Keep to the Code
You would think that one would start any kind of autobiography from the beginning. Not me. I figure I will just write the stories of my life as they come to me.
I was stationed in Tokyo for a little over a year before I was discharged from the Air Force for medical reasons. During that year, I spent a good deal of my time hanging out with my coworker, Jose. I was lucky enough and maybe he was unlucky enough to live in the same apartment complex off base and to share enough common interests to get along. Being as we hung out so much, I do have a few amusing stories (at least I believe so).
The base offered a large variety of trips and tours every month at great deals to help us enjoy the surrounding culture. I went on four that I can think of at the moment and I believe this was the last one.
It was a tour a Yokohama’s China Town (largest in Japan), a short boat ride that showed off the bay, and ended with a trip to the Yokohama Landmark Tower. We had two tour guides if I remember correctly. An OK looking Japanese girl and a much older Japanese fellow who been the guide when we went to a sumo match earlier in the year. More about him later.
The boat ride was neat, but nothing much to talk about so I won’t.
China Town was huge and took us a while to walk through all of it. I even made a new friend… but he didn’t say much.
The highlight and most expensive part of China Town came when Jose and I decided it was time to eat. It gets to be fun when everything is either in Japanese or Chinese and you have no clue what place will have food you will eat. My advice if you are ever trying to find food in a foreign country is to find a place that either has pictures in the menu and/or plastic sample dishes on display in the window. We went with the food in the window approach which led us to a place with what you would typically expect to find in a Chinese restaurant and decent prices.
But wait, how does that make it the most expensive? It got expensive when I noticed that they has shark on the menu. Well, shark fin soup. Shark fin soup at $80 a bowl. Normally, I would say no to spending that much money on a bowl of soup. That is like six trips to Coco’s for curry (hmmm COCOs curry). So I order a bowl anyways. I kind of regret that now, but not really.
Don’t get me wrong. It was a damn good sized bowl and I glad I got to eat it. But it was more like finely shredded shark fin in broth. Not bad and I ate about half of it. I was just hoping for something to knock my socks off at that price. Oh well.
After food, we happened across a place that let you feed hand feed birds using more or less popsicle sticks with seed stuck to them. If was insane. Like being in a scene from The Birds. You walked in holding the seed and the birds came from nowhere. They would land on your arms, head, and in Jose’s case his shoulder. In its self, nothing too funny at first, but this bird would not leave. It was like a pirate and his parrot… Jose the Mexican Pirate.
This led to talks of Pirates of the Caribbean and eventually, through what I find to an amusing turn of events, The Code.
After the tour of China Town, we all got on a bus and were dumped a few blocks from the Yokohama Landmark Tower. If you are wondering what is so special about the tower, look it up. Just kidding. It has one of the fast elevators in the world and travels at about a floor a second. And yes, the quick pressure change does make your ears pop.
Our leader from the bus to the tower was the Japanese fellow I mentioned earlier. He was and probably still is one to the point, no nonsense, hard core guides. He is also very quick for an old guy. He took off for the tower holding up his little “guide flag” so you could keep track of him and the group quickly followed suit.
Now when I said he was quick, I mean he was ninja quick. Unfortunately, the majority of the group lacked those skills. Jose and I managed to keep up and from time to time would look back to an ever shrinking group.
I believe “Keep to the Code” came up when someone commented on how they thought some were falling behind. Because I tapped Jose on the shoulder and loudly replied, “Keep to the Code. Those who fall behind stay behind.”
After that, every time Jose or I looked back one of us would loudly state “Keep to the Code.”
Luckily for those that fell behind we had our second guide taking up the rear and she collected those that couldn’t keep up.