dr4b | Today at Seibu Dome

I met my hero, Hichori Morimoto. Lisa pretty much went up to him in Japanese like "Excuse me, Mr. Hichori, but my friend is your BIGGEST FOREIGN FAN EVER and she's too shy to ask, will you pose for a picture with her?" I was so embarrassed.

I also interviewed Hiram Bocachica, which the Mariners fans will appreciate, I think!

The guy in the middle is Taisei Takagi. He played first base for Seibu for ten years and is an extremely nice guy who was given the responsibility of taking me around the stadium. I am a complete fucking moron and didn't know who he was. :( He went to Keio University, too, smart guy. I'm so embarrassed. Lisa spent a while talking to him and she learned a lot of interesting stuff.

This is Micheal Nakamura, closer for the Fighters. He asked me for my meishi, and said he'd look at my blog. HOLY SHIT OH NO THAT MIGHT BE BAD.

Masanori met me at the station, introduced me to Takagi, and took me around. The first thing I did was come on the field for the end of Lions BP, then I interviewed Bocachica. Yikes! I didn't know that would happen but I survived.

I got a tour of the stadium, including the backstage parts where they do the cool screen stuff, and I also got to see the VIP suites, which are NICE. And airconditioned. And I felt guilty sitting down because the seats were so nice! Heh. Lisa showed up and we hung out on the field to watch Fighters BP, and we chatted up Micheal Nakamura and such. I spent a lot of the time just talking to Masanori because his English is good and he's funny. (But he kept telling me, "STOP BEING SO SHY!!") We talked about, of all things, the 1993 World Series. Didn't see Sweeney -- got dragged off the field as BP was ending, sadly.

We sat in REALLY GOOD SEATS except that at Seibu Dome, "really good" also means "really far away from bathrooms and food and all". But that's ok.

Lisa had to leave early since she is returning home to Canada tomorrow. So in the 5th inning we went to the outfield so she could yell and cheer one final time... then after she left I ended up chatting with the people around me. "HOLY CRAP! YOU WRITE A SCORECARD TOO!!!" said one of the guys, and so... yeah. I ended up talking to another gang of guys who were really nice, they said they'd see me at the Tokyo Dome. One of them let me try on his Hokkaido jersey to see what size I need to get, heh.

And then I rode the train back to Ikebukuro with a bunch of other Fighters fans. Introduced myself to them, got names, but I didn't get contact info for most of them, including one really nice guy who I spent a while talking to on the train, oops. I did trade mail addresses with one of the people I'd talked to at the Dome, so we'll see. I'm working on getting more Fighters friends because that makes it so much more fun.

To make the day even MORE surreal, I transferred trains in Akabane and the bookstore was running a subtitled video of Randy Pausch's lecture! No joke!

And to add to the bizarreness...
I ran into my Korean friend again at the Warabi station on my way home. She wants me to teach her English. I told her I can't do that because of my job, but I could maybe help her find a place to study, like the people on Craiglist and such... and that I'd basically be happy to hang out with her and chat in English sometimes but I can't officially teach her. I feel really bad about it, but I also think I would be a HORRIBLE teacher without the books we use at my eikaiwa, to be honest.

Then, came home and saw Ainori. New chick totally got reamed by Kosuke. Kinda funny and kind of not funny all at once. I miss the old cast.

One bad thing about today: I lost my small notebook. Can't find it anywhere. It had a bunch of baseball boxscores in it and an email address of one of my friends. I hope I left it at work BUT I think I lost it coming to/from the Seibu Dome yesterday. ARGH.

Today at Seibu Dome

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