Okay, I’m sorry. I admit it, I’ve been slacking. I went to Japan, a major international film festival, and what I can only describe as a Rock ‘n Roll Flame Daredevil Explosion Festival in Daejeon and I still haven’t updated this site. But it’s only because I’ve been so busy and haven’t had time. That and I’ve been hard at work pursuing my more fictional writing. So anyways, this post will be a quick and dirty update on some of the absurd experiences I’ve had recently.
We’ll start with Japan. My number one motivation for going was to visit fellow Mac English major/EFL extraordinaire Wes in his little city of Uedo. After traveling for a very, very long time I finally arrived, looked around for Wes, and only succeeded in finding him when he shouted, “Jake! You look like a idiot!” To be fair, he was right. My few days in Uedo featured darts and beer, and some raw horse meat. I’m not entirely sure why horse gets such a bad rap as a food in the West. It was pretty tasty.
Anyways, from Uedo I went to Tokyo, where I had a rather strange mission for myself. I had to out-weird the package I received from my friends in Saint Paul, which included pre-colored coloring book pages, two varieties of cat food, random candy, and what I think was a ball of cat hair. That meant going to Akihabara, the video game/girls-in-maid-costumes-cafe/sex shop center of Tokyo. Basically, if you want to see all that weird stuff you’ve heard about people seeing in Japan, this is where you go. So I went there, and found no less than three different varieties of liquor-scented ‘erotic oil’, which I intended to pack up in a box and send to my friends because let’s face it, that’s pretty funny.
What was considerably less funny was when the bottles of liquor-scented sex oil turned out to be a little too big for the strict ‘liquid on an airplane’ limits and my bag was searched. A week’s worth of dirty laundry was unearthed, and the security guard was rather confused by the bottles of brightly-colored oil in my bag and had to run them by about three of his colleagues. While snickering. I tried to keep a sheepish grin on my face so that they knew that I did not, in fact, have an oddly specific addiction to this stuff.
You know you want it.In the end, they made me check my bag. So it could’ve been worse. I could’ve been arrested for attempted lubricant terrorism or something.
So anyways, Japan was indeed a blast. Tokyo is the cleanest city I have ever been to, almost to the level of being creepy. There is no garbage anywhere (and no trash cans, either, which seems something of a paradox to me). The food is delicious, public transportation efficient, and landmarks appropriately beautiful.
Quick! What does this Tokyo landmark remind you of?
October brought the Busan film festival, which is a huge event. For me, it mostly involved standing in line for tickets, finding out that the movies we really wanted to see were sold out, and settling on a couple of documentaries. One was an interesting look at growing up in the Soviet Union as it crumbled, the other was a three-hour propaganda film for kabuki theatre in Tokyo. And we saw a Korean movie star! I don’t know who it was, but I know it was a movie star because he was surrounded by people with cameras and autograph materials.
Finally this brings me to the Daejeon Balloon and Rock Festival. Which also included guys flying around in weird parachute/giant fan contraptions, towering jets of flame, fireworks, and epic fantasy quest music in the background, leading to the single most absurd moment of sensory overload of my life.
Center: towering jet of flame. Background: fireworks. Top right: Guys in weird parachute/fan contraptions. Not pictured: Epic fantasy quest music.www.theflashfictionoffensive.blogspot.com
At last, I leave with some photos of the magnificently unsettling (and deserted) Daejeon EXPO Park. For your amusement. ‘Til next time, dear readers!
