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catching up again
Let's see, last I wrote about was Wednesday.
Thursday night after work I went and got dinner at Otoya, which is about all I remember at this point. I had a huge dinner, which was a bowl of chicken katsudon and a wooden tray of cold udon noodles. And it cost 780 yen for that feast. I'm really going to miss Japanese food a LOT.
Afterwards I came home and played Puzzle Pirates. Being in an active crew is actually kind of neat; you log in and people are like "hey we're going to CI, jump on" or whatever. And there's been quite a bit of "GTFO, Janthina joined our crew?!?! Sweet!" from people, which is also flattering, of course.
Friday was kind of exciting. Kozo invited me along to a group of people who were going to go eat New York Style Pizza at a place in Oji called Rocco's. I was skeptical, but I can walk to Oji from my school, so I figured I'd come along. It was also an unofficial birthday part for Kyoko but I didn't actually know that until I got there and Benjamin had a birthday card and a cake for her.
Anyway... the place is for real! The pizza is seriously New York pizza, the best pizza I've had in Japan in all my time here. We had 7 people (Mika, Kyoko, me, Simon-the-other, Katsumi, Benjamin, and Kozo), so we ordered 2 large pizzas to start, and they were real true 18" huge pizzas. One was pepperoni and one was margherita, which turned out not to be "plain cheese pizza" as we thought, but I got out of eating it by having two slices of the pepperoni :) And we ended up with a half-cheese half-supreme pizza after that. Kozo and Benjamin managed to light candles on a cake for Kyoko while she wasn't even noticing what they were doing, which was impressive.
Also, the proprietors are a guy named Daniel and his wife Keiko. He lived in Japan for a few years in the 1990's, they met and got married, then went back to the US for a while, then decided to come back to Japan and open a pizza place. He was a contractor of some sort in the US, I forget exactly what, but it was definitely totally different than running a food place, that's for sure. But he overheard us talking about stuff in English while he was making pizzas so he ended up talking to our group, and especially me, quite a bit, because I was sitting closest to the ovens and stuff. Benjamin is from New York too, so they were talking about the Mets a bit. I dunno. I asked about the ingredients and it seems they get their cheese and sauce from Europe, which might explain why it doesn't taste like crap like so many other pizza places in Japan (seriously -- Pizza-La tastes like crap when you eat it AND it still tastes like crap 5 hours later in aftertaste).
So yeah, that was really really good, and hanging out with a big group of people was also really good for me since I had a sort of crazy day at school. And there was really good pizza. And cake! Everything is better with cake.
After dinner, we lost Mika and the other 6 of us adjourned to a Doma Doma izakaya near Oji station (basically I live near Oji and so does this other Simon guy), and hung out for another 90 minutes on the all-you-can-drink plan. Katsumi and I both don't actually drink alcohol so we were trying to get 1000 yen worth of soft drinks, while the others were downing lots of beers and talking about lots of random stuff, mostly about studying languages, since we had 3 Japanese people and 3 non-Japanese people at the table. I was kind of blown away when Katsumi told me he'd never studied abroad, since he actually speaks fairly flawless English with idioms and mannerisms that sound really natural (including my usual flag for "studied abroad" which is appropriate use of the word "like" as a filler word). But he also said that he thought I speak really natural Japanese as well, like that my joke about sounding like a 15-year-old boy is not a joke at all, he said I must have picked up a lot of speech patterns from my students.
I dunno.
And then I went home and crashed.
Today is Saturday and I have been studying for the JLPT and I also played volleyball. I am probly going to fail the JLPT, even though I'm only taking N3, because I just haven't been studying. I'm not sure I care at this point, though. Katsumi even pointed out, "Why do you need to pass the JLPT anyway? You're not planning to work in Japan anymore." I guess in theory if I wanted to work with Japanese in the US somehow it'd be a nice credential, but I also bet that they'd be able to find native speakers or people with 1-kyu anyway, so whatever.
Thursday night after work I went and got dinner at Otoya, which is about all I remember at this point. I had a huge dinner, which was a bowl of chicken katsudon and a wooden tray of cold udon noodles. And it cost 780 yen for that feast. I'm really going to miss Japanese food a LOT.
Afterwards I came home and played Puzzle Pirates. Being in an active crew is actually kind of neat; you log in and people are like "hey we're going to CI, jump on" or whatever. And there's been quite a bit of "GTFO, Janthina joined our crew?!?! Sweet!" from people, which is also flattering, of course.
Friday was kind of exciting. Kozo invited me along to a group of people who were going to go eat New York Style Pizza at a place in Oji called Rocco's. I was skeptical, but I can walk to Oji from my school, so I figured I'd come along. It was also an unofficial birthday part for Kyoko but I didn't actually know that until I got there and Benjamin had a birthday card and a cake for her.
Anyway... the place is for real! The pizza is seriously New York pizza, the best pizza I've had in Japan in all my time here. We had 7 people (Mika, Kyoko, me, Simon-the-other, Katsumi, Benjamin, and Kozo), so we ordered 2 large pizzas to start, and they were real true 18" huge pizzas. One was pepperoni and one was margherita, which turned out not to be "plain cheese pizza" as we thought, but I got out of eating it by having two slices of the pepperoni :) And we ended up with a half-cheese half-supreme pizza after that. Kozo and Benjamin managed to light candles on a cake for Kyoko while she wasn't even noticing what they were doing, which was impressive.
Also, the proprietors are a guy named Daniel and his wife Keiko. He lived in Japan for a few years in the 1990's, they met and got married, then went back to the US for a while, then decided to come back to Japan and open a pizza place. He was a contractor of some sort in the US, I forget exactly what, but it was definitely totally different than running a food place, that's for sure. But he overheard us talking about stuff in English while he was making pizzas so he ended up talking to our group, and especially me, quite a bit, because I was sitting closest to the ovens and stuff. Benjamin is from New York too, so they were talking about the Mets a bit. I dunno. I asked about the ingredients and it seems they get their cheese and sauce from Europe, which might explain why it doesn't taste like crap like so many other pizza places in Japan (seriously -- Pizza-La tastes like crap when you eat it AND it still tastes like crap 5 hours later in aftertaste).
So yeah, that was really really good, and hanging out with a big group of people was also really good for me since I had a sort of crazy day at school. And there was really good pizza. And cake! Everything is better with cake.
After dinner, we lost Mika and the other 6 of us adjourned to a Doma Doma izakaya near Oji station (basically I live near Oji and so does this other Simon guy), and hung out for another 90 minutes on the all-you-can-drink plan. Katsumi and I both don't actually drink alcohol so we were trying to get 1000 yen worth of soft drinks, while the others were downing lots of beers and talking about lots of random stuff, mostly about studying languages, since we had 3 Japanese people and 3 non-Japanese people at the table. I was kind of blown away when Katsumi told me he'd never studied abroad, since he actually speaks fairly flawless English with idioms and mannerisms that sound really natural (including my usual flag for "studied abroad" which is appropriate use of the word "like" as a filler word). But he also said that he thought I speak really natural Japanese as well, like that my joke about sounding like a 15-year-old boy is not a joke at all, he said I must have picked up a lot of speech patterns from my students.
I dunno.
And then I went home and crashed.
Today is Saturday and I have been studying for the JLPT and I also played volleyball. I am probly going to fail the JLPT, even though I'm only taking N3, because I just haven't been studying. I'm not sure I care at this point, though. Katsumi even pointed out, "Why do you need to pass the JLPT anyway? You're not planning to work in Japan anymore." I guess in theory if I wanted to work with Japanese in the US somehow it'd be a nice credential, but I also bet that they'd be able to find native speakers or people with 1-kyu anyway, so whatever.
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