since spending so much time in a small town had started to take its toll on my state of mind, i decided to go to osaka (大阪) and kyoto (京都) for the weekend. friday night, after work, i hoped on a 4 hour train to meet up with my friend brent. though he lives in the wakayama prefecture (和歌山県) now, we met and became friends back in boston 2 years ago. small world, eh?

we spent friday night playing a game he called "lawson hoping," which consisted of buying a drink every time we walked by a lawson convenience store (japan is like vegas with their drinking laws - it's legal to walk around with open containers). we walked around the city looking for a tasty place to eat and a cheap place to crash while lawson hoping.

check out the bib on that guy

after eating some japanese and italian seafood pasta, we went to a bar with pool tables, board games, ping pong, and darts. we played a few games of jenga (i totally won) while sipping on some guiness. beer is not one of japan's finer points, so it was oh-so nice to finally taste good beer again.

drunk jenga

saturday we went to kyoto (京都) to see some shrines. brent suggested we go to fushimi inari-taisha (伏見稲荷大社) for a good mix of hiking, beautiful scenery, and shrines. it is said to have 10 thousand torii (鳥居), or sacred japanese gates leading up to the inari shrine. all the orange things in these photo are torii (鳥居):
after our hike we met up with more friends i met in boston, taishi and yakuri. unfortunately, taishi had to leave for nagoya and yukari had a work party to go to, so around 11pm brent and i were on our own again. we took the last train back to osaka with the goals of finding another cheap hotel and some more drinking. but after finding out that all the hotels in our price range were full, we had no other choice but to pull an all-nighter and hop from bar to bar until the morning trains could take us back home. we made friends along the way who took us to yet another bar that stayed open until at least 6am. i dont know when it closes, however, because we finally cut ourselves off around 6 and headed back to the train station.

drinking in kyoto with boston friends

unfortunately, a night of drinking and not sleeping at all took its toll on me. on the way back, i slept through my stop to change trains was and ended up spending 8 instead of 4 hours to get back home. ugh. but oh well. i still feel that it was hella worth it. now that my fun-o-meter has been maxed out, i can (try to) enjoy my small town again. until next weekend, that is..