Fashion, Fish, and Faux Pas

Dear followers,

I have exciting news for us... Houghton Mifflin has offered to publish our blog so long as we don't infringe on any intellectual property of Julie and Julia! Tentative title: 524 Diseases in 365 Days.

We have been eating lots of crazy, unidentifiable food and meeting lots of people, but mostly we have just been observing the Japanese fashion sense. We have all agreed that this best describes it: Japanese dress like wizards trying to pass for muggles. They are working with all the same raw materials, but somehow manage a much sillier result. I say that with the utmost admiration.

Exhibit A:



















Exhibit B:

















Fish Market

As one of the most highly anticipated events of the trip, the Fish Market did not disappoint. The Fish Market is the largest fish market in the world. Every year, over 1, 500,000,000 (1 trillion, 500 billion) lbs of fish are sold there for a sum of over 6 billion dollars. Having been there, I am not surprised by this figure. It is a endless maze of fish vendors, each one slaughtering their still alive fish in front of you in a more gruesome way. They feed their tunas, which are as big as Nick, into huge table saws like the ones they use on cows. We saw one guy performing an abortion on a littler fish with a coat hanger in the back of his Prius. They floss the pointed end in its tail and out its eye socket until it stops wriggling.

We set our alarm for 4:30 AM in order to make it for the morning tuna auction, but since Rise and Czarna slept through theirs, we had to rush to make the first train. We threw our clothes on in the dark (this must what trendy Japanese do to achieve such oddly combined outfits), and literally sprinted to the subway. We had a number of casualties. The exhilaration of running through the empty streets made us a little over-zealous. We were so busy whooping and waking up the neighborhood, that we failed to remember left foot, then right foot, then left foot again. I don't know how models do it. Czarna twisted his ankle and fell straight on his face, and Casey tripped on a handrail trying to live up to his gymnastic Asian genome. When we got to the subway, we found out that a) there are no homeless in Japan and b) the subway doesn't open til 5. It was eerie having such a traditionally chaotic place all to ourselves. Normally, there are all sorts of people avoiding eye contact with us (the subway in Japan is so different from Argentina. In Argentina, everyone is chatting or ignoring the solicitations of gypsy kids; in Japan, everyone is quaking in their boots because of the tall white people. If only they could understand all the wildly inappropriate things we say about them.) The shyest of Asians would likely spontaenously combust if they viewed the music video we filmed in the deserted subway:















At the tuna auction, the buyers scrutinize the fish like nothing you've seen. They each have little ice picks, and they are permitted to poke and prod a little cross section the buyers have cut. I don't know anything about tuna, but even I could tell that these specimens do not end up in cans of Chicken of The Sea. The auctioneers are extremely animated, and after one spectacular performance, I started applauding uncontrollably. The entire warehouse of buyers and sellers stopped everything they were doing, and stared in awe and confusion. Eventually order was restored, and one buyer thought the whole episode was so funny that he gave Rise and me his sticky pad that he used to write down details about which tuna he wanted to bid on. We will treasure it always.





The auction floor. This was before the shit hit the fan. The one guy is poking a tuna that has piqued his interest.








TUNA AUCTION
















Inappropriate photos:

Cherry Blossoms













Sack or shaft?





















Gross pet store/prison. Inside the cages are the cutest puppies and ferrets you will ever see. We are staying in capsules smaller than these cages in Nagoya.














Karaoke advertisement.



















I LOVE TRANSLATION.


Con amor,
W

WELCOME!

Nick, Why Casey?!?

Welcome to Nick, Why(ley), and Casey’s blog for our uber posh trip to Asia. A little background: Nick and I graduated last year from Stanford, and have since been pretending we still go there. We’ve been fairly succesful, although from time to time, Elise will spot us and threaten to expose us if we don’t leave her alone. Just yesterday we bumped into each other at the gym, and without saying a word, pointed to the exit and watched as Nick and I moped home like sad puppies who know they are too old to have peed the rug.

My parents are going through similar withdrawals, although they are trying this new therapy right now called “TeVo every televised Stanford sporting event and then watch the entire thing in slow motion in hopes that the camera frame passes over Elise’s face before going to a commercial break”. Fortunately for them, what usually happens is that some perverted cameraman develops a crush on Elise by half-time, and the network starts cutting to Elise during every timeout, which needless to say delights them…such good parents.

Anyway, I thought I’d do some brief introductions for those of you don’t know everyone. I, for example, don’t know anything about this Casey character (Nick’s friend from High School) except that after graduating from Occidental, he began working the graveyard shift bottling pills in the basement of a Pharmaceutical Company (I don’t know who is farther from becoming a doctor, Nick or Casey). Casey, you are throwing your future away – have fun working as a school teacher the rest of your life.

Nick has been working in a Stanford lab with Dr. Michael Dake developing a new treatment for Multiple Sclerosis. I’ve been teaching, tutoring, surfing, and playing obscene amounts of scrabble in San Diego. The last and most revealing biographical information I will share is… what we have all packed. The three of us got together yesterday, put on the Hogwarts sorting hat, and let it decide what we would each need for the next three months. Here are the results:

Wiley [Hagrid]:



Suitcase: two pairs of socks and a pair of athletic shorts (Lulu Lemon brand). The remaining suitcase space has been reserved for food. Now before you think - “typical Wiley”, know that I have come a long way in terms of civilized eating since Nick and my study abroad adventures in Argentina. For example, if this were 3 years ago, I would right now be eating handfuls of brown rice, legumes, and rotten vegetables (all mixed together) out of a ziplock bag. Nick refused to sit with me on our train rides to volunteer at an orphanage ouside Buenos Aires because he didn’t want to be associated with this person that even the train-roaming blind, tri-legged gypsies beggars didn’t have the audacity to appraoch me. On a backpacking trip in Mendoza, my friend Mike and I met a reformed ex-convict who nicknamed me “Porrota” which translates elegantly from Spanish to “Bean”. He said that in 25 years of dealing marijuana, he had never seen such indiscriminatory eating. “Bean” from Disney’s Even Stevens, wherever you are, I miss you.

One last note on my garbage disposal of a stomach (literally): while Nick and I were in Argentina, Nick’s older sister Alicia worked at a summer camp where I had worked the summer before. When we got back to the states, she asked us if we were aware that it was considered high treason to to refer to the camp’s new high-tech compost bin as anything other than “The Wiley”? We were not aware.

Anyway, I have been adopting some technologies myself. They are: tupperware, utensils, and most revolutionarily- the separate consumption of foods that do not belong together. Currently I am grazing in the SFO International terminal on oats steeped in yogurt, banana, pasta, and raisin (no coffe grounds, tampons, etc.) out of one tupperware, and indulging in homemade chilaquiles out of a SEPARATE tupper. In all honesty, there is a stalk of celery in there too, but I simply didn’t know where else to put it (Nick, if I wake up with you in my 4’x1’ Japanese bed/capsule/pod, and you use that excuse, I will make you into sushi). Confession: I did just put a bite of chilaquiles in my mouth before having finished chewing an oat bite and they mixed together, but I swear to god I didn’t enjoy it.

Nick [Hufflepuff- through and through]





Suitcase:
-his trusty abslide
- 26 tall tees featuring various images of Albert Einstein




Why Casey?...
























If you made it this far, you deserve to hear a little bit about our actual trip. Here is the itinerary:

Japan
South Korea
Vietnam
Cambodia
Thailand
Bali
South Africa (World Cup)

I am about to board my plane (Casey and Nick will meet me tomorrow), but first I will divulge my first Asian experience. I saw Hermione on a Burberry billboard on my way to my gate, and decided to take my first photo of the trip. Since I am by myself, I employed the help of a fellow traveller, a older Japanese man, so that I could cuddle up with my fellow Gryffindor. I explained that I wanted my arm to appear to be around Hermione because I was going to photoshop in the words “Expecto I-bone-‘em”. At first, I thought he was having a hard time understanding my vision, but then I realized he was having a hard time understanding my English. I became very afraid. If I can’t explain to an Asian, whose cameras are usually their excaliburs, that I want a picture of me taken, might my inability to speak Asian be more of an issue than expected? I hope they speak Mexican somewhere we are going.
























Asian experience #2: It’s my hobby/obsession/moral-obligation to sneak up on rat tails and cut them off. If security hadn’t confiscated my scissors, I could have saved this guy from his. One time in the Stanford cafeteria, a wearer of a rat tail caught me snapping a photo, and so I lied that I liked his shirt so much that I wanted to document it. At this point, we both looked down and noticed he was wearing a frayed Church Camp shirt. When he started getting suspicious, I akwardly stammered “It’s 2:23 PM” like McLoven when he gets caught staring at the redhead’s underwear, and walked away as if nothing had happened. True story.





















WISH US LUCK EVERYONE! I miss everyone already – you know who you are.

Con amor,
Wiley