Tour Journal page 1: Super Start

We are already on our 3rd day here in America. It is so great! Here is a run down of what has been up on the first 2 days.



7/28 Saturday:

Too excited to sleep, we left our house a little before 6 on a morning train to the airport. We took a plane to Korea where we had a 5 hour layover that flew by.
If you ever have to have a layover you should try to do it in Seoul because it is the airport with the most delicious food in the world! We had crazy delicious tofu chige.

Then the airport staff let us borrow a power adaptor for our computer. So we watched a couple episodes of Wonder Showzen we had downloaded from iTunes before we left. It is so funny. But, when we were sitting in the chair in the airport we kept smelling something kind of terrible. At first we thought it was the guy behind us but he got up and left after a while (probably because we were laughing too hard at Wonder Showzen), but the smell stayed! And then we could find the real culprit... the chair Yoshimi was sitting in! It was the stinkiest, BO smelling thing in the world. I wonder who left that smell there? It was almost worse than something any human could do! It was like an elephant sized stink. So, if you do have a layover in Seoul be careful when you choose any seat around gate 22.

So, our flight left around 4 on Saturday afternoon in Korea and we got to San Francisco around noon on Saturday. So it was like we had taken a time machine!
When we got to the airport, our super friend Tim came to pick us up. We first met him when he was touring around Japan as the bassist for Rf. He showed us his wood shop where he is making a lot of furniture. He made his own desk on stool, which you can see here.

Then he took us to the mission where Yoshimi tried her first Burrito ever.
It was so delicious.


The mission seemed like a pretty cool spot too.
After that we went to our best friend Patrick (PatPat)'s sister's house where we are all staying for a few days. It is always so much fun to hang out with Patrick and this time we get to take a road trip with him for a whole month! Road party!

If you don't know about his amazing photography yet, you have to check it out. Him and his girlfriend have a big spread in the newest Vice Magazine, and you can see the photos from it here (maybe not to good to check at work though):
www.viceland.com

In the night we were going to go to see copy and panther play, but the jet-lag caught up with us and we ended up going back home and sleeping at like 11.


7/29 Sunday:

In the morning we went to an awesome farmers market which was perfect for Patrick because these days he is really into this strange farmers hat for some reason.

At the market they had so much fruit we could sample for free, and it was even pretty cheap to buy too. Fruit in Japan is way too expensive. These raspberries were perfect.

Then we randomly ran into Gerald who we knew from Nagoya when he was living there for a while. I guess he is living around Patrick's sister's house now. Crazy!

So, we were eating our fruit by a little stream and there were these cool little kids making boats out of sticks and grass and "putting them to sail" (everything in quotation marks are directly from this 6 year-old's mouth). There were 2 little guys. One was the "builder" and one was the "supplier" (he ran around and picked up broken branches). But, none of the boats made it very far before falling apart so the "supplier" was also in charge of "the museum" which was a big rock they put all of their old broken boats on. This is one of their best boats:

After a while, they offered to let us start the "raft company." Together we owned those seas! But, in the end some grown-up lady told us all of our boats and rafts were clogging up some pipe at the end of the stream. I think she was either just jealous of all of the fun, or an undercover pirate bent on halting our expedition. Oh well.

Then we walked around and saw this:


After that we went back to the house for a BBQ! The weather in San Francisco is perfect for BBQing!

We had to leave the BBQ a little early to head down to the Space Gallery, where we played our first show in America in so long.

I was a little worried how it would go because half of the songs were in Japanese, but everyone seemed super super into. People clapped along, gave us some hoots, and looked overall excited which made us more and more excited and totally killed our jet-lag! Then we sold so many CDs and bags! Thank you so much to everyone who came! And, thanks to the Megamoog (who was awesome for setting up the show) Space Gallery for having us, and giving us free beer. The red stripe really matched Yoshimi's new dress!


At the show, another super friend and future collaborator Sean Talley gave us some fruit and bread which we took home and ate on the porch as a late night dinner

and then we hit the sleeping bags Patrick's mom let us borrow.

Spooning in two separate sleeping bags is pretty funny.