And it was, I felt, of the utmost importance to rest up before the evening’s festivities which would see us catching up with The Sponge and Lighting Dude, two members of a theatre troupe that had passed through Bowen about eighteen months ago doing an Arts Council gig around the district’s schools on their way to the Pacific Edge arts conference in Mackay. We’d already caught up with The Interpreter in Tokyo, and prior experience suggested that the evening would develop into a rather fluid affair.
A flurry of e-mails established the basic plan for the night’s entertainment. Meet at Karasuma Station and then head towards somewhere to eat, and, what is more important, drink. The Sponge is, as the nickname suggests, partial to a drink.
And so, of course, am I.
Once at the station, we caught up with two familiar faces and a third member of the troupe who’d been enlisted for the night because she was (a) a good drinker and (b) knew her way around the value-for-money eating and drinking establishments in downtown Kyoto.
We stood around chatting for a while waiting for the final member of the party to arrive, and, once she had, set off on a route march which turned to the left and headed down into a basement just as I was about to ask why we’d set off on such a lengthy excursion without a compass and a cut lunch.
We removed the shoes and placed them in a handy locker before we were ushered into an alcove where we set about the important task of organising copious quantities of food and drink. Beer seemed to be the logical starting beverage, and there was some discussion (in Japanese) about the most appropriately-sized drinking vessels.
The Sponge, having spent a busy day on the promotional trail, was not in a mood to drink out of a tooth glass, and uttered something that sounded like Dynamo and which I heard as Dynamite - and I decided nothing less than Dynamite would suffice.
When the first round of drinks arrived, I discovered that Dynamo denoted a drinking vessel containing substantially more than a pint glass.
For the next couple of hours Hughesy and The Sponge washed down another array of assorted dishes, nothing in the high-class-gourmet category, but good solid blotting paper to soak up copious draughts of dynamite before changing to sake.
Along the way we discovered that Lighting Dude needed a change of nickname, due to an aversion to flying. He was, we decided, now to be known as Chicken. It didn’t, however, stop there.