The King and The Castle

Dan started and ends work earlier today which will be perfect for a saturday night on the town tonight. He went to work early and I started hitting the town around 10ish. I walked all over town, until my feet blistered, checking out a lot of different stores on a desperate and so far failing quest for Engrish t-shirts (the one souvenir I MUST get from Japan). Eventually I wandered into a Pachinko arcade. Pachinko is a strange Japanese gambling (I think) game in which you purchase hundreds of small marbles, put them in a machine in which you must turn a dial at the right pressure to not over or under shoot a drop zone of sorts and then watch as your marbles bounce through a Plinko-like area hopefully falling into the proper holes. If you get things in the proper holes then a bunch of crazy stuff happens on your screen and you get slot machine like things to happen and other crazy Japanese stuff like lasers and robots and screaming in Japanese. I don't know, it's all very very loud and confusing but in some way mesmerizing and fun. If you do well then you get more marbles though I'm not yet sure if there's a skill to it. I went once in the morning then went with Dan after lunch because he hadn't been. When I first went I saw a guy who had 4 full baskets of marbles (worth at least 2,000 yen a piece I'd say) and when we saw him after lunch he had 6 baskets, so he must have the key to the game down. They also have slot machines of which I played a 24 themed machine and a Godzilla machine. Overall the place was kind of fun but mostly confusing and about 4 or 5 times louder than it needs to be.

After lunch, which we had at a place called Mos Burger, pretty standard and not bad fast food, I went to the famous Matsumoto Castle. Other than hiking in there mountains and I think Dan mentioned some hot springs, it is their big tourist attraction. The castle is apparently one of the oldest still standing in Japan and is pretty cool. Oddly enough it had very very steep steps which to me makes no sense for such short people. As I was leaving a tour guide named Ichiro asked me if he could speak English with me and I gratefully obliged informing him that it would be a delight to speak English with anyone as other than Dan I have had almost no use for words.

After he got off work Dan, his co-worker Matthew and I all went out on the town. Matthew has been in Japan for a couple years now and seems to be pretty much fluent in Japanese which was quite helpful. He first took us to a mexican restaurant that had a picture of Bart Simpson with a mustache, a poncho and a sombrero painted on the wall. They also had delicious enchiladas and, unexpectedly, my favorite drink, a Moscow Mule. Though the way they make it is Ginger Ale and Vodka with a lime and I know it as Ginger Beer, vodka and mulled lime, close enough nonetheless.

After dinner we went to a very trendy little club that used to be a house and a tile factory or something, Matthew was telling us all about it. There a nice guy who's name I forget did an excellent job DJing and we had drinks with some other Westerners, an Irish Guy, two Parisians and a girl claiming to be from Brockton Mass. though her accent and skin color made me think she was originally African or something. It was fun for a while but we moved on to the next bar, a place called Elbow Room. It was a small but nice bar and we sat in the corner drinking where we met an Australian named Daryl. As Daryl over indulged us with information we didn't particularly ask to hear about his marital infidelities as well as how he came to live in Japan and work in rebar a friend of his from across the bar eyed us and came over.

He was a curly-haired man who seemed very drunk, and was, and was not particularly happy to see us. His name was Michael and as he introduced himself he seemed almost upset that two of us were named Matthew (or maybe it was that not all of us were Matthew, I couldn't tell). As we divulged our hometowns I scoffed slightly when he said he was from Kansas thinking how weird it is that I, at the time, couldn't think of a single person I knew from Kansas, but here I was at a bar in Matsumoto meeting one. He thought I was laughing at Kansas, which is a completely laughable shit state anyways, and took offense to this. Basically he turned angry, or angrier really, very quickly. He started asking how long we'd been there, boasting that he had been there two full years to Matthew's one and a half. The quote of the night was definitely him saying to Matthew, "Let me ask you something. How many friends you got here?" He got angrier and just didn't like us, he tried to start a fight, attempting to take Matthew's glasses off as if he didn't want to break them. Fortunately Matthew explained to us all that if they so chose to the Japanese police could fuck our shit up royally and were legally allowed to hold us for 21 days with little to no reason. This kept our camp peaceful even through Michael getting dragged out and returning two or three times and when he angrily dubbed me "Mr. World Traveller" and slapped me in the face, to which I quite literally turned the other cheek offering to let him hit me again. When all was said and done we bought Daryl a drink for helping resolve the situation, waited til we knew Michael was long gone and headed to the universal hub of late-night drunken eating, McDonald's, proclaiming Michael the King of Matsumoto on our walk there. Once there I got a chicken sandwich, Matthew got a burger and Dan got the Shaka Shaka Chicken, which is basically a slab of chicken breast which one shakes up in a bag to add spices (thus Shaka Shaka) and we then called it a night all semi-wishing we had taken up The King of Matsumoto on his offer and dethroned him if you will.