Wanderlost 2

by Simon Williams

  'I'd like a ticket on the Sky Access Express please,' I carefully explain. 'That is the Sky Access, not the Skyliner. Sky Access. S as in Sapporo. K as in Kyoto. Y as in Yamamoto. A as in… as in… Fuck it. Sky Access. Sky Access!!!'

  The immaculately attired ticket seller stares at me. He doesn't have a clue what I am saying. He is conditioned to show me all the respect in the world by appearing to listen attentively. That is no bloody help. What was the point of us winning the war if I can't get this guy to sell me a ticket? How about you get a manager up here at the front desk pronto, sonny? Then I hit on the problem. Of course, he doesn't understand me, I am in a foreign country. I had the same issue when I went to Uruguay. No one could understand a word I said there unless I spoke Spanish. So that is what I do. I start talking Spanish to him. 'Buenas Noche meu amigo. Gracias. Yo neccasita compro uma ticket…. Ticket. Bloody hell, what is Spanish for ticket? Uma billet por traino por Tokyo. No traino rapido. No traino despacio. Traino in the middle. Comprende?'

  The ticket seller slowly nods. The Japanese always remain super dutiful even with some wanker yelling at them in English and then Spanish. Underneath his politeness he is probably thinking, why the hell did I come into work today? Every day I must deal with the same dumb pricks. I could have stayed home in my kimono and watched game shows all day.

  Finally, he grasps that I am after a train ticket. He points to the schedules behind him. Aha, I have made progress. But he doesn't do anything further. Only smiles some more and nods. Idiot. Probably played too much with a Tamagotchi pet when he was young. Fried his brain. Japan, that is what happens when you stifle the creativity of your populace. They become mindless drones, incapable of performing the simplest of functions. I amp up the vocals of my Spanish until I am reaching Pavarotti levels of volume. That is what travelers do when someone doesn't understand us in our native tongue, or second native tongue, we yell. Didn't order the penne alfredo the Italian waiter brings to your table at the bistro near the Trevi fountain. Scream blue murder. Studies have shown that yelling loudly in your native tongue is 5% more effective in being understood than simply talking at a normal level and punching someone in the face.

  After much hand waving, threats on his family (in both Spanish and the little Greek I know), and a quick lesson in the English alphabet, we sort things out. I make it all the way to the 7-11 without another hitch, although I am genuinely scared to talk to anyone else. How do countries like Japan come up with a language so uniquely dissimilar to every other tongue on the planet. The intermingling of cultures has been going on for centuries. Half the words in English are simple derivatives of Latin or Germanic. Accidente, limon, telefono, bier. Meu casa, seu casa. What were the Japanese doing while Ferdinand Magellan, Sir Francis Drake, and Hernan Cortes were out and about spreading the love? Let's all just stay here on our islands and sulk. Imagine if some industrious bugger had gotten Japan included in the slave trade. Instead of cotton plantations in the south worked by Africans, every rich, southern land owner might have carved out rice paddies all over the Appalachians.

  The taxi driver I flag down looks at my map of the neighbourhood and appears as lost as the moron who sold me the train ticket at the airport. It is a map, mate. A map. M as in Mitsubishi. A as in… fuck it. This is how you people get around, isn't it? This guy couldn't read a map to save himself. It falls on me to do the navigating. I really don't know how this guy thinks he deserves the $50 I owe him for driving one kilometer. We get to the right street at least and then I make the driver go up to the doors of three apartment buildings to buzz the residents to find the correct one. Bingo, he finds it. Thank god. I have no idea how anyone gets any mail in this country.

  The next week is a dramatic cultural experience for me. I visit temples, palaces, and shopping districts. I go to temples inside palaces and shopping districts inside temples. The Japs don't waste any space. I visit the train station during morning rush hour just to see stewards push people into the trains to be able to close the doors. In my next lifetime that is the job I am going to apply for. Commuter assaulter. They get away with it without any charges and even have the train riders thank them.

  At the Tokyo fish market, I watch grown men eat raw eels while they still wiggle through their fingers. Not a highlight. Nigel and I go to a baseball game in the Tokyo Dome. That isn't such a huge thing except that in two weeks Nigel and his family will be swinging by Miami and I am taking his family to a Miami Marlins game. Because I wrote about it in my book the ticket price becomes a business expense in my career as a writer. I can write it off on my taxes. Didn't know that did you? Well pay attention. You don't find this important life stuff out listening to TED talks topics like: Swag, even your grandmother has it; How to use a paper towel; and My journey to yo-yo mastery.

  I also take in a Sumo event at the Ryogoku Kokugikan, an indoor arena that houses the sumo tournaments in Tokyo. This just about breaks the bank on the cultural scale. Sumo is a religious ritual and there are only six grand tournaments in the entire country all year, so I lucked out. A tourney last 15 days and the event takes all day starting with the younger, smaller, and presumably less fit sumo wrestling divisions in the morning. By about 4pm it is time for the Makuuchi, the top division in professional sumo. This is when shit gets real in the sumo world. The bouts are fierce and intense. I wouldn't want to be a fried chicken placed on the ground between two famished Yokozuna level sumo. This designation is only for their hall of fame caliber talent. In the history of this sport there has only been 72 wrestlers promoted to this classification. I am about to watch the only non-Japanese born Yokozuna compete today, Akebono. Hey! A for Akebono. I finally know a Japanese word that begins with the letter A. Fuck lot of good it does me now.

  What can I say about almost naked 148-kilogram men leaping at each other to try and knock their opposition out of a ring that can't be better visualized by picturing bikini clad, female mud wrestlers holding 500 Big Macs. For a sporting competition that can be over in as little as five seconds the tension and atmosphere in the arena is electric. The pageantry of each bout begins with the walk in of the fighters, the ritual stamping of the feet, and tossing of salt into the ring. The tossing of the salt dates back 1500 years to the beginnings of sumo when this harvest ritual was all about two large men fighting over a fried chicken.

  Going to a sumo event was a highlight of cultural immersion in Japan but it is not the experience that made the trip memorable.

  Having a shocker - part 3

  My last night in Tokyo Nigel organizes me to hook up with some employees from the Australian Consulate and travel out to spend a night at the embassy house near Yamanakako. This is a small town on the banks of Yamanakako Lake which sits directly below Mt. Fuji. I meet the other Aussies at Shinjuku station and we catch a local train to take us out into the countryside. During the train ride I visit the bathroom. By Japan standards it is state of the art. A circular hole in the floor through which I can watch the railways sleepers fly by. The room is barely big enough for me to brace both legs and both hands against the wall for stability. Good luck if you are a Yokozuna. I must be as precise with my timing as the British Lancaster bombers that delivered the bouncing bombs to destroy Nazi Germany hydroelectric dams during World War 2.

  In the end it is a short ride. Mt. Fuji is only 100 miles from downtown Tokyo. On a fine day you can see the summit from the top of the Tokyo Tower, the nation's second tallest building and world's largest traffic cone. After two hours the Aussie contingent gets off the train and catch two sets of taxis out to a wooded, hilly area outside of town. This is close to where the house is. I say close to where the house is because no one on this trip has ever been to the house before. We are following the official Australian Embassy treasure map.

  At 9pm, with the sun long ago set, the ten of us are still tramping through the dark woods on this hillside trying to determine which of about twelve houses is the Australian embassy one. The problem is the map is dated. There have been new hous
es constructed so we have no idea, as a frame of reference, which house is which on the map. What do we use as our brick house landmark? The new house half way up the hill or the old house two driveways down? We know there is a punch code on the door to gain access, but all the houses have keypads. We are just punching in codes willy-nilly at every house while keeping our fingers crossed that we aren't tripping alarms. More worrisome, what if a little old Japanese couple is sitting inside their summer cottage nervously listening to a band of frustrated Australians walking around their house abusing each other while swearing their heads off.

  'Hey mate, Is this the fucking house?'

  'No. Fucking Christ!'

  'Who organized this shit show?'

  'Barry.'

  'What, does he have shit for brains.'

  'I can hear you.'

  'We love you Barry mate.'

  'You're both a pair of fucking wankers.'

  The only thing preventing terrified inhabitants from picking us off with rifles fitted with night sights is that Japanese culture has some of the most restrictive gun laws on the planet. Still, it isn't hard to imagine Mr. Watanabe bursting out of his front door with a samurai sword screaming, 'Banzai,' before hacking Barry into sushi pieces. Finally, we hit the jackpot. The last one we try is the correct house. Everyone is so exhausted that we are asleep within minutes of getting inside the door. Anticlimactic. But the trip is still worth it for the chance to do a crap though the hole in the floor of a train.

  The next morning, I am up early to get back to Narita for my flight home. I have arranged for one of the taxis that dropped us off the night before to come back to roughly the same spot in the morning and drive up and down the road until they find me. I bus back to Tokyo, because they have real proper toilets on board, then catch the cheap, slow train out to the airport and save myself the dollar fifty.

  The flight back to the USA is infinitely better than the flight over. I allow myself to have a drink. I was warned by the company before leaving America that while flying I am acting as a representative of the firm in Japan and shouldn't drink. I assume they were only referring to the outbound flight. Not imbibing on a plane is a waste of 75% of the best part of international travel, the free inflight drinks.

  The Singapore Airlines stewardess hands me a US immigration card to fill in during the first hour of the flight. Exactly at bourbon number two in the Australian system of calculating the length of airline journeys. Rather than miles travelled, Australians measure flight times by the number of alcoholic drinks consumed. For instance, the drinking record for the flight from Australia to England was set way back in 1989 by test cricketer David Boon at 52 cans of beer. This singular achievement is the only thing Australians remember of Boonie's cricket career. A feat statistically equivalent to Michael Phelps eight gold medals at a single Olympic game. A normal flight from Australia to New Zealand is six beers. If there is a delay due to bad weather, it is six beers and a bottle of Zinfandel. Some people might argue that when I am on long flights I have a drinking problem. I am here to deny that accusation whole heartedly. I have no problem at all knocking them back.

  Before I get too focused on my inflight drinking all the sections of my immigration form are appropriately filled in. Except for my passport and flight number. This information is in my passport and on the ticket, which I always pack into my carryon for security and store in the overhead compartment. After I buckle myself into my seat I usually then realize, bugger I need those. But, I am not the type of wanker who stands up needlessly to open an overhead compartment. The person who only just sat down in their seat and then realized there is something so important in their hand luggage they must stand up and rummage through it right before take-off before the hostess tells them to sit down.

  Instead, to piss people off I prefer to complete my immigration form at the last possible second. When I am the next to be called forward at customs. This makes me the type of wanker who is always desperate to borrow a pen from the travelers standing behind him in the immigration line. This annoys people to no end, but it is my guilty pleasure in life. Unlike a person's guilty pleasure of watching Keeping up with the Kardashians, mine doesn't cause irreparable brain damage.

  Arriving in Los Angeles from Tokyo, I stand on wobbly legs in front of US Immigration at LAX asking to the people around me for a pen. Then I realize I can't find my I-94 form. My passport is here, my green card, and the ticket stub too, but what have I done with the immigration form? I vaguely recall that I was using it as a drink coaster somewhere over the longitude of Hawaii. That was about bourbon number seven. It might still be attached to the bottom of the glass? Damn. Oh well, too late to do anything about it now. I stumble forward to support myself heavily against the immigration official's booth. 'I think my form was lost on the plane,' I closely squint at the ticket, 'Singapore Airlines flight 12.' The official sternly looks at me. What a hopeless prick he probably thinks. However, under the Constitution, being blind rotten drunk is not a reason to deny a person entry to the country. It at least confirms I am not Muslim.

  'Fill in the form, please,' he gruffly orders, while passing me the distinctive blue card for passengers arriving to the US. He hands me a pen. I fumble it and it drops to the floor. First strike. I make a few attempts to pick it up. My fingers feel like they are made of the soft dough of Pillsbury Crescent Rolls before fresh out of the tin. The Immigration Official watches in stupefaction as I push the pen around his counter for five minutes unable to hold it. Strike two. He snatches the form from me, looks at the details in my passport and fills it in. 'Just sign it,' he says. As if me being unable to grasp the pen beforehand didn't foreshadow that I would have a bugger of a time performing that function as well. I grapple with the pen and finally lock it in between my digits with something approaching a death grip. I lean down close to the paper, so I can clearly see the small X beside which I sincerely hope to put my signature. To no avail. I am too drunk to even remember what my signature looks like. I am having a shocker.

  I forlornly look up at the Immigration man, 'I can't do it. I'm sorry.'

  'Your signature? You can't put your signature on the paper?' The way he says it makes it sound like he has never seen anyone so drunk that they can't write their own name.

  'Yes, I know. I just can't. I really can't.'

  The whirlwind of emotions this poor man is enduring must cover everything from, we need to enact a law to lock up fools like this, all the way to why didn’t I study harder at college, so I don't have to put up with this shit.

  'Pathetic.' He states.

  Thankfully I have matured since my days as a wild 20-year-old when I might have let fly with scathing abuse at everyone from the chief of homeland security to the Wright brothers. A fantastic lesson for life, if you are going to be a drunk then be a pathetic, sympathetic drunk. The type of compassion-stirring alcoholic that garners a compassionate day time talk show interview, supportive news stories, and proposals of marriage from Elizabeth Taylor. You don't want to be so pitiful as to go full David Hasselhoff. While you certainly won't be getting away with any shit pulling a Mel Gibson. Unless you're Mel Gibson.

  'Are you proud of yourself?' He asks.

  'I'm from Australia. Of course, I'm bloody proud of myself mate. I keep this up I could be Prime Minister one day.'

  With a resigned shake of his head the Official plucks the I-94 from my hand and orders me to, 'just get out of my sight.' Strike three. I'm out. When you are genuine people have no response. I drop my passport, fall over trying to pick it up, then stagger off in what I assume is the direction of baggage claim. A week in Japan has worn off on me. There is so much about their culture that I wish existed in the western world. For instance, I could really use a little map of the airport to help me find my way around. I spend an hour waiting for my bags to appear on the carousel before I remember I don't have any to collect.

  Bloody hell

  Have you ever killed someone while on holiday? Spouses, annoying children
, and people who stand up to take things out of their bags in the overhead lockers before take-off excluded. I am headed to Honolulu for a rugby tournament. Sounds awesome on the surface, but underneath my calm exterior my life is in turmoil. The normally vast amount of patience I have with the stupidity of the world has worn thin in recent months. My travel agent and best mate Jonesy thinks it is in my best interests to attend the event in the islands to calm me down. Of course, he doesn't think to put me in a better frame of mind before we leave.

  Watching Rick Steves' travel productions on television, people have the assumption that anyone travelling on vacation must always be in the brightest of moods. Why is that? Does no bad shit ever happen to anyone during or right before vacation? How is it that Rick Steves never gets diarrhea while travelling? Does he have a steel tube for a colon? I get diarrhea after my first meal of foreign food. Am I the only one? Sorry I digress. I love travelling, don't get me wrong, there are simply enough pitfalls and hassles with it that it is always advantageous to not already be suicidal when you arrive at check-in. Don't know what Jonesy thinks a weekend in Hawaii will do for me. Molokai, Lanai, Maui, Kauai, every bloody word ends in an 'i.' That alone is enough to send someone postal.