The sorry police

Their car definitely didnt have a spoiler.

Ok so I dont plan on this being a long post because my space bar button is just big enough for me to put both thumbs in between and on either side of the space bar there is a button that changes my roman characters to hiragana, katakana, or kanji, japanese symbols. So (1) Im not able to type as fast as I would like, and two, I still dont have interenet (Im at a net cafe) and I prefer to write my blog entries on my own computer, especially when I have such a huge space bar, haha.

Ok, second week in Tottori is awesome. I finally got my bike fixed so people dont hear me riding rim and squeaking all the way from the other side of the street. Its much easier to peddle the bike now. All that stuff I may have mentioned about my legs getting more defined and stronger because Im on a bike, yeah...that was due more to the fact that I was riding on a flat tire and it was THAT much harder to get the bike moving. So now I am very appreciative that I can go over bumpy surfaces and not feel as if my bike is going to fall out from underneath me. Oh..the small things in life.

Secondly, I went to Toys R Us today!!! YAY!! And I bought a medium sized pokemon stuffed animal (Turtwig for those of you who are wondering) and....(drumroll), I bought Relakkuma!!! YAY!!!!!! Click on the word to see what Im talking about. Lets just say hes my new favorite bear of all time!!! Oh, and last but not least, I bought Street Fighter IV. I wanted to buy another game as well, buuut...it doesnt have English subtitles and since its an RPG (role playing game) I KIND of need to know what the characters are saying so that I can progress in the game. Shoot, it was hard enough just scrolling through the SFIV menu today to figure out where the options were, the survival mode, and pretty much just how to start up a fight. If for no other reason, I need to learn Japanese so that I can understand my games!!!

Story time!!! So on Friday night me and Becca went out and hung with some other foreginers who teach English here in Tottori as well, but not for Amity, I believe all of them are in the JET program. We didnt intend to stay out late because we work from Tues-Sat with Sunday and Monday off. So Saturday is our real going out night. But anyways, as we are biking back home we dart across a street that doesnt have a cross walk because our building was RIGHT there. One small, eensy weensy problem with this. Unbeknownst to me and bex, we did it RIGHT in front of a police car. yay...no... They blarred something in Japanese out of their speakers, turned their lights on, got out of their cars and stopped us from going to park our bikes. We were AT our building and we are looking at each other like `Ok, I know we just jay walked with our bikes, but seriously...`. So the police officers first ask us if we are married. And we tell them no, they ask us if we are dating and we said no, we are just friends, we work together. And then they RAN OUR TAGS!!! Apparently, our bikes have little license plates on them, more like stickers. But they still count as license plates. So, if you dont know at this point, me and bex did not buy these bikes, they were given to us by the people we replaced. If you dont see where this is going yet, let me fill you in. THEY THOUGHT WE STOLE THE BIKES!! But then we told them that Brady and Andrea GAVE them to us. Please keep in mind, one officer didnt know any English and the other one wasnt too far behind him. So once I told him that it was Bradys and did the motion for GAVE, he understood, but they still wanted to see me and Bex passports. We were relecutant, but hey, what were we going to say, no. Ah, but let me back up. So I asked the officers as best I could, did we do something wrong? And I pointed to the street, the odd thing is, they werent concerned with any wrong doing as far the street was concerned. So bex is looking in her dictionary and we are trying to find the word for `trouble` and `wrong` to get them to tell us what we did. Ok, so fas forward. They know we are from America, we go get our passports, they are talking on their walkie talkies and telling SOMEone our names. So what I think happened is that they let dispatch, or WHOEVER know that even though those license plates came up as Andre and Brady, now Jeremy and Rebecca had them. So ultimately I think we got our bikes registered in our names.

The odd part about this whole story is that no ticket was written and one of the police officers kept saying sorry, like HE was doing something to US. They were both really polite and really cool. To this day, haha, like it happened so long ago, it was 2 nights ago...but anyway, to this day I still really dont know what happend. Im thinking they pulled us because we crossed the street right there but then they asked us if it was our bikes before they ran our plates, so I believe maybe they THOUGHT we may have stolen the bikes because they asked Becca if that was even her purse. Once we showed them that we had the keys for the bikes and told them Andre and Bradys names and told them that we teach at Amity, I think everything was cool, and thats when they had us get our passports so they could let dispatch know our names for the specific license plates.

Apparently foreigners are targetted a bit more for stupid stuff that Japanese people would get away with. This is coming from friends of ours we`ve met here that have been here for a year or so. So all in all, I still dont know WHAT the heck was going on, but its a great story....now anyways. Strange...but those were the nicest cops ever, haha, who says `sorry` when they are the police!!!?? Good times. So no, Im not in jail in Tottori writing you this and telling you how Im stuck here for Jay Biking, so dont worry, all is well and good in Jeremyland and hes not an international criminial.

Oh and if you see some of these posts that have some spelling errors, give me a break, there seems to be no spell check on these computers as I write. Thanks peoples.

-Jeremy aka The Jay Biking Criminal

P.S.- Just in case you need a reminder, I wont be posting pictures until I get internet for my OWN computer at my OWN place again. Just an FYI. Be cool peoples.