![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Saturday - hanging out with Shin, and holding out for a Hero
Today was a pretty good day. Thanks to it being a holiday, not only did I not have work, but other people didn't have work either. So I finally got to hang out with Shinsuke again, which was really awesome.
I'd emailed him yesterday and we made some vague plans, so he called me this morning and said "Let's meet at Ochanomizu around 1:30. Go to the exit where you transfer to the Chiyoda line." I was, of course, half-asleep, so I completely forgot where he said to go. I was worried since a few weeks ago I got totally messed up waiting for Jesse and Kat "by the Ochanomizu exit with the bridge", of which there are three, but this time, amazingly, I walked out of the station at a random exit and he was right there waving at me. That was good luck, I guess.
We chatted a bit about the Japan Series -- the last time I saw him was in September when we had gone to see the Giants-Dragons game, and Daisuke Yamai had started that game too, so we were like "can you believe that guy we saw threw most of a perfect game? WTF!"
Sadly, one problem with it being a holiday was that some shops and restaurants were ALSO closed. We walked down the hill to Jimbocho to get lunch, since Shin hangs out there often. He had all of these great ideas in mind for places to take me to, except naturally none of them were open. So we ended up at a place that said it had "Indian Curry", although the name of the restaurant was "Ethiopia". Their spice level scale goes from 0 to *70*. Shin got a 5. I got a 1. He told me, "Now you can say you've been to Ethiopia!"
After that we walked around some of the shops for a while. Since we'd been talking about board games and other geeky CMU things, we went to Shosen -- which I'd gone to the basement of with Sam a few weeks ago and gotten baseball magazines -- but this time I went to the second floor with Shin. He said "Just ignore all of the posters and come check out the back wall of this floor..."
No, so literally, there's an entire side of the shop full of board games. It is ironically on the same floor as all of the magazines and calendars and posters of what they call "gravure" models here, which is a way of saying "it's not porn, because the girls in provocative poses are wearing bikinis". I suppose they really know their market to group that with board games and D&D books. If I'd been thinking about it I would have gotten a wider shot of the floor to show the way it was like, "Here's a stack of board games, and here's a poster of a Japanese teen wearing a bikini".
Anyway, we spent like half an hour going through games, with me babbling about all of them. Shin actually speaks German so he was amused to read the boxes of some of the games that had the original German versions. But it turned out that he's never played ANY of them! How sad! If games didn't cost so damn much here I'd have picked up something so we could play, but alas. I might have to get some of mine sent from Seattle or something, maybe. I was thinking Starship Catan might be a good one to have around.
After hitting up a few more bookstores (and me resisting the temptation to go into the baseball card store) we went to an arcade and played this videogame called "Quiz Magic Academy", because Shin was like "Dude, you would kick ass at the baseball sports questions". Sure enough, I kicked ass at it, but it was funny because I couldn't READ the questions fast enough, even if I knew the answer. ("Err... Kaneda... something something..." "How many wins did Kaneda Masaichi have?" "400." "Really?" "Yeah, 400, just type it in!" "Whoa! You're right! How do you know all this crap?") We actually played a bunch of rounds of trivia competition against real people connected to the network, which was kind of bizarre. I did NOT kick ass at general trivia and mostly just read the answers Shin was typing in.
I guess we spent the rest of the afternoon just wandering around places, walking and talking. We ended up walking to the Tokyo Dome since we were on Hakusandori anyway, and I got my Fighters PL Champions 2007 t-shirt, and then we decided to go to Akihabara, where I looked for videogame buzzers. Shin showed me a crazy store which is JUST capsule machines, and a little bit scary. Sadly, he had to go home around 6pm, so we walked to the Suehirocho station and said goodbye, and then I walked back through a bunch of stores and eventually found the exact capsule machine I wanted in Asobit City. It had Namco buzzers, which I'm going to use for props in my English classes (so people can "buzz in" with answers to things). By the luck of the draw I got a Mappy, two Digdug, a Pacman, and two Family Stadium.
I headed home at that point. Thanks to walking through Yodobashi Camera with Shin, where we went past a huge Nikon ad with Kimura Takuya in it (which I stared at for a minute, and he said "You really like Kimutaku, don't you?" and I said "Yeah, but actually, I really want that lens he's holding."), I remembered that I really wanted to see the movie Hero. I thought I'd go see it at the Kawaguchi MOVIX as usual since I thought they had a late showing, but I checked on my keitai and it turns out they changed their schedules this week and Hero was only showing at 12:20 and 18:00 there. OOPS! So I was all worried and looked at the list of other movie theaters, and there's a MOVIX in Saitama Shintoshin, which is about 10 minutes north of Warabi on the train line, so I decided to try heading there instead, stopping first at the Omiya bookoff and finding nothing I was looking for.
Saitama Shintoshin's train stop is actually pretty great. You leave the station and you're on a boardwalkway that goes straight to this outdoor mall thingy. It was a really great mall too, lots of shops, and a Kinokuniya, and restaurants, and an Ito Yokado, and the movie theater, and so on. I got my movie ticket and then went to a place called "Kua'Aina'" which claimed to have "Hawaiian Delicious Burgers!!!" and had lots of staff yelling "Aloha!" when you came in instead of "Irasshaimase!". I don't know whether they were Hawaiian or not, honestly, but I got an "avocado burger set" for Y1370 and it was a 1/3-pound big juicy burger with tons of lettuce and tomato and avocado, and fries, AND a side salad (!!), and a drink. The only downside is that the burger had so many toppings it pretty much completely exploded on me and I made a huge mess eating it. But, DAMN it was tasty.
Then I watched Hero. I hate to say this but I only understood about 60% of the movie. Basically, all of the funny parts, I understaood completely, but the courtroom scenes were usually a bit over my head, and a LOT of the movie was courtroom scenes. To some extent it was still entertaining despite that -- and it's always fun to watch Kimutaku -- but I feel sort of dumb nonetheless. The only other annoying thing was the director's style of "oh look I am going to focus in and out on various things to show you how good we are at using our camera's focus mechanisms", which just kept happening over and over again. Still, I think it was a good movie and I'll hopefully watch it again in a year or so and understand more.
Then I came home.
Now I am tired.
I'm going to sleep in and depending on when I get up I may or may not try wandering to Kamagaya tomorrow for the hell of it. We'll see.
I'd emailed him yesterday and we made some vague plans, so he called me this morning and said "Let's meet at Ochanomizu around 1:30. Go to the exit where you transfer to the Chiyoda line." I was, of course, half-asleep, so I completely forgot where he said to go. I was worried since a few weeks ago I got totally messed up waiting for Jesse and Kat "by the Ochanomizu exit with the bridge", of which there are three, but this time, amazingly, I walked out of the station at a random exit and he was right there waving at me. That was good luck, I guess.
We chatted a bit about the Japan Series -- the last time I saw him was in September when we had gone to see the Giants-Dragons game, and Daisuke Yamai had started that game too, so we were like "can you believe that guy we saw threw most of a perfect game? WTF!"
Sadly, one problem with it being a holiday was that some shops and restaurants were ALSO closed. We walked down the hill to Jimbocho to get lunch, since Shin hangs out there often. He had all of these great ideas in mind for places to take me to, except naturally none of them were open. So we ended up at a place that said it had "Indian Curry", although the name of the restaurant was "Ethiopia". Their spice level scale goes from 0 to *70*. Shin got a 5. I got a 1. He told me, "Now you can say you've been to Ethiopia!"
After that we walked around some of the shops for a while. Since we'd been talking about board games and other geeky CMU things, we went to Shosen -- which I'd gone to the basement of with Sam a few weeks ago and gotten baseball magazines -- but this time I went to the second floor with Shin. He said "Just ignore all of the posters and come check out the back wall of this floor..."
No, so literally, there's an entire side of the shop full of board games. It is ironically on the same floor as all of the magazines and calendars and posters of what they call "gravure" models here, which is a way of saying "it's not porn, because the girls in provocative poses are wearing bikinis". I suppose they really know their market to group that with board games and D&D books. If I'd been thinking about it I would have gotten a wider shot of the floor to show the way it was like, "Here's a stack of board games, and here's a poster of a Japanese teen wearing a bikini".
Anyway, we spent like half an hour going through games, with me babbling about all of them. Shin actually speaks German so he was amused to read the boxes of some of the games that had the original German versions. But it turned out that he's never played ANY of them! How sad! If games didn't cost so damn much here I'd have picked up something so we could play, but alas. I might have to get some of mine sent from Seattle or something, maybe. I was thinking Starship Catan might be a good one to have around.
After hitting up a few more bookstores (and me resisting the temptation to go into the baseball card store) we went to an arcade and played this videogame called "Quiz Magic Academy", because Shin was like "Dude, you would kick ass at the baseball sports questions". Sure enough, I kicked ass at it, but it was funny because I couldn't READ the questions fast enough, even if I knew the answer. ("Err... Kaneda... something something..." "How many wins did Kaneda Masaichi have?" "400." "Really?" "Yeah, 400, just type it in!" "Whoa! You're right! How do you know all this crap?") We actually played a bunch of rounds of trivia competition against real people connected to the network, which was kind of bizarre. I did NOT kick ass at general trivia and mostly just read the answers Shin was typing in.
I guess we spent the rest of the afternoon just wandering around places, walking and talking. We ended up walking to the Tokyo Dome since we were on Hakusandori anyway, and I got my Fighters PL Champions 2007 t-shirt, and then we decided to go to Akihabara, where I looked for videogame buzzers. Shin showed me a crazy store which is JUST capsule machines, and a little bit scary. Sadly, he had to go home around 6pm, so we walked to the Suehirocho station and said goodbye, and then I walked back through a bunch of stores and eventually found the exact capsule machine I wanted in Asobit City. It had Namco buzzers, which I'm going to use for props in my English classes (so people can "buzz in" with answers to things). By the luck of the draw I got a Mappy, two Digdug, a Pacman, and two Family Stadium.
I headed home at that point. Thanks to walking through Yodobashi Camera with Shin, where we went past a huge Nikon ad with Kimura Takuya in it (which I stared at for a minute, and he said "You really like Kimutaku, don't you?" and I said "Yeah, but actually, I really want that lens he's holding."), I remembered that I really wanted to see the movie Hero. I thought I'd go see it at the Kawaguchi MOVIX as usual since I thought they had a late showing, but I checked on my keitai and it turns out they changed their schedules this week and Hero was only showing at 12:20 and 18:00 there. OOPS! So I was all worried and looked at the list of other movie theaters, and there's a MOVIX in Saitama Shintoshin, which is about 10 minutes north of Warabi on the train line, so I decided to try heading there instead, stopping first at the Omiya bookoff and finding nothing I was looking for.
Saitama Shintoshin's train stop is actually pretty great. You leave the station and you're on a boardwalkway that goes straight to this outdoor mall thingy. It was a really great mall too, lots of shops, and a Kinokuniya, and restaurants, and an Ito Yokado, and the movie theater, and so on. I got my movie ticket and then went to a place called "Kua'Aina'" which claimed to have "Hawaiian Delicious Burgers!!!" and had lots of staff yelling "Aloha!" when you came in instead of "Irasshaimase!". I don't know whether they were Hawaiian or not, honestly, but I got an "avocado burger set" for Y1370 and it was a 1/3-pound big juicy burger with tons of lettuce and tomato and avocado, and fries, AND a side salad (!!), and a drink. The only downside is that the burger had so many toppings it pretty much completely exploded on me and I made a huge mess eating it. But, DAMN it was tasty.
Then I watched Hero. I hate to say this but I only understood about 60% of the movie. Basically, all of the funny parts, I understaood completely, but the courtroom scenes were usually a bit over my head, and a LOT of the movie was courtroom scenes. To some extent it was still entertaining despite that -- and it's always fun to watch Kimutaku -- but I feel sort of dumb nonetheless. The only other annoying thing was the director's style of "oh look I am going to focus in and out on various things to show you how good we are at using our camera's focus mechanisms", which just kept happening over and over again. Still, I think it was a good movie and I'll hopefully watch it again in a year or so and understand more.
Then I came home.
Now I am tired.
I'm going to sleep in and depending on when I get up I may or may not try wandering to Kamagaya tomorrow for the hell of it. We'll see.
no subject
no subject
I can imagine!
Really enjoyed reading all of your travels, and boggling at the photo of the wall of board games. :-)