The longest post about 2 and a half days ever?
EvilToasterElf
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The best week on anti-biotics...ever
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.
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.
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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.
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.”
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.
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.
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!”
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.
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.
HAPPY FREEKIN' BIRTHDAY STEVIL!!!!
spank!!!
CHEERS!
Happy birthday!
(And, thanks for the story.)
these stories and more can be found at http://www.senseandsenseibility.blogspot.com
i'm really trying hard to keep it together, here? lol... like... I kinda remember maybe starting a birthday thread... or posting on one? but, time slips past so fast that it could've been a year ago...
lol
D'UH
sorry homesworth
lata
ok. alright.
shoot. it's hard to shop using only my imagination. i was hoping you could make a suggestion or two
definitely look for The Throwing Muses': House Tornado, that's supremely rare
i'd like also, Led Zeppelin I and AC/DC's For Those About to Rock... I don't even have those on CD, and it's criminal
tell me, too... i need to send you some cash or something? i need instructionnnnnn
ok first off, since this threat will be up on top for about 12 seconds, I've updated the blog: http://www.senseandsenseibility.blogspot.com and secondly - Zeppelin is probably doable, The throwing muses house tornado is probably not, I'm not in tokyo so the obscure stuff is hard to find. But this store has a ton of amazing classic rock on vinyl. Most are between 12 and 15 bucks a pop, so think of all the classics you'd like to own with some japanese gibberish on the front and back
price out Zeppelin I, II, III & IV for me? and I'll fuckinnnnn...
can I paypal 'em or something???
holla
I'll price em - a good ole fashioned money order might be the best way, lemme ask around.
hugs and kisses