Nagasaki Halloween Party 2001
(or How I came to be speeding down the highway in the pouring rain on a 50cc moterbike at 4:30 am with a girl I met only 5 hours earlier, while wearing a wet Samurai outfit)
Ok.. let me set the scene. It's November 27th(28th by the end of this story) and we crazy American students have decided to go to a Halloween party in Nagasaki. Keep in mind that the Japanese don't celebrate Halloween. This party was held at a pool bar near the "Lucky Bowl". This location is near Urakami, ground zero of the atomic bomb. But I digress... This party attracted all the Gaijin (Americans mostly) from the surrounding area(in particular Sasabo Air Force Base). The mix was about half Japanese and half American. The music was mainly latin and 80's, which is condusive to dancing. When we arroved at 10:30 there were only about 20 people there. One was wearing a whitches hat. That was the only costume we saw. This worried us a bit, as our group consisted of a samurai(me), a cowboy, a flower chlid and a hula girl. After about half an hour more and more people started showing up, many wearing costumes. As I said earlier the Japanese do not celebrate Halloween and therefore many did not know they needed costumes.
Here is the party in full swing. By midnight there were hundreds of people here all dancing, drinking, sweating and having a good time. I danced a few times but I spent most of my time mingling at a small round table near the dance floor. They had giant video screens showing MTV Japan music videos. It was a pretty lively place. At around 12:30 they announced that there was going to be a costume contest. So I got up, went over to the stage...
...and won the costume contest. This is probably the proudest moment in my entire life (aside from all those better things that have happened to me). It was my 15 seconds of fame. People cheered.. then went back to some drinking they needed to get finished. My prize: a six-pack of Zima most of which Tyler bought off me for bus fare.
Mental Note: Never leave your digital camera unattended at a party with copious amounts of alcohol floating around. Or you might discover pictures like the two above when you get your camera back the next day. Ok, back to the story..
This is Aoi. She is a student at Nagasaki University. A much larger school than the Nagasaki College of Foreign Language, which I am attending. I was talking to her because she had that special something, the ability to speak English. (She is also, pretty, intelligent and kind) The conversation often got a little strange, with her speaking English and me replying in broken Japanese. We talked for a long time, actually we shouted for a long time, the music was so loud. I suggested that we go somewhere away from the speakers so we could hear each other. We left our seats and went to the place they kept all the pool tables.
Mistake #1: I left my digital camera on the table.
We talked over by the pool tables for a time and then went back to the dance. In the time we were away the small table we were sitting at had become occupied, so we went to the other end of the dance floor to sit on some folding chairs.
Mistake #2: I didn't tell anyone I was going to change seats.
After about an hour 4:00am rolled around. This is when the party was schedualed to end. Little did I know that my friends had left about 20 minutes ago in a van. I went back to where I was sittling and I noticed my digital camera was missing. This freaked me out a bit and I spent the next 10 minutes running around looking for it. I hoped that my friends, who had forgotten me had remembered my digital camera. It was maybe 4:20am now and trains don't start running until 6:00 and I was very far from home. Oh yeah, it was pouring rain. I had no umbrella and no clue how to get home.
Ok, here's the cool part. Instead of saying sayonara and leaving this Great White Samurai to figure it out for himself, Aoi and her friend Sachiko stayed with me and offered help. All I wanted them to do was give me directions to the nearest train station with an overhang so I wouldn't get saturated while waiting almost 2 hours for the first train. The two girls didn't have umbrellas either, Aoi didn't even have a jacket (she refused my offer to loan her mine), but they walked with me. I assumed we were headed for the station, but we stopped at a small apartment buidling. They said "wait here about 30 seconds". I did as I was told and 30 seconds later, Aoi emerges wearing a coat and gripping a motercycle helmet. Turns out this was Sachikos apartment and the current plan is for Aoi to transport me on a 50cc. Moterbike. This would be a good time to bring up the fact that I have never been on a moterbike before. Much less one designed for one person. And NEVER while wearing a Samurai costume. I sat on the back(where I think groceries are supposed to go) and I held on tight. The motor groaned under our combined wieght and everytime we made a sharp turn there was this horrible grinding sound. We were going pretty fast. I think. I couldn't really tell, the rain was falling so hard I really couldn't see much of anything. I was still under the impression that I was being taken to a train station and not in fact to my house 2 cities down. I was wrong. After a while she needed specific directions to my house. I gave them as best as I could having never gone that route and not being able to see. It must have worked because I wound up at my house around 5:00am. Said thank you to this mysterious former-stranger, took a bath then went to bed. Right before turning out the light, I grabbed a notebook and scrawled the phrase "It's amazing what thoughts run through your head when you are speeding down the highway in the pouring rain on a 50cc moterbike at 4:30 am with a girl you met only 5 hours earlier, while wearing a wet Samurai outfit." on a piece of notebook paper. When I woke up the next afternoon (about 2:00pm) I looked at the notebook, and the events slowly came back to me. What an adventure! You can't buy memories like that.
BTW as you can tell from the pictures, I did get my camera back.
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