COMING SOON HOUSE ADVERTISING ads_leader
Fashion Parade
Only Yu (third from left) shows her heritage by doing the peace signI wake up the morning of Day 2 refreshed after an amazing first day and a good night of sleep. Pulling on some fresh clothes, showering, shaving and then walking into the kitchen to pancakes and bacon, I felt like I could take on the world…if the world embodied itself as smaller than my skinny 5’7” frame.
After breakfast (where the highlight was watching Shin construct a pancake sandwich), the fair weather called for a trip to the downtown. Walking from Ted’s house, we ohhed and ahhhed at the great view of Calgary’s skyline and started walking. Naturally, I shorten my strides to match Chiaki’s (she barely clears 5’0” when standing on a 5 foot chair) and we start talking about nonsensical things to feel each other out. Remember, I barely know this girl as we’ve only met for about 5 hours in Japan (during which we were both hammered out of our minds) and maybe 10 hours the night before (during which I was hammered for 5 and she was jet lagged for all ten), so I had to pass the “I don’t really know you but…let’s be Facebook friends!” stage and move to the “Let’s sort of be
friends-I’ll be in your Myspace top eight!” stage.
I find out a bunch of stuff about her, her hometown, her family, etc. When she’s talking about her father’s job, she suddenly lets out a tiny squeak, I turn towards her and she’s fucking horizontal in the air, legs flapping, toy camera floating in the air. Thinking this is some sort of weird Japanese hipster mating dance, I take it all in, realize she actually slipped on some ice, reach out to grab her…
…and watch her head piledrive into a combination of pavement and ice.
I’ve seen people slip and fall, hell, I’ve experienced it with 3 concussions under my belt. But I’ve never seen anyone get their head smoked so hard. The closest thing I’ve seen was in elementrary school when a huge black/Hispanic/Native kid named Ray who had beef with this kid Emilio because Emilio showed him up in class (if you haven’t guessed, Ray was big and strong, but dumb). During recess, Emilio went down the slide, and as he shot out of the end, Ray decked him in the face. Emilio flew back up the slide a good halfway, then slowly slid back
Walking to Chinatown
Asians leave Asia to go to an imitation of Asia down, completely knocked the fuck out, nose crushed, blood spurting everywhere. This was what I was remembering as I saw Chiaki’s head slam into the pavement. Her hood and huge hat obstructed her face, so I couldn’t tell if she died with her eyes closed or open. I was completely freaked. Was Chiaki’s death a sign from God that I would be single and lonesome forever? Did it mean I was destined to a life of solitude? Was it a sign to stop going after her?
But luckily I didn’t need to bust out my English minor honed analytical mind because she, like all humans who don’t make the height requirements for roller coasters (namely, children), she bounced back up with a smile and continued to chatter like nothing happened.
I breathed a sigh of relief. Chiaki being alive was integral in my grand scheme of making her my girlfriend.
From there we were accident free as we made our way to Calgary’s Chinatown. I’ve been to quite a few Chinatowns, but this place was the cleanest Chinatown I had ever seen. It was even cleaner than Fifth Avenue after a rainstorm. None of the
Bubble tea (aww cute!)
You gave us opium, we're conquering you with this! barf-inducing, greasy, rotting smells one associates with Chinatowns worldwide, but just pure, clean Midwest air.
We made our way to some Chinese restaurant and ate while the Japanese contingency flipped out at the cheap prices. I was flipping out because this was the most expensive Chinese food I had ever bought. Fucking $6.00 for pork fried rice? That rice better have been cooked in Holy Water. I couldn’t believe these J-Poppers were flipping. I wonder what they would do if I showed them $3 lunches in New York. The food was worth the money though as it was pretty good.
Then, seeing as we were a huge Asian group in Chinatown, we of course had to experience the bane of Asian-American culture, bubble tea. For those not informed of what bubble tea is, stay uninformed, as it is an edible drink that looks like rabbit shit drowning at your local Starbucks. They try to hide the ugliness by putting cute uniforms on the workers who put your drink in cute pink cups adorned with cute pink pups topped off with cute pink straws but when it hits your cute pink lips, it tastes like cute pink shit. However,
all your white friends invariably love it but they can’t drink it unless they’re in the company of their “Asian friend”, so they constantly drag you to it under the pretense of “visiting Chinatown”. It looks heinous, the prices they charge look heinous, the people who drink it look even more heinous (think Anime freaks, pedophiles, mass murders) but its super addictive so when someone says, “Let’s drink bubble tea!” you respond with “Ok, just this once!” instead of, “I’m actually trying to quit.”
Of course, this was their first time experiencing this so they loved it. For the first time since we meet them, this group of chatterbox Asians were completely silent as they sucked, chewed and gulped down (get your mind out of the gutter) this concoction. Slowly sipping my drink, I basked in the silence, listening to the birds chirp and the wind whistling through the willows (ok, I was in downtown Calgary, but if you want to experience 6 J-Poppers, get 12 6-year old children and tell them whoever screams the loudest gets a lifetime supply of candy). Then, when the last sip was slurped off, it sounded like a bomb fucking exploded in my
tranquil state of peace. Roughly translated into English this is what it sounded like:
“ROFLOLOMG…OMGOMGOMGOMGOMG…Cute! OMG nice! OMG cute! OMG pretty! OMFG! LOL THX TTYL BYE!”
I was ready to deck them like Ray did to Emilio back in ’94, but I took a look at Chiaki to calm down. My father told me the way Japanese talk was one of the reasons he left Japan and though we disagree on a lot of things, I don’t fault him for that.
After I got my blood pressure down (and my eardrums healed), I drank every last drop of my bubble tea and then added it to the ever-growing list of bad habits I should quit but never will (between masturbation and racial jokes).
After the pitfall of drinking bubble tea, I didn’t think things would get worse, but being an all-Asian group (Teddy is one by default since he can speak/write/read better Japanese than me), we were bound to live out the stereotypes. So what do Asians do after bubble tea…?
SHOPPING!
I, of course, being a heterosexual male, bought nothing. And they, being cheap Japanese bastards, bought nothing. In what has
Escalade
Random escalade on the street. FRESH! to be one of the most annoying cultural tendencies ever, Japanese love to window shop. In fact, when I was an English teacher in J-Land, whenever I met a new student and asked the obligatory “And what is your hobby?”, 9 out of 10 times, I would receive “I rike windo shyoppingu!” and I would try not to shake my head in disgust. First off, if window shopping is your
hobby you need to either (1) rethink your life, (2) get paid or (3) get laid. Secondly, how the fuck is window shopping fun? I could stare at $300 hats all day but the price won’t drop, I’ll just be depressed I’m not rich and it doesn’t put food on the table nor smarts in my head nor pussy in the bed. Then again, I’m wildly hypocritical because when we later passed an Escalade parked on the street, I couldn’t help staring and wishing it was mine.
We looked around the giant mall, ohhed and ahhed over expensive clothes we could never buy, checked out shoes (there being many women in the group) and watched Yuriko flirt with workers in every shop. Chiaki spared us the embarrassment of leaving
Chiaki Sporting Her Cap
pussies and caps, amazing combination the mall empty-handed by buying a flex fit black Flames hat, which by the way, looks super fresh (I love caps and I love black—God this woman is amazing…if she could freestyle rap and wear Mets jerseys I would’ve fucked dating and handed her the ring).
We then met up with Sam, Teddy’s super cool, super hipster, super handsome, “super douchebag” (Teddy’s words), super blond, super tall, super silent brother. Of course, he immediately became Yuriko’s next flirt target as we tramped around downtown Calgary.
Walking back to Teddy’s house, I couldn’t help wishing I was a super cool, super hipster, super handsome, “super douchebag”, super tall and super silent guy with Chiaki by my side sporting a super fresh black fitted and a Reyes jersey as we rode off into the sunset in a suped up Escalade.
Then I remembered I couldn't drive.
We got back to Teddy’s house and there was the matter of food. The only thing sustaining our arduous trek through Calgary’s mall being bubble tea, we needed something quick and dirty to fix us up. So naturally, we made Northern comfort food, grilled cheese sandwiches with Campbell’s tomato soup.
YURIKO!
On the way back from the mall Shin started flipping because he had never tasted anything like it and promptly asked Jayne if he could keep the cans as a souvenir. After blinking trice, she told him to take a picture and he went about photodocumenting the can from every possible angle.
Once we had got our stomach’s relatively full, Ted busted out a surprise on them (no, not that kind of surprise). Hearing him plan this trip since last year, I knew what was coming, but he just told them to load up into the car. We rolled into town once again and stopped in front of a sketch alley (probably Calgary’s only sketch alley), which happened to be the side entrance to a jazz club.
Slight aside: the day we picked up these girls in Japan, apparently they were at the fireworks festival because their jazz group was having a get together in the park together…Ted, cluing in on this hobby, had a jazz club penciled in early in the itinerary to get them wet. In baseball analogies, its like watching game tape to pick up a pitcher’s tendencies before the real deal.
After a problem with ID’s, everyone finally got settled
down and we waited for the band to start up. First time in a jazz club, so I was pretty excited. What I was not excited about was the exorbitant pricing of really sweet martinis…but whatever, women love this type of shit.
The band started playing, it was amazing (as all music is when its played live), and the J-Team was loving it. Shin even left our table just to get a better view, the sort of action rarely displayed from shy, timid Japanese boys. I was sitting next to Chiaki so I tried to say something intelligent about jazz and then realized I knew absolutely nothing about it despite living in the capital of jazz (or at least the only capital of jazz above water). Ted, seeing me flailing, came to my rescue and coached me on some of the finer points of jazz and some of the famous clubs in my hometown. He was speaking to me in English (so Chiaki wouldn’t understand), I was translating it into Japanese in my head, and he was translating her response in his head. All in all, there was probably a 3 second gap after everything she said, which probably
led her to believe I was mildly retarded but hopefully she wrote it off on the drinks and the loud music straining my hearing capabilities.
This however, made an amazing conversation starter as during one of the intermissions, we started to plan a New York City trip (I quickly offered my house), which segued into my life in New York City (exaggerated only slightly), and then my previous relationships in New York City (they were all tragic relationships, where I was searching for true love, but they weren’t. They were all great learning experiences for my maturing, yet still romantic character) and then into what I looked for in a girl.
Contrary to what you’re thinking, I didn’t push the conversation into the last topic…she did. Thinking it was a fastball, I described someone really similar to her and then asked, “How about you? What do
you look for in a guy?”
The first pitch of the season sails in…
“Someone nice, someone who will treat me well…”
“Someone like me?”
GEN SQUARES DOWN A BUNT!
She giggles.
I hold my breath.
The pitcher is out of position!
We lock eyes.
No one is noticing.
The catcher was caught off guard!
She continues staring.
I set my drink down.
Gen’s racing towards first!
She opens her mouth to speak.
I lean in.
The fielders aren't even CLOSE to the ball!
This is it.
This is it!
This Is It!
THIS! IS! IT!
It's gonna be an infield hit!
A cymbal CRASHES, we both flinch in surprise, the rest of the band starts up and its way too loud to talk.
OH!…he stumbles and trips!…OUT! OUT! OUT AT FIRST!
But Gen walks slowly back to the dugout, a grin on his face. Confident.
He’s got the timing down. Next at bat, that pitch is fucking flying out of the park.
COMING SOON HOUSE ADVERTISING ads_leader_blog_bottom
Tot: 0.074s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 9; qc: 25; dbt: 0.0258s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
