Sense and Senseibility

Blood in the rearview mirror

2006-10-16T07:59:00.000-07:00

Ok, ok ok. The last post was a cop-out, I'll admit it. I just pasted an old file that happened to be on my computer. I promise though new stuff is coming, and it's quite excellent. Before I break off an another massive, I need to take wednesday off to finish this story entry, I will leave you with a small anecdote about my drive to work today.

The day started at about 2 when I woke up on El Charro's couch, for reasons that will be explained in one or two entries, and walked down the Serene Path of Serenity, to the Mysterious Park of Mystery, eventually wandering back into my apartment. I quickly showered, got dressed, ate some left over patato salad, and got in my car to go to work.

When I leave my apartment for the spectacularly annoying main drag to the office, Route 2, I have to enter the flow of traffic in the wrong direction, which means everyday I have to bust a U-ey at the same spot. This spot is about 30 to 35 feet long, paralell to the highway, and maybe a little over a carlength wide. As I approach U-town, there is already one car waiting to make the turn, I pull up next to it. Immediately following me, an old man in a tiny car pulls up trying to turn in the opposite direction, blocking my view and the flow of traffic, then a woman in a huge mini-van pulls up next to the old guy looking to turn in the same direction. Then another huge van pulls up next to me going in the same direction I'm going in. What we have now is this little u-turn playground is a five vehicle mexican standoff, that ensured that absolutely nobody had a clear view of the two land highway they are trying to pull into. This is obviously the fault of women and old people, who upon seeing cars already waiting should have opted to wait another 30 god damn seconds, and turned around at the next traffic light. The day is not beginning well, after 3 to 5 minutes of sitting there, I went, it didn't seem like anyone was coming, the road felt clear.

Anyway, I got going, and simmered down a bit, then as the highway moves into one lane I look at the car behind me. Obviously it's a police car, it's a white sedan, with big red lights on the top, and the occupants look thirsty to nail some gaijin ass. Of course we're driving on the street that everyone speeds on, even grandma, and naturally as I slow down, the cop speeds up. The cop gets right on my ass, and as I look back I notice that there is a word, an English word, written on the hood; BLOODin big red capital shiny f*$k off letters. I am officially terrified. What the hell is this, what kind of police force writes blood is huge god damn letters on the hood of their car? Is it some kind of Enrish mistake, did they mean to write...ummm...brood, or blued, or brewed? What is the deal here, are they out for blood? Did an entire Koban (police station) have their minds poisoned by Chuck Bronson movies, we're they goth police on some kind of vampire trip? I have not been this LIT (lost in translation) in quite a while. The car is beating down on me, I'm imagining that I'm seeing fangs on the uniformed men in the car, and is that radiator grill tinted red? I can't be sure.

Finally, the road turns back into two lanes, and I get my ass over to the slow lane in a heartbeat. Which is as long as it took to read the English phrase on the back of the car as it sped away. Blood Transportation Vehicle was written neatly across the back panelling, along with a picture of a green hospital cross on a blue background.

Just one of those weird moments that stick with you for a while.

Jet-Lag in memory

2006-10-13T22:24:00.000-07:00

This is kind of fun. I guess this would be my first travel story. I found it on my computer from the days in 2002, when I was planning on writing a travel book about my semester abroad. This is the story of leaving New York to go to London for a semester.

Jet-Lagged

I am not afraid to fly; in fact I always find it to be a giddy rush when a plane takes off. If you think about it, flying is nothing but riding a controlled explosion thousands of feet into the air, and then moving hundreds of miles an hour because you don’t have to compete with both gravity and friction. The whole fuselage of an airplane is built to shake and move because if it were completely rigid the forces acting on it would simply rip the plane to pieces. I always found the premise of a seatbelt on airplanes a little ridiculous, the plane is moving at a few hundred miles and hour, unless it crashes into a mountain made of marshmallows what good could a little piece of fabric possibly do? But I think what drew me to flying was the complete abandon you have to mentally embrace before boarding, you have to realize that if something happens to the plane at 30,000 feet there is absolutely nothing you the passenger can do about it. If lightning hits the engine, or a wing flops off, or the rudders stop responding, or a gremlin attacks, or the food is poisoned, or a disabled kid who needs an extra kidney and is tone deaf misses the high note in “loving you” and smashes his helmet through a window de-pressurizing the whole cabin, or any number of mechanical errors, all you can do is enjoy the most intense roller-coaster ever, just without the loop de loops. However, despite my attitudes about airplanes the flight to London would be by far the longest flight I had ever taken. But first I had to get out of the airport.

JFK international airport, one of the busiest in the world by all measures, and if it isn’t at least it feeds into the busiest city in the world, New York. New York is the behemoth of the post cold war world. It is one of the bastions of the dominance of capitalism. If the goal of creating a respectable city was to block out the sun, eliminate nature, and make every single human being it it’s lair seem insignificant, then New York City gets the nod. To most Americans New York is a city that has both incredible new-age technological and architectural achievements, and a city imbedded with all the bloody, and glorious history of America from the rise of the thirteen colonies, to the fall of the invulnerability of the superpower. New York is not an aesthetic city, however, it is frightfully intimidating, as are most of those who work within its financial district. In the city that never sleeps I guess that after nightfall the financial district is the doped up nursing home where the occupants sit in bed and stare at fuzzy television screens. The entire area is comprised only of office buildings and restaurants. Brokers like their food like they like their money, well suffice to say they like each a lot. I remember the first day I strolled into my office expecting a professional work environment fostered by the nexus of information, art, and culture of the big city, and I remember leaving the office angry at the Yankees’ general manager for blowing key trades in the off-season. “So Bill what do you think of the human cloning issue, I think It has a lot of potential especially with stem-cell research,” I would say trying to elicit a conversation and exchange ideas on the subject. To which the response would be, “Derek Jeter is a fucking pussy.” Indeed, I don’t know how I didn’t see it before, at that it was time for a lunch break.

Moving back to my flight to London, it was a sunny August day and I had decided to play it cool when making my first impressions with the 30 people I was spending the semester with, so I donned a bright yellow shirt with the face of Spongebob Squarepants dominating the front, with brown shorts to complete the ensemble. This wasn’t really so much for the fashion statement I was making but out of the shear fear of missing my plane because I had gotten lost and everyone had forgotten about me. I assumed that out of the group of thirty people a bright yellow cartoon character could not be forgotten. Hey where’d the weird kid in the Spongebob shirt go? That was really the look I was going for. Everyone else did not seem to have my foresight, and dressed as normal human beings. I suppose the first impressions were slightly awkward but we had plenty of time to make up for it. We waited to check our bags for what seemed like a few hours when suddenly we heard from somewhere above, “All passengers on flight 412 to Paris please step to the front of the line.” Now that was the bottom line, we’re in America, and we aren’t going to let those no good Frenchmen get ahead of us. But, despite our indignation JFK did not show much sympathy to our situation. Once we finally got to the counter we were pretty much given seats as far away from each other as possible, and only my friend Ryan and I were seated together, saving us hours of awkward conversation with strangers.

The good byes were not particularly teary from what I can tell, it was simply a bunch of college kids traveling slightly further than Binghamton University. To the old world, the motherland, ancestral roots, and drunken adventures. I myself looked forward to all of these things, it was a great escape from the American perspective. Not the American perspective that Europe copies, the post 1987 American perspective. I judge that for whatever emotion they felt my parents began to drink more heavily while I was away. If I lost me to Europe I know I would drink a lot more, and come to think of it that’s exactly what I did.

And with that we were on the plane without too much fuss. Some people got randomly checked but since no stereotypical Islamic men were flying they were forced to go back to the previously subscribed method of harassing Blacks and Hispanics. The plane ride seemed to go on forever, and although a few people sank their worries into alcohol I was too excited to really drink, after all I thought it would be better to at least approach this phenomenal experience sober. On the plane ride there one of the passengers had some kind of medical emergency, but unfortunately nobody asked me if I was a doctor, and I imagined myself reaching into the overhead compartment and getting that brown bag that most people use to carry bowling balls but stereotypical movie doctor’s carry professionally, and then in a calming voice approach the victim with a stethoscope swinging vigorously in front of a bright yellow smiling cartoon character, “It’s ok ma’am, I’m a child prodigy.” But unfortunately all I could do was sit back and stair blankly at the television screen.

It’s amazing what technology can do these days to keep humanity from reading. Seemingly endless tricks can be employed in almost any given situation to keep everybody from learning anything...ever. I’m not saying I don’t like to be distracted now and again from the more academic pursuits of life, but is it necessary to have 37 movie channels for a six-hour flight? During take-off and landing someone so much as sneezes wrong and a stewardess (flight attendant for those of us practicing political correctness, but if we were really politically correct they wouldn’t hire thin perky blondes and force them to wear mini-skirts while demonstrating how your god damned seat belt works) will fly toward your direction scolding you, but as soon as that baby hits cruising altitude 240 TV screens flick on immediately and Everybody Loves Raymond and Austin Powers and Jack Daniels all help to relieve the tension associated with flight.

I honestly couldn’t believe it when I overhead one of the stewardesses say the words, “we’re out of the chicken,” of course you are out of the chicken, because you idiots still offer people fish on these planes, in the decades since you started serving food on airplanes how many people have said, “oh the salmon that’s been freeze dried, vacuum packed, sucked of all flavor and nutrients, and covered with a sauce derived from curdled mayonnaise sounds delicious, I’ll have that.” Take a hint; offer beef and chicken.

Little did we know after that six-hour fiasco we had similar trials waiting for us on the island, customs and immigration. We were given three or four sheets of paper detailing the basics of our reason for travel; we were students of Binghamton University on a semester study abroad program from the month of September until mid-December. It was a pretty straight forward operation, I mean why would they ask us anything, the sheets of paper said Binghamton University right on them. I knew there would be a level of restraint needed here, that one so sardonically inclined, as me needs to employ when dealing with virtually any authority, and/or bureaucracy. So as a pasty white kid, wearing the clothes described earlier, I would have assumed that my presence in wondrous England would not be perceived as threatening. I was not here to praise the tenants of Islamic fundamentalism, I was here on an English program, that means I’m studying tyranny of the monarch, and colonial oppression, don’t these people know anything? They would ask us questions like:

“Oh, you’re a student?”

“Yes.”

How long are you studying for?

“About 3 and a half months.”

“What are you studying?”

“English.”

“What else?”

“Shakespeare, and umm there’s a class called the British experience, but I think that’s kind of a bullshit class where we just go to museums and visit parks and watch British television and stuff, but I doubt we’ll actually be in class learning anything about it, if you know what I mean, you know kind of how they consider lunch a class.”

Oh…Alright then, move along.”

Coincidentally we all made it through customs and acquired one of those airport push-carts which are required by the FAA and it’s international equivalents to have at least one wheel that can’t turn and brakes that don’t function, but after a few luggage casualties and a few well timed collisions with well-armed security officials we were met by the grandfather figure of our trip. A wizened Binghamton Professor who would be the voice of reason and experience to a gaggle of college students getting their feet wet in the currents of European culture.

As we packed out luggage onto the bus and started to get acquainted it finally dawned on me that I was actually in England. I had come to associate airports and that hassle of flying with America, and it took a while for the realization that I had landed somewhere else to settle in. The “flat” was some two hours away, and by the vague description of our living quarters all I could assume is that it would be no taller than one-floor. The bus ride progressed and as I looked out the right window of the bus to the other lanes of traffic I noticed that there were no drivers, in fact there were little girls sitting where the driver should be, and the car was passing us at near 70 miles an hour. What the hell was going on with this place? Yes, British people drive on the other side of the road, and yes they have the steering wheel on the other side of the car, but it doesn’t really hit you until your bus is passed by a speeding eight year old girl. At that point I knew, Jet Lag had set in, and I should prepare for a long ride.

Samurai Indie Rock

2006-09-07T08:12:00.000-07:00

After a busy day 1 of the vacation Daphney and I awoke at the crack of noon on Friday. We stumbled around the hotel room for a little bit, showered, and sallied forth into the afternoon. I broke with my typical traveling style of blundering into the sights worth seeing, and decided we should head to the infamous Osaka Castle. We had to take the subway to a different train line, and though I was becoming increasingly frustrated with the endless underground labyrinths of the large stations in Osaka, Daphney guided us toward the seven story white monster that loomed on the outskirts of the city.

The intense heat of the previous day had done some damage though, and everywhere my foot met my sandals yesterday was rubbed raw, so I went down to the convini (convenience store) and bought some band-aids for the sore spots which seemed to do the trick.

I’m going to bombard you with photos of the castle, which was breathtaking, until I was informed that the entire thing was fake. It had been completely razed sometime in the 19th century, and the exact exterior replica was rebuilt sometime after World War II. Defeated countries often cling to the glories of the past; see Italy or France for further details. This first, in my opinion the worst photo was taken a few hundred meters from the castle, and the second photo gives you a little better idea of the distance.

The castle itself was situated on a massive island of its own, which had in the absence of feudal lords, shoguns, serfs, and samurai become a kind of public park, complete with Japanese tourists walking around with giant clownfish hats from the movie Finding Nemo, I may never know why, but I don’t think I want to. The park was lush, and paths criss-crossed in every direction, but it wasn’t hard to head in the general vicinity of the castle, as we could see it from any angle, at every position in the park.
As we neared the castle I kept snapping pictures, it seemed to be the only actual photo worthy thing I’d seen in a while. Notice, there are no pictures of me standing bemusedly in front of the castle…tourist douches.

Then as we approached the sprawling courtyard which would have no doubt held the lifeblood of any castle’s ecosystem, blacksmiths, markets, farms, animals grazing, everything was replaced by Coca Cola vending machines and dancing Korean religious cults. God I hate religious cults. However, these misled sheeple (that’s modern leftist slang combining sheep and people, it’s very chic in collegiate circles) provided abundant entertainment. As you can see from the picture, what should be a synchronized dance to promote the lord is a mish-mash of unattractive Asians in various states of totally arrhythmic disarray. If the thriller video was made with real zombies, it would look something like this.

After chuckling heartily we made our way to the vending machine for tickets into a recreation of a castle burned down before the declaration of independence was signed. As a general rule of thumb, if you enter something you think is a fortress meant to protect people from catapults and flaming arrows (which as I write it seems like the perfect name for the next big boy band) and that castle has…an elevator, something is wrong.

All of the signs that bothered to have English translations advised us that our phony castle viewing experience would be best if we began at the top and worked our way down. What this meant was that I had to try extra hard to have a good time working my way up. The entire interior of the castle had the feel of an under funded museum, it was well laid out, but hardly aesthetically appealing to someone who has more of an interest in how people killed each other hundreds of years ago.

The first stop on the first floor was a small dark room, showing an endless loop of a video about the construction of the castle…the original castle, sans gift shops and elevators. I’d by lying if I didn’t say after a few hours of walking in the sweltering heat I wasn’t more motivated by the darkness and the air conditioning than the video. I couldn’t exactly avoid watching the giant screen in front of me though. As such, through the tiny version of the movie off to the right with English subtitles I did learn a decent amount about the castle. So for those of you reading this because you’re taking a much needed break from writing that master’s thesis about castle construction in Tokugawa era Japan, I’ll enlighten you. The physical specimen of the castle itself isn’t very remarkable, other than the fact that you can see it’s entirely more decorative and less functional than a European behemoth of the same era. What’s interesting are the stone walls and the foundations of the castle. Unlike the Europeans, or even the Egyptians that constructed massive buildings from stone, the Japanese did not strive to create walls from thick uniform blocks of limestone that sealed together. The Japanese looked for the largest, most massive stones they could find, and then crafted the other stones individually to interlock with them.

Enough of that though, let’s move on to the second floor. I don’t remember anything about the second floor…

Let’s talk about the third floor, my favorite floor. Well I’ll just show you. I actually have no intention of explaining this floor; I think I’ll let you use your imaginations for this. Suffice to say the other tourists were wildly amused. However, since it is extremely rude to laugh at a Samurai, I was forced to go on a killing spree reminiscent of the scene in Monty Python’s search for the Holy Grail where Lancelot murders a few dozen wedding guests to rescue his flamboyant damsel in distress.

Umm, the fourth floor…I think there was a diorama. Are you excited? I sure as hell wasn’t…moving on.

The fifth floor was remarkable only for being ten feet higher than the 4th.

The 6th floor though, had a very large observation deck, and if I had a bow and arrow, and about two years to figure out how to accurately aim a bow and arrow I could have murdered me some Korean sheeple.

Would you like to see how a Samurai looks after he’s been drugged and his armor and sword have been stolen:

The next couple of shots were taken from the top, and you can see the fake gold plated fish in the foreground, and some random parts of the city of Osaka in the background, and possibly you will get an idea of the scope of the island the castle was sitting on. The photos of course do no justice to the amazing view from the top. After we’d had our fill of the castle we refused to take the elevators down and walked back down six flights of stairs.

As usual, and this rule applies to almost every square inch of Earth dubbed interesting enough to generate tourist revenue, “All Roads Lead to the Gift Shop.” Everywhere from the Alamo to Mt. Everest, all roads will invariable lead you to an overpriced novelty store full of crap that’s so far from genuine in any conceivable sense that buying one of the items will detract from any experience or connection you had with history or human culture. They are filled with only the most brainless of tourist douches, the bottomfeeders of cultural enlightenment. I bought some postcards and a kabuki mask.

On the way out of the castle we saw this sign. It is a perfect example of how badly English is butchered everywhere in Japan, and the central reason I’m somehow gainfully employed in this magical land. This sign is not advertising Samurai shaped cookies, or some kind of cake designed to help you escape prison by smuggling a samurai sword into your cell. What they were trying to say is that you could get a taste of what it’s like to be a Samurai Warrior if you pay money like I did to look bad-ass and murder people who disrespect you.

We charged back out of the gates and all semblance of the poorly orchestrated homage to the powers that be had disappeared. Walking back through the park, I heard this high pitched sound, and after a few minutes it began tunneling its way toward my brain. It felt like I was being stabbed with an ice pick through the ear drum. Eventually we identified the source of the sound; it was a Japanese woman with a really annoying voice, armed with a megaphone. I began talking to her so she would shut up, and eventually got her to pose for this picture for about 3 minutes as I fumbled with my camera, pretending it wasn’t working, and checking the batteries, to afford myself a few moments of peace from her paint peeling voice.

Walking away from the harpy I spotted these odd stone statues. I again made Daphney pose for a picture, as my only Japanese subject around. I like the giant monoliths dedicated to the old traditional appearance of Japanese woman juxtaposed with a modern Japanese girl. Yeah, that’s right, I said juxtaposed, about a picture, because I’m artsy like that.

We fled back to the hotel and picked up some sammitches to gnaw on. Afterwards I convinced Daphney that we should both get hair cuts, because I thought she’d look really hot with short hair. We headed back to Namba and began searching in vain for some able bodied homosexuals to make me look like less of a goon and for her to look stunning. The search was sadly coming up empty, but when I saw this wall outside of a café I just had to take a picture.

After wandering for a little while we stopped off at a burger joint for a late lunch/early dinner. After we finished eating she said her feet were bothering her a little bit, so I took off her shoes to have a look. It was god damn gruesome. Her feet looked like she’d been a leper for twenty years so much of her skin had rubbed off, she was completely calloused and almost bleeding in about a half dozen places. While I whined like a little girl about a few sore spots she’d endured what I can only imagine was excruciating pain and not made a peep. Herein lies one of the hidden strengths of Japanese culture, despite the fact that they have almost no outwardly confidence, they have an inner strength that radiates from this standoffish culture that no Western nation can come close to touching.

I ran off to a 7-11 that luckily had a huge assortment of large and small band-aids and ace bandages. Since I didn’t want anyone in the restaurant to vomit on me, I took her outside and played nurse for a little while as I bandaged and wrapped her feet. She went from leper to mummy in the span of a meal. Right before I left to get her supplies though a gorgeous stripper looking girl sat down in the table next to us. I told Daphney to ask her about a hair salon before I left, and by the time I got back she had a map with a small area circled and the name of a salon next to it.

I have no idea how big Osaka actually is, so I couldn’t very accurately gauge the distance, but a few inches on the map didn’t seem so insurmountable, we walked toward the dot.

On the way we passed a contraption that looked very much like the London Eye, attached to a mall in Namba. It was basically a huge Ferris wheel, but instead of the rickety carnie operated loveseats, each point on the wheel was a small observation bubble, completely encased, and air conditioned. While we were up top I took a bunch of pictures, but only two of them were worth anything. The first picture, if you look closely, shows what appears to be the demolition of a building, with bulldozers, from the top down. I’ve never seen anything like this before, and I’m not entirely sure how the process works.

The second photo is worthwhile because it gives you an idea of how insane the traffic patterns are in Osaka. If you look at the bottom right hand corner you can see a cab on the lowest level of streets. Above the cab in the middle of the picture are train tracks, a lot of train tracks. Further above the train tracks is a third level of traffic, an overpass that looks like it’s about level with the 8th floor of a nearby building. This picture made me happy I was not navigating this city by car.

We got out of our romantic little bubble and cruised back down to the city streets, looking for a hair salon. Maybe 20 minutes down the street I took what we might call the first of my purely artistic photographs. Since modern photographers tend to name their pictures as precisely as possible, I call this shot, “Abandoned bike meets lonely shed, under a street in Osaka, where two travelers were on the way to a hair salon, which would prove not only too expensive, but completely booked, and thus they were forced to abandon their plans for a haircut and begin binge drinking slightly earlier than the night before.”

It was getting dark when we got to Namba again, so not knowing where the good bars were, we stopped into a 7-11 and bought a beer for the walk. This was followed directly by another stop at another 7-11 for another beer for the road. Staggering randomly around Namba we came across this sign:

This seemed like as good an opening bar as any for the evening so we popped in. However, we later discovered that the sign was not intended as irony, the drinks were overpriced, watered down, the food was overpriced, and microwaved, and the bartender paid us no attention the entire hour and a half or so we were there. The score for the night was Osaka 1 – Samurai Steve – 0.

We boondocked outa there and veered toward the general vicinity of America Town, which despite the name, was by far the coolest part of the city we’d seen. The entire city was buzzing on this particular Saturday night, and the next bar we flowed into was jubilant in comparison. It was an Irish pub, filled with all sorts of Japanese and European patrons, wildly shouting, chugging, and rocking out to the…rock music playing. I was quite happy with our current decision. Osaka 1 – Samurai Buzzed – 1

As a general rule, any city that contains over ten bars will have at least one Irish Pub. This rule has never failed me, and the ratio usually maintains that consistency across the larger cities of the planet. This rule obviously doesn’t apply to Ireland, or Boston, otherwise known as “New Dublin;” or maybe, “Successful Dublin.” From what I’ve seen of Boston they could change the city slogan to “drinkers with a working problem.” It goes without saying that the slogan doesn’t apply to the Red Sox, who’ve hardly worked a day in their lives. Did I mention I was from New York?

We found a table for two near a wall that separate the serious, restaurant section of the bar, from the boisterous happy portion of said beer dispensing establishment. However, the amazing experience we had last night eluded us at this bar as well. It was loud, and filled, but it was nothing more than an ordinary bar filled with tourists, we had a decent enough time, we had a few drinks. Daphney ordered a drink that looked like a frozen rainforest. As we got up to pay the tab I went on a bathroom run, and when I got out, Daphney was in mid conversation with a giant, gangly, long-haired fellow, who turned out to be the drummer from a band called “Little Barrie.” This was one of the bands playing in the massive Summer Music Festival, and apparently there were more people like him out on the town tonight after the show. This folks is what we call foreshadowing.

After a slightly off key interaction, the night takes on a more optimistic note, something different had already happened, even if the rest of the night was a wash, we met a drummer from some band at an Irish pub in Osaka. If I met a really boring person somewhere I could probably embellish just that part of the evening to make myself sound exotic and adventurous. Luckily though, the rest of the night was not a wash.

We strolled around town for a while, America Town that is, and came around to the same concrete park that was crowded last night. Tonight it was filled to the brim, there must have been over a hundred people drinking and carrying on in the park. I immediately felt a little nostalgia for the experience I had in Budapest with a bunch of strangers sitting idly in the courtyard in front of St. Stephens Basilica, but I was not alone here. I probably would have sat there for hours if I was wandering around by myself, but Daphney isn’t what one would call a conversationalist, and I didn’t think she would enjoy this environment too much. So instead of popping a squat I asked a couple of girls who lived in Osaka for directions to a solid bar.

What came next was the most drunkenly convoluted series of directions I’d ever heard in my life. She was literally still talking 5 minutes later about how to get there. I thanked her for her thorough directions and made sure that she saw me start walking in the exact opposite direction of where she told us to go. In the end, it would prove better that I hadn’t stayed, but that’s purely speculation.

We aimlessly shot down the narrow alleys of America town until I had to stop to take a picture of the front of this hotel:

As we kept walking the streets were getting darker and darker, less and less businesses were open, and bars were very few and far between. I was still a little buzzed though so it didn’t bother me too much. Eventually we stopped at a familiar looking intersection. There was an ad for a J-Pop band called, “Dirty Old Man.” I thought it picture worthy.

As soon as I put the camera back in my pocket I realized exactly where we were. We were at the intersection where Peace Street was located, the crazy ass bar from last night. Even if the bar was dead, we definitely owed that bartender money for a couple of drinks to thank them for last night’s insanity.

The bar is completely and absolutely empty. I’m sure the douche douche bang bang club downstairs was packed to the rafters though. We had a drink and carried on a conversation with the Marijuana Cowboy, and Juggles the bartender. It was mellow but entertaining. Then I looked out the window, and down below on the street level 30 white guys were mulling around across the street.

30 white guys in a group anywhere in Japan is very suspicious. We immediately assumed that this must be a posse from the Rock Festival. As the group was all guys I immediately tried to send the cute Japanese girl down to fetch them, but she wouldn’t budge. I chugged my drink, I wasn’t going to miss this opportunity. I told the bartender he was going to owe me a free drink soon. I marched downstairs and across the street. I had to think now, I wanted to get 30 people to follow a strange white guy in Japan of their own volition. This would be much easier if I had breasts.

I tried to gauge if one of them was the ring leader of this walking boondoggle. I couldn’t find anyone taking charge of the situation, so I singled out the quietest one on the outskirts of the group.

Me: Hey are you guys with the rock festival?
Random Indie Rocker: No mate, we’ve got nothing to do with it.

Shit, ok that was stupid, I took the completely wrong angle with that one. I had to react now before they decided to move off. Some of the bigger guys in the middle of this circle were much more belligerent, and belligerent people usually win the tit for tat where should the group drink arguments. I decided to act wildly drunk, and try to go for the drunk ones.

Me: (charging through a couple of people to the middle) Yoooo! What the fuck is up guys!? Listen, are you guys looking for an awesome bar, it’s right up the fucking stairs, man…this bartender…he like fucking flips all the bottles all over the bar, and does crazy fucking shit. It’s like a one man Japanese version of Coyote Ugly, without all the tits.

Drunks: No shit? Guys let’s go to this fuckin’ bar.

I am a god damned genius. Though to be fair, I probably could have been laying in a pool of my own vomit and grunted “bar” while pointing my finger and it would have had the same effect.

I led the way to the bar which was previously empty, and the owner looked at me in total disbelief as thirty gaijin stormed into the bar ordering about a dozen drinks at a time. I was the patron saint of Peace Street. The lads are began boisterously drinking, here they are:

The two old guys said they were roadies, the guy with the cigarette in the corner is the drummer for a group called, “We are scientists.” The craziest part about meeting this fellow the drummer is that I’ve met him before, about three years ago in a tiny bar in New York City, while they were, low and probably not coming. The fellow in the blue shirt next to him is the bass player for the Arctic Monkeys, who have apparently made it pretty big recently, with MTV videos and such, despite the fact that they’re pretty damn horrible. The lead singer from the same band is somewhere to the left, he’s very drunk, and very British, and at one point while he was talking to Daphney she turned to me and said that in 15 minutes she couldn’t understand a single word he was saying. The awe of being in the same company as indie stars soon faded though as it became apparent they were a bunch of whiney bitches.

One guy behind complained about his record label for a solid two hours, until I turned around and asked him if he whined that much in his lyrics. He moved to the other side of the bar after that. Indie rockers aren’t the strongest guys in the world. I carried on a pretty solid conversation with the drummer and bass player in the picture for a while, they were still in control of their ego’s and had no problem talking to a mere mortal for a while.

During this entire interaction, various members of various bands were crawling behind the bar to mess around with the laptop off of which all the music was being piped through the bar. It made for some interesting sing-a-longs, and it was pretty funny when someone would find a song, belonging to one of the bands present. The band whom the song belonged to would always say, “turn this shit off,” and immediately look for a song from one of the other bands.

The all hell broke loose. The bartender decided it was time for a show, he put on a song he liked, dimmed the lights, and went to town. All the tricks from last night, were warm ups compared to the stuff he was doing tonight. The man had a flair for theatrics. He did the same thing with pouring the drink into the cup he was balancing on a small pole, then stood up on the bar, jumped off, spun around, and caught the drink in mid-air.

Then, after that, the bartender’s friend came in, took off his shirt, and proceeded to do BMX ticks…ON THE FUCKING BAR. What, you don’t believe me?

There’s only so much you can cope with from a single bar, I’ve never been to a single place that has provided so many crazy experiences in the span of two nights. Eventually most of the whitey’s got too drunk to carry on much further, and I was pretty sandblasted myself. We stayed a little longer after they filtered out, and I did about a half dozen free shots with the bartender, who you can imagine was happy I showed up that night. He was actually about to leave for the night, but I made him stay 5 minutes when I went outside to gather the troops.

We paid our very modest tab, and headed out into broad daylight to go back to the hotel. We must have stayed somewhere in the vicinity of 4 hours in Peace Street, and if you happen to find this bar, look for the little book on the bar where patrons can leave a message. After the illiterate ramblings of a bunch of indie lyricists I wrote what I remember to be some kind of sappy message, but I have no recollection of what it was.

On the way to the main street to get a cab, I realized that some American bitch had followed me all the way here to Osaka. I think you can get a grasp of my feelings about my homeland from the tinge of vomit that rose in my chest when I saw this little icon proudly displayed in Osaka. We grabbed a cab, went back to the hotel, and immediately passed out.

Final Score: Osaka 1 ½ - Samurai Hangover – 387

Wheat Out

Watermelons in America Town

2006-09-03T11:24:00.000-07:00

– A photographic Journey through Osaka – Day 1

After royally screwing up at work that day, I came home in somewhat of a funk, however, vacation had officially begun. That night I scrambled to pack 7 days worth of traveling into a single backpack…gonna pack it up nice (for you lazy Sunday fans). Luckily it’s unbearably hot, and Osaka and Tokyo are two of the warmest places in the country, so I only needed sandals, shorts, and t-shirts.

We met up at the office and left her car there because there were no classes during the break. Then we parked Yama back at my place and hoofed it 15 minutes to the Shinkansen (bullet train) station. We picked up some breakfast-like snackables and continued to the station, where everything progressed as it would at an American train station, except we were waiting for a train that travels over 200 miles per hour, and were surrounded by Japanese people.

The Shinkansen (bullet train) is amazingly spacious and comfortable. This comfort comes at a cost though, roughly 400$ (40,000 yen) for a round trip ticket to Tokyo from Tokuyama. In about three or four hours we’d arrive at Shin-Osaka, the train station. We got on a subway and headed to the stop according to the directions from our hotel’s website.

We looked at the map a few times, spun it around, turned it over, folded it up, unfolded it again, turned it into and origami crane, and then went left. The directions told us to go past a Lawson (convenience store) and a Family Mart (convenience store) and the hotel was on the next block. Unfortunately there are about 3,000 Lawson’s and Family Mart’s in Osaka, most of them within a block of each other. We walked straight, gave up, turned around, walked straight the other way, gave up, turned around, walked to another Lawson in a different direction, and finally got directions to the hotel.

When we got to the hotel it was a little after noon, and we couldn’t check in until 3:30 or so. So, after dropping off the bags at reception we ventured out into the city, back into the subway, and off to Umeda. Umeda very closely resembles downtown Manhattan, otherwise known as the boring part of the city. There are two types of buildings in Umeda, and in downtown Manhattan, office buildings and restaurants, where fat office workers eat and work respectively. The difference, of course, being that a fat person in Japan is about as rare as a thin person in America.

We walked through Umeda and I stopped to buy batteries, not so much for me, but for you people, my 3 to 7 adoring fans. Although I find myself hysterical, I felt bad constantly bombarding you with pages and pages of text about these amazingly visceral aesthetic experiences and denying you the pleasure of seeing any pictures. So I’ve endeavored to take as many pictures as possible of Osaka, and then kind of petered off a bit in Tokyo as I was way too drunk most of the time to operate machinery.

As we strolled down the 3 lane urbanity of Umeda, we saw a temple being gang raped by the collective shadows of towering office buildings. We stopped in for a picture or two. Here you’ll see Daphney in her typical, cute, shy posing. The funny thing about seeing a picturesque Temple is you realize, nobody gives a damn that it’s there. It was completely deserted. In fact the only people who entered the area while we were there were simply using the courtyard as a shortcut to the next street.

We flip-flopped down the street a bit and after asking a young man in a suit for direction headed straight toward Namba. Anything worth its salt in the city of Osaka is somewhere near Namba. We were also told that it’s quicker to take the subway one stop down, but I felt like walking, and I’d rather make sure I didn’t miss anything interesting on the way there.

As soon as we reached the border area of Umeda and Namba, the whole town exploded into a smorgasbord of terrible elitist yuppie crap. On one corner we have Louis Vuitton, an another corner Coach, on another corner Dulce and Gabana, on another corner etc…Just looking at the windows of most of the stores here made my wallet hurt. We casually strolled down the street until I saw this cartoon. Knowing this picture was taken in Japan would be a little odd in and of itself, now, imagine that this picture is about 40 feet tall and 25 feet wide on the side of a building…your guess is probably damn close to as good as mine.

We went into one hipster clothing shop where t-shirts cost about 7,000 yen (70 bucks) and then we gave up on doing any shopping while we were in Osaka. We walked through the streets of Namba and Daphney mentioned there was a popular place called America Town. I responded that wild dogs couldn’t drag me to a place called America Town while I was in Japan.

Eventually during our wanderings we came to a huge crowd of people, so we assumed naturally that it must have been a worthwhile area to be in. I haven’t mentioned yet how unbearably hot it is in Osaka in August, the temperature was probably only around the high 80’s Fahrenheit, but the humidity in Osaka approaches somewhere around 90%. It feels like swimming through the air, and I was bathed in sweat the entire day. This next picture shows about 400 Japanese girls, probably ranging in age from low to mid teens to low to mid 30’s, waiting in line, in the scorching heat, for a J-Pop band. In typical broken English fashion, the name of the band’s tour, or new album, is “Another’s Another.”

Apparently we’d stumbled onto one of Osaka’s most famous streets. Its notoriety isn’t derived from anything as exciting as a red light district, secret Yakuza meetings, or a historic battle. It’s derived from this thing:

A giant crab mounted on the side of a restaurant. I mean the thing was massive, probably 5 meters wide by about 3 meters tall, and….and….get this, the legs moved. Sigh.

Another infamous piece of garbage on this street is this Harry Potter looking thing that drums at some irregular interval. I took the picture of these two gentlemen, because I had instantly judged them to be giant tourist douche bags. They just radiated douche and as such I snapped the photo. I just generally don’t like placing myself in front of famous things for pictures, unless the photo is somehow aesthetically enhanced by my presence in it. Most tourists, however, feel like taking a picture of something beautiful or famous somehow isn’t enough, as if they wouldn’t remember they were there if their face wasn’t in front of it.

“Oh man, I totally forgot that I took this picture of the Sphinx because nobody was around to take a picture of my jerk face in front of it.” If this sounds like you, please, stay in America, because when I meet you in a foreign country and you speak to me, I want to pretend that you’re Canadian.

Have I mentioned I hate tourists?

Anyway…we moseyed a little further down the street and I spotted an arcade. I was very excited, and you my fair readers are about to find out why. Japanese arcades aren’t too much like their American counterparts, despite the fact that almost all arcade games are developed in Japan. We’ll start with the size, this arcade was three solid floors of games, and almost all arcades also include Pachinko (Japanese slot machines). Don’t get me wrong, your standard zombie shooting games, racing games, and air hockey are pretty standard, but the other stuff is 100% goofy Japanese, multi-colored, seizure inducing robot fighters material.

As we walked around the arcade I spotted this little gem, and I was so excited I took 3 pictures of it. I shit you not, the original Super Mario Brothers was available to play at the arcade, for the low low price of…300 F%$!#ing Yen (3 F%$!ing dollars). This game was released in 1986, when I was 3 years old, and they had the balls to overcharge me for it. I somehow managed to curb my nostalgia enough not to throw the money in anyway.

The next beauty we saw was this neat little game. It was a video game with an attached guitar. You physically pick up the guitar and play along with the game. You can rock out 300% in Japanese arcades.

I also did not put money into this one, as I can’t play guitar, but it makes quite an amazing prop. Daphney was having a little trouble with my camera at this point, and though she kept saying the picture didn’t take, she managed to snap about 7 shots and about a 2 and a half second movie, of me posing with the damn thing.

Afterwards we climbed upstairs and got to the second floor. Half of the floor was devoted to various gambling, or token, or ticket, games, which all really amount to the same damn thing anyway. One of the unique features of the floor, and I’ve seen this in a few places now is this:

Maybe it’s hard to adequately understand from the pictures, but this is video horse racing. People sit at these little screens, and gamble on which horse will win, the video race. I’m calling it ORB, off reality betting.

We left the arcade after Daphney kicked my ass three times in a row at some racing game. I had officially been emasculated by a Japanese woman, and could only take solace in the fact that none of them can drive in real life.

We rolled out of the arcade and continued our sweaty meander around town. We came to a ginza street. A ginza is a sort of covered pedestrian alleyway, and both sides of the street are mostly floor level shops. They have them in every city and large town I’ve seen so far, even Tokuyama has one.

While in said ginza this photo was taken. The caricature is of some famous Japanese comedian.

As we strolled down the street a little longer I saw this gruesome scene. I know it looks cute, it looks like two little girls standing under a giant cat. However, a team of 6 men took about ten minutes to finish wiping the blood after this shot was taken. The little sister is kissing her big sister goodbye, because she’s about to be sacrificed to a Japanese Kawaii God. This is how the Japanese keep the population down, if you have too many daughters, one’s got to go, you have a few years to decide which one you like the best, and then a giant cute kittie paw comes down with Rapture force, and goes Gallagher on a little girl’s head.

Naturally we picked up the pace, feeling a little awkward after viewing our first human sacrifice. Ironically the next place we stopped was a cemetery. I am fascinated by the entire “burial” and treatment of the deceased in this country. It’s entirely different from Christian norms. In Japanese culture, which revolves around fitting a lot of small people on a small island, there is no burial, there is only cremation. Generally entire families are placed together, obviously over a period of time, which each family member being represented by a single stone pillar, around a central block with the family name, and possibly motto’s or quotes in the largest center stone. At this particular cemetery however, once a family had nobody left to visit them, or nobody had come for a long time to visit, the stones are dug up, and crammed together in a row, looking much like a tiered American, or European cemetery. I know this because I forced Daphney to translate a half hour interview between myself and the current caretaker of the cemetery, who was napping in a small building when I came in and woke him up. Naturally, as an American my curiosity is more important than a stranger’s comfort, but he did seem generally happy someone was taking an interest in what he does, because he looked like he was phenomenally bored with his job.

After the cemetery we got a little lost. We weren’t actually lost because we didn’t have a destination or a map, but we weren’t in a fun part of town, and we endeavored to get back there. We managed to get decent directions from a chap at a convenience store and wait…

Bar…What?

Anyway, we bee-lined back toward Namba, and on the way saw this monster. This crazy looking building is a jewelry store. You can see Daphney’s reflection in the bottom right hand corner. We didn’t enter the jewelry store, because there are only three good reasons to buy women jewelry; she’s your mistress, you haven’t had sex with her yet but know she’s a gold digging whore, or you’ve done something terribly wrong and know women are easily distracted by shiny objects. Some other incidental reasons for jewelry existing are that men often can’t think of a unique gift to buy a woman that somehow matches her personality and shows that they put thought and not just money into the purchase, or the woman is impossible to shop for.

We crashed into a Chinese restaurant for a lunch/dinner type meal, and then skedaddled back to the hotel to take a nap. By the time we got back to the hotel, we had walked around blisteringly hot Osaka for almost 6 hours.

We woke up a few hours later, and took the subway back to Namba, which we’ve heard is where all the bars are at. Daphney doesn’t so much dance, or sing, so Karaoke and clubs were out of the question. I decided the best course of action would be a bar crawl. After walking around a bit we found some decent looking streets, and as it turns out we had inadvertently entered America town. Well, if Osaka equates being American with drinking I could hardly do anything but comply with their stereotype.

The first bar we went to was a tiny hole in the wall, called Tako Tako King (octopus, octopus king). There was no standing room, just seats around the bar, which was square, and seats were on the left and far side of the bar. We sat at the far side of the bar, against the back wall, and ordered drinks. It was vacation, so Jack and Coke. The bar also had a kitchen, so I asked them if they could make Okonamiaki. If you tell Japanese people you’re going to Osaka, apparently it’s a rule that you have to eat this particular dish, because Osaka is famous for it. Through Daphney’s translation, the owner, Koshien, told us that it would take 20 minutes for the dish, and basically everything else could be cooked in 5, but we weren’t in any hurry. We had another drink.

After the second drink we were the only ones in the bar. Koshien related the exciting details of his life story, something like: college, blab la bla, here’s my food. We had another drink, and wished him a happy life before venturing out into the night. The food was by the way, delicious. Okanomiaki is some kind of pork based dish, which is elaborately put together and festively colorful.

We walked maybe half a block before I got thirsty again, so we walked down the stairs toward some American rock music. When we entered the bar, the only other people there were two German students on vacation. It’s ok though, as you may have forgotten, there is a classification for Europeans, and these two fell squarely in the goofy category. No blitzkrieg was happening in the near future at this particular establishment. Not only was the music good but low and behold, Guinness sprang forth from the taps.

I ordered a beer, and was politely chastised by Daphney for saying, “Hetotzu” incorrectly. I was saying, “Hatatzu” which sounded a lot like “Fatatzu” which is 2. As if to help make me look foolish the bartender came back with 2 and not 1 Guinness. Wait, what did I do wrong again?

Afterwards the owner of the bar and one of the German guys started jamming together, the owner on drums, german dude on guitar. They weren’t particularly good, but we were 2 for 2 as far as interesting bars go, and holy shit were we 3 for 3 by the end of the night.
Though the bar was interesting, it was hardly much fun and we paid our tab and buggered off.

So we stammered off into the hot city night, and decided to get a better view of our surroundings before heading into another bar. There is a small concrete park in the middle of America town filled with people, the streets at the nexus were buzzing, and none of the convenience stores had a bathroom. This is the only place in Japan to this day I’ve seen a 7-11 without a shimmering clean bathroom or indeed no bathroom for patrons at all. I like this part of town.

Eventually we come to an intersection, and we see a bunch of signs for the businesses in one of the buildings. There’s an obnoxious sounding club in the basement floor, and on the second floor was a bar called Peace Street. We went upstairs.

The owner is a Japanese guy with a shaved head, who studied for four years in the US, as such his English was stellar. His employee was a long haired Japanese dude in a cowboy hat, wearing a marijuana shirt, whose ambition was to learn English so he could be a bartender in LA.

We were the only people in the bar. The bartender was also the best bartender I’ve ever seen, but for now all he did was flip a couple of bottles around to make our drinks. We talked a little bit and had a couple drinks, when two other people came into the bar. One of them came into the bar toting a watermelon, her male friend was a bartender somewhere nearby, and everybody knew everybody’s name.

I will remark now upon the oddity of bringing a watermelon to a bar in Japan. A watermelon in Japan is like the Lexus of Cuisine. A watermelon costs more than a steak dinner here. One full sized watermelon will run the average consumer about 2000 Yen (20 bucks) even in peak season. This young lady, had one with her, and we learned the reason for which was that it was her birthday.

So the equation so far is us:

Aww, that’s a cute picture

+ birthday drunks

+ crazy ass bartender

+ watermelon

The oddest part of this whole deal is that they actually had no idea what to do with the watermelon. So I told them to fill it up with booze, and then drink/eat it. They thought this was a wondrously frivolous idea, and immediately complied.

The bartender cut open the top, and then inserted a lot of alcohol. The men of the bar then took turns shaking the thing for about 15 minutes. We couldn’t exactly wait 24 hours for it to soak in. The bartender then scooped out all the watermelon, and we ate copiously, and got copiously drunk. (shutup, it makes sense)

Afterwards the girl wanted the bartender to put the top of the watermelon on his head, and he did, and then suddenly took it into the bathroom. We were having a good time, and then all of a sudden ten minutes after he’d gone in the bathroom, the bartender comes out wrapped in so much toilet paper he looks like a mummy, and the watermelon top was wrapped on his head. I was totally LIT, I have no idea what would drive a person to do such a thing, but it was pretty amusing.

The bartender then inserted straws into said watermelon, and all of us drank of the remaining juice. Afterwards, we ordered another drink, and the bartender went to town. I’ve never seen anything like this in a bar. I’ve seen people flip bottles before, and it looks cool, but this guy put on a performance.

He would take a bottle of liquor and a gray container just big enough to flip the bottle of the bottle into it, and flip the bottle over his head and catch it in the container, then he would flip it from the container into the container again. He would juggle three bottles of liquor at the same time. At one point he jumped off the bar, flipped a bottle under his leg and caught it behind his back in the little gray container. He flipped a bottle 360 degrees off of a flat spatula, and caught it again on the spatula.

The coup de grace was when he balanced a glass on the end of a thin metal stirrer, and the part of the stirrer on his hand was shaped like a spoon. He then carefully poured ice in the glass, and made the drink, stepped up on the bar, flipped the whole drink in the air behind his back and…well…he dropped it, but he was pretty drunk and it was still god damn impressive.

After the show we ordered another drink, and the girl carved the Japanese characters for “Peace Street” into the Watermelon, which eventually ended up here.

Which in turn led to this picture, and this picture, and this picture.

I don’t know exactly how long we were a part of this ridiculous little adventure at Peace Street but the sun was already up when we left, took a cab back to the hotel, and immediately went into a coma. Tomorrow was after all, the second day of vacation.

Prelude to a Binge

2006-08-29T10:14:00.000-07:00

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

RIC...El Angel Solo

2006-08-27T10:10:00.000-07:00

No, it’s not a misprint, it stands for Rest In Canada.

Well, our fine young Canadian friend El Angel Solo, Angela, has departed this country to go home to Toronto. That’s in Canada, stay with me people. We could do naught but send her away in an orgy of binge drinking, ugh, on a Wednesday.

The evening began as these evenings generally do, at a nomehodai (all you can drink for two hours) restaurant. 14 people, a mix of gaijin and nihonjin sat around a huge table swapping embarrassing stories, most of which didn't revolve around El Charro and I. This was comforting. The evening started simply enough. We all ordered drinks, and talked away an hour or so, salad, Vietnamese spring rolls, fondue, roast chicken and other various dishes were served. I planned on drinking but I didn’t plan on getting totally blasted, until El Jesus Aviendo rolled onto the scene and decided he wanted to make up his two hours of all you can drink, since he arrived late. We sat at the bar.

We ordered a shot of whiskey.
We ordered another shot of whiskey.
We ordered another shot of whiskey.

At this point we ran out of our chasers, vodka tonic, and whiskey and coke, respectively. So we refilled our chasers, and asked what the bartenders name was. He was a sprightly chap with fantastic hair, missing one of his front teeth. I don’t remember his exact name, but it was something like Shoita.

We instinctively and simultaneously named him Showtime, which, ironically enough was my nickname at Mather Street. Showtime seems happy with his nickname, we are happy showtime likes his nickname, but would have continued using it even if he didn’t approve.

We order another shot of whiskey.

This probably would have been the end of our binge, although since we had drunk the shots in less than a half hour we weren’t really feeling it yet. Then another Gaijin who has his own school in the area, who we’ll call “The Hat,” came over and said, “Hey, you guys doin’ shots of whiskey?”

We order another shot of whiskey.

Our nomehodai was running short at this point, we didn’t have too much time left, and then another Gaijin, the one who is replacing El Angel Solo at SES, who we’ll call “Pretty McPolo,” came over and said, “So are you guys drinking shots?”

We order another shot of whiskey.

This is the first shot that does not go down smoothly. The gag reflex hasn’t kicked in, but my body is in the first stages of denial. At this point, El Charro, who is noticeably intoxicated comes over to the bar and says, “Gimme a shot of F!#$ing Whiskey!”

El Charro does not take whiskey well. This is evidenced by his behavior on the night of La Escuelito Corriendo’s birthday party. We yell at Showtime for the last time.

We order another shot of whiskey.

El Charro puts his glass down on the table, his eyes bug out a little bit, and he immediately sprints toward the bathroom. He does not handle his whiskey well. The nomehodai has officially ended, thank god, and I don’t remember anything that happened from the bar stool to leaving the restaurant, but it has been confirmed by multiple sources that El Jesus Aviendo put his head down and proceeded to vomit at the bar, on the floor next to his stool. He then apparently got up and vomited somewhere else.

The next thing I remember we entered Karaoke without him. We sat down, ordered drinks, qued up a few songs, and then my body rejected my whiskey. I stood up, steamrolled over 3 or 4 people, ran to the bathroom, and lost my proverbial lunch. I didn’t so much make a mess though, and cleaned up the toilet area before I stood up. I washed off my face, took my shirt off, and walked quietly back to the Karaoke room.

I then tossed my shirt in a corner, sat back down in my seat, and passed out for an hour and a half. Everyone apparently had a good time around me. I woke up for some reason during “Everything Zen” and grabbed a microphone and started singing again. Since the entire process of waking up and grabbing the mic took around 2/3 of a second, the audience was surprised. Than El Angel Solo requested one last Steve Wheat Pearl Jam rendition which I happily supplied and Karaoke was over and I went home with a cute girl from a small island south of Japan.

We took a shower, and despite the fact that the mind was willing, my body was not conducive to procreation at that particular juncture, and I fell asleep sometime around 6. I had class at 10 the next morning. Thanks to the girl I managed to wake up, one of my Japanese friends who was instructed to call my phone to make sure I woke up, called 45 times. He literally called 45 god damn times, and I didn’t hear the phone ring once. But I made it, everything was ok, the world was in order, and El Angel Solo was on a plane sometime Thursday night.

Falling off the crazy tree...hitting every branch on the way down

2006-08-24T22:43:00.000-07:00

Well it has finally come to it, after thousands of words and dozens of picture less pages, Golden Week, and the best week on anti-biotics ever is finally drawing to a close. It ends with the craziest story of all, the volcanic mountain top rave, a 48 hour bender in the midst of a sprawling campground. Naturally all of the details won’t be discerned but the bulk of the insanity is describable without revealing the total disregard of societal norms, and moderation. And without further ado…

Yama burned up the dark hill of some country road as fast as its tiny little engine could carry two full sized gaijin (whiteys) and a weeks worth of paraphernalia. The speakers blasted psytrance in the form of the wildly discordant Cities of the Future. Emotions were running as high as they’d been for the entire trip, the party we’ve looked forward to for almost two months was a few kilometers away. A few kilometers of dark turns, cleaved into mountain fuming with sulfurous gases, the Earth’s colossal force slumbering for the time being, somewhere below the surface. We were told that asthmatics were advised not to even enter the region, as the air impurities could catalyze an attack.

We arrived a mere half hour after the music started but the initial two parking lots were already filled to the brim, and two grungy looking twenty somethings with light-rods led our two-door monster to a parking space on the grass down the hill from the ticket table.

I shouldered a backpack filled with some essential goodies and we headed up toward the party. At the ticket table we ran into a tiny snag, as they wanted to charge us extra because El Charro had forgotten the flyer we got at the last rave. However, the gathering’s maitre de of bump in the night, Hiro, was the man who gave me the flyer in the first place, and he remembered the only gaijin at the last rave, so after having a brief conversation with the girlfriend of one of the DJ’s we slowly lumbered up the next hill toward the rhythmic bass thuds ahead. This is a picture of me under the massive lumber arch which signalled the entrance to the campground some hours later in the night.

After about ten minutes of walking we began to see signs of life, not bodies twisting to the rhythmic thumps of the music, but arms rhythmically beating tent stakes into the ground, dozens of tents already setup and dozens more everywhere in the woods taking form as we walked past. Then next to a small bathroom the trail came to choke point before we entered a massive clearing, over a football field in width and at least twice that in length.

In the area around the back where we were standing and the right and left sides of this field were various distributors of such paltry, unimportant goods as food, water, and beer. Straight ahead of us, about 50 yards away, was a massive circular depression ringed with stone, where a half dozen Japanese guys were busy constructing what looked like the beginnings of a fire that might last twelve hours; which, consequently, it almost did, the fire burned well past dawn and nearly to noon. A short distance ahead of the fire pit was a small teepee which housed the mixing board and various technological knick-knacks, in front of that in a space about 50 meters long and twice as wide, about 100 Japanese ravers were getting their dance on. At the far end of the field, was a massive teepee under which the DJs of the evening would take turns spinning there wares to the general amusement of their adoring public.

It was still dusk when we had finished our initial exploration of our surroundings and we sat on the stone as they set the fire alight. Despite the fact that hard psy-trance was booming so loud it seemed like it must carry the entire 20 kilometer distance to the mouth of the mountain, the fire somehow lent the whole scene a sense of tranquility, despite the fact that a fire is essentially partially bottled chaos to begin with.
El Charro and I sat there with the initial beer in our hands before the onslaught of heavier fare when the scene was comically broken by a tall, long haired Japanese man dancing around the fire clad only in a blue bikini. The surreal nature of the gathering was starting to take form.

Through Hiro, the organizer, and the girl we spoke with at the entrance we began to make a few new Japanese raver friends, who set us on the course to satiate our more metaphysical appetites. Darkness had completely fallen, around 11 PM it seemed like most of the tents had been setup and the dance floor and fire pit began to accumulate fresh bodies. At this point it was hard not to feel like an outsider, considering we were the only gaijin in a group of about 400 people circulating the party. As the storm clouds of the mind began to metathesize in the blood the “dance floor” called.

El Charro and I then separated for periodic amounts of time, to dance, wander, or socialize as we saw fit. I dropped my bag in a corner somewhere, because it’s Japan, I could have left it in a stranger’s car and they would have put it on the ground before they drove off. Due to our complete lack of communicative skills in Japanese, the party became an internal, self-conscious, but still very fun trip for a few hours. That is, until a boat load of gaijin came onto the scene. A motley crew of Americans, Brits, a Frenchie, an Irish guy, and a Japanese girl fluent in English floated into the party. As this point we had people to socialize with, which made for much better transitions from “dancing” to sitting around the fire and talking.

The featured DJ of the party was an American born half-Japanese guy from San Francisco, and we were introduced by Hiro and quickly settled into a light hearted semi-circle so that we could pass the conversation along, to the right. The party was more or less your garden variety mountaintop Japanese rave during the night. There was one incredible visually stimulating aspect of this party though, the DJ’s were spinning at the edge of the clearing, and as such the area directly behind them was deep forest, and a dense tree line. Projected onto the tree-line behind the DJ’s was a psychedelic visualizer, something akin to your windows media player visuals, just a lot better, and it was the size of a movie screen projected onto the black foliage twenty feet in the air. Here's a blurry picture of it which does a horrible job of explaining it.

As the fire began its ultimate decay, having already burned almost all of its fuel, the sky began to enter that coquettish state of not knowing whether it was coming or going, whether the night was still hungering for darkness or ready to concede to something as simple as a floating ball of nuclear explosions. It was at this time that our surroundings were more accurately revealed to us. We stood upon a plateau maybe two-thirds of the way up the mountain, and although most of the clearing was ringed by the hilly slope of the mountain itself, or trees, one side was completely covered in beautiful flowers, and I could see an overwhelming distance across a valley to the tops of the other mountains in the range.

The music took no notice of the change in setting however, and continued blasting as if the party had started an hour ago. It was at this point, sitting around the stone belt the circled the fire, that a Japanese guy with long hair, clad only in leather pants, sandals, and a blue cape, danced over to me with a bottle of Jose Cuervo in one hand, and a joint in the other. Breakfast was served.

After slathering on some sunscreen in preparation for the onslaught of the summer sun I decided to go for a hike. Well it didn’t exactly happen like that, the hike more or less found me, as I was sitting with a notebook on a bridge near the parking lot. I noticed the bridge led to a path that went up the mountain, at the time there really wasn’t a choice.

The hike started with a narrow passageway like something out of an Indiana Jones movie, the rocky path was full of small stones that rolled away down the mountain as I walked, and I was completely encapsulated in a swath of bamboo, above me and to both sides. Severed stalks of bamboo jutted across the path at about eye level and the sunlight shining down on the leaves illuminated a fog of dust particles that made this area something like walking through a kind of ethereal curtain, solid and visible, but having no substance or resistance to my movement, like the gateway to a different world.

As I climbed a little higher, the intensity of the music began to diminish, and I was confronted with my first choice. I had come to a fork in the trail, and there was a rather interesting sign which looked like some kind of warning. Naturally I straddled the chain across the trail to the right and took the path less travelled, because the sign could have said nude women, and free cheeseburgers, I mean one can never be sure of these things. However, the sign apparently was a warning and after walking for a little while I was forced to retreat from a horde of naked women wielding delicious cheeseburgers. So I pressed on over the “real” trail.

The footpath which was previously concrete, broke, shattered and disappeared further up the trail, and then I came to a small clearing where a forgotten picnic table was conveniently placed, I assumed for sitting, and so I did. I once again opened my notebook and began to scribble as tiny red wood mites crawled along the white pages. The contents of said notebook are not to be revealed until my death, to what I assume can only be a legion of loyal followers. Sitting at the table the sounds of the mountain equaled the volume of the now distant music.

A short to long time later I stood up, left the table and continued climbing somewhat vertically along the side of the mountain, suddenly their was a roaring sound above my head that I couldn’t quite place. Then I saw it. The biggest god damned bumblebee any man on Earth has ever seen, its wings sounded like a helicopter, and it must have measured four inches long. The more I stared at it though, the odder it became, it wasn’t just massive, but the proportions of its being seemed wholly impossible. It would be akin to staring at a cruise ship hovering above you with nothing more than helicopter blades holding it aloft.

After the giant bug finally flew away, I realized I had climbed to a point where I could not hear the music anymore, near the top of the mountain. I sat down and scribbled some more into the journal, and remarked upon the irony of my situation. My goal had been to climb to the point where I couldn’t hear the music anymore, and I had achieved my goal, but now the problem was, that I couldn’t hear the music anymore.

However, after about twenty minutes of walking I had circled back to the original side of the mountain, and the music was ten times louder than before. I was almost directly over the camp, some thousand or so feet above, give or take a few hundred feet, to the point where the people weren’t really that visible, just the outlines of biggest features, and a mass of dancing dots somewhere near the middle. I turned around to go back down to the party. The only thing that happened on the way down is that I acquired a nifty little bamboo walking stick.

When I got back to the party I was in a fantastic mood, like a flower child coming back from something probably very much like this party, with different music. I danced around, I stole a soccer ball and tooled around with that, I bought about 6 bottles of water and drained them, and carried on with general frivolity for the better part of an hour, until I became rather bored with unbridled happiness and decided I was hungry. There was an attractive Japanese hippy chick making food of some kind or other near the back of the field, so I strolled over to her tent and got overcharged for some delicious concoction of what looked like couscous with some spices and fresh tomatoes and cucumbers and other non-meat items. As I hadn’t eaten in about 14 hours, it tasted pretty damn good.

It was sometime in the next couple of hours that we decided we needed some kind of sleep, we’d been up a solid 24 to 26 hours already, and the music was not letting up in intensity, which was beginning to piss almost all of the white people off. What I’ve been told by El Charro, whose experience in these arena’s dwarfs my own, is that there is generally a much lighter set when the sun comes up, and not the continued hard pounding bass of the midnight hours.

The other gaijin (whitey’s) were camped out at the “hippy festival” somewhere near here. I have no idea what the hippy festival was, but by their description it was quieter, and we could crash in their tents for a little while, so we made our departure from the scene. We drove about 20 minutes, down the mountain, along some country roads, and eventually came to the remnants of the hippy festival. A French guy, Irish guy, 2 British girls, and a Japanese girl blasted off in a 60’s looking VW hippy van ahead of us, but we somehow arrived way before they did.

We hung out with a few American jets at the hippy festival grounds, which was slightly less auspicious than the psytrance rave, basically just a big field with some huge teepees built hither and thither, and most of the gathering had already cleared out. One of the Jets (people teaching in Japan for the JET program) happened to have a football with him, and I immediately goaded him into throwing it around with me for about a half hour. I hadn’t seen an American football since I left the states.

We had blankets, so we decided to join our new friends at Denny’s for some much needed diner fare. I don’t think anyone had eaten anything of substance in at least 12 hours. Before we left though, I saw something that may possibly be burned into my memory until I die.

As we got into our cars and turned around to leave, a white VW van, rumbled into site, going way to fast, spitting mud in all directions, and nearly tipping over as it came onto the grass. It was also blasting Rage Against the Machine at ear-splitting volumes. The motley, international group of strung out ravers plowed their way over to their tent, and we stopped and rolled the window down. I was talking to the tall, blonde British girl, who seemed quite attractive the night before, but now looked so strung out from various activities last night that she looked quasi-monstrous. She was making us promise to come back after the meal, which we had every intention of doing, and as we were talking, “Killing in the Name of” peaked. I started honking the horn in synch with the bass line and the last thing I will remember of this trip was as the girl leaned in to say, “We don’t really mesh well with the hippies,” a French guy and an Irish guy were screaming, “F*&! YOU, I WON’T DO WHAT YOU TELL ME,” over and over again into a head of broccoli, while a tiny British girl was honking the horn.

After we finished our meal at Denny’s and promised to e-mail each other etc…it began to rain. We were planning on taking a nap outside on what was a beautiful day and regenerating a bit, but now that would be impossible. El Charro and I had a little pow-wow, and despite being up for something like 32 hours straight, we decided to make the drive home, and pass out for a day before work started again. By the time we were back on the road again it had started raining…hard. The words torrential downpour would probably describe it best. That was the least of our worries however. We only needed to take one highway all the way back to our doorstep, and calculated it would take around 4 and a half to 5 hours based on our trip to where we were.

We hit the mother of all traffic jams, something like 300 meters away from Denny’s (Joyful). I was officially not happy anymore. We waited in traffic for about 40 minutes and we still weren’t even on the highway yet. We parked at 7-11 and bought about 30 dollars worth of sugar, caffiene, coffee, crack, ginseng, vitamin packs, etc…and got back on the road. The whole drive back, traffic would accumulate and then somehow the road would be empty for about a half hour. Just at the moment when we thought maybe this time the traffic had finally ended that it was smooth sailing home, we could bury the speedometer and make up some time, we would run into another endless pile of tiny white Japanese cars. After 7 hours of driving, multiple rest stops, and 40 sleepless hours of partying and driving and traveling my body had finally reached its limit. I pulled into the next rest stop, woke El Charro up and let him drive the final 2 hour leg home.

He dropped himself off and I drove the last 5 minutes from his house to mine. I didn’t unpack, I didn’t even bring my backpack in, I unlocked the door, took off my shoes, and dropped into bed. I woke up sometime around 7 PM the next day, and relaxed until work started the next day. The road trip had officially ended.

Dude, where's my party?

2006-08-20T09:13:00.000-07:00

When we left our hotel sometime around checkout the cash in our pockets was all but spent. On the way to and from “the island” we had seen the sign for a local post office, so we went to investigate. A post office is the only place in Japan where you can withdraw money from an international bank account. I had taken out around 7 or 800 dollars before we left, and I had maybe 200 of that left, El Charro was down to naught but his credit card. We pulled over and parked near the sign for the post office, there were no kilometer notations on the sign, so we assumed it had to be within walking distance.

After about a half hour of walking we walked to an overpass to get a crow’s nest view of the situation, and spotted the post office down the street. When we approached the entrance the doors didn’t open. And if it’s one thing I’ve learned about being white in Japan, it’s that all doors, automatic or not open for you here. The post office was closed. This was potentially catastrophic. An immediate panic crept over us, the first question El Charro asked was if we had enough cash to get home, which we did, but that was a horrible question to even put to words considering the next stage of the journey was to the active volcanic region where one of the biggest outdoor raves in the country was about to take place. We assumed that if this Post Office was closed for the holidays, it was a definite possibility that they were all closed for the holiday.

We got back in the car and high tailed it to Beppu, too distraught to even bother putting angry music on the ipod speakers. We dismissed our hatred of Let’s Go and managed to get a vague understanding of where the biggest post office in the city was located. We circled the runways for about a half an hour and finally spotted the monstrous white building that was Beppu’s central Post Office. We parked in an almost full parking lot and happily sauntered into the building, which was almost entirely closed, except for the ATM’s.

There were a few people on line for each machine but we expected within 5 minutes we’d have the cash in our hands and be able to continue on our journey. However, the ATM’s in Japan aren’t exactly just ATM’s, and the post office doubles as the largest banking agency in Japan. I have no idea what the other features of the post office ATM’s are, but I know you can pay your rent, water bills, phone bills, and electric bills at the ATM. I imagine you can acquire a mortgage, refinance your home, browse the internet, find a mail-order Russian bride, order pizza, and type your doctoral dissertation, because we waited 40 god damn minutes for three people to finish their transactions before I could spend 13 seconds grabbing my cash.

But we had money, so we left the Post Office in high spirits and a much lower bottom line on my savings account, as I had to take out money for myself, and El Charro, who you might recall forgot all of his money in a desk drawer at home.

It was nearing the time for the breakup of the fellowship, whereby our enchanting Canadian gal, El Angel Solo, would get on a train bound for home to go to her friend’s wedding, and El Charro and I would be headed for 2 days of reckless insanity. We parked Yama in the parking lot of the train station and asked for the nearest Starbucsu (starbucs). We also found a bookstore, because El Charro and I did not in fact have any god damn clue how to get to the party. So we purchased a very handy atlas, and poured over its pages while sipping yuppie starbucs drinks trying to figure out how to get to Aso. As it turns out we only had to take one road for most of the journey until the very end, so after figuring out where that road was we walked around the city for another few hours, enjoying each other’s company, pestering the natives, and finally dropped her ass off at the train station and boogied out of there.

We got on the road and out of Beppu without too much trouble, and the road almost immediately began climbing into the mountains, the road built to fit two opposing lanes of traffic was barely large enough for my tiny Suzuki Alto. This made driving along these beautiful vistas somewhat intense. But the views didn’t stop, it was an uninterrupted wall of incessant natural beauty for two straight hours. No rest stops, no hotels, no Onsens, hardly a car in either direction; nothing human and ugly to offer us a break from the mountains, flowers, rivers, and massive insects and birds.

It was as if there was a God, and he or she or it, was giving me this one long stretch of unimaginable beauty, seconds before he was going to throw my tiny car off of a cliff and send me packing straight to hell. But, as I’m still here to write this we know that there is in fact no God.

We finally stopped where there was some space for El Charro to take a pee break, and then it happened. As soon as I stood up to stretch my legs, my body full force let me know that I had to poo, and poo a lot. Apparently God just has a better sense of humor than I’d imagined. Naturally we hadn’t seen anything resembling a bathroom for a long damn time, so this was going to be a commando squat, something I’m not quite hippy, or commando enough to have much experience with, and I didn’t exactly have time to go through basic training right at that moment.

I opened the trunk, fumbled through my backpack, pulled out a notebook, and ripped out a half dozen white sheets of paper and then hobbled farther into the woods. What happened next could only be described as a poosplosion, the sound and the fury, Louie Armstrong meets hurricane Katrina. The Japanese however, now refer to it as the unknown ecological disaster that destroyed 3 square kilometers (1.8 miles) of natural habitat and forced 15 different rare plants and animals onto the endangered species list.

When we had reached the city of Aso we stopped at ShopRite (Maxvalu) and bought some food, went over to the in store microwave, nuked it, ate it and continued on to the next town, which was supposedly where this gathering was taking place. I say supposedly because we didn’t actually have any idea what the specific location of the party was, we were helped out by the text message of one of the crazy ravers we met in Fukuoka a few days earlier. Since I had left this particular detail up to El Charro, I was markedly unhappy with our current predicament. In fact he hadn’t even remembered to bring the flyer for the party that we could have used to at least give someone an idea of where we were heading.

However, the party did go for 48 straight hours, and it wouldn’t even start for about 4 hours so, we relaxed and went into a vacation state of mind. We had reached the town that we knew was very close to the party, thanks again to the crazy Indian girl we met in Fukuoka, and El Charro’s plan was to stand in the parking lot of the convenience store at the town’s main intersection, and wait for someone who looked like they were ready for a drug addled 48 hour party to stop in and give us directions. Not only did we look ridiculous standing there, but the prospect of someone showing up hours early for a two day party was looking fairly grim at that particular moment in time. So we got back in the car and drove around for a little bit.

We had failed to procure a tent for ourselves at that particular moment due to some dramatic circumstances at home before our departure, but we knew there was a hostel not too far from the party we could crash at. We actually knew a lot of things about the “area” but not so much where anything actually was. Then low and behold, we drove right past the hostel, so we stopped and checked out the prices, found out they had about a million beds left and then left. We would have asked the proprietor about the location of said volcanic trance rave but she was about 173 years old, and very cronish looking so we thought better of it.

Back we went to stand outside of Lawson, the convini (convenience store) once more. We had stood outside for about an hour before we realized we’d only seen about three cars pass by, and none of them contained anyone looking like they were off to a rave. I looked inside the store and saw that the clerk was a twenty something with spiked hair, and a tattoo. I sent El Charro in to plug the bastard for some information. In literally ten seconds they both come walking outside of the store and the kid takes the map and makes two very small very specific circles of possible spots for the party. One was at least a 45 minute drive from where we were and the other was about 10 to 15. We bowed, said about 40 thankyous (the plural of thankyou, come on Microsoft word spell check) and blasted away in Yama.

The road was completely uphill, which was a good sign, since the party was supposed to be in the mountains, and we drove optimistically up the mountain, the party still two hours from beginning. Then all of a sudden we came to a campground, it was a YMCA campground believe it or not, whether the acronym translated or not, I don’t know, but as we drove around the parking lot it became pretty clear this wasn’t our destination. We kept going uphill, and eventually we came to a rather large intersection, and stared in confusion. We waited a few minutes, and a few cars passed us, coming from the left, then coming from the right, and going straight. We went straight for a few minutes and seeing nothing turned around. We drove for about ten minutes until we were stuck behind a cab going very slowly down the road, occasionally slowing to a crawl, with its two occupants looking around wildly. We felt this might be a good sign.

We followed the cab down the hill for a few minutes until it stopped completely and two Japanese twenty somethings got out to look at one of the signs on the side of the road, I glanced at El Charro and he immediately jumped out of the car to talk to them. I pulled the car over and got out after him. The two kids pulled out the flyer for the party that El Charro had forgotten at home, and pointed to the sun and then indicated that it was a sign for the party and that it was up the hill. We were very excited by the current turn of events. We offered to give them a lift, but they had their tents packed into the cab already and our tiny car was filled with our own travel remnants. So we followed the cab up the hill, when we got to the same perplexing intersection the cab stopped, one of the kids got out and ran across the intersection to a similar looking red sign on the other side of the road, he then indicated that we did have to go straight, so our intuition was right on earlier. Maybe 50 meters from where I had originally turned around, there was a huge purple sign that said “Mystical Village” in huge English characters. Common sense would tell most people that if they were looking for a huge campground full of dancing drug addicts in the middle of the woods, a sign pointing to a place called the “Mystical Village” is probably a step in the right direction.

The next time the cab stopped we were at the party, there was a table where tickets were being doled out, but it was still an hour and a half before the music started, and we were starving, so El Charro and I went all the way back down the hill to the Denny’s (joyful) down the street. After our meal, we went back up blasting psytrance from the Ipod speaker’s in joyful celebration.

We had driven three hours to a remote forested area of Japan’s southern island, both of us illiterate is spoken and written Japanese, with no idea where this party was, and yet somehow we’d managed to find it. Surviving it, of course, is a whole other story.

Wheat Out

Let's Get Naked...Part II

2006-08-05T02:14:00.000-07:00

The Onsen in Beppu was gargantuan by comparison. We jumbled into the entrance of the Heotan Onsen in Beppu, and were overwhelmed by the sheer number of people waiting to get in. The parking lot was packed, and it took a few minutes to secure for ourselves, ball towels, tickets for entry, lockers etc…Once we donned our awkward wooden clog like sandals the entrance opened up to a huge waiting area with tons of vending machines and picnic tables scattered about a large rectangular open air room.

One of the reasons this Onsen sounded so appealing was due to its “hot sand bath” facilities. So we went to our respective gender based locker rooms and disrobed our civilian garb before re…robing for the sand bath. The sand bath area is co-ed for families and spouses and what not, and despite the fact that all you had to do was cover yourself in sand and relax, we were unsure of what to do once arriving in the room. The sand room was a large concrete rectangular room, with 6 areas about bed width and about 20 feet long, spread down the room. It wasn’t really possible to bury yourself and then poor more sand on top of yourself, so the buddy system would have to be initiated. After standing around awkwardly trying to gauge the best method for sand immersion and relaxation El Angel Solo and I picked a spot and began experimenting.

Unlike the beach, the hotter sand was farther below the surface, so I dug myself a little trench and started piling the sand on while El Angel Solo hit me with the plastic sand scooper that was nearby. It’s difficult to describe the sensation of sitting in a pool of hot sand with someone gently pouring the fine grains on top of the thin layer of fabric separating my skin from the heat. I guess sensual would be a good word. The sand feels like weighted water essentially, it flows over me, leaving only heat in its wake, it ripples, and rains from the scooper, and I quickly enter the relaxed mode of a man with nothing to think about but the euphoria rising from somewhere within me. Then the cackle of my neighbor breaks the spell, “Alright I’m done, do me now.”

It’s hard to return a comment sufficiently thanking her for her small labor, but reminding her that she’s an impatient nuisance who with one comment wrecked everything she had done for the five minutes before. So I just say, “Sit over there and wait a god damned minute, I’m relaxing for the love of crap.”

Getting up in hot sand when you’re a hairy bastard is a bit tricky, suffice to say there was more sand than skin in most places. So I began pouring sand on El Angel Solo, after a few minutes I just poured a ton of sand on her breasts, which she liked at first but eventually told me to stop, I figured this was the quickest way to piss her off so I could wash the sand off all the uncomfortable nooks and crannies where it had accumulated. I stood up, and when I looked over, El Charro had a whole &*^$ing Japanese family pouring sand on him, a little girl, wife, and husband. He said it had nothing to do with him, for some reason they had just volunteered to do it. Lucky bastard. He naturally enjoyed the experience more, and stayed for quite a while.

El Angel Solo and I departed at our respective gender based locker rooms and I quickly disrobed and headed for the shower stools. It only takes one Onsen experience for the routine to click, and you become much more comfortable with the overall environment. In the stool shower room there were at least 6 different indoor pools, as well as outdoor pools, 2 different saunas and my favorite room that we’ll get to later. Though I didn’t do it that day, you can get the closest shave of your life with a simple Bic at the Onsen, the air is so permeated with heat and moisture that you won’t even cut yourself, and it’s a chin like a baby’s ass for 24 hours.

I scooted out to the outdoor pool and moved toward the corner which was empty of patrons, there was a sign at the end of the pool that I couldn’t read, but it apparently read, “do not walk this way magma is being injected into the pool and it’s hotter than the ****ing SUN!” I made an about face and tried with every ounce of willpower I had to keep from screaming and crying from the unbearable pain…it was that hot. Once I labored back to cooler climes and rested my back against a rock, I was treated to Japanese guy after Japanese guy, and sometimes Japanese kid after Japanese kid, walking into the scalding hot section of the pool, screaming like little girls, and running and jumping back to the slightly cooler waters.

After that pool I did the ole’ jump in the freezing cold pool, hit the sauna, jump in the freezing cold pool, hit the hotter sauna, jump in the freezing cold pool go back to the hot water routine. As I sat in the pool reflecting on the greater forces of the universe, and where I would likely get inebriated later that evening, the sun began to set overhead. It reminded me of the flaming good ole’ days of sitting in the hot tub with a cigar, and a glass of Australian Shiraz with the poker crew and watching the sunrise on a Friday night…you know, without all the naked Japanese men around.

The hordes of children at this Onsen struck me as slightly peculiar. Kids under 7 in general are pretty much asexual creatures, actually some fathers bring their little girls into the men’s section of the Onsen. They run around ball towel free, or vagina towel free as the case may be, like little Asian nymphs bounding along the rocks, and generally frolicking hither and thither. It lends the Onsen an almost Willowesque (or insert poorly received fantasy flick here) quality, but the nymphs and faeries were almost the most annoying part of the fantasy, so it wasn’t long before vast reserves of mental energy were spent picturing the pure hearted little bastards falling on the rocks and shutting up.

So after the little bastards had sufficiently ruined the outdoor pool for me, I went to what would become my favorite room at this particular public bathing establishment, The Waterfall Room. The room is rectangular, with a massively high vaulted ceiling, and I had to climb down about 25 steps to get to the floor. Directly across from the stairs, lined along the far wall were about a dozen pipes, sticking out of the wall. I’ll leave the obvious phallic metaphors to you the reader, as I continue with my story. The pipes were probably a good 15 feet (5 meters) above the floor, and pouring a steady stream of water in the direction of the ground, most likely aided by gravity, but I can’t be sure the fundamental laws of the universe have any effect on this country.

So as is the usual trick, I spent a few minutes watching what other people did, so I could fit in, then decided what they were doing was stupid and made it up as I went along. I sat under one of the pipes, where water was falling, and was treated to a shoulder massage. It was one of the most interesting physical sensations I’ve ever felt. I moved my head under the water, and became completely deaf to the outside world, while getting a scalp massage. I tried leaning in a number of different positions to hit different areas of my back, and it felt nice but was slightly awkward, so I had the brilliant idea of laying down under the thing. Naturally I positioned my ball towel in a comfortable position for some cushioning, and then sat under this pipe for about an hour. It was bliss.

Afterwards we went out in search of meat. We ended up at a Yakiniku restaurant. This is a Korean barbecue restaurant, a little do it yourself affair. You sit at a table with a small grill in the middle, sticking a foot or so above the wood. You order a plate of assorted meats, and barbecue to you heart’s content. We ate without any major incidents and then moseyed back to the car, where there was a minor incident. If you recall we managed to park for free, however, we did not look at the hours for the parking lot. Yama was the only car left in the lot, and chains were drawn across the entrance. Luckily the chains weren’t locked, so we just unhinged them, drove over the chain, and sped down the road to the center of town.

The details are starting to blur now, being a few months removed from the event, it’s sort of like trying to remember the last few hours of a binge through the fog of a hangover, and I was hungover two months ago when it happened. El Charro was DDing that night, so I know we found a few bars, and wet our whistles a bit. The drive back to the island from said bar was worth mentioning though. We were listening to a psytrance band called Infected Mushroom’s killer track, “Cities of the Future” driving through Beppu. We noticed for the first time, that during the night, the entire street on both sides in both directions was covered with blue, white, and green lights, that were setting off on a timer down the road like an epileptic airport runway. So as the bass thumping came in under the vocals, “take me down to the cities of the future,” El Charro was burying the speedometer down the empty streets after the traffic lights had ended and the road became one lane. The drive became an intensely trippy experience, barrel-assing
down the lonely miles (kilometers) 90 miles an hour (130 km/hr) with these lights beckoning us back to our remote island.

There are a quick series of turns and narrow roads that gave me the slight feeling of diving into the bat cave on the way in. The island is dark and quiet; the hotel is empty, even devoid of staff at this hour, giving it an almost ethereal quality. As we walked back to our building I heard an oddly repetitious sound, and I stopped to identify it. The three of us stood next to the main building of the hotel, and the only rooms were on the second floor. After a few moments we realized what we were hearing was the syncopated coiling and uncoiling of mattress springs. The island from that moment on had an official love shack.

We stumbled back to our room, finished off last night’s booze, and fell fitfully asleep sometime before dawn, as expected we would wake up well after check out tomorrow.

Let's Get Naked...Part I

2006-08-01T18:58:00.000-07:00

Well for those of you reading the blog thus far, I assume you’ve come to the logical conclusion that I’m a cultural imperialist who has no appreciation for other cultures or ways of life, and I came all the way to Japan for a new environment to booze and carouse in. Well, you’re only about 80% correct. I happen to appreciate other cultures for exactly what they are, crude imitations of the perfect culture of my people. I am man enough to admit it.

I will also offer a brief warning to those of you with weak stomachs, or umm…imaginations because there are never any pictures to accompany these blatherings. There will be an excessive amount of male nudity in this entry, accompanied by detailed descriptions of male nudity. There will be a tragic amount of male nudity, and no description of female nudity, for reasons that will be understood only if you make it past the male nudity. But enough of that, we have stories of bathing naked with hordes of Japanese men to get too.

We woke up sometime in the mid afternoon and decided to spend our waning daylight hours in Beppu, grab some food, and find an onsen to relax in. We drove back into town, and encountered massive traffic getting up into the mountain, where it seemed like all of the big onsens were smattered across the cityscape. We drove up the hill, and being in a particularly good mood, I put on the mantel of obnoxious American, screaming pointless slogans at passengers and passerby indiscriminately. I would shout things like, “It’s Golden Week! We’re on vacation!” or the obligatory “I’m on anti-biotics, bitch!”

We managed to park the car for free, in the parking lot of some illegible establishment, and wandered in search of food. Our heroes have had enough Denny’s (Joyful) for one city, and declared we would find a small out of the way restaurant and do our damndest to order something edible.

After we’d completely given up on that we decided to search for a chain restaurant with English menus, but we spied a really fat Japanese couple walking into a restaurant. To give you an idea of how rare this is, we’ll compare it to walking around a smallish city, say Albany, and seeing Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, the Pope, the Olsen Twins, and Satan walk into some hippy cafe together. Our rationale was that if fat people were eating there, then the food is probably good, and/or cheap and plentiful. Either of those would work for us, but it turned out to be the former.

We walked into a sushi hole in the wall – all of the fish was neatly arranged at the bar on ice. It was all incredibly fresh, and seemingly impossible for us to order. There were no pictures on the menu, and if anything familiar sounding like Tekka roll was written on the menu, we couldn’t read it in lines, dashes, and pacmans (katakana). So we walked up to the counter, and with the help of our portly patron companions, managed to point at fish in the glass and make up numbers for what we thought we wanted.

Me: ummm….the Tuna looking thing there *pointing*
Portly Pepperpot (male) – Ushkalushi?
Me: Hai (yes) Mitzu (three)

Me: and the uhh, salmon looking thing over there *pointing*
Portly Pepperpot (female) – Baklaitemu?
Me: Hai (yes) Yatzu? *shrugs shoulders* (4)

And so on and so fourth.

The chef didn’t make any sushi rolls, the ones you would recognized as small balls wrapped in rice, he made only sashimi, a chunk of fish sitting on top of some rice; but Holy God, Mother of Pearl, Jesus H. Tapdancing Christ was the fish incredible. We dipped the sashimi into some shoyu (soy sauce) and it just fell apart in your mouth and slid deliciously down your throat. It was by far the most unbelievable sushi any of us had ever had, maybe ever will have. I haven’t had anything like it anywhere else in Japan. We went back to the counter and pointed at another half dozen unpronounceable fish for bigger and bigger numbers of servings with the same result. We didn’t ask the price, we didn’t want a salad to go with it, we just ate and ate. We even out-ate the helpful fat people.

This would be the basic reason why we hate “Let’s Go”, and the prototypical travel books. “Let’s Go” would have told us to go to some tourist trap with decent food, where everyone has been before, but somehow fulfilled a tourist’s idea of the stereotypical experience they wanted to have in said country to bring back in the slideshow; but without the book we had stumbled onto one of the best meals of my life. That’s essentially what traveling is, coming to terms with your ignorance and taking chances that may enhance your life.

This is why not 3 hours from eating I would be sitting in a pool with 20 naked Japanese men…and enjoying myself.

So we’re going to have to break with the chronological order of the vacation and go into a dramatic flashback sequence…STAR WIPE! (for you Simpson’s fanatics)

The Saturday before we left for our epic, anti-biotical road trip we decided to go for a test run to an onsen, knowing full well the city of Beppu sported some of the best in the country. We were graciously given until 3 PM to begin our journey, as most of us we’re plastered from some even or other the evening before. We took two cars, between myself, El Charro, La Escueleta Corriente, El Angel Solo, El Jesus Aviendo, one of La Escueleta Corriente’s students, and an attractive Japanese girl from the office, who we will give an American name, let’s say Daphne.

We drove to Kasado Island, up a winding narrow road, past a giant painted Dinosaur, to Kasadojima – the Onsen of Kasado Island. So let me describe what an Onsen is a little bit. An Onsen is a Japanese public bath house essentially. Everyone inside is nude, and despite their cultural reservations toward sex and drugs, public nudity is a part of traditions that go back far longer than current societal reservations. An onsen is a place to relax, and unlike the spa culture in the US, it’s extremely cheap, only about 700 yen (7 bucks) and is supposed to be available to poor and wealthy Japanese alike. When we get to the counter of the Onsen we put our shoes in a little locker and don the Onsen slippers, we then get small tickets for a towel and general admission. At this point the guys and girls separate into our separate locker rooms.

Once the three of us walked into the lockroom, the game was officially afoot. I looked around nervously, there were two half-naked Japanese men getting ready to disrobe, and I couldn’t remember being this uncomfortable since the banker grabbed my ass my first day of work. El Jesus Aviendo looks at us, shrugs his shoulders, and says, “Well, let’s get naked.”

It was actually the perfect way to break the ice, and we brought him along because he knew how this whole shebang worked. So I took my clothes off, and opened the bag that had my towel in it. Let’s take a moment to describe the ball towel. It’s a small square towel, about the size of a hand towel in your bathroom, used expressly for the purpose of covering your genitals as your flapping around the onsen from one pool to the next. Usually the towels are monogrammed with the initials or name of the onsen, so you can amass a collection of tiny towels used to cover your penis from unwary Japanese gazes.

Before we can jump into a hot pool of water and splash each other and giggle though, we’ve got to scrub down. As soon as I walked into the Onsen area, with the pools of water and what not, I noticed a series of pink plastic stools near the walls, which were lined with mirrors and shower heads attached to cords. You have to “shower” before you enter the communal pools. So I plant my hairy ass (if there was any speculation let’s put that to bed now) in one of these stools, and in front of me are a bottle of soap and a bottle of shampoo. So, I threw the ball towel onto the shelf in front of me and went to town, all those remnant fumes of alcohol faded away and I readied myself for the plunge.

We rinsed off, gathered our respective ball towels and looked over our options. There was a pool inside, and a pool outside. We went outside. The pool was about twelve feet wide, five feet long, and about thigh high. We clambered in sat down and were treated to an amazing view of a chain of islands fading into lighter and lighter blues as they approached the horizon and the sun shouted a slim highway of bright light across the Pacific Ocean. We sat in awe of the scene for a good 15 minutes without a word passing between us, my mind wandered through the landscape of my life’s history, and plans for the future, visions of prophetic greatness rose from the depths of the empty closets of thought, and the world, and the naked men sitting next to me completely faded from view. That is until the entire universe that had gathered around me was shattered by some Japanese asshole in front of me. (Go ahead…read it again)

Speaking of Japanese asses, it would have been kind of awkward walking around a room holding a tiny towel in front of my dangling member, but luckily, the hairless skinny Japanese men have asses that closely resemble that of Japanese women so after a few minutes I had my own convenient towel rack…Alright, alright, I went a little too far, I’m pulling your leg there, getting an erection would have been not only horribly embarrassing but I think probably emotionally scarring as well. And most of the people in the onsen were over 60 so don’t worry about my masculinity, I’m good to go.

Kasadojima also sported a small sauna, so that was the next stop. Next to the sauna though, was a small pool of water slightly above freezing temperature. So we jumped into the cold water, shocked the body a little, then popped into the sauna for a spell, then jumped back into the cold water again, and then outside to the hot pool with a view. We repeated this process a couple times and then went out to the hot pool for the last time. It was hard to resist the urge to simply stand naked outside in the cool breeze overlooking the ocean. Eventually the three of us did succumb to the inherent human desire.

So picture for yourself, three hairy-assed (what are the chances) gaijin standing outside a Japanese bathhouse overlooking the sunset, in the pose of a 15th century Spanish explorer of the bow of his ship heading towards the new world. Or maybe a more colloquial picture would be three Captain Morgan’s standing naked at the top of an island in Japan. There was something unmistakably Rockwellian about it, maybe bizarre Rockwell. Three men standing with their right leg on a small boulder, eyes fixed in the distance, holding a small ball towel at their sides.

After our dramatic experience we dried off, got dressed and hiked around the onsen for a little bit before going home…

STAR FADE ! (back to the future…err…present…err months in the past)

The Island

2006-07-13T08:21:00.000-07:00

When we approached the hotel, gray and cracked in the distance, like the perfect setup for a campy summer horror movie, we realized, the hotel was in fact, an island. We crossed a small bridge and began driving along the water to the biggest, hoteliest looking building we could find. When we arrived at the check in counter, the procedure was typically short, find the gaijin name, smile at them, give them something to sign, show them where their room is. This system was thrown into a bit a fix when he pulled out the map of island though, it had a golf course, windsurfing, it’s own onsen, bike rentals, boat rentals, 3 restaurants, miniature golf, a basketball court, and a series of cabins spread in the slightly forested area in the middle. When he pulled out a map of “the island” and tried to explain it in Japanese, and we nodded and sounded impressed, but we had no idea what the hell he was talking about. We figured it out as we went along. The place was a resort, self-contained, and inconveniently located a half hour from the nearest bar. Suffice to say we made use of none of these fine attractions on our island, though I was close to trying to play golf.

We settled into a palatial suite, compared to our last room, it was about 40 feet long, had 3 beds, a couch, a desk, a table, two chests of drawers, two closets, a fairly large bathroom, and a small fridge. All of the island’s eateries had closed for the evening, so we decided to go back near town to Denny’s (Joyful). It has all the comforts of home, it’s open 24 hours, and there’s a button on the table you press when you’d like to summon a tiny Japanese woman to bring you food. Coffee, Soda, Water etc…were all you can drink for two bucks. You can get burgers there, but they don’t come on a bun, you just get a hamburger patty slathered in sauce on a plate, but your body doesn’t really miss the bread too much. It was time for some crucial decision making, sane people would have gone to bed, and woken up early to explore this prominent and unique new city that opened up before us. I’ll spare you the trite remark here, we argued over whether to get a cab to the bars or load up on liquor and drink in the hotel room. After discovering a cap ride would be about 70 dollars, one way, from the hotel into town, we decided on the liquor, some ice, and some mixers.

As we left the 7-11, towing Jack Daniels, Vodka, and Rum, with various mixers; that’s right, in Japan, liquor is a convenience store item, we noticed three remarkably attractive Japanese girls, sitting in the car next to us, and their lucky guy friend walking back to drive them wherever they were going. I had a new destination in mind. We exchanged pleasantries, well, we said good evening at least, and then the conversation took a turn downhill, because I was out of Japanese. I held up the booze and said, “Partyu?” They giggled gregariously, but we weren’t getting anywhere, we needed to work on the driver. El Angel Solo, once again proving her vast worth, refused to flirt with the driver, even though she loves Japanese boys. To my dismay the car drove away in the opposite direction, but I was still holding a bag of liquor, so the night wouldn’t be a total wash.

We trekked the 15 minutes back to the hotel, blasting something or other out of the IPOD speakers in the Suzuki Alto – which by the way is named Yama – meaning mountain. Yama purred like like a three-legged asthmatic cat with one lung, on dialysis, in heat…and we poured the first drink in the hotel room. El Charro put on some hip-hop, but underground stuff with amazing lyrics…which I could make out maybe 20% of. It was definitely more intellectual than magic stick, slim shady, and “In da club” put together. It was more like 50 Cent doing a dramatic ghetto reading of War and Peace. I was not entirely happy with the situation though, our vibrations were mellowing out too much, and I feared we might fall asleep well before dawn. After I finished my Jack and Coke I informed the group that I would DD if we decided to go find something to do in the city of Beppu. 12 minutes later psycadelic trance was blasting from the IPOD speakers now re-located to Yama’s dashboard.

We weren’t proud of it, but we used a “Let’s Go” book to figure out where the best nexus of debauchery was located. As travelers we hate using a tourist book to guide us to where somebody thinks we should go, but we were moderately desperate and wanted to do less wandering and more…debauching. We parked in a parking garage somewhere near the train station and set off to boldly go where only a few thousand gaijin have ever gone before. Beppu has the reputation of being the “Sin City” of Japan. Comparing it to Las Vegas is about the equivalent of comparing Amsterdam to Disney World.

Almost all of the bars in Beppu are hostess bars. The streets then had only two major features in the small alleys, and side streets around the hostess bars. Florists, and very attractive Japanese women dressed up in terrific evening wear. Let me explain. A hostess bar is like a strip club, except there’s no nudity, trashiness, or really anything entertaining going on. It’s an extremely expensive bar where attractive Japanese girls will flirt with you and pour your drinks. These establishments exist because to be honest Japanese men have “no game.” They have a lot of trouble, attracting and or copulating with Japanese women on a day to day basis. So they throw themselves into their jobs, get really stressed out, never have sex with their wives, and blow all of their money to goggle at girls who pretend to be interested, and hope to god they look like they have enough money to get the hostess to accompany them to a love hotel, for 7 minutes of small bodied ecstasy. As a result of so many hostess bars, a number of florists have sprung up in the area, since girls are always impressed by such a unique and thoughtful gift as a fistful of soon to be dead brightly colored things. The streets normal odor of urine and failure was slightly overpowered though, which is a plus. The attractive Japanese women standing outside were of course, hostesses, and they were quite fetching, but I wouldn’t pay them exorbitant amounts of money to tell me how good looking and cool I am, that’s what my mom is for. She thinks I’m the coolest best looking guy in the world.

Finally we found a normal bar. We cantered in, and I was immediately impressed by the décor. Here’s a picture to save you the imagining…just kidding I never take pictures of anything. There were couches squared against all the walls, of crushed velvet. The passed out guy in combat boots also added to the ambiance of the establishment. As the DD I sighed and ordered a coke while the rest of the fellowship began boozing in earnest. It was still a mellow trip, but at least we were out of the hotel room. We stayed for a few drinks, reminiscing over what had happened in the last 6,000 words of the blog, and had a gay old time, which, consequently, is not to be confused with an old gay time, because that’s just disgusting.

We moved outside again and began looking for a club, or an abandoned factory, or anything remotely exciting. I forgot to mention that other than the bartender and the passed out guy in combat boots, we were the only people in the bar. During our meander around town, we happened into the tallest human being I have ever seen in my life. This guy had to be pushing 7 feet tall. We immediately started a conversation, the fact that he was a big black American dude, probably meant he knew something about Beppu that we didn’t. We asked him if there were any clubs, or gatherings, or people in the city. He said there wasn’t but he would show us the way to a cool bar.

As it turns out the guy was a basketball player, shocking I know, and he played for the semi-pro Oita Heat. Apparently there are about 12 basketball teams in Japan, all consisting of mostly American expats. He took us to his friend’s bar, which according to the owner was designed to feel like your bedroom at home rather than a bar. There were really comfortable chairs and couches, the walls and ceilings were painted in camo, the walls were covered with posters of Bob Marley playing soccer, and he had a huge tv connected to every game system known to man. The bar was predictably empty except for the fellowship, a giant basketball player, and the bartender/owner of the establishment. We stayed here for quite a while, as it was comfortable and it didn’t appear that we’d find anything better anyway.

Eventually the basketball player left and the owner came over with his English dictionary and did a pretty good job of keeping up a conversation in English, while we failed miserable to say anything valuable in Japanese. He apparently designed a lot of shirts and sold them at the bar, most of them revolving around ye olde cannabis culture. El Charro came to Japan partly to get an insider view of the fashion industry, no he’s definitely straight, calm down. El Charro also purchased two of said t-shirts at a very accommodating price from the owner. Who managed to explain all the cryptic insider drug slang to us before we left.

We rolled out sometime around 2 AM and decided we were hungry again, and we knew exactly what was still open. We went back to Denny’s (Joyful) again, with the exception to the meal being the vast quantities of beer drunk by my compatriots. El Angel Solo wanted to go to Karaoke, I didn’t particularly feel like going to sleep, and El Charro was planning to drink himself into a coma, and Karaoke seemed to fulfill the how and where of the equation.

We went to Karaoke, me for the first time…sober. I ordered a beer and we went to it. Not more than an hour into the rock out session El Charro was passed out on the bench, and my diseased throat was aching, so we cut it short fairly early, woke up El Charro, and bounced back to “the island.” Once unburdened by the albatross of DD around my neck, I went straight into the JD, on the rocks, and we turned on some music, and stayed up to watch the sun come up over the water from our balcony. Immediately followed by some vomiting and passing out until tomorrow afternoon.

All Signs Point to Insanity

2006-07-05T12:08:00.000-07:00

I awoke to an impossible combination of a bus full of nuns, a helicopter full of orphans, and an all you can eat buffet of endangered species at Woodstock, crashing through my window, crawling into my ear and tap dancing on my brain…at least that’s what the ringing phone sounded like. When that high pitched ringing sound we desperately wanted to avoid burst into the room, it was somewhere around 12:30, and our check out was scheduled for 11 AM. I would like to say that we had prepared the night before, packed our things, organized ourselves, etc…but we’re lousy tourists, and damn good alcoholics. It’s in these awkward moments went your freshly jolted body is springing around the room piling clothes into your bag and smell testing for a single moderately clean shirt that the thought of paying extra for the room creeps into your mind. You brush your teeth like they’re covered with spiders, throw water on your face, get dressed so fast that you barely avoid zippering your testicles and rush down to the concierge to tell them the phone was broken.

What we forgot was that we weren’t in New York, or California, we were in Japan, the land of I’m sorry. When we walked downstairs with our big puppy dog eyes, they had the polished brass cojόnes to tell us they were sorry for waking us, but that it’s past check out. They couldn’t even dignify our irresponsibility with a glib remark, or feigned anger because they hate their job. Sometimes these people can really get on your nerves.

Well, I had a solid 6 hour coma after the debauchery of my birthday, and now it was time to go ahead with the simple task of navigating around the island of Kyushu toward our hotel without an atlas, an ability to read road signs, any idea where we currently were in the grand scheme of things, hung-over more than a little, and on anti-biotics, which I popped before we left the hotel. We trekked to the airport parking lot, found the car, opened the doors, and waited outside with the doors open for a solid 15 minutes so the car could reach a temperature around hot enough to cook chicken in the oven. The current temperature inside of my Suzuki Alto hovered somewhere around the center of the &*$*ing Sun.

We got on the expressway (6$) and drove, maybe in the right direction, for about ten minutes. Then the expressway split 5 ways; Route 1, Route 2, Route 3, Route 4, and Route I hate Japan. None of the signs were particularly helpful as we couldn’t read them. I asked El Charro which one, and he gave me a look like he’d been drinking all night, I would have asked El Angel Solo, but she was a woman, and we weren’t in a kitchen. I took Route 3 and we leapt through the lanes, driving like angry people who want to get somewhere but know they not going the right way. We gave up, got off the expressway, turned around, and got back on the expressway the other way (6 $). We came to the same mouth of asphalt tributaries and chose Route 1. Why not? El Charro came out of his stupor enough to start looking at the old maperoos. One page computer printouts of random parts of the city, and the island of Kysuhu, it would be what an atlas looked like if designed by 140 monkeys with ADD, and ADHD, and Alzheimer’s, and AIDS too, just for the hell of it. El Charro decided we were going the wrong way again, so we got off, and got back on (6 $). We took Route 4, it lead us past a giant tower, and a domed baseball stadium, home of the Fukuoka Hawks, because El Charro’s Asahi animal spirit guide swore to him the night before we needed to pass these two structures to get where we were going. So far the ride had taken 1 hour. We were within 5 miles of where we had started.

I said to El Charro, “I swear to God if we drive past this dome again, I am going to invent a time machine so I don’t have to wait to murder your first born.”

This was not a pleasant hangover.

We stayed on the toll road for a while, if we were going in the right direction we would have to come to what El Charro’s students called, the most confusing off ramp of all time, afterwards it was supposedly smooth sailing to Beppu on the expressway. We were cruising a solid 130 Km an hour (The maximum reading on the Suzuki Alto dashboard is 140) and we saw the toll gate. We paid the toll (3 $) and proceeded down the impending stretch of…single lane country road. The speed limit was 50 km/hr (30 mph) and there was no traffic. All rational signs pointed to the fact that I would have to invent a time machine, but El Charro’s was sprightly and optimistic. In possibly the best line of the trip so far, possibly dwarfing his confession that he had gone on a week’s vacation with absolutely no money on him because he left it in a drawer in his apartment, El Charro’s turned to me and with a note of sincerity blurted, “Well, it feels like we’re going East, I mean it looks like we’re going East.”

We drove on for about a half hour, and then turned around, following a few other lost vacationers the wrong way down a one-way street for a while, which wound to the point where we were all going the wrong way over a one way bridge, and finally ended up in a town. We were lost, hung-over and hungry. We stopped at a supermarket and had an obligatory pee/sandwich break…in that order…kind of. We drove straight for another half hour afterwards and in some horribly bitter turn of cosmic spite spied the highway in the distance. The same set of tolls we had passed to enter this god forsaken, “East-looking” wasteland. I checked for cops, then I checked for traffic, and then made an illegal U-Turn, through some cones, 50 meters from the entrance/exit of a toll-booth, on anti-biotics. Picture yourself driving towards the George Washington Bridge, deciding you didn’t want to go over it, and turning around in front of the toll-booths, then picture yourselves being the only white people in a 5 mile radius, driving a car with your boss’ phone number on the back of it. We kept driving.

Soon afterward we stopped at some kind of market to ask for directions. A gentleman with his wife and kid was kind enough to help us out. I forgot to mention that for the duration of the driving on this trip, we are listening to our IPOD’s on my nifty little battery powered IPOD speakers in the car, Jumping Jack Flash was playing at the time when I decided to really murder El Charro’s first born. Beppu was due East of where we started, in the two hours we’d been driving, the bulk of it was spent going…drum roll…Southwest. SOUTHMOTHER%&*!INGWEST!!!! The guy did manage to map out our route perfectly for us though, we recognized all the streets because we’d already turned around on them at least once and we now had a damn good idea of the way we should go. We thanked him vigorously for his much needed counsel, and I politely asked him if he had any uranium for my flux capacitor. El Charro winced a little.

We made another U-Turn. We headed back toward the toll booth we went through once, made an illegal U-Turn in front of, and then went back through them again. When we passed the Dome again I gave El Charro the best shit-eating grin I could manage, and then I changed the music. I needed angry driving music, because I was an angry driver. I put on the album Ignition, by The Offspring. The opening lines of the song session appealed to me at this moment, the thought of LAPD police brutality resonated within me, and the thought of burning down a few buildings leapt over my heartstrings.

Steve: “Ok, for the next 40 minutes, while my angry music is playing, nobody look at me, nobody talk to me, nobody breathe near me, if you open your mouth once before this album is done, I’m just going to head straight for a gas tanker”

With the exception of the music at full volume, the car was dead silent.

When the music had finished we were approaching the off ramp our students had told us was the hardest part. After what we’d been through already this morning though, I didn’t think it could be that tough. We approached a sign that quoted distances of a few dozen destinations, and we recognized one as the correct one, things were going ok. Then we approached THE SIGN.

This sign was about twenty feet long and ten feet high. The roads were in 6 different colors. The best way to describe would necessitate inventing a few extra dimensions, but I’ll try to explain it in two. Picture, if you will, 4 pretzels. Now interlock them. Melt them into each other. Stretch them out. Wrap them into a perfect trapezoid. Color them different colors. Now write Japanese characters in all the empty spaces.

El Charro: (Pointing to the sign) There’s our exit!
Steve: Umm…
El Charro: The little white one on the left

The little white one on the left looked like it was a smudge of white-out on the corner of the sign. It was like a tiny alien popping out of the chest of a real exit.

Steve: That’s our exit?!
El Charro: Yeah dude I’m 100% sure, that’s the exit we have to take.

We took the exit. Nothing happened, we were driving down a highway in a string of already similar looking wrong highways. We gave it a chance though. Ten minutes later, we saw a sign that stated the distance to Beppu, our destination. El Charro and I screamed our heads off, I was honking the horn like crazy, turning on the windshield wipers, flipping my blinders on, and if crashing the car would have been apt celebration, I would have gladly done that too. I looked behind me, and El Angel Solo was asleep. She slept through the entire sign adventure. The most complicated sign in the history of travel, worse than the silk road, the trail of tears, the Oregon Trail, and Magellan’s circumnavigating the globe put together, and she slept through it.

We ambled at a moderate pace (burying the speedometer) for a couple of hours, with a brief stop for doughnuts and sun glasses at a rest station. Then as we approached Beppu proper, there was some odd happenings on the highway. We started seeing police cars with their lights on, driving down the highway…very slowly. I, as a driver, was confronted with a spectacle I’d never seen before, and I had no idea how to handle it. There were a half dozen police cars going in both directions on the highway, driving at very low speeds. The lights were flashing, a lot of people were lined up behind them, and some people were blatantly speeding past them.

I decided to play it safe in this situation, we probably could have blasted past them, maybe we would have gotten pulled over, maybe not. Despite the fact that most people in Japan treat us like Gods, not because we deserve it, but because we’re white, the police are a whole different ball game. There’s not actually any crime in Japan, so the police find it increasingly difficult to exercise their power trip. Nothing, and I mean nothing, gets them off like arresting or pulling over a Gaijin. We’re like black felons with no license driving past and smoking a crack pipe in plain view. Essentially we are a drive-by orgasm for a bored and power hungry cop.

We followed slowly and arrived in Beppu proper, the only problem was our hotel wasn’t actually in Beppu but about 17 km outside of the city. We somehow made it without incident, parked at the hotel and heaved a massive collective sigh. Our 3 hour journey had taken roughly 7. But part two of Golden Week was about to begin…on anti-biotics.

The Best Birthday on Anti-Biotics...continued

2006-06-26T09:29:00.000-07:00

Birthday – Part II

So we left the restaurant fairly buzzed around 8 PM or so, and after walking for about 5 or 6 minutes we realized we were very close to Oya Fukadori. This was rather convenient due to the fact that our only frame of reference for the entire city was the area where we knew there were parties and bars. Everything else was pretty much a wash as far as we were concerned. We strolled into the same building where the American rock bar was last time, the building now dubbed piss break alpha.

This time the problem was not only that we were white, didn’t speak Japanese, and were not dressed in suits. I mean, those were still problems, but the bigger problem was that it was still only around 8:30 and most of the bars don’t open until at least 9. So we started at the first floor, got summarily rejected from two bars, and found 4 more closed. Standing in the hallway on the 4th floor one of the bar owners happened to pop out of the door, and we shot her big whitey puppy dog eyes so she graciously admitted us into her establishment a little while before they opened. We were already rolling 4 drinks deep so it was time to dispense with the pleasantries and fire straight into the whiskey and coke. The bar was playing music videos of concerts on the TV, and although it was apparently a country themed bar, which, we all know, would have sent me into a drunken flame wielding rage, the crisis was averted when Paul McCartney’s iron curtain concert went on. Well, at least the crisis was turned into a slightly less appalling crisis. The interior of said bar had all the rustic comforts of a T.G.I. Friday’s at home. Cheesy crap covered the walls from ceiling to floor, but we were in Japan, so this was kitschy and exotic.

The three of us sat down and began another round of drinking games. It was way too early for the major parties to start, and the streets were still nigh deserted, but this was vacation damn it. It basically came down to making a bunch of rules about the conversation which when violated resulted in a drink, no swearing, no addressing people by name, and at one point we outlawed negative comments for ten minutes. During this segment El Angel Solo was almost completely silent, it’s not that she’s a bitch, but well…it kind of is that she’s a bitch. We still love her though. It was during our short tenure at this bar that a new phrase entered the lexicon of the fellowship. El Angel Solo turned to me and asked me some stupid womanly question, to which I replied, “I’m on Anti-biotics, bitch.” It would be a running theme, as you have no doubt gathered for the remainder of the vacation. When we’d finished a few more drinks we departed and went back out to the street.
El Charro has eagle eyes for spotting white people in Japan. He gets very excited and his eyes start twitching a little bit. For a few minutes the trip becomes an old lassie re-run.

“What is it boy?”
“You need to pee?” *El Charro shakes his head”
“Are you hungry? Do you want some Ramen?” *Shakes head*
“Is it white people? Did you see white people somewhere?”

El Charro points across the street, and sure enough, there’s a pile of white people mulling around, looking much like…a group of white people in Japan. We saunter across the street, and make their acquaintance. There was one giant white guy, and as a general rule, giant white guys in Japan are always marines. Sure enough, the dude was a marine stationed at Iwakuni, where all our marine friends were stationed, about a half hour from home base. There were a couple of other guys and girls mixed in and an Indian girl who was a raver, and had some useful information for us about our encroaching volcano rave in Aso.

We exchanged e-mails and promised to be friends forever, when the Indian gal dropped a bombshell on El Charro, “Digweed is playing across the street tonight.”
This meant nothing to me or El Angel Solo, but El Charro was going nuts. He could not in fact believe that “*$&%ing Digweed is playing here tonight?!?!”
I’ll explain: El Charro’s favorite genre of music is psytrance (psychedelic trance), stay with me people; pyschadelic trance is not the most popular genre of music, but in the little nexus of California drug addicts, hipsters, yuppies, and artists that listen to psytrance, Digweed is deified. According to El Charro he regularly charges 10,000 Yen (100 bucks) a head to a few thousand people to listen to him “spin.”

He was playing a really small show in the city of Fukuoka for the measly price of 50 bucks, and by measly I mean, “there’s no way in hell I’m paying 50 bucks to watch a guy play with turntables for a few hours.” El Charro was convinced fate had brought him to this moment in time to see Digweed, but I was convinced fate had brought us here to get drunk and have sex with random Japanese girls. These differences were becoming more irreconcilable by the minute. But just so you don’t gain any respect for me, I will fast forward to the next day a bit and say that none of us “got any” that night.

The other group split and we stood around trying to figure out what the hell we were going to do for the rest of the night. In the meantime my hands were feeling very light, almost ethereal, and as I searched through the darkness of my mind, into the shredded remnants of my soul, I realized…I wasn’t holding a beer. We went to 7-11 and remedied the situation.

Outside the 7-11 the same pile of degenerate Japanese dirtbags who reason forsook the lifestyle of the average Japanese teenager to early twenty something sat outside drinking and smoking cigarettes. Why they would want to give up a life consisting of studying during the day, during the night, during the weekends, and during vacation I’ll never know, but they had fantastic haircuts, trendy/slutty outfits on, and were getting drunker by the minute. We were comfortable here.
We were sitting on the curb blathering about something or other when El Charro’s whitedar went off again. An odd trio was walking in our direction. They turned out to be two Italian guys studying at Fukuoka University, with one of their Japanese classmates, who spoke very good English and acted as their unofficial interpreter. They were pretty interesting kids and we hit it off pretty well. As it turns out, right next to the bar Digweed was spinning, there was an R&B, hip-hoppy thing of some kind going on for 15 bucks. I was pretty much sold. That show started at around 10:30, and Digweed didn’t come on until around 2AM, at this point I was pretty much resigned to the fact that I would drunkenly agree to spend my not so hard earned money to see the show anyway.

As we found ourselves once again confronted with the problem of needing somewhere to continue drinking, my boy Louis showed up, and looking fine in a Camel Hair jacket (always trust a man wearing Camel hair…maybe not men who ride camels).
We start talking to Louis about this guy, Digweed, and his apparent pull within the psytrance community. Louis predictably knows the owner of “Air Bar” and goes to see if he can pull some strings for us. The night is rolling very smoothly. We get another beer and keep talking to our new Italian friends, and I can’t remotely remember what their names were. Ten minutes later Louis comes back downstairs, and he says he can get us all in for 3000 Yen (30 bucks) with two free drinks. Well hell yeah, that comes down to 20 bucks because I would have bought two drinks anyway. Louis will continue to be the man for the remainder of the evening.

It’s still only about 9:30 and the hip-hoppy party thing next door still doesn’t start for about an hour, so Louis offers us a free pitcher of beer at his “Salsa Bar.” I love this man. So we walk behind our Camel Haired leader for about ten minutes and walk into a bar on the third floor of a non-descript building. This is one of those weird juxtapositions that I may never forget, a few dozen Japanese men and women dancing to Salsa. I won’t remember it because it was bad and goofy, and characteristically arrhythmic Japanese. They were all really $&#*ing good at Salsa, and god damn does Salsa make a girl more attractive. Louis moved a bunch of patrons to different tables to make room for us, and the beer began flowing…like beer, from a tap…that pours beer. Listen, we’re not going for Hemmingway here.

El Angel Solo and I tried, and failed miserably, to Salsa. We just made a big mess of the dance floor, threw in a few “Sumemasen Gaijin” and fled the dance floor back to where the beer was being housed. Eventually the Italians and their Japanese friend went to the hip-hop thing and the rest of the fellowship ambled to the bar. It was still technically my birthday so Louis offered me a birthday shot, who knows what it was. At that moment, as the small glass clanged ritualistically on the bar top, I spotted the Japanese Holy Grail. Louis sold Cigars, and damn good cigars, behind the counter. Next to Japanese twins I could not think of a better birthday gift for myself. I bought a rather thick 6 inch Dominican, Don Esteban. Before I lit the birthday girl though, I had more important business to attend to:

“Louis, who is that?”
“Oh, the attractive girl?”
“No the 50 year old next to her. Of course the attractive girl.”
“She’s a salsa teacher, her name is blablabla (I don’t remember her name, and it doesn’t really matter anyway)”
“Can I get a free lesson?”

Louis called her over, and we were introduced, she was incredibly attractive, probably a bit older than me, but I was only half sure, and fully drunk. She spoke almost no English though, but she could probably understand a lot of what I was saying, if I spoke a little slower. Then she called the tall good looking guy who was another Salsa instructor over. El Angel Solo and I were treated to a free salsa lesson. I wasn’t half bad either, at least for the 3 or 4 extremely basic moves I was taught. Afterwards, we bounced to the Rap/R&B/Whatever it was and met up with the Italians.

I lit up the Cigar and we paid the entrance fee into the…frat house? In this nexus of well manicured bartenders, and pristinely designed clubs, this place had all the charm of a set from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. There were concrete floors and concrete walls with no decoration, a giant poorly constructed wooden bar, with nothing behind it. There were just a few bottles on the counter and a refrigerator full of beer next to it. The kids working the door and the bar were wearing hoodies and jeans, and for some reason the entire place reeked of a fine Dominican cigar. Oh, wait, that’s me. The dance floor was pretty large, and there were a dozen or so people mulling around in front of the stage. The stage consisted of four sets of turntables, with 4 DJ’s spinning simultaneously. Two guys seemed to specialize in scratching, while the other two were setting the rhythm and the playlist. It was like home away from home. Minus all the Asians I was back in the basement of my crack infested Binghamton ‘hood, and I drank accordingly.

The music wasn’t really my style, but the DJ’s know what they’re doing in Japan, and I started getting pretty into the set soon after we got there. We drank, and jibber-jabbered and talked for a while, and we still had an hour and a half or so until Digweed, so we decided to go back to Louis’ main bar across the street and grab some grub so to speak. We loaded up on American comfort food, Pizza, fries, burgers, etc…anything rolled in grease really appealed to me at this point. It was only about 1 AM and we’d been drinking for a solid 7 hours or so already, and the main event of the evening hadn’t even started yet. We paid for our food and grabbed the Italians and they’re Japanese friend, then we grabbed Louis and went to go seek the fruit of our social labors for the last two days.

As promised, Louis got us all in for 3,000 Yen, with 2 free drink tickets, double Jack and coke please. I’ll be honest at the risk of losing the respect and admiration of my adoring fans. I nursed this one for a while. This place was called “Air Bar” but it wasn’t one of those cheesy shot bars where you huff oxygen for an inflated yuppie price. They ripped you off the old fashion way, with exorbitant door fees and overpriced drinks. It was very American of them, so I appreciated it. The bar was two floors; the first floor was just a giant square dance floor. We all stumbled up the poorly lit stairs and inside, Digweed, the man of the hour, was not on yet, but the place was packed anyway. Within 30 seconds of entering the bar, Louis had maybe the most attractive Japanese girl I’ve ever seen leaning into him, hinging on his every romantic scream into her face, the man was smooth. We went to check out the upstairs, where the bar was. Apparently every white person in town had the same idea, because it looked like hurricane gaijin had scoured the neighborhood and dropped them in this room. We ran into most of the people from the group we’d met on the street, and other assorted grungy lookin’ foreigners were sprawled across the half dozen couches and 10 or so lazy boy looking contraptions.

I believe we had reached the point in the evening when we all felt much smoother than we actually were, because despite repeated attempts by all three members of the fellowship to hit on the opposite sex, we were instead dragged into inane conversations about our origins, purpose of visit, and plans for the future. It was like ten consecutive conversations with an alcoholic customs agent. We decided it would just be better to go downstairs and listen to some awesome music and dance for a while.

We got downstairs just as Digweed was starting his set, and I was blown away. He’s apparently ranked number 6 among worldwide psytrance DJ’s by a magazine that gives a #$*% about global psytrance DJ’s. But the dude was phenomenal anyway. I had been introduced to a lot of the genre by El Charro, and once you get into it, it is actually closer to classical music than anything else really. It’s insanely complex, multi-faceted, micro-managed like an orchestra, and thumps the breath right out of your chest. At first it all sounded exactly the same, varying levels of “thump, thump, thump, thump.” When you hear a really talented DJ though, they bring in the high notes, and the “obligatory line from an old science fiction movie,” and keep the music rotating and changing and shifting, like real music should.

Dancing to psytrance is a lot of fun too, because like me, none of them can really dance. But everybody is doing their own thing, nobody is standing against the walls judging me, or naturally, laughing at me. After an hour of constant movement, and 11 hours of constant drinking, I used my second bar coupon for a water, amazingly the same price as a beer without a ticket. We ended up shifting back and forth between Digweed and the “frat house” 3 or 4 times over the next couple of hours, chasing girls, or wanting to get off the crowded dance floor, or running from girls and wanting to get back on the crowded dance floor, and finally we went back outside the last time and it was past dawn. We got in a cab around 6 AM, and the drinking started at 6 PM. Our check out time in the hotel was in 5 hours, and we had a 3 to 4 hour drive in front of us…without getting lost. And did I mention, “I’m on anti-biotics, bitch!”

Asshole....or Gaijin

2006-06-20T10:23:00.000-07:00

Before continuing with the story of my birthday I will offer a small personal anecdote. Today I took the beloved drinking game “Asshole” and morphed it into an English Game. Essentially, instead of someone telling you to “drink” they had to tell you to “Speak English” and ask a question from like 30 categories I typed up 5 minutes before class. I also renamed the game “Gaijin” so that the asshole in fact became the gaijin. So today I got paid 25 dollars an hour to play asshole with the research and development team of a petrochemical wax company. What did you do at work today?

The best week on anti-biotics...ever...continued

2006-05-20T23:29:00.000-07:00

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.

The best week on anti-biotics...ever

2006-05-14T11:47:00.000-07:00

Day 1

One of the few drawbacks of my job is that I have to take my vacations during Japanese national holidays. I know all of you cynics out there are saying, “That doesn’t sound so bad, people in the US go on vacation around the same time usually.” Well, it’s a little different in Japan, every single Japanese person who gets a holiday gets these three holidays off. This means that 150 million people on a tiny little island are all going on vacation at the same time. It means traffic like you’ve never imagined in your worst nightmares, and tiny traffic, like clown car traffic, which is even more infuriating because you feel like you could just pick up the cars and throw them out of the way. It also means price gauging, everywhere, on everything.
But enough bitching, moving on with the story, El Charro, a Canadian gal at the school who we’ll call el ángel solo and myself piled into my tiny Suzuki Alto at about 1 PM on May 1st and sped off onto the expressway toward the city of Fukuoka. We didn’t so much have an atlas, or a map…but El Charro had spent two weeks of his lessons getting his students to give him a pile of information on what to do during our ensuing vacation to the island of Kyushu. We had maps of the city of Fukuoka, and the City of Beppu which told us more or less where to go once we got into the city, but we didn’t really have too much of an idea how to get to said cities. We got on the expressway assuming there would be signs pointing us in the direction of said metropoli (which will forever be the plural for metropolis).
The first brazen act of stupidity of our little adventure happened in the parking lot of a 7-11 about a half hour from Fukuoka proper. We had just finished some tasty convenience store morsels of some kind, sushi, ice cream, French fries and what have you, when El Charro says, “ummm, we have a little problem, I forgot my money.”
He got a cash advance from his boss, just so that he would have enough cash for the trip, and he left it all in a drawer in his apartment. I had just become the banker in this alcoholic game of monopoly, but without any of the benefits of taking the players last dimes and laughing as they look sullenly upon the decision of mortgaging Park Place or Marvin Gardens. Ironically enough my car was about the size of the little metal playing piece that comes with the standard Monopoly board.
We arrive in Fukuoka without too much fanfare, and we have a little map of the area of our hotel. However, Fukuoka is massive. Imagine yourself with a map of 6 square blocks of Greenwich Village, your hotel is on Christopher Street let’s say. Now imagine entering New York City, unable to read or speak English, at about 110th street, and navigating your way to your hotel. That’s us. We get on the Urban Expressway, which is basically equivalent to the freeway system in LA, going in one direction or another, convinced we’re going the wrong way we get off. Then we get back on again going in another direction, it costs 6 dollars every time we get on the Urban Expressway. We dance this dance for about 40 minutes before stopping at a gas station after recognizing something that correlates to some piece of paper in El Charro’s massive folder of donated ideas and maps from his students. El Charro and el Angel solo get out and ask an old woman for directions, when I return from the bathroom I see the woman turning the map upside down and right side up and upside down again. Hope is fading quickly.
We eventually get back on the Urban Expressway, going in the right direction to the airport. In a stroke a genius a few days before we realized the airport subway line goes directly to the street our hotel is on, and airport parking is cheap and plentiful, if you go to the right terminal. When the expressway splits between international and domestic terminals of the airport El Charro points us to the domestic and we sally forth to the parking lot. After parking, getting our bags and moving toward the subway we see the parking prices, to our dismay, 2400 Yen a day. El Charro informs us that it was in fact the international terminal that was cheaper. We have been driving a solid 5 hours so I don’t really care about 20 bucks over the course of 2 days, these spending habits would continue for the rest of the week. I also take a few stressed out seconds to remind El Charro that he is in fact a dumbass.
We get on the incredibly comfortable subway. It is the weirdest subway car I have ever been on. The seats are covered in red plush fabric that stretches across the entire car, and by the entire car I mean the entire train. Whereas every other subway system in the world would have segmented the train into ten or twelve cars this train was one continuous object, to look from one end of the other caused a small sensation akin to vertigo, or an infinite mirror effect. You see an identical train car setting that continues for about 150 yards, all moving in eerie unison with slightly different Japanese occupants.
We are on the car with our luggage, the man across from us is reading what looks like cartoon porn, another guy across from us looks like a gay Japanese cowboy. He is dressed in pointy little boots, skin tight jeans, a white belt, and a cowboy hat; he is currently pre-occupied with changing his shirt on the subway car. The other two men on this little crazy train are speaking in sign language to each other across the train car. Finally, I’ve entered a real city.
We stumble out of the subway and look at the very detailed directions from the station to the Hotel. We walk away from the park down the street, and we look for any indication that one of these buildings is a Hotel. We find none. We keep walking down the street. I realized immediately that this is not the most exciting part of town, the probably means there will be cab rides in the near and slightly more distant future. So we walked all the way down the street until all three of us agree we’ve walked too far, then we turn around and ask a Japanese woman for directions. She doesn’t know where the hotel is, but it’s ok because she turned out to be completely insane. After babbling something to us she took off up the street at a brisk pace pointing to the sky and shouting phrases to herself while messing up her hair and spinning around. We walk back to the subway station, look at the map again, and end up walking back the exact same way. We turn around. We ask another Japanese person for help, but she is also a tourist. I’m ready to give up and keep walking and she runs into a restaurant, and asks an employee where our hotel is. A waitress comes out, looks us over for about 30 seconds, and points her finger to a sign about 30 yards down the street. We walked right past our hotel, indeed, 10 feet under the huge sign for our hotel 4 times. The phrase El Charro and I use for situations like this is LIT (lost in translation). We use this phrase every time a language or cultural barrier prevents us from arriving somewhere or procuring some kind of service, or getting laid. A good example of being LIT happened at Mcdonald’s a couple of weeks ago, I asked for the number 5 value meal or whatever it was and the woman came to my table with 5 regular hamburgers…I was completely LIT.
Back to the story…we were checked into our two rooms in about 15 seconds, the attendant at the desk saw white people approaching and pulled out the reservation with a gaijin name on it. El Charro, penniless, paid the tab with his credit card and we gave him back cash to spend…on food and alcohol, which next to gas and tolls would be our only expenses for a week. We left home at 1 PM so by the time we put our bags down in the room it was dinner time. We all put on an outfit designed for the specific purpose of attracting a mate of some kind or other, we were on vacation so the standards for casual mating had probably dropped a few rungs, to rest quietly above fatty and mongoloid, hovering somewhere around, “she looks good when I’m drunk.”
We took the subway to an area of Fukuoka nicknamed Oya Fukadori. The translation is “your parents will be angry.” We did quite a bit of casual research by probing our students about the name. Apparently, the area houses a few “community colleges,” and since Japanese students work about 712 times harder in school than their American counterparts, getting into a community college means that they have basically failed at life, in otherwords, they have a personality. As such, the area then symbiotically spawned a few hundred bars and clubs in the span of a 5 block radius. We were home.
So this motley giajin crew arriving at Oya Fukadori began the search for sustenance, being three people of mixed wallets and personalities we disagreed on every restaurant we came across. “That looks too expensive.” “That looks too cheap.” “That looks too Japanese.” “That doesn’t look Japanese enough.” This dance went on for about a half hour or so before we gave up and went to a Yakitori restaurant. A Yakitori restaurant is an establishment devoted to delivering various sticks of meat to its patrons until they are so happy their heart immediately explodes, it is then collected diced and served to another patron. The beer, it should be remarked, was cheap and plentiful, and yay all the people did rejoice.
We then scampered to a 7-11 to buy some Ukon. Ukon is an amazing little product, it costs 200 yen, comes in a little bottle, tastes like pepto-bismol and will work its little butt off to ensure that you the consumer wake up hangover free. It works amazingly well. Afterwards the immediacy of a bladder full of beer came to a head. The quest to find a bathroom, and by bathroom I mean a bar with a bathroom had begun. It was still very early, maybe 7:30, and many of the bars open at 8 or 9.
We entered a five story building that housed a solid 20 bars. We got on the elevator and went to the second floor, there were two bars, and both were closed. The urge to urinate on the door was strong, but we held fast. We went to the third floor, one bar was closed, the other was Nihonjin only, the $#&%ing ethnocentric fascists. The urge to kill, preferably somehow using urine, was rising. We got back into the elevator. El Charro picked a bar on the fifth floor. We basically ran in, and El Charro was dispatched to make pleasantries with the bartender while I prepared to unleash my stream of justice upon the porcelain villainy.
As it turns out we picked a good bar, the description on the elevator said, “shot bar” and it had a cool name, which now eludes me, but it was something like the black monkey or iron butterfly or some such nonsense. It was a gaijin rock and roll bar. They were playing good music, and the owner was a white dude who had come to Japan around 1994 and opened the bar, at a time when there were no “rock bars” in Fukuoka. We meet a lot of admirable white business owners in Japan, they all seem like fairly happy, tranquil kind of people. I started with a Jack and Coke and he informed us that there was a patio on the roof, the decision to move outside was silent and instantaneous. It was a gorgeous night, and we were in a new, a real city in Japan, sitting on the top of a building looking at the night sky above and the nightlife down below. This, I imagine will be a good vacation. We were 2 all American college educated liberals and 1 Canadian of the same persuasion, getting drunk in Japan on vacation, contemplating the vast matters of the universe around us, the effect this vacation and the whole time will have on us, including the desire to murder all of our politicians in both countries and slap all those red staters in their fundamentalist, bible wielding, wrong side of scopes monkey trial, uninformed patriotic, mindless cross burning faces. But that’s just us.
The music was piped upstairs and I went down to request “Beer” by the Reel Big Fish. It is the quintessential high school drinking song of our generation, and on the rooftop I rediscovered skanking (a form a dancing attributed to those who are white and listen to white ska music, and can’t really dance). I skanked around the patio kicking over the cheap aluminum patio chairs and frolicking hither and thither, but I was only in the jerk stage of drunk, slowly approaching asshole, but not quite making it there yet, as such I picked up all the chairs I made a racket of knocking over. The owner came upstairs with a book of pictures. Apparently every band that has played in Fukuoka in the last 15 years had come to his bar to party afterwards, rappers, rock stars, pop stars etc… The owner eventually gave us a lot of advice about what to do and where to go in the nearby area, but he also mentioned that today and tomorrow most people aren’t really off from work, for most people Golden Week begins on Wednesday. He also said that during Golden Week most of the Fukuoka locals leave Fukuoka and tourists flood the city, most already married, or old, or just not much fun in general. This partly explained why the bar was completely empty except for us.
We were told where the good dance clubs were, but they were all closed on Mondays, and would be open tomorrow. We went to one of the bars suggested by the owner called the Broadway. I assumed it was a crappy New York themed bar that the Japanese natives found kitchey and exotic.
On the way we grabbed a beer and sat outside for a little while, across the street we saw two Japanese youths practicing the craze sweeping the nation, freestyle walking. That’s right freestyle walking, they were trying to balance themselves on benches and poles and all sorts of other random crap. Naturally when they were confronted by a tree they intended to climb and couldn’t your hero drunkenly ran across the street to help out.
The first branch of the tree was about 12 feet in the air, and neither of them could reach it. So using a series of hand gestures, and I think even that crude language was slurred, I made them understand that two of us would use our hands to cup the other’s foot and propel the other one up high enough to grab the branch. He failed miserably, though nobody was injured. Then I had the two of them boost me up, I latched onto the tree with my legs and shimmied up the trunk until I reached the branch. Not really having any goal past reaching the branch I held on for a bit and then dropped back to the ground, but not before scratching the hell out of my arm. But I am not the best damn freestyle walker I know.
Afterwards we moseyed over to the Broadway bar, it was a little more crowded than the last bar, but not even close to a full house. We were immediately greeted by the owner, another gaijin, a Dominican born New Yorker named Louis. He gave us the same tired sob story or having a lot of balls opening his own bar in Japan and being blessed with wealth and happiness for 15 years. We immediately continued drinking heavily and talked to Lois for a while. I had woken up to a greeting of green mucus that morning and I knew I would need anti-biotics to survive the massive amounts of alcohol I would be imbibing over the course of said vacation and he gave us the address of an international medical clinic not far from my hotel, in fact it was only one subway stop away. My stomache began growling soon after and looking at my watch I realized it was in fact my birthday, so after looking at the menu for about 2/3 of a second I ordered a bacon cheeseburger with fries to go with my next double jack and coke. We stayed there for quite some time, the music was awful but everything else was satisfactory. Eventually Louis took us to his friend’s reggae/soccer bar. It’s a bar that plays reggae music and has soccer playing on tv. We were the only ones there…again. But the birthday was given a free shot of 151 – which he drained vigorously – and then the rest of the night kind of fades into nothingness, but I don’t think there was a whole lot more too it. We got a cab back to the hotel sometime after dawn and woke up sometime around noon the next day.
My birthday would prove to be an orgy of stupidly expensive decisions with the outcome much the same as the night before…but I get ahead of myself.

No....no this can't be?!?!?!

2006-04-27T06:32:00.000-07:00

For two or three of my classes, I have spent time AND effort preparing lessons. Not only have I planned lessons, but planned lessons that review and reinforce the things they learned in the previous lessons. I actually cared whether they were learning or not. Is this possible? Am I growing as a person? Could I really be maturing as a human being? How could this have happened in a single month, what cosmic colonoscopy could have reversed my karma so fast? For a few hours after class today I had feelings of self-worth. I might as well start chiseling my name into a tombstone. What’s next, remorse? I am extraordinarily unhappy with the sudden turn of events, and despite the fact that it’s Thursday, I am going to do my patriotic duty, and go to a bar, get drunk, curse and yell and scratch myself in inappropriate places at inappropriate moments, mock Japanese culture and objectify women. I’ll talk to you when I safely feel like a bastard again.

Johnny Walker will drown the Devil's Strudel

2006-04-24T23:42:00.000-07:00

Saturday began as most Saturdays do, at around 3 PM. La Escueleta Corriente’s 30th birthday extravaganza was due to begin at 7 PM, and I had to bring an American dish. I asked her if she’d ever been to America, our job is to take the unique foods from every culture around the world, add sugar, fat, or additional meat, and make it taste better. She was not satisfied with my reproach, so I endeavored to make Hamburger Helper…from scratch mofo. I threw a couple of pounds of ground beef in a pot, cooked it, added a buttload of elbow noodles, some onions and peppers, and a huge swath of tomato sauce, and being able to find only what I could assume was mozzarella cheese, a whole lot of that on top, and let it simmer for about a half hour. It was delicious, I guess American, food.
El Charro came to pick me up and we rode off to the party, and boy was it kicking, by 7:30 the entire party consisted of myself, El Charro, La Escueleta Corriente, another gaijin teacher who we’ll call El Jesus Aviendo, and a Japanese teacher who has expressed interest in reading the blog and as such will now be referred to as Muchacha Reservada. El Jesus Aviendo is the type of person I like to refer to as one funny &%$! though, so everything was ok for the time being. We blew up some balloons and waited for the festivities (drinking) to begin.
The gaijin began pouring in, in ones and twos and threes until there were about 15 Americans, Brits, and Aussies at the party. La Escueleta Corriente knows what she’s doing so she also invited the neighbors, who brought their two little girls, and 2 cakes for the birthday girl. Apparently not everyone brought food, but there was a lot of booze, and good booze. It was a nice feeling to have about 4 pounds of food completely eaten by the end of the party, possibly the first time in history Hamburger Helper has been consumed with chopsticks.
Then the Austrian’s showed up, and Senorita Blitzkrieg looked even hotter than last time. El Charro and I have had long discussions about her. She has the kind of natural beauty you could easily imagine yourself waking up next to for 20 years. We have both agreed that she’s the hottest thing we’ve seen in this country thus far, and because she’s taken and she flirts like there’s no tomorrow, we’d rather her not be anywhere around us. It’s an exercise in sexual tension torture. But suffice to say she baked an apple strudel which caused an event later in the evening, but first to the drinking.
The birthday girl was given 100$ (10,000 yen) drink coupon to a liquor store by someone or other, so she bought two excellent bottles of French Wine, and a bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label, which I don’t think I’ve ever had before. It’s about the smoothest, tastiest whiskey I’ve ever pounded 5 shots of without a chaser in an hour. We spent a good deal of time making each other’s acquaintances, sharing travel stories, the highs and lows of our jobs. Most of the people at the party worked at other English Schools, or had opened their own. Some were just as wet behind the ears as I was, and others had been here 5 or 6 years. It was slightly overwhelming being in the same room as everyone, I haven’t seen this many gaijin in one room since the Toga Party before I left.
Then it came to the point where I was sitting next to Senorita Blitzkrieg, and she asked me if I had tried the apple strudel yet. In fact, I hadn’t, and since the drunkening (thanks Brian) was apon me, I’d love some apple strudel. Completely ignoring EL Charro’s warning, I walked into the other room, where a single piece of apple strudel lay on a plate in the middle of the floor. A dim halo emitted from the crust as if it was the lost Holy Grail. (Which according to Indiana Jones is held in some Nazi bunker anyway).
Suddenly the world fell into a deep silence, my brain felt disconnected from my arm, moving as if the air was thickening concrete, and El Charro leapt into the living room, as if from the top ropes of some wrestling ring in a spandexed Tijuana bloodbath and screamed, “Steve, do not eat the apple strudel.” But it was too late, he fell to the floor with a sickening thud as I put that devil's brew in my mouth, sprinkled with the sugar from Satan's fetid cane fields, where the tormented souls of rapists tend the crops, cooked in an oven heated by the boiling juice of pedophiles exploding eyeballs, with fresh apples picked from the orchards of misery by a thousand naked despots, flailed for all eternity by the peasants they starved and..."is there cinnamon in there?" I asked sheepishly. The answer was “yes, and nutmeg,” this is the best god damn baked good I'd ever tasted, I turned to El Charro, and said, "I must marry this girl." He sighed when I asked him why he was on the floor.
The girl was perfect, and she bakes with evil in her heart, which really turns me on. Soon after the party quickly split in two, since El Charro lives in a neighboring apartment, the more intense partygoers moved next door for a spell.
The birthday had peaked and its downward parabolic arch was pointing straight to a club. Someone who spoke decent Japanese lined up 3 cabs for us, but some people had bikes, and some people were bailing, so we only needed two. However, if we ordered ten cabs and only used one, none of the drivers would have said a word to us. They would have shrugged gotten back in their cars and left, giving respect to those who don’t deserve it is built into Japanese culture, and we’re going to abuse that fact until they realize caustic honesty and derision is what makes the world go round. Before we left though La Escueleta Corriente and I for some reason took turns punching the monkey hanging from her living room light. The shit eating grin is thanks to Mr. Johnny Walker Black Label.
The cabs mosey down to a bar called Suzie Wong’s. It’s fairly large, has a medium sized dance floor, nice catches to chill on toward the other side, and relatively but not outrageously overpriced drinks. There was only one aspect of the bar we were concerned with really, that it was empty. We stayed for about two minutes because we were waiting for the folks biking down, and then we decided to wait outside. Suzie Wong’s was an abysmal failure, but we’ll have a decent Suzie Wong’s story next weekend to make up for it. One of the other reasons we left is because one of the gaijin teacher’s who we’ll call T (because I don’t feel like spending 5 minutes on Babelfish right now) happened to be smuggling the bottle of Johnny Walker into the bar with her, and as the bar was completely empty, felt rather conspicuous about it. The smuggling will be a continuing theme throughout the night.
We waited outside for a wall, there were a lot of new faces for everyone, so we had plenty to talk about, El Charro went to vomit his Johnny Walker somewhere as I swigged a little more at sporadic intervals. The people on bikes finally showed up, a few people went home, and most of us agreed to meet at the Q-Bar. The stomping ground of the Russian Working Girls the night before. This time I knew better than to steal a bike and tool around though, I was sure my stomach was going to find plenty of reasons to be mad at me by the end of the night anyway. As we were walking away some Asian girl begged us to stay as Suzie Wong’s, we gently informed her that Suzie Wong’s sucked, and the owner of Suzie Wong’s was the same owner of the other bar we were going to, that would no doubt suck as well. She pouted as we left, but I don’t think anyone noticed or cared when she appeared or left. The translation, folks, is that she wasn’t attractive.
We rolled ten deep into Q-Bar, and T was toting the bottle of Johnny under her jacket and disappeared into the bathroom. The rest of us quickly ordered a beer and surveyed our new temporary surroundings. It was the same dark hole as it was Friday night, the music was a little better, and we had brought a big enough posse to keep everyone entertained, so life wasn’t so bad. About 5 minutes later the ugly, pouting girl from Suzie Wong’s showed up with what could be called two moderately attractive compatriots. During the course of the next few minutes or hours a few minor incidents occurred, I would say they weren’t even blogworthy, but I’ve seen what bored 16 year old girls put up on their blogs. I tried vigorously to get one of the shy Japanese teachers, Muchacha Reservada to dance. It did not work, so I danced with my wingwoman La Escueleta Corriente for a little while, so I could check out the Asian girls from a distance. Not that this was necessary, because Japanese girls don’t play mind games, but it’s a force of habit. I quickly decided tonight was leading in the direction of impossibility for any kind of sexual performance so I got a double jack and coke after a quick swig of Johnny in the bathroom and stopped dancing for a while.
About halfway through the jack and coke I decide it will be more fun to flirt with El Jesus Aviendo’s wife. This is much more playful than it sounds though, as she went to school in the US, she not only speaks English but actually acts like a person with feelings and emotions. This is a rarity among Japanese girls, and the two of them have a really great sense of humor. This is why I can ask her if she’d want a gaijin who actually wants to go somewhere where she can get a green card, or if she’d like to upgrade from a man with a bicycle to a man with a shitty car. No human being driving around in the car we drive around in should ever feel confident talking to a woman, in any country but Japan.
Eventually I managed to get El Jesus Aviendo’s wife and Muchacha Reservada on the dance floor at the same time. I had to keep hold of one of their arms, which rather severely limited actual dancing, but they were on the dance floor nonetheless, and despite repeated attempts they did not make out.
Whatever time it was after this happened was agreed as the time to go, so everyone packed up their jiving, the bottle of Johnny Walker was left behind, it may in fact still linger under the same very sink, and we prepared to vacate, El Charro however, had decided to stay behind and hit on one of the Asian girls, he said he would meet us a half hour later at the Karaoke Bar, I estimated at the time that we would see him in about 6 and a half minutes. The funny thing is he was staying to hit on this girl because it was really obvious she wanted nothing to do with him, and that made her the most appealing Japanese girl he’d seen in the country so far. Two other gaijin remained dancing with her two friends for a while. It would result in neither of them going home with a Japanese girl.
On the way out of Q-Bar we ran into a half dozen Japanese dudes, who may have been nearly as drunk as we were. They quickly recognized the significance of 7 gaijin standing out on the street at 4 AM and began making conversation. I was at the point of the evening where I was probably a few volume notches higher than necessary for conversation, and as such drowned out most of the group. He asked if we were all English teachers, and I pretended to take horrible offense at the assumption, telling him we were all CFO’s and VP’s of various parts of Saikyo Bank. Since the president of the bank is one of my students, I could name drop fairly well. But my credibility may have been suspect since I was probably slurring a good deal of my words, however, one word I managed to get out was Karaoke. At the very mention of Shidax, the karaoke bar, the gentleman’s eyes lit up, he reached into his shirt, and I shit you not, handed my a tambourine. Just like that, all of a sudden the walk down the street was taking on completely new vibes, because I’d been randomly gifted a tambourine. Soon after they headed into Q-Bar, and we took off toward Shidax, following the barely rhythmic shaking of a tambourine toting drunkard.
El Jesus Aviendo was riding his bike, as he turned his head to say something about the tambourine he ran into the clear wall of a bus stop. The laughter was nearly vomit inducing. He claims it was on purpose, but I don’t believe him, for the next five minutes what he did was on purpose. He said he always did it when his brother came into town. In Tokuyama people of all ages have bikes, they’re parked everywhere, they don’t have gears, but they have baskets. I call them Dorothy bikes because they are the same model Dorothy rode in the Wizard of Oz circa 1955. These bikes are parked in near rows, tightly packed together. El Jesus Aviendo ran full speed into one, and a column of twenty Dorothy bikes fell like Dominoes. In the course of a 5 block ride he must have knocked over 200 bikes. I nearly sneezed, burped, vomited and poo’d myself at the same time.
As we were collecting the group in front of Shidax, the Karaoke place, an exceptionally wasted Japanese guy was jumping around screaming Ozzie Osbourne, El Jesus Aviendo and I looked at each other, and he quickly grabbed his camera, saying quietly, “stall him, stall him, my flash is charging.” I quickly started doing my Ozzie schtick, which can be quite funny unless prolonged to the point where the very impersonation makes you want to eat live rodents. However, I don’t think the Osbournes had penetrated Japan yet, so I belted out the opening lines to crazy train, and he ran with it, and we got this picture.
It was quickly apparent the tambourine under my jacket was in fact stolen from this very establishment. El Jesus Aviendo asked me why I was hiding under my jacket when I was bringing it back to the place it came from. “It’s because drunks don’t return stolen property, they steal property, and that little man down the street will not have drunkenly stolen this in vain,” I blurted. I was going to take this out with me again, and the great cycle of drunkreprocity will be complete.
It immediately dawned on me that crowding people into a little box with no air conditioning in our currect collective state was not the best Idea, but they had cold drinks and I wanted the mic in my hand.

“Reluctantly crouched at the starting line,Engines pumping and thumping in time.The green light flashes, the flags goes up,Churning and burning, they yern for the cup…

The cake was flowing, the beer was on the way up, and the night was not yet over. We belted out some American feel good rock tunes, the girls sang some feel good girl tunes, and general frivolity permeated the room.
Then El Charro stumbled into the room, with the three Japanese girls from the club in tow.
He has no idea how he got them to come, or what he said to them to get them out of the bar, but he was officially in bad shape. We smiled and kept singing our songs, they ordered beers they didn’t drink, and sang some Japanese songs. El Charro began freestyling over Eminem beats, and the Japanese girls were becoming more uncomfortable, they ordered another beer, despite barely touching their first beers.
Then as soon as they came, they left, without saying a word, and most importantly without paying. El Charro decided to take a nap on the floor a few minutes later. Ignoring the consequences of the events transpiring around me, I set to work on Pearl Jam’s “Alive”. Soon, T the handler of Johnny Walker for the evening left money on the table and rushed out. Our time soon ran out, and we walked downstairs for the invevitable paying of the tab. Most of which would fall on El Charro for drunkenly inviting the bitches who ordered drinks and ran out on us. El Jesus Aviendo’s wife managed to talk down the tab a little bit, and we left.
I got home sometime after dawn, and woke up sometime before dusk. Sunday would be a quiet night.

And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Russian Prostitutes

2006-04-20T09:04:00.000-07:00

The middle part of Friday was rather unremarkable; I probably taught somebody something resembling the English language. There were probably some minor confrontations with our boss, the 4 foot 7 matriarch known as el dragón minusculo.
Since the school is within site of El Charro’s window, and we know when she is still in the office because the lights are on, driving past it has become something akin to Frodo and Sam crossing the plains of Mordor avoiding the gaze of Sauron’s Eye. The eye of SES is a thing of wonder and terror, and is not to be crossed while wearing “The One Hangover.”
Anyway, El Charro, La Escueleta Corriente and I came to my place for dinner after work, we stopped to grab ingredients and a 6 pack of half liter beers and I set to work making some confection or other. All I know for sure was that the meal was delicious, the beer was drunk, and we were on the way downtown. Although La Escueleta Corriente doesn’t drink, she still enjoys coming out with us, because well, we’re fairly funny little maniacs, and consequently we love when she comes out with us, because we’re toting a hotty around who has no problems being possibly the best “wingman” in history. She lovingly refers to Japanese girls as toys that you can pick up and play with and when you get sick of them in a week, throw them away. When we first came to Japan and asked her where the girls congregate, she suggested just wandering around 7-11’s and convenience stores at night, because you can literally pick them up anywhere. Bear in mind she’s one of the sweetest, genuinely kind human beings I’ve ever come across, but when she lays down the street knowledge you listen, and then laugh.
We meander down to this gaijin Irish pub called El’s Ditch where all the whiteys hang out, picking up a beer on the way for good measure (public drinking rocks by the way) and settle down to some Brooklyn Lagers and Anchorheads. Yes, they have good beer from microbreweries in New York, and San Francisco, for only a dollar more than the garbage on tap. While El Charro was discussing matters of great personal importance with the bartender, La Escueleta Corriente and I began chatting with a local private English School owner, el Asesino Británico, who as a former SES teacher had much to say about our current trials and tribulations with el dragón minuscule.
Over the course of the conversation it swang to talks of monogamy and polygamy, his almost vitriolic hatred of his wife, his current writing project, a book he’s been writing, and at one point he managed to turn an empty cigarette box into a crude mock-up of a person, with a working erection. I’d be impressed sober, but that was damn close to David Copperfield in my current state.
After we left the bar, el Asesino Britanico, decided to share our further adventures that evening, so we decided to wander to a dance club called Q-Bar. On the way there, I stole La Escueleta Corriente’s bike and rode around. It was one of the red Dorothy bikes with a huge basket in the front, so I started barreling around Tokuyama as fast as I could and skidding to a stop by sweeping the back wheel around. Apparently this is not common behavior here, because drunk businessmen and ne’er do well passerby would react rather dramatically as the wheels screeched to a stop within a few feet of them. But luckily we have a cure all phrase here, “sumemasen gaijin.” It basically translates to excuse me I’m a foreigner, but it must have much bigger cultural implications because no matter how stupid you are, how dumb you look, they’ll just stop and laugh and keep going. You could be speeding down the wrong side of the road and get pulled over by the cops, but if you start by saying “sumemasen gaijin” it’s basically a white guy admitting he’s not culturally, mentally, and physically superior to a Japanese person, and they instantly feel better about you ruining their country.
So after about a dozen or so skids, I finally almost fall over, stuff flies out of the basket, I finally feel as dumb as I look, and I give the bike back. My stomache has decided after 4 or 5 hours of heavy drinking, that a half hour of full tilt bike riding was not in its best interests. But I had plenty of time to think about that problem while I was drinking, we’d arrived at Q-Bar.
We showed up about a half hour before they were slated to close. I started with a water, because all the vitriol in my stomach wanted to come out and play. By the time I finished it I was feeling better, so La Escueleta Corriente, El Charro and I decided to break it down, I went through my patented series of white guy dances (the hand on head, other hand on foot hopping thing – the shopping cart – Saturday Night Fever – some 360 turns – and the penultimate bust your granny hip show stopping finale of a Curly Shuffle)
And the only people who saw and appreciated this succession of awesome were my Mexican Wrestling cohorts, the bar was completely empty.
After the dancing stopped, I once again realized the vometer was climbing again, so I went outside for some pacing in the fresh air. Once again, the urge to spill my dinner on the concrete was subdued and I returned to the smoke filled bar and got a beer. Halfway though said aperitif the carnival pulled into town.
Three amazingly hot Russian girls and their two massive Russian handlers strolled into Q-Bar after closing, and we all knew the place would stay open until they left. The girls immediately started dancing, in .6 seconds El Charro and I brought our wingwoman out to play and we were all shaking it like Russian girls in Japan were on the line. I’ve been to enough bars to know when girl’s don’t find me even remotely attractive, want to have nothing to do with me, or summarily wish the space and air I was taking in their club could instead be given to someone with a tighter Abercrombie Polo, dyed hair, and a lobotomy. This is not to say I know when girl’s are into me, I would never assume that, I do know however, how to recognize the opposite of revulsion, and this was it. These girls were wide eyed and ready to play. The two Yakuza wannabe handlers who brought them in, had a distinctly different look on their faces, mainly contempt bordering on murderous rage.
They were constantly glancing at el Asesino Britanico, as he was looking properly dour, and angry, it also helped that he spent a good many years as a body builder. As the music flared from techno-jargon, to R and B jargon, to 80’s American Pop jargon – El Charro and I had made our decisions and narrowed our focus to a single Gulag Maiden.
Then the DJ had the balls to bust out a slow song, at a techno club, I think he wanted to spark the powder keg that was this post cold-war smash and bash coming to a head any minute. So I had a blonde Russian girl pinned against me, and El Charro had the crazy ass Redhead. We danced close for a while, screaming sweet nothings at the top of our lungs into each other’s ears. It’s funny to trace a Russian Prostitute’s thoughts through a drunken haze as she’s trying to scream through the music.
RP: What’s your name?
Me: Steve (That’s a rich country name)
RP: Where are you from? (Does your country offer asylum? How long will it take to get a green card?)
Me: New York
RP: (Her eyes lighting up) You’re from New York? (He can totally get me out of the human slave trade, in fact he could probably even trade a green card for a sham marriage just to show me off to his friends) I work at Club Moscow, I play the saxophone

At this point I’m assuming saying this is a way of trying to make me think she isn’t in fact a prostitute, which although in the realm of possibilities is not my first, second, or fourteenth guess. She’s still ridiculously hot though, and this is her night off after all.

Me: Saxophone? (If this skinny ass girl plays saxophone, I play professional basketball for a living) How long have you played?
RP: 8 years (He is so interested right now, get him to book a ticket back)
Me: I’m a basketball player, I play center in Kudamatsu for the Flying Tigers
RP: What?
Me: (Damn it, that was *$&ing funny and she missed it) What’s your name?

It turned out the name she gave me was Oxana, and if I was going to come up with a fake name, it would have been much hotter than that. Anyway after the slow song was over, Ivan Drago and his friend KGP Olaf were visibly anxious. They came here so the girls could have some fun and forget about their indentured servitude to club Moscow, and a bunch of Americans were dancing with them, and the rest of their posse sat in the corner of the bar getting drunk and meaner looking by the minute. I forgot to include the fact that we towed along a bunch of Japanese ravers from El’s Ditch to Q-Bar. So all the chips were on the table, what was going to happen next? Would these guys just come and bust our skulls right now? Would they grab the girls take off and hire some hardcore assassins to kill us in our sleep for our impudence? Would they call up another 6 Ivans and brawl in the street like Gangs of New York?
No, Ivan got up, and came out to the dance floor. I’ve seen plenty of people without any rhythm, and I happen to be one of them. But Stephen Hawking could have wriggled on the floor and kept better time with the music. As far as intimidating gestures go, this was not a well conceived plan. At this point Oxana sat down and I went to laugh myself silly in the corner with the rest of the crew. El Asasino Britanico leans over to me and says, “These are the dumbest &*%$ing wannabe Yakuza I have ever seen in my life. Look how nervous these guys are. They have no $#&^ing idea what they’re doing.” Now, he’s been in Tokuyama for 7 years, he owns his own school here, he’s been out to all these clubs plenty of times, he’s seen the Russian girls all over, so if he makes an observation, El Charro and I keep our ears open. These guys were ridiculous, intimidating people smile at little shits like us, or they look mean, these guys despite their size looked like scared puppies. So we got the girl’s email’s and phone numbers. I’m sure they’ll have another day off eventually.
Eventually the girls were taken back to their cells in Club Moscow, the club closed down, and we too were off. After all, La Esceuleta Corriente’s Birthday party was tomorrow night, and every gaijin in a 30 mile radius would be there.
So El Charro and I walked home to my place, La Escueleta Corriente got on her bike and rode home, and we got a beer on the way back. It was already dawn and the club was supposed to close at 3:30, they stayed open a solid extra two hours.
We talked in great length about our Russian night laborers. Eventually we had even convinced ourselves there was a chance they actually did play instruments for a band as Japenese business men ogled the fact that they were from Russia. Then he dropped this bomb.
El C: That girl was smoking; she said her name was Lilu. That is hot.
Me: (stopping in the middle of the street and laughing, knowing specifically that El Charro was a big sci-fi fan) So the beautiful skinny Russian girl with dyed red hair, who we thought was a prostitute, just dropped Mila Jovavitch’s character from The Fifth Element on you, and you didn’t even notice. She’s the god damn spitting image of the character, she probably saw in translated on Siberian prison TV.
El C: F&^% dude, you’re right
Me and El C Simultaneously: They’re prostitutes

I Hope they serve Sushi in Hell

2006-04-19T10:09:00.000-07:00

So much happened this week, it’s hard to remember what days correspond to what insanity, but I’m going to give it a go. On Monday I had the three kids I played twister with last week. This week I decided to buy them guns. So before class I popped over to the 100 yen store (dollar store, 105 yen with tax) and bought 4 toy guns for 420 yen.
I proceeded to draw an almost anatomically correct human being on the board, and identify the various parts a gun could blow off in combat. I then set them into teams, to take turns shooting each other ruthlessly with machine guns, and making them scream, “Ouch! You shot my arm,” or “Ouch! You shot my stomach,” etc…They almost played by the rules for about a third of a heartbeat , and then it degraded into a full-scale little kid shit-fit of saliva, guttural sounds, flailing limbs, and most importantly Japanese gibberish, I lost control of a mob consisting of three 10 year old kids. I made them put the guns away and then thought of some other asinine project for them to do.
Apparently GH cancelled my class, claiming there was some kind of “conference” after my subtle yet ingenious reproach with the backpack last class. CEO’s of nationwide banks never go to “conferences” so I think I may have shattered his self-esteem. Steve .7 – Japan 3.4
After that I met up with my Japanese Sake brewer who promised to bring a nice bottle of Sake to our next lesson. SHAZAM! Easy job, free booze, what’s better than this?
On Tuesday I have a class at a chemical company, it consists of one extraordinarily cute 19 year old, who for some reason works in the research and development department of a Petrochemical Wax Company, and 9 assorted less attractive cohorts. It’s funny because the “grunts” and the “big boys” attend the same class, and when one of the bosses makes fun of someone, they’ll sulk and not say a word back, but they’ll pester me all class. Somehow I arrived at the bottom of the totem poll to TEACH them. Anyway, I had told them about this Cherry Blossom Liquor I'd seen at OPA, and none of them (some avid drinkers, one of the bosses comes in every week with liquored up stories) had ever heard of it. They said I was lying to them, ME, the gaijin was mocking them. Despite the fact that there was still a half bottle of it left at OPA, I would have to drink it before next week and bring it in.
Flash forward to 11 AM Wednesday – Hangover.
The night before, El Charro and I went to OPA because we didn’t have to work until 4 PM the next day, in what will probably be our last week of freedom before early classes (10:15!) start. Suffice to say we drained the bottle, it tasted good, we were happy. I believe I sang “Hotel California”, “Layla” (Unplugged and Plugged) and “Help!” with the owner and his accompanying keyboardist. I imagine it was not good. We also have not been back since, because of the incident during the ceremonial paying of the bar tab. The young bartender, who I like because he thinks I’m super cool, (which according to my mom, is absolutely correct) happened to tell us the shots were much cheaper than they actually were. When we got our tab we were shocked to appalled at the number, but then a cultural butting of heads ensued, we said it wasn’t the bartenders fault (though it was) and for the first time in a month I saw the owner of OPA get heated, he said the kid was an awful bartender, we disagreed, it was in fact the first time I’d seen him show anything towards his patrons other than a gratuitous smile, or utter indifference, and assuming we thought if we underpaid there would be a good chance the bartender would lose his job, we did the most utterly un-American I’ve seen anyone do here, we paid the inflated tab. This good deed by my math should wash 16 or 17 much worse deeds from my permanent record.
Friday morning was something new. I drove down to a town called Hikari, with La Esqueleta Corriente to teach English to thirty 3 year olds in a kindergarten. I haven’t seen this many Japanese running around since the air raid drills in Nagasaki. There were easily two hundred kids running around this building, the teachers looked like they could drop dead on the floor any minute of the hour we were in there. I haven't felt this sorry for another human being since I watched people waiting in line for the opening night of a Carrot Top performance in Las Vegas. Suffice to say my pity eroded seconds before the kids starting pouring into the class room like a screaming midget tsunami. La Esqueleta Corriente was teaching the class, as she had observed it once before, and I was there to help out, since I’d be taking over the class afterward. These kids were utterly and completely in awe of us the second we walked in, we strolled into their lives like anime characters bursting out of a tv screen into their living room. A white girl with blue eyes and blonde hair and curves, and a white guy with facial hair, body hair, and blue eyes are not something the children of Tokuyama Japan see every day. They would almost break into fights trying to get our attention or hold our hands, or make any conceivable contact they could. They would hug our legs until we pried them off and put them into a seat. It’s remarkably endearing for about 15 and a half seconds, and then you see a blur in the corner of your eye, and when you hit the ground you realize one of the little tyrants just punched you square in the nuts.
The cleverly orchestrated attack was on, I was Custer, and this was my Little Big Horn, the kids quickly started pulling out arm hairs, and rubbing the stubble on my face, two aspects of my genetics I would have no problem surrendering, because they themselves have older brothers and fathers who probably don’t have a single hair on their face or arms. Then the hair-pulling began, and my scalp’s taken to throwing them off by itself recently so pulling out more is not what I needed, and I think I finally recovered my faculties when someone tried to poke me in the eye. At which point I brushed the kids off me and pointed at the chairs until they sat down. This class was on, 3 year olds 15 – Me
-6 and a half.
So we began the lesson with the hokey pokey, the class split up into two circles, one with La Esqueleta Corriente and one with our hero. Apparently they’ve never seen a full grown gaijin man give 110% to the hokey pokey, because my circle quickly devolved into a puddle of children while La Esqueleta Corriente’s circle maintained its relative circlativity. Afterwards the lesson came down to flashcards for a while, and then we played the color game. The game is simple, you hold up a flash card for a color, let’s say green, and then tell the children to run and touch something green. La Esqueleta Corriente is wearing tight black from head to toe. When she yelled touch black, one 3 year old boy runs behind her, grabs her legs, and plants his face straight into the crack of her ass, Freud would have a field day I’m sure, I almost fell down I was laughing so hard, because after the initial rush, about 12 more little kids grabbed her legs until she was wading through a sea of tiny limbs, watching a stunning 30 year old woman staggering around a classroom with 15 Japanese kindergarteners holding on to her for dear life, while urine stain in a classroom funny, was not the highlight of my Friday.
Towards the end of the class I just started picking them up and tossing them into couches as they laughed gregariously. It probably all amounted to riling every single kid up right before we left and essentially making the Japanese teachers deal with a bunch of crack babies.

Ladies and Gentlemen, now for something completely different

2006-04-18T05:06:00.000-07:00

I'm sorry to say that due to the fear of retribution from much less entertaining blogs, harassment from fundamentalist religious groups, overactive parents, the DEA, the KGB, the organization for the unionization of midget bowling, the organization for the blacklisting of unionized midget bowlers, the NRA, the NAACP, the band Creed, South Dakota, Chuck Norris's left bicep, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Rainbow Pride Union, Bob Dole, seven half-naked Spaniards tripping on acid in Miami, the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity, the Confederation for the Use of Land Mines in Mcdonald's playplaces in Kentucky as an expirement in Social Darwinism, Darwin, Jesus, Prime Minister Koizume, Primus, Optimus Prime, Emperor Hirohito, Your Mom, Google Pics where I stole this picture from, Mexico, the WWE, the WWF, WorldWidePants, the inventor of the ring-pop, NAMBLA, a French bakery owner who consequently lives in Poland but nonetheless still makes excellent croissants in Warsaw, bangbus,com, a bus driver in Phoenix who still refers to President Bush as a man he'd like to sit down and have a beer with, Budweiser, Wise Potato Chips, Chip and Dale's Rescue Rangers, The New York Rangers, The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers specifically the blue one, a woman in Istanbul who's last Blueberry muffin was stolen by a one armed leper who thinks he's a snake because he sheds his skin, and the estate of James Dean. All side characters and minor acquiantences found in Sense and Senseibility will hitherto be referred to by nicknames. The worst kind of nicknames, those of Mexican Proffessional Wrestlers.

Sensei Steve's Hungarian Drunktacular - Day 3

2006-04-12T09:36:00.000-07:00

The next morning/afternoon I woke up and mosied on down to the bridge in question. Then the five of us went to the very intuitive subway line and got on a train for 45 minutes to go to the Baths. I didn’t realize until then how massive Budapest really is. When we exited the train we were in what looked like a huge park, hot dog (or some sub-par meat) vendors, and cotton candy vendors, and balloon animal makers, were everywhere we looked. We finally got to the “Bath” and looked like deer caught in headlights for about 20 minutes because we had no idea what to do. We finally figured out how to buy a ticket and get a locker and all that jiving. Changing was remarkably uncomfortable with a bunch of shriveled old Hungarian men jaunting around the locker room.
I finally managed to slather myself with sunscreen and move outside. For any of you right-wing Christians who have homosexual tendencies and Jesus won’t love you if you pursue them go ahead and visit a Hungarian Bath. If you think the male form still has anything resembling symmetry or beauty you’re definitely gay. A 350 pound bald man, whose body hair makes my chest look like the Gobi desert, frolicking in a speedo so small it doesn’t bother to hide the fact that he’s a well hung-arian is enough to blind a man for life. The women weren’t all that great either.
The bath itself was more like a public swimming pool, one pool was heated to body temperature, 98.6 and the other pool was a lot colder, maybe 60 degrees. Then their were the sauna’s. They were heated about equivalent to the surface of the sun. The first time I went in the sauna my eyes started boiling and I began speaking in tongues. After about thirty seconds I counted to ten and left. The little pool right outside the sauna would make a penguin’s member shrink. There were chunks of ice floating in it, but I dove in for about a third of a second, and then went back to the hot pool again. We repeated this cycle a dozen times or so over the course of the day; hot pool, cooler pool, sauna, freezing water, hot pool again.
The second time I went in the sauna I saw a bunch of old men, who looked like the blood and muscle had been sucked out of them, and all that was left was sagging wrinkly skin on bones. While I was counting to 30 before running out of the sauna, trying to pretend I was still a man, these guys were reading the god damn newspaper in there. We had a decent meal there, and some beer, we sat around chatted, read a little bit, I wrote a little poetry, and then we bailed on the bath and went back downtown. Before we did though we met up with one of the American guys from their hostel, I think he was from Prague. He mentioned they were celebrating tonight as a specific bar one of the British guys knew about. I asked what they were celebrating, and he informed me that today was in fact, the 4th of July.
As we left we had to say our goodbyes, the hot Brindian girl and her not as attractive friend were getting on a train and leaving the city in a few hours. The two British guys and I went back downtown, and went our separate ways, we would meet back at the bridge at 8 PM and head for the bar.
I wandered around the city for quite a few hours, and realized the lens of my camera was severely smudged so none of my pictures would come out, and went to 4 different camera stores that didn’t sell lens cleaner. I ate dinner somewhere and eventually wandered to the bridge to meet those British chaps.
Then the girls walk up to me, they missed their train, and after I laughed for a good spell we made our way toward the bar. On our way to the bar where the 4th of July was being celebrated we turned around six or seven times and gave up in a head on the sidewalk. The Brindian called the British guys on their cell and we told them we’d be waiting for them in front of this church, relating directions somehow. The funniest part about the whole conversation is that we must have passed 3 dozen churches and they all look exactly the same in the dark. So we waited for a half hour in front of this non-descript church for help to arrive. Eventually we told him we’d meet him back at the bridge, somehow.
Eventually we met up and made it to the bar, where everyone from the Hostel was sitting outside at a huge table. Collectively the group was comprised of 6 Americans, 6 Brits, 3 Norwegians, 4 Irish Girls, and 2 Canadian guys. We sat there for a long time talking about topics ranging from Philosophy to Pornography and closed out the bar. After that there was only one place to go.
So for the second night in a row, we found a 24 hour convenience store, bought a huge amount of cigars, beer, wine, chips, water, and snacks, and headed back to what has become our north star in Budapest, the sprawling courtyard in front of St. Peter’s Basilica. We got there and sat in a huge drunken hippy circle, and had an unaccompanied Karaoke jam, with every song people from five different countries knew. A lot of Beatles, Zeppelin and Rolling Stones mixed with Pink Floyd, pop music, and we all learned some Irish Folk ballads. Some of the highlights include a two man re-creation of the American Revolutionary war between me and one of the Brits, and 14 drunk internationals screaming the American National Anthem at the top of their lungs at three o’ clock in the morning. At one point the group was joined by 3 Israeli’s with a little dog named Elvis who sat and hung out for the rest of the night, and 3 Hungarian guys stumbling back from some party, who all happened to speak English. We returned to the corner store to re-up on supplies 2 or 3 times, and I loaned the most attractive Irish girl some cash for wine, with the promise of meeting up at the bridge at 2 PM the next day.

Sensei Steve's Hungarian Drunktacular 2005 - Days 1 and 2

2006-04-12T07:49:00.000-07:00

Wait what? I thought you were in Japan. Well I told you it would be anachronistic. I spent 4 amazing days in Budapest last year and I randomly found a huge write-up of it on my computer, as it was a personal high water mark for me in my travels, I'm going to share it, and you know what, you know you're going to read it anyway. It is also the first city I've visited in a foreign country completely on my own, not in a hostel, no friends, no family, and I managed pretty damn well.

So as my time in Prague finally ended it was time to go to Budapest, Hungary by train. I kind of almost gathered that the 7 hour train ride departed from Prague sometime around 4PM maybe, and maybe everyday, maybe. So I went and bought a ticket at main station, Havli Nadrazi, unfortunately the train didn’t leave from that station. So a quick fifteen minute ride on the metro(subway) lugging around my ginormous 7-ton suitcase, laptop, and backpack, naturally there were no escalators at those stations, and I was on the train. I ended up making conversation with a pair of kids from Ireland and England for a couple hours before I fell asleep. When I woke up there was a Slovakian girl in the car, so we talked a little bit and I got her e-mail, she lives in Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, and I think I’ll be putting in a brief appearance there before I come home.
I get to Budapest, which is really like two cities, Buda and Pest, the two sides of the city are separated by the Danube river. I take a cab to my hotel at midnight for about 15 dollars, which was fine, since;
A: I had no clue where the hotel was,
B: I don’t know how to ask where it is since I don’t speak Hungarian,
C It’s midnight and nothing’s open anyway, and
D I’m hoisting a Hungarian college tuition worth of Electronics.
Most people in that situation, traveling alone, would probably get to the hotel and hunker down for the night, try and figure out tomorrow’s plans, and go to bed so they can wake up early to explore what appears to be an amazing city. Well, I guess I’m not most people, I went to the concierge told him to call me a cab, and told the cab to take me to a club. After about a ten dollar ride the driver drops me off on what appears to just be an abandoned fair ground in a place called Citadella.
So I see people stumbling around, which is good because it means there’s alcohol nearby. As I continue walking, up a fairly steep graded hill I begin to hear music, and as I round a turn I see the club. Two outdoor bars are straddling a dance floor in an outdoor club, which in itself is pretty awesome, because most of the time clubs are really just large basements in the middle of a city where you sweat through your expensive clothes and get overcharged for drinks; but here you get the benefit of a cool breeze as you get overcharged for drinks. But the best part of this little place was that when I turned away from the dance floor, drink in hand of course, and looked over the railing, I realized I was standing 1000 feet above the entire city of Budapest looking straight down on the Danube. It was just stunning to see this carpet of lights running down the length of the river and reflecting in the water, a 1200 year old fortress glowing from green spotlights overlooking massive suspension bridges, and an orange lit Byzantine church that has a design closely resembling Westminster in London; and I would have never seen it if I was planning out some tourist adventure, I was just being a hormonal, somewhat functional alcoholic. So if we’re keeping score, (Beer 6 : Tour Guides 2). I stayed out at the club, wandered around the area, and generally frolicked around until about 4:30, when this phenomenal view was replaced with an unbelievable sunrise – don’t worry I didn’t have my camera on me. As I walked down to where the cabs were, a sea of girls kept stealing all the cabs, so I wandered down the hill a ways and figured I’d catch one on the way up. So as I’m sitting on the side of a hill looking like a lost puppy waiting for a cab two Hungarian guys walk by and jibberjabber something Hungarian at me, and I respond with, “sorry, English,” to which they respond by smiling and yelling, “Oh, English, come on my friend.” I figured eh, why not, so I started walking down the hill with them, one guy turns out to speak pretty good English from working on Parkinson’s awareness projects in England and Australia with his mom, and the other guy named Peter was just too drunk to function, Paul was 35 and owned a chain of Karate Dojo’s in Hungary, and his friend was celebrating his name day, it’s like a birthday except everyone with the same name celebrates it on a certain day, and as such was in bad shape. So we went down to a little corner store which was either opening up or didn’t close, because it was close to 6 AM, and bought some beers and sat around in a Park chit chatting. Peter not drinking so much as vomiting, and was very worried about how badly his fiancé would beat him whenever he got home. Eventually, they got in a cab to go home and I figured since I had only seen the city at night through cab windows I would be perfectly capable of finding my way back to wherever the hell my hotel was, it was a few hours past dawn so I started walking, in what would be the first of four days in a row of trying to get back to the hotel long after dawn. So as it turned out I only took one wrong turn and the cab only took about 5 minutes to get me back to the hotel. But the sheisty son of a bitch wanted to charge me more than the cab driver who drove me 20 minutes from the train station to the hotel did. So sitting in a cab in front of the hotel at 7 AM, still drunk I’m arguing with a Hungarian cab driver, who didn’t turn his meter on, about the price of a cab ride, I told him there’s absolutely no way that the fair was right, and he tried to explain to me that the fair was based on kilometers, not time, and I told him that unless the cab was moving the speed of light there’s no way we covered that much distance, and when I began to explain that we would have returned before we left and I would be younger so I’d have more time to make money which I still wouldn’t use to pay for the cab he got flustered and graciously accepted 1000 forints, down from 4000, so I’m not entirely sure what I did, but it was damn good negotiating on my part, especially since I hadn’t bothered to tell him I didn’t even have the original amount in my wallet to begin with. I then fell into my bed and slept until about 6:30 PM the next day.
Since I got up so late I put off trying to figure out the bus system to get into town, I just called another cab, but before I got in the cab we agreed on a decent price, and he then dropped me off at an ATM so I could actually pay him. I strolled around downtime Budapest for a little while and decided I would not stop at a restaurant to eat unless it looked like it actually served Hungarian food and wasn’t one of the ten million burger joints for scumbag tourists with no sense of adventure, but after two hours I just gave up and went to one anyway, but I was damned if I was going to eat a hamburger, I had pork medallions wrapped in bacon with mashed potatoes and some kind of sauce on the side with two beers for about 15 dollars. God f-in bless Eastern Europe. Afterwards I was wandering around looking for a decent bar, as it was starting to get dark out, and an attractive Brindian (British-Indian) gal came up to me and asked if I knew where any good bars were, she was with another girl and two other British guys, so I joined them on their quest for a large wooden structure filled with alcohol. By quest I mean jaunt down the block, where we found an outrageously expensive, yet crappy bar, but they had outdoor tables so we sat down for a half liter of god aweful Hungarian beer, made each other’s acquiantence, and moved on. All 4 Brits were medical students at Leeds, and oddly enough the two pairs met randomly in town, not even knowing they were traveling at the same time. So we left that bar in search of a club, and after stumbling around for a couple hours couldn’t find one, so we stopped for ice cream, considered our options and pressed on into the night. We then snuck to the girls hostel, because it had a bar, and a cheap bar upstairs. The bar was called the Mellow mood, where we inhaled cheap shots of Hungarian schnopps and vodka, and spent the better part of two hours making ridiculous toasts to anyone, and anything that popped into our heads. We would have a toast to filling our passports, to traveling, to one night stands in hostels, ad infinitum. We gave up around 2:30 or so, went to a 24 hour corner store, loaded up on beer and junk food and starting trolling around the city looking for a nice spot to sit and chat in Hungary. We ended up sitting in this sprawling outdoor courtyard in front an a gorgeous 11th century Bassillica called St. Stephens. I remember scrawled across this black mass of marble and stone were the words I am the way and the light, in English. I was happy the words rang so true for having a good time outside of a church, although in our present state, being in the Church would have been a lot of fun too.
Around dawn we agree to meet the next day at 2 PM at this very recognizable suspension bridge and go to a Hungarian Bath. I walked across the bridge as the sun was coming up, it’s parabolic arch comes almost directly over the Danube, and it’s quite striking (no pictures). That morning I made the two hour walk all the way back to my hotel without taking a single wrong turn.

Cherry Poppin Daddies

2006-04-12T07:13:00.000-07:00

On the left is Yama, my 1991 Suzuki Alto in my apartment complex, in front of the fairly impressive Cherry Blossoms that grow in my parking lot.

On the right is the school, I love this picture, because it captures the noise of the traffic, the odd shape of the building, and the huge ugly tower in the backyard. Talk about a picturesque place to work.

Oh, the entendres. I wanted to take a little while to explain Cherry Blossoms, because I've mentioned them a lot, and I'm sure some of you are wondering about my obsession with a tree. Cherry Blossoms are native only to Japan, it's the only place in the world where they grow naturally, in Washington DC there's a row of them that were traded for dogwoods from the Japanese government sometime after we made it apparent that Tokyo was going to do what we want. (What do you tell a country with two smoldering craters? Nothing, you already told it twice.)

Anyway, in Nihongo (Japanese) there is a verb whose only use, is to watch the Cherry Blossoms bloom, Hanami. Cherry Blossoms are more intrinsically tied to Japanese culture than Samurai's, Sake', Sushi, Small Eyes, Cartoon Porn, Bamboo, and Kamikaze's put together. There are probably about 700 trillion Haiku's written about them, thousands of books with them as the central theme, and they make liquor (quite tasty, 22%) from them. The biggest reason that they have become so precious is due to the amazing fragility of their blooms. A cherry blossom only blooms for two weeks a year, and after they reach full bloom, a single rainstorm knocks almost every single petal off them.

Some of my students have gotten into arguments over whether this year the Cherry Blossoms would reach full bloom on Saturday or Sunday. It's a horticultural science that almost everyone deeply follows. So arriving here two weeks ahead of the Cherry Blossoms and seeing them reach full bloom after a rave in the mountains has a heavier significance to it than, "Oh, that's cool." The Cherry Blossoms start blooming in the south in March at some point and they bloom in the northern, colder island of Hokkaido a few months later. People will literally chase the plants blooming up the latitude of the country.

Sorry to drop the knowledge on yo' fool asses, but I figured I would clarify.

Wheat Out

Fear and Loathing in Translation

2006-04-09T09:12:00.000-07:00

Ok, so the first picture is right after we arrived at our destination, that small white dot in the sky on the left is the three quarter full moon.

The white trees behind the amphitheatre on the right hand side are all cherry blossoms.

The last picture is off the park we were in, but this picture is not even close to capturing anything up there.

Ben, Cathy (French), Rieko (Japanese) and I left Ben’s house around midnight on Saturday, a day spent mostly pacing around the house in confusion and snacking. Our destination was a psychedelic trance rave, in an open air amphitheatre, in the middle of a national park, on top of a mountain, that goes until 8 AM Sunday, in Japan. I could just stop there I think, but I won’t.
The four of us piled into Ben’s 1991 Suzuki Alto, the sister vehicle to my own toy car. It’s about 4 feet wide, the wheel’s all look like donuts, and the rear visibility is almost completely compromised by the fact that the school’s logo, SES (Shunan English School) and its phone number are written in opaque white lettering across the entire damn rear windshield. We were following directions written by a girl named Mika in broken English on a piece of paper where she scrawled a fairly detailed, but ultimately incorrect map of how to get from where we were to the rave an hour and a half away.
The first turn Ben took to get to a town called Hofu, was a wrong turn, three seconds into the drive we needed to make a u-turn already. Ben and I had resolved the day before that if we left on the trip we had to consider secondary options in the likely event that we got so lost that it was easier to just go to some random city and find something to do. I bought a six pack of 24 ounce Asahi’s (bieru) ((beer)) for myself, but I’d be damned if I was going to drink a ton of beer on a car ride that had the potential to take 4 hours, my bladder is about the size of a walnut. Cathy doesn’t drink at all, she is in fact healthy enough to make the average person look like a walking corpse, and Rieko is a typically shy, reserved Japanese girl, who pledged to get drunk so she could open up a bit.
We drove without too much fanfare for about an hour, there was confusion regardless of how dead straight the road was, and we skipped a few parts of the directions because the route we were on seemed more convenient. We stopped at a few convenience stores to load up on non-alcoholic supplies. An hour and a half or so into the drive (which was the ETA for the whole drive) we came to a town called Ogori, and we find Route 9, the road we need to take, we have no idea which direction to go in, so we picked one and went. For about 10 minutes down this road, we did not see a single functioning car, we didn’t see any animals, we saw maybe a half dozen broken down cars on the sides of the road, and then eventually we saw an umbrella, casually drifting between lanes in the middle of the road. It’s a pretty freaky little piece of driving in our packed up little Alto, and then Cathy pulls out this gem:

Cathy “Do you know, umm what is the word, the wolves under the full moon”
Ben “You mean werewolves?”
Cathy “Yeah, those are scary”

Eh, maybe it was just the timing that made it funny, and the French accent, but I nearly wet myself. That seemed like as good a time as any to turn around, so we turned around and went back down Route 9 the other way. For some reason it immediately felt like the right call, not that there were any cars on the road. It’s almost surreal how Japan, one of the most densely populated countries in the world, can feel like a post apocalyptic world, everyone safe in their bunkers waiting for the fallout to recede. At night the whole country is almost deserted even in the built up areas, most of the streets aren’t lit, and the silence in a lot of places can be desolate, no crickets, or birds, or scurrying animals anywhere. When we stopped for a while to relieve ourselves, we were greeted by the small swathe of sky not blotted out completely by the smokestacks and ambient light of a nearby city, and an occasional breeze rustling the soon to be naked Cherry Blossoms.
Eventually we crept back into civilization, and thinking about the sky I related an article I had just read about two black holes in a distant galaxy NASA has just discovered on a collision course to become one supermassive black hole, with enough power to swallow 100,000 Suns. When Cathy asked if a black hole destroyed everything that was sucked into it I explained that practically it did, but that wasn’t entirely correct, “In fact if a black hole swallowed a 2006 Chevy Suburban, it would come out looking much like a 1991 Suzuki Alto.”
We had now been driving for about 2 hours in our hour and a half trip, without seeing any of the landmarks drawn by Mika’s less that artistic hand on the Japanglish (broken English mixed with Japanese) map. Then we saw the car dealership we were supposed to see, and then a sign, and then *$&^, “Ben what the hell was that?” My face still smashed into the seat in front of me, Ben said “Akeyoshi-Di, the sign right up there said it.” So he took the corner at high speed and we were maybe off on the direction of the party. About 10 minutes later, there hadn’t been another sign, we hadn’t driven through the tunnel we were supposed to drive through, or seen this thing called the lotteria. We hung another U-turn and went back to the main road. We drove down route 9 some more when Ben thought he saw the tunnel, and Cathy thought she saw a tunnel, and I thought I saw a dark tree against a slightly less dark hill. Everyone whooped and hollered for about a minute and a half before we realized it was in fact a dark tree, in front of a slightly less dark hill. We hung another U-turn and decided to go back the empty road that at least had a sign for where we were going, we hadn’t seen a tunnel, or a lotteria, the only two landmarks on the map that signaled the end of the drive.
Then the road began to climb, and we all perked up a bit. Then we went through a tunnel, and we all perked up a little more, and then we went through three more tunnels and cursed Mika’s god damn map. At any rate we kept climbing up through the 2 AM darkness of blotted hill after blotted hill, the landscape was like a leaking inkwell, everything was simply different shades of darkness, a geographical Rorschach. The signs finally led us to believe we were 6 Kilometers away from our destination Akeyoshi-Di. What we didn’t know at the time, was that arriving at Akeyoshi-Di is a lot like arriving at Yellowstone National Park, when you enter you can still be 30 miles from Old Faithful, but old faithful wasn’t spinning trance music and dispensing beer and other illicit substances to a boatload of Japanese girls.
We climbed up these mountains for what seems like an hour, there were parking lots, empty parking lots, everywhere. We had decided if we saw even a group of 3 or 4 cars parked together it meant, get out, and find the damn party. We had been warned by one British guy that the “rave” might only be 20 people, but we were ok with that. Then as we reached the very top of the mountain, it happened. We started going back down again, no party, no music, no girls, nothing, we just kept sinking back into darker and darker turns in the road. Eventually we stopped at the next pull-over, having almost given up completely, we’d been driving near 3 hours, we were in the middle of nowhere, we hadn’t seen a car in at least 20 minutes and we finished the last of the snacks we brought. We called Mika the map-maker but since it was almost 3 in the morning she didn’t pick up her phone. My vote was to keep going the way we were going for a while, Ben completely disagreed, and the girls were ambivalent. Bear in mind each one of us had made one wrong decision about which way to go already. The decision was ultimately solved for us; a car came, the first car in what seemed like months. We jumped in our car and sped down the road to follow it, and not three &*$!ing minutes down the road, was a massive parking lot, PACKED with cars. There must have been at least two hundred cars in the lot, we got out, we could hear the music, and everything that happened during the drive instantly faded from mind.
I grabbed my bag and a beer, Cathy took a group photo, and we headed toward the thumping bass ahead. Since the party started 4 hours ago nobody bothered to charge us, and we walked to the “rave.” When I hear the word rave, it instantly conjures up images of seedy abandoned wearhouses across broken industrial and meatpacking districts across every city in the country, where underage girls and men of all ages inhale ectasy and grope around in the darkness for 8 hours or until the cops swarm in and break up the party. Raves have that illicit sub-cultural quality and the allure of danger, specifically because they are so illicit.
This was an actual amphitheatre, the dj’s or mc’s or whatever they happened to be called spun from a little booth under this angled wooden building, the dance floor sprawled out for 50 feet in every direction in front of them, and ten huge rows of wooden stadium rows rose up the hill around the dance floor. There were no authorities there, no police, no security, no event staff, just a horde of Japanese ravers and some gaijin out in the open air dancing to trance music, with no judgements or sidelong glares. There were no defensive cliques of girls dancing together, or guys standing around the bars waiting for the girls to get too drunk to care that they’re only there to pick up girls. The vibe, as we young kids say, was incredibly positive, everyone came to have a good time and lose themselves in the overwhelming immensity of the music and the surroundings.
I immediately began snapping some pictures, the moon lolled between two sets of mountains directly behind the dj, booth, and a hundred Japanese men and women, girls and boys, most undoubtedly on “E” gathered and un-gathered on the dance floor and lost themselves. Ben is a huge fan of electronica music, and he knew this sub-culture existed here, so for him, this was his nirvana. He and Cathy cruised down to the dance floor, while I wandered around a bit, trying to drink away the cold, and drink up the buzz for a little while. Rieko being the reserved girl she was, sat on the bench and cracked open a drink for a little while.
Behind the stadium seating on the hill, dozens of tents, and campfires, and drum circles, and people covered the grass. One group had brought those sticks that are about three feet long that you twirl around. I know that fairly ambiguous, but you hold two of these wooden or rubber sticks in your hand, and the third stick has two bulbous soft ends, and you twirl the third stick, or spin it around, or throw it in the air and catch it with a single stick. I’m sure whatever they were on at the time made it incredibly fun, I had a good time watching them for a little while, and all I had was a couple of beers.
Eventually after I had wandered my fill, and drank a half dozen beers, I took my bag back to the car, just as I was heading back to the rave I remembered I had my spelunking light with me. For those of you who don’t know, it’s a small flashlight attached to a headband, and mine happened to have a red-light option on it. You can ask why I would need a red light on my flashlight, I certainly have in the past, but right then I finally realized what it was for. It was for raves in the mountains of Japan in pitch darkness, so I grabbed it and headed back to the dance floor. I turned on the light, moved the bulb down so it shone directly on my face, and then proceeded to do everything which a human being could not truthfully define as dancing, but it didn’t matter, because I looked like a total badass doing it. Ben was a big fan, Cathy thought it was hysterical, and my new Japanese lady friend was a big fan as well. After a solid hour and a half or so of dancing, I walked off the dance floor to talk to a girl I had seen dancing who at least spoke broken English. After some aimless chit-chat we’d both decided it was getting colder, and we’d be much warmer in the car. So we left the party for a spell to “warm-up.”
Afterwards, dawn was finally breaking. The music never stopped, but all of a sudden the whole black rave became a vibrant playground of colors. There were about 50 massive, sprawling Cherry Blossoms right behind the stage, that were a bright pink and white, and we didn’t even notice a single one of them on the way to the party hours before. The campfires behind us were becoming ash, the sun rose with the beat to peak over the mountains, and we all stood together in silence for a while, as all people who know they’re witnessing a moment which will shape their lives in unforeseen ways do.
The rave was coming to a close, and we’d all started wandering away from the dance floor for different reasons, Cathy met a Japanese couple and engaged them in conversation. When I came over for a good vantage point for a picture, she handed me the flyer they’d given her. There was another similar party, during our week off. A two day rave was happening during our week off…in a volcano. In a &*$#ing VOLCANO. Done, I was sold, I don’t get paid before this vacation, and I’d wanted to do something in Japan, now I’ve found it.
Ben was talking to three very hot Japanese girls he was dancing with for a while, Cathy came over and took pictures of them, and he got some e-mail addresses from them I think. Knowing how this type of sub-culture tends to be I’m sure we’ll see them again at the volcano. The last half hour consisted of a lot of snap shots and we got in the car and began the trek home. It was about 7:30 or so in the morning.
On the road back, this entire sprawl of ink spots, and dark unintelligible masses became a national park. Winding back through the small curved roads, every valley filled with a morning mist, as thick as clouds, the sun sprayed small rainbows through the moisture and the air was as fresh as any I’ve ever smelled, at the first turnoff we stopped to take some pictures. After such an amazing night, the morning proved that Japan wasn’t done with us for this trip yet. For the first time since I’ve landed, standing next to an idle car soon after dawn in the mountains, I admitted this was in fact the land of the rising sun. Nothing I have ever seen is comparable, and I know for a fact none of the 4 megapixel images will do it anything resembling justice. We stood there reveling for what seemed like a long time, talking about the distant night and the new morning with the sound of motorcycle drivers tearing down the mountain paths in the background. Cathy lived in Nagoya, a much larger city than Tokuyama for three years; she said this was the best experience she’s ever had in Japan. My initial thoughts about the country receded with the dark air of that night in the mountains, I’m beginning to warm up to the place, and I knew as we got back into the car, that a year from now, I would definitely miss it.

Colonel Sanders has Yellow Fever

2006-04-08T02:04:00.000-07:00

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

Specialist in International Humanities

2006-04-05T21:58:00.000-07:00

According to my visa I am a Specialist in International Humanities, according to my Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) certificate, I am qualified to Teach English to Speakers of Other Languages, but by all practical measures my only necessary skillset to do the job I’m doing, is to make sure as hell I was born and raised somewhere where they spoke English. So being born in the USA is essentially what qualifies and entitles me to the position I hold here.
My first week of “work” as we shall refer to it, started with a class of three ten year olds. We started by passing a plush, oversized strawberry around the room and saying every food we could think of, which the overweight kid is really good at. He comes up with gems like avocado, calzone, and fried chicken. We then passed the strawberry around and counted to 30 or 40. After that it was time to learn. So we played leapfrog, we were reviewing prepositions, so after they leaped one another I asked them who was in front of them, and who was behind them. Then we played twister, after each contortion I would ask them which foot was next to them, who was under them, who was on top, etc…Then we did a few minutes of work in their book, and class was over. Man I wish I was still sitting in a cubicle.
After that it was off to the infamous banker’s office. I feel like I’m starting to collect my own Seinfeldian characters at this point. Though I don’t have a “man-hands” yet I think we can now appropriately refer to this character as “grab-hands” or GH. So I went to GH’s office, due to the fact that he’s exceptionally busy, even though it’s slated to be a two hour lesson, it will often run only 45 minutes or so, and will often be interrupted to some phone call or other. The class itself consists of me waiting in a small waiting room, walking into his office, drinking tea and eating little sandwiches, and talking to him until he gets tired of me and tells me to leave. I brought pictures of the house, the family, (he knows where you live) and of places I’ve traveled. And oddly enough before he kicked me out he gave ME homework. He gave me a small book of Who’s Who in Japanese history, which, I have to say, is perfect for me because it’s exactly what I was looking for to get a little perspective on the culture.
Now to the important part of our meeting, the exit, that small corridor between the office and the elevator which separates the men from the boys. Ingeniously I wore a backpack to this meeting, and as we walked out of GH’s office he had his hand on my shoulder again, and I think it moved a little bit down the bag, but then I think he was frustrated with no clear way to surreptitiously slide down to the naughty place. So, on the one hand I’ve found an easy way of triumphing over this assiduous awkwardness, but on the other hand I feel a little sorry for the guy. I mean this guy probably knows almost everyone there is to know in Japanese high society, he bought one girl a bike, he hooked one teacher up with some gig in Tokyo just by picking up the phone, so in the long run, if letting GH cop a feel every once and a while is what it takes to ensure stellar connections, maybe it’s worth it to go a little above and beyond the call of duty. I can pretend I just hit a triple or something and the third base coach does the olde ass-pat. I mean for some reason its ok in baseball, why not in international banking and language coaching.
You see how I’m torn.
So after that class I went to the “Rune Rune Club” to teach some more businessmen. Now this is a really difficult assignment too. I have to show up, and talk, and subsequently listen to them talk, for an entire hour. Seriously, this is my job. So this one gentlemen owns a Sake Brewery, that’s right, he brews Sake, and then travels all over the world to secure exporting deals for it. The other guy in the class wasn’t there, but I’m sure he owns something valuable and useful as well. So we talked about his travels, my travels, and I actually learned a great deal about the Japanese political scene because I brought in an article from BBC.com. There are essentially two Kennedy families in Japan, a conservative one and a liberal one, and they’ve both pretty much established dynasties on the main parties and the Prime Minister’s office since the second world war. Hooray for democracy on the march. Day 1 is over. I’m a teacher, it’s a damn tough job but somebody has to travel around the world talking to people.

Wheat Out

Mr. Beer and Chicken a la Samurai

2006-04-05T05:47:00.000-07:00

Your hero in the foreground, rockin the camel hair jacket, the other Steve right next to me, British Rob (who I've dubbed the X-factor of the group) and computerholic canadian Sean in the midst of some alcoholic squat thrusts

As I sit here eating dinner, a concoction of rice, ham, shrimp dumplings, octopus dumplings (apparently that’s what they are) soy sauce, and two other sauces I can’t identify but taste tested, mixed with some sugar, I realized I haven’t told you how our hero faired during this excellent weekend in Nihon (Japan).
Friday ended my observation period, and oddly enough it ended with me actually teaching a woman who was a potential student. All of the gaijin (whiteys) and Nihonjin (Japanese) teachers were meeting at this area an hour from school called Sunzoku. So Cathy (French), the other Steve (USA) and I jumped into a Japanese battle van driven by one of the Japanese teachers and drove off. Her choice of music on the way consisted of Kings of Leon and The Strokes. I was not really ready for how surreal the whole place was going to be, because I thought we were just going to a restaurant, it turns out to be like the Japanese version of Medieval Times. Although disappointingly there were no colored samurai to jeer and taunt, the area was built entirely to look like Fuedal Japan, everything had a thatched roof, hanging lamps everywhere, weird doll things floated around, and opium dens as far as the eye could see. Well, not so much opium dens, but suffice to say if it actually was feudal Japan, and not a crude knock-off, there would damn well have been opium dens somewhere.
The spellbinding power of the buildings really died as soon as we walked out of the car though. We strolled past six rows of chotchky, useless crap being sold to get to the restaurant, which brings me to the title of the post. Once we got to the restaurant the interior was definitely realistic of…something. All the teachers were gathered at one table, I would say there were 16 or so of us in all. We all sprawled out on pillows on the ground because the table was only about a foot off the floor. But it’s surprisingly comfortable and for some reason much more social. All around the table were huge pieces of wood, like two hundred year old tree trunk size, and we had to duck, or climb over, or jump, or veer out of the way of a rolling boulder Temple of Doom style everytime we needed to get a beer or use the facilities. Though the four of us in the battle van walked in fashionably late, we only missed about a beer’s worth of conversation, so Ben and I quickly moved to remedy the situation. We didn’t order more beer at the restaurant, but we did walk outside about 50 feet away to the beer vending machine, which actually turned out to be about the same price as a supermarket. So I put in 350 yen, and out popped a 24 ounce Kirin. Rinse, lather, and repeat 5 or 6 times. This ice-cold box of brew will now lovingly be referred to as Mr. Beer.
The meal itself is where the real medieval times reference comes in. When I say that everyone at the table was eating chicken on a stick, I don’t mean yakitori, or a kebab of some kind, it’s literally a giant chicken breast on what’s essentially a wooden sword. Whatever you can't gnaw off with your mouth, you pick at with your hands, and it was drenched in a tasty sauce as well. So the "chicken a la samurai" was a great hit with all the gaijin (whiteys). So we all paid and left the restaurant around midnight, and then as is typical with gatherings of co-workers, stood around outside for about an hour trying to figure out what to do next, who was driving where, who was going to keep drinking, who wanted to go to sleep etc. In the end, two steve’s, a ben, and a cathy decided to go to a proper karaoke club. So one New Yorker, one San Franciscan, one Frenchie, and one other Steve, who was undoubtedly born somewhere, went to a Karaoke bar where we were later met by Steve’s Japanese wife.
We had one decision to make when we entered the Karaoke bar, which was if we wanted the 2 hour all we could drink price, or the regular price with ordering overpriced drinks occasionally. So three seconds later, after we’d paid, we went to our room. Now, this will take some explaining for the folks at home. Apparently a real Japanese karaoke club is much different from anything you might know of. In fact I like it a lot better than anything we have in the states, or even in Turkey where rows of Karaoke bars seduce drunken brits to sing Soccer Hooligan songs until the break of dawn. So at a Japanese Karaoke bar, you pay a flat fee, and then you go into your own very comfortable room with couches and chairs, and there is a large TV and some microphones inside. So basically you can go with your friends and get drunk and sing without an entire bar hearing you. I (tone deaf) really appreciated it’s discrete nature. The room also has a phone to call down and order drinks. Which we may have used a solid 8 to ten times over the course of two hours. So the five of us (Steve, Steve, Cathy, Ben, and Steve’s Wife) sat in a room picking out American songs (although Cathy sang some Japanese songs as well) ranging from Eminem to Aqua’s classic hit single, Barbie Girl. Which I’m proud to say thanks to the men nailing their part (Come on Barbie, Let’s Go Party) we achieved our highest score of 9.7 on the song. There is a rating system, but I have no idea how it works or what it measures. The highlights of the night were probably when Ben gave up on hip-hop lyrics and began freestyling about sushi, teaching English, and Tokuyama, and then ended one rhyme with “so why don’t you kiss your wife.” The rhyme was so impressive that it was followed by Steve trying to oblige Ben by leaning over to kiss his wife, and summarily falling straight onto the floor in the process. After our 2 hour drinking period ended we didn’t have much of a reason to stay at the Karaoke bar so we left, although the fact that it was around 4 or 5 AM might have had something to do with it too. So Friday night was over, I came, I karaoked, I conquered.
Saturday was mostly spent in a daze after waking up at about 4 PM. I don’t think anything remarkable happened, and I decided not to go out Saturday because I was meeting Cathy to run to the top of Tycozahn, which is the tallest mountain in the area, where I assumed I could get some good pictures, and I would try to purchase a cell phone.
But, of course, I woke up Sunday and it was pouring. So I met Cathy and then we went to Vodaphone to procure a portable communication device. Cathy lived in Nagoya for 3 years so she speaks close enough to fluent Japanese to seem like a native speaker to me. We got to Vodaphone, I picked out a plan where I got unlimited texts and e-mails because actual minutes are ridiculously expensive here, and bought the phone for 58 bucks, the only thing I’ve seen that was cheap. I was told I needed to present my papers I got from the Tokuyama government office (because I don’t have my alien card yet) and everything would be settled and they’d give me my phone, and put the bill on my debit card. However, when I dropped Cathy off, picked up the papers, and returned they said my address wasn’t on the papers, so I couldn’t get anything. I’m in the process of having the school snail mail me a memo because they said any mail with my name on it would do the trick. But, as usual I have the sneaking suspicion nobody involved in this situation knows what the hell they’re talking about.
After that Cathy, Ben and I met up at around 7 PM, and we went to the 100 YEN STORE!!! It’s a dollar store for those of you reading this in English. Dollar stores in Japan are nuts, they make Wal-Mart look like Tiffany’s. Apparently what happened is that Japan looked at itself and said, “Wow, shit’s really expensive here, maybe we should utilize the fact that 9 out of every 10 workers in Asia are slave labor, and import something.” So this place had hardcore pots and pans, clothing, gardening equipment, food, dishes, glassware, plates, sick-ass sharp knives (for the kitchen) office supplies, shampoo, conditioner, soap, and everything is good quality stuff.
Then we went straight to the second-hand store and I almost wet myself, wait, nope remembering it now I did just wet myself a little. The whole bottom floor, that’s right this is a multi-floor salvation army (although maybe the Buddhists call it the enlightenment army or some such tree-hugging rapture-less nonsense) consisted of books and electronics and musical instruments. Although they only had about 6 books in English and they were all children’s books, it’s still a big used book store, which excites me nonetheless. Upstairs was entirely devoted to clothes and furniture. I’m not too proud to say I bought a Winnie-the-Pooh pillow, because it’s the first pillow I’ve come across in two weeks, but Ben bought a really nice couch, and a huge desk, and is having it delivered to his apartment for 150 bucks. When you consider that a bag of rice, in Japan, is like 12 dollars, that’s a pretty disgusting deal. After that your hero went home and planned some lessons for his first day of work.

Wheat Out

First Week Roundup

2006-04-01T01:47:00.001-08:00

Well like any alcoholic or alzheimer's sufferer, there are moments I remember with crystal clarity and everything else passes through my head sponge in a watery blur. The bulk of the week was spent travelling to my accustomed classes. On Tuesdays and Wednesdays I teach until 9 or 10 PM, but I never have any classes before 11 AM, which I am very excited about. Not just because I have a lot of options as far as boozing and carousing go, but I like being a night owl, and I won't have to change my post college twenty-something timetable of pacing and listening to music until 3 AM every night.
Driving. Holy Crap, driving is crazy here, the first time I got in the car and drove was pretty crazy, the whole left side of the road thing. Everytime I need to make a turn I repeat the mantra of tight left, wide right, so I don't cause some limb severing pile-up. All the street signs are in Japanese but luckily all the major arteries are numbered, most of my driving to class happens on route 2, so I'm ok there. My car is a tiny Honda from the civil war era, it couldn't hit 100 if you dropped it out of a plane, but I've been driving Saturns my whole life so it's not so hard to get used to. Also, I'm constantly getting in on the wrong side of the car, since the driver's side is also switched here. Other than the main roads, all the back roads here are tiny, most can't fit two cars side to side, but almost all of them are two way streets.
Karaoke is quite an interesting endeavor here. I've gone to an atypical Elvis themed Karaoke bar a couple times, the owner speaks pretty good English and I think we've reached a rapport at this point where he undercharges me a little bit if I decide inebriation is in order. The owner also is the headline act, he plays guitar and sings a wide variety of English and Japanese songs, and if he knows the one you want he lets you sing the song. The last time I stopped in I ended up drinking with a trio of Japanese real estate agents who were decent chaps, they said thankyou about a hundred times when they left, which makes me feel pretty good because people thank me just for my company here.
I also taught my first two classes this week. Which I will have to remind the school's administrator that according to my contract I should be paid for. Both classes were private lessons, the first one, which I think was on wednesday or thursday, was one woman who wanted to brush up on her English because she is getting married in Hawaii in a couple months. So we talked for a half hour or so, I tried to gauge what her weak points were, and then I used some kind of travel English workbook to do some listening and reading excercises etc. The important thing is that the class was a trial class, and afterwards she decided she would come in every week, so I just earned the school a student on my first lesson, which I assume looks pretty good for me. The second lesson was a Japanese High School girl who was pretty shy and nervous, and we talked for the entire hour because I had no idea what else to really do for the first lesson, for some reason I ended up explaining Plate Tectonics at some point during the class, but she said she understood what I was talking about. The funniest part is when I try to explain something, she will tell me the Japanese equivalent and all I can say is, "umm, maybe" so it makes it a little hard to know if she knows what the hell I'm talking about half the time, but nothing catastrophic happened so I'm satisfied.
The weekend isn't over yet, but It's already proving quite interesting so I'll try to cover everything on Monday.

Wheat Out

First Day of Skewl

2006-03-30T04:12:00.000-08:00

I have a meeting at noon with the director of the Shunan English School, so when noon rolls around and my ride to the school hasn't showed up I start to worry a little. The biggest problem is that the nearest pay phone is a ten minute walk away. I debate whether its worth going to the phone to call her and risk my ride coming and missing me for a few minutes, and just as I decide to walk to the phone, her husband shows up to pick me up. When I arrive at the school, sans necktie (which will be important later, suffice to say I searched in vain all weekend for a store that sells ties) a half hour late the director asks me If I knew we were supposed to meet today. Then I asked her why nobody came to pick me up since we spoke on the phone sunday about just that subject.
This was followed with a few awkward minutes of jabber and then some explanations of a bunch of paperwork. I met one of the other new teachers, Ben from San Francisco, who turns out to be a pretty cool guy. As a side note the school is entirely composed of Americans with the exception of one British Bloke and a beautiful French gal. But moving back to our hero in this slightly awkward first day meeting, Ben and I were then given some kind of grammar test, which I'm pretty confident neither of us did well on. This would be the kind of thing that worried me at the first day on a new job if it wasn't immediately followed by recieving the schedule of classes I would be teaching.
For the first week of work, we aren't exactly paid, since it's an observation period, she gives us the equivalent of a few beers in Yen a day. So I went about observing, the first class I observed only had 3 students who were around 11 or 12, and consisted of the teaching wrestling them for about 40 minutes, with some bowling thrown in and a smattering of English between spares and strikes. The second class was a conversation class with an older woman, she writes in a diary, we go over it, correct her grammar, and then talk for about a half hour. The classes will usually come down to playing with a small group of children, or talking to a few adults. A minority of the classes involve using any kind of books or reference guide, and in the extreme minimum some kind of plan of attack for teaching them anything.
However, I did experience what might be the most awkward 18 and a half seconds of my life on Monday. Some of the clients of the school qualify as the extreme elite in both wealth and power in this little hamlet of 120,000 people. This particular student happens to literally be one of the most powerful men in the country of Japan. We're talking more money than God and bi-quarterly meetings with the Prime Minister powerful. Of course now it becomes a slightlly bigger deal that I am underdressed, I mean I look fantastic as always, but I'm not wearing a tie. Anyway the class with this particular person consisted of Elijah, the teacher who's leaving, Ben the other new teacher, and myself. It's all conversational, we walk in, talk to him for the alotted time and leave. On the way out the man in question walked us to the elevator. What happened between his office door and the elevator is the awkward series of moments I hinted at a moment ago.
On the way out he had his hand on my left shoulder, and then on my back, and then...What the $*&%! I'm thinking ok, that was below the border, but this is a baseball culture so maybe that's common. He says he likes my leather coat, and the coat is pretty long so maybe it was an accident. But not the second time....and there he goes again. Bear in mind these three bad touches occurred in the span of a 20 yard walk to the elevator. Obviously I can't complain about it to anyone at the school because the guy is by far their most influential customer. And although the class might go to Ben or myself, the student has preference over which teacher they want, so I'm pretty sure I know who's getting drafted for this mission. But at least it wasn't a problem that I showed up without a tie. When I got home that Monday my only thought was, "I wish I could go one damn day without my hot ass getting me into trouble."

Wheat Out

Day 1

2006-03-28T04:26:00.000-08:00

After a 35 to 46 second tutorial on how my apartment works the previous occupant and my ride ditched out. It was around 12:30 AM and despite the massively long trip I was restless enough to unpack everything. Afterwards, still restless, I decided at about 2 AM to take a walk outside around my apartment. This is the first time I'd set foot outside an airport, train, or bus station since I landed in Tokyo, suffice to say, it looked like a cross between The Bronx, Harlem, Bulgaria, and anything we've all gleaned from watching Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. That is however, the one back road I ventured down, which was totally vacant of anylife, cars, people, stray cats or otherwise.
I tried to instill extremely low expectations about my apartment in myself before I left. As a result, my apartment is f'in (this is a family blog afterall) awesome. Not only are the kitchen and bathroom separate entities, but there's also a livingroom, bedroom, and balcony (albeit a first floor one). The hot water feels like the center of the sun (thankyou volcanic island) and the shower is big enough for...well more than one person.
The bedroom isn't so much a "bed" room persay, but more like a matt-room, because everyone sleeps on a 3 inch thick matt layed on the hardwood. Apparently the easiest measurement for a room is by how many of these matts can be layed across it, I have a moderate six matt matt-room, where I will watch matt-lock with laying on my matted hair with Matt Stiles.
Well Saturday came, I have no phone, nor anybody to call locally to show me around, nor do I have voltage adaptors to plug in my computer, which doesn't have working internet yet anyway, so I decide to wander until I find something useful. With that I traverse the mean streets of Tokuyama.
The mean streets of Tokuyama are pretty much shut down on Saturday. There is nothing open. I found a moderate sized supermarket and decided to grab some chow. Which I can store in my refrigerate and freezer unit - provided. Along with a microwave and rice cooker. The kitchen also has two gas burners, but no stove, so nobody gets cupcakes. The first thing I see in the market is beer, I decide I like this market, I picked up a couple of Kirin Beers and toss them in my basket, then on trying to decide if I want a third I look at the price. $2.50 for a can of beer, or 2500 yen for you currency exchange nazi's. I picked up a box of Japanese frosted flakes, because they had snoopy on the box, and Snoopy would never give me food poisoning, and some vegetables, bread, deli meats etc. As a side-note, all deli meats in Japan look like ham, but I like ham so it's ok. I did a double take when these items were wrung up though. Because it came to almost 40 dollars, 40000 yen, as it turns out beer isn't the only expensive item here, everything you can eat or drink is ridiculously expensive, which is the only reason Japanese people are so thin, don't buy into that diet crap. You have to be a millionare to afford to even gain weight here. I decided on day 1 the food budget would have to be kept to a minimum to furnish the beer budget. Big bags of rice, big bags of noodles, and big bags of beer will be the norm from now on.
With food out of the way, I went back home, dropped off my wares and set back out in search of adaptors, how hard can it possibly be to find an electronics store in Japan? What the #&$^! I wandered around literally a thirty block radius, 360 degrees around my apartment and found one electronics store, which didn't have voltage adaptors. But if I were writing a treatise on Japanese culture based on what I did see it would go something like this.
The Japanese are a race of car loving people who have wonderful smiles, but for some reason their hair grows at 6 times the rate of a normal human beings. They have no wish to look "cool" or even reasonable for that matter. They love to sing karaoke, but hate to buy music. Unfortunately they seem technologically inept, and have severe aversions to crowded places and smog.
Based on 6 hours of walking Saturday I did not see a single dirty car, they cherish their cars more than their children, spouses, cameras combined. A small note on Japanese cars, they're very cute, most are about 3 1/2 feet wide, and designed like card board boxes, but they love the things. During this walk I saw 2 hair salons for every other kind of business, with the exception of car dealerships. A lot of people around here ride bikes, and most of the men I saw were riding bright pink or purple bikes with little Wizard of OZ type baskets in the front. They have a ton of Karaoke bars, but no record stores, and I did not see another electronics, computer, or dvd, computer or game store the entire day. Every other Japanese person also happened to be wearing a thin white mask over their mouths, similar to what we'd see housepainters wearing, which I have to say makes me slightly nervouse *cough* birdflu *cough*
Also, I'm not sure how many of you can truly appreciate the degree of helplessness a foreigner faces here. This is not like France, or Italy or any other European country. There are no letters here (abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz). Our alphabet does not exist in this country, everything is written in the same stlye as the whorey tattoos every post gen-x long island girl decides to scrawl across the crack of her ass. There are slashes, and boxes, and lines, and circles mashed together like a playschool factory exploded. So suffice to say, nothing was accomplished aside from buying the beer I would later use to help me fall asleep.
I am writing this particular entry on Tuesday night, I landed on friday - This morning I discovered...the voltage here is the same as the USA. Bear in mind Sunday and Monday were consumed with the same quest to find adapter I didn't need. Welcome to my world.

The Enola Wheat - From Take Off to Dropping It Like It Was 10,000 Degrees

2006-03-28T04:21:00.000-08:00

Well the day started simply enough, I “finished” packing (and I say that because at this moment I haven’t thought of anything important I forgot to pack) at about 3:30 AM, and decided to take a cat nap until 5 or so. I woke up to wash the last stink of America off of me before charging into a country that subsists almost entirely on raw fish. We got to the airport without too much fanfare, parked, got a bus to the American Airlines terminal, which thankfully wasn’t busy at all. We had plenty of room to vent and gesticulate wildly when we had to pay 86 dollars to check a third bag. The suit carrier I packed to keep my suits from getting wrinkled had to be discarded so I could stuff the suits into an already overstuffed suitcase. They also informed us that, despite the forms I had printed which listed in bold lettering that international flights sent all of your bags to the final destination, my bags would only go as far as the first airport. In fact that line that soothed my worries of scrambling for my luggage and finding the right bus to go to a different airport within a couple of hours of landing in a country whose signs are going to be pictures of boxes and dashed lines, was kind of like an airline set of dinosaur bones. It was simply put there to test my faith in the incompetence of American Airlines. After a thorough pat down from a large black guy with what I can only assume was a metal detector I was through customs and on my way to the gate.
While waiting at the gate I decided it’s entirely unlikely I will ever be able to understand a single Japanese person over 60, no matter how fluent I become in the language. They have a specific kind of mumble that I can’t quite put my finger on, and because their mouths are generally smaller, you get kind of an old prospector’s whistle added in. Suffice to say I give up, the old people win, unfortunately they won’t be able to enjoy their victory being so pre-occupied with outrunning death, who surprisingly still flies coach.
The plane I’m riding in is a 777, and I know what you’re all thinking, that’s the luckiest god damn plane in the fleet. How many sevens can you pile into one flight design? Unfortunately, 21…eh…not so much a lucky number, remember how 21 jump street ended? No? That’s right, because nobody does. 21 jump street is a lot like a 14 hour flight, it begins a bunch of people trying to go to sleep even though they know they can’t because Johnny Depp is going to take off his shirt, it was inevitable that once an episode Johnny Depp was topless, and you could lose yourself in those chiseled abs like watching the clouds break and re-form above the Canadian Rockies. Yet somehow the show was still awful because 21 is an unlucky number. However, to honor the sacrifice of all those wasted hours, I now dub this craft the Boeing 21 Jump Street.
But I digress, so I am going to again recount my love of take-offs. The shear insanity of the physics involved in making a giant cylindrical school bus airborne never ceases to amaze me. It starts off with what’s essentially a controlled explosion of jet fuel which propels the plane, much like a Deloreon to a pre-determined speed that’s fast enough to keep the plane moving while the entire front section lifts into the air. So you (or in this case me) the passenger actually feel a slight dipping sensation before the plane takes off because the front of the plane is in the air well before the rear.
The seat belt, ah the airplane seat belt, has now become even more useless. Say the plane were to slow itself enough during a crash that we all didn’t die instantly, well luckily for us we have these seat belts on, and this seat belt goes well with the other new safety feature on this particular airplane, a small television built into the back of the seats. Whereas without my seatbelt I could potentially fly into something soft, like a fat person (although not as likely in a plane filled with Asians) now with the seatbelt on I am guaranteed to smack my cranium straight into a television screen, or if I’m lucky just the tray table.
After the take off is over it’s time for the actual flight, snooze central, what I have discovered however, is that if you fall asleep chewing gum, your body will eventually stop chewing, and there’s going to be a lot of extra saliva left over, and since you’re sitting up, well gravity is going to tell that saliva were to go, your shirt. Listen, I learn these lessons so you all won’t have to. Swallow your gum when you hit cruising altitude. Luckily some of the passengers probably just thought it was a leak in the air conditioning system since craning their necks to the point where they could see my head would cause severe neck pain. It was kind of funny watching everyone stand on their seats to put their carry-ons in the overhead compartment.
So awash a sea of Japanese folk returning home, I was curious to see who I would end up sitting next to, and as it turns out, I ended up sitting next to a Mexican born New Yorker. A gal named Miryam who I have nothing negative to report on, although even if I did there’s a good chance she’s reading this out of the corner of her eye so I won’t write it anyway. She’s flying out to Osaka to sell wedding plan designs to Japanese hotels. Apparently the Japanese can’t quite flaunt their cash and conspicuously consume as well as we can. I’ll make a note to add chrome and bling into my lesson plans. Damn if she didn’t buy the most comfortable looking plane pillow in the world too, it practically took an Alaskan mountain to wake her up for lunch.
The flight is 14 hours long, I assume it’s mostly because the flight moves in a parabolic trajectory to the god damned North Pole and then south again to Japan. Although I can’t complain too much because the views over Canada and Alaska were phenomenal, it’s good to have a reminder of what the world was like before it was a Wal-Mart parking lot. Especially on the way to an island more densely populated than Jersey.
Everything else today has been kind of a blur, I think single run-on sentence will encapsulate it pretty well; we landed in Tokyo and I scrambled to get my luggage, paid thirty dollars for a bus to the other airport in Tokyo I had to get to for my next flight, sat next to a Japanese dude who was a 4 year army vet that I could probably snap like a tooth pick, got on the next plane, checked all three bags without a single comment or extra penny added, stupid American Airlines, got on the flight to Hiroshima, fell asleep, woke up as we were landing with a little note that said you missed dinner, bought a bus ticket, got on another bus for about 45 minutes to get to a train station, bought a train ticket, got on the train, got off at Tokuyama (in Shunan City) got picked up by the husband of the head of the school, got dropped off at my new apartment, and here I sit after 24 straight hours of traveling, 2 planes, 2 buses, 1 train, almost two hundred dollars in bus and train tickets and no geishas later. Tomorrow of course is another day.

Wheat Out

Some More Toga Pictures

2006-03-28T04:11:00.000-08:00

TOGA TOGA TOGA

2006-03-28T04:06:00.000-08:00

We had a farewell bon voyage on St. Patrick's Day, in the form of a Toga Party, I don't really have a lot to report about, there was much drinking, some dancing, and much debauchery. But you know what they say about pictures...and their mathematical equivalent in words.

2006-02-10T12:41:00.000-08:00

The Many Faces of Sensei Steve

Impact Statement

2006-02-10T12:26:00.000-08:00

As of today, February 10, 2006 I have about 6 words of Japanese under my belt, and no real teaching experience, I am due to depart for my new home in Shunan City, Yamaguchi Prefecture, Japan around March 23.

The goal of this blog is to help downplay the insanity of life ahead for my worried family, and entertain my bored friends. I expect no short list of adventures stemming from my complete and utter lack of understanding of the Japanese language and culture, my inexperience living off of a salary and paying all my bills, and general tendencies to procrastinate extensively and party slightly harder than is usually expected.

What this will not be, is a diary prolonging every boring and sordid detail of my trip to the mall and my feelings about some new girl I just met who doesn't like me. It will not extrapolate on every thought that flies through my head through the day to day. So at the very best it will be scattershot, probably anachronistic, and possibly exagerated. At the end of the day though, I will not have to worry about facing the wrath of Oprah's Book Club.

Wheat Out