Hunting the Past Presently

Not a chance that I am posting pictures from Sapporo. It was the scene and the city of my life about eight years ago. I have been revisiting the behaviours of those days (and dragging Mark into the sinkhole of days gone by).

It has been sugoi subarashii!

Yakkitori, Jingisukan, Tabe-to-Nomi-Houdai. A night of Potato Circus with Noriko and Yasuko ending in two hours of 80's laden karaoke. All you can eat and drink and two hours of a microphone for 4000 yen each ($40 each) leads you down a path you probably didn't expect the evening to explore.

I can't tell you how much I enjoy the right of return.

Yesterday we went to an Onsen (Hot spring). Volcanic activity bubbles to the suface here in Hokkaido - and not just in the social lives of the Japanese and their foreign friends.

In a Japanese Onsen you split into boy's and girl's baths. Enter the change room. where you shed it all and leave your clothes and your modesty in a plastic basket.

Enter the common bath where along the wall are about a dozen spouts. Sit down on a wooden stool just big enough for your generous North American botton and scrub until your skin is pink and you are Mista Spakeruu.

Choose your own adventure. a) Go out the door to your right. b) Slip into the steaming bath in front of you.

b) Good jeebus are you insane?

a) This door leads the Rotenburo - the open air hot sping bath. You soak there for an hour and feel like a nicely manipulated bit of play-do'h.

Ma-ku, Noriko, and The Boy in Red rested well that night.

Many more tales unfit for television await.

-mikael