll have an English speaker on staff. You don’t even need to give them a credit card number, let alone pay some kind of deposit.
A day later I sat alone in my apartment, scouring every Youth Hostel website the internet had to offer looking for a hostel in Tokyo during one of the three busiest tourist weeks in the year, 3 days before I would arrive. After about two hours I hadn’t found anything. However, I had already purchased a 400$ Shinkansen (bullet train) ticket to Tokyo, passing through Osaka for the two days we would stay there. I would be going to Tokyo solo, and Daphney had to work for those days anyway.
Eventually I found a hostel for 25 bucks a night for 3 out of the 4 nights I needed, so I called them up. The girl at the desk spoke very good English, and had a very cute name which has already eluded me because she turned out to be rather ghastly, and was summarily erased from the important part of the memory which stores information about potential mates. So I made a reservation for the 12th, 13th, and 15th of August. I asked if the hostel could help me find accommodation for the remaining night, and she said they could, and put me to the top of the list for a room, if there were any cancellations. I hung up satisfied and called back El Charro, who had invited me out to dinner with himself and some other gaijin at The Hat’s place.
El Charro, his girlfriend: a lovely girl you won’t have much chance to hear about through this blog, due to some unfortunate circumstances, who we’ll call Madam President, for some notorious games of Asshole; and El Charro’s best friend from San Francisco, who we’ll call Shawshank, because he’s already escaped from prison, and El Charro’s brother Princess Jesus, who was here for vacation all jumbled their way through my house and demanded a ride. (Nobody tell the AP style guide about this last “sentence”)
Having told them previously I would not be going anywhere until I found accommodation in Tokyo, I reversed my decision to stay away and acquiesced, even going so far as to offer my services as DD for the evening. We had food and plenty of booze to bring to The Hat’s which was a solid 20 minute walk from my apartment, so we loaded up into Yama and drove a little out of the way to a grocery store where we knew we could park. This will be important later, remember that the car is approximately 4 kilometers from my apartment.
We hike a few minutes to The Hat’s place, and settle down as the salad is being mixed and the pasta is almost ready. We were naturally a little over a half hour late. We’re pretty much late for every meeting or gathering outside of work in Japan. We were joined by the other American teacher, who we’ll call Zen, and the new French teacher, Champagne. We ate, and everyone else drank, and general frivolity was the order of the evening. Madam President was leaving the country soon, so she wanted to make the most of the night, and as soon as they showed a willingness to take a cab home, I began catching up, released from my DD burden. Beer cans were stacked, and sake glasses rang for the next hour or so, and the divine saucing ended. El Angel Solo, also knowing we wouldn’t have too many more opportunities together decided Karaoke was in order.
The only member of the crew steadfastly against our present course of action was El Charro, who through repeated drunken episodes and multiple sessions of passing out on the floor had decided paying exorbitant amounts to hang out with his friends was no longer worth his trouble, he’d been Karaoke’d out. He threatened to charge straight home by himself in a taxi rather than go to a fun filled drunken sing along. While the rest of the group was trying to cheer him into it, I began trying on hats, and some hilarious photos resulted on somebody’s camera, somewhere in Japan.
Eventually most of us moved on down the street, having made a compromise of first going to Yatai (outdoor ramen and beer tent) and then going to Karaoke. Once we got to Yatai we met El Jesus Aviendo and his gorgeous wife Whacko. Once we got to Yatai though, nothing really happened, everybody was still throwing hissy-fits and mulling around with nobody committing to either destination. I chased some girls down the street to pass the time, my inability to speak coherent Japanese or English may have been the cause of their not so subtle rebuttals.
Eventually most of the group strolled into Karaoke, and proceeded to a room upstairs. We settled into the usual grooves, and ordered a few drinks, although I wasn’t set to kill tonight, only stun. The typical playlist had morphed slightly and some new favorites were emerging into the lexicon. These included: Rock the Casbah, Mr. Roboto, Bulls on Parade, Bullet with Butterfly Wings, Plush, and No Rain respectively.
The two hours passed without much of a fuss, there were those of the group that were past the sanity point, while I was held pretty much in check for the evening, which is ironic given tomorrow’s mishap. We exited Karaoke, and El Angel Solo and Madam President escaped into their little Husseinesque spider-hole under the stairwell, which they had dubbed their “clubhouse.” The funny thing is that one side of the clubhouse is totally exposed to the windows facing the street, so it wasn’t so much a private sanctuary as a kind of gaijin zoo cage. Both girls being incessantly drunk started banging on the window as I approached. Madam President attempted to press her previously covered breasts provocatively against the window and blatantly exposed pretty much both entire breasts con nipple to the passersby.
The passersby included an old Japanese man who upon seeing an exposed breast had the curious reaction of crossing his arms and yelling “Dama!” (no) Why he reacted this way I’m not entirely sure, half the town pays exorbitant amounts to watch Russian strippers with less adequate mammaries a block away. It is to be expected that I am the only one with any memory of this incident happening in the group. However, I am the only member of the group publishing to the rest of humanity, or at least my parents who check the blog daily. (Thanks for the hits mom)
I walked home after having maybe 6 or 7 drinks over the course of about the same amount of hours, I was by no means drunk, or incapacitated. So knowing I had to be at school around 11:30, I set my alarm for 10:30 AM and fell into a fitful slumber.
I woke up to the sound of someone opening the door and walking into my apartment, I jumped up in a spasm wearing only boxers and saw the husband of my boss charging into the apartment. He asked me if he knew if I had a class in a half hour, I shook my head and ran over to the wall above my desk, where I had clearly marked the class on my calendar and had a large note 3 inches above my computer screen reminding me of the extra kindergarten class I was supposed to teach in a half hour. I apologized for again having him have to come over to my apartment after I’d screwed up and he quickly left, seeing as I was visibly upset, and wearing only boxers.
In the euphoria of the day before an amazing vacation to two entirely new cities, and the success in staking out a claim at a cheap hostel in Tokyo last night, I hadn’t bothered to once look up at my wall to notice the giant note that I was supposed to teach an irregularly scheduled kindergarten class today. My boss had no doubt called to remind me, but ironically in following a memo posted at the school a few days earlier my phone was on “manner mode” and thus rang in silence while she called and left three messages in the preceeding half hour.
I quickly got dressed, brushed my teeth, and gargled with half of gallon of Listerine to get rid of any lingering alcohol stench on my breath, and peacefully, quietly walked out to my parking space to drive to the kindergarten. Now, do you remember where I parked my car last night? That’s right, 4 kilometers away. The stream of expletives I unleashed at that moment in time was Homeric in it’s prolific length. Birds and cicadas were silenced and flew to a new location, traffic came to a halt, and mothers covered their children’s ears.
I went into a dead sprint. I sprinted into town, tried to flag down 4 cabs unsuccessfully and continued sprinting, in the 90% humidity, and the 100 degree heat. I sprinted 4 kilometers in a little less than 15 minutes. I was going on pure fuck-up pride/shame adrenaline at that point. I ran into the supermarket the car was parked at, grabbed a 100 Yen bottle of water and dropped the hundred yen on the counter without stopping for the woman to even scan it.
I then blasted the a/c in the car while I chugged the water to make up for the massive amounts of sweat coating my entire body. I had to stop into the office to pick up my kindergarten supplies, I strolled in looking like I literally had just taken my first step out of the shower towards a towel. I stopped to profusely apologize to my boss and promise her she could chide me on the way back from class.
I arrived something like 20 minutes late to the class, and bullshitted three separate twenty minute lessons. It realistically made no difference to either the kids, or the teachers at the school, but in Japan it does look pretty bad. Sometime in the next few months we will get into why I didn’t really have anymore room to screw up with forgetting or being late or missing classes.
When I got back to the office, the boss was disappointed but understanding when I explained that after having 3 drinks (yeah, maybe she believed that) that I would have been perfectly legal and capable of driving the car home, but that I respected Japanese laws (zero tolerance, 1 beer = 300,000 yen fine) and that because Madam President was going home I wanted to share a drink with her and send her off in a good fashion, but admitted it was 100% my fault for forgetting the class. She charged me 3,000 Yen for being late to buy sweets for the teachers to apologize during the next class. This is ridiculous and exorbitant considering that I only make 2,500 Yen and hour for teaching, but vacation started tomorrow and I didn’t mind throwing her a bone once and a while, so she could maintain her ideas that she had rigid control measures over all of her employees.
The next day I went to Osaka, and did not come back to my hotel before dawn for 7 straight nights of going out. Stay tuned blog monkeys.
Wheat Out
posted by Just1Wheat at
10:14 AM
