Adventures in Japan

Glorious

The wet season is going to hit soon. But right now, the weather is <insert title here>! The humidity is not oppressive yet and the sun has been shining! We had an absolutely lovely weekend. On Saturday, we went and caught another AkaInu gig. The opening band was called Midori. It was... interesting. The good kind of interesting. The keyboardist would take running leaps at his instrument. And he liked to yell. They all did.

I can't remember the middle band's name. DMBQ maybe. They escaped from the 70's. They should have stayed there. I was all excited when they came out, all duded up in their heppest of finery. Their hair was pretty groovy too. And the music, I enjoyed for the first little bit. The next little bit after that, I appreciated on an ironic level. After that Carla and I found an empty stretch of wall along the back and sat down. There were no songs, it was all just jammy lameness. I like my songs to have a beginning and a middle in addition to the drawn out ending. Some might say without middles and beginnings, endings are worthless. I like to call those people "Correct."

Even though the music was very loud, I managed to sleep during some of the second set. I woke up just as they finished.

AkaInu was AkaInu. I sure hope they play whilst Ry is visiting.

After the concert, we spent just long enough in an izakaya to miss our last train home. Luckily, Ben and Jon have a spare room and live a five dollar cab ride away. So we stayed up till about 3, drinking and playing video games. Would have stayed up later but Ben was a bit under the weather.

So under, in fact, that he had to skip out on all of Sunday's festivities.

There was a free rock concert in some park somewhere. All the bands were local, which is not to say they were bad. I'm just trying to give you a sense of scale. About the size of Regina's Folk Fest. But with more, y'know, RAWK!!!

The weather was awesome. Hot and sunny and good. The bands were mainly unremarkable, mainly because the weather was so remarkable. The park wasn't all that big. One of the bigger ones I've seen in Osaka, but not a patch on the one in Tokyo. Lots of dirt, too. There were plenty of food and drink tents and nice grassy knolls to lay down on. Good times. And we were given free Red Bulls by a cute girl. That was a delightful bonus.

Abrupt change. As we were quasi-jumping/dancing near the stage, we espied a young man clad only in his most under-est of pants. These boxers had a large hole torn in the posterior area. His exuberant jumping, when coupled with the even more crazy than usual AkaInu performance the night before led Carla to dub this weekend "The Weekend of the Unexpected Japanese Genitals". She may not have used the word genitals.

Speaking of genitals, it was Michiko's birthday last week so we had a dinner for her Sunday night. That might have been an inappropriate segue.

We had Mexican. It was cheesy and good and spicy and good. And good. One of the guys working there was a little creepy, he kept trying to talk to us in Spanish. And dance with us. But he kept giving us free tequila, so no harm done. After the meal, we went and karaoked.

Good times.