well, back into the proverbial swing of things after my impromptu 6 day vacation in fukuoka, japan on my extended visa run. so i suppose that allows time for me to finish the long-winded two part recap.
but before i begin, i think it's worth noting that my fan has a timer on it. so's i don't die of the fan death. after two hours it automatically shuts off. thank god, i'm not dead yet. if you don't know about fan death, it's a korean urban legend. wikipedia that shit.
so where did i leave off? i think i only covered the first day. yeah, i'm lame. but i was on vacation, so let's all pretend that i was consumed by uber-important site-seeing and cultural enrichment and those are the things that prevented a more timely record of all things fukuoka. day two began early again, on account of the construction immediately adjacent to the hostel. whatever, i'm cool with forced motivation. it's difficult to just lie there in bed waiting for the next hammer in the sequence of ever-increasing hammering. that's one of those small ways i like to torture myself. when the faucet's dripping and i'm trying to sleep, i could just try to tune it out, but it's so much more uncomfortable to count the seconds between drips and then immerse myself in this repetitive 2 second counting cycle. same with the hammering. i would lay there and wait for it, all the while scrambling for random tissues to stuff in my ears. and even with the tissue, i still listened through it because i knew the sound was imminent. funny how routines and patterns ultimately govern our lives, no matter how arguably minute they are.
anyway, moving on...i believe it was on the second day that i began my routine of going to starbucks early in the day to sort of jumpstart myself. reminded me of waking up every morning in europe, totally hungover and requiring espresso and red bull. could be why i'm still in credit card debt. that shit's expensive...
anyhoo, i'm reading saul bellow short stories. i'll try to make any forthcoming cheesy acts of quotation less cheesy by thoroughly disclaiming beforehand that yes, i am cheesy. there are things people say and write that move me, seemingly stoney exterior be damned...
"it might be said that all of these beautiful stories throw out at us, in burning centrifuge, the secular-religious questions: what are our days of awe? and how shall we know them?"
of course such flattery not written by mr. bellow himself, but it's always a plus when you find such nuggets as early as the introduction.
so there i was in japan, and it was nice to have such an obvious distancing, despite the geographical proximity, from the annoyances that are everyday life in korea. you could smell the difference when you stepped off the plane. it was extremely difficult to come back here on tuesday night. it's hard to explain--a lack of obvious judgement, feeling human amidst all these other humans. individuality, some semblance of counter culture. it was just good, healthy and comfortable. how to adequately describe...
events of the days. second day was just as good as the first. it was rainy pretty much the whole time (except the last day, but i was so out of sorts from my hangover that i was sort of oblivious to meteorological factors). but the rain didn't affect my mood or motivation. so friday it rained, but i think i actually preferred it to the alternative of sunshine and heat. so i went to the art museum, some japanese gardens and the ruins of a castle. the art museum was great. i think art museums are probably designed for rainy days and single people. perhaps some people are destined to be creators and others to be appreciators. i guess one couldn't exist without the other. so i am probably the latter. i create things i guess, but those things fall under the extremely stretched umbrella of an already stretched definition of creativity.
anyway, i really enjoy art, or at least i enjoy wandering around an art museum in japan. i bought some interesting paraphernalia by a japanese artist named ohtake shinro. good eats.
after that i went to a japanese garden and once again, let it be noted that i was the only person there. just me and the koi fish. that would never happen in korea, there would inevitably be old women with penciled in lips and walking sticks (no matter how flat the landscape), along with cute girls in mini skirts and stilettos. so i took lots of pictures, got rained on, and it was amazing. things in fukuoka were so green. i thought i had seen green things before, but these trees and plants put my former concept of green to shame. i took way too many pictures of foliage. after the garden, made my way to some castle ruins. they weren't kidding when they called them "ruins." really more just dilapidated walls and wet gardens. huge black crows squawking at me, again, the only other obvious moving life form in their domain. but the cemetery, the castle and the sushi restaurant (not yet talked about) were the highlights of the trip. with the castle and the cemetery there was just something so primordial about the setting. i felt like i had accidentally been granted this great gift of isolation, so it was up to me to spend it in as remote and elemental a place as possible. i was quite happy to not share the events of that morning/early afternoon with any other human beings.
so after wandering around for a while, content in my increasingly soggy clothing, i made my way back to the hostel to take a nap. i met anna, the girl in all the pictures, while checking my email. so we made plans to eat and drink a little later. those are things that are actually very nice, should company present itself. napped, met up with her to go eat a pizza and nachos at some place in the tenjin area of the city.
post pizza, decided more food and brews were in order. found ourselves at a tiny irish pub in japan, the craic and porter. bob marley (sooo irish) on the tv, rogue ale on tap, and fuller's bottles available. holy shit. the bartender was even wearing a samuel smith oatmeal stout t-shirt. that's amazing. drank some beers, ate some lasagna, inquired about where to get really drunk really quickly. the bartender was drunk and molesting anna, telling her her name meant strange things in japanese. still not sure whether that's true or not...
ultimately ended up at a bar called the happy cock. yup, happy cock. not normally the sort of place i'd go, but then again, neither is japan. and for $20 all you can drink, why the fuck not. i probably drank 20 cocktails during the course of the night, including a shit ton of vodka tonics. when we first got there though, it kind of sucked. but we'd committed our cash, so we were in it for the long haul/ met some dude named dan, also living in korea. aligned ourselves with him for the night. eventually we started dancing (ah, the beauty of alcohol...).then it actually became really fun. i'm always a fan of molesting strangers. met some italian guys, one of whom was pretty fucking hot. he was a bigger dude, but he could actually dance really well. so that element of surprise, coupled with the whole italian accent thing, bode well for him. anna and i pretty much danced with them the whole time.
oh yeah, there was a scantily clad russian looking girl too. her thong was pulled up inexplicably high and she danced awkwardly. i guess that's what passes for hot these days. next thing we know, it's 5 in the morning and we need to get back to the hostel. only thing on the agenda for saturday was to find a currency conversion place for anna.
slept in on saturday, but finally decided to leave the hostel. went to the currency exchange, tried to see transformers, but it's not out in japan. resorted to wandering around, kind of hungover. found ourselves back in the same area we'd been in the night before, so why not start the debauchery again. found a head shop, bought some jewelry, then went to this amazing little seafood restaurant/sochu bar. we decided just to try some sochu (tastes like watered down tequila). so that was sort of a waste of money, but the decor in there was so arty and reminiscent of the venice cafe in st. louis. i always really liked that place, despite how difficult it was to find every time i tried...
after that went back to a bar i'd gone to on my first night called off broadway. the owner, louis, looked like gregory hines and was so amazingly hospitable to us. drank/ate there for a while, met some germans that louis knew. then we all migrated to a place called "jackie's bar" where there was an impromptu band featuring a russian dude (replete with handlebar mustache) and some really spry older korean man. it was great fun. the cool part about that bar was that we ran into the italian dudes on the street on the way there. we were all excited to see each other again.
after jackie's we went to a new bar called "infiinty." another one of those places that i would probably never go to, but fuck it, i was in japan, so why not. reminded me a lot of pure lounge in como, back in the days of glow sticks and smoke machines, despite the fact that neither of those things were present here. there was a velvet rope/vip area that louis, because he's also a bar owner, had access to. so we sat there for a while. he bought us beers and shared his cigar with us. but the italians were also there, beckoning us to come dance with them. so we obliged. again, good times. much better dancers at this place. some breakdancer/b boy types. another long night.
next day, anna left at noon and i had some fucking killer cramps that made me sort of curl up in a ball and sweat for a good portion of the afternoon. good gad. but i did eventually venture out. went to some famous row of shops that was actually underwhelming. felt sort of crazy and sweaty for a good 4 hours. i had a vision of myself looking like rick moranis in ghostbusters when he's wandering around dazed and confused.
anyhoo, wandered back to the tenjin area, in said haze, ate some curry and ran into an awkward, uber self conscious canadian guy who liked to get a little too close to me and awkwardly put his arm around my waist. and what made it so awkward was that despite his self-consciousness, he still mustered up the balls to quite physically weird me out. i guess that's a skill. i played that for a free beer at one of the street stalls, then [also awkwardly] left the situation. always shocking to me when i run into people who are actually more socially inept than i feel most of the time. granted, i play it off alright, but the feeling's still there. and this guy couldn't play it off at all. he was just weird.
went back to the hostel and crashed. next day was my embassy day to place my korean work visa order. don't ask me why you have to do this in japan. i have no idea. made my way to the consulate (this was on monday; i was sposed to get that elusive code number on thursday). i also happened to stumble upon a.....MOTHER FUCKING GAP JAPAN!!!!!!!! i don't know that anyone can fully understand the significance of this. but i'm a big girl living in a little country (in every sense of the word). shit doesn't fit me here. but in gap japan, there was so much stuff and everything was on sale. honestly, the highlight of my day, maybe even my trip. made me feel a little more human. humans wear clothing, this store has clothes that fit me, therefore making me a human.
after gap, had another bout of cramps. some self-prescribed bedrest, then i went out to eat sushi. i went back to the cool restaurant i went to with anna before. told the waitress i didn't care what i ate, so she gave me a beautiful variety tray. it had octopus that was fucking amazing. it was so good, so tender, and yes, raw. japanese octopus: 1. korean octopus: 0. i drank a lot of beer while i ate, so i was already slightly drunk when i left. and i guess sushi doesn't make the best foundation for a hard night of drinking, not that i was even planning on that. but i went back to the irish bar because i wanted more rogue beer.
of course i expected there to be other humans there, but no dice. so i was in for some drinking and inappropriate conversation with the guy who had molested anna before who was older than my father and married, neither of which he at any point tried to downplay. creepy. i tried to leave, and then i noticed my rogue beer was refilled or there was a glass of whiskey in front of me. eventually i did escape to off broadway and the safety of louis and company. but it only stayed safe for so long.
louis and his entourage showed up a little after i got there (after already having food and drink purchased for me by a cute little japanese woman. okay, i like free. it was turning out to be a very cheap last night in japan...). at this point we started drinking champagne, then pervy older than my dad guy showed up. there were also some spanish dudes there. they didn't speak a lick of english. and of course i only remember how to say the most rudimentary phrases involving midgets and wooden legs.
when creepy older guy put his hand on my thigh, i escaped to the bathroom, where i encountered one of the spanish guys as i came out of the stall. he looked at me and said "bonita" so i responded with "guapo." and then, with the reflexes of a cat, or just an overly-sexed spanish guy in japan, he took that as his cue to shove his tongue down my throat. people casually throw that expression around, probably never having actually had a tongue shoved down their throat. but there was quite a bit of violence to this kiss. i feel bad even calling it a kiss--even a bad kiss--because there was nothing delicate or pleasant or sensual about it at all. this kiss stripped the very word kiss of any of its niceness for me for a while.
i felt doubly violated because he hadn't taken his time to wash his hands after using the urinal. GEEEROOOSSSS. i fled the scene at that point. the champagne and whatever was on that dude's tongue were combining to make me not feel so well.
ultimately, the moral that was reinforced this night, in shocking and saddening clarity, was that it's never the people that you want to hit on you who hit on you. and it's never the people whose tongues you want shoved down your throat who actually deign to shove their tongues down your throat (i'm talking to you, hot italian guy! where was your tongue?). i'm not morbidly obese. i'm not an idiot. i'm a reasonably attractive young lady. and yet, this is what i've been reduced to. narsty people in foreign bars who have no tact button. both my sisters are married to dudes who aren't douchebags. and i honestly wonder how that's even possible after the number of unfortunate episodes i've had with dudes in the past year.
my last day i went back to the embassy to retrieve the visa. went to fukuoka tower to check off some sort of touristy activity for the day. wanted to go to the zoo, but decided that having to transfer on the subway was waaaayyy too difficult for my aching body/brain to handle in the wake of the beer/whiskey/champagne/sushi/tongue night. so i went to starbucks again. met another guy there who actually didn't suck and was spewing all sorts of facts about saul bellow, faulkner, etc. you never really expect to have that sort of conversation with a guy from barbados who you meet in a starbucks in fukuoka, japan.
so that was my trip. it was great. and because the nice man from barbados talked about saul bellow, here's some more:
"when dr. braun closed his eyes, he saw, red on black, something like molecular processes--the only true heraldry of being. as later, in the close black darkness when the short day ended, he went to the dark kitchen window to have a look at stars. these things cast outward by a great begetting spasm billions of years ago."
sigh. sleepy.
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