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Thursday in the city!
Feb. 11th, 2011 01:48 pmYesterday was pretty good.
Although the last thing in the day was finding out that my passport is back and renewed (hooray, expedited really DOES mean expedited), BUT, none of my stickers are in the new passport -- so I'm not sure how I continue my Japan visa status, do I just bring both passports around with me, showing my reentry and so on? Or... I guess this could be a convenient time to drop my Japan status and start getting railpasses again. I'm just not sure how this all works. I think technically I was supposed to renew my passport from Japan and they'd fix all of it for me, sadly.
Anyway, so I went to hang out with Carl yesterday. The day started with me bussing into Seattle, and hanging out for an hour or two downtown. I played Pop'n Music for a while at Gameworks, yay, and then ended up getting lunch at Westlake's Thai place again after wandering around for a bit both literally and figuratively. (Chipotle was too crowded.) Then I bussed up to Ballard! Got off the bus at the Safeway at 15th and walked to the Ballard house via Market... only to get a phone call from Carl when I was 2-3 blocks away, saying he was at the Blue Dog Cafe. Oops. Had I walked the other way I would have been at the BDC about right at that moment, but instead, I had more walking to do. Which was fine with me as it was a really nice day out.
I had Carl ask me algorithms and software engineering questions while he ate his sandwich, so that was my job-studying for the day, I think :) He asked me some really good ones and I learned a lot, so that was good. (Oh, and on the bus ride up to Ballard I passed the quick 8-kyu on Kanji Kentei DS, so I started the long 8-kyu... and I passed that this morning! Hooray! Maybe I have learned something!)
Then we hung out at the Ballard house for a bit, and then we went to check out Rock Box, a karaoke place in Cap Hill that someone pointed me at the other day in a comment here. It was supposedly Japanese-style, at least insofar as it had private rooms and 60,000 Japanese songs (and something like 120,000 songs total). Well... going in there does not feel like going into a karaoke place in Japan at all at first, it's very yuppie-like and clearly also intended to serve as a bar, there's an open bar area with TVs and whatnot, but yeah, if you want to do karaoke, they do infact have private karaoke rooms, AND they have lots of Japanese songs, and they even give you an iPad to input stuff with (though it doesn't have an interface quite as good as Japanese places do with searching by genre and whatnot -- this one you only get to search by Title and by Artist. Which is fine for me but not so much for Carl who knows stuff as being from various shows or games).
(And they really do have all the stuff in Karaoke Champ as far as I can tell.)
I guess we were there for almost 2 hours. I sang a lot, Carl sang some, I lost my voice, it was good times. The only weird thing is that since there are no glass doors to the room, occasionally staff members poke their head in like "you doing okay? want to order anything?" which is a little weird, that'd never happen in Japan.
But, yay! I suppose I need to find some regular Japanese-singing karaoke buddies in Seattle (kinda like how I finally found Kozo and Kyoko and all in Tokyo... right before I left, sigh). It seems that if you go on a weeknight before 8pm it's only $4 per person per hour (and it's something like $7 per person per hour after 8pm and weekends) which actually is pretty cheap for karaoke, that's even cheaper than Tokyo rates believe it or not, aside from some of the daytime deals.
After karaoke, Carl and I went to Maneki for dinner! Yay for Japanese food that doesn't suck and isn't overpriced (but of course the only times we can go there without waiting a ton is like, weeknights at weird hours). We accidentally overordered because I was counting on Japanese portions at the prices they gave, but instead, like, the $8 for tempura turned out to be a huge plate of it, and so was the $6 for karaage or whatever. Oops. We got those, and some sushi, and agedashi nasu, and kinpira/gobo, and that's it, and might have been ok had it been Japanese portions, but instead, we really could have used a third person with us. Oh well. I ordered in Japanese without thinking because it seems silly to use the Japanese names for dishes without chaining them together with actual Japanese speech. Also while we were there the fire alarm of the building next door went off, which was a little odd, but we just kind of sat through it.
But it was really good.
After dinner, Carl drove me to Microsoft since the 545 buses were only running every 30 minutes by then and it was cold out, and MS isn't too bad for him to get home from, but I didn't want to drag him to Sammamish. Mike picked me up at MS and took me home, and that's when I got to see my passports and all.
It was a good day :) I'm lucky to have a friend that I can drag around and relive parts of my Japan life with, yay.
Although the last thing in the day was finding out that my passport is back and renewed (hooray, expedited really DOES mean expedited), BUT, none of my stickers are in the new passport -- so I'm not sure how I continue my Japan visa status, do I just bring both passports around with me, showing my reentry and so on? Or... I guess this could be a convenient time to drop my Japan status and start getting railpasses again. I'm just not sure how this all works. I think technically I was supposed to renew my passport from Japan and they'd fix all of it for me, sadly.
Anyway, so I went to hang out with Carl yesterday. The day started with me bussing into Seattle, and hanging out for an hour or two downtown. I played Pop'n Music for a while at Gameworks, yay, and then ended up getting lunch at Westlake's Thai place again after wandering around for a bit both literally and figuratively. (Chipotle was too crowded.) Then I bussed up to Ballard! Got off the bus at the Safeway at 15th and walked to the Ballard house via Market... only to get a phone call from Carl when I was 2-3 blocks away, saying he was at the Blue Dog Cafe. Oops. Had I walked the other way I would have been at the BDC about right at that moment, but instead, I had more walking to do. Which was fine with me as it was a really nice day out.
I had Carl ask me algorithms and software engineering questions while he ate his sandwich, so that was my job-studying for the day, I think :) He asked me some really good ones and I learned a lot, so that was good. (Oh, and on the bus ride up to Ballard I passed the quick 8-kyu on Kanji Kentei DS, so I started the long 8-kyu... and I passed that this morning! Hooray! Maybe I have learned something!)
Then we hung out at the Ballard house for a bit, and then we went to check out Rock Box, a karaoke place in Cap Hill that someone pointed me at the other day in a comment here. It was supposedly Japanese-style, at least insofar as it had private rooms and 60,000 Japanese songs (and something like 120,000 songs total). Well... going in there does not feel like going into a karaoke place in Japan at all at first, it's very yuppie-like and clearly also intended to serve as a bar, there's an open bar area with TVs and whatnot, but yeah, if you want to do karaoke, they do infact have private karaoke rooms, AND they have lots of Japanese songs, and they even give you an iPad to input stuff with (though it doesn't have an interface quite as good as Japanese places do with searching by genre and whatnot -- this one you only get to search by Title and by Artist. Which is fine for me but not so much for Carl who knows stuff as being from various shows or games).
(And they really do have all the stuff in Karaoke Champ as far as I can tell.)
I guess we were there for almost 2 hours. I sang a lot, Carl sang some, I lost my voice, it was good times. The only weird thing is that since there are no glass doors to the room, occasionally staff members poke their head in like "you doing okay? want to order anything?" which is a little weird, that'd never happen in Japan.
But, yay! I suppose I need to find some regular Japanese-singing karaoke buddies in Seattle (kinda like how I finally found Kozo and Kyoko and all in Tokyo... right before I left, sigh). It seems that if you go on a weeknight before 8pm it's only $4 per person per hour (and it's something like $7 per person per hour after 8pm and weekends) which actually is pretty cheap for karaoke, that's even cheaper than Tokyo rates believe it or not, aside from some of the daytime deals.
After karaoke, Carl and I went to Maneki for dinner! Yay for Japanese food that doesn't suck and isn't overpriced (but of course the only times we can go there without waiting a ton is like, weeknights at weird hours). We accidentally overordered because I was counting on Japanese portions at the prices they gave, but instead, like, the $8 for tempura turned out to be a huge plate of it, and so was the $6 for karaage or whatever. Oops. We got those, and some sushi, and agedashi nasu, and kinpira/gobo, and that's it, and might have been ok had it been Japanese portions, but instead, we really could have used a third person with us. Oh well. I ordered in Japanese without thinking because it seems silly to use the Japanese names for dishes without chaining them together with actual Japanese speech. Also while we were there the fire alarm of the building next door went off, which was a little odd, but we just kind of sat through it.
But it was really good.
After dinner, Carl drove me to Microsoft since the 545 buses were only running every 30 minutes by then and it was cold out, and MS isn't too bad for him to get home from, but I didn't want to drag him to Sammamish. Mike picked me up at MS and took me home, and that's when I got to see my passports and all.
It was a good day :) I'm lucky to have a friend that I can drag around and relive parts of my Japan life with, yay.
