Sunday -- Yokohama on Ice
Sunday I went down to Yokohama for a baseball game, Baystars vs Giants. I went with a guy who I've known in the Mariners blogosphere for about 2-3 years whose handle is IcebreakerX (which means that ![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
gomezticator should at least know who I mean but I dunno if any other LJers will). He works down near there, and we were supposed to meet up at Kannai at 12:30, but he sent me a message saying he'd be 5-10 minutes late. I got there at 12:20 and went to the Baystars store and bought a Murata #25 t-shirt. (I mean, sure, I could get a Miura or a Saeki or a Takuro or whatever, but half the team is over 35 years old, if you know what I mean, and Murata's the best hitter period.) And then I waited around at the station... thinking, y'know, there are 40,000 Japanese people here and one gaijin, it can't be MY fault I can't find him...
Anyway, he turned out to be more like an hour and change late, so around 1pm I just headed to the stadium by myself, and it was almost sold out. Yikes. I ended up getting a single seat in the infield near first base, for 4000 yen, but it was on an aisle and actually pretty damn good. When Ice showed up he got a single seat a few rows behind me and just came down and sat next to me in the aisle for the whole game instead. (It was packed. There just weren't any empty seats anywhere near us.) He also had a Nikon camera and the 18-200 VR lens (sigh), and I had my 70-300, and we spent the game taking pictures and talking about the Mariners and stuff. (Unlike me, he has internet and actually knows what the hell is up with the Mariners, though as far as I can tell, what the hell is up is nothing good.) I'm pretty jealous of him in a way -- he's ethnically Japanese but grew up in America, went to UW, and then went to Waseda for a year here and then decided to stay and work in Japan, so not only did he not have to go through ridiculous visa things, but he also pretty much gets to be an American in Japan but without having everyone stare at him funny. (Like at one point we both yelled something like "Nasuno, you SUCK!" in English and of course everyone was staring at ME.)
On the other hand, it was nice to be at a game and to say something like "Dude, (Takahiro) Saeki is just like Raul Ibanez, watch him field this one" and have the other person know EXACTLY WHAT I MEANT.
I hate the Giants so much sometimes it's not even funny. And even worse, the Giants fans were waving inflatable dolphins for Ogasawara's at-bats, just like we used to in the Fighters cheering sections. I'm like "THOSE ARE OUR DOLPHINS! FUCKING COPYCATS!" And forfirearmofmutiny, who is the only one who'll get this, I was looking up at the scoreboard during Yoshinobu Takahashi's at-bat, saying "Man, has there been anyone that came out of Keio recently that's anywhere near as good as Yoshinobu?", and of course then fucking BLAM he sends a game-tying home run flying into the Giants cheering section in left field. Fucker. We both agreed that it's a bloody shame he's on the Giants because otherwise it'd be so easy to be a big fan of his. (Ice had been saying that he doesn't really have a favorite player in Japan except maybe Aoki, so I had been trying to come up with some other suggestions for him.)
Uh, so anyway, we got to see Kizuka (!!!) in the 8th inning for only one batter (?!?), who he immediately hit with a pitch (...) and then a few throws later picked off first base (!!!). Sigh. But then in the 10th, WE GOT TO SEE MARC KROON, MISTER 161KM/H, and they played his rap song and everything, woohoo... except he came out there and got beaten up by the Giants. No, I am not joking. Kroon's line is 7 batters faced, 3 runs, 4 hits, and... 3 strikeouts. WTF.
Anyway, of course the Giants win 7-4, but even more ominous, I've now been to four games in Japan since moving here, and every time, the team I was cheering for (2 Fighters, 2 Baystars) lost. This sucks.
After the game we walked around a bit, since I didn't want to get right on a train with the mob coming out of the stadium. Ice walked down towards where he lives and pointed me towards Chinatown to catch the train ahead of the mob, so I went that way, but instead ended up getting on the Minatomirai line, which becomes the Toyoko or whatever and took me all the way up to Shibuya! Quite convenient...
...since I was meeting up with Felicia again at 8pm in Shibuya to go get dinner. So that went flawlessly and this time we went to a "Modern Japanese Dining" place near the station. There were several other English-speaking people there, which was freaking her out, which was funny -- at one point the table next to us was 2 foreigners and 3 Japanese, even.
I wish I could remember everything we got. I had two cocktails, a Moscow Mule and a Cassis-and-Orange mix, and she also had two drinks, and we had a ton of weird random food -- cream cheese with wasabi, tuna sashimi, boiled kabocha, tempura asparagus and mushrooms, house potato croquette, eggplant-and-sauce-and-stuff, and probably other things I'm forgetting, and then add on desserts, and it wound up being like 9000 yen total for both of us. Really, though, I don't mind having expensive dinners when I'm with other people. I just can't afford to spend that much on food by myself :)
We did purikura after that because I thought it'd be a funny thing to do -- especially since it was my first time since moving here and it was her last time before leaving. We did a whole bunch of crazy poses and drawings and the only thing is, I now wish I'd had the machine send the images to my cellphone rather than just printing them! I didn't really think about it at the time (since I think last time I did purikura, several years ago, you couldn't have it do that). So yeah. That was fun and it was 10:30 by then, so she went home and so did I.
I also actually took that "picture of Shibuya that everyone takes" since I had my camera with me.
And that was it for Sunday, pretty much -- I mostly just came home and crashed at that point.
gomezticator should at least know who I mean but I dunno if any other LJers will). He works down near there, and we were supposed to meet up at Kannai at 12:30, but he sent me a message saying he'd be 5-10 minutes late. I got there at 12:20 and went to the Baystars store and bought a Murata #25 t-shirt. (I mean, sure, I could get a Miura or a Saeki or a Takuro or whatever, but half the team is over 35 years old, if you know what I mean, and Murata's the best hitter period.) And then I waited around at the station... thinking, y'know, there are 40,000 Japanese people here and one gaijin, it can't be MY fault I can't find him...Anyway, he turned out to be more like an hour and change late, so around 1pm I just headed to the stadium by myself, and it was almost sold out. Yikes. I ended up getting a single seat in the infield near first base, for 4000 yen, but it was on an aisle and actually pretty damn good. When Ice showed up he got a single seat a few rows behind me and just came down and sat next to me in the aisle for the whole game instead. (It was packed. There just weren't any empty seats anywhere near us.) He also had a Nikon camera and the 18-200 VR lens (sigh), and I had my 70-300, and we spent the game taking pictures and talking about the Mariners and stuff. (Unlike me, he has internet and actually knows what the hell is up with the Mariners, though as far as I can tell, what the hell is up is nothing good.) I'm pretty jealous of him in a way -- he's ethnically Japanese but grew up in America, went to UW, and then went to Waseda for a year here and then decided to stay and work in Japan, so not only did he not have to go through ridiculous visa things, but he also pretty much gets to be an American in Japan but without having everyone stare at him funny. (Like at one point we both yelled something like "Nasuno, you SUCK!" in English and of course everyone was staring at ME.)
On the other hand, it was nice to be at a game and to say something like "Dude, (Takahiro) Saeki is just like Raul Ibanez, watch him field this one" and have the other person know EXACTLY WHAT I MEANT.
I hate the Giants so much sometimes it's not even funny. And even worse, the Giants fans were waving inflatable dolphins for Ogasawara's at-bats, just like we used to in the Fighters cheering sections. I'm like "THOSE ARE OUR DOLPHINS! FUCKING COPYCATS!" And for
firearmofmutiny, who is the only one who'll get this, I was looking up at the scoreboard during Yoshinobu Takahashi's at-bat, saying "Man, has there been anyone that came out of Keio recently that's anywhere near as good as Yoshinobu?", and of course then fucking BLAM he sends a game-tying home run flying into the Giants cheering section in left field. Fucker. We both agreed that it's a bloody shame he's on the Giants because otherwise it'd be so easy to be a big fan of his. (Ice had been saying that he doesn't really have a favorite player in Japan except maybe Aoki, so I had been trying to come up with some other suggestions for him.)Uh, so anyway, we got to see Kizuka (!!!) in the 8th inning for only one batter (?!?), who he immediately hit with a pitch (...) and then a few throws later picked off first base (!!!). Sigh. But then in the 10th, WE GOT TO SEE MARC KROON, MISTER 161KM/H, and they played his rap song and everything, woohoo... except he came out there and got beaten up by the Giants. No, I am not joking. Kroon's line is 7 batters faced, 3 runs, 4 hits, and... 3 strikeouts. WTF.
Anyway, of course the Giants win 7-4, but even more ominous, I've now been to four games in Japan since moving here, and every time, the team I was cheering for (2 Fighters, 2 Baystars) lost. This sucks.
After the game we walked around a bit, since I didn't want to get right on a train with the mob coming out of the stadium. Ice walked down towards where he lives and pointed me towards Chinatown to catch the train ahead of the mob, so I went that way, but instead ended up getting on the Minatomirai line, which becomes the Toyoko or whatever and took me all the way up to Shibuya! Quite convenient...
...since I was meeting up with Felicia again at 8pm in Shibuya to go get dinner. So that went flawlessly and this time we went to a "Modern Japanese Dining" place near the station. There were several other English-speaking people there, which was freaking her out, which was funny -- at one point the table next to us was 2 foreigners and 3 Japanese, even.
I wish I could remember everything we got. I had two cocktails, a Moscow Mule and a Cassis-and-Orange mix, and she also had two drinks, and we had a ton of weird random food -- cream cheese with wasabi, tuna sashimi, boiled kabocha, tempura asparagus and mushrooms, house potato croquette, eggplant-and-sauce-and-stuff, and probably other things I'm forgetting, and then add on desserts, and it wound up being like 9000 yen total for both of us. Really, though, I don't mind having expensive dinners when I'm with other people. I just can't afford to spend that much on food by myself :)
We did purikura after that because I thought it'd be a funny thing to do -- especially since it was my first time since moving here and it was her last time before leaving. We did a whole bunch of crazy poses and drawings and the only thing is, I now wish I'd had the machine send the images to my cellphone rather than just printing them! I didn't really think about it at the time (since I think last time I did purikura, several years ago, you couldn't have it do that). So yeah. That was fun and it was 10:30 by then, so she went home and so did I.
I also actually took that "picture of Shibuya that everyone takes" since I had my camera with me.
And that was it for Sunday, pretty much -- I mostly just came home and crashed at that point.