On hitching

Glebe’s running commentary while hitching, “Come on, I’m smiling, oh you bum. Look at the sign. You bum! It’s just down the road. Bastard. Come on. Oh you bum!”

On killer whales

The second ride we got was a hop up the road from Mount Takasaki to Beppu. Once again it was a youngish guy and his two kids. They were returning from a day trip to Umitamago, the flash new Aquarium right on the coast opposite Mount Takasaki. The younger one had one of those plastic Killer Whales on a stick (he insisted that it was a shark) that you could make bite things by squeezing the trigger at the bottom. He was busy using it bite his own face and keeping us in the loop with a running commentary, “It doesn’t hurt at all! No, it doesn’t” although it did actually seem to be pinching his cheek quite severely. I ask, “It doesn’t hurt?” and he pauses a second to consider before replying, “Well, actually it does.”

I don’t think I was supposed to ask.

On humping zebras

Lorna wrote in an email, “It’s kind of one of those things you feel you have to do cos everyone’s heard of it, but personally, I don’t think seeing a scale model of an elephant dick was worth 2000 yen.” She was talking, of course, about the famed dodgy sex museum in Kannawa, near Beppu. It was one of those things that everyone who goes to Beppu seems to end up doing, whether they originally intend to or not. This same happened to us. We caught the bus to Kannawa with two objectives in mind, one: eat delicious pudding at a pudding factory and two: go soak our brains out at one of the many awesome onsens in the area.

Unfortunately we didn’t count on the majority of crap being closed at night. We got off the bus and wandered up and down past shut gates, closed ticket booths and boarded over entrances for a while, admiring both the steam coming out of grates and the utter lack of onsens. The only thing that seemed to be open was the sex museum, and it was only a thousand yen, and it had a picture of two Indian women fondling each others boobs out the front. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Sadly, the museum had seen better days. The wax models of semi-famous people who you’d probably not really want to see naked looked very much like wax models of people you wouldn’t really want to see naked, only a little more runny. The collection of animal sexual organs was eyebrow raising at best. The humping zebras were dusty in all the wrong places. The home made porn video of Japanese people twitching frantically in truly painful looking positions left me grasping my crotch and grimacing in anguish. I’ve never seen people look so much like they were in pain before. The amusing highlight was the runny wax model of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Disney Lawsuit edition.

The receptionist (who I’m secret convinced starred as the bouncing, screaming woman in the previously mentioned video) did, however, direct us to a sick onsen with waterfall baths and a big pit of heated sand to bury yourself it. It was heavenly.

On the rest

Later.

Posted in Japan on Tuesday November 8, 2005.

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