国際友情

There's a river that runs through Kyoto called the Kamo River and runs right along side one of the most popular areas for the university age crowd to hang out, the Sanjo and Shijo areas of Kyoto. These areas are packed with clubs, bars, karaoke bars, yakitori, ramen and various other restuarants, but there are tons of people who just hang out by the river chatting, drinking, or having little fires. Anyway, last Friday Aaron (the other guy from U of T), Andy (from Washington D.C.) and myself went down to the river just to chill out, drink, and maybe get a couple of phone numbers. Things started out fairly slow and then we met a group of the craziest guys ever. What started out from Aaron asking for a cigarette turned into a night that included sumo wrestling in the Kamo river, hitting on basically every girl that walked by, and even some nudity thanks to Tetsuo who wanted to show everyone his shaved dick so he stripped and went for a swim in the river and then posed for the all the people in the middle of the river, and there were a lot of people too. Probably 250-300 people were within viewing distance at the time. Funny thing was no one else really seemed to think this was out of the ordinary and some people just didn't even seem to care at all. Then as we were about to leave they invited us to a birthday party on Wednesday (yesterday) Kitai who was turning 22.

Last night, the three of us went back down to Sanjo and met up with the guys. Then we went to an izakaya which is kinda like a japanese style pub. Yakitori skewers and other small foods as well as beer and other liquors are the staple of any izakaya outing. Very similar to wings and beer back home. The place we went to was called Watami and it was incredibly nice on the inside. For 30 bucks each we got 2 plates full of about 7 or 8 different dishes and all we could drink. As you can imagine we were there for hours. We also got to meet one of their friends who wasn't there on Friday named Ken who speaks incredible English. His mother is a translator so he's been exposed to it for a while. He even has a slight British accent when he talks in English. The only thing that's weird is he doesn't know much slang so he speaks very properly. Line of the night was when Kitai was showing Ken his presents (we got him a couple porn mags, Tetsuo got him a couple of sex toys) and Ken turned to the three of us and said "He's full of sperm" After a good laugh we introduced the word horny to him and explained it. The three of us also learned a lot of great Japanese slang, but unfortunatly I can't remember too much of it anymore and the stuff I do remember, well let's just say it's good stuff and leave it at that. The guys invited us to come over to Doshisha University where they are all at and they said they will introduce us to tons of girls who would love to meet foreigners. Doshisha is located a convinient 10 minute bike ride from Kyoto University so that is the plan for next Wednesday afternoon.

It's so fantastic that all of this came from such a little thing. Even though our Japanese isn't amazing and they're English aside from Ken's isn't either, they're always trying their best to speak in English to us and us in Japanese to them. Even though the words may be jumbled sometimes, the meaning is clear and we all seemed to take a liking to each other and bonded pretty quickly. The start of a great friendship I think.



Kitai (sitting) and Testuo testing out his new toy