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Back in Tokyo
Well, but I didn't write an entry last night about my Sunday in Nagoya. Whoops.
Basically, I met up with Jeff at Nagoya station. We found a locker for my stuff (and for the newspapers and other stuff I was giving him too), and then went to wander around. First was a stop at Bic Camera, where we looked at lenses (there's now a 28-300 that almost feels like it'd be more droolworthy than that 18-200) and whatnot, and then we went into the shopping/restaurant underground mall thingy by the station to get lunch. There was some super-brand-new miso katsu place that had a lot of signs leading to it and a LONG LONG line outside. It apparently just opened 3 weeks ago, and it was a Sunday lunchtime, so eh. We ended up going to a place a few storefronts over that had no line. Only downside is, they also had no sushi -- I wanted a sushi and miso katsu combo that was pictured. Instead, Jeff and I both got "Nagoya Teishoku", where they pretty much serve you Nagoya. I mean, not really, but you get miso katsu, tebasaki (chicken wings), some spicy miso beef mixture, some salad, miso soup, etc. LOTS OF FOOD whee.
Then after that, we went off to Nagoya Kyujo! By which I don't mean the Dome, where the Dragons currently play, but the outdoor stadium where they used to play, and where their minor-league team still does play, but didn't have a game this particular day. However, that didn't stop there from being like 15 fans or so waiting outside the gate from the training building or dorm or whatever it was, hounding for autographs. We kinda ignored them and just walked around the stadium. Jeff pointed out things like "This is where the huge outfield bleachers were -- you can see the foundations -- but they got rid of them..."
Eventually we got to the "front" of the stadium and were able to walk in, but there was a guard. We told him we were just taking photos, and talked to him for a bit. He gave us Dragons schedules, and I also got him to take a photo of us:
So, nothing hugely exciting in the stadium itself that we know of -- there might have been practice, but ordinary humans weren't allowed in, so we don't know.
Walked back to the station, stopping to take some pictures of railroad tracks and stuff. Well, more like, Jeff experimented with a fisheye lens and whatnot and I just kinda walked on the tracks and made him take this photo:
See, I'm posing for the next Train Geek Girls Calendar or something. Yeah.
Anyway, after that we just went walking around the area by Nagoya station, by the new spiral art institute building, stuff like that. Then Jeff had to head home so I went and got a shinkansen ticket and went on my happy way home too.
Shinkansen ride was largely uneventful. I checked my senbatsu scorecards a bit more and played some Ouendan.
Arriving home in Akabane was pretty weird though -- the street lights were all out near my place as were the lights in the apartment building across from my house, so I had to get out my cellphone in order to have light to see where the hell my front door lock was. Even the neighrbors' houses were dark, I saw a dim light on in one house. Very weird.
I'd eaten a buncha snacks on the train, so I never really had dinner exactly. I spent some time working on cropping some more Koshien photos and just kinda conked out.
This morning I woke up and watched the Tohoku vs. Ogaki game. I felt like it was kind of unfair to both sides -- especially being Ogaki, if you win, you feel bad for beating the team that came from the epicenter of all the earthquake problems, but if you lose, then you feel like you got beaten by a team that should have been pretty weak from their troubles. Bleh. The upshot was that Tohoku's ace/captain/cleanup Kamimura impressed me, but the entirety of Ogaki Nichidai's team impressed me, so there.
I also watched Game 2 today because it was Kyushu Kokusai vs. Nihon Bunri, and Kyukoku has a super-awesome catcher/captain/cleanup guy named Takajo that I fell in love with on Day 1, so I wanted to see him play again, and he is still awesome, and Kyukoku won. I also spent that time cropping more photos, but realized my "Meet Nichidai Sanko" set is more like a "Deanna has an unhealthy fixation on Kentaro Yoshinaga" set. Whatever :)
Oh, and I helped one of my JHS students with their English homework, over email. They already have "spring vacation" homework to do for high school, apparently, despite that school hasn't even started yet. Yikes.
Then I went out to do errands. Got lunch at Tenkazushi and then went to pay some bills. Unfortunately it seems that I have to actually find the water office or something in order to pay my overdue water bill. Guess I kinda fucked that one up, but I went to a convenience store and a bank and they both told me the same thing. Doh. I was in Ikebukuro anyway so I stopped by Bookoff and also by Mint, but Mint was closed (thank god I just looked and they're just closed Mondays, whoops). And I called the hair salon near my house and made an appointment for 4:30; went home, dropped off stuff, and went to the salon.
Same hairdresser as before, he was like "As usual it's been a while since you last came in!" but I asked for just the same cut as last time, around my shoulders, and he did that. One odd thing is that during the massage thing he pressed against the back of my head, by my neck, and it HURT. Not sure if that's a sign something is weird with me or if my neck is just stiff as all hell after 3 days of Koshien photoshooting.
Whee.
It took a while and so I went to Shinjuku after that to meet up with Kozo and Ben... I'd emailed Kozo earlier in the day like "Hey, do you like omurice? What are you up to later?" and he answered, "Eating omurice with you?" :) so I dragged them to Rakeru, since I really wanted to go back there sometime on this trip! Rakeru is that Alice-in-Wonderland themed place with the excellent omurice and also the really awesome bread. I hadn't been to the Shinjuku one before but it's pleasant -- feels like being in a huge living room! And Simon also eventually joined us, which was also nice, hadn't seen him in a long time. So, got to catch up with people and eat yummy food and all.
Simon and Kozo and I went to karaoke for a bit after that too! So even more fun! I'd never actually been to karaoke with Simon before because he used to always duck out when Pau and I were going, in the old days.
Whee.
I feel like I had something else to say but I forgot what. Doh.
I guess one thing that came out of dinner's conversation was realizing that the power problem is going to royally suck this summer -- summer is so horrendously hot and Tokyo's power grid won't be able to sustain all the air conditioning. So it put some perspective on why it's probably a good thing I'm not going to be here this year. But it also still made me feel sad because I really really like being in Tokyo. Bleh.
Basically, I met up with Jeff at Nagoya station. We found a locker for my stuff (and for the newspapers and other stuff I was giving him too), and then went to wander around. First was a stop at Bic Camera, where we looked at lenses (there's now a 28-300 that almost feels like it'd be more droolworthy than that 18-200) and whatnot, and then we went into the shopping/restaurant underground mall thingy by the station to get lunch. There was some super-brand-new miso katsu place that had a lot of signs leading to it and a LONG LONG line outside. It apparently just opened 3 weeks ago, and it was a Sunday lunchtime, so eh. We ended up going to a place a few storefronts over that had no line. Only downside is, they also had no sushi -- I wanted a sushi and miso katsu combo that was pictured. Instead, Jeff and I both got "Nagoya Teishoku", where they pretty much serve you Nagoya. I mean, not really, but you get miso katsu, tebasaki (chicken wings), some spicy miso beef mixture, some salad, miso soup, etc. LOTS OF FOOD whee.
Then after that, we went off to Nagoya Kyujo! By which I don't mean the Dome, where the Dragons currently play, but the outdoor stadium where they used to play, and where their minor-league team still does play, but didn't have a game this particular day. However, that didn't stop there from being like 15 fans or so waiting outside the gate from the training building or dorm or whatever it was, hounding for autographs. We kinda ignored them and just walked around the stadium. Jeff pointed out things like "This is where the huge outfield bleachers were -- you can see the foundations -- but they got rid of them..."
Eventually we got to the "front" of the stadium and were able to walk in, but there was a guard. We told him we were just taking photos, and talked to him for a bit. He gave us Dragons schedules, and I also got him to take a photo of us:
So, nothing hugely exciting in the stadium itself that we know of -- there might have been practice, but ordinary humans weren't allowed in, so we don't know.
Walked back to the station, stopping to take some pictures of railroad tracks and stuff. Well, more like, Jeff experimented with a fisheye lens and whatnot and I just kinda walked on the tracks and made him take this photo:
See, I'm posing for the next Train Geek Girls Calendar or something. Yeah.
Anyway, after that we just went walking around the area by Nagoya station, by the new spiral art institute building, stuff like that. Then Jeff had to head home so I went and got a shinkansen ticket and went on my happy way home too.
Shinkansen ride was largely uneventful. I checked my senbatsu scorecards a bit more and played some Ouendan.
Arriving home in Akabane was pretty weird though -- the street lights were all out near my place as were the lights in the apartment building across from my house, so I had to get out my cellphone in order to have light to see where the hell my front door lock was. Even the neighrbors' houses were dark, I saw a dim light on in one house. Very weird.
I'd eaten a buncha snacks on the train, so I never really had dinner exactly. I spent some time working on cropping some more Koshien photos and just kinda conked out.
This morning I woke up and watched the Tohoku vs. Ogaki game. I felt like it was kind of unfair to both sides -- especially being Ogaki, if you win, you feel bad for beating the team that came from the epicenter of all the earthquake problems, but if you lose, then you feel like you got beaten by a team that should have been pretty weak from their troubles. Bleh. The upshot was that Tohoku's ace/captain/cleanup Kamimura impressed me, but the entirety of Ogaki Nichidai's team impressed me, so there.
I also watched Game 2 today because it was Kyushu Kokusai vs. Nihon Bunri, and Kyukoku has a super-awesome catcher/captain/cleanup guy named Takajo that I fell in love with on Day 1, so I wanted to see him play again, and he is still awesome, and Kyukoku won. I also spent that time cropping more photos, but realized my "Meet Nichidai Sanko" set is more like a "Deanna has an unhealthy fixation on Kentaro Yoshinaga" set. Whatever :)
Oh, and I helped one of my JHS students with their English homework, over email. They already have "spring vacation" homework to do for high school, apparently, despite that school hasn't even started yet. Yikes.
Then I went out to do errands. Got lunch at Tenkazushi and then went to pay some bills. Unfortunately it seems that I have to actually find the water office or something in order to pay my overdue water bill. Guess I kinda fucked that one up, but I went to a convenience store and a bank and they both told me the same thing. Doh. I was in Ikebukuro anyway so I stopped by Bookoff and also by Mint, but Mint was closed (thank god I just looked and they're just closed Mondays, whoops). And I called the hair salon near my house and made an appointment for 4:30; went home, dropped off stuff, and went to the salon.
Same hairdresser as before, he was like "As usual it's been a while since you last came in!" but I asked for just the same cut as last time, around my shoulders, and he did that. One odd thing is that during the massage thing he pressed against the back of my head, by my neck, and it HURT. Not sure if that's a sign something is weird with me or if my neck is just stiff as all hell after 3 days of Koshien photoshooting.
Whee.
It took a while and so I went to Shinjuku after that to meet up with Kozo and Ben... I'd emailed Kozo earlier in the day like "Hey, do you like omurice? What are you up to later?" and he answered, "Eating omurice with you?" :) so I dragged them to Rakeru, since I really wanted to go back there sometime on this trip! Rakeru is that Alice-in-Wonderland themed place with the excellent omurice and also the really awesome bread. I hadn't been to the Shinjuku one before but it's pleasant -- feels like being in a huge living room! And Simon also eventually joined us, which was also nice, hadn't seen him in a long time. So, got to catch up with people and eat yummy food and all.
Simon and Kozo and I went to karaoke for a bit after that too! So even more fun! I'd never actually been to karaoke with Simon before because he used to always duck out when Pau and I were going, in the old days.
Whee.
I feel like I had something else to say but I forgot what. Doh.
I guess one thing that came out of dinner's conversation was realizing that the power problem is going to royally suck this summer -- summer is so horrendously hot and Tokyo's power grid won't be able to sustain all the air conditioning. So it put some perspective on why it's probably a good thing I'm not going to be here this year. But it also still made me feel sad because I really really like being in Tokyo. Bleh.
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