Real Life, Tuesday/Wednesday
Dec. 9th, 2010 09:00 amI caught up on school entries a little, but forgot to catch up on real life.
Monday was boring and I went to sleep at 9:30pm.
Tuesday I met up with Kozo in Shinjuku at 6pm, with a plan to do karaoke. I remembered going to a place in Kabukicho that I had gone to with Ai and some others a while ago where they had some ridiculously good free time with drink bar deal. Well, that deal is apparently over. So it was like 1600 yen each for 2 hours of karaoke and all-you-can-drink soft drinks and coffee and stuff.
Although first, we went to Momo Paradise for shabu-shabu because well, Kozo hadn't had it in YEARS (like, since a few years ago with his family back in Canada) and I hadn't had it in MONTHS. It is truly one of the Japanese group foods that you really, really, REALLY can't do by yourself, I think. Even yakiniku, it's possible to do by yourself though not very fun.
Full of food, we went downstairs two floors to the karaoke place, discovered the rates, didn't care, got a room, and sang for 2 hours. We started off with baseball stuff (I met Kozo in the Yakult Swallows cheering section this year, see) but quickly diverted into bizarre random crap like enka, jazz, weird old 80's J-Pop, etc. It was a lot of fun and we're both like "We should do this again..." So we'll see. Wish we could find a place with free time rates though. I could drag him up to Akabane and the Karaoke Kan that has a weeknight 3-hours deal at least.
Wednesday, I met up with Shinsuke to get dinner. Amusingly, when I was leaving pretty much at 5pm on Tuesday to meet up with Kozo and I said "I've got to go meet up with a friend now," none of the teachers thought anything of it, but when I was at school until 6:30 on Wednesday because I was meeting Shin at 7pm in Oji and walking over, and they're like "Why are you still here?" and I said "I'm meeting my kohai from university for dinner later," suddenly they were like "Eh? Really? A Japanese person or an American person? How many years behind you? Were you in the same club?" Blah blah blah.
("kohai" means "underclassman", I suppose, the opposite of "sempai", but in reality they kind of just establish a "was here first" "was here later" relationship between two people. In theory, kohai are supposed to respect sempai, and sempai are supposed to take care of kohai. I mean, the younger kids at school address the older kids at school as sempai -- Yamada-sempai, Kobayashi-sempai, whatever -- and my baseball-playing kids talk about their little league teammates who graduated as sempai too -- but I have Fighters fan friends who jokingly call me sempai because I've been a fan for 8 years and a lot of them are much more recent. And I call some of my baseball friends sempai as well sometimes. But the funny thing is that there is no way in hell Shinsuke would ever call me sempai even though I was a few years ahead of him at CMU. And in reality I don't think of him as kohai either, BUT it feels like a more natural way to express it succinctly in Japanese.)
ANYWAY.
Shin and I went to Rocco's New York Pizza, the place in Oji that I went to last Friday with a big group of people :) This time it was mostly empty, there were a few people who came in for takeout, but nobody else who stuck around to eat... and there was a high-school-looking boy who was folding fliers and I think his job was to go stuff mailboxes. Other than that, we were the only ones there, which meant we ended up talking to the proprietors a lot -- and especially Daniel, he seemed happy to have people to talk to in English about sports and whatnot, and Shin even lived in California for several years so they could talk about that stuff.
Also, apparently I missed![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
weyrlady there by half an hour or so. Daniel was like "Oh, you're back already! One of your friends stopped by here earlier," and described her. That was pretty funny. So after Shin and I polished off a large pepperoni pizza, we also received free garlic bread knots -- like "thanks for telling your friends about the place!". Those were DELICIOUS -- Shin was like "These are SO GOOD and yet SO BAD for me..."
I really need to post my pizza pics. Maybe tonight or tomorrow I will try to do that. I've been so lazy at home recently, very burned out.
I seriously recommend the place though, the pizza is delicious (seriously, even Shin said "this reminds me of the awesome mom-and-pop pizza places we used to get pizza from in the US") and the people running it are really, really, really nice.
Rocco's NY Pizza
One kind of bizarre thing though is, for example, a medium 14" pepperoni pizza is 2600 yen but a large 18" is 2900 yen. Daniel explained that he was doing that pricing basically so his prices were still slightly lower than a nearby Domino's, which is apparently the popular pizza joint in Oji to order from. HOWEVER the retarded thing is that we are fairly sure that Domino's L pizza is the same size as Rocco's M... and we're also pretty sure most Japanese people can't do that kind of calculation in their head anyway, and just go "But M is M. L is L."
Afterwards, Shin and I went arcade-hopping for a bit. We played IIDX together at the first arcade, then I played Pop'n and he played another IIDX game, and we moved on to the second arcade, which is a lot bigger, and we joked about playing DDR but I said "we'd really have to wait a bit for that, I'd probably throw up all that pizza if we played now". So instead we walked around and played various things, and finally got suckered in by a 4-credits-for-300-yen deal on AnswerAnswer, since Shin likes quiz games and hadn't played it before. Of course, this one, much moreso than Quiz Magic Academy, depends on answering quickly. So many times, Shin would answer before I had even finished reading the question! And also, a lot of the questions require you to type in an answer, too, and sometimes I knew the answer but didn't know the Japanese word for it ("How do you say magnifying glass in Japanese??") But I did my best to keep up and I even was able to chime in and help for a few of the questions too, so that was good. By making it to the final round in each game we played, we managed to stretch our 4 credits into over half an hour of playing time. BUT, unfortunately, that also meant that by the time we made it back to the DDR machines, they were full. So, no DDR. Probably a good thing. Instead, I ended up playing Crazy Taxi, since they had an arcade machine... the machine was all in Japanese but the game was still exactly the same, including the Offspring music. Wacky.
So that was fun.
I talked to people at school about the idea of me coming back for graduation and they said it sounded like a good idea and that it would make a lot of students happy (even if none of the students would ever ADMIT to being happy), so yeah, I am tending towards this "round trip" thing...
Monday was boring and I went to sleep at 9:30pm.
Tuesday I met up with Kozo in Shinjuku at 6pm, with a plan to do karaoke. I remembered going to a place in Kabukicho that I had gone to with Ai and some others a while ago where they had some ridiculously good free time with drink bar deal. Well, that deal is apparently over. So it was like 1600 yen each for 2 hours of karaoke and all-you-can-drink soft drinks and coffee and stuff.
Although first, we went to Momo Paradise for shabu-shabu because well, Kozo hadn't had it in YEARS (like, since a few years ago with his family back in Canada) and I hadn't had it in MONTHS. It is truly one of the Japanese group foods that you really, really, REALLY can't do by yourself, I think. Even yakiniku, it's possible to do by yourself though not very fun.
Full of food, we went downstairs two floors to the karaoke place, discovered the rates, didn't care, got a room, and sang for 2 hours. We started off with baseball stuff (I met Kozo in the Yakult Swallows cheering section this year, see) but quickly diverted into bizarre random crap like enka, jazz, weird old 80's J-Pop, etc. It was a lot of fun and we're both like "We should do this again..." So we'll see. Wish we could find a place with free time rates though. I could drag him up to Akabane and the Karaoke Kan that has a weeknight 3-hours deal at least.
Wednesday, I met up with Shinsuke to get dinner. Amusingly, when I was leaving pretty much at 5pm on Tuesday to meet up with Kozo and I said "I've got to go meet up with a friend now," none of the teachers thought anything of it, but when I was at school until 6:30 on Wednesday because I was meeting Shin at 7pm in Oji and walking over, and they're like "Why are you still here?" and I said "I'm meeting my kohai from university for dinner later," suddenly they were like "Eh? Really? A Japanese person or an American person? How many years behind you? Were you in the same club?" Blah blah blah.
("kohai" means "underclassman", I suppose, the opposite of "sempai", but in reality they kind of just establish a "was here first" "was here later" relationship between two people. In theory, kohai are supposed to respect sempai, and sempai are supposed to take care of kohai. I mean, the younger kids at school address the older kids at school as sempai -- Yamada-sempai, Kobayashi-sempai, whatever -- and my baseball-playing kids talk about their little league teammates who graduated as sempai too -- but I have Fighters fan friends who jokingly call me sempai because I've been a fan for 8 years and a lot of them are much more recent. And I call some of my baseball friends sempai as well sometimes. But the funny thing is that there is no way in hell Shinsuke would ever call me sempai even though I was a few years ahead of him at CMU. And in reality I don't think of him as kohai either, BUT it feels like a more natural way to express it succinctly in Japanese.)
ANYWAY.
Shin and I went to Rocco's New York Pizza, the place in Oji that I went to last Friday with a big group of people :) This time it was mostly empty, there were a few people who came in for takeout, but nobody else who stuck around to eat... and there was a high-school-looking boy who was folding fliers and I think his job was to go stuff mailboxes. Other than that, we were the only ones there, which meant we ended up talking to the proprietors a lot -- and especially Daniel, he seemed happy to have people to talk to in English about sports and whatnot, and Shin even lived in California for several years so they could talk about that stuff.
Also, apparently I missed
weyrlady there by half an hour or so. Daniel was like "Oh, you're back already! One of your friends stopped by here earlier," and described her. That was pretty funny. So after Shin and I polished off a large pepperoni pizza, we also received free garlic bread knots -- like "thanks for telling your friends about the place!". Those were DELICIOUS -- Shin was like "These are SO GOOD and yet SO BAD for me..."I really need to post my pizza pics. Maybe tonight or tomorrow I will try to do that. I've been so lazy at home recently, very burned out.
I seriously recommend the place though, the pizza is delicious (seriously, even Shin said "this reminds me of the awesome mom-and-pop pizza places we used to get pizza from in the US") and the people running it are really, really, really nice.
Rocco's NY Pizza
One kind of bizarre thing though is, for example, a medium 14" pepperoni pizza is 2600 yen but a large 18" is 2900 yen. Daniel explained that he was doing that pricing basically so his prices were still slightly lower than a nearby Domino's, which is apparently the popular pizza joint in Oji to order from. HOWEVER the retarded thing is that we are fairly sure that Domino's L pizza is the same size as Rocco's M... and we're also pretty sure most Japanese people can't do that kind of calculation in their head anyway, and just go "But M is M. L is L."
Afterwards, Shin and I went arcade-hopping for a bit. We played IIDX together at the first arcade, then I played Pop'n and he played another IIDX game, and we moved on to the second arcade, which is a lot bigger, and we joked about playing DDR but I said "we'd really have to wait a bit for that, I'd probably throw up all that pizza if we played now". So instead we walked around and played various things, and finally got suckered in by a 4-credits-for-300-yen deal on AnswerAnswer, since Shin likes quiz games and hadn't played it before. Of course, this one, much moreso than Quiz Magic Academy, depends on answering quickly. So many times, Shin would answer before I had even finished reading the question! And also, a lot of the questions require you to type in an answer, too, and sometimes I knew the answer but didn't know the Japanese word for it ("How do you say magnifying glass in Japanese??") But I did my best to keep up and I even was able to chime in and help for a few of the questions too, so that was good. By making it to the final round in each game we played, we managed to stretch our 4 credits into over half an hour of playing time. BUT, unfortunately, that also meant that by the time we made it back to the DDR machines, they were full. So, no DDR. Probably a good thing. Instead, I ended up playing Crazy Taxi, since they had an arcade machine... the machine was all in Japanese but the game was still exactly the same, including the Offspring music. Wacky.
So that was fun.
I talked to people at school about the idea of me coming back for graduation and they said it sounded like a good idea and that it would make a lot of students happy (even if none of the students would ever ADMIT to being happy), so yeah, I am tending towards this "round trip" thing...
