I hope tire smoke isn't carcinogenic...

So yeah, as I said, it was a bit of a hike. But getting to see a ton of Sylvias, Skylines, hachi-rokus, and a pair of awesome Toyotas (a Chaser and a Soarer, of course!) tear around the Ebisu South Course, mostly sideways, I can honestly say that waking up at 6 and riding the trains for 5 hours was well worth it. Getting there really was crazy though. I transfered at all of these stations I had never heard of onto lines that I had no understanding of geographically. Realistically, I could have ended up in Okinawa and not have realized it. But my broken Japanese was enough to carry me through the commute, meet up with Kristine, and eat ramen way too early at Kouriyama station. From there it was just a couple stops to Nihommatsu and Ebisu Circuit. We gave up on taking a bus once presented with the timetables for doing so, and just took a cab. It was like 3000yen for a 15 minute ride, which believe it or not isn't that bad for Japan. Good thing too, cuz the cab driver took us inside the circuit right to the South Course, which ended up being another 5 minutes up and down a bunch of hills. Good thing we didn't have to walk from the bus station. But being in a cab was definitely a little awkward, especially with all the other car lovers checking each other's rides out, all under a banner that said "no car = no life". So true. But oh man, once we got to the track. All the teams actually racing that day had their cars lined up behind the main grandstands, with the drivers coming out to meet the fans. This was my first event so I didn't really know much about the drivers, but after this race and watching the Option DVD I bought of the first round from 2006, Ken "monkey" Nomura aka Nomuken is def my favorite. For one, because he was a huge showoff and was the only driver to always drift through the unscored warm up section on the upper half of the track, which happened to be where all the free section seats were. Also for trying to slide the rear end of his awesome Blitz Skyline while half out of the car, but not being able to cuz he's pretty short. I was cheering for him after seeing him in the prelims, and he made it to the final battle against one of the Team Orange Imprezas and took second. The judge kept saying "this is truly a high level battle!" :) As far as the cars go, seeing a big Chaser slide around the circuit in full D1 spec solidified my love of all things Toyota (or at least all Toyotas with the 1JZ-GTE / 2JZ-GTE). Every day I'm here I feel the need for a car more and more, and I'm definitely going to run out of things to do in my town if I don't expand my operating range with some (twin turbo) wheels soon.

So maybe, hopefully, I got really lucky after the race. I called a cab to pick me and Kristine up but was kind of worried about the cabbie's ability to determine where we were exactly based on the short conversation. So when an opportunity presented itself, (much like the time I accidentally spent my train fare on McDonald's in Hitachi) I humbly asked for the assistance of the international community in Japan, and ended up meeting some damn cool people in the process. Waved hello and asked the first group of white people I saw if they could give us a lift to the station, and they happily obliged. As luck would have it, the guy was driving a really slick looking JZX100 Chaser Touring V, with the 1JZ-GTE and numerous mods. Turns out he's a dealer just outside Tokyo specializing in exporting JDM cars! Of course I already knew that there's nothing I can do to bring a car here back to the states. But it was awesome luck to meet a guy who knows all the details about buying cars here, especially the kind of cars I want to buy. Plus, he was happy to let me and Kristine know about all kinds of drift events coming up soon. Hopefully I will get to go to some of them, since I just found out today that the Super GT in Motegi is no go :(