El Luchador del Saga

Watch Out Goth Dude, There’s A Yakuza Right Behind You!

Tan: The Man With The Plan And The Winning Blackjack Hand

To Japanese Girls, Bunnies and Kitties Are Very Scary

Spider Mountain

A month or so ago Cassie and I spent a Sunday driving around a little bit north of here in the Giant Spider Mountains. I believe Mt. Tenzan is the proper, Christian name. It’s the highest mountain in Saga, and really very lovely. I took some pictures, but, it was late afternoon all-pervasive cloudy light, so nothing really but these two turned out. The one problem I had with Mt. Tenzan were all of the giant motherfucking spiders. I mean, seriously. They were really big and everywhere. I was basically crouching the entire time we were walking on a path, because where your average Japanese person can walk no problem, I will get a face full of spiders if I stand straight up. This is the extent to which giant spiders and the Japanese people have evolved to live together in harmony and pick off tall foreigners. While I have not, knock on wood really hard, as yet gotten an actual face full of spiders, Cassie has! We were walking just outside our apartment and suddenly she screamed and started clawing at her face. Apparently she just walked through a spider web, invisible and awful that they are. Truly, living in Japan is a daily, frightening struggle for survival. Or at least for not getting a face full of spiders.

Beaujolais Nouveau…jolais

That’s the end of the big pictures in this series. I’ll return to not as big, not as crappy pictures with the next post.

We went to a cool little wine bar last night called Straw. We (and by we I mean not me because I was driving) enjoyed many bottles of Beaujolais Nouveau, something that is huge in Japan for some reason. It’s the first wine of the season or something, a red wine meant to be drunk right away and a bit chilled. I can’t tell if they chill their red wine because Beaujolais Nouveau is so popular, or if they like Beaujolais Nouveau because they chill their red wine. One or the other, I’m guessing.

I Mostly Know Japan at Sunrise and Sunset

Those Children Are Usually Riding Unicyles

photo info: from the balcony outside the front door of our apartment.

I am embiggening the photos for a couple of days! There’s just a lot of hard to see detail in this and others, and my camera is capable of blowing your face off (proverbially) with even larger resolutions. So be happy this is as resolute as I made it.

207

These are from the main road in Shiroishi, the 207. Really, the 207 is one of the few roads that look like roads as we know them. Most of the other roads in Shiroishi aren’t, like, you know demarcated down the middle or even wide enough for two cars. Having said that, driving on the left is becoming more and more natural to me, and I can’t quite fathom doing it on the right now. And flying down those narrow little rice paddy lined roads doesn’t seem nearly as dangerous as it did when I first got a car (although it is probably actually plenty dangerous).

I went briefly to an elementary school festival today, and I’m going to another one soon. As soon as I arrived at the first one the secretary leaped out me seemingly from nowhere and procured a name badge and a lunch ticket. What have I gotten myself into?, I asked myself, having planned to only stay for an hour or so. She promptly led me to some special teacher lunchroom or something and sat me down at a table of 6 or 7 old people having tea. Then she brought me some water and left. I still have no idea who those people were, but they shortly left and I wandered around the school and made sure I was noticed by a few teachers before sneaking out the side door. I hope I haven’t commited a major faux pas, but…guh. I don’t really like elementary school children and I don’t want to spend my Sunday being festive with them.

Sometimes The Mountains Look Nice In This Light

I sent in my ballot on election day. It didn’t count, because that’s the day it was supposed to arrive. Well, fuck you Minnesota, for that and for electing Tim Pawlenty again. But at least, you know, Republicans no longer have both hands around America’s neck.

Gukje Market, Where I Bought A Nice Wallet For 10,000 Won

These are the rest of the pictures from Korea. They were taken in the Gukje Market, which I believe is how it’s spelled, and which I believe means international. There was a lot of stupid, cheap crap in this market. I bought many presents there! Later that night we went to a bar (Bar Bizbaz) on the outskirts of the market where I somewhat drunkenly tried to learn Korean from one of the many attractive bartendresses. It was fun! But Korean beer is possibly the worst beer I have ever had in my entire past, present, and future life. It didn’t taste bad really, it was just an awful excuse for beer, all fizzy and spritey. And 4.5% to boot!

Good Korea

Surprise! We went to Korea! The good one, not the bad one. Cassie’s visa was about to expire, so we took a boat across the pond to Busan. It was, um, okay? I guess? Cassie got another visa to last her until Christmas! Thank god. These pictures, however, do an extremely poor job at portraying the ridiculous, absolutely silly topography of the city (so so so many stairs), the post-communist (or something) decrepitness (the couches photo just touches upon it), and the…the…funny little buildings and trash everywhere and Korean BBQs with aged-blue signs and PC Shops blue tinted with blue lights from the future full of people playing WoW or Counterstrike or whatever the kids’re playing these days right across the street from some granny selling, you know, fuckin alive chickens or something.

Neither of us are crazy about Busan. It was a relief, for a couple reasons, to finally come back to Japan after a whopping 18 hours or whatever in Korea. But, you know, Seoul is probably nice.

Hirohashi Apaato

First off: I am not famous enough. Someone, probably Zachary, needs to tell me how to make me famous via my excellent photo blog. I have a suspicion that my beautiful prose, and by association my breathtaking photographs, are not being relayed to the internet public nearly well enough. Do a search. On Google. Why the f-word don’t my thought-provoking monologues show up? What is going on? Someone needs to solve this mystery. I will pay you viz. virtual bills of exchange, payable by some future famous me.

Second: These are photographs from around my apartment complex, known unofficially throughout the tri-district area as “Hirohashi Apaato” because of the apparently famous person who owns it. It’s proper name is Sancopo, I think. They’ve just harvested the rice field across the street. It’s kind of sad. One of the first things I used to do every morning was open the window over the sink to look at the rice fields and the mountains and stuff, but now it’s gone! Also it’s quite a bit colder.