Oh hai!  So, I went to visit Keriann “Little Boots” Boone in Japan for 9 days.  That’s why I haven’t been blogging my damn face off like our East Coast Correspondent.  But, seeing as how the name of our blog doesn’t necessitate the coast of inquiry being on the continental United States, I think I’ll write about the other side of the Pacific Rim of Fire. 

I’ll make this as brief as possible.  For a more detailed description of what went down, buy me a drink at Finn McCool’s you selfish prick.  

First we were in Osaka.  It was kinda a big, cement-y city so we only stayed one night.  I got in around 4, so by the time we got checked into and got back out of the hotel, we didn’t have time for much but snacks and drinks.  

Good thing we accidentally stumbled on an ancient, secret, ninja sushi restaurant.  It had an automated, sliding steel door and we ate a bunch of nom-able sushi. We had a few drinks called “chu hi” that’re basically like jungle juice in order to deal with the fact it was all served on an entire, live fish.

The next day we road the biggest ferris wheel in the world that overlooked the Osaka harbor and also went to an aquarium with the largest single tank in the world.  It housed two whale sharks which are like normal sharks but totally fucking huge.  It also housed the largest species of crab in the world which were, you guessed it, totally fucking huge. 

Then we went to Kyoto and it was so totally better.  We were there for 3 nights, and a few highlights were this temple with “over 10,000” of these red gates.  It took us 2 hours to hike through them all. The crazy part is that this feat was accomplished because businesses were buying each of the gates to ensure financial luckiness in the future. It made me want to buy a shit-ton of rice. Also there were shrines throughout the hike with “ghost houses” that looked like Japanese bird houses.  Except one thing was different: ghosts lived in them. 

We also had New Years at an underground cave club there, which was awesome except that Little Boots lost her cell phone, but at least she liked my totally awesome New Years surprised because I kick so much ass at present-giving.  

Then we stayed two nights in the bestest of places.  It was a coastal, resort town called Shirihama. It was allegedly a tourist town, but it was off season so we pretty much had the run of this beach resort community.

There, (no joke) we saw fucking ancient pirate caves.  One Japanese pirate was like “Yo, after we pirate things, we should probably have a totally fucking rad cave to sail our boats into, live in, defend, and generally perform piratical duties in.”  The other pirates were like “totally,” so they did it. Here’s what their lair looked like from the outside. The cave is on the left side of that bay.   This is the inside.

Also, we had the best hotel of the whole trip which was 3 times the size of my apartment in Venice and had an ocean view with 2 flatscreen televisions.  The Japanese way is a simple one of graceful plenty.  And also: flatscreen televisions.  And a rice-papered breakfast nook that looks over the Pacific. Also in Shirahama were foot baths from natural hotsprings.  Our little hotel had its own private batch, but the public ones were almost as good.  Especially the one with a bar built over it.

After leaving Shirahama we spent one more lazy day in Osaka just hanging out because there just isn’t much that interested us in the big cement-y city.  

Then I took the train to the airpot, missed my plane, and spent a bonus night in the Kansai Airport Hotel where I watched a documentary on the BBC about the history of American Rock and Roll (especially its roots in the blues) that was partially narrated in Japanese. 

Fuck yourself.  

Tags: adventure, beards, douches from england, pirates, rim of fire, so gay, sturdy footwear, taxi drivers, wanderlust

Posted on Wednesday, January 7th, 2009 at 4:38 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.