I Have a Dream

I Have a Dream
by: Casey Pang

and/or Wiley Birkhofer

Judge not a country by the insensitivity of its tourists


or the flow of its motorbike traffic


or the portability of it’s produce

or the advancement of its fitness technology

Judge not a country by the potability of its waterways


or the danzkerity of its potables


The content of Vietnam’s character is colored by the kingliness of it’s taxi drivers


and the dexterity of it’s shoemakers


and the precision of it’s tattoo artists


and the affordability of its frog



and the suspension of poultry


and the intrigue of it’s spa treatments.


A country’s true color shines in it’s oceans,


its mountains,


its ocean mountains,


and most of importantly, the people who so deservingly inhabit them:

I’m not sure whether our photo essay or the wise words of everyone’s favorite Kazhaki, Borat, “Wawaweewa!!! (Give me your tears gypsy…or I will take them from you)” better embodies the insanity that is Vietnam. Neither does it justice. From the moment we stepped off our plane into the 40 degree celcius, 100% humidity climate in Hanoi, we knew we were not in Gwanju anymore. Our first impression - the heat, and our second - the motorbikes, would turn out to be representative of our greater Vietnam experience. Motorbikes are everywhere. People eat, sleep, and breathe motorbikes.

Coming from a country where televisions outnumber people, it may be less impressive that motorbikes outnumber humans in Vietnam, but not if you consider that half the population farms rice and has no need for automotives. The cities are swarming with motorbikes, each more eager to sell you a ride than the next. They will not take no for answer. At the end of our Vietnamese journey in Rach Gia on the southern coast, we had a man follow us 2 miles on his motorbike despite our urging that we did not require his services. We considered paying him off to reward his silly determination, but we didn’t want to offend an unaffiliated Vietnamese man who had joined our entourage but who hadn’t yet made his purpose known. He and the motorbiker got into an argument at one point when they noticed us trying to interpret their strange behavior. When we arrived at our destination, our pedestrian follower offered us something from some tattered literature he’d been toting, and was utterly surprised when we refused. How dare we. After he'd earned our trust and respect by waiting 30 awkward, silent, confusing minutes to pitch us his product?

Most Vietnamese are trying to sell you something, but so long as this doesn’t annoy or offend you, you will appreciate that the Vietnamese people are a fiery breed (who can blame them after having been a colony of the Chinese and then French for the past 500 years. Had the US done a little research before waging our war (called "The American War" here. The war museum is called "The Museum of American War Crimes"), they may have foreseen that the Vietnamese were not going to surrender their first independence in centuries without a fight. The French literally suffered the exact same defeat as we would just years before us, IN VIETNAM! How could we not have seen the parallels? Probably for the same reason we "didn't" see the parallels between Iraq and Vietnam. Anyway, the Vietnamese are an inspiringly vital people and never unwilling to engage in a bark off with you in their beautiful, if chicken-sounding language...

Anyway, we had a great time here, and will divide our experience in half because four weeks of stories would make for an eternally long, enthralling, entertaining post. Here was our trajectory:



The North: Hanoi, Halong Bay, and Sapa

The Halong Bay tour we booked was a total scam, which is not to say we didn’t have an incredible and incredibly memorable time there.

Our tour guide was a complete pervert. He introduced himself to us by asking a girl on our tour if he could “climb her mountains”. Nick, Casey, and I broke out laughing, after taking serious offense of course, and assumed he misspoke. Mistranslations happen more often than someone accepts a motorbiker’s solicitations. Later on that day, I struck up a little conversation with Chau, our guide, and he proposed to me the following:

Chau: You like make boom boom?
Wiley: Boom boom?
Chau points to a woman trying to sell Casey and Nick something they didn’t want, winks, and claps his hands together suggestively.
"Sure. Why not?" I jest.
Chau smiles approvingly. “You take her nice dinner. Candle, opera, tablecoth. Make boom boom.”
“Sounds lovely,” I laugh.

Here is where our conversation departs from ordinary male banter into the Vietnamese unknown.

He continues, “You make boom boom. Then turn light off.”
“That's within reason,” I agree.

He then points confusingly at the woman and then me, and then does a little dance. I mistakenly think he is trying to arrange a date between us, and tell him no thank you. He insists I don’t understand. He patiently explains, “You boom boom. You no lights. Meet in bathroom. I boom boom. Like this, ok?” A lightbulb goes off; Chau hasn’t mixed his pronouns. Or has he? I ask myself the age old question: have I just been explained “the switcheroo” by our tour guide in Halong Bay, Vietnam - latitude 20, longitude 107. Is it a small world after all? Just to be sure, I ask him, “Me and her boom boom. I turn lights off. We switch places. Then you and her boom boom… without her knowing.” He claps wildly in applause. I can only imagine how many Americans he has failed to explain this to. I bring Nick and Casey over to share the achievement of our understanding, and he explains to them, to my surprise, what he actually meant. Why he couldn't have made it as clear to me, I will never know.

“Wiley and her make boom boom!” (Casey and Nick laugh appropriately). “Wiley and Chau make switchy switchy” (Casey and Nick nod in disbelief). “Then Chau and her make boom boom". Chau waits for the laughter to subside, and then looks hungrily into my eyes: "then we make boom boom."



There were no hard feelings; I let him down easy. We continued to positively reinforce his behavior, and during our farewells he even recommended that a girl from our group try “sticking a goat up her ass”. Nobody, except us, will ever know that he said what he meant and meant what he said.





Upon returning from the stunningly beautiful Halong to our headquarters in Hanoi, we took showers and were on an overnight train hours later to Sapa, a rural mountain town on the Chinese border. Word is getting out about Sapa’s mystically misty mountains, but for the most part we had the roads to ourselves. Or so we thought until me motorbiked upon a tribal H’Mong village. Instantly, we were surrounded by an army of the tribe’s most friendly and decorated women. They asked us about our basketball jerseys and offered to show us their digs. We told them that we didn’t want to inconvenience them, but they insisted on giving us a tour “free of charge”. The village consisted of one dirt path which wound through and around various rice patties, water buffalo, very modest bamboo shanties, and some seriously gorgeous greenery. We were so distracted that we didn’t notice the 20 or so tribeswomen we had accumulated over the course of our walk.



As our adventure was coming to a close, one of our guides (and subsequently all of them) began selling us H’Mong tapestries and textiles. “No thank you,” I said and looked back at Casey and Nick to warn them that they should prepare themselves for some difficult “No thank yous”. They must have foreseen the feeding frenzy because they were already walking a safe distance behind the pack, leaving Wiley to the wolves (this was generally their strategy in Vietnam). They had their bike helmets securely fastened and were fingering their keys in expecation of the impending awkward goodbye. As predicted, when we attempted to leave and thank them for their kindness, we were besieged by offers, promotions, and pleas that we buy a souvenir in exchange for our tour. Mind you these are the same unsuspecting, 4' 11" women from the photograph. Nick and I were able to escape by promising that we might come back tomorrow. Casey was not so lucky. He finally negotiated his freedom by literally swearing an oath that a double decker bus full of tourists was on its way to the village and would be arriving shortly. 15 minutes later on our ride home, we watched in horror as Casey violently crashed his motorbike. Scoreboard: H’mong – 1, Casey – 0.


Casey wrapped his ankle up in his favorite wife-beater, and gimped around the rest of the weekend with a bamboo cane, making it rain on each and every villager out of fear for their curses. Here’s some pictures:

Splinter?

H'Mong women: masters of disguise

SAPA minus Casey

"This hog gets 80 to the gallon" -Lloyd Christmas

More to come from Casey and/or Nick soon. We promise...

First off, I know that we’ve been slacking on the blog as of late. To be honest, we were pretty sure our parents were the only ones reading this thing, but after being scolded by my little sister and Schwabby for being lazy, we are committing to writing updates much more often. Maybe. We did 5 posts for our one week in Japan and this is going to be our one and only post for the 2 weeks we spent in Korea, but we hope all of our Korean readers don’t take this as disrespect. We appreciate your devotion to this blog and look forward to your continued loyalty. Anyway, we were so exhausted by the time we arrived at Czarna’s apartment from Japan that we really just wanted to spread out, sleep, eat fried chicken (or barley), and talk about the cultural things that we wanted to do without actually doing them. For those of you who don’t know who Czarna is, he is the tall white guy in most of our pictures. He is one of Wiley’s best friends from high school and teaches English at an international school in Gwangju. His apartment is located right next to the school, and within 12 hours of our arrival we had turned it into an absolute dump (in our defense it wasn't that clean when we got there)

Some images of the of the apartment after about 1 day

Gwangju is the is the fifth biggest city in Korea with a population of 1.5 million and is 4 hours south of Seoul, or at least that is what Czarna told me and I am too lazy to check any those facts. The great thing about spending a week in Gwangju is that there is no reason for any tourists to ever go there, so the sighting of a white person is an uncommon and noteworthy event for the citizens of that fair city. It was routine for children and adults alike to point at us and exclaim “Wey Gookin”, which means foreigner. This was usually accompanied by some extended stares and a fair amount of giggling. If we made any effort to say even the simplest things in Korean we were always met with surprised excitement. On one occasion, we went into a department store so Czarna could buy a belt. The Korean girls who sold him his belt were so excited that he was buying a belt from them and talking to them in broken Korean that they asked him to wait while they ran into the back. A few minutes later they came out with a pack of ramen noodles and included it for free along with his belt purchase. Another little story I forgot to tell is the time when we were walking down the street, and a Korean dressed up as a big bottle of hand lotion saw us from inside his/her store and came out and stopped us. The big bottle made us play it ro sham bo, and upon our victory, gave us a big a box of Q-tips. I'd like to explain more, but that's it. That's the end of the story. Just marinate on that for a second. Anyway, below I have listed the phrases that Czarna deemed necessary for us to learn in order to survive in Gwangju:

1. An yung haseyo-hello
2. kam sam ni da-thank you
3. Ogul cha gayo- you have a very small face
4. nu ni po yo yo- you have big eyes

Phrases 1 and 2 are pretty self explanatory. Phrases 3 and 4 are Czarna’s go to pick-up lines when it comes to the young Korean beauties. To make sense of this, it is first necessary to understand that Koreans are extremely concerned with physical appearance and equate white European features with beauty. The most popular surgery in Korea is double eye lid surgery, which makes Asian eyes look more European by making a fold in the eyelid, giving the eye a larger and rounder appearance. Apparently 50% of young women in Korea have gotten double eyelid surgery (again this is according to Czarna and again I’m too lazy to confirm it).

Eye tape to make a double eyelid if you can't afford the surgery

Another popular surgery is jaw shaving, in which the jaw is shaved down to give the face a slimmer look. Apparently, Koreans have big faces and think that skinny European faces are all the rage. Yes, this does paint a disturbing picture of the Korean image of beauty, and yes, we did try all these pick-up lines out with varying success (varying success = no success at all). Anyway, in an effort to shorten these lengthy posts and make this a more enjoyable reading experience, I will give you Just some of the highlights of our 2 weeks in Korea.

Our first cultural experience was accompanying Czarna to a free Korean pop concert in the center of the city. Korean pop music is basically American pop music from the late 90’s. Boy bands reign supreme, no one writes their own music, and every group has stupid choreographed dances to every song. It’s hilarious, gives me a headache, and the little Korean boys and girls love it. So does Czarna. At first we thought he was just blaring K-pop from his computer as a joke. Then we saw that his third most visited site was the official Korean pop site. Then we were woken up everyday by Czarna showering while listening to Korean boy bands. Then this concert happened. Its not a joke. The kid legitimately loves Korean pop music. First of all, to get into the concert the four of us had to get in a crazy mob of little kids and slowly make our way to the entrance. Not only were we the only Americans in the crowd, but we were the only people over the age of 14 and over 5’5’’ (yup, I’m tall there). The kids in the mob were packed shoulder to shoulder and the temperature inside the in the middle of the mayhem was scalding.

Crazy mob of Korean middle schoolers

At one point, a little fat kid, sweating and desperate, nestled up to Wiley and pointed into his open mouth. At first Wiley was confused, but he quickly realized the kid wanted Wiley to feed him some of the rice cakes that Wiley had in his hand. With a big smile on his face, Wiley broke off some of his rice cake and sprinkled it into the fat kid’s mouth, not unlike a mama bird feeding her baby. The kid greedily swallowed the rice cake down and pointed to his mouth for more. Wiley fed his little Korean baby until we got to the front of the line, where the old man in charge of security made everyone in the front 3 rows of the line sit down on the ground.

After the concert was over and we were waiting at the bus stop to get a ride home, Wiley's little fat friend walked by. We stopped him, made him wait while I got my camera, and took a picture of him and Wiley. He seemed a little weirded out and worried, which is no way to treat someone who fed you rice crackers to save your life. A few seconds after the kid left we realized that he was not Wiley's little fat friend at all, but actually some poor fat kid who we stopped in the middle of the street and forced to take pictures with us

Once every child (and young adult) had some how found a way to sit on the ground with thousands of kids pushing at their backs, another security would walk up and tap each person on the head, one by one. Only once your head was tapped were you allowed to run into the concert and try to find a seat. I can honestly say it was the stupidest system of crowd control I have ever seen.

This picture is of the security guards is taken from the seated position. They are yelling at the all the kids to sit down and shut up

Upon finding our seats, we sat and waited for the concert to start. The headliner for the concert, and the biggest band in Korea, was a girl band called So Nyo Shi Day, which consists of 9 girls. In his excitement, Czarna asked the little girls sitting next to us when So Nyo Shi Day was coming on, only to find out that they we were in for a 3 hour wait. Every other pop group in Korea had to come on and do one or 2 songs before the big mammas did their thing. Casey and I slept through most of the acts, but woke up in time for a few boy band gems. Finally, when So Nyo Shi Day came on, every little girl in the crowd lost their heads screaming. No one screamed louder than Czarna. He high fived every little girl within a 30 foot radius.

These little screaming girls filmed the entire concert and sang every line to every song. Czarna was a little more excited than them.

Below I have posted the most popular music video for Son Nyo Shi Day and the most popular video for Empire Boys, who were at the concert and are the most popular boy band in Korea:

If you don't believe me that Czarna is addicted to Korean pop, just know this: One night when Czarna was asleep and we were all chillin outside his room we heard him cry out in his sleep, and then mumble: uhh, mhhh, Friday, Saturday Sunday.

Our next enlightening experience in Korea came in the form of the Jin Jo Bong. A Jin Jo Bong is a basically a huge naked bath house full of Jacuzzis, saunas, steam rooms, napping rooms, massage chairs, food stands, weird hot rock rooms, a freezing room with a fake snowman, and lots and lots of naked Koreans. The men just cruise around naked for the entire time and scrub themselves clean with alarming ferocity. There are even special scrubbing gloves they put on so they can really get in the hard to reach places. If scrubbing yourself is too much work, worry not. There are old men who just wait around in the showers and will scrub your entire body, even the no no parts, for a dollar. But the weirdest to thing as far as I am concerned, is the fact that the Koreans love to just chill on benches in the locker room and eat hard boiled eggs, whilst naked. They just sit there, balls out, eating room temperature hard boiled eggs and watching TV. It’s one of the weirdest things I have ever seen. Another interesting little is fact is that on my way back to my locker to put my clothes back on after a session of Jin Jo Bonging, a little man followed along behind me and toweled some of the remaining water off my back and ass. I didn’t know what to do so just turned around and thanked him. He smiled and scurried off. Now as an American, you might think, this sounds a little homoerotic. It looks fairly homoerotic as well. But the amazing thing is, there are no gay people in Korea. Not one. There is no such thing as gay. At least Koreans don’t think so. They claim there are no gay people in the entire country and to insure that it stays that way, they make anyone who is planning to work in Korea take an AIDS test first. I know, it makes total sense. That having been said, I have never seen more men holding hands, massaging each other, or scrubbing each other’s naked bodies than in Korea. But definitely no gays. I would love to include some pictures, but we promised that we wouldn’t post anymore nudity on this here blog. And we didn’t take any pictures. I swear, we didn’t.

Our last 3 days in Korea were spent in Seoul. First, I want to extend a heartfelt thank you to Wendell and Celeste for putting us up in the beautiful and classy Marriott. The hotel was amazing and we felt completely under dressed and out of place, so you know it was good. They even provided socks, shorts, and T shirts to work out in. They didn’t, however, provide a stove top or large crock pot in our hotel room. This didn’t present any problems for Casey or me, but it put Wiley in a bit of pickle considering that he needed a way to cook the remaining 2 pounds of his raw barley. Thinking it was brown rice, Wiley had mistakenly bought a 5 Kg bag of barley from a super market in Gwangju. Not one to waste food, he had been dutifully cooking and eating as much of the plain barley as humanly possible every day in an effort to rid himself of the grainful burden. Not to be beaten by a lack of proper appliances, Wiley improvised and cooked the remainder of his barley in the coffee pot provided by the hotel. It was working pretty well until he got some of the barley stuck in the filter and almost caused and explosion.

Anyway, Seoul had a completely different vibe than Gwangju, as it is one of the biggest cities in the world. Our first night we went out with one of Casey’s friends from college, who is teaching English there. We drank a bunch of Soju, which is the foulest drink on earth, but is all the Koreans drink. It is basically an alcoholic drink made out of chemical waste. But, its costs a dollar for a bottle and we were trying to immerse ourselves in the culture. Casey ended his night throwing up. I ended my night in a ball at the bottom of my bed. Wiley watched.

Soju + Casey = above picture

The next day we planned to wake up early, go for a hike, and then meet up with Czarna at the hotel and go the imperial palace in the afternoon. We woke up to Czarna knocking on the door at 3:30pm. Casey was too hung over to move, but Wiley, Czarna and I went to the palace, which was awesome (it’s not actually called the imperial palace, but I can’t remember what it was called. Don’t judge me. Look it up). That night we awoke Casey from the dead, got fresh to death, and went out clubbing in Seoul. It was a weird night. We went to a huge club that had two levels. The top level had two dance floors; nothing weird there. The bottom level, however, made no sense. There were two sets of big amphitheater-like stairs that rose up from the floor on opposite sides of the club. The stairs faced each other and the clubbers would pack themselves shoulder to shoulder on these stairs so that they were facing all the people on the other set of stairs. They would then stay planted in their spot, and dance with their arms kind of like sea anemone. The DJ, who was stationed at the top of one of the sets of stairs, played all the famous US jams. Surprisingly, Koreans went the craziest for all the reggaetone hits. They also had a crazy choreographed dance to DJ Unk “Walk it Out”, with hand motions for when the North, South, East, and West sides were instructed to walk it out. And in case you’re wondering, Casey didn’t throw up that night.

Wow, that was not nearly as short as I had hoped. Like I said, we are going to try to post a little more frequently from here on out so the posts will be shorter. For now, good bye from Vietnam.

The Never Ending Day

From Hachiman, Nick, Casey, and I suffered/enjoyed the longest/luckiest day of our trip so far. Here goes nothing...

Saturday, APRIL 3

7AM - Wake up in Hachiman. Run 6 miles beautiful miles. Poop somewhere by a stream.

8AM - Wiley wakes everyone else up. Kim drives us 1.5 hours to the Gifu train station. From there, 2 hour train to Toyota City to watch our friend Cynthia Barboza in the Semi-Finals of a professional Japanese Volleyball league. When we arrive, we follow Cynthia's impeccable directions to the stadium. The place is swarming with people, all of them delirious with Cynthia fever. Having expected something along the lines of a small Ford Center-like facility (Stanford gym) at which we could partake in some good old-fashioned heckling with our KA brethren, we were a little overwhelmed. In summary, I was disappointed and shocked not to have been greeted by Calen in a giant Kermit the Frog helmet.


























Our Japan volleyball experience was very different from the above portraits. As it turned out, there was a slew of events happening at the Toyota City Stadium that day- high school games, college games, ribbon dancing, etc. It was at this moment in time that we realized we had no idea what team Cynthia played for, or any information, for that matter, about the match we were hoping to spectate . I'm guessing our plan was to ask the ticket vendor, who, as a citizen of Toyota City ("the Detroit of Japan"), has and will never again have any need to know English, "Hi, our names are Wiley, Nick, and Casey. We'd like to purchase three tickets to watch Cynthia Barboza play volleyball?" I know, I know- one week into the trip and we are already the savviest of travellers.

While Casey and Nick watched our luggage, I wandered to the information booth and explained to them our situation. While I am confident they understood not one word of our plight, they did nicely assign us, in a epitomically Japanese gesture of hospitality, someone to follow us around until we found what we needed. Since he had no idea, however, what it was that we needed, his only purpose ended up being explaining to each subsequent person I asked for help that he had no idea what it was we wanted and that persons X, Y, and Z didn't either. After accumulating an entire alphabet of people who couldn't help me, but were thoroughly informed on the history of my helplessness, I gave up. On our way out, we kept our eyes peeled for life-size posters of Cynthia that we could rip down and show to the ticket window.

In one last act of desperation, we half jokingly and half forlornly started yelling out Cynthia's name. In a moment of sheer luck, we found someone sitting at a promotional tent who recognized the name. Delighted and dumbfounded, we asked, "YES! Cynthia Barboza! Do you know what team she plays for!?!" She then, in perfect English, answered, "She plays for the Toray Arrows. Are you her friends? Allow me escort you to your seats." Cynthia, you are as clutch as we are undeserving of your friendship.

2PM - We are led to the Toray fan section and presented with complimentary vests and cones for amplifying our cheers. EVERYONE in the stadium is staring at us. One of our favorite games to play here in Asia is, "How far are we from the nearest gaijin (white person)?" In this circumstance, we felt very very far. To smooth things over, I used my favorite pick up line, "How much does a polar bear weigh? Enough to break the ice. Pleased to meet you... Wiley Birkhofer." This did not go over well, so we started hooting and hollering in support of the Torays which earned us a few friends. The initial hostility we perceived turned out just to have been alarm that we were cheering out of turn. Japanese fanfare (and volleyball) is the most organized thing I've ever seen. The cones we were given, for example, were not used for yelling. This was in fact frowned upon. The cones were props for an elaborate choreographed celebration the Toray fans would perform after every point. Business men, without any discernible interest in the sport of volleyball, would participate in the cheer with absolute synchronicity. There were even cheerleaders distributed throughout the bleachers to instruct and assist those who, like us, hadn't arrived early enough for the walk-through. We eventually caught on, but of course couldn't help but yell out of turn everytime Cynthia got a kill.

The interesting thing was that although the fans clearly enjoy their routine, they were also undeniably amused and intrigued by our spontaneous outbursts. Time and time again in Japan, we've wondered to ourselves if Japanese feel at all suffocated by the conservatism which dominates their existence. I know it is deeply ingrained in them to be rule-abiding, but it seems to me that all cultural differences aside, human beings have evolutionary impulses to be emotional and impulsive. Do they suppress urges to laugh hysterically, dance wildly in the privacy of their own abandoned wherehouses, or hold their girlfriends' hand in the park? Do they talk themselves to sleep when they arrive at home after a day of relative quietude? The man whose tie we removed at the rave felt unquestionably empowered, and I sensed the same yearning in the Toray volleyball fans... so I streaked at halftime.

Who knows? Maybe they're happier than I could ever know. Here is the video you've all been waiting for, video proof that their souls aren't half as tortured as I've made them out to be:




The game was a blast, as was learning the cheers. I've decided I want to be Japanese when I grow up. Halfway through the match, we noticed that every time Cynthia made a kill, everyone would chant in unison, "Cindy Cindy, Volleyball!" It turns out they were actually chanting, "Cindy Cindy, Mo Ipon! (Do it again)", but hilarious in it's own right. The Japanese struggle to pronounce soft c's and 'th' , so Cynthia has changed her name to Cindy to avoid being celebrated, "Shinshia Shinshia, Volleyball!".

6PM - From Toyota City, we took a handful of trains, planes, and automobiles to Osaka, where we waited a few delirious hours for our rave rendezvous. When the rave started at 12AM, we had been awake for 17 action packed hours. When the rave ended at 5AM, we sleptwalk to the subway, took a 2 hr train to Kyoto, and made it to bed by 10AM the following day, 27 hours after having woken up in the remote village of Hachiman. Before passing out, we swore an oath to sleep through S. Korea and wake up in Vietnam.

Our stay in Kyoto was rejuvenatingly beautiful. The ubiquity of cherry blossom trees in full bloom made navigating a nightmare, but we savored every moment of it; cherry blossom season lasts only two weeks out of the year and we happened upon it. The parks teem with Japanese teenagers who celebrate by laying out massive tarps on which to drink and be merry. In Tokyo, Rise, Czarna, and I were walking through a park and followed our ears to some commotion in the distance. Our first encounter was an young Japanese man chugging Oolong tea out of a gallon bottle to the applause of his friends. "How cute," we thought. "A picnic!". "My, their faces are sunburnt," exclaimed Rise. The tea wasn't tea, and boy was it flammable...



The bottom line: the Japanese know how to get down. And all it does is make them extremely happy and a little red-faced. The same business men who won't even acknowledge you on their way to work can often be sighted in the wee morning hours, still in their suits and ties, recalling the night's revelry with their coworkers or sleeping with their faces in a bowl of soup. We literally saw a waitress rescue a passed out man from drowning. In Japan, you never pour your own drink, so everyone's desire to be hospitable, combined with everyone else's desire to accept hospitality graciously, in addition to a scarcity of socially acceptable alternatives for releasing stress (or emotion) contribute to a culture of binge drinking. I googled it and learned that Japan is the most alcoholic country in Asia and the #1 consumer per capita of spirits in the world.

Nevertheless, we loved it here. I'll leave you with these funny pictures so that your last impression won't be my shamelessly ignorant dogmatism:

"Pirikura"

We suspect they are called pirikuras because that's how an Asian would pronounce the spanish word for movie, "pelicula". Pirikuras are high tech photo booth salons that are wildy popular with little girls and Casey. The camera automatically enlarges your eyes and whitens your face (two qualities that define attractiveness in Japan). Contact lenses and eyelid surgery (and eyelid tape if you can't afford the alternatives) exist to accomplish this same effect. It worked wonders on Nick...























More translation hilarity

The chicest Japanese products usually contain, for the same reason that white skin and round eyes are popular, English words. Below is a mock-egg cookie whose description has been seductively written in English:




























Caption (in case you can't read it):

Sable Which imagined eggs.
Very2 petit and cute confectionary.
It is surely nice!

If that isn't a haiku, I don't know what is.
















Sweet irony. Notice the unorthodox spelling of 'reading' and the creative use of a period after 'and'. Japan, we love you. Everyone else, we miss you. Scroll all the way down to see a newly uploaded fish market video if you like.


Con amor,
W