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Well, incase it isn't obvious where I've been for the majority of the last two days...
Sunday morning I woke up and went to Koshien early, getting there at 8am. Dumb thing is that actually, you could say I was fairly late. Fortunately Danny bought me a ticket when he was there at 6:30am, so I could just go into the stadium. Got a seat pretty much right behind the 3rd base dugout, like 3 rows back. It had rained in the morning so I guess it wasn't THAT crowded yet. And for most of the first game, even, it was cloudy and kind of nice and cool outside, as Aomori Yamada lost to Nodai Niko (from Gunma), 2-1 in 10 innings. I was in theory rooting for Aomori, but actually Nodai had this catcher Machida who's like 6'4" and the team captain and I decided I was secretly cheering for him instead. Aomori had a kid named Maike Magario though, who was born in Brazil... I'm not sure what percentage Japanese he is, he looks maybe half.
The second game was Teikyo vs. Tsuruga whatever from Fukui. Look, Teikyo is a powerhouse and a really scary team this year, but I'm cheering for them anyway for a few reasons: first, it IS my local team, as the school is within bike-riding distance from my house, and second, I have several favorite players who went there (notably Hichori Morimoto, and later on Hiroki Ueno and Atori Ohta), and even two of my former GEOS students were also Teikyo students (although one was Teikyo Univ, so maybe that doesn't count). Also, Teikyo has a bunch of really intriguing players, like Hirahara who pitches and bats 3rd, or Naville Ariga who is half-Ghanan and half-Japanese, or... well, they also have like 4 guys who can hit 90 mph on the radar gun. It's just a strong team, fun to watch. And they clobbered Tsuruga 5-1.
The only downside was, it became HOT AND SUNNY by the end of that second game. I took a bathroom break between the first two games and also got food (stadium KFC, and yes there is a Colonel Sanders outside of it) and put sunscreen on my face and elsewhere while in the bathroom, but didn't leave my seat at all during the second game. I hadn't put sunscreen on my LEGS, so get this, my right leg is sunburnt, part of my left shoulder is sunburnt, and despite everything I guess I sweated off the sunscreen and my cheeks were pretty red too. Sheesh. I bought a bottle of ice, that is, a frozen water bottle, near the beginning of that game, and it barely stayed solid for the entire game, it was that hot. Ugh. I felt really really really sick and so I left about 10 minutes into the third game of the day.
I stopped by the table with the huge school name cards and had the above photo taken. The girl who took my photo asked me where I live, and I told her that I live in Tokyo and basically 10 minutes from Teikyo by bike. She thought I'd actually come down to Koshien just to cheer for Teikyo, which isn't too far off I suppose.
Went back to my hotel, took some tylenol and laid down... and fell asleep. Oops. Was supposed to meet up with Carl and Oren in Kyoto to see Daimonjiyama get set on fire. Ended up being a little later than expected, but we were still able to meet up and see the fires, which were not nearly as cool as anticipated but provided a nice closure given that 8 years ago Carl and Oren and Brad took me on a spontaneous hike up said Daimonjiyama.
Came back, crashed.
This morning I woke up around 10am. I know, it's just there was NO WAY I was going to sit through four Koshien games and I was really only interested in the 4th one. (What sucks is that yesterday's 4th one was also interesting but I simply couldn't remain at the stadium, too hot.) Got out the door around 11:30am, got to Koshien at 12:20pm, and...
...waited for TWO FUCKING HOURS to get a ticket and into the park. See, once the place fills up, they will only sell tickets between games. So I'm sitting in line with a whole bunch of people, half adults half kids, and we're trying to follow the Tenri-Nagano game by watching our little cellphone TVs. It seemed to take FOREVER, at the very least it went over the schedule and so Game 3 didn't start until well after 2pm, though scheduled for 1:30pm. BUT thank god, I was able to get a ticket once they sold them, and managed to snag a seat 3 rows behind the 1st base dugout. Woooo. Except the fences were in the way AND a pole blocked my view of first base, and a guy with a huge hat was sitting in front of me. BUT IT DOESN'T MATTER BECAUSE MY SEAT WAS IN THE SHADE and that rules more than anything. No sunburn and no ridiculous heat makes Deanna something something.
I saw Chukyo, the Aichi school which used to dominate Koshien, beat Kwansei Gakuin, who are the local boys from Hyogo, on a sayonara home run, 5-4. Poor Kwansei. They were funny because their ace pitcher Yamasaki happened to also be their regular starting catcher. I'm not making that up. He switched from catcher to pitcher and back and forth several times. He's pretty awesome. Not so much the rest of the team though. Chukyo had this kid Dobayashi who was also their ace pitcher and cleanup hitter, who started in right field and then pitched the last half of the game.
Then was THE BIG ONE, Hanamaki Higashi vs. Yokohama Hayato. Hanamaki has this kid Yusei Kikuchi who is probly one of the most famous high school pitchers in the country right now -- he's over 6 feet tall, left-handed, and can throw over 90 mph, and wants to play in the MLB as soon as possible. Whatever. He also seems to have become less cocky since last time we saw him. Also, I'm rather fond of the Hanamaki manager, Sasaki... but anyway, so Yokohama Hayato is this school that won Kanagawa OUT OF FREAKING NOWHERE. As it turns out, they really aren't that good. It wasn't really a landslide game or anything, but Hanamaki defeated them pretty soundly, 4-1, and their "ace" Imaoka didn't even come out until like the 7th inning. They had quite a big following though, and their ouendan were amazingly loud. I thought it'd be pretty cool if they won since it'd be one of the bigger upsets ever, but oh well.
The games went REALLY late, until like 7pm. Battled the crowds to get back on the train and...
...met up with Carl and Oren again in Umeda. We went to the same places I went to with Danny on Saturday -- the okonomiyaki place he took me to, which I once again thought was infact pretty fantastic, and then the cafe that had the ridiculous parfaits, though this time I just had ice cream, some marble chocolate thing and some maple-nantoka-I-forget. Ice cream! Hooray.
I walked back to my hotel on a back street, past an arcade that had a disassembled DDR machine outside yesterday and today it had the machine assembled and a guy was playing doubles on it. Talk about a crowd-getting place, it was right outside the MBS building, and I was actually approached by a guy who claimed he worked for MBS and was looking for gaijin exchange students to be on a TV show in two weeks. Regrettably, I had to tell him that 1) I'm not an exchange student and 2) I don't live in Osaka anyway.
Sigh -- been trying to go through photos but it's too big a task. I wonder if I can get any cropping done while on the train tomorrow... maybe if any of them have reasonable seats, we'll see, but I don't have THAT much battery life on this laptop. Local trains don't have power outlets either, of course :)
What I really learned from this weekend, by the way, is that Koshien kind of sucks when you are there alone. I wouldn't mind coming back again someday, but no fucking way will I do it alone -- too much waiting in line by myself makes me unhappy, and it's hard to really talk to people around you because there's not necessarily a cheering interest in common. Seriously, if I watch on TV at home, I get to sit in the airconditioning and chat about the game with friends online, and I can see the action better than if I'm at the park. But it was still definitely a good experience to go and see what it's like for real.
Sunday morning I woke up and went to Koshien early, getting there at 8am. Dumb thing is that actually, you could say I was fairly late. Fortunately Danny bought me a ticket when he was there at 6:30am, so I could just go into the stadium. Got a seat pretty much right behind the 3rd base dugout, like 3 rows back. It had rained in the morning so I guess it wasn't THAT crowded yet. And for most of the first game, even, it was cloudy and kind of nice and cool outside, as Aomori Yamada lost to Nodai Niko (from Gunma), 2-1 in 10 innings. I was in theory rooting for Aomori, but actually Nodai had this catcher Machida who's like 6'4" and the team captain and I decided I was secretly cheering for him instead. Aomori had a kid named Maike Magario though, who was born in Brazil... I'm not sure what percentage Japanese he is, he looks maybe half.
The second game was Teikyo vs. Tsuruga whatever from Fukui. Look, Teikyo is a powerhouse and a really scary team this year, but I'm cheering for them anyway for a few reasons: first, it IS my local team, as the school is within bike-riding distance from my house, and second, I have several favorite players who went there (notably Hichori Morimoto, and later on Hiroki Ueno and Atori Ohta), and even two of my former GEOS students were also Teikyo students (although one was Teikyo Univ, so maybe that doesn't count). Also, Teikyo has a bunch of really intriguing players, like Hirahara who pitches and bats 3rd, or Naville Ariga who is half-Ghanan and half-Japanese, or... well, they also have like 4 guys who can hit 90 mph on the radar gun. It's just a strong team, fun to watch. And they clobbered Tsuruga 5-1.
The only downside was, it became HOT AND SUNNY by the end of that second game. I took a bathroom break between the first two games and also got food (stadium KFC, and yes there is a Colonel Sanders outside of it) and put sunscreen on my face and elsewhere while in the bathroom, but didn't leave my seat at all during the second game. I hadn't put sunscreen on my LEGS, so get this, my right leg is sunburnt, part of my left shoulder is sunburnt, and despite everything I guess I sweated off the sunscreen and my cheeks were pretty red too. Sheesh. I bought a bottle of ice, that is, a frozen water bottle, near the beginning of that game, and it barely stayed solid for the entire game, it was that hot. Ugh. I felt really really really sick and so I left about 10 minutes into the third game of the day.
I stopped by the table with the huge school name cards and had the above photo taken. The girl who took my photo asked me where I live, and I told her that I live in Tokyo and basically 10 minutes from Teikyo by bike. She thought I'd actually come down to Koshien just to cheer for Teikyo, which isn't too far off I suppose.
Went back to my hotel, took some tylenol and laid down... and fell asleep. Oops. Was supposed to meet up with Carl and Oren in Kyoto to see Daimonjiyama get set on fire. Ended up being a little later than expected, but we were still able to meet up and see the fires, which were not nearly as cool as anticipated but provided a nice closure given that 8 years ago Carl and Oren and Brad took me on a spontaneous hike up said Daimonjiyama.
Came back, crashed.
This morning I woke up around 10am. I know, it's just there was NO WAY I was going to sit through four Koshien games and I was really only interested in the 4th one. (What sucks is that yesterday's 4th one was also interesting but I simply couldn't remain at the stadium, too hot.) Got out the door around 11:30am, got to Koshien at 12:20pm, and...
...waited for TWO FUCKING HOURS to get a ticket and into the park. See, once the place fills up, they will only sell tickets between games. So I'm sitting in line with a whole bunch of people, half adults half kids, and we're trying to follow the Tenri-Nagano game by watching our little cellphone TVs. It seemed to take FOREVER, at the very least it went over the schedule and so Game 3 didn't start until well after 2pm, though scheduled for 1:30pm. BUT thank god, I was able to get a ticket once they sold them, and managed to snag a seat 3 rows behind the 1st base dugout. Woooo. Except the fences were in the way AND a pole blocked my view of first base, and a guy with a huge hat was sitting in front of me. BUT IT DOESN'T MATTER BECAUSE MY SEAT WAS IN THE SHADE and that rules more than anything. No sunburn and no ridiculous heat makes Deanna something something.
I saw Chukyo, the Aichi school which used to dominate Koshien, beat Kwansei Gakuin, who are the local boys from Hyogo, on a sayonara home run, 5-4. Poor Kwansei. They were funny because their ace pitcher Yamasaki happened to also be their regular starting catcher. I'm not making that up. He switched from catcher to pitcher and back and forth several times. He's pretty awesome. Not so much the rest of the team though. Chukyo had this kid Dobayashi who was also their ace pitcher and cleanup hitter, who started in right field and then pitched the last half of the game.
Then was THE BIG ONE, Hanamaki Higashi vs. Yokohama Hayato. Hanamaki has this kid Yusei Kikuchi who is probly one of the most famous high school pitchers in the country right now -- he's over 6 feet tall, left-handed, and can throw over 90 mph, and wants to play in the MLB as soon as possible. Whatever. He also seems to have become less cocky since last time we saw him. Also, I'm rather fond of the Hanamaki manager, Sasaki... but anyway, so Yokohama Hayato is this school that won Kanagawa OUT OF FREAKING NOWHERE. As it turns out, they really aren't that good. It wasn't really a landslide game or anything, but Hanamaki defeated them pretty soundly, 4-1, and their "ace" Imaoka didn't even come out until like the 7th inning. They had quite a big following though, and their ouendan were amazingly loud. I thought it'd be pretty cool if they won since it'd be one of the bigger upsets ever, but oh well.
The games went REALLY late, until like 7pm. Battled the crowds to get back on the train and...
...met up with Carl and Oren again in Umeda. We went to the same places I went to with Danny on Saturday -- the okonomiyaki place he took me to, which I once again thought was infact pretty fantastic, and then the cafe that had the ridiculous parfaits, though this time I just had ice cream, some marble chocolate thing and some maple-nantoka-I-forget. Ice cream! Hooray.
I walked back to my hotel on a back street, past an arcade that had a disassembled DDR machine outside yesterday and today it had the machine assembled and a guy was playing doubles on it. Talk about a crowd-getting place, it was right outside the MBS building, and I was actually approached by a guy who claimed he worked for MBS and was looking for gaijin exchange students to be on a TV show in two weeks. Regrettably, I had to tell him that 1) I'm not an exchange student and 2) I don't live in Osaka anyway.
Sigh -- been trying to go through photos but it's too big a task. I wonder if I can get any cropping done while on the train tomorrow... maybe if any of them have reasonable seats, we'll see, but I don't have THAT much battery life on this laptop. Local trains don't have power outlets either, of course :)
What I really learned from this weekend, by the way, is that Koshien kind of sucks when you are there alone. I wouldn't mind coming back again someday, but no fucking way will I do it alone -- too much waiting in line by myself makes me unhappy, and it's hard to really talk to people around you because there's not necessarily a cheering interest in common. Seriously, if I watch on TV at home, I get to sit in the airconditioning and chat about the game with friends online, and I can see the action better than if I'm at the park. But it was still definitely a good experience to go and see what it's like for real.
