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Monday baseball, Tuesday GEOS training
Man, it feels like it's been ninety years since I last wrote an entry, but it's only been two days.
Monday
So, the conclusion of the ticket saga is that I got my money back from Lawson, even if I pretty much immediately used it to pay my KDDI bill. That's the good part. The bad part is that it took like... 20 minutes? Half an hour? to get it done, since they had all these problems with the system, still. Oddly enough, I explained it to the clerk women as "Chunichi won the series in 3 games, so 4 and 5 were cancelled", and when the shop manager came out he said to them, "The Giants lost the series, didn't you hear? So games 4 and 5 were cancelled." Funny perspectives.
In the end I was about 15 minutes late meeting up with Pau at Meiji Jingu stadium, where we were going to watch some Tokyo Big Six League college baseball! Wheeeee! I brought my big camera and we found seats high enough to mostly see over the big obnoxious fence. It was fairly uncrowded due to being a Monday and not being Waseda-Keio at all, so mostly random ojisan and some students and alumni from the various schools. There were also big oendan groups for every school we saw, so for the benefit of the 234234 people on my friendslist who love Osu! Tatakae! Oendan! it seems like I should probably show you that these guys are for real:
Those are both pictures of the University of Tokyo cheering guys (and some gals). And yes, that's THE Tokyo Daigaku, aka Todai, so those are some of the smartest cheering people in all of Japan. Appropriately, their team has some of the smartest guys and worst baseball players in all of Japan as well. Go figure.
We watched the second half of Meiji vs. Hosei, a fairly close game that Meiji won 5-3. Then we watched the entirety of Todai vs. Rikkio, which was basically a slaughter, 7-1, the lone Todai run scoring on an inside-the-park catcher's error. No, I'm not making that up. Todai batters had three separate KKK innings. The funny part is that Pau is a grad student at Todai so I was like "shouldn't you be cheering for them?" and he's like "Well, you know, we have a 160-year-old tradition of sucking, so whatever." Apparently Todai won on Saturday, breaking a 48-game losing streak, which is something like 3-4 straight seasons of losing.
Pau had to leave early due to an advisor's meeting, so I ended up wandering around Tokyo a bit on my own later in the day. I went to the Tokyo Dome but the ticket booths close at 5pm now, so I couldn't check on Asia Series tickets. I went to the To:Do shop and they had 2007 PACIFIC LEAGUE CHAMPION stuff for the Fighters!! I was so tempted to buy a t-shirt but thought that I'd rather wait to see if they become Japan champions... why spend 3000 yen now for a shirt when I might just want to replace it? Sigh. Plus if I go to Hokkaido in two weeks I'll have a lot better choice of Fighters stuff to buy..
I looked around for somewhere to watch the Japan Series next week. Asked at the Baseball Cafe and Hot Dog Inn around the Tokyo Dome and they both said "hahaha no". I went to Ikebukuro and found an Irish pub called the Hub, where a guy on the Fighters mixi community suggested watching it. They said "yes, please come here to watch it!" so I might do that. BUT, after that I went to Nippori, a neighborhood I don't know all that well, but... see, Hichori Morimoto, the centerfielder for the Fighters, is from there. His parents still run a yakiniku restaurant called Yakiniku Erika. I knew this because his cheer song last year had a fanfare basically saying "Yakiniku Erika, a 5-minute walk from Nippori Station, has really delicious food!"
So, I found Hichori's parents' yakiniku place. Except it was CLOSED :( The downstairs place had its door open even though it was empty, so I wandered in. They had Fighters stuff up on the walls which was really cool. I found a woman washing glasses and said, "Is this Yakiniku Erika?" "No, this is the coffeeshop Erika... yakiniku's on the second floor, but they're closed today." "Oh. Uhh.. so... see, I am a HUGE Fighters fan and wanted to watch the Series next weekend, will they have it upstairs?" "Oh yeah, they definitely will." So we'll see. I asked about the pictures on the walls like "Oh! Is this Hichori?? That's so cool!!" and so on. So, we'll see!
On my way home I stopped at Baskin-Robbins and had some ice cream of a flavor called "Base Ball Park", which I am really not making up. You can check out the description here, just look for ベースボールパーク. It essentially tasted like peanuts and cracker jacks... it says there are pretzels and peanuts and popcorn in a caramel-popcorn-flavored ice cream. Either way, it was yummy.
Tuesday
Today I had to go to "Advanced training" for GEOS, down in the Head Office in Osaki. I meant to get up and get out of here a lot earlier than I did, but since my brother is visiting my dad in Philly, they decided to give me a phone call around 10:30am and I talked to my brother for 20 minutes or so, and I didn't get out of here until around 11:15. Which means I didn't get to Osaki until 12:20, and the session started at 12:45pm AND I needed to get lunch. Yikes. Fortunately there were a bunch of fast food right by the building, including a Lotteria and a Subway! Whee Subway.
I went into Subway, where I ran into Sara and Jason, two people I had met when I interviewed for GEOS back in May. A bit after that two more people showed up that I didn't know, who turned out to be Marin and James, two more GEOS teachers. Eventually we met up with the rest of the group for today's training, and went to the big office to sign in, which was scary, because it's just one gigantic room with 50 people or so sitting at desks doing work. And that includes people like Hirakawa-kakaricho, who I was surprised to see there (and Kirk told me not to say hi to him anyway). Then we went down to the training conference rooms for the real sessions.
I was at a table with Sara, James, an American girl named Laurel from Sakado and a British guy named Neill from Kashima. The other table had Marin and Jason, and David from my Vancouver training, and a British guy named Rory who looked like a model. And... and Carlos was supposed to be at that table too, only he got lost, so I called him and Kirk got on the phone to tell him where the hell to go. It was kind of bizarre.
Anyway, we learned a whole bunch of stuff and did a lot of group activities, and that pretty much filled up 7 hours of training. We compared stories of different classes and talked about paperwork and lesson plans and just random GEOS things. The most difficult part was probably doing these mock new-student-interview thingies, which is always weird when you're "interviewing" native speakers.
We had a bit of stupid when we went to get dinner as a group, with 9 people in the "Cats Cafe". We should have realized it'd take too fucking long, but we didn't. With 15 minutes left until we had to go back to the office, and no food in sight, they nominated me to go talk to the staff since I can speak Japanese, and I explained to the restaurant hostess what was going on, and she said "but it will be ten minutes more for your sandwiches" and I'm like "WE DON'T HAVE TEN MINUTES MORE, WE HAVE TO LEAVE THEN," everyone else just got up and decided to leave. Oops. Some of them grabbed food at McDonald's; I ran back to get food from Vie de France quickly, and got back to the classroom about 2 minutes late. Oops. This time, Carlos tried to call me to find out where the hell I was.
After the sessions were all over, 9 of us (David decided to head home) adjourned to Gotanda (since Rory and Neill were staying in a hotel there, having come all the fucking way from Ibaraki) and found an izakaya and got a tatami room on the second floor and, well, we did what you do at an izakaya, which is order a shitload of random little dishes of various foods, and order an even bigger shitload of alcohol. I think our bill came out to around 16,000 yen total (so about 2000 each) in the end, and my only disappointment is that I ordered tebasaki and it never showed up. But everything else was really good so whatever. I even had like four drinks (two cassis-orange cocktails, some sort of black-grape-sour, and another one I forget the name of).
I asked a waiter to please take our picture with my cellphone... wish I'd had a real camera with me, but oh well:
Carlos, me, Jason, Rory, Sara, Neill, Laurel, Marin, James...
...and a whole lot of food and beer. Whee.
We all stumbled back to Gotanda station around 10:30pm. It seemed like all of the non-Brits were going to take a train towards Ikebukuro, but when the Ueno-bound Yamanote showed up, Carlos was like "HEY DEANNA, ISN'T THIS OUR TRAIN?" and I figured whatever, we could also just go take it a few stops and grab the Keihin-Tohoku. So we ditched everyone and ran off, going a few stops to Shinagawa to transfer, and then we stood in a crowded Keihin-Tohoku train for an hour or whatever it was, drunkenly ranting about random crap.
Eventually I got home around midnightish, and had to ride my bike back home, still wearing my suit skirt and jacket and all, which I'd been wearing all day. It's REALLY bizarre trying to do that. Suit skirts are NOT meant to be worn on a bike.
I'm glad I got to go drinking with some other GEOS people, definitely beats my normal after-work weeknights, but I think tomorrow I might try to come home a bit earlier, since I'm really zonked and I pretty much have to get up in 8 hours and repeat the whole thing.
Monday
So, the conclusion of the ticket saga is that I got my money back from Lawson, even if I pretty much immediately used it to pay my KDDI bill. That's the good part. The bad part is that it took like... 20 minutes? Half an hour? to get it done, since they had all these problems with the system, still. Oddly enough, I explained it to the clerk women as "Chunichi won the series in 3 games, so 4 and 5 were cancelled", and when the shop manager came out he said to them, "The Giants lost the series, didn't you hear? So games 4 and 5 were cancelled." Funny perspectives.
In the end I was about 15 minutes late meeting up with Pau at Meiji Jingu stadium, where we were going to watch some Tokyo Big Six League college baseball! Wheeeee! I brought my big camera and we found seats high enough to mostly see over the big obnoxious fence. It was fairly uncrowded due to being a Monday and not being Waseda-Keio at all, so mostly random ojisan and some students and alumni from the various schools. There were also big oendan groups for every school we saw, so for the benefit of the 234234 people on my friendslist who love Osu! Tatakae! Oendan! it seems like I should probably show you that these guys are for real:
Those are both pictures of the University of Tokyo cheering guys (and some gals). And yes, that's THE Tokyo Daigaku, aka Todai, so those are some of the smartest cheering people in all of Japan. Appropriately, their team has some of the smartest guys and worst baseball players in all of Japan as well. Go figure.
We watched the second half of Meiji vs. Hosei, a fairly close game that Meiji won 5-3. Then we watched the entirety of Todai vs. Rikkio, which was basically a slaughter, 7-1, the lone Todai run scoring on an inside-the-park catcher's error. No, I'm not making that up. Todai batters had three separate KKK innings. The funny part is that Pau is a grad student at Todai so I was like "shouldn't you be cheering for them?" and he's like "Well, you know, we have a 160-year-old tradition of sucking, so whatever." Apparently Todai won on Saturday, breaking a 48-game losing streak, which is something like 3-4 straight seasons of losing.
Pau had to leave early due to an advisor's meeting, so I ended up wandering around Tokyo a bit on my own later in the day. I went to the Tokyo Dome but the ticket booths close at 5pm now, so I couldn't check on Asia Series tickets. I went to the To:Do shop and they had 2007 PACIFIC LEAGUE CHAMPION stuff for the Fighters!! I was so tempted to buy a t-shirt but thought that I'd rather wait to see if they become Japan champions... why spend 3000 yen now for a shirt when I might just want to replace it? Sigh. Plus if I go to Hokkaido in two weeks I'll have a lot better choice of Fighters stuff to buy..
I looked around for somewhere to watch the Japan Series next week. Asked at the Baseball Cafe and Hot Dog Inn around the Tokyo Dome and they both said "hahaha no". I went to Ikebukuro and found an Irish pub called the Hub, where a guy on the Fighters mixi community suggested watching it. They said "yes, please come here to watch it!" so I might do that. BUT, after that I went to Nippori, a neighborhood I don't know all that well, but... see, Hichori Morimoto, the centerfielder for the Fighters, is from there. His parents still run a yakiniku restaurant called Yakiniku Erika. I knew this because his cheer song last year had a fanfare basically saying "Yakiniku Erika, a 5-minute walk from Nippori Station, has really delicious food!"
So, I found Hichori's parents' yakiniku place. Except it was CLOSED :( The downstairs place had its door open even though it was empty, so I wandered in. They had Fighters stuff up on the walls which was really cool. I found a woman washing glasses and said, "Is this Yakiniku Erika?" "No, this is the coffeeshop Erika... yakiniku's on the second floor, but they're closed today." "Oh. Uhh.. so... see, I am a HUGE Fighters fan and wanted to watch the Series next weekend, will they have it upstairs?" "Oh yeah, they definitely will." So we'll see. I asked about the pictures on the walls like "Oh! Is this Hichori?? That's so cool!!" and so on. So, we'll see!
On my way home I stopped at Baskin-Robbins and had some ice cream of a flavor called "Base Ball Park", which I am really not making up. You can check out the description here, just look for ベースボールパーク. It essentially tasted like peanuts and cracker jacks... it says there are pretzels and peanuts and popcorn in a caramel-popcorn-flavored ice cream. Either way, it was yummy.
Tuesday
Today I had to go to "Advanced training" for GEOS, down in the Head Office in Osaki. I meant to get up and get out of here a lot earlier than I did, but since my brother is visiting my dad in Philly, they decided to give me a phone call around 10:30am and I talked to my brother for 20 minutes or so, and I didn't get out of here until around 11:15. Which means I didn't get to Osaki until 12:20, and the session started at 12:45pm AND I needed to get lunch. Yikes. Fortunately there were a bunch of fast food right by the building, including a Lotteria and a Subway! Whee Subway.
I went into Subway, where I ran into Sara and Jason, two people I had met when I interviewed for GEOS back in May. A bit after that two more people showed up that I didn't know, who turned out to be Marin and James, two more GEOS teachers. Eventually we met up with the rest of the group for today's training, and went to the big office to sign in, which was scary, because it's just one gigantic room with 50 people or so sitting at desks doing work. And that includes people like Hirakawa-kakaricho, who I was surprised to see there (and Kirk told me not to say hi to him anyway). Then we went down to the training conference rooms for the real sessions.
I was at a table with Sara, James, an American girl named Laurel from Sakado and a British guy named Neill from Kashima. The other table had Marin and Jason, and David from my Vancouver training, and a British guy named Rory who looked like a model. And... and Carlos was supposed to be at that table too, only he got lost, so I called him and Kirk got on the phone to tell him where the hell to go. It was kind of bizarre.
Anyway, we learned a whole bunch of stuff and did a lot of group activities, and that pretty much filled up 7 hours of training. We compared stories of different classes and talked about paperwork and lesson plans and just random GEOS things. The most difficult part was probably doing these mock new-student-interview thingies, which is always weird when you're "interviewing" native speakers.
We had a bit of stupid when we went to get dinner as a group, with 9 people in the "Cats Cafe". We should have realized it'd take too fucking long, but we didn't. With 15 minutes left until we had to go back to the office, and no food in sight, they nominated me to go talk to the staff since I can speak Japanese, and I explained to the restaurant hostess what was going on, and she said "but it will be ten minutes more for your sandwiches" and I'm like "WE DON'T HAVE TEN MINUTES MORE, WE HAVE TO LEAVE THEN," everyone else just got up and decided to leave. Oops. Some of them grabbed food at McDonald's; I ran back to get food from Vie de France quickly, and got back to the classroom about 2 minutes late. Oops. This time, Carlos tried to call me to find out where the hell I was.
After the sessions were all over, 9 of us (David decided to head home) adjourned to Gotanda (since Rory and Neill were staying in a hotel there, having come all the fucking way from Ibaraki) and found an izakaya and got a tatami room on the second floor and, well, we did what you do at an izakaya, which is order a shitload of random little dishes of various foods, and order an even bigger shitload of alcohol. I think our bill came out to around 16,000 yen total (so about 2000 each) in the end, and my only disappointment is that I ordered tebasaki and it never showed up. But everything else was really good so whatever. I even had like four drinks (two cassis-orange cocktails, some sort of black-grape-sour, and another one I forget the name of).
I asked a waiter to please take our picture with my cellphone... wish I'd had a real camera with me, but oh well:
Carlos, me, Jason, Rory, Sara, Neill, Laurel, Marin, James...
...and a whole lot of food and beer. Whee.
We all stumbled back to Gotanda station around 10:30pm. It seemed like all of the non-Brits were going to take a train towards Ikebukuro, but when the Ueno-bound Yamanote showed up, Carlos was like "HEY DEANNA, ISN'T THIS OUR TRAIN?" and I figured whatever, we could also just go take it a few stops and grab the Keihin-Tohoku. So we ditched everyone and ran off, going a few stops to Shinagawa to transfer, and then we stood in a crowded Keihin-Tohoku train for an hour or whatever it was, drunkenly ranting about random crap.
Eventually I got home around midnightish, and had to ride my bike back home, still wearing my suit skirt and jacket and all, which I'd been wearing all day. It's REALLY bizarre trying to do that. Suit skirts are NOT meant to be worn on a bike.
I'm glad I got to go drinking with some other GEOS people, definitely beats my normal after-work weeknights, but I think tomorrow I might try to come home a bit earlier, since I'm really zonked and I pretty much have to get up in 8 hours and repeat the whole thing.
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