Saturday -- too many gaijin
Saturday I had my normal classes during the day and then in the evening I hung out with ![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
guitarcries, who was in town over the weekend before flying back to America after finishing up her two years at GEOS. The only problem is that ALL DAY I kept having these mental lapses and forgetting crap, I swear. Like my cellphone. I found out that I can infact go home and come back with an hour break from class... but I really SHOULDN'T.
I meant to get in a bit earlier than I did, more like 10:30, but I got there at 10:50 instead, and Male-manager-san was like "Wow, only ten minutes, will you be ok?" and I was like "oh, yeah" and ran and changed into my suit and cleared up all the stuff in my room and set out my books and whatnot (I always take home the Sprint 6 book on Friday night so I can make sure I know what I'm doing with my 11am Sat. student).
Only problem is, while I was on the train coming down to work, I noticed I didn't have my cellphone. Funny how that works -- I wouldn't know while riding my bike or while standing on the platform, but on the train I immediately was like "What? I have no cellphone to play with? WTF?" Normally it wouldn't be a problem, EXCEPT that I knew I was meeting up withguitarcries later on and I knew she wouldn't have a phone and so if anything went wrong and I couldn't find her, it would depend on her being able to call me, so I really needed it. Also, I knew that I couldn't use the GEOS computer to check email during the day since the Honbu manager would be there.
So after my 11am class -- which I went over on by about 5-10 minutes because I really like the student and we like to chat about baseball and stuff a bit after -- I found out that my 12pm was 1) with Duane this week and 2) not showing up, so I... ran home to get my phone. I didn't tell anyone that though, I just said "I'll be back in a bit, I'm gonna go grab lunch", and left, still wearing my suit skirt and a button-down shirt and my stockings and dress shoes, and carrying just my wallet (with my house key and bike key inside it)...
I got on the 12:11pm Keihin-Tohoku train, which got me to Warabi at 12:19, and I ran to the bike garage, and got on my bike, and pedalled like mad to get home as fast as possible. I ran in, grabbed my phone, and pedalled like mad to get back to the station quickly. Funny part is that it's annoying to bike in a business skirt, so I pretty much just hiked it up really high and I bet several people along the way were rather amused by my appearance, if they noticed, though I was riding pretty fast. I got back to the station for the 12:38 train, which got me back to Akabane at 12:47, and I ran back down to the school, and... and none of my 1pm students were there. Thank god! I was a bit of a sweaty mess at that point and pretty flushed. Eri looked at me funny, like "Why are you so red?" and I said, "I ran to the bookstore to look for The Importance of Being Earnest since we're doing scenes from it in Headways, discussing British comedy... but I couldn't find it... and then I realized it was getting really late and I ran back here!"
I knew what I wanted to discuss in my 1pm and I only had to go photocopy a transcript to be ready, so I went and did that. (A few days ago one of my Passages students requested the "subscription" of the dialogue, and when I realized she meant "transcription", I've been trying to print those out for people ever since. It makes them understand things a little better, though we always do straight listening first.) The 1pm went pretty well, I still only had 2 students there out of the 4 that are registered -- and I still haven't even MET the other 2 -- but it was fun anyway. We were talking about technology still, so of course that is interesting (and one of my students showed me how to reboot my cellphone, when I taught the words "powercycle" and whatnot).
My 2pm students didn't show up and my 3pm students never show up, but rather than going out to do anything I ended up spending an hour talking to Duane and Eri. Eri introduced me to another student of hers, who is an aerospace engineer in Ibaraki, who comes to GEOS once a week to work on his English. Eri's college student had been telling me how cool this other guy is, so I was like "Hey, he is a big fan of yours!" and the other student was just confused. Hee.
My 4pm went well. We talked about the "Japanese Spirit" this week, and I managed to actually steer the conversation away from military stuff and more to things like ikebana, tea ceremony, judo, aikido, etc, and how people learn the methods as opposed to the spirit of the cultural activities. So that was good. He might be transferring schools though -- his boss apparently wants to shift his schedule so he doesn't have the same time free on Saturday, so they might need to put him in another school where he can have a private lesson at a different time. We'll see what happens. (I was worried when I first heard this that he wanted to switch schools because he didn't like me, but apparently no, that isn't the case.)
And then I was freeeee!
I managed to get out of the school around 5:40pm, changed into my brown skirt and black shirt -- a combo I usually wore to ballroom in Seattle and now wear here as my "trying not to look like a completely unstylish gaijin" look -- and was off to go to Harajuku!guitarcries had suggested we meet up at the top of Takeshita street, because it's a landmark both of us knew, that isn't too big to worry that we might not find each other, etc. Now, everything was fine, except that on the way down I'd intended to re-attach my house key to the rest of my keychain... and I thought I'd accidentally left the rest of my keychain back at GEOS! So the first thing I said when I found her was, "Hi, I'm Deanna... and I am a complete fucking moron." I was almost thinking I'd need to go back to GEOS before it closed just to make sure I could get my sneakers and my clothes and all, but then decided that if worse came to worst, I'd just call Eri to see if she could let me in on Tuesday and I'd bring more clothes, and I'd wear my chucks instead of my sneakers all weekend. Also ironically, Felicia was also wearing a black shirt and brown pants. I hoped people wouldn't think we were matching gaijin on purpose, heh.
(Fortunately, about ten minutes later I discovered that my keys WERE actually in my bag. Thank god.)
Anyway, we looked around Harajuku for a while for some places to eat, but sort of failed to find anything that was both reasonably priced and worth eating at, especially for Felicia's last weekend in Japan, so we ended up going off to Shinjuku instead. It was funny because she was pretty freaked out by the number of foreigners in Harajuku -- apparently there were more foreigners wandering around on Saturday night in Harajuku than there are living in the entire city of Hakodate. So of course, we go to Shinjuku, where there are even more :) We ended up wandering around and eventually settled on a yakiniku place for dinner. It was really more like a Korean bulgogi place, but whatever. Funny part is, I'd never actually ordered at yakiniku before, having always gone with other people who know what to order, so this time I had to actually figure it out myself, since Felicia is a vegetarian and mostly ordered big plates of veggies and some of what I think of as "korean okonomiyaki". The restaurant even had a menu with a picture of a cow and a diagram showing where all the cuts of meat come from, which was kind of freaky. I ended up getting some "roast" and some "galbi", and they both were quite good.
The other great thing about yakiniku is that it's sort of geared towards sitting at a table pretty much bloody forever while you cook your food and talk about stuff, so that's pretty much what we did. I tried to pick Felicia's brain for an hour or two about everything she knows about GEOS, and she was pretty willing to just ramble about all the good and bad crap that happened to her in the last two years working there. So that was good. Dinner ended up costing me about 2000 yen, which seems average for yakiniku.
We decided to grab dessert after that, and I wanted to try to get back to that place where Eri and I had gone the other day, with the Moa alley with all the little cafes and whatnot, but being Shinjuku, where I ALWAYS GET LOST, it took us a while to find our way there. But we did. We got ice cream from one of the outdoor cafe stands (this being Japan, they were selling tea/coffee, ice cream, pastries, and European beer on tap). We hung out a while and watched people go by and basically tried to figure out whether random Japanese guys were gay or not, and what nationalities the other random non-Japanese people were. You really could almost make a hobby of people-watching in Japan.
After that, she decided to go back and sleep around 9:30pm, and I decided to go back up to GEOS to get my clothes/sneakers/textbooks/homework/etc. (I also had sort of hoped that maybe Male-Manager-san would be gone and I could use the computer by then.) So I get back to GEOS at 10... the outside door is locked, so I unlock it, but the security system was surprisingly NOT locked. I wondered if Sachi had left her key with MM? But no, it turned out HE WAS STILL THERE DOING WORK EVEN AT 10PM EVEN THOUGH HE ARRIVED AT 10AM WTF.
So he was shocked that I was there, and I was shocked that he was there. I explained that I needed to get some stuff, and he asked what I'd been up to, and I told him I had dinner with a former GEOS teacher who was going home and he thought that was really great that I was taking such an active role in finding out more about the company. He told me about a possible new student I might get in two weeks (yay), and we talked about baseball some more. I showed him all the baseball/Mariners decorations in my classroom and he thought it was great. Turns out he transferred here from Fukuoka so he was quite familiar with Kenji Johjima. I said "Ahh, Hawks... I like Saitoh... and Kawasaki... and Sugiuchi..." and he said "Ahh, you like the cute guys, huh?" "No! I mean... they're really good players?"
And then I went home, goddamnit. Riding my bike at night with a long skirt was actually sort of bizarre since it was windier, but whatever.
guitarcries, who was in town over the weekend before flying back to America after finishing up her two years at GEOS. The only problem is that ALL DAY I kept having these mental lapses and forgetting crap, I swear. Like my cellphone. I found out that I can infact go home and come back with an hour break from class... but I really SHOULDN'T.I meant to get in a bit earlier than I did, more like 10:30, but I got there at 10:50 instead, and Male-manager-san was like "Wow, only ten minutes, will you be ok?" and I was like "oh, yeah" and ran and changed into my suit and cleared up all the stuff in my room and set out my books and whatnot (I always take home the Sprint 6 book on Friday night so I can make sure I know what I'm doing with my 11am Sat. student).
Only problem is, while I was on the train coming down to work, I noticed I didn't have my cellphone. Funny how that works -- I wouldn't know while riding my bike or while standing on the platform, but on the train I immediately was like "What? I have no cellphone to play with? WTF?" Normally it wouldn't be a problem, EXCEPT that I knew I was meeting up with
guitarcries later on and I knew she wouldn't have a phone and so if anything went wrong and I couldn't find her, it would depend on her being able to call me, so I really needed it. Also, I knew that I couldn't use the GEOS computer to check email during the day since the Honbu manager would be there.So after my 11am class -- which I went over on by about 5-10 minutes because I really like the student and we like to chat about baseball and stuff a bit after -- I found out that my 12pm was 1) with Duane this week and 2) not showing up, so I... ran home to get my phone. I didn't tell anyone that though, I just said "I'll be back in a bit, I'm gonna go grab lunch", and left, still wearing my suit skirt and a button-down shirt and my stockings and dress shoes, and carrying just my wallet (with my house key and bike key inside it)...
I got on the 12:11pm Keihin-Tohoku train, which got me to Warabi at 12:19, and I ran to the bike garage, and got on my bike, and pedalled like mad to get home as fast as possible. I ran in, grabbed my phone, and pedalled like mad to get back to the station quickly. Funny part is that it's annoying to bike in a business skirt, so I pretty much just hiked it up really high and I bet several people along the way were rather amused by my appearance, if they noticed, though I was riding pretty fast. I got back to the station for the 12:38 train, which got me back to Akabane at 12:47, and I ran back down to the school, and... and none of my 1pm students were there. Thank god! I was a bit of a sweaty mess at that point and pretty flushed. Eri looked at me funny, like "Why are you so red?" and I said, "I ran to the bookstore to look for The Importance of Being Earnest since we're doing scenes from it in Headways, discussing British comedy... but I couldn't find it... and then I realized it was getting really late and I ran back here!"
I knew what I wanted to discuss in my 1pm and I only had to go photocopy a transcript to be ready, so I went and did that. (A few days ago one of my Passages students requested the "subscription" of the dialogue, and when I realized she meant "transcription", I've been trying to print those out for people ever since. It makes them understand things a little better, though we always do straight listening first.) The 1pm went pretty well, I still only had 2 students there out of the 4 that are registered -- and I still haven't even MET the other 2 -- but it was fun anyway. We were talking about technology still, so of course that is interesting (and one of my students showed me how to reboot my cellphone, when I taught the words "powercycle" and whatnot).
My 2pm students didn't show up and my 3pm students never show up, but rather than going out to do anything I ended up spending an hour talking to Duane and Eri. Eri introduced me to another student of hers, who is an aerospace engineer in Ibaraki, who comes to GEOS once a week to work on his English. Eri's college student had been telling me how cool this other guy is, so I was like "Hey, he is a big fan of yours!" and the other student was just confused. Hee.
My 4pm went well. We talked about the "Japanese Spirit" this week, and I managed to actually steer the conversation away from military stuff and more to things like ikebana, tea ceremony, judo, aikido, etc, and how people learn the methods as opposed to the spirit of the cultural activities. So that was good. He might be transferring schools though -- his boss apparently wants to shift his schedule so he doesn't have the same time free on Saturday, so they might need to put him in another school where he can have a private lesson at a different time. We'll see what happens. (I was worried when I first heard this that he wanted to switch schools because he didn't like me, but apparently no, that isn't the case.)
And then I was freeeee!
I managed to get out of the school around 5:40pm, changed into my brown skirt and black shirt -- a combo I usually wore to ballroom in Seattle and now wear here as my "trying not to look like a completely unstylish gaijin" look -- and was off to go to Harajuku!
guitarcries had suggested we meet up at the top of Takeshita street, because it's a landmark both of us knew, that isn't too big to worry that we might not find each other, etc. Now, everything was fine, except that on the way down I'd intended to re-attach my house key to the rest of my keychain... and I thought I'd accidentally left the rest of my keychain back at GEOS! So the first thing I said when I found her was, "Hi, I'm Deanna... and I am a complete fucking moron." I was almost thinking I'd need to go back to GEOS before it closed just to make sure I could get my sneakers and my clothes and all, but then decided that if worse came to worst, I'd just call Eri to see if she could let me in on Tuesday and I'd bring more clothes, and I'd wear my chucks instead of my sneakers all weekend. Also ironically, Felicia was also wearing a black shirt and brown pants. I hoped people wouldn't think we were matching gaijin on purpose, heh.(Fortunately, about ten minutes later I discovered that my keys WERE actually in my bag. Thank god.)
Anyway, we looked around Harajuku for a while for some places to eat, but sort of failed to find anything that was both reasonably priced and worth eating at, especially for Felicia's last weekend in Japan, so we ended up going off to Shinjuku instead. It was funny because she was pretty freaked out by the number of foreigners in Harajuku -- apparently there were more foreigners wandering around on Saturday night in Harajuku than there are living in the entire city of Hakodate. So of course, we go to Shinjuku, where there are even more :) We ended up wandering around and eventually settled on a yakiniku place for dinner. It was really more like a Korean bulgogi place, but whatever. Funny part is, I'd never actually ordered at yakiniku before, having always gone with other people who know what to order, so this time I had to actually figure it out myself, since Felicia is a vegetarian and mostly ordered big plates of veggies and some of what I think of as "korean okonomiyaki". The restaurant even had a menu with a picture of a cow and a diagram showing where all the cuts of meat come from, which was kind of freaky. I ended up getting some "roast" and some "galbi", and they both were quite good.
The other great thing about yakiniku is that it's sort of geared towards sitting at a table pretty much bloody forever while you cook your food and talk about stuff, so that's pretty much what we did. I tried to pick Felicia's brain for an hour or two about everything she knows about GEOS, and she was pretty willing to just ramble about all the good and bad crap that happened to her in the last two years working there. So that was good. Dinner ended up costing me about 2000 yen, which seems average for yakiniku.
We decided to grab dessert after that, and I wanted to try to get back to that place where Eri and I had gone the other day, with the Moa alley with all the little cafes and whatnot, but being Shinjuku, where I ALWAYS GET LOST, it took us a while to find our way there. But we did. We got ice cream from one of the outdoor cafe stands (this being Japan, they were selling tea/coffee, ice cream, pastries, and European beer on tap). We hung out a while and watched people go by and basically tried to figure out whether random Japanese guys were gay or not, and what nationalities the other random non-Japanese people were. You really could almost make a hobby of people-watching in Japan.
After that, she decided to go back and sleep around 9:30pm, and I decided to go back up to GEOS to get my clothes/sneakers/textbooks/homework/etc. (I also had sort of hoped that maybe Male-Manager-san would be gone and I could use the computer by then.) So I get back to GEOS at 10... the outside door is locked, so I unlock it, but the security system was surprisingly NOT locked. I wondered if Sachi had left her key with MM? But no, it turned out HE WAS STILL THERE DOING WORK EVEN AT 10PM EVEN THOUGH HE ARRIVED AT 10AM WTF.
So he was shocked that I was there, and I was shocked that he was there. I explained that I needed to get some stuff, and he asked what I'd been up to, and I told him I had dinner with a former GEOS teacher who was going home and he thought that was really great that I was taking such an active role in finding out more about the company. He told me about a possible new student I might get in two weeks (yay), and we talked about baseball some more. I showed him all the baseball/Mariners decorations in my classroom and he thought it was great. Turns out he transferred here from Fukuoka so he was quite familiar with Kenji Johjima. I said "Ahh, Hawks... I like Saitoh... and Kawasaki... and Sugiuchi..." and he said "Ahh, you like the cute guys, huh?" "No! I mean... they're really good players?"
And then I went home, goddamnit. Riding my bike at night with a long skirt was actually sort of bizarre since it was windier, but whatever.