![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Adventures in Sendai
I should have been writing an entry about my Sendai trip, but instead I spent the last 3 hours weighing books and magazines to take home to the US. Two suitcases at 50 pounds each will be mostly filled with Shukan Baseball, I think :) I am a little bit surprised by how much they weigh though, to be honest. Turns out the bag by itself is already like 8 pounds, which is part of the problem. It may be that I take 100 pounds worth of stuff back and re-shuffle it all at the airport.
Anyway...
I had a really good time up in Sendai, all things considered -- I've got some kind of cold, I'm sniffly with an annoying sore throat. But I wanted to go, and in the end I am glad I did.
I was on the same train as Shinozawa J and K going up, and we found Mayumi in the station, and the four of us walked to the stadium together, where we met up with Tsuyoshi and Watanabe and Kaori and her mom and Taicho and so on. We couldn't find my friends in the Michinoku Fighters, but it ended up not mattering and we saved seats for ourselves. I ran into Minechi finally, it turns out he was playing kusayakyu so didn't come down for away games until now. Saw a bunch of other people, too.
The Fighters were out doing pregame practice and it started lightly raining. I went up to the gate and watched people throw, and I yelled out a "hey, nice pitching, Mr. Carlyle" at Buddy Carlyle -- and so when the rain turned to SLEET, and I am not making that up, he actually came over and threw me the baseball he'd been practicing with! I was really surprised but I thanked him and also introduced myself like "I'm Deanna, I write a blog about the Fighters, hopefully I'll get to write about you sometime!" I dunno, I was kinda babbling. But he said "Nice to meet you, Deanna!" before running off.
So then we all waited under the stands for the sleet to stop, for like 10-15 minutes. Really. It was so weird. We could see the sunny blue sky in the distance, and watch the sleet and rain 10 feet away from us.
Funny thing is, it became sunny and lovely out and the game was quite nice, weather-wise. Unfortunately the Fighters lost 3-0 and made a lot of errors. The place was packed for Darvish vs. Iwakuma, but the Fighters' batters were so lousy that we barely got to do any of our Sendai cheers.
After the game we all went to check into our respective hotels and then reconvened at Sendai station at 6pm and went off for a night on the town. I have to mention that checking into my hotel really pissed me off though -- I spoke nothing but Japanese and had this annoying clerk speaking to me in lousy broken English that was barely understandable, and I had to keep confirming the random crap she said in Japanese. When she finally asked for my passport I was like "WHAT PART OF I'VE LIVED IN JAPAN FOR THREE YEARS DID YOU NOT CATCH THE FIRST TIME?" and finally she switched into Japanese, but I was just really annoyed.
Anyway, Taicho had to head home and we lost a bunch of the other acquaintances that had been sitting nearby, but the other 8 of us went to get gyutan for dinner at some famous place (Tasuke?). Tsuyoshi and I walked there talking about the Baystars the whole way. After dinner, Kaori's mom left, and the remaining 7 of us (the Shinozawas, Mayumi, Kaori, me, Watanabe, and Tsuyoshi) ended up going to Shidax for karaoke.
It was pretty damn cool to be in a room of people who actually know baseball songs! I think we were there for between 3-4 hours and we did baseball-related crap the entire time, even if it was just like, entering some songs that a player uses at the at-bat music, listening to it halfway and then singing the 15 seconds of it we all know. But we also did things like putting in YMCA or Dschingis Khan and yelling Fighters cheers to it. Tsuyoshi also kept looking up various songs and he'd put things in and it'd play for a minute and we'd be like "WTF is this" and then all of a sudden "OMG IT'S KOICHI HORI'S AT-BAT THEME!" or something. Watanabe and Tsuyoshi can sing really well, and everyone was also saying they were impressed by me since I did stuff like Kyuji's song, or Sunny Day Sunday, or Kiseki, stuff like that, like "OMG you sound like a Japanese person when you sing". Actually, I made Shinozawa K sing Zundoko-bushi (thanks to Hosokawa Toru) so he made me sing Shuchishin (thanks to Nemoto Shunichi), which I wrote a song parody of once but had never actually tried to sing before, which was pretty crazy. Oh yeah, we also put in "Wa" by Lee Jung Hyun, which is the ouenka theme used for Lotte's Imae, and I actually started singing along to it and everyone's like "WHY THE HELL DO YOU KNOW THIS, IT IS IN KOREAN" and I'm like "...it was in DDR 10 years ago or so..." Oh yeah, I sang "Bad Day" by Daniel Powter because it's Makoto Kaneko's at-bat song. It went surprisingly better than expected. Tsuyoshi said "It's not fair, Deanna can sing in Japanese AND English and doesn't need the katakana."
Anyway, so after a few hours of singing baseball music in a karaoke room with Kaori smoking, I was pretty much ready to die. (Nobody in our usual gang smokes, but she lives in Kobe and comes up to hang out with us every now and then.) So I pretty much did exactly that -- found my way back to the hotel and collapsed. Well, I watched the sports news and there was a long special about Takuya Kimura, the Giants coach who died a few weeks ago, and that was really sad, they showed the ceremonies for him and speeches and his 10-year-old son throwing out a first pitch. I never hated Kimutaku despite him being on the Giants, so I actually found myself crying. It's pretty sad.
Got up this morning around 8 or 9. Checked out of the hotel (fortunately got the non-stupid clerk), and walked to the stadium... where I found pretty much nobody, at 10am or so for a 1pm game. So I put my stuff down on the "Team 52" mat that we'd made the day before (we needed a name for our group and Kon-chan couldn't make it this weekend, basically, so we called it Team 52 after outfielder Konta) and wandered around the area, until I ran into half of our group and we wandered some more and took photos and stuff.
With the Shinozawas and Mayumi.
I'm standing in front of the Takeshi Yamasaki cardboard. Whee.
This time when we went into the stadium it was all sunny, and I went to the field to try to talk to the foreign players again, but they weren't having any of it. Well, to be fair, I wasn't assertive enough. I yelled twice, "HEY BRIAN, WHY AREN'T YOU OUT THERE RUNNING?" at Brian Wolfe, but he either didn't hear me or ignored me. Bobby Keppel, I yelled some random things like "Go get 'em Bobby!" or whatnot as he ran by, but he also either didn't hear or ignored it. Alas. Didn't see Carlyle again.
So I wandered around. Got a Rakuten t-shirt -- the 2010 Team one -- and also got chicken curry for lunch, which was OMGFANTASTIC.
The game was frustrating though -- the Eagles got up on the Fighters but then the Fighters came back and were winning for an inning or two! And then suddenly they weren't, and they lost AGAIN, and we were all saying how sad it was that some of us still hadn't seen them win an official game this year yet. Bleh. On the other hand, enough guys got on base that we got to do a lot of the fun Sendai-only cheers and yell a lot, and they scored runs so we got to run all over the place high-fiving people. And I was on the aisle so the ouendan people kept standing next to me. And stuff.
Walking back to the station with my group, a random old dude tried to stop me and talk to me in broken English, he was all like "are you here alone? do you speak English?" and I was just like "WTF" and said to Kaori and Junko, "Help me," and they basically told him to go away. How annoying. Kaori was like "Why was that drunk bothering you?" and I said "Because I'm not Japanese?"
Then, to top that off, when I got on my shinkansen back -- there was a dude sitting in my seat (it's all reserved seating). So I told him he was in my seat, showed him my ticket, and he got kinda huffy and moved across the aisle to sit with his friend in his real seat. WTF? Why was he sitting in my seat instead of in his seat anyway? Then to top it off he told me in, again lousy English, that there was room in the rack next to his bag if I wanted to put my stuff up there. (I had my bags on the floor in front of me because the train was packed.) I was like, "DAIJOUBU", and he continued, saying how the seat was narrow or something and I told him that no, really, it was fine, please leave me alone. Then when I got out the bento I had bought for dinner and started eating it, he stared at me in disbelief and was telling his friend how OMG the gaijin was using chopsticks.
Fuck this country.
I went to sleep for the rest of the train ride anyway. Got up at Omiya, took the train home, etc. Actually, I stopped for a minute to listen to some random band outside at the Bakamatsuri... it's a little bit of a shame that I missed it yet again (the Dai-Akabane Matsuri is its real name) but whatever. Looks like people were having a good time, at least.
Overall it was a good time -- I got a baseball! And I got to party with my friends in Sendai! It's neat to go on road trips with the gang! But I still haven't seen the Fighters win a game, and the country is still pissing me off.
Anyway...
I had a really good time up in Sendai, all things considered -- I've got some kind of cold, I'm sniffly with an annoying sore throat. But I wanted to go, and in the end I am glad I did.
I was on the same train as Shinozawa J and K going up, and we found Mayumi in the station, and the four of us walked to the stadium together, where we met up with Tsuyoshi and Watanabe and Kaori and her mom and Taicho and so on. We couldn't find my friends in the Michinoku Fighters, but it ended up not mattering and we saved seats for ourselves. I ran into Minechi finally, it turns out he was playing kusayakyu so didn't come down for away games until now. Saw a bunch of other people, too.
The Fighters were out doing pregame practice and it started lightly raining. I went up to the gate and watched people throw, and I yelled out a "hey, nice pitching, Mr. Carlyle" at Buddy Carlyle -- and so when the rain turned to SLEET, and I am not making that up, he actually came over and threw me the baseball he'd been practicing with! I was really surprised but I thanked him and also introduced myself like "I'm Deanna, I write a blog about the Fighters, hopefully I'll get to write about you sometime!" I dunno, I was kinda babbling. But he said "Nice to meet you, Deanna!" before running off.
So then we all waited under the stands for the sleet to stop, for like 10-15 minutes. Really. It was so weird. We could see the sunny blue sky in the distance, and watch the sleet and rain 10 feet away from us.
Funny thing is, it became sunny and lovely out and the game was quite nice, weather-wise. Unfortunately the Fighters lost 3-0 and made a lot of errors. The place was packed for Darvish vs. Iwakuma, but the Fighters' batters were so lousy that we barely got to do any of our Sendai cheers.
After the game we all went to check into our respective hotels and then reconvened at Sendai station at 6pm and went off for a night on the town. I have to mention that checking into my hotel really pissed me off though -- I spoke nothing but Japanese and had this annoying clerk speaking to me in lousy broken English that was barely understandable, and I had to keep confirming the random crap she said in Japanese. When she finally asked for my passport I was like "WHAT PART OF I'VE LIVED IN JAPAN FOR THREE YEARS DID YOU NOT CATCH THE FIRST TIME?" and finally she switched into Japanese, but I was just really annoyed.
Anyway, Taicho had to head home and we lost a bunch of the other acquaintances that had been sitting nearby, but the other 8 of us went to get gyutan for dinner at some famous place (Tasuke?). Tsuyoshi and I walked there talking about the Baystars the whole way. After dinner, Kaori's mom left, and the remaining 7 of us (the Shinozawas, Mayumi, Kaori, me, Watanabe, and Tsuyoshi) ended up going to Shidax for karaoke.
It was pretty damn cool to be in a room of people who actually know baseball songs! I think we were there for between 3-4 hours and we did baseball-related crap the entire time, even if it was just like, entering some songs that a player uses at the at-bat music, listening to it halfway and then singing the 15 seconds of it we all know. But we also did things like putting in YMCA or Dschingis Khan and yelling Fighters cheers to it. Tsuyoshi also kept looking up various songs and he'd put things in and it'd play for a minute and we'd be like "WTF is this" and then all of a sudden "OMG IT'S KOICHI HORI'S AT-BAT THEME!" or something. Watanabe and Tsuyoshi can sing really well, and everyone was also saying they were impressed by me since I did stuff like Kyuji's song, or Sunny Day Sunday, or Kiseki, stuff like that, like "OMG you sound like a Japanese person when you sing". Actually, I made Shinozawa K sing Zundoko-bushi (thanks to Hosokawa Toru) so he made me sing Shuchishin (thanks to Nemoto Shunichi), which I wrote a song parody of once but had never actually tried to sing before, which was pretty crazy. Oh yeah, we also put in "Wa" by Lee Jung Hyun, which is the ouenka theme used for Lotte's Imae, and I actually started singing along to it and everyone's like "WHY THE HELL DO YOU KNOW THIS, IT IS IN KOREAN" and I'm like "...it was in DDR 10 years ago or so..." Oh yeah, I sang "Bad Day" by Daniel Powter because it's Makoto Kaneko's at-bat song. It went surprisingly better than expected. Tsuyoshi said "It's not fair, Deanna can sing in Japanese AND English and doesn't need the katakana."
Anyway, so after a few hours of singing baseball music in a karaoke room with Kaori smoking, I was pretty much ready to die. (Nobody in our usual gang smokes, but she lives in Kobe and comes up to hang out with us every now and then.) So I pretty much did exactly that -- found my way back to the hotel and collapsed. Well, I watched the sports news and there was a long special about Takuya Kimura, the Giants coach who died a few weeks ago, and that was really sad, they showed the ceremonies for him and speeches and his 10-year-old son throwing out a first pitch. I never hated Kimutaku despite him being on the Giants, so I actually found myself crying. It's pretty sad.
Got up this morning around 8 or 9. Checked out of the hotel (fortunately got the non-stupid clerk), and walked to the stadium... where I found pretty much nobody, at 10am or so for a 1pm game. So I put my stuff down on the "Team 52" mat that we'd made the day before (we needed a name for our group and Kon-chan couldn't make it this weekend, basically, so we called it Team 52 after outfielder Konta) and wandered around the area, until I ran into half of our group and we wandered some more and took photos and stuff.
With the Shinozawas and Mayumi.
I'm standing in front of the Takeshi Yamasaki cardboard. Whee.
This time when we went into the stadium it was all sunny, and I went to the field to try to talk to the foreign players again, but they weren't having any of it. Well, to be fair, I wasn't assertive enough. I yelled twice, "HEY BRIAN, WHY AREN'T YOU OUT THERE RUNNING?" at Brian Wolfe, but he either didn't hear me or ignored me. Bobby Keppel, I yelled some random things like "Go get 'em Bobby!" or whatnot as he ran by, but he also either didn't hear or ignored it. Alas. Didn't see Carlyle again.
So I wandered around. Got a Rakuten t-shirt -- the 2010 Team one -- and also got chicken curry for lunch, which was OMGFANTASTIC.
The game was frustrating though -- the Eagles got up on the Fighters but then the Fighters came back and were winning for an inning or two! And then suddenly they weren't, and they lost AGAIN, and we were all saying how sad it was that some of us still hadn't seen them win an official game this year yet. Bleh. On the other hand, enough guys got on base that we got to do a lot of the fun Sendai-only cheers and yell a lot, and they scored runs so we got to run all over the place high-fiving people. And I was on the aisle so the ouendan people kept standing next to me. And stuff.
Walking back to the station with my group, a random old dude tried to stop me and talk to me in broken English, he was all like "are you here alone? do you speak English?" and I was just like "WTF" and said to Kaori and Junko, "Help me," and they basically told him to go away. How annoying. Kaori was like "Why was that drunk bothering you?" and I said "Because I'm not Japanese?"
Then, to top that off, when I got on my shinkansen back -- there was a dude sitting in my seat (it's all reserved seating). So I told him he was in my seat, showed him my ticket, and he got kinda huffy and moved across the aisle to sit with his friend in his real seat. WTF? Why was he sitting in my seat instead of in his seat anyway? Then to top it off he told me in, again lousy English, that there was room in the rack next to his bag if I wanted to put my stuff up there. (I had my bags on the floor in front of me because the train was packed.) I was like, "DAIJOUBU", and he continued, saying how the seat was narrow or something and I told him that no, really, it was fine, please leave me alone. Then when I got out the bento I had bought for dinner and started eating it, he stared at me in disbelief and was telling his friend how OMG the gaijin was using chopsticks.
Fuck this country.
I went to sleep for the rest of the train ride anyway. Got up at Omiya, took the train home, etc. Actually, I stopped for a minute to listen to some random band outside at the Bakamatsuri... it's a little bit of a shame that I missed it yet again (the Dai-Akabane Matsuri is its real name) but whatever. Looks like people were having a good time, at least.
Overall it was a good time -- I got a baseball! And I got to party with my friends in Sendai! It's neat to go on road trips with the gang! But I still haven't seen the Fighters win a game, and the country is still pissing me off.
no subject
I can't remember if anyone's ever copied my toroku card, but generally I try to make it as clear as possible that I refuse to speak English to them and that I think they suck at it (unless, in some rare cases, they don't, but I can't remember a time where that has happened). And if they ask for my passport I'm like "You fucking moron, I live here, why would I carry a passport? Do YOU carry a passport? sheesh."
no subject
The "talking behind your back about you because they think you can't understand them" thing happens in the US too. Not usually in, say, New York, but in Pittsburgh I've certainly had my share of being talked to loudly and slowly in case I couldn't speak English despite evidence to the contrary. I'm not sure if that's better or worse than the condescending "talk really fast and watch the foreigner get confused for the lols" that happens sometimes too.
no subject
no subject