inside the wonderful world of vee

I’m watching TV for the first time in however million years long and I’m watching Andrew Zimmerman’s “Bizarre Foods” show on the Food Network.

SUCKLING PIG IS SO FUCKING SICK. YOU EAT THE WHOLE PIG!! THE WHOLE PIGGGGGG. THAT’S UNDER ONE MONTH OLD AND WEIGHS LESS THAN SEVEN POUNDS!! KILL MEEEEE! SICKKKKK!!!

And that’s about all I have to say. It’s nice to see a show about somewhere across the world, in Madrid, and feel like you were there long enough (granted, only 5 days, but 5 days was kinda enough to feel at home KINDA) to know where they are on the street. D:

I <3 Spain.

So, we stayed the night in Hiroshima at the same hostel and then checked out in the morning to head back to Tokyo. YAY! Not much time in Tokyo, so we had to make the most of it.

The shinkasen trip back was like 3 and a half hours or something. We prepared by getting a lunchbox in Kyoto, since we had to go there to pick up our luggage anyway.

SushiMonster scared of shinkasen!! Seriously, though, the first time I rode the shinkansen it definitely felt uncomfortable. The feeling went away after riding it for the second or third time, though.

My lunchbox! Lunchboxes are definitely the way to go as far as variety goes. MMM! Too much of it was sweet, though. I was a little disappointed by that.

Lenny’s lunchbox!

SushiMonster likes this fake tamago thing!

The Tokyo portion of our trip was no doubt the BEST portion simply because there was so much going on, with so much of it going on by CHANCE.

We just went to Akihabara right away and walked around. Went to an arcade where some dude was playing this CRAZY game where there’s like a million things on the screen at once and you pretty much just have to dodge the flying shit. He totally must play that game a lot, because he could maneuver past every little bead and only died once. Tons of people were entranced by him.

I also came to conclude it must suck to be a woman in Japan, because in the arcade, there was ONE other woman, and she was there with her boyfriend. It is absolutely not culturally acceptable for a woman to really play video games, other than maybe some music games (the playful kind with taiko drums or something, not even like guitar hero) or those stupid ridiculous UFO games which I STILL don’t understand the allure of. They are a trip, those UFO machines. They seem so completely and utterly pointless and have such stupid prizes you think that there couldn’t possibly be anyone stupid enough to pay money over and over again to play. But there are people who do. TONS OF THEM! WTH.

We also checked out an old videogame store, which had an old console we used to have at our house. Hollar!

There were also penguins in this window… :/

This waffle covered chocolate ice cream bar Lenny bought from one of the ice cream vending machines. DELICIOUS!!

We spent FOREVER in Don Quixote. At least Don Quixote always results in some interesting photos, even if it’s boring after floor 3.

Takoyaki hat, courtesy of Don Quixote. Actually, I think they spell it Don Quijote.

Hitler Halloween costume. I shit you not.

I also suggested we eat at Yoshinoya since Lenny hadn’t had it before and I needed to show off the cheapness that is yakiniku in Japan. I was the only woman in there, again. I also suspect that’s not fully acceptable, either. WHATEVER. They were all lonely singular men, in there by themselves. Pretty pathetic.

Then we went back to our hostel in Asakusabashi. There was this totally sketchy playground with like two of those springy horse rides or whatever and a bathroom that was open. I totally saw an old dude pissing… like TWICE. He was pissing twice, in full view of anyone passing by because that’s how the bathroom was designed. It was pretty fucking sick, I must tell you. Sick in a bad way.

Anyway, at the hostel, there was an amusing lady manning the front table when we first checked in earlier in the afternoon. Hehe. She had a funny voice. Lenny liked to impersonate her. I can’t describe what it was like, though, cept really high pitched, friendly, and scratchy. Haha.

The next morning, we got up, and it was SUNDAY!! Sunday meant the day that supposedly, one could rent bikes to bike around the Imperial Palace with. Free bikes? SIGN US UP! Turns out it wasn’t as exciting as one might think, though, and the bikes were limited to a ‘track’ that was set aside for people. The Imperial Palace is also kind of a lame place that is completely not worth going to. You can’t even go in!!!

Before we got there, though, there was this antique garage sale in Ginza we passed when we were walking along. Weird. Didn’t know Japanese people were into antiques. Yeah, yeah, I like to generalize.

Bikes for rent! Guess we totally shoulda tried a tandem bike. DAMN!

“Booya. I need a haircut.”

After riding around the lame Imperial Palace and realizing there wasn’t much to do, we went to the Global Festa, which was this festival with some foods from represented countries (mostly African), and a lot of non-profit organizations. Cute event. Very cute.

See kid in orange on the right? Kid in orange was terribly scared of man and/or woman in robot suit. How can one be scared of that? Who knows!

Well, we didn’t really know what was going on at the event since mostly everything was in Japanese and pretty much everyone was trying to promote some non-profit cause like stopping world hunger and helping education in third world countries and blahblahblah. I settled on some food from I-forget-what-African-country. It was like this beef, potato, and carrot or something stew with couscous. Pretty delicious. Lenny got some samosas from Ghana. Mmm, food. He also got some beer which he thought was disgusting but felt obligated to finish anyway since he paid $5 USD for it. It was also expired. Haha!

After that, we headed on over to Harajuku, for the most interesting part of our entire trip!! We had only planned on going to see the dressed up women, but there turned out to be SO MUCH going on in Harajuku that day that we were extremely, extremely amused.

First up, at the Shibuya stop: weird man dancing with flag. YAY!

Then as we were walking down from the train station stop to the Hibiya Park where all the stuff in Harajuku goes down, we passed a SEAFOOD festival. Needless to say, Lenny was in lorv. There was a crab grilling area but the line was super long, so we didn’t try to go there… we would go back, we said.

Then there was some kinda taichi conference or something…

And across the street from the taichi conference, we heard the bustle of music. What is it? What was it?! ROCK MUSIC? OUTDOOR CONCERTS? SIGN US UP!!

The first thing we saw… greasers!!! TOKYO ROCKABILLY CLUB? WHAT THE FUCK?!!

There they had their boomboxes and they were dancing up a fucking storm. Poses, limber moves… some of these guys were fucking old, too! But one thing’s for sure: ALL OF THEM HAD FUCKING FABULOUS HAIR.

SUPERSTAR!

SUPERSTAR!

What else? Rice Riot was an AWESOME electro pop band.

These girls um, played these drums? It was pretty… but not that entertaining.

I forget the name of this band at the moment… Primal something… will update with their name later… but they had these fucking girls in the palm of their hands!!!

“We are robots!”

Headbanging women? YES!

White girl in maid outfit? YES!!!

Have to look up the name of this band too, but their guitarists were REALLY good… very reminiscent of old Incubus like during “Hilikus!” But the vocalist was just okay, unfortunately.

TERRIBLE TERRIBLE TERRIBLE girl band with a vocalist who wasn’t even REALLY singing. I mean, check it out. They have no amps. Their guitars are not plugged in. I FELT like something was amiss when we first walked by, and I said that, but when we walked by again, it became obvious. They weren’t REALLY playing their instruments at all. PATHETIC. I mean, REALLY pathetic.

When we finally finished looking at all the music, we finally headed over to check out the famous Harajuku girls. We were met by THREE!! OR MAYBE FOUR?!! BUT LAMENESS!! There was only one that was actually posing.

Went shopping for a bit. I bought a cool scarf and a cool pair of pantyhose. Lenny bought two fitted shirts and a tie! Good shopping, but lots of people!! And it started raining a little bit.

We then decided to go back to the seafood festival, but poopingly enough, most of the booths had closed and the crab Lenny wanted to eat was gone, gone, gone :[

We decided to go back to check out some more bands. Very good band, Stereo Lynch!! The drummer was AWESOME. Reminded Lenny of Lingo, I guess.

R&B group from America. Los Angeles area, to be exact. They were just OK.

Think we went home right after that… maybe ate some meals along the way. Twas a long day, twas.

—

The next morning, we thought about getting up at 4:30am to go see the Tsukiji Fish Market fish auctions, but then got lazy. That’s way too early. We woke up at like 8:00am instead and bummed around Tsukiji. It took a while to get there. It always does. More tuna than one could ever REALLY want to see…

Tank full of FUGU!!

They don’t REALLY take that kindly to tourists. Whatever, though.

I was slightly in love with these trays of blood and guts. Call me a sicko!

Check out that grain!

This guy was carving up the head of the tuna, and we saw him pick off a piece and eat it as he was cutting it. Haha!

Mmmm, bin of miscellaneous tuna parts. I’m fascinated.

More. Seriously, is there something wrong with me?

Let’s not forget that we had to try one of the dozens of sushi restaurants along the outskirts of the Tsukiji Fish Market. We didn’t want to wait, so we picked a small bar type restaurant with three old people working. It was a very small menu selection, and very very expensive for being so basic. I had wanted to take Lenny to a place like we went to last year, where there was HELLA selection, but this place catered only to tourists and ONLY had the basics. :/ Above is what I ordered… crab, scallop, and cucumber rolls.

Lenny ordered two very delicious toro, ama ebi, and salmon. Evidently the toro and ama ebi were amazing but the salmon was just okay, since that’s a Pacific Northwest thing anyway.

Knives on sale!

After that, we went back to the hostel to check out because it was still like 10:00am or something absurd. And then we were deciding between going to Asakusa to look at temples or to the Science Museum on Odaiba that I thought Lenny would REALLY like. Unfortunately, Odaiba is ass far from everything. So it took a while to get over there. It was worth it, though, and it cost only $5 to get in (it actually cost more than that to actually physically get there because we had to take the subway and then a new line that only services Odaiba).

Just some pretty ceiling decorations.

ASIMO, the famous Honda robot, happened to be there that day!

Giant cool glowing globe thing, plus walkway!

“A working model of the internet.” Kinda interesting.

Virtual videogame horseriding?!

Cool motion sensor thing, where the fish would be able to detect the pillows and would bounce offa them. COOOL.

Just another view of the globe.

An astronaut’s bedchamber.

An astronaut’s toilet.

Evidently all the components that make up the human body.

Toy that let people try performing surgery on their own. :0

Regular cup of noodle styrofoam cup versus styrofoam cup of noodle cup that has been brought into a submarine!!

Cool ass exhibit. Through the mirror, a face would appear in that blue circular thing, but when you just turned around and looked at the blue circular thing on its own, there was no face… just water. A total trip. AMAZING.

And this post is not done yet, but I’ll finish it later. Must go to bed now.

Lots to say about catching the flight back to Seattle, and about the crazy ass Chinese people on the plane. This photo is a partial note of what’s to come as far as crazy Chinese peoples go.

This guy was to Lenny’s right, and he seriously had his feet propped up on the TABLE while he was sleeping. How crazily unsanitary, man!!! And that is seriously only the beginning. CHINESE PEOPLE. THEY ARE INSANE!!!

After visiting the main Hiroshima sights, we took a ferry to Miyajima Island. First, we took the bus to get to the area where we should take the ferry. Then we decided to eat at some ghetto little cheap restaurant before we went on the ferry. Then we went on the ferry, where there was a baby with like the most hair EVER. He had such a huge head of hair. Or was it a she? We never could figure that out…

Well, Miyajima Island was only, like, a ten minute ferry ride away. We docked at the tourist station and then proceeded to walk around. Lenny figured out a route for us to go up (with some suggestion by me) and then we were immediately met with deer. MOO!

The deer wants Lenny! MOO!

Poor poor antlerless deer.

These deer will eat everything! There are notes EVERYWHERE telling people to watch their passports and tickets because the deer will eat them! I thought it was a joke… it certainly sounds like one… but one deer definitely ran off with one of Lenny’s flyers, and one can only imagine that it is really NOT a joke, and that it seriously happens ALL THE TIME!!!

The deer was totally facing Lenny til right before I took this photo.

“GIMMEE SOME!”

So we headed to the park first. Sorry, forget names of places here.

I scared of the scary horsey.

Dragonfly! Pretty cool when zoomed in. Unfortunately, this is NOT zoomed in.

Tree root!

One can take the gondola type thing up or hike up. We chose to hike up. Unfortunately, Lenny is much more in shape than I. He got kinda bored of waiting for me at times, I think, but shit, I needed to rest sometimes godamnit! I’m a weakling!

Cool flower I’ve not much seen before!

The view from halfway up. I have to admit, it’s pretty godamn nice.

Mt. Misen is the top. Supposedly, there were monkeys up here. I SAW NO GODAMN MONKEYS. Seriously disappointing. Seriously.

So there’s this guy with beads… but check out the little guys with beads!!!

One lone crane, in a thing of rock.

Not sure what this is for, but it looks freaking sweet!

I’m trying to look sexy. What?! This isn’t sexy at all.

His sexy pose is a little better.

His sexy pose is the best yet.

Again, the deer was looking at Lenny right before this photo was snapped!! REALLY!

A view from the top.

This raven was just chillin for a while.

Descending the mountain. It was getting late. Unfortunately, one of the shrines Lenny wanted to check out was closed ~__~

But at least we got to see the Floating Tori Gate at sunset, which was quite very gorgeous.

It also happened to be low tide, which means we could actually walk out to it. It was a helluva task getting photos where there were no humans around.

Sky and water blend into one.

Giant SPOON!

So on our ferry back, this younger hip-hop dressed type dude was sitting next to me. As it was time to get off, there was a bag next to me. Thought it was his, so Lenny ran after him and tried to return it. The guy ended up explaining that it was, “For you,” even though he seemed surprised by it at first and said, “Thank you.” So… I’m not sure if he intended to leave it there or if it was someone else’s, but we got a whole lot of momijis!! Which are these little cakes filled with different things. Flavors we got included the regular red bean, the green tea, and CHEESE! (Which we thought was cream cheese, but later found out was like… regular cheese… and it was hard whereas the other flavors were like, paste, so it was a little… odd.) I must say I was slightly scared of eating it initially and joked about it being poisoned! But hell, what’s the worst that could happen! Parents tell you not to accept candy from strangers?! We’re living proof that it’s perfectly OK!!!

That night, we ate at a sushi restaurant in Hiroshima, and next to us was this Chinese family. I decided to make conversation with them and ask them where they were from. They were from Northern California, of course. The wife was friendly but the husband pretty much like ignored my ass. The mom asked me if I was on post-graduation vacation, though, and I strangely (because I was nervous, I guess) answered YES. The answer was quite very much… NO. So, WTF.

We leave from Himeji and get to Hiroshima relatively late in the evening. It’s okay. People tell us there’s not that much to do in Hiroshima anyhow. We pretty much just get to the hostel and chill the first night. The hostel is within walking distance from the train station, so we walk. The map we have is a little shifty, but we make it without problems. It is K’s Backpacker Hostel. The front desk guy is so so so friendly, almost in a ditzy kinda way. Lenny lurvs him a lot. He’s Lenny’s favorite person on the whole Japan trip — tied with Shoji MAYBE. We originally have booked two nights at this place, but we’ve since decided to stay a night on Miyajima Island and decide to cancel one night at the Hiroshima hostel.

So we get our room, which is shared with two other people. They turn out to be two people from England, and they’re on a one year world trip. Just like everyone else, except for Americans. We head to the kitchen… just us and our food we got from a supermarket in Himeji! Yay! We had a whole smorgasbord of random foods to eat. Yay! Clean kitchen, and FREE LAUNDRY SERVICES! This place is crazay!

Bed bed.

Food food.

Left to right… Lenny, potato salad, crab legs (dammit, they turned out to be imitation! No wonder they were so cheap!!), croquette, and my autumn vegetable platter, which was delicious!!

Damn, that’s some real-looking imitation crab!

After eating, we decide we want to stay in Hiroshima after all, since ferries coming back from Miyajima Island run late. No need to stay on the island. So we get our second hostel day added back on… yay!

The next morning, we head out to explore Hiroshima. We start off by taking their local bus/rail thing. It’s $1.50 anywhere you go in the city center area.

We stop by the A-Bomb Dome first. It’s funny because the bus or whatever has all these stops, and all of them are only described in Japanese, except for this one, which is clearly a place only tourists go to… that stop is described in English and Japanese. Haha.

For some reason, birds seriously LOOOOOVED this godamn thing. I mean, like all kinds of birds. Cranes, pigeons, ravens, etc. ALL OF THEM WERE ALL OVER THIS SHIT.

There is a whole peace park in Hiroshima. For obvious reasons. This statue is based off that famous story of the girl who folded 1,000 cranes (yet still died).

Evidently this was also the week for remembering victims who died from the Atom Bomb. It was the anniversary of the bomb dropping.

There were all these colorful booths, filled with cranes from individuals in schools around the world. While we were there, there was a group of I think Australians who sang a song and then placed their string of cranes inside one of the open glass booths.

Monument with a perfect view to the A-Bomb Dome… planned, I’m sure!

We decided to go into the Hiroshima Museum because it only cost 50 CENTS. Which is like, the cheapest thing ever in Japan. They were really clever to make it so cheap, because that was pretty much the only reason we went in, and I’m sure that’s the case with many passerbyers. I didn’t think that the museum could possibly be all that interesting, but man. It affected me pretty deeply. It was definitely an amazing museum. Well put together, lots of useful information, etc.

Model of Hiroshima BEFORE the bomb. Japanese people fucking LOOOVE these godamn models.

Model of Hiroshima AFTER the bomb.

Well, there were a lot of disturbing things in the museum, and it made me feel really weird, frankly. The most interesting things in the museum were…

1) Letters written by the mayors? of Hiroshima to every country who ever runs a nuclear arms test or thinks about running a nuclear arms test, telling them that they should not.

2) The fact that they planned to drop three bombs but later whittled it down to two, and that Kyoto was on the list of places to possibly bomb. Lucky Kyoto and lucky Japan that it was not, but who knows just how many culturally rich places just like Kyoto were destroyed because of the bombings :/ Kyoto was also largely unscathed because all cities which they THOUGHT of A-Bombing were not regularly bombed, because they wanted to study the full effects of the A-Bomb.

3) The fingernails and stories of one boy who got bombed and then tried to suck the pus out of his own fingertips / fingernails because he was dying of thirst. Fucking. Worst. Imagery. Ever. ~__~

An image from a war or something protest in Germany.

Happy chair!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The previous night, the Indian dude at Shoji’s house told us that we should go to Himeji, since it was on the way to Hiroshima. We decided to go. It was just a simple train stop! And Indian dude told us… FREE BIKES!! SIGN US UP!! WE’RE SOLD! The bikes are available at the Info Center of the train station… you simply have to ask and then they give you a key. You exchange the key at the bike place, four blocks down the road at this bike parking lot area. We just had to go downstairs.

BIKES!! ALL FOR US!!

So we paid however much money and went into Himeji Castle, which is like… one of the best castles in Japan, I guess. Go here and you don’t really have to go to any other ones again, because they’re all the same really!

Geometric fancy wall!

Inside the palace All wood.

The view from inside Himeji.

Apparently, they had guns then! Fancy ones. I forget when this shite was built. But I guess it was pretty late. Actually, it was also burned down at some point, so it was rebuilt. Cheaters!

Low ceilings. High Lennys.

Yet another view! MMM!

Himeji Castle!

VICTORIOUS!

This wall’s special, cause it’s made out of a lot of stones lifted from other places, including from gravestones! YAY!

Supposedly, a woman lives in that well. Or a ghost used to haunt it. Or something.

So after going to the castle, we decide to go back to return the bike. The bike needs to be back at like 5:00pm or something, but Lenny thinks it’s 4:30pm. We get to the bike place and I say it’s still early, so we decide to ride back around the ring around the castle. It’ll be fast, we say! Unfortunately, we get a little lost and make a wrong turn, so we have to furiously ride back the way we came. We had like 8 minutes to get back and we actually MADE IT. Man, bikes are CRAZY! IT’S LIKE TELEPORTATION! INSTANT RETURN!!!! MEEEEEP!

On the way around the castle.

Yet another

And so we furiously ride back, return the bikes, and head off again… train station! Hiroshima, here we come!

The train station. BEAUTIFUL!

Goodbye, Himeji!

WE LOOK LIKE WE’RE 12!!!!

We left Osaka early the next morning. Of course, we had to grab our baggage before we left. Unfortunately — and we did not know this — the lockers had a 24 hour reset, so we had to pay ANOTHER $6 USD to get our baggage back. BOO!!! Had we known, we would have… I don’t know what we would have done differently. Nonetheless, definitely worth bitching about

We headed one stop back towards Tokyo to go to Kyoto. GOOD STUFF.

First stop: dropping off luggage. We decided to ride the subway one stop to another subway station, where it would be easier for us to pick up our luggage later. Unfortunately, subways have smaller lockers than train stations do, and we couldn’t find one big enough for our luggage. So we had to ride back to the main Kyoto station again. There, we still had a helluva time and tried to stuff our baggage into a medium-sized thing because we couldn’t find a large one, but a couple elderly workers saw us and tried to tell us that was not OK. We didn’t understand though, and they left, and we kept trying to stuff it into the medium-sized one, and one came back and LED us to the bigger lockers. That surely helped quite a bit, because then we could drop off our backpacks, too. Ahh yes. So fresh and so free free.

Then we took some subway lines to Nishikujo Food Market. Or at least I think that was the name.

Here’s what it looked like. By now, it was around lunchtime, so what better to do than eat snacks from this place?! There were so many cheap, small, delicious things, after all!

Puffed rice cake covered with spices. Mmm.

Scallops, with spiced powder on it. Mm, not so worth it. Not so tasty.

After leaving Nishikujo, we saw this man. With cats O__O

Walked around the old town, and finally came to this area. We decided to start our exploration from here. There was a big park here, with lots of temples, but really, Kyoto has a million things to see and we only had one day to see it. So, we missed a LOT!

These girls were trying to feed these pigeons, but then were terrified when the pigeons actually started to fly around because, like, they’re birds. And birds fly. And stuff.

Caught some fake geishas on some of the narrower streets. Don’t believe they’re fake? One was talking on camera and a crew was filming her! What’s up with that!

This guy was making some snacks. I think made out of rice? Not sure.

CART MAN!

Gaudy temple.

Big-sacked cat.

Found some guy who loved feeding turtles. Don’t think he was too keen on us taking photos, though. ~__~

This was some palace or something in the outskirts, ish. We went here to kill time because it was nearby and we had to meet our CouchSurfing host in a little bit of time. Saw a lot of really cuteeeee doggiesssss! In particular a British Bulldog who was my homie. He liked me and didn’t want to leave! His owner was this old guy who was nice. Didn’t speak English really, though.

Lenny <3

After going to that place, we got ready to meet Shoji, our CouchSurfing host. We were supposed to meet him at the Rokujizo stop. But there was a JR stop (train) and a subway stop. We took the subway. Turns out we were supposed to meet him at the train stop… so there was some communication and confusion, but finally I called him (the first two times I called him, no one picked up) and he picked up. He came to find us. We followed him to his house.

Shoji is this like 40-something year old farmer with a family and kids. He also evidently plays bass? in a band and owns like 12? motorcycles. He has one house to live in with his family and one house, effectively dubbed the CouchSurfing House, in which CSers stay. That night, there were 3 other CSers. An Indian guy from Washington DC (I forget his name, unfortunately) who was traveling around Japan and then Taiwan, a French guy named Gael, who worked in this program in Korea and Japan, working on organic farms and in exchange getting free housing and such, and Rene, this Canadian dude from Montreal who I guess is like 35?! but looked quite young… to me, anyway. The place was NICE. It was like a hostel, but for CSers and for free! CRAZY. Shoji barely spoke English but he was still very kind and washed everything. Clean bedsheets, clean blankets, tatami mat sleeping arrangements. It was kinda in the outskirts but there was a 7-11 nearby, and that’s all you really need, I guess.

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The house!! People used dry erase markers to write on the walls!

The upstairs wall, right next to where I was sleeping on the floor! So comfy. So excellent.

My tempura udon from 7-11. It wasn’t very good. But it was CHEAP!

Bathroom at Shoji’s!

They don’t have hot water heaters. They just have instant hot water makers for the shower. Amazing! I forgot to turn it on when I hopped in the shower, though, but luckily Lenny saved my ass. I was wondering why it was only cold water!!

That night we had a good talk with the other CSers… and then we went to bed, comfortable, well-fed, and happy.

The next morning, we woke up, and Gael and the Indian guy were still sleeping. Rene had been long awake and gone. We packed up and prepared to leave. But not before watching some amazing kid show on TV!! Amazing!! Lenny’s favorite Japanese dance thing was on TV along with a song about onigiri. It was quite a catchy song. I sang it for a while.

We headed to Tenryuji Temple in the outskirts of Kyoto. Far, far from the heart. Here are some photos from it! Man oh man. Had we gone one month later, the trees would have been orange and yellow, and it would have been REALLY nice. :[ We got off the train and were walking around and came across a bike rental, so we rented one. YAY! I love riding bikes in foreign countries ^__^

Waited forever to take this godamn photo. People kept getting in the way. GET OUT DA WAY!

Geisha with a cellphone. SUCKA!

Bamboo forest

Spider may be larger than it appears. Much. Larger.

Cool ocean of these weird plants / roots. Not sure what’s going on with them, though.

And I will close with this pretty cool, albeit random, image.

The next morning, we get up early and go to Tokyo station. We take the train to Shin-Osaka, which is the Osaka city train station. I mean, way to make it confusing. Kyoto’s is called Kyoto station, Tokyo’s is called Tokyo station, yet Osaka’s is called Shin-Osaka station? I mean, come on! We’re foreigners! Make it easy on us, please!

So we each have backpacks and then we shared a suitcase. We aren’t planning on carrying that shite around, so we stow it in one of the larger lockers at the train station. 600 yen / $6 a pop. We keep the backpacks. By the time we get to Osaka it’s kinda afternoonish, and we just walk around aimlessly.

Even their subway doors are exciting! YAY?!

Lenny’s a giant when compared with THIS subway door. ^__~

After dropping shite off, we decide to find some food in the subway. Oh, this is after I go to the Ladies’ room and find out that it’s gross ass squatters and that there is NO TOILET PAPER! So I decide to hold it and save some paper from lunch to wipe my cooch with. LOL. We walk down this aisle of relatively typical Japanese food and finally decide on this place with DORIA. MMMM. Only the plastic food doria outside the shop doesn’t really look like the doria I get inside the shop, but nonetheless. Shit was tasty. People were smoking inside that restaurant, and the restaurant had air filters throughout it. The air filters had three little bars… one for tobacco smoke, one for pollen, and one for something else. The pollen filter was at low. The something else filter was similarly at low. The tobacco smoke was in the red, completely full. This was the case for every filter in the place. Kinda amusing.

Lenny’s food at the place in the thing.

Some wooden boards at some temple right near all these shopping strips.

Find a lot of long, indoor shop type places such as shown in this photo below.

Those are expensive mushrooms! $580 - $600 USD a pop!! There was a “NO PHOTOS” sign right there, but I took a photo without noticeing, only to have a dude come by and point at the sign right after I took the photo. LOL.

What’s this? MINI FISHIES!

Tied to a chair. A fucking prisoner.

Poster on a sticky photo thing, where the girls look plastic. But wait, what’s this? ACRYLIC NAILS THAT LOOK LIKE HELL!!!

In this arcade, there was this ‘ride’ that looked scary. Had to do with puppets and mannequins and shit. I woulda liked to go on it but they only played it certain times of the day and there were all these warnings!! DUN DUN DUN!

For those who have not been to Japan, the convenience stores have pretty much anything you could possibly want.

ICE CLEAM!

Oh colonel… I heart you.

Shit, even their manhole covers are purdy.

Porn theatre in Osaka.

Frankly, though, there was not that much to do in Osaka, so we pretty much just walked around. There was a Universal Studios there, but that’s kinda expensive at $50 USD a ticket, and was also kinda in the sticks, so we didn’t go there. Instead, we did random walkings and also went to a mall. The mall was sooo expensive, but at least most of the malls have a top floor that is nothing but restaurants. That’s kinda exciting sometimes. Unfortunately, no clothes to buy, and we came to the conclusion that it was a bit sickening that EVERYONE and their MOMS in Japan gives a huge fuck what they look like. EVERYONE seems to feel the need to dress up and look nice. We probably only saw like 2 dudes in t-shirts. Lenny’s conclusion was that you can always pick out who the tourists are, because they actually wear t-shirts, and it’s pretty much true. And that’s a little freaky.

Hot vending machine! WEE!

As we were walking around frustratingly, I got cranky because I was hungry since we hadn’t eaten in a while. We finally stopped into one restaurant. BEST MEAL OF THE WHOLE TRIP. Here’s what we ate.

Takoyaki, with egg and green onion. SO GODAMN DELICIOUS. Like seriously. I wasn’t a fan of takoyaki before that, but man. That takoyaki. DELICIOUS.

Okonomiyaki. ALSO DELICIOUS. I was also using the hot plate to make our own mini omelettes and okonomiyakis from the leftover egg and green onion in the takoyaki dish. IT WAS AWESOME!

By the way, we didn’t book a hostel this evening in Osaka, because we wanted to find a sex hotel. Osaka supposedly has the best ones, but they’re pretty expensive. And really, we couldn’t figure out WHERE they were… and with the lack of internet access, we REALLY couldn’t find out. So we actually asked a couple English-speaking dudes in the restaurant we were at if they knew of a hostel we could go to, and they gave us really terrible directions, but somehow we found it (it helped that it was on the map in the subway… evidently Hostelling International has some… tricky mainstream shit going on… cause well, I guess Youth Hostels are more state-sanctioned than other hostels… SHIT, I DON’T KNOW!). The hostel was really nice, but I personally had to sleep in the ‘Japanese-style’ section (AKA NO MATTRESS) for the same price as the regular beds. I guess there were roll-out mattresses in the closet, but I didn’t know that, so I just piled blankets up and it was quite an uncomfortable sleep the whole night. Also, the hostel was kinda weird and no one — even residents — could enter after midnight or whatever. WTF. Weird. Youth hostels. Must do more research. But they’re weird. The whole place was also EXTREMELY clean but only had ONE shower in the WHOLE place for guys AND girls, and also, the whole place smelled like CHEESE. Would not go there again. Would NOT.

Common room.

Bedroom. Lenny’s, not mine. Oh yeah. No co-ed rooms. Everything was separated male / female. There were also a shitload of New Zealand kids there, some of whom apparently went to some music cover band show where some Japanese band covered a Saosin song of all things… amongst other things. I only eavesdropped a little bit. And I was blind at the time (no contacts), so I didn’t bother making conversation. And they were like, 12. Okay, maybe 14. Or 15. No idea.

SUSHIMONSTER LOVES SUSHI!!!!

We arrive at the Narita International Airport late in the afternoon, and then pick up our Rail Passes and exchange money. By the time we finish doing that stuff, it’s around 7:30pm. We have to check in at our hostel by 9:00pm. Will we make it?!!!!! Well. It seemed like an easy task (taking the subway is easy), but trains are way confusing. The train from Narita to Tokyo station, in the heart of Tokyo, takes an hour. By the time we get there, it’s around 8:30pm, which gives us only half an hour to get to the hostel. Not really possible, considering it takes two subway line changes because I thought the hostel was in ASAKUSA. Turns out we could have taken the train directly from Tokyo station to Asakusabashi station, because that’s where the hostel REALLY is. We stayed in Asakusa last year and I thought it was a good spot. Asakusabashi is decidedly LESS exciting of a place. ~__~ Close, but not close enough to walk to. We call the hostel from the train station at 9:00pm on the dot, and they say that they will have a note for me on the door. Thank GOD. There was lots of frustrations and bad attitudes and freaking out from my point of view, because I had to figure out all this directional shite and it was just a MESS! We end up not getting there until 10:30pm or 11:00pm, because there were all types of confusions with maps and subways. Bah. Japan. Confusing. Quite the foray into terribleness, especially when considering my relaxing time in Spain. Japan is GO GO GO GO GO all the godamn time.

The view from the Asakusabashi station… or was it Asakusa station?

We get to the hostel and then decide to go out for a meal at some ramen place. Luckily, in Japan, there are a lot of photos so you can just pretty much point at what you want to order. Quite helpful considering Lenny can barely read Japanese and I can’t really read it at all! We ate and ate and all there were were dudes and businessmen… and then we went back to the hostel and slept. YAY!

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 28TH - SEATTLE

Posa drops Lenny and I off at the SeaTac International Airport, and we head over to Japan! Only our flight is delayed two hours, so really, we wait for a couple hours. turns out someone clogged the toilet in the front of the plane. As a result, United gives us each a $250 voucher… (this was after we returned from the trip, but still!) SCORE! One un-score thing is that the airport totally is lacking in fucking electricity plugs. Why would anyone do such a thing?! The guy on the plane in front of me has an Asus EEE PC too. I borrowed my parents’ again for this trip. On the flight, there were some movies playing… yayeer. There were also MANY MANY babies, and one in particular would not stafu… and the mom babied the shit out of the kid, which probably added fuel to the fire.

Right now, it’s 7:20am in Portugal! I’m sitting on the floor of the airport, near the baggage claim area, trying to not go crazy. You see, I need to stay here for the night. My flight coming out of Philadelphia was delayed two and a half hours, which caused me to miss my flight after that. And my mom had the audacity to say, “It’s cause you booked it poorly.” What a bitch. It’s not like I had many options since I used award points. What a bitch move.

Anyway. So I desperately want to sleep, despite the fact that I slept probably the entire way from Copenhagen to Philadelphia today, waking up on slight occasion to watch bits and pieces of Walk The Line (although I hated that movie when I first saw it, it was SLIGHTLY more tolerable this time).

Once I got to Philadelphia, I was four hours early, but that’s okay, because I’d paid a flat rate of $7.95 for 24 hours of internet. Kewl, I thought. This’ll entertain me before I have to take off. Well, I guess it did, but the two and a half hour delay due to weather was highly unfortunate. Our plane got to Denver at 10:00pm and my flight was at 9:30pm. Just missed it. What’s also weird is that when our plane first got there, we couldn’t park for like 15 minutes, because no one was at the gate to let our plane in. Very very bizarro world.

I also need desperately to take a shower!! So bad. It’s been 2 days. Ferreal. And one of those two days brought with it massive exercise. Not too much sweat, but still. Probably adds to the nastiness… @__@ I’d really love to wash my hair in the sink but I dunno, seems like it might make things worse…

And I also, of course, once again missed the Infected Mushroom show. See below. At least I sold the tickets, I guess.

At the moment I’d REALLY love to keel over and sleep, but I’ve got to charge my cellphone at least a little bit so that I can ensure I can alarm clock and wake myself up in the morning. Bah, humbug.

36+ hours at the airport and on airplanes? SIGN ME DA FUCK UP.

Also, United Airlines wouldn’t give me anything cause it was a weather delay and subsequently out of their control. T__T They gave me a ticket voucher for “cheap hotel stay” and the cheapest was at the Radisson, for $55. Shit son, that’s cheap? Insane. @__@

I also have to sleep sitting up while hoping no one jacks my bags…

Oh man, I’m tired. Even my cellphone game TriplePop cannot give my weary soul any rest. At least there are at LEAST 3 other dudes sharing my same miserable plight, crunching themselves sideways and over chair handrails and such.