"Thank you for safety driving"

The title is borrowed from a girl that went with me and some others on a trip this weekend. Her English is pretty good actually, but stuff like that just makes me wonder if they get as much of a kick out of my Japanese as I do of their English. Yeah, probably. ;P

So if driving is necessary I'm usually more than happy to oblige, and this past Sunday was one such occasion. We took a day trip down to the next prefecture and took in some sights in scenic Fukushima. All toll I drove us a total of 500km for the day, and it was my first chance thus far to actually drive on the highway and exorcise my speed demon. Cops are a pretty rare sight out here and there's very little enforcement of traffic laws - although I hear they're trying to really crack down on drunk driving lately (zero tolerance policy in Japan btw) - with the rare cop car on the roads and apparently the occasional speed camera on the highway. The only real big pain is that the highways here are pretty expensive. For example, we spent basically 50USD today on tolls. Bleh. Along the way and after going down a nice little windy road that wrapped around a beautiful lake, we stopped by an old Japanese village, a rock formation, a castle, and a lake. For pictorial evidence and further explanations, proceed to flickr.


Oh, and I know how people love drama, so along the way I heard a rather messed up tale of misguided love that I figured I'd share with you guys - don't tell anyone! (like you know who I'm talking about anyway) So this girl was telling us how the night before she slept over at this guy's place that she's seeing, but was rather upset about things so of course we asked for a story. Apparently she gets to his place only to find some feminine undergarments that were not hers. Of course she asks for his story, and here's what she got: "Oh well those are a friend's that slept over, but we didn't do anything." Yeah, because I have girls over and we sleep together in the buff (in the winter, mind you), but it's purely platonic. She proceeds to tell us how there are 3 other girls, that she knows of at least, that are basically in the same boat as her, but it's ok because he says that she's special. Her response? "Well I like him, so I want to believe him."

There's no real point to that story, I just thought I'd relate it to give you an idea what goes through the head of some Japanese girls... or maybe I should say girls in general? I dunno, I could never figure out what they're thinking either way. Oh yeah, and the guy is American, so it shows you the respect some guys that come over here have for the women too... or again, maybe just guys in general. I hear a bunch of people that say they're not really that crazy about dating Japanese guys. I don't have any personal experience on that one, so I can't really say why.