The best week on anti-biotics...ever
EvilToasterElf
Posts: 1,119
I haven't been writing a whole lot of poetry, or fiction, but the words have been flowing through the blog which consumes most of my free time that isn't spent partying. So I figured I'd throw a new one on here.
If anyone's interested in the rest it's http://www.senseandsenseibility.blogspot.com
The best week on antibiotics…ever
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.
If anyone's interested in the rest it's http://www.senseandsenseibility.blogspot.com
The best week on antibiotics…ever
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.
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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.
P.S. Pearl Jam come to Japan for the love of crap
and i'm thinking...
i wanna live in a town called Fuck-U-Ok?
um. i don't want a little one, ok? (and i don't mean i'm hot for sumo, GOT IT?) i know i know... i'm a sucka for a rarity
fck*n....
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, EVIL!!!!!!!!
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I just got to the end of the story! I think you and me would have a friggin' blast travelling.... I'd go Beer instead of Jack, but that's me. Cheeseburgers? Oh Hell Yes.
Thanks darlin,
Jack and Coke's are a staple for me sometimes, depending on my mood, and that mood was vacation, which called for a stronger inebriant. Otherwise I'm on a strict beer and sake diet.
Down in Brazil, my favorite beer was Chopp... I miss it bad
There's one bar here where I can get Guinness and a great microbrew called Brooklyn Lager, so I'm pretty set