I should've listened to Stone Cold.

He said, as did most t-shirted backs in my high school, DTA. That is to say, don't trust anybody. ASITTURNSOUT, the sum'bich had a point: the following are a list of things people told me before coming to Japan:
1. the bread is terrible
2. don't eat anything made with wheat--it's terrible
3. including pancakes
4. Japanese is the devil's tongue
5. the women have sideways vaginas
6. you won't under any circumstances save money

The last point could easily be true--if I drank like a fish any/every day of the week. While I haven't seen a Japanese vagina habeas corpus yet, I've seen plenty of porn magazines, as they're both prevalent in this country and often admired by my neighbors. They're shaped pretty much like you'd imagine.

I have yet to see the devil, or hear him speak.

Now, for hard evidence, I trusted the info about Japanese bread. I mean, they've a history with rice, which they made with great skill and goodyumminess--but bread? No way. The rumormongering must be true. So for about a month, I didn't have bread or bread products in Japan. and then, one day, I did. And it's so much better than American bread. It's on par with European bread, in my awesome opinion. And their pancakes? They're better than any I've ever had, and twice as filling.

It just goes to show, never trust anything you can test for yourself. Since I've been to Japan, my Canadian/English neighbors have told me a few truisms, usually when we're out drinking, and they observe me drinking. The following list accounts the criteria for being "gay":

-ordering a sangria
-drinking a sangria
-drinking anything with alcohol AND fruit in it, unless I point out everyone drinking Corona has a lemon in their beer, at which point the argument is adjusted to exclude lemon as a fruit, and to include wine
-owning a handbag BUT NOT INCLUDING wearing a dress, which many had done upon a time

I'm guilty of many of these things, so I'm probably gay. But on Monday I'm fairly sure a man was hitting on me and I returned little to none of his affections, so I still may be in the limbic pre-gay sangria-fag zone. I'll have to get back to you on that.