The Castle

It's been a few busy days over here of riding, going to a castle, and checking out one of the local wakeboard contests with the guys from O'Brien Japan. Unfortunately I didn't have a camera for most of it... sorry.

Anyways, there have been more and more riders showing up at the cable recently, so Yuki and I have been going out and riding with them. It turns out that the rails at the cable will be the ones used at the Japanese pro tour stop that will be held next week. Everybody is getting their practice in. I'll try to get some shots of the guys riding the cable later. Unfortunately it is raining right now.

Yuki wanted to show me a little more of traditional Japan, so after riding the cable one day he took me to the castle in Osaka. When I think about castles I picture massive rock structures that appear very dark and cold. This was not the case. Now there was a lot of rock, but that was used for walls, moats, and overall protection. The actually living quarters of the castle was made of white painted wood and it had a green shingled roof, as well as some gold trim. The way that it was lit up at night made it look amazing.

The next day I was picked up by Tetsuya from O'Brien Japan and we went to a local amateur wakeboard event. We arrived at the site at 9:00AM and the contest had already been going on for 3 hours. That's some determination. We met up with "Stinky", who also works for O'Brien Japan, set up a tent with all of the new 2011 product. After hanging out for a bit, the organizer of the event, Moto, asked me to go out and do a demo ride which I was excited to do... until it was time to ride. They day started out with incredible conditions, but by the time that I rode the wind had really picked up. It got choppy... like really choppy. On top of that, the Air Nautique started having engine troubles as soon as I hopped off the dock. We switched over to one of the normal Japanese outboard boats and it was time to ride. It wasn’t spectacular session on my part, but I still got some cheers. Luckily for me, I had an opportunity for what I like to call a redemption ride at the end of the day. It was still pretty choppy, but I felt like my riding was back up to par and I was really happy with that and so was everyone else.

Aside from having just a normal wakeboard contest, they also had a kicker contest and the winner was going to take home about $5000. They held the qualifiers for the kicker contest at the end of the day and unfortunately there were no open spots so I wasn’t able to compete. It was a lot of fun to watch though and there were plenty of spectacular crashes. (Sorry for the lack of photos, I thought that I was going back there today so I slacked off and left the camera in the car.)

So to finish off the day, the O’Brien guys wanted to take me out to dinner and wanted to see me eat some weird stuff. We ended up going to another Japanese BBQ place and they just started ordering food. The first plate that came out was sliced cow tongue. I was relieved to find out that we were going to grill it up before eating it. I was a little surprised on how tasty it was. Next up, raw beef and something raw that nobody could explain in english (Yuki thinks that it might be cow intestine). The beef was pretty good and the intestines??? were interesting (not horrible but not something that I would probably order for myself). The third weird thing for the night was another thing that they couldn’t translate. I actually don’t want to know what it is. It looked like a large glob of fat, but it was probably some part of the digestive tract. This is not something that I would recommend. Of course we did have some really good meat with dinner as well as some dessert, so I was well taken care of. It was great hanging out with those guys for the day.