I'm back from my Hokuriku adventure

I'm back at home, sitting at my laptop in my apartment, and surprisingly I'm sort of thinking "Wow, it's good to be home", which is strange because I'm still not sure I think of the Little Apartment That Could as home yet.

Anyway, this morning I started off the day in a ryokan in Kanazawa, with my back hurting from sleeping at a weird angle on a futon on a tatami floor. (I can only hope that sleeping at a normal angle on my normal futon on my apartment floor will help things.) We got up and settled our bill and left the ryokan for grander places. Well, or more specifically, we went to the station, dropped our bags in lockers, then went to Omimachi, the fish market, to get kaiten sushi. Only catch is, most of the area was closed. We did find a kaiten place and I ate a lot of yummy sushi, including this awesome stuff that was hamachi rolls with shiso. However, the proprietors of the establishment seemed less than thrilled to have us there, which was a bit weird.

Carl went off to see more temples, and Oren and I walked back to the station, and then he went off to get tickets to go to Tokyo. Me, I got a ticket to go to Toyama, and rather than taking the expensive express (36 mins, 3000 yen) I took the local (65 mins, 950 yen). It was nice to just see the scenery in the north, plus I had to give shiguma time to wake up since I'd told him 1-2pm in the first place.

Showed up in Toyama and met up with Ryan outside the station, and he said "Dude! We have good weather! You can take pictures of the castle here!" So we walked to the castle and I took pictures of it, and we stood around talking and sharing stories about being a JET teachers vs. being an eikaiwa drone. I think both of us are jealous of each other's workplace (me thinking "wow, it must be nice to be done with work at 4:30pm each day, and to actually get to speak in Japanese at work, and to not wear a suit" and him thinking "dude, it must be nice to not have 1000 students, and to get to eat lunch, and to teach people who aren't immature school brats all the time, and to not be in the fucking inaka"). It's nice to get perspective from someone who isn't at GEOS. Anyway.

We walked to the karaoke place but they were full and it'd be like 50 mins for a room, so we went off to an arcade and played some Pop'n'Music battle, which we tied on in 4 songs. It was surprisingly crowded for a Sunday afternoon in general. I also managed to win a Hello Kitty daruma out of a UFO catcher machine by sheer luck -- I was aiming for one of them and accidentally knocked a DIFFERENT one off the edge. Woohoo.

We did karaoke for an hour and I sang lots of Bemani songs as threatened, also finally got to do Moeyo Dragons 2007 (go figure that a karaoke place in Hokuriku has it but places in Tokyo don't). For our final song we butchered Sobakasu, which is always fun.

Then Indian food! Sadly, the place wouldn't make chicken tikka masala, but I had chicken curry, and naan, and a mango lassi, and it was pretty good. We were talking about Taste of India back in Seattle, which was kind of funny, and also trying to remember what the hell happened to all of the people we used to know from Bemani.

After that I had to go catch a train back to Tokyo, so we went to the station. It was good fun all around and I'm glad I got to hang out with Ryan (I really can't remember the last time I saw him. Probly like 3 years ago?) and see a bit of Toyama City.

The trains back were fairly uneventful. I fell asleep for most of the Toyama->Echigo-Yuzawa leg of the trip, and had a 30-minute layover in the snowy station before continuing on to the Echigo-Yuzawa->Omiya part of the trip. Then onwards to Warabi, where I got my bike and rode home. It was really nice to ride a bit after three days of walking.

I basically spent the last 3 hours just reading LJ and other webpages. I did get my pictures off my camera but I haven't even looked at all of them yet, so a photopost will come eventually, but not tonight.

Tomorrow I have to do laundry, and maybe stop at school to do some stuff, and maybe see Oren if he's around, and of course it's time for SMAPxSMAP and Ainori to resume wheeeeee!

Vacation is over :(

Funny, an 11-day vacation went by WAY too fast. At least Ainori is back on! Though I'm now getting SICK of the whole Carbonara-Ryo-Remi plot and wish something would happen with the other people (besides them making fun of Miya). Surely something else must be going on with these people besides the whole rivals-now-bestest-friends-ever thing.

Today, since I for once didn't feel like it was my responsibility to eat Japanese food, I went to Diamond City to get lunch at Subway, and after that I peeked in Jusco out of curiosity and THEY HAD WHITE DRESS SHIRTS IN MY SIZE AGAIN!!!! So I bought a white dress shirt and I also bought a light lavender dress shirt. Y1980 each, and they're all polyester so I just have to throw them in the laundry and let them air dry and they should be wrinkle-free I hope. Yay. I tried to also get socks but failed for various reasons, mostly being unwilling to spend a lot of money on them. I also finally looked around more of the mall. There's an insane amount of children's stores on the third floor. I have to wonder how many stores full of Disney crap does one mall need?

Came back home, did laundry. Tried a new idea, namely putting towels in my laundry machine at home, then putting my dryerable clothes in the big 1-hour wash-and-dry machine at the laundromat, came home, and 45 mins later took my towels over to the laundromat to dry too, for "ten minutes", only it took twenty minutes for real. Then I washed the rest of my non-dryerable clothes using my net here. I guess it works, kind of.

Around 7:30pm I wandered down to Akabane with a whole ton of stuff to drop off at GEOS (easier to carry it all today than when I'm running to work in the morning tomorrow) -- dress clothes, boxes of omiyage, baseball calendars for 2008, etc. I came in, finished getting Christmas decorations off my door, cleaned up the mess of papers I'd left on my table, switched the lesson plans and props in my folder for this week, moved things off the whiteboard, put cards in drawers/packets, etc. I even checked in the office briefly to see if there were any messages for me, and it turns out that four of my students sent me New Year's postcards via GEOS! Cool.

My original plan for the evening was to grab Mexican food for dinner after stopping by GEOS, but I spent so long on everything today that it was 9pm by the time I left GEOS (and Il Torito has "last order" at like 9:30 and it's in Ikebukuro) so instead I went up to Kua'Aina in Saitama-Shintoshin for otherwise-gratuitous "foreign food", and had a turkey-avocado sandwich on wheat bread with fries and a salad. Then I stopped in Tully's. I wanted a chai latte, but Tully's here doesn't make that, so instead I got something called a "honey milk latte", which wasn't bad, but as I was drinking it on the train home around 10pm I realized it was probably pretty stupid to be drinking coffee so late. Oops. Fortunately, the one good thing about going out to Saitama-shi or Omiya or whatever for dinner is that the trains coming BACK are generally empty, so I could just drink coffee.

Now on News Zero, important news flash: Koji Uehara is playing catch! And Yoshinobu Takahashi is jogging! And Hisanori Takahashi is very bad at racquetball! See, it's time for "personal training", which happens a month before Spring Camp, which happens a month before normal Spring Training happens in America. Oh well, at least it's news, kind of. Also, Kazuhiro Wada looks really old. And about ninety billion press are watching Tsuyoshi Nishioka and Sho Nakata at a batting cage. I'd totally forgotten they were both Osaka Toin kids. Go figure.