Speech went off without a hitch, midterm test was like a summer breeze off Mount Hakodate, and my trip to Sapporo was an unmeasurable success despite some faulty travel planning. My initial plan was to stick it to the Man and try to ride the train for free using my expired Tohoku rail pass. Unfortunately, the good men at Sapporo Station actually check dubious passes flashed at them by disembarking gaijin youngsters, and as soon as the attendent took my pass for a second look, i knew that all was lost. He gave it to his superior, who gazed over it while making discomforted faces, and ultimately tried to explain to me a number of things wrong with using said pass:
1. It covered the Tohoku area, which is not Hokkaido. Wrong island.
2. It was about one week expired.
3. There was pretty much no sensible way i could've been confused enough to think it was usable.
I desperately came up with a dumb story about how i mixed up the Japanese year 17 with the date, which was July 2nd, but he didn't buy it. Neither did the English-speaking staff who was sent for to aid in the appropriation of my money. She was quite pushy and told me repeatedly to "pay now," pointing to the paper upon which was written the exorbitant sum of 8800 yen. I had no choice but to pay, giving them all sour looks but secretly thanking the god of business prosperity, Ebisu-sama, for saving me from a night in jail. I mean, i suppose it was slightly criminal, but since it worked before in the boons of Tohoku, where i used that limited pass time and time again even though it should've been used up, i thought it would work here too, in the sprawling metropolis of Sapporo. Think again, bandit! A lesson for anyone looking to cheat the Japanese Railways company--they will eventually catch you and make you pay the proper fare for a one-way ticket, and send you off feeling ashamed and dishonored, which in Japan is worse than paying 8800 yen.
The purpose of the trip was to visit Mike Donohue, a jolly good friend from Duke who is currently engrossed in planning his ambitious master's project concerning agricultural tourism in Hokkaido, apparently a booming financial frontier. He currently resides with his lovely and animated girlfriend Tomoko, who is a woman of many faces, literally. Well, she only has one face, but she manages to contort it into a variety of expressions, all perfectly fitting for the situation at hand. The time spent with them was nonstop fun. We went to the beach and played soccer and volleyball and a sandcastle game with Tomoko's friends, we went to the Sapporo Bier Garten and ate off a grill and drank ridiculously large glasses of beer, we ate at an eel restaurant that served the eel's heart in a salty soup, Mike and I did a two-man karaoke session that was more fun than most four-man sessions i've had, we had a scallop eating fest with delivered microbrew beer at their apartment with friends, but the most memorable moments were spent playing the New Mario Brothers on DS while Mike played Warcraft as sumo blasted on his tv. Man can those Mongolian guys sumo!
I am back in Hakodate now and classes have begun again. We "learned" about how a law gets made in Japan and the structure of the Japanese government today. I put that in quotes because i must have blacked out five times during class from a combination of sheer boredom, complete lack of understanding, and the sheer number of long vocabulary words. I mean, i can't even explain that stuff in English, about my own country! Semester two, here i come!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
Anyone can explain how laws are made here, you just gotta know monkey sign language. Banana-banana-clenched fist-somersault = new law. The system works!
guess you learned a lesson or two. cant mess with the japanese authorities. good try, anyway. sounds like a blast being with mike and his girlfriend, except for the animal eating part, which you dined on with mucho gusto. good luck in your new sememster.
i wouldn't go as far as much gusto, but i did choke it down with a disturbed face. full of vitamin e, or so i'm told. but i suppose human flesh is also high in nutrients...
as for monkey sign language, i never learned the language of the Japanese macaque, which is the standard monkey sign language of the Japanese Railways Authority. i did attempt a few banana-clenched fists, and was just about to leap into my somersault when i was apprehended by some rail police and taken into dark quarters, where i was beaten with an enormous cedar chopstick until i licked the sea urchin sashimi off the officers' boots. they didn't even give me any soy sauce. it was then that i realized that i must have expressed something awfully offensive in Japanese macaque sign language without actually knowing it, when all i was trying to say was that i couldn't read my own rail pass.
Post a Comment