So sense friday I have been in Tokushima (the pot capitol of japan if your into that kind of thing (also that's a joke if anyone didn't get it toku sounds like toke, in Japanese, although it is apparently easier to get pot here than in other parts of japan. That's what you get for being in the country I guess) at the largest dance festival in Shikoku, if not japan.

The days kind of run together, and I didn't really do any super touristy stuff so I'll just give the highlights. 

Getting there was probably the hardest part. The last I wrote I was on a too small night bus not getting sleep as it drove from Fukuoka to Kobe. The plan from there was to take a bus from Kobe to Tokushima, arrive around 11am and nap until the festivities started that night.

Well we got into Kobe alright, but failed to book bus tickets in advance. We were at the bus counter when it opened in the morning, and thought we would be fine, however when we to book our seats everything was sold out. In our sleep deprived state it took about another minute to realize that not just the bus we wanted, but every bus for the next two days was sold out. Remember when I said this thing was big? I wasn't joking. 

So we explored other options but they were all fairly pricey, so we decided to buy a youth pass the cheapest and slowest option that, in the best case it would take 7 hours by local trains.

So we got started, because it was summer vacation everyone was riding our trains, I was literally falling asleep on my feet for the first 4 hours.

After the four hours of hell there was an hour transfer at okayama (岡山), not to be confused with ookayama (大岡山) which is my schools station. We recharged our batteries there, figuratively as well as literally, my iPhone was almost dead. And from there promptly missed our scheduled train.

We didn't realize this was a problem as we were island hopping over the Pacific Ocean on a train getting to Shikoku. Words and train photography don't do the route justice. I probably should have stayed awake for more of it, but we finally had a seat so I just kind of passed out.

Sadly once that leg of the trip was over we realized by missing the previous transfer we had screwed ourselves. This is getting a bit boring so to make a long story shorter we arrive in tokushima 5 hours later than expected and 8000 yen lighter. 

As we arrive, before we can even shower and recover from two days of very hard traveling beers were placed in our hands and we were informed that we needed to start drinking because we were going to dance (awa-odori literally translates to awa dance) in the festival that night.

Well we do as we are told and go with a whole bunch of other foreigners in the tokushima international association to "practice" which meant drinking more beers.

We finally get to the dance, which is more of a parade / slow forward moving dance and I still have no idea what I'm doing. It's then that I'm given a tall lantern post thingy and told that I'm just perfect for leading the group. 

Queue about 15 million pictures from stunned Japanese people and just as many people asking how tall I am. I actually got quite sick of it. There are only so many ways you can say "I am 2m tall and am from Seattle, yes I like Ichiro"

So the dancing and questions continued for basically the rest of the night. Sadly my phone was dead so no pictures, but my friends got some so those will go up on Facebook soon hopefully.

After the dancing we went to "Ingrids international bar" for the after party. I mention the name for two reasons. First, I've never seen such an explicitly named gaijin bar in Tokyo second the friend we were staying with loved it and we went there for the next 4 nights.

The next day was fairly uneventful. We stayed out fairly late so slept in fairly late, went to go actually watch the dancing, which was way less exciting than being in the dancing, I couldn't even get very good pictures :(  then went to an all you can eat / drink place for dinner. We stayed out fairly late again, and as a result woke up late, just in time for a BBQ the next day.

The BBQ was great, Ingrids is mostly a singles place and a place for friends to meet. The BBQ was all the older lifelong English teachers and their wives.

An odd thing about Tokushima is that unlike Tokyo people like to stick around and teach English here. Most people had lived in Tokushima for 6 or more years. Unlike the one or two year stints that most Tokyo teachers appear to do. I think it might have something to do with actually being a fairly prominent figure in a small community. Also life here is easy and laid back, more like the states than other places, I can see it's draw.

Anyway back to the BBQ, we chatted, and I got to see a glimpse into the life of a grown up gaijin, after they stop fooling around and settle down with their Japanese wife. Not going to lie it looked like fun, but there is something about my personality that makes me think I wouldn't be happy teaching English and raising a family until the end of my days.

The kids were great though, once they weren't scared of me anymore of course. Kids are always scared of me at first. We had a squirt gun fight.

I should stop and mention that I'm eternally  grateful to Tashi for putting me and Michael up for 4 nights even though he had no idea who I was.

So that night we went out to a karaoke bar (American style) with one of Tashi's students. This guy was really cool, he was like 60 and so were the rest of his friends. Like normal everyone was shy until they realized we could speak Japanese. After that people really opened up. 

Our friends were 60 so they hadn't really kept track of pop culture from the last 20 years. We were stuck singing songs from the 50's and 60's which was an interesting and challenging task. Still great fun.

Near the end of the night we made friends with the Japanese version of white trash, I think. Which is ironic because they were dressed up very properly in kimonos. In any event they talked in a really annoying style and one of the girls only stayed with her strict controlling boyfriend because he was "macho" (in this case that means he can carry an 18 pack of beer up three stories with one arm, what a catch) they knew all of two words in English and one of them was "wow" I swear the first thing English teachers need to do when teaching English from now on is kill the always responding habit, it sounds fine in Japanese, but in English its just painful to listen to.

So eventually they went hone, Michael and Tashi were having fun but my contacts where killing me so I went home before them. It was then that I ran into my least favorite form of foreigner. A guy that I met earlier in the night, and was a fairly nice guy, but this time I see him, start walking with him, and within 30 seconds he starts bragging about how he got a blowjob in a club earlier that night and about how much "he just loves the culture here". People always talk about how easy it is to get laid in Japan, like it's something special and unique to this country. I really hate this, Japan is no different from any other country, if you know where to go, and find the right girl it's just as easy to get laid in America and Europe, and other parts if Asia as well. I could rant about this for days but I'll leave it at that. Japanese girls like all other girls are all very different, some are easy some are, um what's the word, not so easy.

Anyway that ended my night at 4am.

The next day we again slept in, relaxed, went to some tourist things, got some pictures and went out again. This time we went to a girls bar, basically a bar with cheap drinks, a cover and cute bar tenders whose job it is to give you a bit more attention than a regular bartender. Its a poor mans version of a snack bar where you pay a lot of money to get a lot of attention. For my American readers, attention is not a metaphor for sex, Japan has a strange bit culture of where both guys and girls will pay large amounts of money for a conversation with an attractive member of the opposite sex.

In any event I ignored the girls and had a very nice conversation with David one of Tashi's friends. We bassically talked about everything above plus the annoying points of American culture.  I always here people my age talk about this stuff, it was fun hearing some more developed opinions about why staying here is great, and why someone choose that life. Thankfully we called the night early and went to bed, so we could catch an early bus to Kobe the next morning.

The ride was uneventful except apparently we drove over the longest suspension bridge in the world. I mostly slept through that...
Also what was a 7 hour train ride there became a 2 hour bus ride.

From Kobe we met two of Michael's friends, and went straight to Kyoto. Because everyone else there had lived in Kyoto before we basically dicked around the city until 6:00 when we headed for a temple I still can't remember the name of in kanji it was 出町柳 don't ask me to read it for you. Anyway that temple area was the main event for the night. We were there to see the daimonji festival, which involves lighting a giant 大  as well as a 法 and some other characters in fire on the mountains around Kyoto. It was cool, but again iPhone and cheap digital camera tech can't capture it well.

Oh yah I met Yurika for like half an hour, she is as cute as ever :)

Once daimonji was over I went back to my hostel, bid goodby to everyone and went upstairs to the common room to make friends. There I ran into Axel, a guy from my Japanese class two years ago. He was just kind of traveling with his dad and we randomly met in the same hostel. Anyway we sent the rest of the night chatting with other folks in the hostel and I woke up early, 5am to catch my flight to shanghai. I'm at Kansai airport now excited to see at least a part of china. I got here fine, but we'll see if my luck holds up when finding my way to my hostel.