At least we didn't sleep outisde.

Sarah & her friend Maisie came to visit for a week & we went to Kyoto to rage. Or, spend way too much money on nothing... At the train station in Kyoto, we saw an Italian marching band. They were wearing sexy white tights & we stared at them, giggling. They were kinda hot...

We made out way to the outskirts of Kyoto to check out an open air market where we purchased Xmas gifts. This guy was making fish cookies filled with red bean paste. I don't like red bean paste. I like Mexican rice & beans, ok?










We ate lunch at an Italian place to honor our hot, tights-wearing marching band.

This is my friend. I forgot his name. We passed Nolan's phrase book back & forth in order to have a conversation. I asked him in Japanese if he would meet my parents. He laughed & told me he loved me. We almost got married, Japanese-style. (Just kidding, Jess.) The only serious thing I got out of the conversation is that Zima is very popular in Japan.
DISGUSTING!!!


This is a great example of the names of bars and/or clubs in Kyoto. Maybe new club? Seriously. The best part is we walked around the bar district for a while trying to find an oldman bar & would be like, "Ohh, Persian Cat sounds great," or, "Let's try Dracula's Dungeon," but the fact of the matter is that it doesn't matter which bar name sounds the best; they are all exactly the same.

Finally, after hitting up like 12,000 expensive bars, we went to karaoke, Japanese-style. This is my first time. We say Mariah Carey, Jesse's Girl, Madonna. This Friday we're doing karaoke again, only it's going to be a Journey-themed night.














This is prob the best picture ever taken of Nolan. He looks like he's having a hard time, no?These two actually have good voices, so they annoyed me. Brenda is too funny to live on a Japanese island all by herself.

After karaoke (at about 3am), we had no choice but to go to an all-night internet cafe to sleep because all the hostels were booked, being Thanksgiving weekend. It was better than sleeping outside, in a squatter, or an outhouse. And it was warm. We awoke at 6 am to get breakfast & drop Brenda off so she could take a bullet train home. We then explored the more historic part of town.
By historic, I meant expensive cars that we posed near.






















This is actually temple grounds (I forgot the name) that have been nominated for the Seven New Wonders of the World. I didn't take that many photos because it was too magnificent & the photos just looked like cheap metaphors you can buy at the 100 yen shop.

























































































This is kind of f-ed up. This is an abortion shrine type of thing. When a woman has an abortion, it's common for her to buy a doll & place it in one of these temples. Abortion seems to be a more common method of birth control than the pill or condoms in Japan

On the way home, we were all pretty burnt out. We got back to Nolan's & vegged out for the rest of the day. I fell asleep under the kotatsu, which was a lil weird.

A Different Day, A Different Moustache

While Nolan went to work, Brenda & I decided to shock the Japanese by wearing moustaches on the train to Nara. Yes, Brenda is drinking a juice-box of sake.






























We are excellent at making friends. When we got off the train, we looked for a place to eat lunch, but everything had gross fish broth, so we wandered into this trashy-looking restaurant owned by a Chinese-Japanese guy who spoke English pretty well. I told him I am a bijetarian & he told me he couldn't promise the taste, but he would make me something special. It was SO good. He's a great man.


This is the beginning of cultural Nara. We had to walk through the amazing crap-shop district to get here, & some crazy Japanese photographer saw me dancing by this pond & called us over. He made us sit down & take a picture with this old Japanese bald man, whom he called a skinhead. It was kind of awesome.



















You can see the top of a five-tiered pagoda in the distance, which is totally bizarre. These pictures, btw, don't do justice to anything I've seen so far. Even the moustache pics are blurry.






Here's an example of a crap-shop:















This guy was making traditional Japanese desserts. I think they're made of rice. The machine kind of pooped out the pastries.


So in Nara, deer are considered sacred & they roam around. You can buy these deer cookies for 150 yen, but once the deer see that you have purchased this, they f-ing stampede over to you & head butt you until you show them the cookies are gone. Some of the deer had weird scabs on their heads & this one had a terrible limp. This other old guy followed Brenda & me around hissing at us. I was a little scared.




































This deer was pretty tame. Brenda took an amazing video of when the deer attacked me.

















This guy is a Shinto priest. Look at him pretending to be Laura Ingles Wilder. Here I am looking all Laura Ingles Wilder. That priest was just copying me.








Brenda running away backwards as she gives a cookie to the deer. If you ever go to Nara & feed the deer, DO NOT wear a skirt because they will stick their heads up it if you don't give them food.








This is the five tiered pagoda on the Todaiji Temple grounds. I was wrong about the other temple housing a shard of the Buddha's bone; it's actually this pagoda. It's only open once a year for viewing.


















This is Todaiji Temple, the largest wooden structure in the world. It's magnificent. Also, it does not translate as a photograph.

This Buddha is amazing, it's the largest bronze sculpture in the world, bigger than the house I grew up in, I swear. Also does not translate as a photograph. The architecture is amazing
































This is the interior architecture of the Todaiji Temple. Incredible.











Little Red Riding Hood Buddha.






On our way home, we picked up some biiru for the train & fixed ourselves some new moustaches. I had to pee the whole time & the train took forever because there was an accident/suicide. It took us all in all 3 hours to get home. I held my pee the whole time & considered being the gaijin that peed on the train.

Japanese-Style Thanksgiving

We started off our luxurious day of giving thanks with an American-style breakfast under the kotatsu, the f-ing best thing from Japan: a heated table!! Nolan's friend Brenda came over for a short home-stay, that's how we were able to get this photograph:





After breakfast, we rode our bikes to one of the school's where Nolan works & got side-tracked on the way there by this awesome bamboo forest. RADICAL!! That's Brenda. Doesn't this remind you of a Dr. Seuss book?




She's not using the rice paddy to pee, however we watched a man pee in one just the other day. Be sure to wash your rice, man.


I don't know.

No wonder these kids don't speak English well, they can't even spell vegetable.

This is where Nolan works. Jealous? It's an agricultural high school, where one of the largest or most renowned agricultural fairs take place on Japanese Labor Day. Or something like that.
This small temple is adjacent to the agriculture school. Those stairs were way more difficult to climb than they seem, I assure you. Plus, I wore those damn boots again because I didn't realize there were temples all over the place. Duh.
American Apparel ad. Lame.


It's a custom in Japan to purify your hands & mouth with these types of fountains, which are all over. Not a drinking fountain, btw. You have to spit it out. You just let the cup fill up, then pour the water on your hands. I don't think I got any magical powers, though.


The guy in this temple was tots drinking sake.


This is a view of Nagahama from the top of the temple stairs. It's funny because a lot of young Japanese women wear the most ridiculous shoes to temples (yes, more ridiculous than the ones I wore). Stiletto thigh-high boots. Seriously. But they walk up the stairs like it's nothing.

We discovered this secret path down & found some old building that was falling apart.

Those leaves are seriously magenta. Seriously.

After our descent from the amazing trees, we rode our bikes to downtown Nagahama, where we passed some piles of radishes hanging out with a wheel barrow & a hole.



There is a figurine museum in Nagahama (weird) with a giant dinosaur head. However, this is actually a secret entrance to a mall, which was pretty disappointing. We found some massage chairs to sit on while Brenda did holiday shopping & we discovered that if you put 100 yen in the chair, it would massage you for 7 minutes. (Happy ending extra.)

This was our dysfunctional family Thanksgiving dinner: Brenda is the alcoholic father, I'm the bitchy daughter home from college, & Nolan is the closeted homosexual. You can't really tell from our poses. We made mashed potatoes, green beans, & bbq tofu. And biiru. I had a popsicle for desert.


This is a terrible picture of Brenda terrorizing Nolan. I told her to eat in a disgusting way, so she smeared her face across the bbq sauce on her plate & attempted to attack Nolan with her face as her weapon. He tried to run. It was great.