Gaijin Tales! Couch Wars

Insufferable Dumbass: (encountering me coincidentally at post office, very excited) Rude Boy, what the fuck are you doing here?!

Rude Boy: ...Calisthenics class.

Insufferable Dumbass: Really?

*

Rude Boy: (stares at legs of passing girl for several seconds, then checks out her face)

Girl: (not impressed)

Rude Boy: (no sense trying to hide it now, goes back to staring at legs)

*

Jugs: why are there fingers

Jugs: in mouths?

Rude Boy: because europeans apparently think that that is acceptable

Jugs: ...

Jugs: in what context?

Jugs: like

Jugs: just

Jugs: here let me suck on my fingers?

Rude Boy: just kickin' it in the common room

Rude Boy: no. here let me pick shit out of my teeth for the next seven hours straight

Jugs: hmm.

Rude Boy: oh i spilled a little food on one of my fingers, transferring it into my mouth requires swallowing my entire hand

Jugs: hahaha

Rude Boy: its soooo gross ;_;

*

Rude Boy: Can you break 500 yen?

German guy: (looking at the hard metal coin) Um...probably, if I had the tools?

*

Going for a stroll downtown, a young woman standing with a rollybag on the sidewalk at Shijou and Teramachi stopped me to ask for directions. The way she talked, she seemed to (correctly) assume I was a local, which made me wonder, did I just seem especially comfortable in my surroundings? Was I walking with purpose and confidence, as though I knew where I was going? Or perhaps I merely lacked a wide-eyed tourist gape? Occam's Razor says I was simply white, but I was by no means the only white person around, and she chose to grab me. Anyway, I was happy to help.

Not long after, I was walking alongside an old man who caught sight of me out the corner of his eye, did a startled double-take, and proceeded to openly stare for a solid five or six seconds. Um. This is Kyouto. There's not exactly a shortage of us. “Where are you from?” he asked in English, and I told him, at which point he seemed to realise he had exhausted his vocabulary. Luckily he reached his destination at almost exactly that moment, and excused himself with a smile.

Sitting on the local train home, waiting for the semi-express to go around us, I spied a girl waiting at another track who was a dead ringer for one of my ex-girlfriends. It's like I was looking right at her. Bizarre.

It wasn't a particularly eventful or exciting day, but somehow these three things made it feel like a good one.

*

A motorcycle, a van, two more motorcycles driving in convoy at 2 am.

Yeah that's not suspicious at all.

*

Anarchy in the UK: I'm trying to teach Taiwan about banter...and how it's different from just being abusive.

*

Anarchy in the UK: (enters room)

Rude Boy: Hey Anarchy in the UK, I dreamed you and I took a bath together.

Anarhcy in the UK: That's...the weirdest greeting I've ever gotten.

*

Rude Boy: Are we in Daylight Savings yet?

J-friend: That's in the summer, and we don't have it here.

Her boyfriend (only half-joking): Typical Canadian! The five countries that think they're the centre of the universe? Canada, America, the UK, France, and China.

J-friend: And Korea.

Her boyfriend: Oh yeah, and Korea. Ok fine, maybe not Canada.

*

Anarchy in the UK: Those girls are properly staring at us.

Rude Boy: (distracted) Yeah, let me count how many fucks I give. I'm done.

*

Insufferable Dumbass: No offence, but I'm pretty sure I have better rights than you.

German girl: Like the right to higher education? Or medical care?

*

Hot girl's T-shirt: Snort cocaine, fuck a lot, get pregnant, break bones. Red Loght District.

*

Cologne: (comes in and sits down)

Insufferable Dumbass: (laughs his customary deranged squawk, yells something incoherent into Skype)

Rude Boy: Yeah, it's been this way all morning.

Cologne: Maybe I should go back to bed.

*

Cologne: Insufferable Dumbass wants so badly to be a ladies' man...but he's closer to being a ladyboy.

*

Girls' bar guy: Excuse me, gentlemen, looking for a girls' bar? Good evening, feel like touching some boobs tonight? Hello there Mr. Foreigner, come on in, practise your Japanese!

*

Rude Boy: insufferable dumbass from america just recently discovered the phrase "sou nan?" except he says "sou na?" because his choukai sucks cocks

Rude Boy: and he also recently discovered the word "yabai" as well as the fact that you can use it at basically any time for no particular reason

Rude Boy: so he uses it, sometimes, just over and over again, like 5 or six times per minute. sometimes per second.

Rude Boy: resulting in sentences like, "yabai, yabai. kore ha yabai. ah, yabai. yabai, yabai. yabai." exact quote

Soymilk: Honestly

Soymilk: I think that's pretty natural

Soymilk: If anything

Soymilk: He's lacking yabais

Soymilk: A lot of stupid Japanese people talk like that.

*

Australzealand: He ate my horse! You son of a bitch.

*

I used to leave my cell phone in the common room whenever I took a nap.

Mother Russia: hellooooo lonely keitai!

Mother Russia: aww :( need a hug?

I don't anymore.

*

Anarchy in the UK: And another thing, Insufferable Dumbass thinks it's absolutely amazing that the Italians can understand each other when they speak Italian quickly...I'm like, you idiot, that would be like if I spoke in really fast English to you.

*

One of my blood sisters: Hey Rude Boy! I'm in town again for another couple of weeks. Are you finished exams yet? Do you have time to meet?

Rude Boy: That would be great, except I've been living in Japan for the last seven months and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

Rude Boy: I finish my exams in late July or early August.

*

Insufferable Dumbass: No, you have to do it like this...

Mother Russia: I'll do it however I want.

Insufferable Dumbass: Rude Boy, do something!

Rude Boy: If you think that I can control her, you've severely misunderstood how this works.

*

Australzealand: All I know is, black centre, two petals.

Anarchy in the UK: Uh, three petals?

Rude Boy: Four petals?

Australzealand: ...Wow. The Commonwealth really needs to get its shit together.

*

Tiny Korean Girl learning to ride a bike.

I almost died from cuteness overload.

*

In past posts I have mentioned “my” couch, which is mine in the sense that I have staked such a firm Lockean claim to it that no else dares use it. Eventually, every piece of furniture in all common rooms was replaced. Where before twin couches had sat, we now had a couch and two chairs. Disastrously, the two chairs were placed in my spot, throwing off my entire life. Cough Medicine and Big Finn observed this development with amusement, wondering what I would do.

After a dissatisfying experiment in angling the two chairs into a makeshift couch, I simply swapped things around, but Cologne tipped me off that somebody had it in for me. They were planning to switch them back again, just to fuck with me, but he wouldn't say who, because he wanted to watch the war. (Mother Russia thinks it was him all along.) To prevent their machinations, I gathered as much random shit from about the common room as I possibly could and spread it across my new couch, to make moving it more effort than it was worth. My plan succeeded, and I thought it was over. But then! Days later, they made good on their threat!

There was only one thing to do. I waited until 4 am one lonely weeknight, that I would be the only waking person in the entire dorm. Then I stole to the little-used second-floor common room and ganked their couch. Though bulky and awkward, it was actually mostly hollow inside, and I had no problems carrying it up the stairs by myself; turning on its side made short work of the hairpin hallways leading to the common room. In exchange, I gave our chairs to the second floor. Your move, pranksters!

They went with turning both couches and their attendant table 90 degrees. That was just stupid and not even funny anymore, so I simply turned them both back and there have been no developments since.

Australzealand: How did we get two couches?

Rude Boy: Yeah, that's so weird, I have no idea how that happened.

Australzealand: Suuuuuure. ;)

I like to picture several second-floor residents standing around their four chairs and frowning in confusion.