Continuation after a long dry spell

Hey all! I want to apologize about the long absence, it's been pretty insane over here. I haven't been blogging nearly as much as I wanted to. On the positive side, I do have an excellent answer for Question number 4 now. The coolest thing I have done so far in Japan, by far, was go to Osaka for the International Beer Festival!

It was unbelieveable. The amount of stuff we packed into a three-day weekend was really like trying to get 10 gallons of oil into a 5 gallon drum, but we pulled it off somehow. We all partied like rock stars every evening, and woke up by 9AM every morning to check out of our capsule hotel and go sightseeing all day. The guys I went with were awesome, too. I knew one guy from Shibukawa who went, named Akira, but he was meeting with some friends from high school in Osaka, so the other 5 guys all knew each other. They all ended up as ALT's, four in Japan and one going on to Thailand. I was basically just along for the ride, but I got to know them a little bit through our experiences on the trip, and they all seemed really cool. Basically, fun times all around. I will attempt to chronicle them a little bit:

When we were talking about the trip the previous week, we were discussing taking a midnight bus from Gunma to Osaka, but we shook off that idea as being stupid in the extreme. As it turns out, Friday night turned out to be a memorable night for me, too, so I'm glad we didn't try to rough it. So we took the Shinkansen (bullet train) from Tokyo to Osaka, riding in luxury for about half the way and standing packed in like sardines for the other half. For future reference, don't try to travel by train with suitcases in Japan at commuting time on a Friday. But from the moment we arrived, we were beset on all sides with stimulus. Meeting Akira's friends in the station, we went out into Osaka and the first thing we saw trying to find the hotel was a group of Japanese rappers freestyling it on the corner of a busy intersection. Being too good an opportunity to pass up, the guy Ryan jumped in and showed them how freestyle rap battles are done in New Jersey. I think the Japanese guys might have put up a bit of a fight, but none of us could understand, so we just laughed and got directions to our hotel from them and went on our merry way. Just wandering around Osaka is incredible, the amount of beautiful women and street performers and just general life in the city is enough to give you a contact high. After checking into our capsule hotel (which was kind of rugged, but better than the other capsule hotel I'd been to - this one had a little spa on the sixth floor), we set out to explore the night life in Dotonbori and America-mura (little America). We hit a bar called the Pig and Whistle, which catered to British foreigners, and proceeded to play darts for about an hour with a Japanese salaryman named Tokita (or Tokiiiiiiii!!!, as we called him), who would moon us when provoked. This kind of behavior was totally unexpected, and therefore everyone was buying him drinks, and he'd moon us again when he was dry. Kind of a 'lather, rinse, repeat' cycle, except with mooning and beer. I love Osaka. After that, we wandered around America-mura a little bit, admiring the scenery and commenting on the Yakuza driving down the middle of pedestrian streets in a white Ferrari. I think the guy Austin may have high-fived him on the way by. We chatted with bouncers outside strip clubs and passed around a bottle of alcohol and some orange juice with them. They were actually really funny guys. I forget what the alcohol was called, but I believe it's Korean and it's fairly common in Japan. Japanese guys seem to love it, for reasons I can't comprehend. It physically cleaned the snot from my nostrils, like as unto Dran-o to a clogged pipe. Regardless, we spent the rest of the evening in a bar called Pure, where I had a very wonderful time with a Japanese girl and a girl from Norway and a girl from Kentucky (for real, no shit) on the dance floor. I love Osaka. We split into two or three groups, the group I was with stayed out until about 4:30 AM. We were not the last ones in.

I will post this entry to avoid losing it, and post more a little later.