After a harrowing 3 weeks of reading the Chronicles of Narnia, Darb's books, The Secrets of the Da Vinci Code, and ALL the Harry Potter books, Tiffany has finally come back from America to me!! Wheee!!!! I don't need to tell you, my patient audience, that I missed her incredibly during her absence. We talked a fair amount, through email and the phone, and a few times, we were able to use my anniversary gift to her, a web cam! So that was all right, but it was still tough to a)see her go and b) not being with her or around her. With her arrival though, she brought herself back to me as well as tons of omiyage for me (apparently, she had fun shopping for me and didn't want to stop, but couldn't quite bring EVERYTHING she wanted to give me. Plus, the gifts kept getting bigger and bigger so there was less space in the luggage.) I couldn't believe how much she brought. In fact, she came straight to my place instead of hers because most of her luggage weight was gifts for me. She had been debating how to give them to me. One day for a month (I'm not kidding!) or just all out in one massive orgy of gifts. After seeing my first reaction, she didn't want to wait anymore and bombarded me with gifts, ranging from Simpsons boxers shorts to card games to peanut butter (she brought JIF....JIF!!!!!) to the Simpsons DVDs (Season 5 AND 6) to taffy to cactus jelly candy to granola bars to...it just keeps going and going. Wow! I'm lucky to have her in my life, eh? Anyone jealous yet? :) Of course, in return for this, I got her...a puzzle. A simple, reversible (apparently) puzzle. Yeah, I feel like a heel.

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Aaron (hereafter known as Aa) came to visit. Of course, being the total idiots we are, took no pictures, constantly lamenting that fact and constantly saying, "I should have brought my camera!" So, there are no pictures for this momentous occassion. He'll just have to come back so we can take pictures this time around.

Friday was a holiday, so he arrived late Thursday after a harrowing adventure where the trains decided to stay in a small town for a while. We have no idea why. I was proud of myself as we were able to simply communicate in Japanese the whole time. Only a few times did his kanji get the better of me and I didn't understand what he was saying. A lot better than a year ago. So he arrived and after cleaning my Corridor from head to toe, I met him at the station. We walked back to my Corridor, his home for the next couple days, dropped his stuff off (he was staying for only three nights, how much stuff did he need?!), and we proceeded to a nearby favorite restaurant of Tiffany and mine, Pepper Lunch. This place is awesome. The food comes quickly but it is still cooking in the skillet. Sajo and Dad experienced the same when they came in May. A staple. Of course, to commemorate the occasion, we ordered a few beers at the restaurant. Not the good kind, mind you, just fairly average light beer. Since it was fairly late, we decided to rein it in early, for the next few days will be filled with keggers, steinhoists, beer blasts, beer busts, and beer raids.

Subway: Never Forgotten, Always Longed

On Friday, I had to make an important phone call to Hawaii (a toy company) at 7 o'clock in the morning, so we both ended up waking up too early. The morning just passed trying to figure out the many things we could do in the next few days. We had all of Friday and Saturday together, and the morning of Sunday. How were we going to spend it? Well, as we were deciding on a lunch menu, I remembered and reminded Aa of his long standing love for Subway sandwiches, which we can't get near him. He lives in a really small town (See Toyoshina pictures from Christmas). So suddenly lunch was taken care of (for every single day, as it turns out), and we needed to figure what else to do. Because of his deprivation of the Subway goodness, he ordered a footlong, which ended up not being a good thing throughout the day as he was full and could not enjoy the succulent Hamamatsu food later on. But alas. The staple of course of any visitor coming to this great city is Act Tower, the 45-story harmonica shaped building.

The tower dwarfs all the other buildings in the area. I think the second tallest building in Hamamatsu is maybe 20 stories. Basically, wherever you are in Hamamatsu (or even as far as Kosai!), you can almost always see Act Tower (the only x-factor is fog). So going up to the top is really cool. Aa was duly impressed.

A Budding...Friendship

After that, we went to the nearby beach, Nakatajima, and walked along the coast, listening to the waves crash. There were a good number of people and children on the beach and we just talked and ran when the waves got too close. There were a few times when the waves came up to our knees. We happened upon a secluded spot and just stood there, letting the waves wash over our feet, taking the sand with it, and burying just our feet. We stood there for about a half hour, just talking and listening to the waves. There was nobody around for meters and our footprints were effectively erased. We could do anything we wanted, live any idea we had. It was very romantic.

Real Kakigori

When we had enough of the beach, we started to walk back, but Aa wanted to go into this Natural Conservatory place that I had seen but never went in. They had the best kakigori I had ever had. Kakigori is shaved ice. That's it, with some colored sugar syrup on top. At least, that's my description of it from previous experiences. Nothing spectacular, but highly addicting nonetheless. However, this kakigori was different. THIS was shaved ice with flavor! Of course there were only two flavors, strawberry and melon (What IS it with this country and melons?!), but then you could add fixin's to it. Aa always has milk added to the top to give a bit of a dairy twist. I usually don't like the milk addition, but this time, they offered a scoop of sherbert on top. Well, for 600 yen (roughly $6.00), I was skeptical about whether this would be any good. Usually for 300, I get a cup with a little syrup. But they gave me this beautifully huge bowl with a huge pile of shaved ice, and every shard was colored green from the melon syrup. And resting on top was my little scoop of apple sherbert. Fantastic! I must remember to bring Tiffany there sometime!

Karaoke

The beach takes it out of you. You end up being really tired after getting pounded by the wind for a few hours. So we returned home and wanted to relax a bit and didn't really want to think about dinner. So we decided on an izikaya, a fairly casual bar that offers minimal food. But what happened next was the most important part of his visit. Looking through the archives sections (Hiroshima and Osaka, and Yamagata), Aa and I love karaoke and when we're together, all hell breaks loose as we camp it up and belch out our favorite tunes. This was the highlight to his visit. We went to the karaoke place, where apparently I have a membership (they also let you spin your own cotton candy and make sundaes). We ordered nomihodai for a half hour (that's all you can drink. The Japanese use them as a good deal in a huge party. Young foreigners tend to like them because they want to drink as much alcohol as humanly possible in a short amount of time. Brilliant!). Four and a half hours later, we stumble out our private booth, having only had three drinks, a little water, sundaes, and cotton candy. We were nowhere near drunk, but we were definitely thrashed. We sang our favorites and staples of our karaoke experience, Linkin Park, Rage Against the Machine, Shima Uta (a Japanese/Okinawan song that I sang in concert), Elvis, the list goes on. But then we got the bill. They charged us nomihodai for the whole four and a half hours! Hell, if we had known they would do that, we would have ordered a hell of a lot more drinks. But oh well. We didn't get home until really late but managed to stay up talking until about 3 or 4 in the morning.

Saturday, we woke up late. We felt we deserved a rest and a break from our little voice thrashing the previous night. We woke up in time for lunch and as we were deciding what to do, we ended up at Subway again. And yes, it was the same people working there and they recognized us and smiled. From there, we walked to the nearby Museum of Musical Instruments, which usually is interesting, but this time, they took away the exhibits where you could play the drums! How crappy was that, especially since Aa himself is a drummer (Taiko)! But he was interested nonetheless especially in the walking cane violin, a cane that has a hidden violin built in, a remnant of a period where violin players were illegal so they had to smuggle them around. After that, I had to make a quick visit to Kosai to check on Tiffany's place briefly and here's where the story takes a radical twist.

Intermission warning. Cheerful story gets strange for a little bit

The Cops...again

I forgot to ask where Tiffany had kept her bike parked at the station and of course, Aaron had no idea what it looked like. So we walked along the parked bikes looking for hers. I remembered where I parked her other bike, the one I usually ride, so I wasn't too worried. I pointed to two bikes that ended up not being hers, Aa tried the key we had in a few others. When we finally did find hers, I heaved a sigh of relief, grabbed "my" bike, and got stopped by cops.

They took us to the police station and we sat there while they ran a check on the plates of the bikes, seeing who they were registered to and what not. Fortunately, the bike that Aa was riding (for a minute) was actually purchased and bought by Tiffany, license and registered too. So the bike that we spent a few minutes looking for was known by us. They accused us of stealing bikes, which Aa says is fair, I still maintain that it ended up being fair, but it started unfair. Anyway, Tiffany's bike cleared completely ok, but "my" bike, the one that I rode was registered as stolen! Huh? Apparently my bike was reported stolen. The one that we had no hesitation finding and no problems. So they asked me who owns the bike and I said in broken Japanese that it was my girlfriend's bike, she has two, one she bought, one that her predecessor gave her. So what happened? Did Tiffany's predecessor steal a bike? The cops were doing the tried and trusty good cop, bad cop routine but we weren't buying it simply because we didn't know what the hell was going on.

So we revealed that we were English teachers at junior high schools (usually a trump card here), and that Tiffany was in fact, an English teacher as well, but at the local high school. They looked into the records of the bike and found that it was registered to a high school student who went to that high school. Ok. Now what the hell is happening? So while we tried explaining what happened in slow Japanese (Aa is remarkably almost fluent), the bad cop called the person who had reported it stolen. She had graduated from the high school a few years prior, so Tiffany never met her. She said she didn't need that bike (the cop saying all this to us) anymore, and it was fine. Then the cops, after finding out we were just bumbling idiots and not the mastermind behind the International Kosai Bike Theft Ring, told us that the sticker on the back of "my" bike was proof that it was for a high school student and since I don't look like a high school student, they were suspicious and had to stop me. Then they let us go telling me to make Tiffany re-register the bike to her.

These are the facts, and they are undisputed. (mostly)

There are a few problems though with what they said and what I believe is fact. First, they stopped us on the groungs that I was riding a high school student's bike, when I was clearly not a high school student. Seems reasonable, except they pointed as their proof the sticker that was on the back of my bike. But when they stopped me, they had never seen the back, they stopped me from the front. Aa maintains that they were justified because we WERE looking at all the backs, and how were they supposed to know? But considering that I had a run-in with them before (See these archives), I can't help but feel that there is a great amount of injustice being done. I think almost every foreigner would agree that there is a great deal of profiling going on in Japan. Anyone who supports profiling back in the states, come to Japan for a bit and experience the other side. Anyway, Aa and I were laughing at the end and I resolved to try and get as fluent as possible so I can tell the cops where to stick it! :)

On the way back to my Corridor from Tiffany's palace, we saw a stunning sunset behind rolling clouds. The colors were so vibrant. We were just walking along the street (back from Yamada Denki, if you must know), and we both saw it. Again, lamenting that we didn't have a camera around to capture it, we stared in awe at God's beauty. It was incredible. The sun gave a glimmering behind all the clouds, but it was incredibly bright. The reds and the oranges in the sky were crystal and vibrant as it faded to a pure deep blue. Of course, I'm describing it poorly, because this elaborate sunset can't be defined so easily. It was incredibly romantic. We walked to the bus stop to go to Tertullia, which deserves its own section in this review.

Brazillian, Meat, All You Can Eat Goodness

This is unique to Hamamatsu because of the huge Brazillian population here. I'm not saying the restaurant itself is one of a kind because I don't know. I'm not saying it isn't a chain because it very well could be. I'm not even saying that it exists anywhere else in Japan because I haven't been everywhere. But I can say that one of the reasons this particular restaurant thrives is because of the huge Brazillian influence in Hamamatsu, but even that I'm not fully sure of. Regardless, without a doubt, this is definitely in my top three restaurants in all Hamamatsu. When you sit down, you have a placard that says in Portuguese Yes or No. If you select it to "Yes" [sim, por favor], these guys come from out of the kitchen with huge meat slabs on skewers to your table and ask if you would like garlic steak or chicken heart or pork ribs or rump roast or...The possibilities are endless and they never seem to repeat their entrees. At the end of the restaurant, they also have a salad bar where you can eat slightly healthy while gorging yourself on amazing rib eye steak, roast beef, flank steak, lamb chops...Sorry. They just pile on the different types of meat as long as you say "Yes, I'll have some of that!" I've noticed that the waiters tend to speak Portuguese, English, and Japanese, so trying to have a hearty happy conversation is easy and fun, but also interesting because I'm trying to speak in all the languages. For dessert though, they have a guy come out like all the others, with a skewer, but on this skewer is a pineapple covered in cinammon. They grill that sucker and peel off slices for you. It was amazing and Aa was drooling. He also said he's gotta to come back to Hamamatsu for this restuarant again!

Jazz and More in the City of Music

After the amazing meat-eating experience, we walked to the Crystal Bar, a local favorite jazz club. Well, I don't actually know if it's a LOCAL favorite, but I'm slowly becoming a local here in Hama, and it's one of my favorite jazz clubs, so there you have it. Aa was impressed with it and drank different shochus all night long. He was very good at talking to strangers (because he can) and we hit it off well at the bar. After that, the jazz band hopped on stage and played. They were awesome. Bassist, drummer (who looked possessed and more interested in chewing his tobacco than playing, but he was amazing, so I shouldn't complain), and a pianist who could "tickle the ivories" really well. Then a trumpet player hopped up on stage, and played a mean horn. And just when we thought this was the show, an American hopped on the stage and played sax. It made me wish I had chosen sax instead of clarinet. Aa and I were talking about it later, and both of us groaned when he got on stage. We're Americans, we didn't need another one running in and trying to run the show. But as he played and we listened, we gradually warmed up to him. At the end, I was even rooting for him, Go America! Nevermind that he was there on his own and not representing my country in the least, but still, way to go! Show these Japanese what jazz is really about! We were at the club till about 11:40 at night. Contrary to popular belief and/or common sense, we did not go to bed after that. No, we went to Mister Donut to get a sugar high to keep on going throughout the night. Only problem was, we didn't know exactly where to go. Then the idea dawned on us again. Why not? It'll be fun. Stupid but fun!

We went back to the karaoke place and sang new songs, songs that we weren't too sure of. Songs that we forgot and wanted to sing the previous night. But because our voice was still pretty thrashed FROM the previous night of four and a half hours, we decided to go easy. Three hours. Yep, more sundaes, water, and cotton candy. But no alcohol this time. 3:30-ish, we stumbled home, more high from fun than from alcohol. Aa showed me some video games and we crashed.

The next day, we tried to do a video webcam chat with Tiffany, but for some reason it didn't work, but there was no time to do anything else. We were going to do something fancy and cool for Aa's final meal, but we ended up at Subway. Again. So I'm sure whenever Aaron wants a fix for his good ol' Subway sandwiches, he'll be on the train bound for Hamamatsu. You're welcome anytime here, pal!

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I decided to take two random trips this weekend...because I could. I had spent a lot of time in the south of Japan, but not enough in the north. So on Saturday, I got on the train and went up north to Shizuoka, the capital of the prefecture. I had only gone up to Shizuoka for work, so I thought about time that I go up for pleasure. I didn't see much. In all honesty, I really wasn't that impressed with Shizuoka, but maybe that's just because I didn't know what to do or where to go. I saw a street performimng jazz band, so that was cool. But then, I saw another band that convinces me even more that the Japanese should probably not do rock and roll. Of course, I couldn't understand it, but....uh....well, there are no words. They were dressed in this bizarre...what I sincerely hope is a costume and not their regular attire, although neither would really surprise me. They were essentially Power Rangers with instruments. They were "hard rock" but they played with a trumpet and a sax. The General guy, whom i didn't take a picture of, was in this military uniform, but everyone else was dressed....well, see the pictures.

I admit, that I was basically trying to find some cool toy stores, ones that sold Transformers in the vain hope that maybe I'll be able to procure the recently rereleased edition of Predaking, a Decepticon from the 80's. Geeky enough? Soon I'll put up a page of my current transformers and scare you all off! HA HA!

Anyway, Shizuoka wasn't as interesting as I was hoping, but I called up a friend in the area (actually, he called me up to be perfectly honest) and I left Shiz for dinner with Blair in Fujieda. We had Mexican food and oh damn, was it good! A few margaritas later (only 2), we parted ways for the night and I went back home to finish Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

The next day, Blair told me about a kendo tournament in Hamamatsu, so we went, and was surprised to see my students there competing! Cool! Unfortunately, they didn't do too well, but I'm proud of them nonetheless. I then showed Blair the town of Hama, basically tempting him with everything from a cheesecake crepe to a $1,500 digital video camera that records in true 1080i HD. Apparently, I'm the devil with my temptations.

Finally, I went up to Tenryu, the north side of Hamamatsu. It's up in the mountains and supposed to be really pretty. It was. I didn't even see all of it, but it was massive. The river, the mountains. But lonely and isolated, so as I started to walk back, I randomly ran into another friend, Mike, who had just moved up there about a month prior. So we were just talking and he drove me into teh mountains. So we're driving along the mountains for the rest of the afternoon and stop at an antique store. She explained all she could about Japanese pottery, but I didn't understand (nor really care), but it was really pretty anyway! The I hopped on the train and finished Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

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September 11 has a very significant meaning to people around the world. The Japanese call it teraa no hi, or terror day. It's devastating that the twin towers happened as it did and ther terrorists could even do something like that. I wish consolances for the survivors of this horrible tragedy.

However, this day means many things to me. On this day, one year ago, Tiffany and I started seeing each other. That's right, this is our one year anniversary of being together! It has been an incredible year with her, as you can certainly tell just looking through this site. We've seen, heard, smelled, tasted, and felt many exciting things here and we've shared our lives for a year. She has become a solid source of support and in truth, became one of my closest friends around the globe. Not a bad catch, eh? Close friend and girlfriend in one person. That's quite a cool package and a terrible responsibility to bear. But she's been doing a great job so far. Happy Anniversary, my koibito! I hope our future anniversaries are just as great!

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Ah yes, it is time. The nice one month vacation has come to an end. And with that, the students are back in full swing, ready to start school. Maybe. Actually, they're tired. A month of lounging around playing Nintendo and studying will do that to you. Yes, studying. The Japanese students have homework that they have to get done over the break. They have tests on the first day of school! Imagine if that system were initiated in the States! You would have everybody standing up and screaming bloody murder! A test on the first day back after a month?! But who had time to study of all things? There were other things to be done in the States! Like playing basketball with friends or playing pool or playing Nintendo or Playstation or XBox or Atari! There's harvest! The harvest! What about lounging around actively trying to forget everything that was taught in the last term?!

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