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Hmmm... yeah, weekend. Let's see, I last updated about Friday (and it's now Monday morning 1am). Saturday I pretty much just got up and went to work; it's my earlier day, so I have to do that. As usual I've somewhat friends-list-locked all the work details. It was actually a crazier day than usual, with various things happening like my manager getting sick and having to go to the hospital and whatnot. I had thought of going to the Giants game at 6pm but that plan sort of got scrapped by various events happening, so instead I collected up all of my dirty clothes to bring home for the weekend to wash and such, and just left.
By the time I got on a train to anywhere, it was around 6:30. Eri and I rode together to Nippori, and then she had to go switch trains to go to her hockey game; I continued on to Akihabara, where I had a goal of getting a cheap memory card for my keitai. Which is pretty much exactly what I did. I left the station and crossed the street and literally went into shop after shop pricing microSD cards. The shops nearest the station were all like 5900 yen for a 2GB card; it went down to 5200 yen a block away, and 4900 yen two blocks away, and THEN I struck gold at a Sofmap a few blocks down where I bought a 2GB microSD for 3900 AND it came with adapters for miniSD and normal SD. I even called a clerk over to ask her for real, was that the price, and she said "Yeah, isn't it cheap?" and I said "Yeah! I'd like to buy it!" and so that was that. I was also trying to price Nintendo DSes so I stopped in a few places, but they were 16800 yen no matter where I went (like $160).
Of course, Akihabara is retarded and everything closes by 8pm even on Saturdays. I ended up getting some kaitensushi and then stopping in an arcade to play some Pop'n'Music and then I thought I'd go to the Tokyo Dome and look for a Fighters keychain and the latest issue of Shukan Baseball, except something I hadn't counted on was that my watch had stopped, so it wasn't 7:50pm, it was actually 8:30, and the Giants-Swallows game was in the 9th inning and likely to end soon, and I did NOT want to be around the 50,000 people leaving the game, so instead I rode to Shinjuku to try to go get to a bookstore and/or a Yodobashi. But, I got lost and found neither and eventually just got pissed off and gave up and came back north, my legs aching. I stopped in Akabane station's little minibookstore to get this week's Shube and I looked at some maps but still didn't find what I want (Warabi station area map).
Eh.
Oh, another funny thing is that while crossing town to get to Shinjuku, after I felt all relieved for avoiding the baseball crowds at Suidobashi, of course a BAZILLION soccer fans came on at... Yotsuya?, having just watched the Urawa Reds play some other team. There was one empty seat next to me and this family comes on and they have two sons and they suggest the kids should sit down and the kid looks at me and won't sit down, so I just giggle at him and say in Japanese, "Americans are scary, aren't they?" And he just gets that shocked kid look of "Oh crap, she speaks Japanese" that I get so amused by. So then I just ask the mother in Japanese, "Are you all coming from a soccer game? I see the Urawa stuff.. how was it?" and she told me the name of the team they were cheering for, which I already forgot, and THEN the kid speaks up to me saying "It was good but our team lost..."
...and of course when I stand up to get off at Shinjuku the kids both sit down in my vacated seat. Go figure.
Anyway, I barely remember how I got home once I spurred north but I'm pretty sure I just went to Warabi and walked back the long way. Yeehaw. I meant to just go to sleep but instead I stayed up watching the 24-Hour TV thing on whatever channel that was (Asahi? Channel 4..) since I turned on the TV and saw Hideaki Takizawa, better known to the masses as Tackey (of Tackey And Tsubasa), in the last half hour of a sad dorama. Then after that ended, I saw all of these celebrities/talento types kick off this 24-hour thing... including Tsuyoshi Shinjo, who is apparently now a TV star. So I HAD to watch for a bit. An hour in, I swear to GOD, they had Jennie Finch come on the show. No, I am not making that up. She did the Jennie Finch Challenge and they had brought in all KINDS of crazy baseball people to face her, including Randy Bass. You really have to love Japan for creative late-night TV ideas. They had half an hour of Tsubasa Imai (the Tsubasa of the aforementioned pair) running around Tohoku interviewing random farmers for ideas for the 24-hour TV show. It was pretty weird. I fell asleep watching it, basically.
So, Sunday morning I wake up and my game plan for the day is
1) do laundry
2) get showered/dressed
3) go food shopping (while waiting for laundry to dry, etc)
4) watch Saga Kita play Teikyo at Koshien (also while the above)
5) go to the Seibu-Orix game for lack of anything better to do
So, I get started on the laundry just fine, and I take a shower and get dressed and all. I had to manually restart rinse mode on the laundry machine because I'm an idiot, and add fabric softener (yay!) and then I went to the supermarket across the street from me which is only open 10am-9pm and thus I never ever go there.
I guess I could have gotten some real Japanese food, but instead I got some cup noodles and some more Kirin tea, and then some Ritz crackers so I'd have some snacks around. Of course, rather than actually making the noodles for lunch I was a dumbass and bought some Hokkaido potato croquettes instead. They were delicious :)
And then I basically did laundry and watched Koshien and I spent a while cleaning off the other plastic drawer set so I could use it to store clothes. I also sorted through the gigantic pile of papers/receipts on my table -- this place almost looks reasonable enough to take pictures of to show everyone! ... except that I still don't have internet so it's not like I'd be able to really upload them yet... eh, we'll see.
Oh, I did get a letter and postcard from KDDI but I can't read it because I'm illiterate. Sigh.
Saga Kita won the Koshien game in THIRTEEN INNINGS when they really should have won in nine -- btw, I am officially rooting for them though I didn't want to say that because it'd jinx them like I jinxed Tomakomai last year, but hey, whatever. I also was going to root for Imabari Nishi because one of my students went there but alas, it appears they lost.
I'm about to start getting my crap together to head to Tokorozawa when my cellphone rings.
Me: "Moshimoshi, Deanna desu."
Voice: "Hey, what's up?"
Me: "Err... hello? Who is this?"
Voice: "It's Carlos."
Me: "OH! HOW ARE YOU?"
Carlos: "I'm okay, what are you up to?"
Me: "I was about to head to a baseball game."
Carlos: "Oh, okay, nevermind... I was going to Akihabara and thought I'd see if you wanted to come along, but don't worry about it."
Me: "Oh, sure! No, really, I'm just going to it because I had nothing better to do today."
Which was true. This was just Seibu-Orix, two teams I really couldn't give a shit about, but would rather watch than the Giants-Swallows game, plus Hideaki Wakui was starting for Seibu, and he's one of the cutest players in Japan, even if I hate the Lions. But it wouldn't take much to talk me out of going there, especially since I was going alone and planned to just sit wherever the hell I could get a cheap seat, and wasn't even going to root for either team. (Next weekend when it's Fighters-Lions, on the other hand, there's no WAY anyone will talk me out of going.)
(For those not following the saga, Carlos is another new GEOS teacher who lives and works a few stops away from me, who I met in training in Vancouver; he's the only person from my training that I kept in touch with. I emailed him my cellphone number when I got it but didn't really expect him to call me.)
So he said he'd call me back after he finished eating, and so I spent the next half hour trying desperately to get my stupid keitai to actually take files and play mp3s, but it steadfastly refused. I have this bad feeling that it doesn't actually play mp3s. And I have confirmed that I can't install the stuff from the au/KDDI disc because I'm not running a Japanese OS. Ugh. But anyway. I also switched most of my laundry indoors except the last few pairs of jeans and some socks, which I figured would be safe because I have new laundry clips and all.
We met up at the arcade outside Kawaguchi station, which -- despite him working in Kawaguchi and going by there EVERY DAY -- he hadn't really been inside. So heh, I played a game of PNM and he played a game of Tekken, and after that we were on our way to Akihabara, which of course I had just been to, but whatever.
I decided my goal for the day was to find a cheap Nintendo DS, even if I wasn't actually going to buy it. And I didn't find one or buy one, though I almost talked myself into buying an old used GBA instead, heh. We basically just spent about 4 hours walking around Akihabara, to all of the random little shops, mostly of used videogames, and a few other random places. I didn't really buy anything at all, though. Oh, the funniest was when I took Carlos to Yellow Submarine -- haha, it turns out he's a gaming dork too, though he's more into White Wolf and Shadowrun and I'm a big D&D person. It's funny, I kept thinking that I was the big dork there, but then it turns out he plays WoW and all of this other crap, so whatever. I guess I just feel like I look and act a lot more like a big dork.
We spent a whole lot of time talking about GEOS and comparing our workloads, managers, students, other teachers, etc. I don't envy his teaching situation, BUT I do envy his living situation, he lives like two minutes from his station, and already has internet, etc, etc, whereas I live 20-25 minutes from my station and have nothing, etc. At least I have a TV! But yeah. It's sort of funny how that all works out.
We left Akihabara and ended up going to Ueno for dinner, where we went to -- heh -- kaitensushi. Which was great! I asked for water in Japanese (and a cola for Carlos), and a staff guy eventually brought an English menu out, which was sort of funny. Carlos ended up having three colas and a whole lot of sushi; I had a whole lot but slightly less. It was good though. I just remind myself that the sushi I spent 900 yen on tonight would have cost $25 at Blue C and then I have no regrets about eating so much sushi lately, heh. After that we went to a crepe place across the street from the sushi place -- well, by "crepe place" I actually mean a van where they made these cream-and-fruit concoctions inside pancakes, essentially. It was AWESOME though, very tasty, I had a strawberry-and-cream cone crepe and it was just really yummy.
I showed Carlos a big Ueno area map and pointed out the park and zoo and recommended he go there. And I also realized that I have a student who works at the Shitamachi museum, where I've actually been before. That's crazy. I'll have to ask them about it this week when I see them.
We took the train back up north after that. Carlos came out at Warabi with me and we went to a few bookstores in the area -- the Book-Off is not all that impressive, though it's got a reasonable amount of stuff I guess. We went to the big bookstore by the station (see, both of these close at 10 so I'd never been to either before) as well and looked for some Japanese study books for him but they didn't have those, or at least not as far as I could tell, I even asked two clerks and they kept saying to go to different floors, so whatever.
And then it started raining so Carlos decided to go home, and I decided to go to the arcade and play some puzzle games and then some Pop'n'Music to waste time so I wouldn't have to walk in the rain... until I realized, like a big moron, that I HAD LEFT MY LAUNDRY OUTSIDE WHEN I LEFT. So I pretty much just walked home through the rain (it wasn't really hard rain) and took in my laundry, which had fortunately been mostly covered by an awning and was mostly dry.
I spent the last four hours of the evening futzing with my fucking cellphone trying to make it realize I put files on it, and watching TV, and writing this entry, and listening to music on my laptop (these little laptop speakers I bought right before leaving Seattle are actually pretty awesome), and now...
...it's Monday morning 11am and I need to get ready to go to school to drop off my freshly-washed business clothes (and let my manager into the building, since she left her keys there when she was in the hospital.) Then I'll go down to Kichijouji and meet up with Eri, I guess.
By the time I got on a train to anywhere, it was around 6:30. Eri and I rode together to Nippori, and then she had to go switch trains to go to her hockey game; I continued on to Akihabara, where I had a goal of getting a cheap memory card for my keitai. Which is pretty much exactly what I did. I left the station and crossed the street and literally went into shop after shop pricing microSD cards. The shops nearest the station were all like 5900 yen for a 2GB card; it went down to 5200 yen a block away, and 4900 yen two blocks away, and THEN I struck gold at a Sofmap a few blocks down where I bought a 2GB microSD for 3900 AND it came with adapters for miniSD and normal SD. I even called a clerk over to ask her for real, was that the price, and she said "Yeah, isn't it cheap?" and I said "Yeah! I'd like to buy it!" and so that was that. I was also trying to price Nintendo DSes so I stopped in a few places, but they were 16800 yen no matter where I went (like $160).
Of course, Akihabara is retarded and everything closes by 8pm even on Saturdays. I ended up getting some kaitensushi and then stopping in an arcade to play some Pop'n'Music and then I thought I'd go to the Tokyo Dome and look for a Fighters keychain and the latest issue of Shukan Baseball, except something I hadn't counted on was that my watch had stopped, so it wasn't 7:50pm, it was actually 8:30, and the Giants-Swallows game was in the 9th inning and likely to end soon, and I did NOT want to be around the 50,000 people leaving the game, so instead I rode to Shinjuku to try to go get to a bookstore and/or a Yodobashi. But, I got lost and found neither and eventually just got pissed off and gave up and came back north, my legs aching. I stopped in Akabane station's little minibookstore to get this week's Shube and I looked at some maps but still didn't find what I want (Warabi station area map).
Eh.
Oh, another funny thing is that while crossing town to get to Shinjuku, after I felt all relieved for avoiding the baseball crowds at Suidobashi, of course a BAZILLION soccer fans came on at... Yotsuya?, having just watched the Urawa Reds play some other team. There was one empty seat next to me and this family comes on and they have two sons and they suggest the kids should sit down and the kid looks at me and won't sit down, so I just giggle at him and say in Japanese, "Americans are scary, aren't they?" And he just gets that shocked kid look of "Oh crap, she speaks Japanese" that I get so amused by. So then I just ask the mother in Japanese, "Are you all coming from a soccer game? I see the Urawa stuff.. how was it?" and she told me the name of the team they were cheering for, which I already forgot, and THEN the kid speaks up to me saying "It was good but our team lost..."
...and of course when I stand up to get off at Shinjuku the kids both sit down in my vacated seat. Go figure.
Anyway, I barely remember how I got home once I spurred north but I'm pretty sure I just went to Warabi and walked back the long way. Yeehaw. I meant to just go to sleep but instead I stayed up watching the 24-Hour TV thing on whatever channel that was (Asahi? Channel 4..) since I turned on the TV and saw Hideaki Takizawa, better known to the masses as Tackey (of Tackey And Tsubasa), in the last half hour of a sad dorama. Then after that ended, I saw all of these celebrities/talento types kick off this 24-hour thing... including Tsuyoshi Shinjo, who is apparently now a TV star. So I HAD to watch for a bit. An hour in, I swear to GOD, they had Jennie Finch come on the show. No, I am not making that up. She did the Jennie Finch Challenge and they had brought in all KINDS of crazy baseball people to face her, including Randy Bass. You really have to love Japan for creative late-night TV ideas. They had half an hour of Tsubasa Imai (the Tsubasa of the aforementioned pair) running around Tohoku interviewing random farmers for ideas for the 24-hour TV show. It was pretty weird. I fell asleep watching it, basically.
So, Sunday morning I wake up and my game plan for the day is
1) do laundry
2) get showered/dressed
3) go food shopping (while waiting for laundry to dry, etc)
4) watch Saga Kita play Teikyo at Koshien (also while the above)
5) go to the Seibu-Orix game for lack of anything better to do
So, I get started on the laundry just fine, and I take a shower and get dressed and all. I had to manually restart rinse mode on the laundry machine because I'm an idiot, and add fabric softener (yay!) and then I went to the supermarket across the street from me which is only open 10am-9pm and thus I never ever go there.
I guess I could have gotten some real Japanese food, but instead I got some cup noodles and some more Kirin tea, and then some Ritz crackers so I'd have some snacks around. Of course, rather than actually making the noodles for lunch I was a dumbass and bought some Hokkaido potato croquettes instead. They were delicious :)
And then I basically did laundry and watched Koshien and I spent a while cleaning off the other plastic drawer set so I could use it to store clothes. I also sorted through the gigantic pile of papers/receipts on my table -- this place almost looks reasonable enough to take pictures of to show everyone! ... except that I still don't have internet so it's not like I'd be able to really upload them yet... eh, we'll see.
Oh, I did get a letter and postcard from KDDI but I can't read it because I'm illiterate. Sigh.
Saga Kita won the Koshien game in THIRTEEN INNINGS when they really should have won in nine -- btw, I am officially rooting for them though I didn't want to say that because it'd jinx them like I jinxed Tomakomai last year, but hey, whatever. I also was going to root for Imabari Nishi because one of my students went there but alas, it appears they lost.
I'm about to start getting my crap together to head to Tokorozawa when my cellphone rings.
Me: "Moshimoshi, Deanna desu."
Voice: "Hey, what's up?"
Me: "Err... hello? Who is this?"
Voice: "It's Carlos."
Me: "OH! HOW ARE YOU?"
Carlos: "I'm okay, what are you up to?"
Me: "I was about to head to a baseball game."
Carlos: "Oh, okay, nevermind... I was going to Akihabara and thought I'd see if you wanted to come along, but don't worry about it."
Me: "Oh, sure! No, really, I'm just going to it because I had nothing better to do today."
Which was true. This was just Seibu-Orix, two teams I really couldn't give a shit about, but would rather watch than the Giants-Swallows game, plus Hideaki Wakui was starting for Seibu, and he's one of the cutest players in Japan, even if I hate the Lions. But it wouldn't take much to talk me out of going there, especially since I was going alone and planned to just sit wherever the hell I could get a cheap seat, and wasn't even going to root for either team. (Next weekend when it's Fighters-Lions, on the other hand, there's no WAY anyone will talk me out of going.)
(For those not following the saga, Carlos is another new GEOS teacher who lives and works a few stops away from me, who I met in training in Vancouver; he's the only person from my training that I kept in touch with. I emailed him my cellphone number when I got it but didn't really expect him to call me.)
So he said he'd call me back after he finished eating, and so I spent the next half hour trying desperately to get my stupid keitai to actually take files and play mp3s, but it steadfastly refused. I have this bad feeling that it doesn't actually play mp3s. And I have confirmed that I can't install the stuff from the au/KDDI disc because I'm not running a Japanese OS. Ugh. But anyway. I also switched most of my laundry indoors except the last few pairs of jeans and some socks, which I figured would be safe because I have new laundry clips and all.
We met up at the arcade outside Kawaguchi station, which -- despite him working in Kawaguchi and going by there EVERY DAY -- he hadn't really been inside. So heh, I played a game of PNM and he played a game of Tekken, and after that we were on our way to Akihabara, which of course I had just been to, but whatever.
I decided my goal for the day was to find a cheap Nintendo DS, even if I wasn't actually going to buy it. And I didn't find one or buy one, though I almost talked myself into buying an old used GBA instead, heh. We basically just spent about 4 hours walking around Akihabara, to all of the random little shops, mostly of used videogames, and a few other random places. I didn't really buy anything at all, though. Oh, the funniest was when I took Carlos to Yellow Submarine -- haha, it turns out he's a gaming dork too, though he's more into White Wolf and Shadowrun and I'm a big D&D person. It's funny, I kept thinking that I was the big dork there, but then it turns out he plays WoW and all of this other crap, so whatever. I guess I just feel like I look and act a lot more like a big dork.
We spent a whole lot of time talking about GEOS and comparing our workloads, managers, students, other teachers, etc. I don't envy his teaching situation, BUT I do envy his living situation, he lives like two minutes from his station, and already has internet, etc, etc, whereas I live 20-25 minutes from my station and have nothing, etc. At least I have a TV! But yeah. It's sort of funny how that all works out.
We left Akihabara and ended up going to Ueno for dinner, where we went to -- heh -- kaitensushi. Which was great! I asked for water in Japanese (and a cola for Carlos), and a staff guy eventually brought an English menu out, which was sort of funny. Carlos ended up having three colas and a whole lot of sushi; I had a whole lot but slightly less. It was good though. I just remind myself that the sushi I spent 900 yen on tonight would have cost $25 at Blue C and then I have no regrets about eating so much sushi lately, heh. After that we went to a crepe place across the street from the sushi place -- well, by "crepe place" I actually mean a van where they made these cream-and-fruit concoctions inside pancakes, essentially. It was AWESOME though, very tasty, I had a strawberry-and-cream cone crepe and it was just really yummy.
I showed Carlos a big Ueno area map and pointed out the park and zoo and recommended he go there. And I also realized that I have a student who works at the Shitamachi museum, where I've actually been before. That's crazy. I'll have to ask them about it this week when I see them.
We took the train back up north after that. Carlos came out at Warabi with me and we went to a few bookstores in the area -- the Book-Off is not all that impressive, though it's got a reasonable amount of stuff I guess. We went to the big bookstore by the station (see, both of these close at 10 so I'd never been to either before) as well and looked for some Japanese study books for him but they didn't have those, or at least not as far as I could tell, I even asked two clerks and they kept saying to go to different floors, so whatever.
And then it started raining so Carlos decided to go home, and I decided to go to the arcade and play some puzzle games and then some Pop'n'Music to waste time so I wouldn't have to walk in the rain... until I realized, like a big moron, that I HAD LEFT MY LAUNDRY OUTSIDE WHEN I LEFT. So I pretty much just walked home through the rain (it wasn't really hard rain) and took in my laundry, which had fortunately been mostly covered by an awning and was mostly dry.
I spent the last four hours of the evening futzing with my fucking cellphone trying to make it realize I put files on it, and watching TV, and writing this entry, and listening to music on my laptop (these little laptop speakers I bought right before leaving Seattle are actually pretty awesome), and now...
...it's Monday morning 11am and I need to get ready to go to school to drop off my freshly-washed business clothes (and let my manager into the building, since she left her keys there when she was in the hospital.) Then I'll go down to Kichijouji and meet up with Eri, I guess.
