Long Beach: the August 4th Lightbulb Mouth Radio Hour.

My first stop in the grand ol' United States of America was Long Beach, California, to visit Heather, who was interning at Write Bloody Publishing, an independent press that does mostly poetry but also dabbles in kids' books and more. One of the many fun things they do is host the weekly Lightbulb Mouth Radio Hour, a kind of variety show that features a musician, an informationist [someone they interview about something], and an author [usually a poet, but not always].

The first time I went promised to be a good time, since there was a - wow! - celebrity involved [as I found out for myself the next time I went, it's actually also a good time - maybe even a better time - when there are no celebrities involved]. Since I got there early to help set up, I nabbed a front-row seat.

The show always opens with an open mic. I had no idea what this darling old man was saying most of the time, but he was adorable and gave all the girls marshmallows after the show.

Champagne in a can with a bendy straw. So much class in such a small package.

Hosted by Derrick C. Brown. So much class in such a poetic package.

Also hosted, this time, by Jeremy Radin.

[Note: all videos in this post not by me.]

Musical guest: Jason Whitton.

Additionally hosted by Jeremy Radin with a napkin mustache.

Informationist: David Cross. Yeah, that guy. The microphone was very annoyingly positioned. What's up with microphones actually having to be somewhat near people's mouths?

Communicating with Edith Piaf the only way he knows how.

Reading from his not-particularly-funny book.

Also with Jason Bowe.

Author: G. Murray Thomas, a big player in the Southern California poetry scene.

Around Moorea.

Some pictures from my 37-mile / 60-kilometer bike ride around Moorea.

Bungalows right on the water - at another hotel. I'm not rolling in quite enough cash for these. All the different blues in the water were just beeeeeeeeautiful.

Typical road view.

Pineapple tagging?!?

The interior of the island is mountainous.

The above two pictures are of the island of Tahiti off in the distance.

Tahiti again, with the mini-island in front of it.

French Polynesia!

I bought my big, intercontinental flights from STA Travel [especially recommended if you're a student and/or under 26 years old] in Freiburg back in February. The travel agent and I spoke German with each other, both thinking that the other had an interesting accent - and then I mentioned that I was from the US, and she said, "Oh! I'm from Australia!" Then we switched to English. When she was looking up flights from Tokyo to Los Angeles, she said, "Looks like the best one is with Air Tahiti Nui, and there's a stopover in Tahiti. If you want, you can extend that for a few days and just stay in Tahiti." I certainly couldn't say no to that, so although it hadn't been even a glimmer of a thought going in, I walked out of STA with two nights in French Polynesia.

After months of sharing apartments, rooms, and sometimes even beds, sleeping on all kinds of surfaces, not having much time to myself, constantly being on the go, and so on, I was determined to just relax and do as little as I wanted while I was there. Most of my time there was spent reading and sleeping, which might seem like silly things to do when you only have two days in French Polynesia, but I don't really care what you think!

On a whim, when I was booking my hotel, I decided to stay on Moorea, an island about nine miles northwest of Tahiti [they're both part of the Society Islands, which I've read about plenty of times in anthropology books but never really thought I'd end up in/on].

I stayed at Hotel Kaveka, which I can neither recommend nor not recommend - it's pretty much what you can expect in its price range [by the way, Polynesia is expeeeensive! I'm glad I was only there for two nights]. Buuuut it was on Cook's Bay and had beautiful views [then again, so does the whole island!]. Here's what it looked like from my bungalow:

They had a little beach where I sat and read as the sun went down.

And when the sun went down, the crabs came out!

Tahitian beer at a restaurant down the road [that is, the one road that goes around the whole island].

A cat hanging out in Moorea's open-air airport.

I took the ferry from Tahiti to Moorea, but coming back I missed the last ferry because the shuttle didn't come when the hotel said it would. Instead, I took a taxi to the airport, bought a plane ticket on the spot for about $50, and hopped on the plane that left about 15 minutes later. That's how flying should be!

Baby plane!

Don't worry, though, I wasn't completely lazy while I was there - the morning of my last day, I rented a bike from the hotel and biked around the whole island. Pictures from that to come!

Overall opinion: French Polynesia is beautiful but a bit expensive and awkward as a single traveler [so many honeymooners...]. A lot like Hawaii, but French. Nice for a couple days of relaxing, if you're in the neighborhood!

Japan: miscellaneous.

Going into Japan, customs decided to rifle through my luggage. Of course, the guy found my two boxes full of heparin needles [I have to shoot myself up with an anticoagulant before each flight because I had deep-vein thrombosis last year] and was suspicious. He asked me what they were for, and I tried to tell him, but I guess "thrombosis" isn't one of the English words they teach customs. I flashed a little leg to show my compression stocking. He asked me whether I was sick, and I said not anymore, but I still have to treat it. He asked whether I was a doctor. Uh...no. Finally he let me carry on my merry little way.

I had been worried the whole time that the large number of needles might be a problem at some point, but I guess as long as I say I'm not a doctor, everything's okay.

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Japan is a difficult country for me to really get into. A lot of it seems really cutesy and artificial and repressed. Someone told me that Japan has the highest rate of people unhappy with their day-to-day lives. That's just not really my bag, man. But maybe I just need to spend more time outside of Tokyo.

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I already mentioned that I bought a new digital camera there. One of the things I really like about it is that you can tell it's serious because it has a neck strap, not one of those wimpy point-and-shoot wrist straps [psh!]. Also, I didn't have to pay taxes - duty-free, baby!

But! I also got a Polaroid-style camera from Fujifilm that produces credit card-sized instant pictures. I'm not really sure what I'm going to use it for [if I had gotten it at the beginning of the trip, I would've used it for pictures with all the friends I visited], especially since the film is kind of expensive, but I'll find something!

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I got to visit my cousin Will and his wife Sachiyo [both of my paternal grandfather's two grandsons married Japanese women] and their son William Yuuki. They're raising him bilingually, but since Sachiyo spends the most time with him, he speaks a lot more Japanese. In fact, he started out referring to himself as "Billy," which is what Will calls him, but after spending so much time with his mom, he now refers to himself as "Yuuki," which Sachiyo calls him. Huh!

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I didn't get too crazy with food on this section of the trip - the donuts really did make me smile.

The whole time, though, I really wanted katsudon [the Japanese version of schnitzel with rice and egg] and never quite managed to get it. Finally, the day I left, Sarah took me to a fast food restaurant down the street and we got fast food katsudon. Not quite the same, but better than no katsudon at all!

Japan: the Lockup.

After the beer garden, we went to Shibuya to meet up with Kaori and Shihomi. I wasn't any help making a decision about what to do, partly because I'm not exactly a Shibuya expert and partly because I'm never any help making decisions. Eventually someone in the group got a mischievous glimmer in their eyes and said, "Ooh, let's take her to the Lockup!"

They wouldn't tell me what it was, and after going through the door, it mostly seemed like a cheesy haunted house, with a dummy being "electrocuted" and so on. But there was just a little bit of that, and when we walked through another door, it became a jail-themed restaurant/bar, still decorated in a pretty cheesy way. A woman in a naughty cop outfit came up to us and apparently asked who should be handcuffed - everyone else in the group nominated me. So she handcuffed me and led us all to our "cell" - each group gets their own cell with a table [like any good Japanese restaurant, you take your shoes off and sit on the floor].

My drink - you use the turkey baster thing to put the alcohol into the other test tubes and then mix all of the colors however you want. A lot of the drinks had a "mad scientist" theme - I think this was one was called the human experiment.
Note also the pill on the plate - bad-tasting liquor in an edible plastic-y cover that you really take like a pill.

Occasionally the music would go crazy and the lights would start flashing, and monsters would come into cells. Sarah and Erin chose to dance with ours - and/or stab and be choked by ours.

My senior year of high school, I went to Tokyo for a week and a half on a school trip. My classmates and I all stayed with host families whose daughters were going to the same college. My host sister [Kaori] and I stayed in touch for a little bit at first but then kind of lost contact, and when I tried to e-mail her and the other host sisters that I was coming, most of the addresses bounced back and I didn't hear back from anyone. I tried one more last-ditch effort a few days before I left Japan, and finally Shihomi, one of the other host sisters, wrote me back and got back in touch with Kaori [they had lost contact with each other, too], and we all planned to meet up. So seven years after I had been to Japan and six after they had come to visit in Wisconsin, we finally saw each other again! I was so happy and glad it worked out.

Shihomi starred in a great photo series:

"Oh hey, what's this?"

"OH GOD what is this?!?"

"Well...guess I'll eat it."

Back to Japan: Germany in Tokyo.

The street Sarah lives on is also known as Bremenstraße. The story behind that is that...there is no story. Some administrator just thought it'd be cool.

They even have a little statue of the Bremen Town Musicians.

One night we went to a beer garden, which is not really at all like a German beer garden.

You pay about $40 each for two hours of all you can eat and all you can drink. They keep bringing plates of raw meat and vegetables to the table...

...and you cook it all yourself on a little grill in the middle of the table.

And you get your own drinks - beer, juice, and so on - from the drink bar.

Don't be fooled - the grass is fake.

Some patrons dressed up for the occasion.

Cambodia: seriously the last thing - but it's exciting and dangerous!

I'm pretty sure I remembered the last thing I wanted to mention about Cambodia.

One evening at the Yaklom Hill Lodge, Brian and I independently decided to head to the sunset viewing point. He had a net to catch bugs [oh, traveling with biologists...] and I had on pajama pants and sandals and was carrying a book because I thought it would be a quick, easy jaunt up there and I could read a few pages and then enjoy a beautiful sunset. [Helpful hint: this did not end up happening.]

We ran into each other on the way up and continued the journey together. The hill lodge was in the jungle, so the trail was a little rough. It got darker and darker, and we couldn't find the viewing point. After climbing over some downed trees, we realized the trail had disappeared. We halfheartedly tried to find another one going up, but it was getting so dark that we knew we had already missed any good sunset and decided to give up and head back down.

Three-fourths of the way down, when it was all dusky, off to the side of the trail we heard the leaves rustling and then a growl, whereupon I said, "Oh shit!", Brian roared back, and we both ran like hell.

We're both pretty sure it was a boar, but the rest of the group mostly just mocked us when we told them about it. Thanks for your concern, guys.

Japan: America[ns] in Chiba.

Sarah and I hung out with Fred, an elementary school friend, in Chiba, an area that's partnered with Wisconsin for school exchanges and so on. We did a tour of American restaurants. [Two restaurants counts as a "tour." Just go with it.] Our first stop was Pantry Coyote, or, as the menu says, "the storge [sic] of food of the prairie wolf."

They had big, delicious burgers.

Shark! Not necessarily American.

Next stop: Hartley, the cowboy restaurant.

Americuuuuuuuh.

Did you know that cowboys used chopsticks? Now you know!

After all the Americanness, we needed some Japaneseness, so we went to a karaoke place. We passed a Burning Building on the way, but no one was putting it out. What's the point of the sign if no one cares?

Karaoke room - we snuck some booze in [my classy choice was a bottle of Franzia] so we didn't have to pay their high prices. Don't tell them.

Just to make them hate me a little, I made Fred and Sarah sing Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber. But I made up for it by also choosing "Come Together," which I bet is one of the least frequently chosen Beatles karaoke songs.