Archive for January, 2008

Boys in a Box

Published by Bob Sanchez on January 29, 2008 in Bike. 1 Comment

This particular ride was canceled due to rain, so I was really looking forward to the makeup a week later. Didn’t know exactly where we were going, but I knew that it wouldn’t be at a hellish pace because the old ladies were coming along.

We departed at 8:30 from the Bike Shop, and if I had to guess I’d say it wasn’t a hair over 40 degrees. I had a ski mask, earmuffs, and scarf on underneath my helmet as well as double layers everywhere else, and I was cooking. I took off half the stuff and jammed it into the pockets of my heavy jacket, right next to a small bottle of sake that I was told to bring along to keep warm.

We took back roads all the way up to Tosa-Yamada, a town I had been to several times before to watch baseball games. We passed a little patch of land peppered with every vegetable imaginable. It was just a quarter-acre among thousands of acres of farmland, and nothing was special about it except the variety of produce. Cabbage, ginger, carrots, radishes, broccoli, tomatoes, pumpkins, several different types of onions, and the list goes on.

We waited for the old folks in front of this plot, and I didn’t read the sign until we had started up again. It threw me for a loop, so I turned around and read it again:

Pick-It-Yourself Market!
Grab a basket from out back and load it up with whatever you want!
Drop the money in the bucket!
Enjoy the fruits of the labor of your land!

I thought that was a pretty cool variation of the Honesty Market and said so out loud. It was here that Mr. Bike Shop would drop his first gem of the day:

“I don’t think that they are free.”

We met a large group at a temple in Tosa-Yamada and wheeled off for some museum on the Monobe River. I didn’t really care where we were going, it was just nice to be outside and with people after spending last weekend alone at home watching the rain. I spoke mostly with another foreign fella in the club, and he was giving me plenty of reasons to stay in Kochi for another year.

It really is a wonderful place. For being the toughest winter I’ve ever experienced, it isn’t bad at all. Aside from the crappy apartment buildings and having to defend yourself against the cold all hours of the day, it’s totally doable in Kochi.

Broken record time: the scenery and nature are just amazing. I looked at the Monobe River, the sky, the trees, and the road and I got so excited about it that it took a physical toll by the end of the day.

We continued upstream, crossing the river on iron bridges several times. These bridges were constructed with see-through steel grating where asphalt would normally be, so we were afforded views beneath as well as above and of all sides!

The museum was in there somewhere, but it was under construction and I was too busy trying to appreciate everything I had been seeing all day. Most riders headed home on their bikes from the museum, but Mr. Bike Shop coerced us into going “just 6 miles farther” to a hot spring that he knew of.

I still haven’t learned how to speak Mr. Bike Shop’s language. He said it would take “1 hour plus alpha,” to which I asked what the hell this alpha business was all about.

He said, “Relax, alpha is just some undetermined amount of time. It’ll probably be like an hour and a half.”

Over two hours and about 12 miles later, we arrived at the Sasa Hot Spring, nestled in a canyon beneath Three Peaks.

I’m beginning to think that Mr. Bike Shop talks the way he does on purpose and that his distances and times are latent challenges. Maybe when he’s duping me into doing something I wouldn’t have done if I knew the truth, what he’s really doing is saying, “See? Didn’t know you could go that far, did you?”

Back to Sasa Hot Spring and Three Peaks. We dismantled our bikes and put them atop the Bike Shop’s van, which their daughter had driven in order to meet us and take us home. We entered an A-frame building made of logs, complete with a smoking chimney.

This would be my first hot spring with the bike club, and I was looking forward to it. Six guys, including me, piled into the tiniest bathhouse dressing room I’ve seen since I’ve been here.

It didn’t get much better as I stepped through the curtain and into what I can honestly call a bath-room. Most hot springs are resort-like, with rows upon rows of squat showers, saunas, and Turkish baths. This place was just a bit bigger than my bedroom.

Three sets of spigots, not shower heads, stuck out of the wall about 18 inches off the ground. Icy water spurted from the hot water spigot and I did my best not to gag at the hideous odor of sulfur when the hot water finally came out.

And the bath - it was a wooden tub about the size of a couple of coffins put together. It looked like a gigantic sake box, and the hot spring water trickled into it from a single bamboo reed resting on one corner.

I had dallied getting naked and showered, so I had the unenviable task of squeezing between middle-aged men who were already positioned, very comfortable, and very naked. I got in and the displaced water whooshed over the side, much to the delight of the other guys. I’m in the best shape I’ve ever been in and I weigh about what I did in high school, but you can still pinch more inches of me than you could of them.

Rub-a-dub-dub, six men in a tub. We were able to relax, but quarters were cramped. Mr. Bike Shop started telling me about his first trip ever overseas, to Los Angeles about 20 years ago. He’s a good story-teller and he had me leaning closer and closer, trying to get the best earful possible.

His left eyebrow shot up, and he gave me a sly look and said, “Wait a minute, Mac. Check this out!”

His left hand was fishing around for something in the murky water, and I choked at the thought of what it could be. What was this crazy old dude about to show me?

He cocked a grin and slowly raised a One-Cup Sake bottle out of the bath. He peeled back the lid, giggling, and gave a toast to an imaginary partner.

After three seconds plus alpha, I exploded in laughter so deep and hard that it hurt. Mr. Bike Shop is a tricky fella, he certainly knows how to take a kid for a ride.

School Funnies

Published by Bob Sanchez on January 19, 2008 in Funnies. 1 Comment

If “Do you like your job?” was strictly a yes or no question, I’d say “No.” The kind of English “teaching” I do stinks. It is a horrible combination of expectations and responsibilities without power or authority.

However, the job makes me smile and laugh on occasion and isn’t a bad gig considering what I get to do on the weekends.

The students’ energy level ranges from catatonic to manic. Some classes are absolutely comatose: half of the students are asleep, the other half is text-messaging or playing blackjack, and three or four students are actually trying to pay attention.

The complete opposite of this is a class full of rambunctious 17-year-old boys that need everything but a bit and bridle to corral them into learning English. They’re also texting and playing blackjack, but more so than that they are acting out the latest comedian’s shtick, punching each other, or wrestling in the narrow aisles.  Civil Engineering classes are anything but!

The other classes are usually somewhere in between with a few characters at either extreme. When I pick on a narcoleptic student, he’ll say, “Oh, yeah, Mac, very good, naisu to meeto yuu…” and then trail off and go back to sleep. Amazingly, that’s that at this school. The teacher will say, “Wake up, sleepyhead,” to be able to say that she tried and then continue with the lesson.

A village idiot-type will reply with, “Mistah Mac, Engrrrish berrrrry, berrrrry deefeekarrruto!” to which I say that the kid has a future in Spanish. The wild ones tend to be able to roll their Rs well.

They also tend to come up with the gems that I write home about.

A couple of months ago, while going through an excruciatingly boring review lesson for the 11th or 12th time, I asked some future mechanics how to say “refrigerator” in English. This one gets them because it’s long and full of sounds that Japanese people don’t make.

The big kid in the front, who kind of resembled a refrigerator himself, said, “Kuuraa box!” rather confidently. I told him in Japanese that he wasn’t wrong, but that I was looking for a more modern word.

He screwed up his face, and then I saw the light go off in his head. He stuck out his index finger and swept it across his body, smiling as he shouted, “NOW kuuraa box!”

I dropped the textbook I was holding and fell over the podium laughing. The class exploded and so did Mr. Refrigerator. You totally had to be there, but for us it was beautiful, glorious laughing from the gut that I hope we never forget.

These things help me get through the week. I love kids like Mr. Refrigerator. He has complete disregard for the shame that many Japanese kids feel when they make a mistake. He wasn’t exactly right and he wasn’t exactly wrong, but he tried anyway and he communicated.

“NOW” popped up again a week later in a lesson about shopping with the electricians-in-training. The teacher and I were reading some prepared dialogues and the students were supposed to write down what the customer bought and how much he paid.

I played the role of the customer and had to trim my order down from two CDs to one because I didn’t have enough cash on me. This was a mildly poignant dialogue for me given that Japan is a cash society and that I had been in that situation several times before.

Mr. Refrigerator’s cousin, another “big kid in the front,” snickered and made a remark about my character’s financial situation. Still playing the role, I turned toward him and said, “Hey, I’ve got the cash at home, OK? I’ll come back and buy the other CD later.”

He told me that Japanese still considered that kind of person to be bimbo (poor) and I let him know how ridiculous I thought that idea was. He thought about it for a second and offered a compromise: “NOW bimbo!”

The class tittered and we moved along with the lesson. I had made a home delivery order sheet and crafted a structured conversation between the customer and the operator. We went over the exchange and I asked the students, “What does ‘delivery’ mean in Japanese?”

A few of them turned to each other and pondered the meaning of deribarii. Mr. Refrigerator’s cousin kicked off the following conversation:

Mr. Refrigerator’s cousin: Hey Mac, is that the same deribarii as deriheru?
English Teacher: Knock that off, Mr. Refrigerator’s cousin! That’s inappropriate!
Me: Yes, that’s the one.
ET and MRC in unison: Wait, you know what deriheru is?

[Deriheru = deribarii herusu = “delivery health,” a home delivery-style telephone escort service]

Me: Of course I do, I don’t live under a rock.
MRC: Why do you know deriheru? What kinds of girls do you order?
Me: I’ve never used deriheru, it’s not my thing.
MRC: Awww, c’mon, why not?

Me (making the money sign): NOW bimbo!!!!

I had thought of it and said it before I realized its double-meaning. Of course, I was the only one in the classroom who understood that this newly-coined Japanglish phrase could also be used to define deriheru!

The next day, I visited the Special class with the shopping lesson in hand. In a different exercise, they were to order any number of onions, postcards, coffee, or bacon in a General Store-like setting where the clerk measures the items for you.

I encouraged students in all classes to order items other than the four on the worksheet, and of course plenty of boys ordered cigarettes, beer, and girls, but at least they were being creative.

There are only 15 kids in this class, so someone always gets left without a partner. That someone is usually a very mousey girl that sits in a front corner. She’s smart and pretty good at written English, but she has difficulty speaking it, and Japanese, too, for that matter. When she does speak, it’s eerily quiet and makes me wonder if she isn’t some kind of Japanese ghost that only I can see. I usually partner up with her.

Me, the clerk: How can I help you?
Eerily Quiet: Ah…I’d like…some…coffee…please…
Me: How much would you like?
EQ: … … … …

I looked at her and she was shaking softly first, then more violently. I feared the worst. If anyone had closet epilepsy or some other scary medical condition, it would be this girl. You just never knew what, exactly, was going on in her head.

I peered beyond her stringy hair, which she always had in front of her face, and saw her lips curled back over her yellowed teeth. She was laughing faintly, her body doing more laughing than her mouth.

She took a huge, gasping breath and continued the eerily silent laughing. I can hardly call it laughing, but I don’t know another word for it. Crying is to sobbing as laughing is to what she was doing.

Me: How much would you like, Eerily Quiet?
EQ: I’d… … …I’d like… … …

The convulsing continued. I was stuck in this strange place, because I knew she was laughing, but hadn’t yet closed the book on a serious medical condition requiring medical attention.

I decided to try the question one last time, and then dial 1-1-9 if the shaking didn’t stop.

Me: Eerily Quiet, can you tell me how much coffee you would like?
EQ: I’d…like… … …one gram!

Then she began to giggle uncontrollably. She had just made a funny. Coffee was listed in my “general store” at 200 yen per hundred grams.

I released the tension that had built up and shared a good laugh with Eerily Quiet. The words themselves were amusing at most, but the roller coaster through which she had just led me multiplied the humor. I charged her two yen (about two cents) and returned to the front of the classroom.

I wanted Eerily Quiet to share her treasure with the class, but unfortunately the teacher had already gone through and chosen a few pairs of outgoing boys.

The boys did the charming yet typical orders of 10,000 onions, three girls, ten kilograms of bacon, and the like. The chimes rang and Eerily Quiet’s unique little dialogue vaporized like I’m sure she does when something sets her off. Or when a fellow White Spirit dies in anger.

Truly, you never know when your day will be changed by a gram of coffee.

“LSD Ride” or “I Put the S in LSD”

Published by Bob Sanchez on January 13, 2008 in Bike. 0 Comments

I make it a point to go and see the Bike Shops once a week outside of our Sunday group rides. They’re good people and have plenty to say about matters other than pedals, gears, and equipment.

I doubt that I’ll leave much of an impression on their lives, as they are well-known in the biking world and have enough friends and acquaintances, but I treasure my chances to learn from them.

Mrs. Bike Shop gave me the traditional New Year’s greetings and then said, “Pictures?” in English because I had promised some snapshots from home in exchange for a picture of the Bike Shops. I told her the truth, that I had not snapped a single shot while I was at home. I left that to my family and friends, and they took some great photos, some of which I’m using on this site.

She smiled nonetheless and produced a bike club newsletter with the complete schedule for 2008. I thanked her and returned home without looking at it.

What a surprise when I checked the schedule for January 13th and saw that we would take an “LSD Ride.” It was written on this Japanese newsletter exactly as it appears here: “LSD Ride.”

Now, I’m not silly enough to believe that this actually had anything to do with drugs, and I knew that there would be a reasonable explanation. Japanese people abbreviate things and write out words in English quite casually and often, far outside our use of burrito and laissez-faire.

However, for literary purposes, cue up my giddiest, most bewildered voice: I prepared for the trip, wondering what amazing things we would see, hear, and taste on our LSD ride. Would we shoot up together at the Bike Shop or wait until we got to the top of Magic Mushroom Mountain?

I got to the Bike Shop before anyone else and caught Mr. Bike Shop with a toothbrush in his mouth (they live above the store). “Yo, Mr. Bike Shop, what’s an LSD Ride?”

He informed me that it stands for Long Slow Distance Ride, which in Japanese sounds like “Rong Su-roh Deesutansu Raido.”

He said that we’d be going about 65 miles round trip and that everyone would do the course at their own pace. Which, in this bike club, means that we were probably going 75 miles, the pace would be maniacal, and that I should’ve packed a sleeping bag because I was going to finish a day behind everybody else.

Keeping up with the pack was a lot of work for me, even on flat ground. The wind was in our faces as soon as we turned away from the coast and started the gentle ascent, and I quickly fell behind and lost whatever draft I could have gotten. I climbed steadily until I reached a tourist trap nearly 20 miles out of Kochi and probably got there within two or three minutes of everyone else.

The shop owners had prepared a giant vat of a New Year sweet bean soup and gave each of the riders a bowl. I got a “Wow, you’re good with chopsticks!” from a guy who has heard me detail in Japanese the trials and tribulations of being the group’s caboose. Still gets me!

It’s not LSD, but egg nog sends you on a trip that lasts for weeks. The way that sweat was oozing out of me instead of running like water, I figured I was still feeling some effects of the copious amounts of egg nog that I consumed when I was home for Christmas, so I decided to call it a day and head home.

I would have liked to see whatever it was that we were working toward on the LSD Ride, but I decided a few days ago that there’s no sense in making myself crazy on the bike and pedaling myself blind each time I go out. I don’t have anything to prove; I did that last year by trying this new activity and grinding it out. Until I get a roadie like everyone else, I will probably not accompany them for complete trips.

That will go down as my first LSD trip!