Oda

After we visited Nara, we took the train down to Oda, or actually we accidentally took the train to Ooda, which led to Kyle having to drive a little ways from the other, nearly identically named station, to our station. Meeting up with Kyle again was fantastic! I was madly hung over from drinking with Tomoko and Errol all night though, and had a pretty excruciating headache. The Shimabe area in general is really beautiful; roughly as beautiful as Hokkaido, actually, although in different ways. There are lots of mountains and the plant-life is very lush and jungly. The first day we were there Kyle took us to a small delicious Indian place where I was able to eat and drink enough to make my headache subside, then we went to meet up with Kyle's JET friends at Jusco, which is the biggest and best supermaket I have seen in Japan. We all gaijin-smashed the place (a term used by gaijin when a large group of us all converge on an area, which is usually a crazy strange sight to Japanese people). The meeting and shopping took far longer than planned, but it was okay. Kyle's friends are all really nice and seemingly great people, and I'm glad he's got such a great community around him there. It was a little intimidating being the person no one knew out of, in the end, like 20 people, and having to remember all their names and not mix them up and whatnot. Although I found that to not be as hard as I was expecting, perhaps because they were all worth remembering.

After stocking up at Jusco we all went back to Kyle's place, which is a really nice Japanese style house in a small neighbourhood of really nice houses. He has a tatami room, as well as a pretty decent kitchen, a living room, his room, a bathroom and a laundry room at least that I remember. We all organized slowly and headed out to the beach near Kyle's house, but only after we all got crazy worried because a girl whose name I knew at the time tried to use Kyle's key in her car and we all thought the steering block was locked and we wouldn't be able to move the car out of the street where it was parked. Down at the beach more people showed up to the party, including a South African guy who gave us a really funny retelling of the history of South Africa, and a Japanese guy named Keishin who was into electronic music. We all got pretty drunk, set off fireworks, ate food, and generally had a great time hanging out and being young at the beach long into the night. We couldn't really swim though because the people who tried got stung by jellyfish like 2 seconds after starting. After that we walked back to Kyle's place to continue the drinking and hanging out. We played some beer pong, during which Kyle and I won a big Europe vs. America match, which was a lot of fun. We also learned a bunch of Irish slang, which is truly hilarious stuff. I wish I had an Irish accent. I made it well into the night, after most people had passed out, which I'm pretty proud of since I was pretty much ready to go to bed by the time Kyle picked us up at the train station. Probably over the course of my night in Osaka and my first night in Oda I had over 20 drinks. Not to mention the night before we went to Osaka in Kyoto, where I probably had like 7 drinks at Karaoke with Kenji and his friend. So those were definitely my drunkest days in Japan, I think with Osaka taking the cake thanks to the fancy Shabu Shabu restaurant.

Next day at Kyle's was largely spent resting, doing laundry, and not doing stuff for once. In the morning we gaijin smashed "Joyful," which, other than actual Denny's, is the Denny's of Japan. They have basically a lot of really unhealthy food there, out of which I picked a cheeseburger (no bread) with the cheese on the inside. It was delicious... and yet kind of disgusting in its own way. That way had nothing to do with the flavor though. They also had unlimited drinks for 200 yen. It was kind of weird - they had a machine for cold drinks, but they all came out hot so you just had to fill your glass with ice and wait for them to cool. There was also a really disgusting drink that Keishin showed us, which was green and hot and tasted like salt-water but more disgusting. At night we went over to Erin's house, who is another JET from Maine that lives really close to Kyle and who we met at the birthday party. I liked Erin a lot and we all had a lot of fun going to Yakinikku that night. Yakinikku is basically raw beef and vegetables that you cook on a heating thing in the center of your table. It may have been the most delicious thing I ate in Japan; not sure. Afterward we went back to Erin's for a bit and drank and played Poker with yen as chips.

Then the next day was already time to leave, which was unreal. I had left my wallet at Erin's, and Garrett had a lot of packing to do before we left, so I was a couple of minutes from missing my train, and since my JR pass ran out that day, if I had missed it I would not have had enough money for tickets back to Tokyo to get home. That was a very tense car ride for me. But I made it, and road the trains for like 9 hours to get back to Tokyo and found my hotel at about midnight.

Thanks for an awesome time Kyle!