Getting Back

It takes something funky and special inside to walk into a local bar in a foreign country. Why? Because the moment your foreign foot cross that threshold, every local eye is staring at you.

Tonight was no exception. The look on the owners face was nothing short of a cocktail of shock and dismay. The two old men sitting at the bar eyed me like a stray dog who had wandered into a wedding reception. For a scant moment the music stopped, everyone looked up. It was now all up to me.

With a priceless grin I greeting the girl behind the bar in Japanese and without breaking stride took a place at the bar. As each eye in the bar followed me, I ordered a glass of the local specialty, Awamori Sake. (An alcohol that can best be described as a mix between Korean Soju and Chinese rice wine.)

For a moment the girl behind the bar did not register that I was speaking Japanese to her. So I repeated what I wanted twice, then three times. After the third time she regained her composer and told me that there were cheaper Awamori Sakes. However I had made my choice and asked her once again for a glass of the bars special Awamori Sake.

With slight hesitation she poured me a glass, the music resumed, and one of the old men at the bar started talking to me.

Thirty minutes later the men at the bar were ordering me local delicacies, while the girl behind the bar was laughing away like I came in there every night. Forty-five minutes later the everyone was joking how the squid fried rice (which was jet black from the squid ink) was going to make me poo black tomorrow and that I need not go the hospital, because that was normal. Fifty minutes later, the old man I had been talking to in Japanese since I came in, warned me that the fish heads I had just eaten had bones that might get caught in my throat and kill me. Sixty minutes later everyone was talking about the difference Eastern and Western girls and male counterparts penis sizes while I just laughed and buried my face in my hands.

And so it went till I had to borrow an umbrella from the bar, thank my hosts, and run out into a downpour on 70 degree evening in February thinking maybe I was, "living the dream."