Flashback time

Ya know how most people cut the apron strings and get buck wild when they go off to college? Well, I never went off to college. I still lived with my parents and had a serious boyfriend when I went to college in Florida, so no buck wildness for me.

My sister, on the other hand, went away to college and got buck wild and would regale me with her tales of drunken debauchery and dating misadventures and I felt like I was missing out.

Soooo... she wound up going straight from undergrad to graduate work for her Masters in International Business and therefore was part of a 1 1/2 year student exchange program in Tokyo, Japan. The first year she attended university, then she interned with a company for the last 6 months. It was at this point that I graduated from college and broke up with the serious boyfriend and decided to pay my sister a visit in Tokyo for a couple of weeks.

I called her and talked to her about it and she said, "Hey why don't you just stay for the remainder of my internship! We can live together and hang out. I can get you a job where I work and it will be great fun!" (or something along those lines... all I really heard was ESCAPE FROM PARENTS, SMALL TOWN, and SMALL MINDED BOYFRIEND WHILE YOU STILL CAN!!) So I enthusiastically agreed and bought a ticket in July that returned in December of 1993. I quit my job, dumped recycled boyfriend (one of those on again, off again things) and hopped a plane to seek my fame and fortune in a new and exotic place.

Whoooo let me tell you... that flight was soooo long. I went from Orlando to Chicago to Alaska to Seoul to Tokyo. It was the cheapest ticket I could get. Don't ask. I took off on a Thursday and landed on Saturday - I kid you not, thanks to crossing the international date line. Talk about jetlag! I felt like I was on drugs by the time I landed!

((Funny side note about the plane trip over: I took a brown suede bomber jacket with me -hey, it was 1993- and fell asleep and drooled all over it. When I woke up and wiped the drool off my chin, I had left 2 perfect lip prints and a dark space in between where all the spit accumulated - and the lip prints are still there to this day! Not that I still wear that jacket - it's at my mother's house in Fla.

Also, when I landed in Chicago, I changed airlines and got on a Korean Airlines flight. At the time, I knew smatterings of different European languages since I grew up there, but I didn't know squat about Asian languages - how ironic when I look back on that now. The announcements on the plane were made in English, Japanese and Korean. But dumb little South Florida Beach Girl (me) couldn't tell the difference between Japanese and Korean and thought THEIR announcements were twice as long, so I got all paranoid about what kind of information they were getting that I wasn't because I only knew English. Uhh...

BTW, have I ever mentioned that I can be quite the ditz, despite my intellectual prowess? That despite having a pretty high IQ and having been in Gifted and Talented classes and AP courses all thru-out school that, most of the time, I have the common sense of a retarded puppy? All enthusiasm and no fore-thought? Well, now you know.))

Anyway, back to my illustrious tale.

Let me tell you what my expectations of Japan were BEFORE I went:
-Quality time with my sister
-Learning a new culture and a new language
-Making pretty good money and saving it for my return to Fla.

What actually happened:
-Worked illegally in a casino under the Japanese mob
-Got drunk almost every day
-Smoked alot of cigarettes
-Smoked alot of hash
-Dated a few cute American military boys
-Punched drunk Japanese business man
-Got felt up by many drunk middle-aged Japanese men
-Made alot of friends, many of which were drug dealers who would slip drugs in my pocket for free, which I would promptly give away, unless it was hash.
-Hid friend from Japanese mob so they wouldn't kill her - she owed them money
-Went to Korea to illegally renew my tourist visa.
-Got drunk in Seoul with a bunch of Marines. Drank them under the table.
-Got in trouble with Military Police in Seoul for taking off my shirt. I was wearing a bustier.
-Made Military Police look like assholes in front of Korean police by putting shirt back on when they requested it. Sorry guys.
-Got interrogated by immigration upon my return to Japan. That was funny, cuz I was taller than the guy trying to interrogate/intimidate me. It didn't work.
-Was propositioned by Patrick Ewing. Said no. He was perfectly nice after that.
-Was propositioned by Terrance Trent D'Arby. For $4000! Said no.
-Met U2. Burned Bono with my cigarette. Good thing he was really drunk.
-Hardly learned any Japanese at all
-Only did one cultural thing the whole time I was there, which was pretty cool.
-Blew all money but $1000.

So it turned out that my time in Japan was my time of buck wildness. Do I regret it? No. Would I repeat it? No. My ignorance of Asian cultures is long gone, much of it with first hand knowledge. Some of which I really wish I didn't know - for example: child porn is legal in Japan. Know why? Because it is illegal to show pubic hair in public, and since children don't have pubic hair, they must be legal. Turns your stomach, doesn't it?

For more hilarity see: http://www.quirkyjapan.or.tv/