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Monday and Tuesday
Oh man, so much to write about, but I don't feel like typing.
I guess I'll start with tonight's "adventure". See, I live in Kawaguchi, but I come home to Warabi station. Warabi is dead boring, at least after 10pm, it seems. But, on an upside, the weather is really nice at midnight -- it isn't quite so goddamn hot out. So I've actually been deviating from my normal path a bit; usually I go a few blocks down a side street and then veer over to Sun Road. But this time I went all out -- I followed this one road that goes to the right of the station, all the way down the tracks; after a few blocks I actually saw some fireworks in the sky and thought I'd go see where they were coming from.
Turns out they were coming from a gigantic municipal park across the street from what looked like Warabi city hall (or maybe Tsukagoshi, I dunno) and were just firecrackers being set off by a bunch of teenagers; I figured it was better for me not to go up and talk to them, so I didn't. Thing is, then I realised that I had to get the hell around the park to get home... so I walked past the park, veered left, and had absolutely NO idea where the hell I was. I continued for a bit and came across -- I am not kidding -- what looked like a Japanese version of the Central Market shopping center at 155th and Aurora in Seattle. It was a big shopping center, with a BIG FUCKING PARKING LOT, in the middle of this crowded residential area, with a Seattle's Best Coffee in it, a gigantic 24-hour grocery store, and a few other shops attatched to it which seemed to be closed. But I mean, a gigantic free parking lot for stores in reasonably-dense-suburbia-Saitama? What?
I would have gone in, but at this point I'd already been walking for about 20 minutes and still had no fucking clue where I was, and figured it was more important to get home and I could re-find the 24-hour gigantomart later. I do wonder if maybe they have some foreign (read: American, like granola and other things I sort of want) food there.
So, I decided to veer left at that point some more, figuring I'd have to reach some major street. I passed by what seems to have been the Tsukagoshi community center; it looked like there is some interesting stuff to do there so maybe I'll find it again someday. I kept going forward. Eventually, I reached a main road...
...and was NOWHERE near where I thought I should be, and I wasn't even actually sure the road was the one I thought it was. BUT off in the distance I could see a gigantic orange yakiniku sign which I thought I'd seen a few days ago when I tried walking around this area a bit, and sure enough, thank god, I was right. I walked towards it and passed by a katsudon place open until midnight (YES!) and an izakaya that appears to be open until god-knows-when; I even was staring in to see if people were in there and the lady at the bar waved a "come on in" at me, but I just nodded and kept walking. Still, good to know those are around -- and I even know where they are in relation to my house. It was pretty weird to realize that I'd actually OVERSHOT my apartment and had been tracing backwards towards it. The worst thing about Japan is just that there are very few named streets, so if I had decided to stop someone and ask directions, I would have basically been like "Uhh... I live on a tiny side street off of Sun Road... near Tsurukame Kusuriya... in Shibanakata 2-chome... umm, where the hell am I?"
I basically folded out the futon when I got in here and have been stretching out on it since. My feet are killing me. I'll need to look at a map tomorrow but I am guessing I walked about 2 miles total during that all. Oops. Keep in mind that I USUALLY walk a mile to/from the station going the direct route.
OH, one good thing is, I found the Warabi Book-Off. It's actually pretty close to the station and looked fairly big. I can't figure out its hours though, and they didn't have them displayed on the outside.
Uh, anyway. Going backwards, I still need to actually talk about Monday and Tuesday, don't I. I'll LJ-cut again I guess, even though this is already pretty long, eh.
When last I wrote, I was heading out to Akabane to drop some stuff off at GEOS and to meet up with my friend Isamu (aka Tokyo Sam on some Mariners forums). I found Sam at the Starbucks without too much of a problem, but then I went to drop stuff off -- it was a baseball calendar and two Mariners posters and some GEOS lesson plan thingies -- and I accidentally set off the school's security alarm :( So I had to wait for a cop to show up, and he patiently told me what I did wrong and we had to fill out some paperwork, so I didn't get back to the Starbucks until 4:30. I told Sam what happened though and he just thought it was funny, and told me to go get a drink and calm down. I went up to the counter and said (in Japanese), "I'd like an iced chai tea latte, please", and the counter guy -- who was really cute and very tall, especially for Japan -- asked me what size drink in Japanese, I didn't catch it and said "Ehhh?" and he said in perfect English, "What size do you want?" and I said "Oh! Medium please!" in English. He took my money and I asked, in Japanese, "Is it okay for me to order in English here, then?" and he replied in Japanese, "Not really, but you can talk to me," so I guess I'll keep that in mind.
So Sam took me around shopping for a few hours, to show me various stuff in the neighborhood. Background story here is that Sam is a Japanese guy who grew up in America, speaks Japanese and English fluently, and now works as a freelance technical translator; he's quite a bit older than me and has a wife and kids and they live in Akabane. We've been friends online for like two years and met up for a Lotte game last fall when I was in Tokyo. Either way, Akabane is Sam's neighborhood, so it's really great that I'm working there, and he could show me around!
The first thing we did was go to an au/KDDI stand and I signed up to get internet in my apartment. Sam helped me translate the forms to fill in, and also translated the quick-speed-talking saleslady. Sounds like I should be getting it in about 2-3 weeks, so yay! Other cool part is that they'll basically combine my cellphone bill and internet bill (though it's going to be like... 12-13k yen per month total, yikes) so I just have to go pay it together.
After that, we looked at bikes and shoes. No, really. It seems that if I want to buy a standard one-speed normal old bike, it's going to cost me about 10,000 yen, which is like $100. Sam assures me that is "cheap". At the Sports Authority, where I looked at other bikes, I also looked at their selection of New Balance sneakers, and Sam helped me measure my feet, and the deal is basically that I can get men's size NB shoes that'll fit me perfectly, and they're even relatively cheap, so I'm not too worried about my sneakers wearing out anymore. Dress shoes are another story of course... anyway, we wandered around some mall-like things by the station too, and decided to just go to Shibuya early.
We were meeting up with John (aka Shimanchu, another guy I know from Mariners forums, who I went to a Royals game with last June; he used to live in Hawaii and was working in Tokyo for the summer; he's leaving in a few days but hopefully will be coming back in a few months) at Yotsuya at 7pm, but we got there at 6:30pm or so, so we decided to scout out the area for good dinner places. After walking around for a little while, going back down the main street I suddenly hear "DEANNA!" from behind me, which wouldn't be completely strange in Seattle or Pittsburgh, but in Tokyo? Of course, it was John, who saw me and Sam walk by as he was leaving his place. So, yay. After some deliberation and walking around a bit we decided on Chinese food.
The Chinese food was tasty but expensive, but at least since it was obon the place was uncrowded and they basically let us sit the 3 of us at a 6-person table for like 2 hours talking. Sam and John caught me up on what was going on with the Mariners these last few weeks, and I told them random stories about English teaching, and it was pretty fun in general. We took a picture of the three of us with cellphones and stuff, and then went to find a coffeeshop that was still open at 9pm -- Starbucks was closed for Obon, no joke. We did find a great place open until 11, and they had iced cocoa with ice cream in it, which both John and I got, and it was great.
Around 11, John's wife came back from visiting friends, so we met up with her for about two minutes out on the main street (John is something like 3/4 Japanese though mostly Hawaiian-sansei-descended, and his wife is Japanese and from Osaka), said hello, and then they went home and we went back to the train. I thought it was sort of funny how Sam and I were just talking in English on the train at a normal conversation speed, as if nobody could understand us, but that's obviously not true. Imagine like when you are on a bus in Seattle or somewhere else and there'll be a few people speaking loudly and rapidly in some non-English language and expect nobody understands it -- it's the same idea. We'd caught a Keihin-Tohoku train from Kanda station, so Sam left at Akabane and I rode back to Warabi, getting home around midnight, I guess.
I meant to get out of the apartment a lot earlier than I actually did on Tuesday, but I also wanted to see the Urawa Gakuin team start up in Koshien, and unfortunately the game before them was NUTS -- I forget what schools it was, but they went into extra innings tied something like 2-2, so in the 10th, the top, one school scored 3 runs. Fine. 5-2, but then in the BOTTOM of the 10th, the other school ALSO scored three runs and tied it up. So then in the top of the 11th, the first school scored FOUR runs -- the first was a home run and the pitcher seemed to come unravelled after that. The other school DID score one run in the bottom of the 11th, but that was it, so the game ended at 9-6. Pretty crazy. I saw the first inning of the Urawa game -- they were playing against Maebashi high school from Gunma prefecture, and I put the game on my cellphone TV and listened to it all the way walking to the station. Cool, huh?
I picked up food from the bakery, and got to GEOS, and fortunately didn't have to open the door at all since Eri was already there. I changed clothes and got to work putting up my decorations, and then working on preparing classes.
3pm, only one woman showed up this time. (The other one called at 2:30, Eri told her she had to come since we had confusion over active vs. sprint classes, so we called her back and told her it was okay to miss class, and so she never showed up.) I had prepared a lesson on art, and believe it or not on Andy Warhol, but we actually just ended up talking for an entire hour about random stuff; she's a very nice person and she said she enjoyed talking, so I guess it went fine, and I'll cover the art leson next time.
Then I spent three hours sorting more Sprint materials and preparing night classes; I did leave for kaitensushi around 5:40pm, coming back at 6:20pm.
7pm class was my Mill B guys again. This time only three people were there, probably because of Obon. (One guy explained that he basically took his wife and kids to Nagoya over the weekend but he had to come back and work while they stayed there for the week, even.) The class sort of went okay for a while, but it sort of derailed towards the end, my fault for the way I led the activity... I think there are some things I need to understand better about Japanese mindsets.
8pm class, Sprint 7x, was sort of bad too. I had planned it for 4 people or 2, and I had 3, so I ended up sort of not getting one of the people to talk enough -- and they're shy enough as is -- so, I have to work harder at that next time.
9pm class, Sprint 7y, was great as usual. We were having a lesson on geography, and the students are just great, so it went well. I did one activity I probably should have skipped, but it went over fine anyway.
I have one guy who is in both the 8pm and 9pm, and actually, that was a good indicator of how differently the classes went -- he talked a ton in the 9pm but not the 8pm. He hadn't shown up last week so we also talked a bit to get to know each other; he liked my baseball posters that I put up and wanted to talk about Hideki Matsui.
I ended up staying pretty late to work on more lessons for tomorrow and to catch up on paperwork (and I had stayed late after 9pm to help one student translate some stuff for work), so I barely managed to get out until 11:30, ended up getting McDonald's food since I was hungry again, and then came back to Warabi station and had the adventure I mentioned above.
Something I've noticed is that I feel like eating at noon, at 5:30pm, and at 10:30pm. It's sort of weird, but I'd rather do that and walk a lot than not eat enough and feel sick. I'm not gaining weight; if anything I'm losing it, so I'm not going to worry too much.
Also, now it is Wednesday morning and my dad just called me! Wow.
I guess I'll start with tonight's "adventure". See, I live in Kawaguchi, but I come home to Warabi station. Warabi is dead boring, at least after 10pm, it seems. But, on an upside, the weather is really nice at midnight -- it isn't quite so goddamn hot out. So I've actually been deviating from my normal path a bit; usually I go a few blocks down a side street and then veer over to Sun Road. But this time I went all out -- I followed this one road that goes to the right of the station, all the way down the tracks; after a few blocks I actually saw some fireworks in the sky and thought I'd go see where they were coming from.
Turns out they were coming from a gigantic municipal park across the street from what looked like Warabi city hall (or maybe Tsukagoshi, I dunno) and were just firecrackers being set off by a bunch of teenagers; I figured it was better for me not to go up and talk to them, so I didn't. Thing is, then I realised that I had to get the hell around the park to get home... so I walked past the park, veered left, and had absolutely NO idea where the hell I was. I continued for a bit and came across -- I am not kidding -- what looked like a Japanese version of the Central Market shopping center at 155th and Aurora in Seattle. It was a big shopping center, with a BIG FUCKING PARKING LOT, in the middle of this crowded residential area, with a Seattle's Best Coffee in it, a gigantic 24-hour grocery store, and a few other shops attatched to it which seemed to be closed. But I mean, a gigantic free parking lot for stores in reasonably-dense-suburbia-Saitama? What?
I would have gone in, but at this point I'd already been walking for about 20 minutes and still had no fucking clue where I was, and figured it was more important to get home and I could re-find the 24-hour gigantomart later. I do wonder if maybe they have some foreign (read: American, like granola and other things I sort of want) food there.
So, I decided to veer left at that point some more, figuring I'd have to reach some major street. I passed by what seems to have been the Tsukagoshi community center; it looked like there is some interesting stuff to do there so maybe I'll find it again someday. I kept going forward. Eventually, I reached a main road...
...and was NOWHERE near where I thought I should be, and I wasn't even actually sure the road was the one I thought it was. BUT off in the distance I could see a gigantic orange yakiniku sign which I thought I'd seen a few days ago when I tried walking around this area a bit, and sure enough, thank god, I was right. I walked towards it and passed by a katsudon place open until midnight (YES!) and an izakaya that appears to be open until god-knows-when; I even was staring in to see if people were in there and the lady at the bar waved a "come on in" at me, but I just nodded and kept walking. Still, good to know those are around -- and I even know where they are in relation to my house. It was pretty weird to realize that I'd actually OVERSHOT my apartment and had been tracing backwards towards it. The worst thing about Japan is just that there are very few named streets, so if I had decided to stop someone and ask directions, I would have basically been like "Uhh... I live on a tiny side street off of Sun Road... near Tsurukame Kusuriya... in Shibanakata 2-chome... umm, where the hell am I?"
I basically folded out the futon when I got in here and have been stretching out on it since. My feet are killing me. I'll need to look at a map tomorrow but I am guessing I walked about 2 miles total during that all. Oops. Keep in mind that I USUALLY walk a mile to/from the station going the direct route.
OH, one good thing is, I found the Warabi Book-Off. It's actually pretty close to the station and looked fairly big. I can't figure out its hours though, and they didn't have them displayed on the outside.
Uh, anyway. Going backwards, I still need to actually talk about Monday and Tuesday, don't I. I'll LJ-cut again I guess, even though this is already pretty long, eh.
When last I wrote, I was heading out to Akabane to drop some stuff off at GEOS and to meet up with my friend Isamu (aka Tokyo Sam on some Mariners forums). I found Sam at the Starbucks without too much of a problem, but then I went to drop stuff off -- it was a baseball calendar and two Mariners posters and some GEOS lesson plan thingies -- and I accidentally set off the school's security alarm :( So I had to wait for a cop to show up, and he patiently told me what I did wrong and we had to fill out some paperwork, so I didn't get back to the Starbucks until 4:30. I told Sam what happened though and he just thought it was funny, and told me to go get a drink and calm down. I went up to the counter and said (in Japanese), "I'd like an iced chai tea latte, please", and the counter guy -- who was really cute and very tall, especially for Japan -- asked me what size drink in Japanese, I didn't catch it and said "Ehhh?" and he said in perfect English, "What size do you want?" and I said "Oh! Medium please!" in English. He took my money and I asked, in Japanese, "Is it okay for me to order in English here, then?" and he replied in Japanese, "Not really, but you can talk to me," so I guess I'll keep that in mind.
So Sam took me around shopping for a few hours, to show me various stuff in the neighborhood. Background story here is that Sam is a Japanese guy who grew up in America, speaks Japanese and English fluently, and now works as a freelance technical translator; he's quite a bit older than me and has a wife and kids and they live in Akabane. We've been friends online for like two years and met up for a Lotte game last fall when I was in Tokyo. Either way, Akabane is Sam's neighborhood, so it's really great that I'm working there, and he could show me around!
The first thing we did was go to an au/KDDI stand and I signed up to get internet in my apartment. Sam helped me translate the forms to fill in, and also translated the quick-speed-talking saleslady. Sounds like I should be getting it in about 2-3 weeks, so yay! Other cool part is that they'll basically combine my cellphone bill and internet bill (though it's going to be like... 12-13k yen per month total, yikes) so I just have to go pay it together.
After that, we looked at bikes and shoes. No, really. It seems that if I want to buy a standard one-speed normal old bike, it's going to cost me about 10,000 yen, which is like $100. Sam assures me that is "cheap". At the Sports Authority, where I looked at other bikes, I also looked at their selection of New Balance sneakers, and Sam helped me measure my feet, and the deal is basically that I can get men's size NB shoes that'll fit me perfectly, and they're even relatively cheap, so I'm not too worried about my sneakers wearing out anymore. Dress shoes are another story of course... anyway, we wandered around some mall-like things by the station too, and decided to just go to Shibuya early.
We were meeting up with John (aka Shimanchu, another guy I know from Mariners forums, who I went to a Royals game with last June; he used to live in Hawaii and was working in Tokyo for the summer; he's leaving in a few days but hopefully will be coming back in a few months) at Yotsuya at 7pm, but we got there at 6:30pm or so, so we decided to scout out the area for good dinner places. After walking around for a little while, going back down the main street I suddenly hear "DEANNA!" from behind me, which wouldn't be completely strange in Seattle or Pittsburgh, but in Tokyo? Of course, it was John, who saw me and Sam walk by as he was leaving his place. So, yay. After some deliberation and walking around a bit we decided on Chinese food.
The Chinese food was tasty but expensive, but at least since it was obon the place was uncrowded and they basically let us sit the 3 of us at a 6-person table for like 2 hours talking. Sam and John caught me up on what was going on with the Mariners these last few weeks, and I told them random stories about English teaching, and it was pretty fun in general. We took a picture of the three of us with cellphones and stuff, and then went to find a coffeeshop that was still open at 9pm -- Starbucks was closed for Obon, no joke. We did find a great place open until 11, and they had iced cocoa with ice cream in it, which both John and I got, and it was great.
Around 11, John's wife came back from visiting friends, so we met up with her for about two minutes out on the main street (John is something like 3/4 Japanese though mostly Hawaiian-sansei-descended, and his wife is Japanese and from Osaka), said hello, and then they went home and we went back to the train. I thought it was sort of funny how Sam and I were just talking in English on the train at a normal conversation speed, as if nobody could understand us, but that's obviously not true. Imagine like when you are on a bus in Seattle or somewhere else and there'll be a few people speaking loudly and rapidly in some non-English language and expect nobody understands it -- it's the same idea. We'd caught a Keihin-Tohoku train from Kanda station, so Sam left at Akabane and I rode back to Warabi, getting home around midnight, I guess.
I meant to get out of the apartment a lot earlier than I actually did on Tuesday, but I also wanted to see the Urawa Gakuin team start up in Koshien, and unfortunately the game before them was NUTS -- I forget what schools it was, but they went into extra innings tied something like 2-2, so in the 10th, the top, one school scored 3 runs. Fine. 5-2, but then in the BOTTOM of the 10th, the other school ALSO scored three runs and tied it up. So then in the top of the 11th, the first school scored FOUR runs -- the first was a home run and the pitcher seemed to come unravelled after that. The other school DID score one run in the bottom of the 11th, but that was it, so the game ended at 9-6. Pretty crazy. I saw the first inning of the Urawa game -- they were playing against Maebashi high school from Gunma prefecture, and I put the game on my cellphone TV and listened to it all the way walking to the station. Cool, huh?
I picked up food from the bakery, and got to GEOS, and fortunately didn't have to open the door at all since Eri was already there. I changed clothes and got to work putting up my decorations, and then working on preparing classes.
3pm, only one woman showed up this time. (The other one called at 2:30, Eri told her she had to come since we had confusion over active vs. sprint classes, so we called her back and told her it was okay to miss class, and so she never showed up.) I had prepared a lesson on art, and believe it or not on Andy Warhol, but we actually just ended up talking for an entire hour about random stuff; she's a very nice person and she said she enjoyed talking, so I guess it went fine, and I'll cover the art leson next time.
Then I spent three hours sorting more Sprint materials and preparing night classes; I did leave for kaitensushi around 5:40pm, coming back at 6:20pm.
7pm class was my Mill B guys again. This time only three people were there, probably because of Obon. (One guy explained that he basically took his wife and kids to Nagoya over the weekend but he had to come back and work while they stayed there for the week, even.) The class sort of went okay for a while, but it sort of derailed towards the end, my fault for the way I led the activity... I think there are some things I need to understand better about Japanese mindsets.
8pm class, Sprint 7x, was sort of bad too. I had planned it for 4 people or 2, and I had 3, so I ended up sort of not getting one of the people to talk enough -- and they're shy enough as is -- so, I have to work harder at that next time.
9pm class, Sprint 7y, was great as usual. We were having a lesson on geography, and the students are just great, so it went well. I did one activity I probably should have skipped, but it went over fine anyway.
I have one guy who is in both the 8pm and 9pm, and actually, that was a good indicator of how differently the classes went -- he talked a ton in the 9pm but not the 8pm. He hadn't shown up last week so we also talked a bit to get to know each other; he liked my baseball posters that I put up and wanted to talk about Hideki Matsui.
I ended up staying pretty late to work on more lessons for tomorrow and to catch up on paperwork (and I had stayed late after 9pm to help one student translate some stuff for work), so I barely managed to get out until 11:30, ended up getting McDonald's food since I was hungry again, and then came back to Warabi station and had the adventure I mentioned above.
Something I've noticed is that I feel like eating at noon, at 5:30pm, and at 10:30pm. It's sort of weird, but I'd rather do that and walk a lot than not eat enough and feel sick. I'm not gaining weight; if anything I'm losing it, so I'm not going to worry too much.
Also, now it is Wednesday morning and my dad just called me! Wow.
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Ewww... That's one of the things I hate about Seattle-area public transport. It's not so much the fact that people speak foreign languages, but the fact they talk so loud to other people, or into their cell phones. I love how in Japan, people have the decency not to talk so loud, and when using keitai, they only type text messages.
Kanda station. I know it all too well. I only had to take one line (銀座線) to get to it from my hotel, and it was only a few blocks from you-probably-can-guess-where.
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