A Journey to the South Part I: Greetings and Calculations

“Ok Max-sensei, please greet the readers”
“Good morning everybody.”
“Thus ends the greetings, Max-sensei please continue with the blog entry.”
“Ok, but it’s gunna be long.”

For about 130,000yen (US$ 1300) you can get lots of great stuff. You could buy a sweet computer, a huge tv, or a mound of coke and a classy hooker. Proving that I will never break out of my college mentality, I blew it all on coke and hookers (American joke). Actually I spent it on an epic spring break road trip down to Kyushu and have physically little to show for it but a 100-yen ninja cell phone charm, two boxes of cheap omiyagi, and a chinaman's tai chi suit. But the stories told, heard, mumbled, and made we're worth every penny.

Like a Japanese museum, I’ll give you the quantifiables first:

Days: 10
Kilometers: unknown
Principal Participants: Jake (dad), Sara Ray (aunt), Francie (drunken daughter), me (hero)
Craft: Jake's white 4-door generic Toyota
Tanks of gas: 5
average cost of take of gas: 5500yen (US$55)
Cities visited: Osaka, Okayama, Fukuoka, Nagasaki, Hiroshima
Cost of tolls on expressways paid for navigation errors: 2000yen (US$20)
Total days of rain: 1 (on drive home from Hiroshima to Toyama)
Numbers of times around Osaka loop: 3 maybe 4
Nuclear Bomb Memorials: 2
Girls that Jake hit on: unknown
Creepy internet friends met: 1
Number or working legs on Jake's chair in Fukuoka: 3
Francie's suitors: multiethnic
Best story told: Sara's by far
Gay bars stumbled into: .5
female to male to ratio at concert staging area in Hiroshima: 400:2
Things that went wrong:0

I’d like to start this yarn with, “on a warm summers evening on a train bound for nowhere,” but that’s not at all how it started. It was a warmish early spring afternoon in a car bound for Osaka. But I’m getting ahead of myself. I wasn’t out of school yet. With about 15 minutes until school ended, I loosened my tie and downloaded some good road music... shit. What the fuck. Closing!!! Cannot read!! My iPod crapped out on my and I lost all my music save some last minute Notorious BIG and 2pac’s Greatest hits. Right before a 10-day road trip…damn Ok so redo:

Things that went wrong: 1

So after a hilarious trip to the bank where I exchanged 25,000yen (USD$250) worth of spare change, picking up Sara, pissing off a hair salon, picking up Francie, and ceremonially opening up new air freshener (deaths head brand), we were on our way to our first of 5 cities: Osaka

On our approach to Osaka we listened to the 90’s Rap ballad, “Put it in your mouth,” and, other classics on Sara’s sleazy Source magazine mix. Sex talk began. Unrecountably hilarious stories ensued. Little did we know that such an explicit tone had been set for the next 9 days.

What would happen!

coming soon... Beatbox Boys of Osaka and the Great Okayama Sleep In