last days of winter.

in one cold, windy, drunken, tiring week, hanami has come and gone. a recap:

i don't know the actual meaning of most of the japanese words below. forgive me for any misuse/mischaracterization.

hanami is a celebration of the blossoming sakura trees, pictured below. each spring, as it begins to get warmer, people eagerly watch the cherry trees for any sign of a first bloom. the news has updates and countdowns until hanami, and you can sense a general air of excitement and expectation on the streets. i've never lived in a city where it was actually cold, so i never understood what the big deal was with spring - i've always been partial to fall myself. moreover, in texas spring means that it's about to get intolerably hot, which is nothing to celebrate. but now, having been cold for the last 4 months, i somewhat understand why spring is such a huge thing here. and hanami, in my eyes, marks the beginning of spring, of good weather, blue (rather than gray) skies, girls not wearing trench coats, and so on. there is also some stuff about the cherry blossoms representing the beauty of nascent life and the delicate nature of, well, nature, but i look at it more as a spring kick-off party.

last monday when i woke up i had a message from paul. "dude hanami starts today." [i should note here that we've been looking forward to this since we got here. everyone you meet that's participated in hanami hypes it as the most awesome time ever]. so i met up with paul in yoyogi park near harajuku to check it out. tons of cherry blossoms had come out quite literally overnight. i saw that some particularly zealous revellers had already set up tarps and stuff under the trees, so we made off to get some tarps and a cooler and a frisbee and all the usual day-in-the-park kind of stuff. [the tarps were for sitting on]. really, hanami is simple - set up a tarp under a cherry tree and drink with all your friends. all day. and all night.

by wednesday we were ready. paul and i met up early and staked our claim. [btw, a case of budweiser here costs $50]. at the time, i was impressed at how many people were hanging out under the trees. but really, as i would find out on saturday, the park wasn't very crowded. probably because it was gray and freezing and windy. after laying around and trying to read for an hour, we started drinking. naturally, that's when it started to get awesome.



we started throwing a frisbee around, and immediately two cute nihon-jin that had been making eyes at us the whole day ran over and wanted to play. after playing frisbee and drinking with them for a while, we got our hands on a football and these nihon-jin dudes ran over and we played american football with them. [by this point everyone in the park, myself included, is completely fall-down drunk. and it's like 3:30p]. we ended up talking to a ton of japanese people and getting invited over to their tarps and offered food and drinks and stuff. basically it's like a huge party in the park, and everyone is friends. and they all wanted to take pictures with us because we were some of the only [festive] gringos in the park.

[don't write off the drunken rednecks for being obnoxious and culturally insensitive - japanese people were barfing all over the park. one dude brought a rolling suitcase to carry all his beer in. he and his friends pounded it in like half and hour and were too drunk to walk out of the park].

so anyhow, we got loaded and frolicked with a bunch of new friends and didn't leave until way after dark. that would turn out to be a long and aweseome night. [there is apparently "hidden cam" video footage of me stumbling and wallowing around my apartment at some ungodly hour beaming about the bartender i fell in love with that night and would soon be "dating." i don't remember any of this and refuse to watch the video].



thursday we had to recover, but friday it was back on. i met my japanese class in the park, played drinking games with my teacher (as if i weren't already in love with her enough, she has to start pounding beers with her students). really, i guess friday was more of the same - get drunk, play frisbee, flirt with nihon-jin, crash, repeat. two of the more note worthy occurrences (besides drinking with the teacher): i saw a weird japanese porno photo shoot going down in the trees (which involved two scantily clad chicks playin badmitton) and i pissed off this huge group of high school guys by flirting with all their girlfriends. [which reminds me that i never mentioned on here that i came dangerously close to getting my ass whipped by a gang of thuggish thai kids outside a 7-11 in phuket].



saturday was supposed to be "the day." the blossoms only last a week or two, and by saturday they were in full bloom. i knew yoyogi park was going to be crowded, so i set out some tarps the night before. "don't worry," they told me, "nihon-jin do it all the time. no one will mess with your spot." wrong. when we got there saturday morning, some douchebags had straight up put their huge (really huge) tarp over ours so that it was totally covered. "where's our tarp?" "we don't know." "uh, well, did you move it?" "nope." and so on. so we lost our spot and had to buy more tarps. as you can see, the park was slammed and saturday wasn't that fun. i did see a wasted nihon-jin get stripped by his friends, thrown in a huge pile of leaves, peed on, and his clothes thrown way up into a tree. i wasn't sure if this was funny or not - but to them it seemed pretty routine. the dude wasn't even mad when he "woke" up. at the end of the day i was dirty and tired and hadn't had as much fun as i did on wednesday and friday.



sunday there were more hanami parties i was supposed to go to, but it rained and i was tired and i couldn't have anymore beer. i stopped by yukio's friends' party and played basketball in the rain. hanami, like thailand, was intense fun while it lasted, but i was glad when it was over. it's a good experience, and i wonder if i'll ever see it again.