"On the Michi" Part Two

On the ferry, we slept in these little cupboards, the boat swaying up and down, but not in a malicious, stomach-churning kind of way. It was just kinda like we were sleeping in a big rocking chair. But in a cupboard. On a boat.

Upon arriving the night before, Sunao and I decided that the first thing to do, of course, was to explore the boat. We tried twice--and got caught both times--to get up to the captain's tower, but evidently it was, like, a restricted area or something, which is stupid cause that's the best view on the boat. I asked one of the men who caught us if he could arrange a meeting with the captain, like when you were a little kid riding a plane and the stewardess would arrange a trip to the cockpit to meet The Man, but he said no. Unfortunate as that was, we retired to our little beds and slept the night through, undulating to the ocean's rhythm.

We woke up the next morning a little groggy, but nothing a couple cups of coffee didn't fix. Mountain cliffs and snow-grazed hillsides of Iwate prefecture were off one side of the bow, the other side: infinitesimal ocean for days, maybe striking the Oregon and Washington Coasts in the way-distance. Sunao and I were quiet that morning, perhaps reflective and internal due to the change in scenery. After coming from urbania, seeing stretches of land without buildings and neon-lights tends to offer a nice window for quiet time. Sunao took occasional cigarette breaks outside on the deck throughout the morning, and I read my book. By noon we were ready to eat and talk excitedly about what to do once we reach Hokkaido's shore later that evening.

Nemo, an old college roommate of mine who is also living in Japan as an english teacher, is the reason for mine and Sunao's meeting a few months ago. When he was 18-years-old, Sunao took his last year of high school in Nemo's small, northern Californian town, Miranda, and that's where their friendship began. The two hadn't seen each other in over ten years, but when Nemo came up to Tokyo to visit a while back, he miraculously got a hold of Sunao, whom, ironically, lives only twenty minutes away from me by car. We all hung out a couple nights, and Sunao and I hit it off. Fortunately, Nemo arranged to be in Hokkaido the same time we would be there, so it worked out perfectly that the first leg of our trip was spent in Hokkaido's largest town Sapporo, skiing during the days, getting after IT during the nights.

We arrive at the ferry terminal. We see snow. We freak out, because where we live it is only cold, we are not afforded the accompaniment of beauty with the bitterness, so we did what anyone who had not seen snow in a while would do: we got in a huge snowball fight. That lasted for a while until we realized our ages and also that we didn't really know how to get to Sapporo, as the ferry had dumped us off in the industrial park of a city of which I can't remember the name. Thus, we headed for the taxi stand, but there were no taxi's and about ten people waiting. Luckily, one of the other passengers had the phone number of the service, and a couple taxis arrived ten minutes later. We shared a taxi with two other folks and headed for the station. The other riders, seeing that I was a foreigner with a big orange backpack, immediately started asking me what I was doing in Hokkaido, where I was from, how old am I, my blood-type, etc. I started to answer, but Sunao quickly interjected for me, saying that I was, indeed, from Canada, and was a professional skier and he was my personal photographer. Incidentally, I was there to make my debut in a international ski magazine and wish us luck, please. I knodded, not having the japanese vocabulary to continue the outrageous lie, and we arrived at the station with them in utter awe of us.

(A side note: this was a continual theme throughout the trip--us (or Sunao, really) lying about what we were doing in Hokkaido and who we were. In the duration of our trip, depending on who we talked to, we were mountain climbers, book and movie translators, crab connoisseurs, and Russians.)

On the train to Sapporo, we were chatting about what to fill our nights with when Sunao noticed a cute girl sitting behind us. He immediately kicked into his spitting-game mode, and by the end of the train ride, our chairs were swiveled around facing her, and he had a phone number and a personal guide to the city, although neither of them actually panned out.

We said our goodbyes to the girl at Sapporo station, and we made our way through the city to the hotel where we would be staying with Nemo. Nemo and his two friends came to meet us at the station and the greetings were warm, snow falling hard in the Sapporo streets while we hugged and wrestled. The hotel, as we found out, was not actually a hotel, but a capsule hotel, which pretty much meant that our "room" was a numbered-plastic box with curtains around it, stacked in grid of other capsules. Waking up in one of those capsules is much like how Keaneu Reeves wakes up out of The Matrix, minus all the plasma and gunk, but complete with all the rank smells. But, whatever, we said, and stuffed our bags in the hotel lockers, and ventured out into the Sapporo night for food and drink.

The rest of the night and the next early morning are slightly hazy, but the overall highlights are: a hour long wrestling match between Nemo, Sunao and I on the floor of the restaurant we went to (Nemo's two older travel companions abstained from the wrestling, but eagerly rooted ooohh's and ahhhhh's when one of us pulled a good move on the other two, or hit our heads against something hard); the scars that we would all carry for the next few days (Nemo's being a bruise on his back, Sunao with a couple cuts on his chin, me with a gooseegg on the side of my head); Nemo falling on the ice outside and refusing to get up for five minutes, claiming that the snowy street was "comfy"; Nemo spearheading a trip to the hotel's spa at 2 a.m; Nemo losing his key after opening his locker and putting his clothes in it; Nemo walking BUTT-NAKED out into the hotel lobby to politely inform the capsule hotel staff that he had, in fact, lost his key and couldn't find it anywhere; the hotel staff helping him find his key, which was in the pocket of his discarded pants; the suppressed laughs of the hotel staff when we came down he next morning to leave to go skiing.

We laughed all the way up to the mountain that next morning, recalling the previous night's charades, agreeing that is was both SOTOU hilarious and YABAI. Many many machigaine's on that cold December morning before we arrived at Furano Ski Resort.