First fellow foreigner!!!!

My first encounter in Shikoku with another non-Japanese person.

I saw him on the horrible climb up to Temple 12, Shosanji. A tall white dude with glasses and a bandana, he obviously stuck out like a hitchhikers thumb. 2/3 of the way up the mountain I sat next to the guy and said hey, but that was kind of it. A lot of Westerners come out here to get away from everybody and immerse themselves in a foreign culture, which I totally understand, so I didn't pursue it any further. However, the next two days, I kept seeing him again and again. It was obvious we were moving at basically the same pace. Ugh, this is getting awkward.

A day later, after temples 18 and 19, I checked into the Kaneko lodge in the foothills of the next goddamn mountains we had to climb. AND THERE HE WAS AT DINNER. Okay, I guess I gotta intoduce myself, no way around it now.

And he was super cool!!! His name's Oliver, and hes from Switzerland. He's married, and he's between jobs, so he decided to go do this thing while he had a break in his schedule. His wife's foreign getaway of choice is Bolivia, btw. He works in the microloan business, which serves poor communities that are underserved or ignored by the banking industry. He was lamenting a bad deal that went down when an entire town defaulted on their microloans because the local mayor said that if they reelected them, all the loans would be written off. Which wasn't true, but there just isn't a will or a way to seize assets that small. Which is when we came up with a brilliant idea.

MICROLOAN SHARKS!!! Like microloans, this is a community based initiative that uses people in rural villages to ensure collection of debts too small to be worth hiring a regular loan shark to collect. Just give the cousin or neighbor of whoever defaulted on a microloan like 10 or 20 bucks, and have them throw a rock through their window or something to show that the microloan industry doesn't screw around. This ain't UNICEF, people. We have a business to run here.

In conclusion, me and Oliver laughed our asses off at that offensive and disgusting idea, then parted ways the next day when I decided to sleep in a bit. I'm sure I'll see him again.