Going International: Snow Monkeys, Temples, and A Couple Swigs of Supposedly Summer Mikans

Well, that was quite the long title, I suppose, but once you get going with colons and shit it's hard to stop. Yes, this is Chad, posting from a far distant land much better known for it's sake than it's beer, and for temples and geishas and other cultural treasures even more than that, perhaps, but nevertheless, I'm writing to say that good beer night can in fact transcend national boundaries. Or should I say, we're writing? Well, right now it's just me because Marnie is busy cleaning my breakfast dishes (and seeing how she can't really type for beans it'll mostly be me anyways) but the sentiment is certainly plural.

So, beer? I suppose there are a few ways we could break Marnie's trip out here into segments, but for the purposes of the good beer blog I guess it makes sense to use the few times we drank alcohol as landmarks. This is going to be a long fucking post.

Stage One: Sapporo Gold



We started things off right with this delicate amber blend of hops (?) and barley (maybe?) that tastes like nothing less than the dregs of a thirty rack of the Best Chest. Yep, in general Japanese beer looks like piss and tastes like it too, so, hey, Keystone goes international, too, it seems. Wanna comment on that Marnie? No. Spot on.

However, a lot has to be said for the effect of atmosphere in improving the quality of an otherwise thin, barely alcoholic can of water sprinkled with yellow food-coloring, and we had atmosphere in spades. Picture this intimate scene: you find yourself walking down a brilliantly lit festival street, shop keepers to either side hawking Hello Kitty purses, cheap samurai-swords, postcards plastered with images of Fuji, the Kinkakuji, Harajuku at night and various other popular spots, and maybe a few pokemon-themed carnival masks, people calling out to you in a language that manages to communicate a headache, but not much else. Take a left, and escape into a side-street. The stalls are gone, but the lights and hanging lanterns aren't. Take a right, and stumble into relative blackness. The party's over. Or is it? Look up, and in the darkness you see a bright white sign that says something Chad can read but you can't. It says, "Kamogawa Family Inn." You've arrived. Our room was a study in the elegance of the marshes: tatami mats, tree-branches stuck directly to walls, thin paper walls enclosing two ... Ok, thankfully Marnie is here to look over my shoulder and tell me when I get too apostrophic and retarded, so, let's skip to the beer. It sucked. But we drank it out of teacups like dilletantes and it felt... classy? Whatever.



Stage Two: There's no Beer here, just Monkeys and Magic Apples

I defer... Hey, it's marnie. Chad's too wordy, so I get to do this part. So, we went from tokyo to nagano to see the snow monkeys (aka japanese macaques). They like to lounge around in hot springs and it's the cutest thing ever. In this monkey park that we went to, they get fed 3 times a day and their monkey bath gets cleaned daily. They have a pretty cushy life and in return they ignore all the people taking pictures of them with cell phones about a foot away from their faces and just go about their monkey business. They just scurry about your feet and fight and hug each other for warmth and just be freaking adorable. As, chad said, there is no beer in this story, but I really like the monkeys.




This picture is sort of misleading because it doesn't show how close you can really get to the monkeys (or how close they get to you), but chad's camera died before we got close so that's all we got. I have a lot of pictures and videos, but I can't put them up. Oh well, just look them up on youtube. They're great. We almost saw one rip a japanese baby's face off when her parents let her toddle off and she tried to pet a monkey. That's it about monkeys for now. We also discovered that this part of japan grows great apples. I mean really fucking good. UNBELIEVABLE. I'm addicted to them like crack. Here is a picture of it.



As you can see from that ecstatic face, they're good. So good, in fact, that fifteen minutes later...




You'd think that look of long-suffering might be a result of being dressed up like a Japanese doll, but, it's actually just apple-withdrawal. She stole at least three more after that.

Stage Three: New Years Eve

You'd think Japan would be a crazy place to party on New Year's Eve, but it turns out that you might find more energy and excitement in a small village in Ghana. 11:35 and aside from a few lonely sheets of paper fluttering around in the wind there was nothing moving on Hamamatsu's main party street (which is usually just rocking, let me tell you). There was a drunk British guy raving about "getting holy," which I think is a euphemism for boning his Japanese girlfriend in a public toilet, though I'm not sure. He claimed he went to a temple to hear the bells, but the hands he kept enthusiastically clapping on my shoulders smelled a little fishy, that's all I'm saying. Like he wasn't telling the truth about something, you know? Whatever, that story was stupid and mostly a lie (there's really little doubt that that dude went to a temple to "hear the bells"). To cut to the quick, we did some stuff with some people, it was sort of unremarkable, we tried to go to a bar, they were pretty much all closed, we found one that was run by a very affable Turkish man who gave us free apple kool-aid that he claimed was champagne, then left the bar and told us we could go behind and just help ourselves, then shit got boring and we left to drink the good beer that I had been saving for months, just for this very occasion. Was it good, Marnie? "Meh." That about sums it up. Shizuoka Summer Mikan Ale.



It tasted a lot better than Sapporo Gold, that's for sure, but I wouldn't exactly say that I was smacked in the face with a blast of tangeriney-freshness, either. It tasted like a Red Hook ESB. Good, but otherwise unremarkable. Sigh. Check out this fucking cake, though. It's fucking cute.



It's a Christmas cake. Japanese people think we eat them in America.

Last Segment: Sake in Welch's Jam Cups (really pretty ones)
So this is marnie again. We were in a train station and there was a liquor store and we went in and were immediately drawn to these cheap glass cups of sake. We spent about 10 minutes picking out the prettiest cups (mine has lilies and chad's has fireworks and mountains). Well, we took them back to our inn, but it's against the rules to drink or eat in our rooms so we had to be silent and most importantly, we had to finish the entire thing once we opened them because they was no way to get rid of it otherwise. They were about 16 percent alcohol, but they weren't that big, so we just prayed they would be drinkable. Well, they sort of were. It tasted like soy sauce with the salt replaced by alcohol. The worst part was that they got nastier and nastier as we powered on. By the end we were shuddering as we gulped it down completely sober.

Surprisingly sober, actually. You'd figure after downing a sizable glass container of clearly alcoholic liquid we'd at least be feeling a little bit stumbly, right? Especially Marnie, her limit is usually about two sips of beer, so three plus shots of sake should have seen her singing Kelly Clarkson songs at the top of her lungs while doing somersaults around the room. But, yeah nothhhhhhhhhhhhhhhiiiiiiiiiii oh fuck. When the drunk hit, it was like a bullet of giggle gas, and considering that the walls of that inn were made of millenia-old papyrus, if the other guests didn't know we had been drinking in our room, than they must have thought we were both really fucking funny people. Then we found 5,000 yen.

Well, that's that in a pretty large nutshell. Tomorrow we're going to my school, so maybe there will soon be another post on here entitled "When Marnie met the kid who humps fire escapes," but that'll have to wait for another day. May the fifty foot tall spirit of the Vairocana Buddha be with you always.