Drunk Last Night, Hungover (Bad) Today

Time for me to dispense another piece of wisdom to my readers...all five of you. When you party with German engineers, expect to get horribly and utterly drunk.

Last night, I was in Himeji because I had to sub for a class and they put me up in my favorite hotel in town, the luxurious Sun Route. Seeing that I was within walking distance of my favorite bar in Himeji, I made the stroll...now I kind of wish I hadn't. I should have known how the night was going to end from the very beginning. The bar I like is called Tiger Pub and its on the second floor of a building it shares with another bar that is called Sports, I think. Either way, both bars are kind of known to cater to gaijin and there were plenty of them there last night.

First, I ran into a guy I work with and another that I used to work with. I talked with them for a while on the patio but both of them took off after a bit leaving me with about 50 guys on shore leave from the US Navy. I can understand the need to blow off steam once you get off a destroyer with 300 other guys and five "ugly-ass" women and these guys were doing just that. There was much drinking to be had and so I talked to them for a little bit. The odd part of the night came when one guy told me he was on the USS Blah Blah (I was a tad buzzed by this point) and I said "oh, a destroyer" and he just kind of gave me this puzzled look as to how I knew the classification of his ship. Sometimes a good memory can make you look like a freaking genius, especially to drunk sailors. As the witching hour approached, one of them was sober enough to realize that curfew was almost upon them and most of them left.

After that series of short conversations, I meandered upstairs to find that of all of the sailors that I last saw drunkenly swaggering toward their bus stop were all lowering ranking guys and that their officers were still partying at the Tiger Pub. The woman that runs Tiger Pub is named Yayoi and she is very cool. If you bring in your iPod, you can jack it into the bar's sound system as long as you play music that makes the bar patrons happy. There was another guy that had his iPod playing rap that some of the Navy guys were dancing to but some of the others wanted to hear Blink 182 and some other stuff. That is where I came in. Its become known that I have a crazy amount of music and that my tastes are pretty eclectic. The challenge to selecting music for a whole bar of people is that everyone has different tastes. So the way I was doing it was I would play a couple of rap songs and then a couple of rocks songs. The Navy guys were happy that I was alternating and this pleased pretty much everyone. Until two German guys came in.

One guy was about my dad's age and the other was in his mid-thirties and we hit it off almost immediately. They liked electronic music and them hailing from a country known for its DJs and dance clubs, they were picky about what techno they liked. Lucky for all of us, I am just as picky and we had similar tastes. It was about this time that all of the Navy guys started to head out and so I felt comfortable to move the music into the realm of downtempo chill trance. Did I mention that I had been drinking up to this point? Well, I had been.

So I am talking with these German guys and it turns out they were engineers of one sort or another and they were staying in Japan to upgrade some equipment that a factory was using. Anywho, we get talking about music and out of nowhere one of them mentions how he would love to hear some Johnny Cash!!! Who knew Germans would even know who Johnny Cash was, let alone like his stuff. When I told them that I had everything he ever did and all of the good stuff was on my iPod they both freaked. One of the guys actually saw him in concert and insisted that I play Ring of Fire. Next to my experience with a drunk Japanese guy singing Motley Crew, drunk German guys singing Johnny Cash is a close, close second. Looove Is A Baaaning Thing!

After the Johnny Cash experience, we started talking about German food and how we all missed eating it. Then one of them mentioned that he may be able to return to Germany in time for Christmas and I mentioned the story of the Christmas Spider and that pretty much solidified the fact that I am at least half-German. Did I mention I was still drinking? Well, I was.

The final topic of discussion was beauty and smooth sweet taste of Jagermeister. Ok, I am going to admit, I brought it up because I wanted one of them to buy a round of it and I figured both of them were drunk enough and friendly enough that it might work. And it did. The older guy had a sweet spot for Jager and it was his special drink. A shot glass was inserted into my hand right about there. I rule.

After that, stuff gets really fuzzy. One minute I am in the bar saying goodbye to my newfound friends, the next I am in the staircase, next I am on the street, next I am in the covered shopping area next to my hotel, puking. Beh.

As it turns out, that was one of the more inebriated moments in my life. Which is strange but I didn't feel too bad until I started puking. It just kind of snuck up on me, friggin' Jager. This morning was bad. On the Mogwai Scale of Hangover Magnitude this was an 8/10. 1 being mildly drowsy, 10 being unable to leave bed lest you puke. I was able to get out of bed but I was not very functional until early afternoon. I still feel a tad messed up now. Freakin' Jager. Having said that, its amazing how comfortable the floor of a train can be to sleep on. There were no seats left on my ride back home today and so I found a spot next to the wall of the carriage, sat Indian style with my backpack in my lap, and slept for over an hour.

I think that if I were not so damned friendly, these things would not happen to me. I don't normally drink alone and it seems that wherever I go, I can always find a friend. And if that friend is drunk enough, a free drink. To turn down free booze is the moral equivalent of head butting an old woman in the face, you just shouldn't do it.

So there you have it, my drunken excursion into Himeji and the horrible, no good, very bad day that followed.