"Please don't come any closer"

Japan continues to impress. I forgot to mention that at the castle they were playing Snoop Dogg. They were also selling football shaped seaweed crackers with a sweet black sauce, rice crispies, a fried egg, and mayonnaise. Delicious.

What is brown and rhymes with Snoop? (answer at the end of the post)

I've been spending the days going around to different parts of the city. Today I almost made the mistake of getting on a women-only subway car. It had lots of seats and I was making my way towards it when I realized that everyone seemed to be avoiding it like the plague. I followed the masses and got on a crowded car. Then I saw the signs that it was women only. Phew.

I found a huge three story arcade. One of the popular games was digital horse racing. You sit at a chair and choose a horse, I guess, as you watch them run on a huge screen. One guy was using the small touch screen on his chair to stroke his horse in the stable as he prepped for the race. Not being able to read any of the signs, I took the escalator up to the fourth floor. There was no escalator down. I was stuck. On a tiny little landing. The only door was into a fancy restaurant, and I stood outside for a minute, embarrassed, then walked in and just kept pointing down as several very courteous waiters tried to seat me. Ugh.

Tonight I had dinner at a restaurant near my hostel. They seated me at the bar, in between a middle-aged Japanese couple and a Japanese woman. The waiter then brought over a bowl of cabbage leaves and set it in front of me. I kind of stared at it, not knowing what to do. The couple was having a discussion, so I surreptitiously fixed my eyes on the Japanese woman to my right and waited to see what she did. She seemed to be watching my cabbage leaves. I didn't do anything. Time passed. She turned to the couple next to her and asked them in English what the hell she was supposed to do with these cabbage leaves. Apparently you dip them in a tub of communal sauce on the bar, salt them with some special salt, and then eat them.

She and I talked a little bit about traveling in Japan without speaking Japanese. The people around us seemed encouraged by this, and they started talking to us. The middle-aged couple asked in English where I was from and how I liked Japan. Only the woman seemed to know a little English, but as soon as I said "Seattle" the man said "Seattle Mariners" and then all three of us said "Ichiro Suzuki" a few times.

When I was done, I got out my Japanese phrasebook to see how to ask for the check. I practiced a little bit with a different couple (at their behest). There were two local girls at the table behind me that were laughing and laughing at my Japanese, and even the cook had a chuckle. The couple then explained that if I couldn't pronounce how to ask for the check (which I guess I couldn't) I could just cross my fingers and that meant the same thing. That reminded me to ask them about another sign I'd been seeing a lot of--holding up your arms in an "x." I demonstrated, and she said it means something like: "stop it," "please don't," "don't come any closer." Hearing this, the two girls behind me burst into laughter and started making it to each other.

To be fair, though, I'd mostly gotten it from shops that were closing. And one hotel proprietor. I'm enjoying myself immensely and don't think I'm being quite as much of a fool as it might seem.

I definitely feel like I am forgetting something interesting, but I can't remember what it is. Anyways, the moment you've all been waiting for: What is brown and rhymes with Snoop? Dr Dre.

Osaka

I still have updates to deliver for Australia and even Brazil, but they will have to wait a bit. In an effort to not fall behind again, I'm going to skip them for now and come back to them.

After the 13 hour delay we boarded the flight at 1am like we were supposed to. So aside from having one less night in Osaka and having to sleep on the plane, and the 13 hour delay, it went pretty well.

Japan is uh-mazing. I got in at eight this morning, took a shower, and went to see the castle in the center of town. The cherry blossoms are blooming and it was gorgeous. Inside the castle was a museum that included a samurai sword from the 18th-ish century that one of the castle's owners had used to commit sepukku. My favorite thing was a picture showing a missing stone in the wall of the moat that was a secret escape route from inside the castle. Determined to find it, I started walking around the walls. There are 12km of moat wall, and I ended up walking all of it before I found that the secret exit was just to the left of where I started to my right around the moat. I did get to see a lot of the castle grounds as a result, though. Pretty much all of them, in fact.

Afterwards I strolled on aching feet in the markets around my hostel and found an arcade. There was a drumming game where you hit a drum in time to Japanese pop music as a carp/angler-fish with a fez danced around on the screen. Weird, but fun. Walking the streets I had seen arcades full of what looked like slot machines. I went in to check it out, because it was packed and presumably fun (it was gambling, after all), but it was a bizarre movie screen set in a little console that ball bearings fell around. It was intimidating, and although I was intrigued, I decided to save my money.

But lo! Here was one at the arcade! I sat down and put in a dollar. The screen started out as a digital slot machine, but with faces. They stopped, there were all sorts of blinking lights, and the machine started to shout at me in Japanese. There was a knob you could turn, and one other button. I fiddled with them and nothing happened. Then I stared at it for a while, wondering why this was worth a dollar, and ball bearings started to drop at random. Occasionally one would land in a little basket thingy and the machine would make noise. To the best of my knowledge, I had zero say in where the bearings would land. In fact, I ended up finding three other buttons, for a total of 5 buttons, and as far as I could tell none of them did anything whatsoever. Not a one of them was linked to an action or a noise, but occasionally a bearing would fall, regardless of whether or not I was touching the machine. Befuddled, I ended up pushing the lights around the machine, tried to work my fingers around edges of the buttons and pull, do ANYTHING that the game would register. All to no avail. There was a digital display keeping score or something, but I couldn't read what they stood for. I also couldn't tell when my turn was over. So, it's possible that the game is normally very responsive but I lost on the first round and then continued to sit at a machine with zero credits and try to get it to work because I am an idiot, but it's equally possible that I left in the middle of a winning round and the lucky schmuck that sat down after me got a free turn and made millions.

One cool thing about the arcade was that they gave you a little metal bowl to keep your coins in. There was one at each machine. The Japanese people's bowls were all empty, and I couldn't figure out why they weren't using them when it was so ingenious and so generous of the arcade to provide them. This fact didn't slow ME down, however. I would sidle up to my game of choice, drop my coins in the bowl, making sure they clanked a bit so that people would know I was high roller, play a few rounds looking like a pro (with the possible exception of the enigmatic ball bearing contraption), take my coins and move on. After about 40 minutes I realized the bowls weren't for your coins at all, but were actually ashtrays, and I left.

Here are a few pictures until I get some uploaded to picasa. The one at the top is the mystery ball bearing machine, the one with the golden trellis is the castle, and the other two are from my neighborhood.

As expected, wonderful Japan has wifi in my hostel room! For free!!! So I will try and assume a schedule of regularity.

Austraaaaalya!!!

No posts in quite a while, and not enough time for a long one now. Travel in Australia has been strange. I've seen tons of cool things, scuba'd at the reef, etc, but I've often felt like somehow the country hates me. For instance, three of the four flights I've taken have seen something explode in my bag. Once it was bugspray that melted all my plastic, including my phone. The time nothing exploded my bag came back wet with some kind of oil that smelled like popcorn.

At the moment I am at a hotel in Cairns, Australia, paying five dollars an hour for internet. I was supposed to be in Osaka, Japan, tonight, but after getting to the airport at 4:00 am and taking a connecting flight, and after a thirty minute delay turned into a six hour delay, turned into a 13 hour delay, the airline booked us hotels. Supposedly we leave at 1 am this morning, but why would they book us hotel rooms only for five hours? Hmm... We shall see.

It's not anything more than an inconvenience, but I must marvel at Australia's relentless ability to toy with me. Lots more good stories to come if it ever lets me leave. And Japan. Oh Japan, with its ubiquitous wifi and lovely technogadgets. It will be lovely.

Where's the WiFi?

Australia is severely plagued by a scarcity of wifi. I can't explain it. Maybe 1 in 10 cafes have it. A few places have it, but it is private and only for their staff's use. What the hell, Australia. So far it's been a cool place, albeit expensive. I finally found some wifi in a mall food court, but I'm in a crunch for time and can't write much. Currently in Melbourne, having fled the bad weather in Sydney, only to arrive minutes after the "storm of the century" in Melbourne. Streets were flooded, hail the size of golfballs, the roof of the train station collapsed, just a mess.

Some choice things I've overheard on Melbourne streets:

"I'm very susceptible to skin rash."

(Into a phone) "Did you see that look I gave you?...No it wasn't a death stare!!"

"What the fuck is that stink?!"

I'm headed back to Sydney tomorrow, where, if there is anything good in this world, I will be able to find a cafe with internet.

Landed in Sydney: Episode One of Backlog

I'm on the plane to Sydney. My connection from Buenos Aires to Sydney was delayed two hours due to a storm, which translated into a four hour wait for me. The Buenos Aires airport was full of big fat crickets the size of your thumb. They were chirping all over the place and you could spot them scurrying around on the floor. I was walking around killing time trying to find one that I could hear but couldn't see, stooping low towards the floor. When “WHOOMP!” one fell from the ceiling right past my ear with a big whooshing noise and landed on my collar. Freaked me out.

I have fallen way behind in these entries, so I've got to go all the way back to Peru. Alix's visit was amazing. I met her at the airport and we stayed in Lima for a few days, eating at delicious restaurants. Peru is famous for ceviche, a dish of raw fish prepared by putting it in lemon juice. I think the acidity of the juice is supposed to cook it some. Peruvian cuisine has apparently been gaining some notoriety internationally, and Lima is considered the “gastronomical capital of the continent.” Lots of seafood, good organic grocery stores, good pasta, all sorts of things.

Before Alix got there I was craving some more normal food, so I got a Pizza Hut stuffed crust pizza. They called it Hut Cheese, and the crust was stuffed with both cheese and ham, which was weird. It was summer vacation for Peru, and the maid at the hostel had brought her little son to work. Poor kid had been sitting watching TV all day, and I could only eat two slices of pizza that night, so I told him to help himself and told his mom it was ok. The next day I came back for dinner, opened up the fridge to eat the rest of it, and found that they'd taken the whole thing home and it was gone. Probably for the best, since I don't need all that ham and cheese and I bet the kid didn't get to savor the hammy joy of Hut Cheese that often.

From Lima Alix and I caught a bus to Nazca. There we stayed in a SUPER swanky hotel, only for a night. On the rather extensive grounds they had ostriches, horses, a mule, rabbits, little deer in pens, and guinea pigs in pens for eating. Also an awesome pool with a bar that you could sit at in the pool. It was the low season and the place wasn't full enough for the bar to be open, but it was still a pretty awesome pool. In Spanish guinea pigs are called cuy (pronounced “kwee”), because of the squeaking sound they make, that sounds just like “cuy.” Almost too cute to eat.

In the morning we got in a tiny three passenger plane and they flew us up to see the lines from the air. The plane was pretty rocky, and by the end I could only glance at the lines and then stare out the window focusing on the horizon, breathing deeply and trying not to vomit. Some of the designs they made really do look a lot like astronauts/aliens, which was cool. Even nauseous I was impressed.

From there we went on south to Cabanaconde. It is a little town on the edge of Colca Canyon, second deepest in the world. The actual deepest is nearby and is only deeper by a few meters. The ride there was long and bumpy on a crappy bus, but we saw condors soaring over the canyon and they showed Rome the miniseries on TV, which made it a little better. The bus kept breaking down on the side of the road. The driver would get out, tinker for a while, get back in, rev the engine futilely, get out again, get it started right when you were collecting your things to start walking, and continue bouncing down the road. Each time it broke it would take a little bit longer to get started back up, so by the last time it puttered to a stop all hope had pretty much died. The canyon itself was pretty impressive. It was so big that it was hard to get a feel for the scale you were looking at. On the other side was a swath of white chalky looking stone that cut through the green of the canyon. If you looked closer, that swath of stone was actually a fair-sized town clinging to the opposite wall. Then you could start to get a feel for how big it was, and how far you would fall if you slipped.

At this point in the trip we were going to go on to Machu Picchu. We had bought our bus tickets and were all set to go. But, we had spent more time in Lima than we had planned to, were behind schedule, and would have less than 24 hours to find a place to stay, see the ruins, and catch a bus back to Lima. Plus, we both would prefer to hike the Inca Trail, a four day approach to the ruins that puts you there at sunrise. There was no way we could have done that in our timeframe, even if we'd stuck the the schedule, so (at Alix's suggestion) we decided not to rush it and to just do it another properly on another trip. At the bus station we changed our tickets from Machu Picchu to Lima and caught an overnight bus. When we got back to our hostel we saw that the newspaper headlines all said “Death at Machu Picchu!” and it turned out that there had been terrible flooding and landslides and the ruins were closed. So if we had gone, assuming we didn't get stalled on a road somewhere or caught up in the mayhem, we wouldn't have been able to see the ruins anyways. And if we'd stuck to our original schedule rather than taken our time in Lima, we could have been there right when it started to hit the fan. Pretty lucky.

The ride back to Lima was pleasantly uneventful, except for the fact that we bought two alpaca saltenas from an old lady that got onto the bus at a stop to sell things. (Saltenas are kind of like hotpockets; alpacas are kind of like llamas.) The next day we were both sick. It might not be totally fair to blame the saltenas, as we were also eating raw fish, shellfish, and other potential culprits. But if you'd seen these things she was selling, or the cloth bag she had over her shoulder that she pulled them from, not to mention the way they were just keeping raw meat out on shelves in some of these small towns, you would ask yourself “why the hell are you touching those things, let alone eating them?!” We were pretty hungry.

Thankfully we were back in our hostel and had a private bathroom. It struck Alix first, in the morning. I felt fine. I bought her some gatorade, and in a few hours it had passed. I thought my stomach had toughened up from three months of South American food and wasn't having any problems. Instead, it just took my stomach longer to admit that it was in over its head. By then it was far, far too late. I didn't start to feel anything until the evening, but once it got started it was terrible. I don't know if I've ever felt so sick. First one end, then the other, then both. Then I went deaf for a few minutes and then I passed out. To give you the complete picture, it must be mentioned that you can't flush toilet paper in a lot of places in South America. To solve this problem, they provide you with a little trash can next to the toilet. The poor little guy was pretty severely burdened already, as it'd been a long day, but now I was also throwing up into it. And when you pass out, you naturally have to rest your face on something, and in this case it was a disgusting poopy pukey little trashcan. It was gross. My ears were ringing, I coudn't hear, I was boiling hot, and all I could focus on was the drain in the shower. Each time I rinsed myself off with cold water and returned to rest my head on the filthy can, wishing death would come, I would look past the traschcan at the drain and notice how with each rinse more of my hair had fallen out of my head and was plastered there in a soapy grime against the metal. Far from my finest hour. In spite of all this, Alix pulled a chair over to the bathroom door and read to me out of The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Wow.

The timing was doubly bad, because we had reservations at the nicest restaurant in Lima, Astrid y Gaston. The hostel manager had asked them to give us the best table and had made it sound like a big deal. Of course, we couldn't use the reservations because I was slowly dying, slipping in and out of consciousness, so we gave them to an elderly couple downstairs. They were thrilled. When they came back they said it was the highlight of their trip. The waiters were calling the man Sam, they had thought it was a special dinner and the cook came out to recommend things to them, they got free dessert, it really sounded amazing.

The next day I could walk again without wanting to fall down. Alix was leaving at midnight, and we were determined to try that restaurant. I walked very gingerly to a cab, we got a table, drank nothing but water, ordered guinea pig and some icecream. It was delicious, but I would have liked to do it at 100% healthy when I could have gotten some wine or something. It was definitely a fancy restaurant, which became obvious when the waiter brought us our breadbasket and said “allow me to introduce the bread,” all of which had some special significance to Peru and were delicious. That night Alix caught a plane back to Seattle.

I stayed in Lima for a few more days and saw some of the things we hadn't had time to. One was a church that had giant catacombs with more than 40 thousand people buried there. The skulls and skeletons had been arranged in fancy designs by the archeologists that had counted them. Sadly, pictures weren't allowed in any part of the church. I also went to the bar were the pisco sour had been invented. It was good, but tasted similar to a lot of the other good ones I had had around Peru and Chile. I spent a few more days going to see movies and not doing much of anything, and then caught a plane to Brazil and Rio de Janeiro.

More later. I've landed in Sydney, where it is like...19 hours ahead? So it is 11:21pm on the third right now in Seattle, and 6:21pm on the fourth. I'm not actually sure what time my body thinks it is. Maybe 4am? I will have more on Australia and another episode of South America soon. The next one will focus on Carnival. Titillating, no?

Last Hours in South America

Another quick post. I've fallen behind on updating both the pictures and the blog. But I will do another monster post soon. Or maybe little episodic ones. I am back in Rio de Janeiro, and am flying to Australia tonight. Today is exactly four months since starting my trip. South America has treated me well. Aside from that crooked bastard of a cab driver on day one, I've had no trouble with anything other than some minor attempts at swindling. (Being swindled, not doing the swindling.)

Two days ago I finished a three day scuba diving course back in Arraial do Cabo. It was awesome, and I am excited to do it some more in Australia. Last night I went to a special Brazilian restaurant that carries hundreds of types of cachaca, a Brazilian rum. I had some sun-dried meat, Brazilian food, and Brazilian liquor. It was a good last night.

That is that for now. It's a short two or three hour flight to Buenos Aires, where I'm connecting on a 19 hour flight to Sydney. Twice the length of my previous longest flight. Sounds like a blast.

Ciao, South America.

Arraial do Cabo

I'm in Arraial do Cabo, in Brazil. Carnival was weird and crazy, kind of like a giant house party at somebody's house you don't know, all over the city and in the streets. Everybody standing around drinking.

Wifi in Brazil so far has been hard to come by. I just got kicked out of a hotel lobby and am now outside sitting on a sidewalk that smells like piss stealing their internet. After this back to Rio, then to Ihla Grande, and then I think to Iguazu Falls. Will have more later.