![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Weekend -- odaiba and ueno and morino
As promised, I went to Odaiba yesterday. I want to make a long photopost with some of the things I saw, but if I do that I may never get around to posting this entry, so in brief, this is what I did:
- took the train and monorail to Odaiba
- wandered around "Venus Fort" mall for about 2-3 hours, managing to get "Californian Italian" food for lunch, and bought a new collapsible waterpoof tote bag to take to baseball games (and it only cost 1500 yen), and saw random things like a boxing match going on
- rode the big-ass ferriswheel at exactly 6pm, so I saw a cloudy sunset which was not beautiful at all
- wandered through the Toyota Design Center and saw some awesome cool car technology and other such stuff, like robots
- got bored and came home
I attempted to get kaiten sushi at the 100-yen place but it was PACKED -- there was a sign saying "40 minutes wait for a table", so I said screw it and went to the kaiten place near Nishikawaguchi station instead, where it was full of old men and business was slow and I had to order things, which takes the fun out of kaiten. Left after like 5 dishes. Came home. Did laundry. Attempted to watch the Hero dorama special in the meantime but couldn't really. (Realized that rather than trying to watch TV on my phone at the laundromat, I might as well just download it later. The internet is silly that way.)
Today, I went down to Ueno to meet up with Shinsuke Fukuda at 2pm. Shin is a guy I met a few months ago at CMU Spring Carnival (CS '02), and he's all levels of awesome. He likes books and bikes and baseball, works on videogames, is fluent in English and Japanese, and is geeky and funny and nice in all the ways that I miss about CMU SCS people. I had been a little nervous about hanging out because he had seemed freaked out by me at Carnival, but it turns out I'm just dumb. There was a little confusion meeting up; I got there about 15 mins early and waited outside the gate, and then he waited right by the gate and never noticed me, so we were both there for like 10 minutes thinking the other one wasn't there. Oops. I feel bad that I didn't see him, but on the other hand, he should have spotted the gaijin in the CMU t-shirt pretty easily :)
We went to the National Museum of Science and History because one of my GEOS students works there and gave me a pair of free tickets to see the current exhibit. Unfortunately, said exhibit ended today, so it was REALLY CROWDED. We ended up sort of standing on our tiptoes to look over other people to see stuff, and just talking about the random things, and sort of went through the exhibit pretty quickly, and into the rest of the museum, where we looked around other exhibits and geeked out about random stuff there. We hung out around Ueno a little bit but it started to rain, so we gave up on that and headed down to the Tokyo Dome.
Because we were a little hungry but not totally, we stopped at a place called the "Baseball Cafe" which was essentially a Japanese interpretation of an American sports bar, complete with a bizarre statue of Tommy Lasorda :) We split an appetizer basket of random fried things and talked about baseball and CMU and stuff for an hour, which was great fun.
And of course, we went to the Giants-Dragons baseball game, where THE DRAGONS WON!!! HOORAY!!!! Our seats were actually really good all things considered, about the equivalent of my upper deck season seats in Safeco Field. We cheered for the Dragons and I wrote my scorecard and all. Despite how Shin had been joking about having to translate for me all day, he assured me that I don't entirely suck at writing kanji (I couldn't write the complicated "Watanabe" and he was like "dude, don't worry, I can't write it either."). I wanted to see if there was a hero interview for the Dragons after the game -- I was hoping it was Morino since he got the first 2-run RBI -- but for whatever stupid reason, the Giants had some weird event going on with fans getting to pitch from the mound or something? We waited like 5 minutes and Shin convinced me to leave (apparently this was one of the first times he'd stayed for an entire game).
Oh well. I hope we hang out again sometime since that was really a lot of fun. Yay for CMU people.
Now, I am home writing this, and I am starving, so I need to go eat dinner. I'll try to work on Odaiba pictures tonight, but I make no guarantee.
- took the train and monorail to Odaiba
- wandered around "Venus Fort" mall for about 2-3 hours, managing to get "Californian Italian" food for lunch, and bought a new collapsible waterpoof tote bag to take to baseball games (and it only cost 1500 yen), and saw random things like a boxing match going on
- rode the big-ass ferriswheel at exactly 6pm, so I saw a cloudy sunset which was not beautiful at all
- wandered through the Toyota Design Center and saw some awesome cool car technology and other such stuff, like robots
- got bored and came home
I attempted to get kaiten sushi at the 100-yen place but it was PACKED -- there was a sign saying "40 minutes wait for a table", so I said screw it and went to the kaiten place near Nishikawaguchi station instead, where it was full of old men and business was slow and I had to order things, which takes the fun out of kaiten. Left after like 5 dishes. Came home. Did laundry. Attempted to watch the Hero dorama special in the meantime but couldn't really. (Realized that rather than trying to watch TV on my phone at the laundromat, I might as well just download it later. The internet is silly that way.)
Today, I went down to Ueno to meet up with Shinsuke Fukuda at 2pm. Shin is a guy I met a few months ago at CMU Spring Carnival (CS '02), and he's all levels of awesome. He likes books and bikes and baseball, works on videogames, is fluent in English and Japanese, and is geeky and funny and nice in all the ways that I miss about CMU SCS people. I had been a little nervous about hanging out because he had seemed freaked out by me at Carnival, but it turns out I'm just dumb. There was a little confusion meeting up; I got there about 15 mins early and waited outside the gate, and then he waited right by the gate and never noticed me, so we were both there for like 10 minutes thinking the other one wasn't there. Oops. I feel bad that I didn't see him, but on the other hand, he should have spotted the gaijin in the CMU t-shirt pretty easily :)
We went to the National Museum of Science and History because one of my GEOS students works there and gave me a pair of free tickets to see the current exhibit. Unfortunately, said exhibit ended today, so it was REALLY CROWDED. We ended up sort of standing on our tiptoes to look over other people to see stuff, and just talking about the random things, and sort of went through the exhibit pretty quickly, and into the rest of the museum, where we looked around other exhibits and geeked out about random stuff there. We hung out around Ueno a little bit but it started to rain, so we gave up on that and headed down to the Tokyo Dome.
Because we were a little hungry but not totally, we stopped at a place called the "Baseball Cafe" which was essentially a Japanese interpretation of an American sports bar, complete with a bizarre statue of Tommy Lasorda :) We split an appetizer basket of random fried things and talked about baseball and CMU and stuff for an hour, which was great fun.
And of course, we went to the Giants-Dragons baseball game, where THE DRAGONS WON!!! HOORAY!!!! Our seats were actually really good all things considered, about the equivalent of my upper deck season seats in Safeco Field. We cheered for the Dragons and I wrote my scorecard and all. Despite how Shin had been joking about having to translate for me all day, he assured me that I don't entirely suck at writing kanji (I couldn't write the complicated "Watanabe" and he was like "dude, don't worry, I can't write it either."). I wanted to see if there was a hero interview for the Dragons after the game -- I was hoping it was Morino since he got the first 2-run RBI -- but for whatever stupid reason, the Giants had some weird event going on with fans getting to pitch from the mound or something? We waited like 5 minutes and Shin convinced me to leave (apparently this was one of the first times he'd stayed for an entire game).
Oh well. I hope we hang out again sometime since that was really a lot of fun. Yay for CMU people.
Now, I am home writing this, and I am starving, so I need to go eat dinner. I'll try to work on Odaiba pictures tonight, but I make no guarantee.