The Reunion

Well, I've put this off long enough, but time has finally come for me to buckle down and write about the Japan reunion between 3 of the greatest minds of this generation. Well, more like the greatest mind of this generation meeting with 2 other folks of little importance, but sometimes it gets lonely at the top, so I give a bit of undeserved credit to the other two. I doubt they'll mind.

Way, way back, ohhhhhhhhhh so long ago, in December I began my trip to Japan. My flight left from Incheon airport at 9:15am on a Sunday morning, so I had to get up bright and early to make it there. Now, I'm no 3 or so hours away like I was last year, but it still takes some time to get there. Getting to the airport was the easy part, everything was were it got sticky. Get up, eat, shower, walk ten minutes to the airport bus stop, wait for 5 minutes, get on bus, ride bus for an hour to the airport. Done. Everything according to plan (so far). So now I'm at the airport with 1 hour and 45 minutes to check in, buy my reentry stamp, go through security and find my plane. Plenty of time, given how quickly I normally get through Incheon. Or so I thought until I got to the airline check in counter and saw the line. To this day I still don't understand why it was so busy on a Sunday morning. Yeah, Christmas was on Friday, but Koreans all have to go back to work on Monday and they don't have any days off till New Years, which was Friday. I started to get nervous as I watched the line move ever so slowly. Tick, tick tick. 40 or so minutes had slipped by when I was informed that they were taking the last call for my plane. I was only halfway through the line, so luckily I was able to jump to the front and get through. Now with around 45min-1hr before my plane takes off, I've still got to exchange money and buy my reentry permit. Screw exchanging money in Korea, I'll just have to deal with being unable to close my wallet cuz its so full of 10,000 won bills (still the highest bill in circulation most of the time). How much did I take out? 700,000 won. Yeah, that's gonna be a fat wallet. Anyways, from there I moved to the immigration office and naturally there were lots of people. 45 or so ahead of me in line, to be exact. Now I'm sweating, cuz I know just how slow these things can be. Eventually I got through and was off to the security check. Time till flight leaves: 25 minutes. Yeah, cutting it close. While in line, to try and ease my fear and mounting paranoia about missing the flight, I texted Jenna a couple of times, as she was also somewhere in the airport on her way to Vietnam. Course, I doubt they alleviated my fears, as most of the messages consisted of "AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH, only 20 minutes till take-off! What do I do?"

However, I did get through in time. Just in time for last call in fact (15 minutes to spare before take-off). Sure, I ran all the way through the terminals, but the terror on the unsuspecting Koreans faces as a giant (don't forget beautiful) white man came bounding towards them was so worth it. The plane ride was a quick hour and 30 minutes, but I wasn't done with the drama just yet. This time it was during the immigration paperwork stuff. Employee: "Where is your hotel?" Me: "I don't have a hotel, I'm staying with a friend." Employee: "What is his address?" Me: "I don't know." E: "...Well, what is his phone number?" M: "I don't know" E: "...... (cue massive panic attack)" As I clearly appeared to be a slimy foreigner of ill repute, having no way to track me, via address or phone number, was a major problem. Several other people were called into the mess and they also promptly had a panic attack. Eventually one women ran away with my immigration forms, not to return for another 20 minutes. Presumably she was furiously looking for a Collin Stecker who lives in Ogaki. Eventually, they let me through. I didn't pay enough attention to see if I had a government agent tailing me the entire time I was in Japan, but there probably was one. Frankly, I feel kinda honored. By the time I actually got to the baggage claim area, the machine had been turned off, probably for some time, and my bag was sitting on the ground next to it. Good thing I wasn't in any rush.

Since I wasn't meeting Collin for several hours, I got to Nagoya station and waited for him. Good thing too cuz it took me about an hour just to find where we were going to meet. Allow me to explain. My directions were to find the Sakuradori side of the station and the gaudy gold clock housed within. When I arrived at the station, I was side A (I don't remember the name, sorry). Naturally, as train stations are roughly square shape with 4 sides, and two of those "sides" are occupied by the track, then naturally the other side opposite side A would be the Sakuradori side, or so I assumed. Boy was I surprised to find out that the side opposite Side A was some new Side B instead of the Sakuradori side. Now I'm just confused, angry, and tired. How to solve this pickle? The only way I knew how: walk around the entire outside premises of the station until I found the proper area. As the station is massive, that took near a half an hour. Where was the elusive Sakuradori side? Right next to side A, maybe 100 feet to the right. I'd explain to them that 100 feet does not a different side make, but I already know they don't speak the English so good.

That done it was time for lunch and some reading to pass the time. As a brief aside on the book I was engaged in at the time, Holden Caulfield is an immense ass hat and I hate him more than any other literature character ever, save maybe Edna from "The Awakening". God that felt good to say. Yes, I was reading "Catcher in the Rye" for the first time then and I was tempted to put down the book in anger over his general asshattery EVERY SINGLE PAGE. That's all that needs to be said on that. Early in the afternoon I met up with Collin and we decided just to head back to his apartment as I had already expended considerable energy being worried, stressed, and angry. Back at Collin's we did a whole lotta nothing (which was the major theme of the trip, really). We ate a bunch. I read some more of "Catcher in the Rye" before I got too angry and put it down. We watched alot of episodes of "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" and "Californication", which are guaranteed good times. We went to bed. Not a bad day really. It turned out pretty good.

That theme of nothing held true especially for Monday, as Collin had to work, so I was left alone in the house. What did I do? I got up (late), showered, ate and played Pokemon on my DS. Bam, its now 4:20pm. Why did I just sit on my ass you say? Several reasons. 1. I've already been to Ogaki, so there's little for me to see and do if I wander out exploring. Plus its December, so its not that cozy to be outside for long periods of time. 2. Ogaki isn't close enough to some place worth visiting that I could get to and back by 4:20pm. 3. Collin's apartment is unheated. Yes, that's right, it has no central heating. What does that have to do with anything? Well, somewhere between wearing several layers at all times, constantly staying within arms distance of the space heaters, and sleeping with my coat, hat and gloves on, I slipped into a mini hibernation of sorts. Like a bear during winter, I had little desire or drive to expend energy on anything besides eating and keeping myself alive till spring. Once Collin returned home, I was roused from lethargy by the prospect of wonderful Indian food at Masala Master. I can now say that outside of maybe Maharani in Madison, this small restaurant in a small dink Japanese town is the best Indian food I've ever had. After dinner we enjoyed several more episodes of "Californication". End result: another good day.

Tuesday finally saw me leave the not-so toast confines of Collin’s apartment, as we, along with one of his English teacher friends, headed off to Kyoto to visit some temples. We boarded a train (gotta love the convenience of being able to take a train to anywhere) and were standing in Kyoto station inside of 2 hours. Nice and prompt. Too bad the inter city bus we caught from Kyoto station was anything but. I kid you not, the bus would stop every 50 feet or so. There must have been damn near 50 stops by the time we got off over an hour later. I’m not entirely convinced it would have been slower just to walk the damn thing. At least we met some other friendly travelers from Canada on the bus. We all exchanged many a laugh about how much nicer winter in Japan is as opposed to home (it was 40 something degrees with no snow on Dec 29th) and then moved on our way.

The first stop was the Kiyomizudera Temple. The temple offered a lovely view overlooking Kyoto. Not too much to say about it that couldn’t be said about a million times better by the pictures I took there. The temple was gorgeous. The surrounding woods and mountains were awesome. There were a million people there from every corner of the globe. I couldn’t help finding the Koreans in the crowd and then not so subtly pointing them out to the rest of the group (and I may have literally pointed at them). How do you like it Koreans? Kind of annoying when people spend all of their energy staring at you or observing you like you were some sort of animal. After wandering around for a bit and watching some people nearly fall into the pond while trying to catch water from a little waterfall (see pic 33), we headed back down the hill. But not before we tasted some delicious snacks. Green tea ice cream and green tea cream puffs? Yes please. Don’t bother asking for a Blue Moon ice cream or anything fancy like that. Choices were vanilla, green tea, black sesame, and maybe chocolate. I was certainly shocked to see cream puffs in Japan, but that didn’t keep me from eating it. The cream puffs were messy and spilled all over, so naturally considerable innuendos pertaining to male ejaculate were made. We are only human.

From there, we moved on the Ryozen Kwanon, a monument to the fallen soldiers of WWII. Unlike the temple, this place was empty. Not sure why, really. How does a huge 40 ft tall or so Buddhist deity, massive 20 feet long footprints of the Buddha (now I understand the inferiority complex everybody else gets around me and my shoes…..sorry), and several Buddhist alters not draw in the crowds? Maybe I thought it was so cool cuz it was completely empty and thus quiet and peaceful. Hmmm.
From there, we moved across the parking lot to Kirodiji Temple to take in a lot of pretty. Pretty ponds, pretty traditional houses, pretty gardens, pretty rock gardens (that looked suspiciously like breasts), and pretty trees. Again, see the pics, as my words can’t really do it justice. My favorite part: the trees. Especially the bamboo. Man, I really like trees. Must be because I see all of….zero here in Seoul. Also because lots of trees usually means not lots of people, which is never a bad thing.

The highlight of the entire day, however, came unexpectedly at lunch. We sat down at some random ma and pa restaurant for some food when we noticed the husband reading a newspaper near us. At least that’s what we thought it was till he turned the page and there was a half page picture of a topless woman. Understandably we were taken aback. Here he was, wife 5 feet away cooking the meals, customers 2 feet away, making no attempt to hide or conceal his porn. Good sirs and madams, we have found my hero. How did the wife take the whole thing? Well, when she finished the meals she sat down right next to him and casually moved the porn he had set down, not even breaking her rhythm a little because of the explicit material. Let that be a lesson to everyone out there….porn brings people together, perhaps literally.

Ready to do some heavy thinking as to what exactly we just witnessed in the restaurant, we headed towards the Philosopher’s Path, a famous pathway that leads between several notable temples where presumably the monks spent their days wandering and thinking up great things. Nice quiet area where we discussed how cool it would be to live in that neighborhood on a FREAKIN’ UNESCO World Heritage Site. Also there were lots of cats, which was wonderful, and they didn’t run away if you tried to come near them and pet them, unlike in Korea (they aren’t so good with animals here….).

Leaving the Path we were discussing the inherent goodness of Wisconsin and Wisconsin cheese products, apparently quite loudly, when several white folk walking ahead of us turned around and said, “Did you guys say ‘Wisconsin cheese? Cuz we’re from Wis-can-sin too”. Turns out the guy was from Appleton and his girlfriend, who was visiting, was from Milwaukee. We chatted for a bit on our way back to the station while crammed into the city bus (well, we weren’t crammed in as nobody wanted to get within 10 feet out of fear of catching Anglo-Saxon-it is). In the interest of being friendly and polite, I neglected to mention I hated the guy’s guts for being from THE shithole on Earth that is Appleton. At least he wasn’t from Fond Du Lac. That would have been pretty terrible. Once back at Kyoto Station, we grabbed some ramen and tried not to cringe every time the waitress spoke (her voice was so loud and high pitched and squealy that I blacked out every time she spoke). Finally, we wandered around in amazement at the crazy ass architecture of the mall/train station. Seriously, it is a testament to the architect’s creativity that I can’t actually, in words, explain what the building looked like. It was cool (see pics).

Thus ends part 1. I could have continued the whole thing in one, but for your sake, I’ll break it up into 2 parts.

Pictures: see Facebook Photo album “Collin, Maria and Wallin….um…sit around in Japan”

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