Raining in Chiba, raining in Shinjuku, raining in Kawaguchi
Woohoo! Go Phillies!
I got up at 9am yesterday (Sunday) and looked outside and it was raining. I briefly debated not going to Chiba at all, but then I figured that knowing my luck, if I didn't go, the game would happen, and if I did go, the game would be rained out. Great logic, I know. I guess I was on a train by 11am, and![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
firearmofmutiny kept texting me messages like "It's not cancelled yet!" and all. I asked at Kaihin-Makuhari if the game was cancelled and they said "We won't decide until 1pm," so I got on a stadium bus. I got to the stadium at 12:30ish for a 1pm game. Normally, this would suck, as it was sold out and all, but since the rain was so hard, it really wasn't crowded at all. I sat on the second floor under the roof which partially hangs over the seats, and I was about 4-5 rows back from the break, and it was perfectly dry, surprisingly enough. I hid out with the other Fighters fans near the left field side of those unreserved seats.
The Fighters lineup was Hichori at DH and our entire farm team. No, really. As they did lineups, these two guys behind me in Fighters jerseys were just like "WHO?" "WHO????" Apparently we actually saw the pro debut of Takayuki Takaguchi, who I wasn't even aware of the existence thereof before today.
I guess the Fighters oendan knew this was coming. I had been thinking "Dude, we're going to sing the No-Theme Song like 5 times out of 9 guys in the lineup," but it turned out they'd made up some new songs and they spent the rain delay time teaching the new songs to people. They also spent a while playing and singing old Fighters players songs, which was really funny. It started out with recent guys like Shinjo and then went back to random old ones. The guys behind me were shouting "Guts! Guts!" and I turned around and yelled at them, "Guts DAME yo!"
They made an announcement around 2:05pm when it had cleared up a little that they would start the game at 2:45pm, and they worked on cleaning the field, and the players came out and warmed up a bit. The game started at 2:45pm, and it rained the whole damn time. I feel bad, but I was mostly there to watch Shunsuke Watanabe, since the Fighters had clinched and we had our 2-gun lineup anyway. I swear, people were slipping and sliding on the field all over. You can kind of of see what I mean on the Marines' site version of today's game... eventually the Marines managed to win 2-1, around 5:45pm. The Fighters had been ahead most of the game but in all honesty I would rather see the game end and the Marines win than to see the game go into extra innings, at that point.
I was supposed to meet up with Pau, a guy I sort of knew from the japanesebaseball forums, who appreciates a good sonnet and likes the Hanshin Tigers. Original plan was to meet at 6pm, but the game went so crazy long with the delay that I emailed him to change that to 7pm. Fortunately, meeting up itself wasn't difficult; we met at the Shinjuku Kinokuniya, and I was still wearing my Fighters stuff, so I was probably pretty easy to spot, kind of.
We navigated through the crowds of Japanese young adults who were all carrying umbrellas and looking extraordinarily trendy, and eventually settled on a tabehodai yakiniku place to go for dinner. For whatever reason, tabehodai meant that you started out with a set of ALL the meats they offered, which included weird looking liver and some stuff that I think might have been tongue or intestine or whatnot (it was rubbery and not very good-tasting to me). Most of the stuff was good though, and they also gave us salad, which I should have eaten more of, but didn't. We finished most of those original plates and one extra after that. Yum! Aside from Pau nearly choking to death at one point it was pretty good :)
I should also mention that he turned out to be an overall friendly and intelligent type of person and I had a lot of fun hanging out and chatting! I'm so impressed and jealous of people who are fluent in several languages (he knows Spanish, English, Japanese, and German, and is learning Chinese, and...) because I barely feel comfortable speaking Japanese these days. He studies Japanese literature at Todai, which is even more impressive; studying literature of another language in another language at a crazy good college and so on. Smart people rule. The good part about him being at Big 6 college, too, is that he can get tickets to the college baseball games at Jingu, so we might actually go to see a Waseda-Keio game in a few weeks! I've wanted to see one ever since several years ago when I originally read about their rivalry (especially since my kaiwa partner in second-year Japanese at CMU was an exchange student from Keio. Hmm, come to think of it I wonder what Asako is up to now). Wheeeee!
So, that was good. I made it home mostly dry and mostly intact, too. Stupid rain.
This morning I was woken up because my landlord came by to clean the downstairs apartment -- there's someone moving in there this week, he says she's a nice person, we'll see. I told him about some problems with my apartment, but it turns out that he's actually selling the building -- so it'll have a new owner in a few weeks. Oi. He wanted to know what the deal was with all the bicycles outfront and I explained how I have one under the stairs, the broken one is mine from the accident, and the other one I think belonged to my old neighbor. But, I dunno. The guy talked with a vague Tohoku-ben accent (infact, I asked and he's from Sendai), so maybe I misunderstood some of what he said about what I need to do. He asked me how long I'd lived in Japan; I said 2 months, he said "You mean 2 years?" "No, 2 months." "You speak really well for only 2 months!" "No I don't... I just studied Japanese in college for a while..."
Ugh, why does this all take me so long to write lately? My guess is that I am really not that comfortable working on my laptop for prolonged periods of time, basically... but it'd be too difficult to get a real desk and chair and all here, really.
I got up at 9am yesterday (Sunday) and looked outside and it was raining. I briefly debated not going to Chiba at all, but then I figured that knowing my luck, if I didn't go, the game would happen, and if I did go, the game would be rained out. Great logic, I know. I guess I was on a train by 11am, and
firearmofmutiny kept texting me messages like "It's not cancelled yet!" and all. I asked at Kaihin-Makuhari if the game was cancelled and they said "We won't decide until 1pm," so I got on a stadium bus. I got to the stadium at 12:30ish for a 1pm game. Normally, this would suck, as it was sold out and all, but since the rain was so hard, it really wasn't crowded at all. I sat on the second floor under the roof which partially hangs over the seats, and I was about 4-5 rows back from the break, and it was perfectly dry, surprisingly enough. I hid out with the other Fighters fans near the left field side of those unreserved seats.The Fighters lineup was Hichori at DH and our entire farm team. No, really. As they did lineups, these two guys behind me in Fighters jerseys were just like "WHO?" "WHO????" Apparently we actually saw the pro debut of Takayuki Takaguchi, who I wasn't even aware of the existence thereof before today.
I guess the Fighters oendan knew this was coming. I had been thinking "Dude, we're going to sing the No-Theme Song like 5 times out of 9 guys in the lineup," but it turned out they'd made up some new songs and they spent the rain delay time teaching the new songs to people. They also spent a while playing and singing old Fighters players songs, which was really funny. It started out with recent guys like Shinjo and then went back to random old ones. The guys behind me were shouting "Guts! Guts!" and I turned around and yelled at them, "Guts DAME yo!"
They made an announcement around 2:05pm when it had cleared up a little that they would start the game at 2:45pm, and they worked on cleaning the field, and the players came out and warmed up a bit. The game started at 2:45pm, and it rained the whole damn time. I feel bad, but I was mostly there to watch Shunsuke Watanabe, since the Fighters had clinched and we had our 2-gun lineup anyway. I swear, people were slipping and sliding on the field all over. You can kind of of see what I mean on the Marines' site version of today's game... eventually the Marines managed to win 2-1, around 5:45pm. The Fighters had been ahead most of the game but in all honesty I would rather see the game end and the Marines win than to see the game go into extra innings, at that point.
I was supposed to meet up with Pau, a guy I sort of knew from the japanesebaseball forums, who appreciates a good sonnet and likes the Hanshin Tigers. Original plan was to meet at 6pm, but the game went so crazy long with the delay that I emailed him to change that to 7pm. Fortunately, meeting up itself wasn't difficult; we met at the Shinjuku Kinokuniya, and I was still wearing my Fighters stuff, so I was probably pretty easy to spot, kind of.
We navigated through the crowds of Japanese young adults who were all carrying umbrellas and looking extraordinarily trendy, and eventually settled on a tabehodai yakiniku place to go for dinner. For whatever reason, tabehodai meant that you started out with a set of ALL the meats they offered, which included weird looking liver and some stuff that I think might have been tongue or intestine or whatnot (it was rubbery and not very good-tasting to me). Most of the stuff was good though, and they also gave us salad, which I should have eaten more of, but didn't. We finished most of those original plates and one extra after that. Yum! Aside from Pau nearly choking to death at one point it was pretty good :)
I should also mention that he turned out to be an overall friendly and intelligent type of person and I had a lot of fun hanging out and chatting! I'm so impressed and jealous of people who are fluent in several languages (he knows Spanish, English, Japanese, and German, and is learning Chinese, and...) because I barely feel comfortable speaking Japanese these days. He studies Japanese literature at Todai, which is even more impressive; studying literature of another language in another language at a crazy good college and so on. Smart people rule. The good part about him being at Big 6 college, too, is that he can get tickets to the college baseball games at Jingu, so we might actually go to see a Waseda-Keio game in a few weeks! I've wanted to see one ever since several years ago when I originally read about their rivalry (especially since my kaiwa partner in second-year Japanese at CMU was an exchange student from Keio. Hmm, come to think of it I wonder what Asako is up to now). Wheeeee!
So, that was good. I made it home mostly dry and mostly intact, too. Stupid rain.
This morning I was woken up because my landlord came by to clean the downstairs apartment -- there's someone moving in there this week, he says she's a nice person, we'll see. I told him about some problems with my apartment, but it turns out that he's actually selling the building -- so it'll have a new owner in a few weeks. Oi. He wanted to know what the deal was with all the bicycles outfront and I explained how I have one under the stairs, the broken one is mine from the accident, and the other one I think belonged to my old neighbor. But, I dunno. The guy talked with a vague Tohoku-ben accent (infact, I asked and he's from Sendai), so maybe I misunderstood some of what he said about what I need to do. He asked me how long I'd lived in Japan; I said 2 months, he said "You mean 2 years?" "No, 2 months." "You speak really well for only 2 months!" "No I don't... I just studied Japanese in college for a while..."
Ugh, why does this all take me so long to write lately? My guess is that I am really not that comfortable working on my laptop for prolonged periods of time, basically... but it'd be too difficult to get a real desk and chair and all here, really.