Ahh the charter bus...

Posted by 花☆雅 (seattle, United States) on 7 January 2005 in Transportation.

7-2-07

I had never actually ridden one myself, so I was pretty darn excited, to say the least! =]

I thought I'd take a picture just for ol' timesake. I'm actually glad I did, too! It brings back a lot of memories...

the first being the giant ferris wheel that we could never figure out--it looked like a ferris wheel, no question, but it also looked like it was missing the seats...so we couldn't figure out what it's actual purpose was. We were told on our way back that it was, indeed, a full functioning ferris wheel, but I still had my doubts....I mean, unless you want to dangle a couple hundred feet in the air by a pole...

The second memory was the phrase, "Japan--the Land of Walls". Seriously. There were these opaque-looking walls for the majority of the trip past Osaka, which were clear enough to see outlines of buildings (etc) but too thick to take pictures through. If you wanted to take pictures of some city-scape, you had to be poised and ready to snap a picture at any second, because you were lucky if you found a twenty foot opening to take on in. And if there weren't any of these half-transparent walls (which we believe to be ultra-recycling xD) there were high, tilted metal ones that looked like they were going to collapse on top of the bus...very unnerving!
Anyway, all this talk of walls to bring us to the more humorous aspect of the trip:

when we recieved our host-family information, one of the details we found out was the occupation of our host parents/siblings. (My father was a 'Bakery Shop Orner' xD)
Leif was the lucky one -- his dad was the Traffic, and his mother the Wall! (Later revealed to have nothing to do with his parents real occupations haha)

The conclusion was that they were proffessional restlers.

But we also came around to blaming Leif's host mother for being in the way so much, and then his father for holding us up once we got to Iwade haha

Yet another memory from our trip in the charter bus was the realization (brought up by Ryan) that Osaka was, more or less, like the Everett of Japan. When I had the opportunity to go with my host family, I pretty much decided that it must have been the parts we were driving past--it was huge, gray, and so very industrial. The sky was literally a dark gray--and not because it was raining, either!

I also liked how Stanwood managed to comondere the back of the bus EVERY SINGLE TIME xDD
MT. Si and Stanwood eventually scooted closer together on the buses as we spent time together, though =]
I'm really glad we got to go with Mt. Si, honestly. They were a lot of fun, even though we didn't interact with each other much.