Otsukaresamadeshita

HELLO!!!
Loyal readers, here I am writing to you live from Ogaki, Japan. My town of 150,000 has a lot of shopping malls, a lot of "snacks" (places where you pay to go sing karaoke and drink with old ladies), and a lot of Brazilians!!! The Brazilians are the good part of that statement, because they make the best dang food in this town, and they also take the heat off of me, because I'm not the only foreign looking guy around.

I always think of stuff to write about while I'm walking around town, but I forget it once I sit down to actually type, so, thus, I will just recap my final weekend for you:

Friday night, I thought about going to the neighboring city of Gifu, so I hit up a few of my homies out there. I went to Gifu and found a little punk rock/hip-hop record store called Sabotage Records, where I bought a 3000yen BREAKfAST 7", then I finally heard back from a friend who invited me to go get sushi. I met up with her and 3 other girls, but we were soon joined by another dude. The sushi was super expensive, but super good!!!!!!! I went home around 10pm, and as I was exiting Ogaki station I ran into my next door neighbor and some other friends who were waiting for someone, and he exited 10 seconds behind me. I ended up hanging out with them until 4am!!!!

The next day we were supposed to go to some posh all-you-can-eat/drink place in Nagoya, but it was on the rooftop of some building and due to the heavy rain we'd been having it was cancelled. A small group of us went anyway, AND IT DIDN'T EVEN RAIN!!!! But, since it had already been cancelled, we just ended up meeting up with my friend Adam in Nagoya and went to this place called Misfits where he works. Apparently it was a bit of an off night for the place, and there was a total dufus playing bad covers on his guitar with drum machine accompaniment, but we all had a good time. After leaving Misfits, a couple of us wandered down to Sakae, the hub of activity in Nagoya, and there we went looking for a place to settle down. Whilst waiting, we decided to be all Rocky-core and down some raw eggs, which may or may not have been a great idea. Right after we had finished doing that, we witnessed an old drunkard grab some young dufus by the shirt and start pushing him around. It was a super tame fight, and when the cops pulled up to stop it, they actually just sat in their car watching for a good minute before getting out. They let the old guy walk off and gave the young guy a stern talking-to. NICE?

We ended up getting some kebabs from a cart on the street, except they were more like falafels (there was no stick). Apparently they call them kebabs in the UK when they're like that anyway, but I digress... Adam ended up meeting up with us again sometime around this point with a friend of his and we went to check out some place that his friend recommended. There were tons of young'uns hanging about, mostly Brazilian, and this one skater fool came up to us and asked us to "go smoke the hemp" with him. I borrowed his skateboard to try and ollie, but ended up bum rushing me from behind, took his skateboard and proceeded to go full speed into a wall. NICE?

This night progressed until we ended up at a ramen shop called Coco Ichiban, where they serve ramen on a spicy scale of 1-10. My Japanese coworkers say that 3 is hot enough, my American friend from Chicago said he could handle 7, but I went for the 10 of course, DUH!!!... What a horrible decision!!! I couldn't even finish it, and I felt pretty disgusting the rest of the night, which I ended up spending napping in a Denny's for about an hour. After that, it was about 6am, at which point I was able to catch the first train of the day back to Adam's house and sleep.

The next day Adam and I explored the town, and I found a rare 7" with the only Fruity song not included on their complete discography CD, and a copy of the first Alkaline Trio LP for super cheap. Ebay, here I come!!! We hit up some other cool places, had dinner with his in laws, and I went home and slept at a reasonable hour.

Good times...? YES!

Love,
B