Weekend - A Photopost
On Sunday, I hung out with Katherine and Jesse and Rebecca again. We went around Ochanomizu and Jimbocho and Ginza, mostly shopped, ate food, looked at board games, and sang karaoke.
On Monday, I hung out with Sam, and actually went into a whole bunch of stores in Jimbocho, which is basically the "used bookstore" neighborhood. In the evening I watched the Fighters game and also did laundry.
That's the short version, but here's a whole bunch of pictures and a few longer explanations of some of the aforementioned events.
And I'm even LJ-cutting it. Aren't I great?
I met up with Kat and Jesse around 1pm near the JR Ochanomizu station, after the confusion over which bridge we were at, and we went and got kaitensushi at a Himawari. I am wondering if this one is also related to the one in Shinjuku, which I have a story about, but which is not worth telling here. The chefs tried to speak to us in English and we spoke back to them in Japanese. But, the sushi was really good, so whatever. Rebecca slept in her stroller through the whole thing. I kept frantically checking the Fighters game score as they were getting their butts kicked by the Marines.
Jesse was interested in finding some traditional Japanese instruments, and also interested in some woodworking stuff, but alas, the instrument stores in Ochanomizu are mostly guitars, with a few brass band instruments thrown in for variety. As it turns out, Sam knows where to get all of this stuff, so next time Jesse is in town I'll have to get them together so they can go hunting for "guy stuff", as Sam put it. We all eventually wandered down the hill past Meiji University, into the bookstore area. I saw a baseball card shop but didn't go in, and eventually Kat went into one of the big bookstores, while Jesse and I sat outside and talked, and watched the Fighters game on my cellphone. Of course, as soon as I tuned into the TV thingy, Saburo immediately hit a home run, putting the Marines up even further. Sigh. Jesse said it was bad luck to watch, so I stopped.
We all went to Ginza, where I finally got out my (little) camera and acted like a tourist. The first place we went was a bakery called Kimuraya. Kat explained that it was the place where an-pan was invented, in 1874, and then she went and bought some an-pan.
Kimuraya, combining modern technology and old-fashioned taste.
While Kat was in there buying bread, I wandered around a little bit. I pointed out a corner to Jesse like "Hey, look at that!". He couldn't figure out what I was pointing to at first, but astute viewers who know some Japanese will probably immediately spot what I was looking at..
Now I know where our GEOS Ginza branch is!
We didn't really have anywhere good to sit down and eat the an-pan -- it was about 4:40pm and they were taking all of the benches and chairs off of the road. So Kat played the "We're not Japanese, we can sit and eat wherever we want" card, and we did so, sitting on the sidewalk. I'm not a big fan of an-pan but this was actually some pretty good stuff, especially since it was still warm.
Kat gets out some coffee and milk to go with the an-pan.
Rebecca is more interested in some of the big advertisements on the buildings.
We walked up the street past a bunch of stores. One amusing thing I didn't take a picture of was that someone had parked a Chevrolet bicycle (yes, bicycle, not motorbike) outside the Prada store. It was so incredibly brandish and Japan-like. What I did take a picture of was one shop front with the craziest stylized kanji I've ever seen. I THOUGHT it was supposed to say 立田野, but maybe I am wrong?
This one's for![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
dvarin.
We made our way up to the Hakuhinkan Toy Palace, which is where I wanted to go in Ginza. I hadn't been there in 3 years, but it's still as awesome as ever. What's really funny is, out front there was this guy demoing puzzle games, so I went up and solved some puzzles with him. I swear to god this is the same guy I sat and talked to about Settlers of Catan for half an hour when I was there three years ago... but, I lost his business card AGES ago so of course I really can't remember.
We went into the store and just looked around at the crazy awesome stuff. I took several pictures of various things:
A Yuki Saito Halloween costume set. This is probably one of the most bizarre things I have ever seen in my life. (Yuki Saito, if you don't know, is a 19-year-old kid who plays baseball at Waseda University and pitched his HS team to a Koshien championship last year and used a handkerchief to wipe the sweat off his face and immediately became a nationwide sensation.)
A Doraemon made out of legos! How cool!
Ticket to Ride, in Japanese.
Big Blokus display, for the benefit ofmwinzi, who doesn't read LJ anymore.
There were other fun things there too. Jesse even found a whole bunch of wooden puzzle boxes he'd been looking for. I only bought some smiley stickers to use for putting on homework in the future, I think.
Afterwards, we rode the subway back to Suidobashi, where we bought a whole big bag of custard-yaki snacks off a guy by the station, and then we went to a karaoke place near where Jesse's company's office is, and did karaoke for an hour until Rebecca got cranky and wanted to go to sleep.
I picked a few random songs in Japanese, and they picked songs in English, and we drank beer (yes, even I drank beer) and sang stuff for a while.
Jesse attempts to sing some Bob Marley.
Kat and Rebecca sing along to some song.
I drank a beer the size of my head, and removed the picture from this post since nobody read it anyway.
Afterwards Jesse and I went to dinner at a little tempura/katsu place near the hotel they were staying at, while Kat went up to put Rebecca to sleep. We ordered a takeout tempura dinner for Kat, and then I went back towards Suidobashi to go home. J&K were headed back to the US on Monday -- they should be back already, even. I hope they come back here sometime though, it was fun having them to hang out with here.
When I got to Suidobashi I went to Yamashita and bought the 2007 All-Star card set, because I am a big fucking dork. I sat down to watch the Dragons-Tigers game on my cellphone, and at 8:54pm it cut out JUST as Morino was up to bat. Sigh. I kept checking the score on my cell on the train ride home, and sure enough, Chunichi won. Bye bye, Tigers! Now I've just got to hope that CLCS2 goes to 4 or 5 games, so I can yell a lot of "YOMIURI TAOSE O" in the Tokyo Dome next weekend.
I thought about doing something productive when I got home, but I actually ended up just watching the 2-hour finale of Hana Kimi and fell asleep immediately afterwards, a little before midnight.
Oh, wait, one funny thing. I did go through the all-star cards and noticed that they mispelled Tyrone Woods's name. The set actually isn't that impressive in general -- I guess I was spoiled by the 2003 All-Star set, which was fantastic. Anyway, yeah, take a look at this:
Tyron? Who's that?
On Monday, I woke up and tried to go get my package from the post office. Only problem is, it wasn't at MY post office, it was at some North Kawaguchi post office, wherever they send packages that come in from overseas. So at my post office, I talked to a lady who basically ended up calling the other post office and rescheduling my delivery for me. That was at least undoubtedly a lot easier than me trying to call the other post office. Hopefully it'll show up tomorrow morning, yay.
As a result I was a bit late meeting up with Sam at the Akabane Starbucks, but I guess it worked out ok. He wanted to drive down to Jimbocho anyway, which was really interesting since that meant I got to see lots of wacky stuff along the roads, and it also meant I got to talk to Sam, since I guess we wouldn't talk as much on a train, most likely.
We went to that card shop I'd seen the day before, and I bought a TON of Fighters cards. 11 of them, from 1998-2003, including an old Shimoyanagi even, and some Kaneko and Yukio and Kensuke and Ide and even an Echevarria, to remember my first Fighters games. Wheeee! They were oly 50 yen each, after all. We also saw a royal crapload of old cards from guys who are now in the MLB, and Sam kept saying things like "I bet you could sell this one on ebay for a lot," and I was like "Noooo, if I bought that, I'd have to keep it!" They had a kickass set of 4 Yoshinobu Takahashi rookie cards, each with a part of his swing, but I wasn't about to spend 4000 yen for that. In more amusement, they had a signed Ichiro baseball in the shop selling for 75,000 yen, and a signed A-Rod baseball selling for 30,000 yen. Only in Japan :)
We went to some bookstores and I saw a TON of old Japanese baseball magazines and yearbooks and all kinds of crazy stuff. The sad part is that everything was in plastic so I couldn't look through it, but I mean, one store even had Shukan Baseball issues going back to 1976! It was total "kid-in-candy-shop" world for me, but I was very good and barely bought anything -- maybe like 3 or 4 magazines total, and nothing expensive. One of them has an Ichiro poster in it from 1997 though.
Anyway, here is Jimbocho, the used bookstore neighborhood at least. I sweareub would love this place, even though he doesn't read Japanese. Just the pure bookstoreness of it. If it were English books, it'd take him a month to go through this neighborhood!
(I'm really proud of this shot, though it's hard to explain why.)
This is the store where I saw all the old baseball magazines.
Many stores had tons of tags on books, and many also had proprietors wearing gloves to handle everything.
After that, Sam dropped me off in Akabane, I grabbed my stuff from GEOS, and took the train home, stopping at McDonald's to grab food quickly (yeah, I know). I got home about just in time to see the start of the Fighters-Marines game.
I watched the game half on the internet Yahoo Douga, and the other half on channel 12 here. And it ruled! Fighters kicked butt! Best of all was this play in the 4th inning when Lotte's Daisuke Hayakawa lofted a huge fly ball in foul territory, and Fighters third baseman Naoto Inada ran after it... ran ran ran... and dived for the ball and caught it. Thing is, he dived into the MEDIA WELL and took out a cameraman doing so. It's so funny to watch -- here he is standing up with the ball and a big smile on his face, and there's this camera dude just standing there like "oh shit oh shit oh shit..." so yeah, Naoto got ninety billion style points, even moreso when during the hero interview he said "inoshishi no you ni tori ni ikimashita..." to mean "Yeah, I charged down that ball like a wild boar!" I swear to god. It was so funny.
I did laundry after that, including actually washing my futon covers and my blankets and all. I did half of it all at the laundromat, and when I came back I debated actually moving all of my bedding up to my loft now that it might be cold enough to justify it, but... I can't really do that until I get an extension cord up there, otherwise I can't charge my cellphone up there and that means if my phone rings or anything else I'll probably fall out of the loft trying to get it. In the end I decided not to move the futon up there today just because I know the mail is supposed to come tomorrow with my box of stuff from Seattle. Maybe next week...
Anyway, dang, that's my story. This entry took me like 2 hours to make, thanks to slurping pictures and writing words.
Tomorrow at work we start Intensive Week... I'm hoping it's less intensive for me than it is for my students. We'll see, though.
On Monday, I hung out with Sam, and actually went into a whole bunch of stores in Jimbocho, which is basically the "used bookstore" neighborhood. In the evening I watched the Fighters game and also did laundry.
That's the short version, but here's a whole bunch of pictures and a few longer explanations of some of the aforementioned events.
And I'm even LJ-cutting it. Aren't I great?
I met up with Kat and Jesse around 1pm near the JR Ochanomizu station, after the confusion over which bridge we were at, and we went and got kaitensushi at a Himawari. I am wondering if this one is also related to the one in Shinjuku, which I have a story about, but which is not worth telling here. The chefs tried to speak to us in English and we spoke back to them in Japanese. But, the sushi was really good, so whatever. Rebecca slept in her stroller through the whole thing. I kept frantically checking the Fighters game score as they were getting their butts kicked by the Marines.
Jesse was interested in finding some traditional Japanese instruments, and also interested in some woodworking stuff, but alas, the instrument stores in Ochanomizu are mostly guitars, with a few brass band instruments thrown in for variety. As it turns out, Sam knows where to get all of this stuff, so next time Jesse is in town I'll have to get them together so they can go hunting for "guy stuff", as Sam put it. We all eventually wandered down the hill past Meiji University, into the bookstore area. I saw a baseball card shop but didn't go in, and eventually Kat went into one of the big bookstores, while Jesse and I sat outside and talked, and watched the Fighters game on my cellphone. Of course, as soon as I tuned into the TV thingy, Saburo immediately hit a home run, putting the Marines up even further. Sigh. Jesse said it was bad luck to watch, so I stopped.
We all went to Ginza, where I finally got out my (little) camera and acted like a tourist. The first place we went was a bakery called Kimuraya. Kat explained that it was the place where an-pan was invented, in 1874, and then she went and bought some an-pan.
Kimuraya, combining modern technology and old-fashioned taste.
While Kat was in there buying bread, I wandered around a little bit. I pointed out a corner to Jesse like "Hey, look at that!". He couldn't figure out what I was pointing to at first, but astute viewers who know some Japanese will probably immediately spot what I was looking at..
Now I know where our GEOS Ginza branch is!
We didn't really have anywhere good to sit down and eat the an-pan -- it was about 4:40pm and they were taking all of the benches and chairs off of the road. So Kat played the "We're not Japanese, we can sit and eat wherever we want" card, and we did so, sitting on the sidewalk. I'm not a big fan of an-pan but this was actually some pretty good stuff, especially since it was still warm.
Kat gets out some coffee and milk to go with the an-pan.
Rebecca is more interested in some of the big advertisements on the buildings.
We walked up the street past a bunch of stores. One amusing thing I didn't take a picture of was that someone had parked a Chevrolet bicycle (yes, bicycle, not motorbike) outside the Prada store. It was so incredibly brandish and Japan-like. What I did take a picture of was one shop front with the craziest stylized kanji I've ever seen. I THOUGHT it was supposed to say 立田野, but maybe I am wrong?
This one's for
dvarin.We made our way up to the Hakuhinkan Toy Palace, which is where I wanted to go in Ginza. I hadn't been there in 3 years, but it's still as awesome as ever. What's really funny is, out front there was this guy demoing puzzle games, so I went up and solved some puzzles with him. I swear to god this is the same guy I sat and talked to about Settlers of Catan for half an hour when I was there three years ago... but, I lost his business card AGES ago so of course I really can't remember.
We went into the store and just looked around at the crazy awesome stuff. I took several pictures of various things:
A Yuki Saito Halloween costume set. This is probably one of the most bizarre things I have ever seen in my life. (Yuki Saito, if you don't know, is a 19-year-old kid who plays baseball at Waseda University and pitched his HS team to a Koshien championship last year and used a handkerchief to wipe the sweat off his face and immediately became a nationwide sensation.)
A Doraemon made out of legos! How cool!
Ticket to Ride, in Japanese.
Big Blokus display, for the benefit of
mwinzi, who doesn't read LJ anymore.There were other fun things there too. Jesse even found a whole bunch of wooden puzzle boxes he'd been looking for. I only bought some smiley stickers to use for putting on homework in the future, I think.
Afterwards, we rode the subway back to Suidobashi, where we bought a whole big bag of custard-yaki snacks off a guy by the station, and then we went to a karaoke place near where Jesse's company's office is, and did karaoke for an hour until Rebecca got cranky and wanted to go to sleep.
I picked a few random songs in Japanese, and they picked songs in English, and we drank beer (yes, even I drank beer) and sang stuff for a while.
Jesse attempts to sing some Bob Marley.
Kat and Rebecca sing along to some song.
I drank a beer the size of my head, and removed the picture from this post since nobody read it anyway.
Afterwards Jesse and I went to dinner at a little tempura/katsu place near the hotel they were staying at, while Kat went up to put Rebecca to sleep. We ordered a takeout tempura dinner for Kat, and then I went back towards Suidobashi to go home. J&K were headed back to the US on Monday -- they should be back already, even. I hope they come back here sometime though, it was fun having them to hang out with here.
When I got to Suidobashi I went to Yamashita and bought the 2007 All-Star card set, because I am a big fucking dork. I sat down to watch the Dragons-Tigers game on my cellphone, and at 8:54pm it cut out JUST as Morino was up to bat. Sigh. I kept checking the score on my cell on the train ride home, and sure enough, Chunichi won. Bye bye, Tigers! Now I've just got to hope that CLCS2 goes to 4 or 5 games, so I can yell a lot of "YOMIURI TAOSE O" in the Tokyo Dome next weekend.
I thought about doing something productive when I got home, but I actually ended up just watching the 2-hour finale of Hana Kimi and fell asleep immediately afterwards, a little before midnight.
Oh, wait, one funny thing. I did go through the all-star cards and noticed that they mispelled Tyrone Woods's name. The set actually isn't that impressive in general -- I guess I was spoiled by the 2003 All-Star set, which was fantastic. Anyway, yeah, take a look at this:
Tyron? Who's that?
On Monday, I woke up and tried to go get my package from the post office. Only problem is, it wasn't at MY post office, it was at some North Kawaguchi post office, wherever they send packages that come in from overseas. So at my post office, I talked to a lady who basically ended up calling the other post office and rescheduling my delivery for me. That was at least undoubtedly a lot easier than me trying to call the other post office. Hopefully it'll show up tomorrow morning, yay.
As a result I was a bit late meeting up with Sam at the Akabane Starbucks, but I guess it worked out ok. He wanted to drive down to Jimbocho anyway, which was really interesting since that meant I got to see lots of wacky stuff along the roads, and it also meant I got to talk to Sam, since I guess we wouldn't talk as much on a train, most likely.
We went to that card shop I'd seen the day before, and I bought a TON of Fighters cards. 11 of them, from 1998-2003, including an old Shimoyanagi even, and some Kaneko and Yukio and Kensuke and Ide and even an Echevarria, to remember my first Fighters games. Wheeee! They were oly 50 yen each, after all. We also saw a royal crapload of old cards from guys who are now in the MLB, and Sam kept saying things like "I bet you could sell this one on ebay for a lot," and I was like "Noooo, if I bought that, I'd have to keep it!" They had a kickass set of 4 Yoshinobu Takahashi rookie cards, each with a part of his swing, but I wasn't about to spend 4000 yen for that. In more amusement, they had a signed Ichiro baseball in the shop selling for 75,000 yen, and a signed A-Rod baseball selling for 30,000 yen. Only in Japan :)
We went to some bookstores and I saw a TON of old Japanese baseball magazines and yearbooks and all kinds of crazy stuff. The sad part is that everything was in plastic so I couldn't look through it, but I mean, one store even had Shukan Baseball issues going back to 1976! It was total "kid-in-candy-shop" world for me, but I was very good and barely bought anything -- maybe like 3 or 4 magazines total, and nothing expensive. One of them has an Ichiro poster in it from 1997 though.
Anyway, here is Jimbocho, the used bookstore neighborhood at least. I swear
eub would love this place, even though he doesn't read Japanese. Just the pure bookstoreness of it. If it were English books, it'd take him a month to go through this neighborhood!(I'm really proud of this shot, though it's hard to explain why.)
This is the store where I saw all the old baseball magazines.
Many stores had tons of tags on books, and many also had proprietors wearing gloves to handle everything.
After that, Sam dropped me off in Akabane, I grabbed my stuff from GEOS, and took the train home, stopping at McDonald's to grab food quickly (yeah, I know). I got home about just in time to see the start of the Fighters-Marines game.
I watched the game half on the internet Yahoo Douga, and the other half on channel 12 here. And it ruled! Fighters kicked butt! Best of all was this play in the 4th inning when Lotte's Daisuke Hayakawa lofted a huge fly ball in foul territory, and Fighters third baseman Naoto Inada ran after it... ran ran ran... and dived for the ball and caught it. Thing is, he dived into the MEDIA WELL and took out a cameraman doing so. It's so funny to watch -- here he is standing up with the ball and a big smile on his face, and there's this camera dude just standing there like "oh shit oh shit oh shit..." so yeah, Naoto got ninety billion style points, even moreso when during the hero interview he said "inoshishi no you ni tori ni ikimashita..." to mean "Yeah, I charged down that ball like a wild boar!" I swear to god. It was so funny.
I did laundry after that, including actually washing my futon covers and my blankets and all. I did half of it all at the laundromat, and when I came back I debated actually moving all of my bedding up to my loft now that it might be cold enough to justify it, but... I can't really do that until I get an extension cord up there, otherwise I can't charge my cellphone up there and that means if my phone rings or anything else I'll probably fall out of the loft trying to get it. In the end I decided not to move the futon up there today just because I know the mail is supposed to come tomorrow with my box of stuff from Seattle. Maybe next week...
Anyway, dang, that's my story. This entry took me like 2 hours to make, thanks to slurping pictures and writing words.
Tomorrow at work we start Intensive Week... I'm hoping it's less intensive for me than it is for my students. We'll see, though.
no subject
(quiet little voice) I READ IT!
...and enjoyed it, as ever. Especially, inevitably, the board game photos.