Yuki Matsuri: The Other Stuff

It was such a relief to eat real Indian curry for a change! Japanese curry mostly tastes like the stuff you can buy at your local fish and chip, not bad but certainly not good enough to satisfy a real curry craving.
Post-love hotel we were clubbing it up in a small, almost perfectly dark, bass-heavy club, having a good time but also having trouble getting any water to drink. The barman was reluctantly serving water, but being a real cock about it despite the 7000 yen in cover charges they'd collected. Eventually he flat-out refused to serve any to Evan and Felicia, despite having just served Chihiro and I. This is illegal in Japan, just as it is in The UK, but the two Americans barely speak Japanese and couldn't argue the point, and it was far too loud and I was far too drunk to do so either.

So I got the barman's attention, lifted my water up high, and slowly tipped it onto the bar.

The barman totally flipped out, snatched up a chunk of spilled ice and lobbed it at my head.

So I lifted Chihiro's water up high, and tipped that too.

He ran around the bar and tried to haul me off or something, the next bit got confused as several bouncers tried to hustle everybody out and everybody else crowded round. The funny thing is that the bouncers repeatedly apologised ("I'm sorry, we're very sorry") and allowed us to gather our coats and leave peacefully. Then someone saw all the blood running down my face, most everyone got angry, the barman claimed I'd headbutted Chihiro and thrown stuff at him, Chihiro was crying and it all got a little messy.

Still. Result in my book - the barman was made to look the fool, the police didn't get involved and we didn't leave with our tails between our legs.
A few hours later, around 7am, we caught an hour or so shut-eye in the McHotel.

Yuki Matsuri: The Love Hotels

We were in Sapporo the day before the snow festival was due to open, and were debating where to go. The main criteria were warmth and the ability to drink carry-out alcohol, since the bars were mostly still closed, what with it being the early afternoon and all.

I argued that since none of us had ever been to a love hotel before, a room would make for a much more interesting atmosphere than the usual 'karaoke box with jacket over the window' approach. We eventually found the love hotel district, after a few calls of 'bugger this for a lark, it's too cold' and several inquiries of locals that met with terse 'I wouldn't know about that' replies.

The next mission was to find one that would let seven people, six of whom were large, white and noisy, into a single room for purposes best left unspecified. The lobbies and entranceways we entered varied from the fabulously strange to the dull, and the interfaces from touch-panel displays to cracked and peeling buttons to a polite suited male receptionist in one up-market instance. We were variously told that only two, three or four (with supplementary payment) people could enter a single room, in almost every case by a nearby phone ringing while we milled around and tried to select rooms by the automatic interface. The few hotels with face-to-face contact we didn't even bother asking.

The eighth(?) attempt, whereby two people scouted out and chose a room, followed by two successive groups, worked in every respect but one. When we had four people in the room and three still coming the door was shut and we were slightly horrified to find it couldn't be opened from inside or out! If Chihiro hadn't been on hand to pick up the phone and apologetically explain that she had entered the room while her boyfriend was still outside we would have been rumbled for sure. There was an emergency 'break glass to exit' panel, but the time-locked doors certainly took us, and I guess any past rape/claustrophobia victims, by suprise.

Sad to say that we didn't secure one of the weird and wonderful rooms with rotating beds, mirrored ceilings, aquarium walls, red lighting or other delights, but we did have a five-foot porn display, and a few hours to play truth or dare and get hammered.

Note the crazy regulation pixellation that afflicts all legal Japanese porn, and Felicia's rapt viewing of same.

Yuki Matsuri

In Sapporo for a weekend of alcohol, debauchery, love hotels, curry and aggressive barmen. Pictures to follow.

Meanwhile here's the only evidence of an anti-smoking movement I've ever seen in Japan. Nice to know they have a sense of humour too...

Setsubun

OK, so, armed with my oversized log of sushi, a bag of beans and my map to happiness, today I endeavoured to rid my self of demons, devils and wrongdoers, and hope for a wondrous future.











Step 1: Pelt the lurking horrors with beans. He seems to be enjoying it though, perhaps I should throw them harder?
Step 2: Every corner of my colleague's classroom is littered with beans, now to orient myself in a SSE direction.
Step 3 (and 4): With all and sundry scared off by the bean onslaught, the coast is clear for me to consume the SSE pointing oversize sushi roll without uttering a word for the duration. This done, I make a wish. The wish does not involve waffles.
Mm-mmm... this IS a tasty burger.