Ogling and "Holy Shit! Its America!!"

So, I spent some time running around downtown Tokyo with two very nice teachers. In fact, this weekend contained what can only be termed the FIND OF THE CENTURY, at least for the purposes of automotive trivia. You can slot this one in somewhere around “Einstien’s theory of general relativity plus a healthy dose of cold fusion.”

We have discovered what the letters C R and V mean, when referring to the compact Honda SUV. You can officially brace yourselves, sit down and/or conduct any small children or people with pacemakers out of the room.

Are you ready….TO ROCK?

CRV means “Comfortable Runabout Vehicle”.

Who knew that that bastion of North American university student transportation was actually a reasonably decent katakana engrishiztion??? Amazing.

Also on that note, I saw a halfway decent engrish shirt … “eat happy only meat!” but it sadly came only in medium. Medium, of course, is Japanese for “really bloody small”. But I still almost bought it.

Also of interest: Shinto Shrines serve free sho-chu! Its part of the operation of a temple apparently. And while I admit that my taking joy in this is kind of like going to church to chug red wine, I still think it’s cool to have people in traditional dress hand me paper cups of booze as I tour their faith-space.

I’d also like to submit the following man-sperience for general internet consumption.

I don’t know what it is about Japanese girls and shorts skirts, and while I am getting used to copious amounts of thigh-showing as a general fact of life, occasionally I am still shocked by the sheer volume of toned flesh being displayed. I say ‘toned’, because Japan seems to have largely escaped a North American phenomenon that I like to call “Ye Gods Woman!!! MORE Goodlife Fitness and LESS Belly Top!!" (or, if you ever visit Darien Lake, USA... "McDonalds Super-sized Women in NON-McDonalds Super Sized Bikinis"... BLEECH!... ... not that I am super fit, but I certainly don't wear fucking belly tops that display my fat, fat belly.)

ANYWAY... the other day when I was in Shibuya, … I actually had a verbal-expleditive-uttering, jaw-dropping, stop-in-my-tracks-curse-out-loud experience.

I was in middle of a friendly conversation with my good pal Geoff, and as we rounded a corner, we came face to face (ok, ok, it was face to face-body-legs-body-face, but who was counting???)…anyway… nearly face to face with more thigh than I'd seen since the last time I went out for swiss chalet. I actually stopped mid sentenced and gasped “Holy shit! Its America!” from about four feet away.

You see, this girl was wearing some sort of shoulder covering pseudo-top, thigh-high blood red leather heeled boots, “shorts” (waist denim) and a huge stars-and-stripes American flag cowboy hat. 'Double take' doesn’t even begin to describe the mental scratched-cd jump that went on in my head for about three full seconds.

Geoff told me after I’d regained my composure that she’d actually smiled at me and said “good evening”, but honestly, I was too stunned to notice. Yeesh. I mean, after thinking about it with my BRAIN, wearing an outfit like that seems to signify some serious attention-starvation, egomania, or who knows what else (and uber high maintenance, I guess?) By my word, what a show.

Incidentally, I should confess that one of my favourite activities after I see a particularly good looking young lady is to cast a quick glance around at all the other dudes. I find it vastly amusing to see that the rest of my gender is as helpless at preventing a horrifically obvious rubberneck as I am. I don’t know if anyone else cursed quite as loudly as I did, but it was still fun to watch.

Boys, try it some time. We look like schmucks, but we can all take solace that ladies have two options when avoiding schmucks – 1) each other (not that there's anything remotely wrong with if you are at all interested in said LGBT persuits) or 2) a battery powered friend, that while fun at parties, certainly can’t carry girls’ shit in ITS pockets when they take it clubbing.

Girls, shut up and stop sniggering. You should see yourselves when you see (insert famous boyish actor/rockstar-of-the-moment here – aka Orlando Bloom, Jonny Depp, and on back through the Backstreet Boys and N-Sync to “NKOTB”. And don’t pretend that you don’t know what that stands for.)