aomori city - fancy new shopping plaza, 4th floor, "inta-netto.ko-na" - free.

one more rainy night in akita was all she wrote. didn't see the friends again, but that's the nature of this business. i caught 4 rides and a train to get to hirosaki in aomori prefecture - the top of the main island, at last! i took a bus from the train station to get to the hostel and got some attention from some junior high school girls (the root of all evil) - nothing good ever comes from that. when i got off the bus i walked a block to the hostel and got slapped in the face by this big-ass mountain just sitting there in all it's snow-covered glory!! holy crap!! maybe it's being from flat-land michigan, but mountains never fail to knock my socks off, especially when the fuckers sneak up on you like that.

the hostel moma was nice enough and sent me on my way to the park. i rolled in to see the biggest, wildest ohanami spot yet! the castle itself wasn't all that impressive, but the garden paths and rivers cutting through the grounds were a dream in breaking bloom. there were a million people there, taking pictures, braving the chill.

hirosaki also boasts the biggest, loudest midway i've seen yet. you could really call it that too - there are always food stands and the odd goldfish-catchery/moon-walkery - but in hirosaki there was a dune buggy ride, a haunted house and an assortment of rigged games with stuffed prizes. for once the competition drove prices down ever so slightly and i took advantage - ate me a 5 banger of cheese balls on a stick and a roasted chicken leg, hell yeah. the damn place was so big and wild that it had attracted a few other random traveling musicians including one old guy from detriot who claimed that he "came from alabama with [his] banjo on his knea." (nothing but LIES!) and another that i had seen in akita.

i played for a little while before getting dragged into an office and made to sign up for permission to play. it cost me 204 yen (why?!?!) for my permission card and i was given a map of the areas i would be designated to. namely those places with no people or cherry trees. screw that.

i left and talked to a travel agent who finally solved my flight to aus. via thailand problem buy throwing my money at it until it went away. it was the day that i walked a 2 mile round trip to save myself a buck and a half on bus fiar just to spend a small fortune on a jet-powered stop-over in a third-world country. let me tell you more about my life as a (hipocrite) homeless hitchhiker.

my per$pective got all screwed up and i spent an unheard of $10 on a dinner set menue and it was good and 10 bucks felt like nothing. by the time i got back to the hostel i was feeling so guilty about the dinner that i ran back into the park and rounded up a night's work in tips and beers. *$igh - all was right with the world.

this morning i got out to the main road and was picked up within a minute! the man in the passenger seat was getting dropped off at the train station by a freind, but was also going to aomori and insisted on paying for my ticket! we talked on the train he was a nice guy, going to a wedding (his brother's wife's sister's). i gave him a cd. when we got to aomori he slapped me on the back and stuck a hundred dollers in my chest pocket before jumping in a cab. and i used to understand money.

whatever - another capsul tonight - i sleep in a drawer.