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English and Beer
Okay, let's see.
Today started off with John calling me at 11am to say, "We're in Ueno, and... we don't have a place to stay tonight after all, I got an email back from the place we thought we booked in that they screwed up. Can we crash on your loft tonight?"
So, I met up with J&C in Ueno at 1pm or so. We walked through Ameyoko looking for lunch for a while before ultimately stopping at the Heiroku Sushi down near Okachimachi station, which is way different than the Akabane one in that every plate is 136 yen. It was really good though. My goal for the afternoon was to get to the Tokyo Dome, and John and Cat's goal was to walk around Tokyo and look at random places, so... we decided to walk to the Tokyo Dome. From Ueno. By way of Jimbocho. Yeah, it made sense at the time, honest.
Since we were already in Okachimachi, we walked further down the tracks to Akihabara, where I basically said "Look, we're in Akihabara!" We went into the Yellow Submarine RPG shop though, where I saw people playing Settlers of Catan, and various RPGs, and am torn over whether I should try to go there sometime to find games to play with people. THEN when looking through the shelves I saw something called Ball Park! TRPG which looks like a JAPANESE BASEBALL ROLEPLAYING GAME OMFG. I'll probly have to go back and get it sometime. I convinced John he should buy a hiragana d10 and he did that, and we took pictures of Akihabara from thesmoking area fire escape.
We walked to the Tokyo Dome from there by way of Jimbocho, and I stopped into Mint for like two minutes to get another Fukubukuro (but, sadly this one is NOT as cool -- 3 packs of "Touch the Game" cards, three Seibu Lions team packs, one Hanshin Tigers pack, and one Carp pack). Then we walked past a whole bunch of shops and turned onto Hakusandori to walk to the Dome, where I bought Christmas presents for Sam's daughters. He had said to get them something "cute/pretty" and also said that "they don't like baseball yet" but, since I'm a smartass, I bought them Hello Kitty plushies wearing the Hoshino Japan baseball uniform. Ten years from now they'll think that's super-cool I bet :P Also, outside the Dome they were selling goods for the Luna Sea concert which is tomorrow night. I can't decide if I'm happy or sad that I didn't know about the concert, which is undoubtedly quite sold out.
John and Cat headed out to wander around Tokyo around 4:30 and I headed up to Akabane. I stopped in GEOS to wrap the presents and then went to the station to meet up with people. See, Sam was having a Christmas Party tonight so I said I'd go to it. In the station the people were him and his daughter and his father-in-law, and at first two Keio students, then two more Keio students, then one recent Keio grad, and then we walked up the hill to Sam's house, where I also got to meet his other daughter, and his wife, and his mother. Sam has a gigantic house by Japanese standards. Seriously. It was also really nicely decorated for Christmas.
Anyway, the party sort of sucked for me at first -- it was me in the living room with the 5 Keio students, and they all just chattered in Japanese, and I didn't know how to break into the conversation obviously, so I just tried to listen. I did get up and talk to family-types for a bit. Then after a while another group showed up, basically a guy about my age ("Paki"?) and his wife and two kids, but it was still all weird like "I have no clue who anyone is" so I was still being unnaturally quiet. Then there was food -- turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, all sorts of wonderful Christmas food!
What really changed the party flow was two things: 1) Sam's other American friend Tim showed up, and he's a tenured English professor here and has taught all of the Keio students, so they actually started talking to him in English at that point, and he started talking to me, and Sam also came in so I had someone to talk to. Also, as it turned out, Paki actually spoke English fairly fluently as well, and the crazy guy sitting to my right (the recent grad) wasn't too bad at English either, although he had an oddly FRENCH accent when speaking. 2) There was beer, and lots of it. The guy sitting next to me, Seki, once he started drinking, also started telling me about all of these kinds of beers he loves, and how he's tried like 100 kinds of beer, and so on and so forth. And he also kept pouring beers for me and telling me to try them, and I couldn't really refuse, so in the end I drank a LOT of beer.
English and beer. Yeah.
So anyway, I guess I spent the next hour or two talking a lot more than I had been, and I learned lots of interesting things and tried lots of interesting beers. I never did really talk to three of the current Keio kids, although I talked to one of the girls for a bit because she wants to visit America, and as I said I also talked to Seki quite a bit. Though at some point I was getting kind of worried because he'd had a LOT to drink. Paki even joked at one point, "Seki! Beer!" and got him to pour him more... and then was like "Wait a minute, dude, you've been drinking a LOT." And I looked over at Seki and he sort of had his hand up on his forehead in an "I'm trying to stop the room from swimming" sort of way. So I said to him, "Daijoubu desu ka, Seki-san?" ("Are you okay?") And he looked at me with a big smile and said "Daijoubu!!!"
Not two minutes later he ran out of the room, ostensibly to take up residence in Sam's bathroom, where he spent the rest of the party being sick, as far as I can tell. The party broke up for the most part at 11pm and he still hadn't come out of the bathroom. Oops. I apologized for not stopping him from drinking so much, and Paki apologized to me for his kohai's behaviour, and Sam assured me that they'd scrape his sorry ass off the bathroom floor and deposit it on a couch at some point and that there was nothing to worry about, so I walked back to Akabane station, where I was meeting up with John and Cat. Walking down the big hill I realized exactly how much beer was in my system, because I felt like I was floating. It was kind of cool and kind of scary.
I grabbed my work clothes from GEOS -- I need to wash them tomorrow -- and on the way back to the station I actually ran into one of my students! He was on his way home. I was SO proud of him for talking to me in English for a few minutes. He was like "Did you work today?" and I'm like "No! I went to a party! I drank a lot!!" He said, "Oh!! Me too!!"
John and Cat and I came back up here to the Little Apartment That Could, and they told me about their adventures finding Italian food and stuff. And now they are sleeping up on my loft (I'm not entirely sure what they're sleeping on -- some combination of old pillows and extra blankets and coats and whatnot, I think) and I'm finishing this entry and then going to sleep. Still not sure what I'll do tomorrow -- I'd like to go somewhere during the daylight hours and then do laundry in the early evening, I think, and then watch SMAPxSMAP. It's going to be weird being so alone on Christmas, though. Hrm. Does anyone want a (short) phone call from Japan?
Today started off with John calling me at 11am to say, "We're in Ueno, and... we don't have a place to stay tonight after all, I got an email back from the place we thought we booked in that they screwed up. Can we crash on your loft tonight?"
So, I met up with J&C in Ueno at 1pm or so. We walked through Ameyoko looking for lunch for a while before ultimately stopping at the Heiroku Sushi down near Okachimachi station, which is way different than the Akabane one in that every plate is 136 yen. It was really good though. My goal for the afternoon was to get to the Tokyo Dome, and John and Cat's goal was to walk around Tokyo and look at random places, so... we decided to walk to the Tokyo Dome. From Ueno. By way of Jimbocho. Yeah, it made sense at the time, honest.
Since we were already in Okachimachi, we walked further down the tracks to Akihabara, where I basically said "Look, we're in Akihabara!" We went into the Yellow Submarine RPG shop though, where I saw people playing Settlers of Catan, and various RPGs, and am torn over whether I should try to go there sometime to find games to play with people. THEN when looking through the shelves I saw something called Ball Park! TRPG which looks like a JAPANESE BASEBALL ROLEPLAYING GAME OMFG. I'll probly have to go back and get it sometime. I convinced John he should buy a hiragana d10 and he did that, and we took pictures of Akihabara from the
We walked to the Tokyo Dome from there by way of Jimbocho, and I stopped into Mint for like two minutes to get another Fukubukuro (but, sadly this one is NOT as cool -- 3 packs of "Touch the Game" cards, three Seibu Lions team packs, one Hanshin Tigers pack, and one Carp pack). Then we walked past a whole bunch of shops and turned onto Hakusandori to walk to the Dome, where I bought Christmas presents for Sam's daughters. He had said to get them something "cute/pretty" and also said that "they don't like baseball yet" but, since I'm a smartass, I bought them Hello Kitty plushies wearing the Hoshino Japan baseball uniform. Ten years from now they'll think that's super-cool I bet :P Also, outside the Dome they were selling goods for the Luna Sea concert which is tomorrow night. I can't decide if I'm happy or sad that I didn't know about the concert, which is undoubtedly quite sold out.
John and Cat headed out to wander around Tokyo around 4:30 and I headed up to Akabane. I stopped in GEOS to wrap the presents and then went to the station to meet up with people. See, Sam was having a Christmas Party tonight so I said I'd go to it. In the station the people were him and his daughter and his father-in-law, and at first two Keio students, then two more Keio students, then one recent Keio grad, and then we walked up the hill to Sam's house, where I also got to meet his other daughter, and his wife, and his mother. Sam has a gigantic house by Japanese standards. Seriously. It was also really nicely decorated for Christmas.
Anyway, the party sort of sucked for me at first -- it was me in the living room with the 5 Keio students, and they all just chattered in Japanese, and I didn't know how to break into the conversation obviously, so I just tried to listen. I did get up and talk to family-types for a bit. Then after a while another group showed up, basically a guy about my age ("Paki"?) and his wife and two kids, but it was still all weird like "I have no clue who anyone is" so I was still being unnaturally quiet. Then there was food -- turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, all sorts of wonderful Christmas food!
What really changed the party flow was two things: 1) Sam's other American friend Tim showed up, and he's a tenured English professor here and has taught all of the Keio students, so they actually started talking to him in English at that point, and he started talking to me, and Sam also came in so I had someone to talk to. Also, as it turned out, Paki actually spoke English fairly fluently as well, and the crazy guy sitting to my right (the recent grad) wasn't too bad at English either, although he had an oddly FRENCH accent when speaking. 2) There was beer, and lots of it. The guy sitting next to me, Seki, once he started drinking, also started telling me about all of these kinds of beers he loves, and how he's tried like 100 kinds of beer, and so on and so forth. And he also kept pouring beers for me and telling me to try them, and I couldn't really refuse, so in the end I drank a LOT of beer.
English and beer. Yeah.
So anyway, I guess I spent the next hour or two talking a lot more than I had been, and I learned lots of interesting things and tried lots of interesting beers. I never did really talk to three of the current Keio kids, although I talked to one of the girls for a bit because she wants to visit America, and as I said I also talked to Seki quite a bit. Though at some point I was getting kind of worried because he'd had a LOT to drink. Paki even joked at one point, "Seki! Beer!" and got him to pour him more... and then was like "Wait a minute, dude, you've been drinking a LOT." And I looked over at Seki and he sort of had his hand up on his forehead in an "I'm trying to stop the room from swimming" sort of way. So I said to him, "Daijoubu desu ka, Seki-san?" ("Are you okay?") And he looked at me with a big smile and said "Daijoubu!!!"
Not two minutes later he ran out of the room, ostensibly to take up residence in Sam's bathroom, where he spent the rest of the party being sick, as far as I can tell. The party broke up for the most part at 11pm and he still hadn't come out of the bathroom. Oops. I apologized for not stopping him from drinking so much, and Paki apologized to me for his kohai's behaviour, and Sam assured me that they'd scrape his sorry ass off the bathroom floor and deposit it on a couch at some point and that there was nothing to worry about, so I walked back to Akabane station, where I was meeting up with John and Cat. Walking down the big hill I realized exactly how much beer was in my system, because I felt like I was floating. It was kind of cool and kind of scary.
I grabbed my work clothes from GEOS -- I need to wash them tomorrow -- and on the way back to the station I actually ran into one of my students! He was on his way home. I was SO proud of him for talking to me in English for a few minutes. He was like "Did you work today?" and I'm like "No! I went to a party! I drank a lot!!" He said, "Oh!! Me too!!"
John and Cat and I came back up here to the Little Apartment That Could, and they told me about their adventures finding Italian food and stuff. And now they are sleeping up on my loft (I'm not entirely sure what they're sleeping on -- some combination of old pillows and extra blankets and coats and whatnot, I think) and I'm finishing this entry and then going to sleep. Still not sure what I'll do tomorrow -- I'd like to go somewhere during the daylight hours and then do laundry in the early evening, I think, and then watch SMAPxSMAP. It's going to be weird being so alone on Christmas, though. Hrm. Does anyone want a (short) phone call from Japan?
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