Awamori or bust

Pop quiz: what do you do when you’re stuck on a slow moving boat for two days with a bunch of Japanese university students, travelling businessmen and a few Europeans. The answer, the only answer, is that you get stonkingly, terrifically, terrifyingly drunk for the entire duration. Just like everyone else on the boat.

The students taught us a bewildering variety of increasingly complex Japanese drinking games that seemed, curiously, to all follow a pattern set by Lorna several years ago: “Dan drinks every minute, on the minute, until he passes out.” Despite this, I soldiered on, and did my best to learn all the rules so as to be able to relate them at future get togethers.

Then a couple of business men carrying millions of dollars worth of transistors to Taiwan busted out the Underworld and a huge, huge bottle of Awamori and it all got a bit messy. To those living in Japan that have a chance to take a ferry from somewhere to somewhere else, do it, it kicks the living crap out of aeroplanes, especially if you’re not in a huge rush.

After all, there aren’t vending machines full of beer on domestic flights.

Posted in Japan on Sunday September 3, 2006.