There was one redeeming quality to this class: the professor. There is no way for me to accurately portray this guy to get the full understanding necessary, but I’ll give it my best shot. He had an unkempt mop of black hair sprinkled with grey, shooting off in several directions. His teeth took poor Japanese hygiene to a new level, dark brown and rotting. His suit, sweater and jacket three piece was each a different tone of grey, and halfway tucked in. His glasses were always tilting down on one side. One of his brown boots was untied. But the kicker was his voice. Honestly he probably spoke better English than any Japanese person I have yet to encounter, but that just made it worse. He had a spitting lisp that wouldn’t quit, peppered each sentence with at least 10 “emms…ehhhs…ahhmmms...” and other dragged out single syllable pronunciations of consonant sounds that served no purpose other than to accentuate his nerdiness. And the tone of the voice was the quintessential high pitch nerd volume, only with an Asian affectation. Pure entertainment.
After the movie the university was having a rice pounding ceremony. I sat across from a girl who looked like she had just walked out of a poor Kyoto countryside village 100 years ago. Bowl cut, dirty face, the works. Anyways I could feel the excitement eminating from her as she waited for the instructions to be explained before we could start. At the end of the instructions she couldn’t contain herself, rocking back and forth in her seat while slapping her hands in a applause like a seal. It was amazing. When the speaker asked who wanted to be first her hand shot in the air faster than you can say “unagi roll.” After a few seconds of passing without the speaker seeing her (even though she was the only one with her hand raised) the girl took matters, and mallats, into her own hands. She got up, walked straight to the rice pounding hammer and went to work on this thing like her entire caste depended on it. It truly was a sight to behold. Her enthusiasm never wavered, and when it came time to roll the pounded rice, guess who was first in line. One of the highlights of my night came later when we played an ice breaker game where you had to fill out a bingo card with names and she approached me to ask for my name. She must have seen how much I enjoyed her display, or maybe she just noticed heard me screaming in laughter when she swung the mallat or saw me point at her everytime it was asked who wants another turn. Either way, though the conversation lasted only through greetings and pleasantries even 15 seconds with this girl was enough. I usually am never at a loss for words, but it was like meeting my childhood idol. Honestly I am probably better off not being able to get more of the conversation out of her, because she definitely struck me as the type of girl who would kill anything that stood between her and rice pounding.
Apparently we were guests of honor at this even, because before dinner we all had to get on the mic and introduce ourselves. I thanked them for inviting me to their pounding ceremony and enjoyed glasses upon glasses of the free beer and sake at my disposal. Eight beers and four glasses of sake later, I was toasted, much to Takagi’s chagrin. As they announced the names for Bingo later, I could barely contain myself. We took turns getting as absolutely ridiculous with our cheers for the winners of bingo as we could, while being the only ones to help ourselves to more beer and sake. After bingo ended one of the coordinators of the event said some incomprehensible Japanese to me and thrust the microphone to my face. Apparently he was asking if I enjoyed myself, but because I was drunk and because I had no idea what the hell he was saying to me, the best response I could muster up was to yell, “BINGO!” into the microphone. I hate myself.
After that we really had no choice but to go out since we were drunk already anyways. Even still, that didn’t stop me from spending every single dollar I had on Long Islands. It was a Monday night so no one was out, but I fell in love with a bar called Dylan that played exclusively (you guessed it) Bob Dylan tunes. They need to put one of these next to my house immediately, I am convinced its heaven on earth. Apparently I am the only who feels this way because the bar was empty and our group wanted to move on. We headed to another bar, the Pig Whistler, which was pretty cool. No extremely intoxicated, I spent the majority of the night telling AP (who is Mexican) some convoluted bullshit about how why I hate minorities (especially Mexicans) that complain about not being given equal opportunity in America, the land of opportunity, and would rather spend their time selling drugs and punching my face than bettering their lives and making the most of the opportunity they were given thanks to their immigrant parents struggles. Trust me I don’t even believe my own bullshit.
Afterwards I turned my hateful drunk speech toward the one girl on the trip, we will call her Martina Navratilova, who has been nothing but overly nice to me since I got here. For a variety of reasons, I began making lesbian or man related jokes to her just shortly after we got here. She constantly laughs them off, which only encourages me more to explore the breaking point. Even last night after checking on me because I was visibly disgustingly and abhorrently drunk I couldn’t contain myself from continuing to explore exactly where the line was. I thanked her for being such a mom to me this trip, but told her it made me uncomfortable because I was fairly certain she had a bigger dick than me. When she later brought up her travels to Australia, I asked her if it was because they have good sex-change specialists there. I gotta hand it to her though, she smiled it off and jokingly said I should watch myself because she could kick my ass. I shut up because she was right. I owed Bleedy a drink from the last time we went out so I went over and told her to order us a couple drinks, the only stipulation being no shots and no vodka. What does she order? Shots of potato vodka. I don’t know if you have ever tasted potato vodka, but it tastes like regular vodka, only if that vodka was used to bidet-style clean the ass of an Irishman, then served. I chased it with an entire coke.
Though most of us were blackout and Jason Cope spent the entire next day throwing up around Kyoto, Brett wins the award for most shameful blackout. And it really is a double victory because the night before he got blackout by himself in the hostel thanks to a bottle of whisky, and threatened to fight everyone including the stranger in our room who he had these kind words for: “I am gonna fucking fight that stupid Jew (we have no idea if he was actually a Jew)” and after we told him to go to bed “I can’t go to bed with that mustached dude staring at me.” Now, the dude did have a disgusting mustache but never even glanced towards Brett. Finally Brett cussed out 7-11 for their “smelly pastries” and went to bed. On this night, after leaving the bar Brett threw a bicycle on the ground, knocked over a parked motorcycle and kept almost wiping a booger on our taxi driver. Thank you Brett Lyall.
Japanese Cultural Aspect that I Have Either Ignorantly, Willfully or Both Disrespected: SARS Masks. I don’t get it. Everyone here wears them. SARS has passed and at the moment there is no bird initiated fatal disease like West Nile or Bird Flu that is stirring the world into an overhyped dramatic frenzy. Apparently they don’t want to get sick, which I find ironic when taken into account the poor hygiene and nicotine addiction the entire country seems to think is not at all unhealthy. It honestly freaks me out when I see people with them, like they know some airborne disease is floating in the area waiting to take down anyone foolish not to cover their face with a think cotton mask, or that I am some disease carrying impure American. The whole thing just makes me want to cough in their general direction when I see people wearing them.
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