I Refuse to Answer that Question on the Grounds that I Don't Know the Answer.

I wish the world was flat like the old days
Then I could travel just by folding a map
No more airplanes, or speedtrains, or freeways
There'd be no distance that can hold us back.

So this is the new year…

Wow, lots to write about… too much almost… so I’ll do my best to be brief, if possible.

Last Friday I got kicked out of my dorm for the week. So I went to JJs, to practice my awesome Dance Dance Revolution skillz. Then I decided that that was a stupid way to spend the week, and went to meet Keith in Tennoji and headed to Kyushu by ferry.

As it turns out, ferry is only slightly better than the night bus. Each passenger (unless they pay a fortune for upper class), gets a sleeping area of about 3 feet by 7 feet, with a blanket and an uncomfortable pillow. This sleeping area is located in a room filled with 39 other sleeping areas, occupied by drunk people, screaming children, and very loud snorers/sneezers. Ferry food is also quite unpleasant, but it is interesting to note that in the Ferry buffet, there was raw chicken sashimi. I can’t even think of how much I’d have to be paid to eat raw chicken from a buffet, on a ferry, but it would be astronomically high. “Please! Just inject me with salmonella right now!”

After the (relatively) short 12 hour ferry ride, we arrived in Beppu, then left almost right away for our first destination, Mt. Aso. Mount Aso is a live volcano that is currently smoking from the crater. Because of 4 eruptions tens of thousands of years ago, the volcano collapsed, forming a special type of crater called a caldera, which is 18-25km across, with a 120km circumference. Not quite as impressive as Yellowstone Caldera, but still cool to see. Looking from Aso Station, you could see an almost vertical rock wall in the distance with a plateau on the top, very neato.

Anyway, we had lunch at Aso Station, then took a 40 min bus ride up the mountain. Though you can take the gondola up to the crater, we walked it. It wasn’t a bad walk, but we were hoping for more hiking trails to go on. But the crater was cool to see.

Headed back down the mountain and to our hotel, had KFC for dinner, looked on the internet for stuff to do in Fukuoka, and went to bed.

I could almost cover Fukuoka in one paragraph. It was pretty dead when we were there… coulda been because of new years though. We went to Canal City, a large mall with stores, arcade, theatre, restaurants, hotel, etc. Stores were very pricy for the most part. We saw a magician perform too, but he wasn’t very good, other than his balance, but I must say it was interesting to hear Robert Miles played on loud speakers while watching a cheesy magician in a mall in Japan. We attempted to look for a bar/club for new years, I had heard Tenjin was the happenin’ area, and assumed we wouldn’t need instructions to find the nightclub street. I was wrong : (. Tenjin was dead, and we ended up walking to Canal City by accident without finding anything decent. We had dinner, went back to the hotel to recover, got directions, and headed back out at 10 to midnight.

We found the nightclub area, it looked like a miniature Roppongi, pretty dirty, lots of foreigners, etc. The only club we found, Sam and Dave’s, was packed, charging 3000en (30 bucks) and it was well past midnight… so we gave up and went back to the hotel.

We went to the Fukuoka Castle Ruins the next day, then went to Fukuoka’s most famous temple for the new years celebrations, hoping for lots of girls and kimono, but really finding neither. It was more like Gion Matsuri, billions of people all moving in a large blob towards the temple. Not a lot to see, but the temple guards had facemasks to protect them from people throwing their go-en coins. Had Fukuoka ramen for lunch, then went back towards our hotel. At this point we had given up on Fukuoka, decided to find billiards or an arcade or something to kill time for the rest of the day, and had dinner at Kaiten (Conveyor Belt) Sushi.

The only other interesting point was we had the traditional new years breakfast at our hotel. It was not bad, mochi soup, veggies, very strong fish eggs, etc. Keith was expecting it to be a lot weirder, haha. After breakfast we left Fukuoka and took a 4hr train ride to Beppu.

Beppu started off as a bit of a drag… our hotel was ok, we had our own bathroom and separate beds, but it was pretty old, not nearly as nice as the Kumamoto one. We ventured off to look for one of Beppu’s famous onsen. The first one we passed by looked like a house, so we moved on. The second one we found after traveling through the shady area. It was in a very old Japanese style building, and was known for its sand baths, where you pay to strip naked and have attendants shovel sand on you. That part was closed, so for 100en we checked out the normal bath, and were kind of surprised. There was one small concrete tub crowded with naked guys, and a small bucket shower area. It was like my dorm, only older, dirtier, and more crowded. We decided to keep searching.

After a long walk, and us being a bit depressed after our past few days bad luck, and it raining out, we finally found a decent, modern sento. I think this was where our luck started to improve. The bath was good, had a hot, an aroma, and a cold sauna, the cold water baths, the jet baths, and the electric baths, which I don’t understand, but I suppose some people enjoy getting an electric shock while they are naked in a public bath.

We had a feast (as Keith put it) at an isakaya place for dinner. We got everything from pork skewers to fried rice and noodles to kimchi stirfry, plus large ice cream sundaes for dessert.

The final day was the best, if a little short. We rented bikes, 900en for 5 hours, with little motors on them to assist with acceleration or climbing hills. We made our way halfway across the city to Beppu’s famous Jigoku, or Buddhist Hells. Toured the Mud Hells (bubbling mud pits), Sea Hell, Mountain Hell (with a zoo), Crocodile Hell, Devil Hell, White Pond Hell, Dragon Hell, Red Hell, and Geyser Hell. Most of them were impressive, with a few duds, but cool to see. Photos on webalbum, with more to come once Keith posts his. We raced back on our bikes so we wouldn’t get charged for extra time. Ate lunch quick, went to the onsen that looked like a house for a quick shower. It was worse than the sand bath place, but at least less busy. Then we caught the bus for the ferry terminal and got on the ferry for home.

The second ferry was a lot longer because it wasn’t direct… made stops at Oita, Matsuyama, and Kobe… so 17 hours total. We met a grad student from China and talked to him for a bit, Keith managed to finish his book, Angels and Demons, I finished my Asimov book, I watched Donnie Darko and some really really bad Japanese TV (more on that later), and had a very uncomfortable sleep. Makudo pancake breakfast in Tennoji, then it was farewell to Keith and off to my dorm.

Overall, the trip was decent, the places I expected to be not so good (Mt. Aso and Beppu) turned out to be the best, while the place I thought would be exciting (Fukuoka) was a drag. But at least we had some good days in there, and ended on a high note. Thanks again Keith for coming with, otherwise I’d have been very very bored haha.

So Japanese TV – What I saw on my vacation to Kyushu.

A show in which 3 guys pretend to be corpses in a morgue. The police officers would be examining the bodies, and kind of torturing them, smacking their heads, pouring hot wax on them, sticking things up their noses, etc., to see if they would react. And when the cops laughed at the “dead” guys’ reactions, other cops would come in and give the cops a spanking with large rubber sticks. At which time the whole thing would repeat. For 30 minutes.

A competition in which the goal is to sprint and get underneath a falling ball before it reaches the ground. Imagine spending your life training for that sport :P.

On the ferry I saw a show with a topless black girl with a chest big enough to belong in Jerry Springer’s hall of fame, a guy that had burning towels placed on top of him, a dating show where the guy had to choose a girl based on video footage of their chest and stats on their body sizes, and 2 guys fingerpainting, nude, in a field, and NOT using their fingers o.O.

Ok, dream diary time, just to scare everyone off now that my post is almost over. Correction, scare everyone off that is still reading after the Japan TV section. I had a few very vivid dreams over the holiday. The first involved my friends on a roller coaster… one managed to get out of his safety device and onto the track, then was using his ninja running and jumping skills to chase the coaster car to try to get back in before it went down the hill. Only he failed, and managed to derail the coaster, and we all fell in the river below.

In the second dream I was a reporter, and the producers of the Daily Show promised an advance copy of America: The Book to the reporter who could best tell them why we must “put an end to celestial violence”. Now I don’t have any clue what this dream means, but you gotta admit, celestial violence would make a good name for a rock band.

The day before the third dream, we discussed whether there were lockers in Beppu Station. That night, I dreamt that we did find lockers, and then the next day, my dream turned out to be true. I think it was a premonition, let it be known that I am psychic.

The fourth dream was creepy… it involved: Killer bees (“No! No Bees!”), the monster from Lost (though this coulda been the same as the bees), a dead body (this definitely came from Dan Brown’s book, Angels and Demons, which I was reading before I went to bed), the evil man-eating plant thing from the safari game we played in Fukuoka, and I also remember a bag of bananas, a street vendor, something about Harry Potter, and a red high heeled shoe.

Any dream interpreters out there? I need serious help.