Weekend update
This is kind of funny. I have a cellphone now but am still typing this entry on my laptop and I'm not entirely sure how it's going to be sent. (It's Sunday afternoon at 1pm right now, and I'm going to add more to it later.)
Hey, you know what? I'm even going to LJ-Cut this one because I know it's going to end up spanning about two days in the end. I'm hoping that I can find a way to post this directly from my keitai. We'll see. I'd still rather type long things on a real keyboard.
I showed up at school at 10:40, having stopped at the awesome bakery in the station to get a potato croquette sandwich and a raisin roll for lunch. I was the first one there so I had to unlock it (and I was able to! Yay!) and by the time I got changed and logged in and did my morning setup paperwork and all, my first student had shown up.
11am: This guy is awesome. He's about my age and incredibly sweet and a little shy. His English is better than he thinks it is (like many of my students). And even better, he's a network engineer, he designs wireless routers and systems. He wants to learn English so he can go back to Silicon Valley and work with people. Also, he's a private student which means that while I can work through the Sprint 6 book with him, we really can do whatever he wants, so I said "I was a software engineer in America, actually... so, how would you like it if we tried to work on some engineering English?" And he thought that idea was great. So we're going to try to do both. We spent half an hour going through Sprint stuff anyway, covered the main grammar point, and I told him to think up three things he wants to be able to say in English and I'll try to come up with three things as well. Awesome.
12pm: I share this guy with Duane, so today he didn't work with me. I used the time to plan my other classes, and to talk with Eri a bit.
1pm: This was supposed to be 4 people but probably due to Obon, only one person showed up He was a pretty awesome person as well -- a guy who does research and patent writing on cellphone batteries. Seriously awesome stuff. He also loves -- and I mean LOVES -- the Simpsons. I felt bad because I haven't watched them in so long, but we talked some about skateboarding and families in America and things like that. I told him we have a Kwik-E-Mart in Seattle and he wanted to know if they also made the counterpeople dress up as Apu. Heh. Anyway, I had planned a lesson, but we actually ended up just talking for the entire hour. I actually thought that was pretty good, his English was also great, and he's very funny, BUT it turns out he's planning to quit GEOS and so it probably actually looked really bad that I didn't do a real lesson with him. Whoops. He says it's because he works far away from Akabane and doesn't have a lot of free time at home, but... we'll see. I told him I'd get a Nintendo DS and we'd play Puyo Puyo sometime. So who knows.
2pm: I'm supposed to have 2 students too, and one of them is even a gigantic baseball fan, BUT he called and cancelled for today and next week :( I even answered the phone in Japanese and it was him and he was like "Oh! It is Deanna? I am sorry, I cannot come to school today" and so on. The other student was there though -- but it turns out that she had missed a class or two as well, so rather than doing the lesson I had planned, we actually went back and I gave her an impromptu lesson on phrasal verbs instead, which was two pages earlier. We had fun talking though and I think she learned some stuff from it, so that's what matters in the end. (She said she was going to see Harry Potter and told me "Please don't give away the ending!", so that was great.)
3pm: Nothing, so Eri took me out and we got my cellphone!!!!!!!! YAY :)
4pm: This guy's awesome too. He's an interpreter for the army, or something like that. He's pretty much fluent, and for today he just wanted to talk, so we did. He actually taught me a few words in Japanese, and we talked about travel in Japan, and about food and drinks, and some about baseball. Next week he's going to prepare a talk for me about different kinds of shochiku, from all around Kyushu -- and he told me that my "homework" is to go try a drink that I have never tried before. Heh.
So, I was done around 5:30, but wasn't really sure what to do, so... so I looked at my upcoming lessons and then I just left. I'm actually going to Akabane on Monday to hang out with Sam before we meet up with Shimanchu, so I figure I will go a few hours early and work on lesson plans then, so they will be fresher in my mind on Tuesday.
I had this brilliant idea to call![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
firearmofmutiny and see what the heck he was up to then, so that's how the rest of the evening happened.
We met up at the Tokyo Dome. It was supposed to be in the actual To:Do shop, since I wanted to get another cellphone dangle and a real keychain for my keys, but it closed at 7! Oops! So we met up outside and went to Yamashita books, where Anthony talked a lot and where I bought 5 packs of baseball cards. Then we walked to Suidobashi (?) station, called his friends, and eventually decided to go hang out in Shinjuku. After a retarded adventure finding them, involving the east exit and west exit and other stuff, finally his friends Aaron and Takuro found us at the bottom of Shinjuku station.
Right, so I should first explain that Anthony is asian but not Japanese, Aaron is a tall white boy from America but has been living in Japan for like two years and is completely fluent in Japanese, and Takuro is Aaron's friend who is Japanese and doesn't speak English at ALL. Anthony and Aaron knew each other from anime club at the U of Minnesota or something like that, and Aaron and Takuro are big anime geeks. (Infact they explained that they were going to some anime figurine convention on Sunday.)
We went for yakiniku, which was just plain funny since Anthony spent the whole time telling me the updated score of every Central League game, Takuro and Aaron babbled between themselves in Japanese and sometimes babbled to us in Japanese as well, and the whole time we ate a lot of yakiniku which was very good. Takuro was just like "Whoa, you guys are BIG BASEBALL NERDS" and it turns out he used to be a huge Hanshin fan 4 years ago so I gave him my Kanemoto keychain that I got out of the capsule machine the other day, heh. (I think it is a Japanese thing to do to give people random little stuff, isn't it?)
Then they decided we should go to karaoke. The decision point was whether or not to do all night karaoke, since apparently it is cheaper to go for 6 hours between 11pm-5am than it is to go for 3 hours between 10pm-1am... so we decided to do that. I don't know what possessed me to say yes beyond my usual "Whee, this sounds like an adventure!" sort of mindset.
We had to waste time until 11pm so we went to an arcade. I played a bunch of Pop'n and one game of Drummania. Whee. There were some other gaijin in the arcade as well, which was the funny part about Shinjuku in general to me -- it's like "whoa, other white people! I never see these up in the north part of Tokyo/Saitama!" Aaron wanted to do print club for Anthony's last day here, but Anthony didn't want to, heh.
And then we embarked on the Karaoke mission. Man, that was pretty surreal. So we went to this place in Shinjuku right near the arcade (and it was an arcade I had actually been to a few years ago with Nykkel and Hitoshi and all), and we got a room for 4 -- which literally was just big enough for 4 people to sit in around a table with a karaoke screen. It had a wireless controller to enter karaoke songs, which was kind of cool, and two wireless microphones. Anthony started off with some weird English song, I forget what it was, and Aaron and Takuro started off with some pop song in Japanese, and I started off with SMAP - sekai ni hitotsu dake no hana. Takuro sang it with me, and a bit later when he put in "Shake" by SMAP, he handed me the other microphone, that was sort of funny.
I'm not going to list all the songs we sang. The other three are anime geeks so they entered a bunch of anime-related songs, and I sang along to the ones I knew. I tried to also enter anime-related songs that I know when it was my turn, so others might sing with me, but alas. I did "Still for your Love" by myself, and "Mysterious Eyes" (though Aaron said "Ooh, Garnet Crow, I like them") but everyone did Sobakasu with me. We also did some Bemani-related songs; I did "Do You Remember Me" by Kitaki Mayu by myself, but everyone did "My Sweet Darlin'" together, and we sung Hot Limit together, in Japanese, which was funny (even though Anthony was like "WE DRINK RITALIN!"). I got Takuro to do Natsuiro with me, and I had actually put in Ryuufukumaru by HY, sang about half of it and skipped, so Takuro put in AM11:00 and we sang that together, I did Izumi's harmony part and that was pretty fun. Aaron and I did some female vocalist songs together, like "tooku made" by DAI and Sakuranbo by Otsuka Ai, and I really don't remember any more.
(It's Monday at 2pm now and I am between doing laundry and cleaning my apartment, so.)
We finished up the night with the two openings from Kodocha... I sang along to 19ji no News, of course, and then... and then we were done! And it was 5am. And oh man. The sun was starting to come up, and we were all wandering around Shinjuku. We stopped at McDonald's, everyone else got food so that Aaron would have change so we could pay him (it was like 9300 yen for the four of us for six hours, yikes) and I opened up the baseball cards I'd bought back at the Tokyo Dome, I promised Anthony I'd give him the first Chunichi card I got. What do you know, it was Tatsunami, who he has wristbands of, so I gave him the card. Everyone walked me back to the station so I wouldn't get lost, and then they all went off to do things like sleep or go to a figurines con or whatever.
Me, I got on the Yamanote line to Ikebukuro, then caught a Saikyo to Akabane, then caught the Keihin-Tohoku to Warabi. By the time I got to Warabi station it was actually about 6:40am and I was starving, so I got food at McDonald's and walked home. It was already getting horrendously hot even at 7am, so I got home and had to wait about half an hour for my apartment to cool down enough to go to sleep. Yes, my Saturday night sleep started Sunday morning at 7am.
Sunday, I woke up at about 1:30pm and I guess I got to Warabi station again at around 3pm and caught the Keihin-Tohoku line express at 3:09. The great thing is that I can go STRAIGHT from my stop to Yokohama Stadium's station, Kannai, on only one train line. It is, infact, the only stadium in Tokyo that I can get to without changing lines at least once. The awful thing is that it takes about 70-80 minutes total depending on whether I get an express.
So I met up with Anthony outside the rightfield gate and we went in. We had unreserved seats in the outfield, and the centerfield part was really shady so we wanted to find seats there. But they were all reserved with towels and stuff.
Fortunately a random Baystars fan saw my shirt and was like (all of these are in Japanese) "Hey! Are you from Seattle?" and I'm like "Yes, I moved to Japan from Seattle," and he's like "OHHH! HAVE YOU SEEN ICHIRO?" and so on, and so we got into a conversation, and well, after a few minutes we explained that we needed seats, and that YES we were rooting for the Bay Stars, even though Anthony said he's a Chunichi fan and I said I like the Fighters. The guy asked around and GET THIS, he hooked us up with two seats in the second row, which was truly awesome. The couple sitting next to me were in their 50's as usual and the guy helped me get uniform numbers for my scorecard and complimented me on my kanji writing, and asked me about the scorecard and so I explained it to him and showed him old games and he asked me about all the other Japanese players I had seen in America. He also hooked me up with a lyrics sheet for Yokohama cheers :)
So the game was a lot of fun and we cheered a lot, but sadly the Baystars lost. Atsushi Nohmi, the young lefthander, started for Hanshin and did really well. Yuuji Hata started for Yokohama and was doing sort of okay until one inning when Wei-Tsu Lin unleashed a BLAM home run to the back of the rightfield seats. I know nobody's counting, but I've seen two Hanshin-Yokohama games in my life now and Lin has hit a gigantic home run in BOTH of them, though it was more impressive last year when he did it as a pinch-hitter for Shimoyanagi.
The guy who found us our seats turned out to be a real tetsu, which was pretty amusing, and he also likes players from Yokohama so when Anthony had me check the Chunichi game I was like "I hope Morino did something!" and the guy's saying that Morino's from Yokohama (I'm like "Sagamihara, yeah") and the guy went to school with Ibata and played ball with him. Crazy. The crazy guys in front of us also had a Giants newspaper with Tatsunori Hara on the cover and they were drawing all kinds of stuff all over his face and the rest of him, ears and a mustache and various stuff, and then they would laugh maniacally about it. They were pretty weird :)
We left right after the game ended. Anthony got off the train at Tokyo station so he could go back to Shinjuku. I got off at Ueno and tried to get food, but ended up just getting katsudon at another little Japanese-cooking noodle shop. Nothing is open in Ueno past 11pm either, apparently, at least not on Sundays. Sigh.
I got back to Warabi around midnight and stopped in Tobu for two gigantic things of Kirin tea, which will save me money as I refill my little bottles, and then I went to sleep.
Now it is Monday, and I meant to go to Akabane a lot earlier than this, but alas. I slept in, until noon, and then spent the afternoon doing laundry and cleaning things in my apartment and moving stuff around. Hopefully in a day or two I will be able to take pictures of the place and show you all what it looks like.
Now I'm going to go off to Akabane to meet up with Sam, and later John. If you can see this, it means there's a USB port on the school computer.
Hey, you know what? I'm even going to LJ-Cut this one because I know it's going to end up spanning about two days in the end. I'm hoping that I can find a way to post this directly from my keitai. We'll see. I'd still rather type long things on a real keyboard.
I showed up at school at 10:40, having stopped at the awesome bakery in the station to get a potato croquette sandwich and a raisin roll for lunch. I was the first one there so I had to unlock it (and I was able to! Yay!) and by the time I got changed and logged in and did my morning setup paperwork and all, my first student had shown up.
11am: This guy is awesome. He's about my age and incredibly sweet and a little shy. His English is better than he thinks it is (like many of my students). And even better, he's a network engineer, he designs wireless routers and systems. He wants to learn English so he can go back to Silicon Valley and work with people. Also, he's a private student which means that while I can work through the Sprint 6 book with him, we really can do whatever he wants, so I said "I was a software engineer in America, actually... so, how would you like it if we tried to work on some engineering English?" And he thought that idea was great. So we're going to try to do both. We spent half an hour going through Sprint stuff anyway, covered the main grammar point, and I told him to think up three things he wants to be able to say in English and I'll try to come up with three things as well. Awesome.
12pm: I share this guy with Duane, so today he didn't work with me. I used the time to plan my other classes, and to talk with Eri a bit.
1pm: This was supposed to be 4 people but probably due to Obon, only one person showed up He was a pretty awesome person as well -- a guy who does research and patent writing on cellphone batteries. Seriously awesome stuff. He also loves -- and I mean LOVES -- the Simpsons. I felt bad because I haven't watched them in so long, but we talked some about skateboarding and families in America and things like that. I told him we have a Kwik-E-Mart in Seattle and he wanted to know if they also made the counterpeople dress up as Apu. Heh. Anyway, I had planned a lesson, but we actually ended up just talking for the entire hour. I actually thought that was pretty good, his English was also great, and he's very funny, BUT it turns out he's planning to quit GEOS and so it probably actually looked really bad that I didn't do a real lesson with him. Whoops. He says it's because he works far away from Akabane and doesn't have a lot of free time at home, but... we'll see. I told him I'd get a Nintendo DS and we'd play Puyo Puyo sometime. So who knows.
2pm: I'm supposed to have 2 students too, and one of them is even a gigantic baseball fan, BUT he called and cancelled for today and next week :( I even answered the phone in Japanese and it was him and he was like "Oh! It is Deanna? I am sorry, I cannot come to school today" and so on. The other student was there though -- but it turns out that she had missed a class or two as well, so rather than doing the lesson I had planned, we actually went back and I gave her an impromptu lesson on phrasal verbs instead, which was two pages earlier. We had fun talking though and I think she learned some stuff from it, so that's what matters in the end. (She said she was going to see Harry Potter and told me "Please don't give away the ending!", so that was great.)
3pm: Nothing, so Eri took me out and we got my cellphone!!!!!!!! YAY :)
4pm: This guy's awesome too. He's an interpreter for the army, or something like that. He's pretty much fluent, and for today he just wanted to talk, so we did. He actually taught me a few words in Japanese, and we talked about travel in Japan, and about food and drinks, and some about baseball. Next week he's going to prepare a talk for me about different kinds of shochiku, from all around Kyushu -- and he told me that my "homework" is to go try a drink that I have never tried before. Heh.
So, I was done around 5:30, but wasn't really sure what to do, so... so I looked at my upcoming lessons and then I just left. I'm actually going to Akabane on Monday to hang out with Sam before we meet up with Shimanchu, so I figure I will go a few hours early and work on lesson plans then, so they will be fresher in my mind on Tuesday.
I had this brilliant idea to call
firearmofmutiny and see what the heck he was up to then, so that's how the rest of the evening happened.We met up at the Tokyo Dome. It was supposed to be in the actual To:Do shop, since I wanted to get another cellphone dangle and a real keychain for my keys, but it closed at 7! Oops! So we met up outside and went to Yamashita books, where Anthony talked a lot and where I bought 5 packs of baseball cards. Then we walked to Suidobashi (?) station, called his friends, and eventually decided to go hang out in Shinjuku. After a retarded adventure finding them, involving the east exit and west exit and other stuff, finally his friends Aaron and Takuro found us at the bottom of Shinjuku station.
Right, so I should first explain that Anthony is asian but not Japanese, Aaron is a tall white boy from America but has been living in Japan for like two years and is completely fluent in Japanese, and Takuro is Aaron's friend who is Japanese and doesn't speak English at ALL. Anthony and Aaron knew each other from anime club at the U of Minnesota or something like that, and Aaron and Takuro are big anime geeks. (Infact they explained that they were going to some anime figurine convention on Sunday.)
We went for yakiniku, which was just plain funny since Anthony spent the whole time telling me the updated score of every Central League game, Takuro and Aaron babbled between themselves in Japanese and sometimes babbled to us in Japanese as well, and the whole time we ate a lot of yakiniku which was very good. Takuro was just like "Whoa, you guys are BIG BASEBALL NERDS" and it turns out he used to be a huge Hanshin fan 4 years ago so I gave him my Kanemoto keychain that I got out of the capsule machine the other day, heh. (I think it is a Japanese thing to do to give people random little stuff, isn't it?)
Then they decided we should go to karaoke. The decision point was whether or not to do all night karaoke, since apparently it is cheaper to go for 6 hours between 11pm-5am than it is to go for 3 hours between 10pm-1am... so we decided to do that. I don't know what possessed me to say yes beyond my usual "Whee, this sounds like an adventure!" sort of mindset.
We had to waste time until 11pm so we went to an arcade. I played a bunch of Pop'n and one game of Drummania. Whee. There were some other gaijin in the arcade as well, which was the funny part about Shinjuku in general to me -- it's like "whoa, other white people! I never see these up in the north part of Tokyo/Saitama!" Aaron wanted to do print club for Anthony's last day here, but Anthony didn't want to, heh.
And then we embarked on the Karaoke mission. Man, that was pretty surreal. So we went to this place in Shinjuku right near the arcade (and it was an arcade I had actually been to a few years ago with Nykkel and Hitoshi and all), and we got a room for 4 -- which literally was just big enough for 4 people to sit in around a table with a karaoke screen. It had a wireless controller to enter karaoke songs, which was kind of cool, and two wireless microphones. Anthony started off with some weird English song, I forget what it was, and Aaron and Takuro started off with some pop song in Japanese, and I started off with SMAP - sekai ni hitotsu dake no hana. Takuro sang it with me, and a bit later when he put in "Shake" by SMAP, he handed me the other microphone, that was sort of funny.
I'm not going to list all the songs we sang. The other three are anime geeks so they entered a bunch of anime-related songs, and I sang along to the ones I knew. I tried to also enter anime-related songs that I know when it was my turn, so others might sing with me, but alas. I did "Still for your Love" by myself, and "Mysterious Eyes" (though Aaron said "Ooh, Garnet Crow, I like them") but everyone did Sobakasu with me. We also did some Bemani-related songs; I did "Do You Remember Me" by Kitaki Mayu by myself, but everyone did "My Sweet Darlin'" together, and we sung Hot Limit together, in Japanese, which was funny (even though Anthony was like "WE DRINK RITALIN!"). I got Takuro to do Natsuiro with me, and I had actually put in Ryuufukumaru by HY, sang about half of it and skipped, so Takuro put in AM11:00 and we sang that together, I did Izumi's harmony part and that was pretty fun. Aaron and I did some female vocalist songs together, like "tooku made" by DAI and Sakuranbo by Otsuka Ai, and I really don't remember any more.
(It's Monday at 2pm now and I am between doing laundry and cleaning my apartment, so.)
We finished up the night with the two openings from Kodocha... I sang along to 19ji no News, of course, and then... and then we were done! And it was 5am. And oh man. The sun was starting to come up, and we were all wandering around Shinjuku. We stopped at McDonald's, everyone else got food so that Aaron would have change so we could pay him (it was like 9300 yen for the four of us for six hours, yikes) and I opened up the baseball cards I'd bought back at the Tokyo Dome, I promised Anthony I'd give him the first Chunichi card I got. What do you know, it was Tatsunami, who he has wristbands of, so I gave him the card. Everyone walked me back to the station so I wouldn't get lost, and then they all went off to do things like sleep or go to a figurines con or whatever.
Me, I got on the Yamanote line to Ikebukuro, then caught a Saikyo to Akabane, then caught the Keihin-Tohoku to Warabi. By the time I got to Warabi station it was actually about 6:40am and I was starving, so I got food at McDonald's and walked home. It was already getting horrendously hot even at 7am, so I got home and had to wait about half an hour for my apartment to cool down enough to go to sleep. Yes, my Saturday night sleep started Sunday morning at 7am.
Sunday, I woke up at about 1:30pm and I guess I got to Warabi station again at around 3pm and caught the Keihin-Tohoku line express at 3:09. The great thing is that I can go STRAIGHT from my stop to Yokohama Stadium's station, Kannai, on only one train line. It is, infact, the only stadium in Tokyo that I can get to without changing lines at least once. The awful thing is that it takes about 70-80 minutes total depending on whether I get an express.
So I met up with Anthony outside the rightfield gate and we went in. We had unreserved seats in the outfield, and the centerfield part was really shady so we wanted to find seats there. But they were all reserved with towels and stuff.
Fortunately a random Baystars fan saw my shirt and was like (all of these are in Japanese) "Hey! Are you from Seattle?" and I'm like "Yes, I moved to Japan from Seattle," and he's like "OHHH! HAVE YOU SEEN ICHIRO?" and so on, and so we got into a conversation, and well, after a few minutes we explained that we needed seats, and that YES we were rooting for the Bay Stars, even though Anthony said he's a Chunichi fan and I said I like the Fighters. The guy asked around and GET THIS, he hooked us up with two seats in the second row, which was truly awesome. The couple sitting next to me were in their 50's as usual and the guy helped me get uniform numbers for my scorecard and complimented me on my kanji writing, and asked me about the scorecard and so I explained it to him and showed him old games and he asked me about all the other Japanese players I had seen in America. He also hooked me up with a lyrics sheet for Yokohama cheers :)
So the game was a lot of fun and we cheered a lot, but sadly the Baystars lost. Atsushi Nohmi, the young lefthander, started for Hanshin and did really well. Yuuji Hata started for Yokohama and was doing sort of okay until one inning when Wei-Tsu Lin unleashed a BLAM home run to the back of the rightfield seats. I know nobody's counting, but I've seen two Hanshin-Yokohama games in my life now and Lin has hit a gigantic home run in BOTH of them, though it was more impressive last year when he did it as a pinch-hitter for Shimoyanagi.
The guy who found us our seats turned out to be a real tetsu, which was pretty amusing, and he also likes players from Yokohama so when Anthony had me check the Chunichi game I was like "I hope Morino did something!" and the guy's saying that Morino's from Yokohama (I'm like "Sagamihara, yeah") and the guy went to school with Ibata and played ball with him. Crazy. The crazy guys in front of us also had a Giants newspaper with Tatsunori Hara on the cover and they were drawing all kinds of stuff all over his face and the rest of him, ears and a mustache and various stuff, and then they would laugh maniacally about it. They were pretty weird :)
We left right after the game ended. Anthony got off the train at Tokyo station so he could go back to Shinjuku. I got off at Ueno and tried to get food, but ended up just getting katsudon at another little Japanese-cooking noodle shop. Nothing is open in Ueno past 11pm either, apparently, at least not on Sundays. Sigh.
I got back to Warabi around midnight and stopped in Tobu for two gigantic things of Kirin tea, which will save me money as I refill my little bottles, and then I went to sleep.
Now it is Monday, and I meant to go to Akabane a lot earlier than this, but alas. I slept in, until noon, and then spent the afternoon doing laundry and cleaning things in my apartment and moving stuff around. Hopefully in a day or two I will be able to take pictures of the place and show you all what it looks like.
Now I'm going to go off to Akabane to meet up with Sam, and later John. If you can see this, it means there's a USB port on the school computer.
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...they do consume your wallet, however. The fact that they have such a variety of games, are much more well-maintained, and have way friendlier staff on average all makes it worth it though. Even the fact that my neck hurt way too much from playing so many candy cabs. :P
The place where I probably saw the most gaijin outside of the hotel was in Akihabara. I did go up to Shinjuku at one point, and didn't see all that many.
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I believe 'tetsu' means 'iron', but I'm not sure what you mean in this context. Just that he's a big baseball fan? Or does it mean something else entirely?
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If I make it out to Japan with
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And it was really nice meeting you ^_^ Chances are I'll be calling you to say "SHINJIRARENAI!!!" in about a month.
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No, silly, that's what the all-night ramen shops are for! Seriously, I was amazed to find out about a ramen shop in Otaru that didn't even open till 11 pm, till I was dragged there several times at 3 or 4 am and it was always jam packed.
As for the game centers... it was the medal games that did me in. I was never a big video game fan, but the medal games... man, I spent so much money there. If you do get into them, go with someone who knows them. There are all kinds of tricks.
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Deanna, sounds like you are having all sorts of fun and that things are going about as well as they realistically could. I'm so happy for you and love to read about how well the adventure is turning out!
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I mean, they are the kind of games that you're thinking of, where you put in coin-tokens (in this case called medals) to try to make other medals drop. Only they're that on steroids- there's a slot machine type video screen, mini-games, balls whizzing around, and a chance at the "grand jackpot" which are all chances to get more medals.
The kicker is- the medals are not worth anything at all. You can't redeem them for anything. No prizes, no money. And you can't even take them to a different arcade cause they're specific to each place. If you win a whole bunch, basically all that you win is the ability to play that much longer for free. But you want to play. You must play. It's so incredibly addictive.