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And now my feet are REALLY going to fall off
A few days ago, on one of Ye Olde Messaging Websites, I got a message from a random guy here in Japan, working at the Yokosuka navy base, looking for interesting people to meet up with. We'll call him C. I usually wouldn't have responded, except his info said that he was interested in swing dancing and board games. I asked if he would take me swing dancing, since I'd never done any dancing in Japan. He said sure.
So, this afternoon we met up in Shibuya, since we'd agreed to go get coffee or something beforehand and I knew there were like ninety thousand coffeeshops in Shibuya, as well as it being a terminus for the Tokyu Toyoko line, which goes to Tamagawa, which is where the Fujimi Kaikan was with the dance floor.
C turned out to be a really nice guy, I'm not sure we have much in common, but he seems to be one of those people who is absolutely impossible to faze, always smiling no matter what. After walking around Shibuya for a while we did find a Starbucks with an open table and sat down there for a while and drank chai and talked about German board games.
Went to Tamagawa in time for the lesson before the swing dance. It turns out to be run by a guy named Shawn who's kind of crazy and had even gotten a big fake pompadour wig for the sake of the dance -- it was "Rockabilly Night". There were a few people totally dressed up in 50's gear, though most didn't bother. I wore a circle skirt and a polo shirt, which I thought looked somewhat appropriate, although it turned out my skirt went up a little higher than expected when spun around... ah well.
The lesson went okay, there were like 4 more women than men so we had to keep rotating out, which sort of sucked... there were no real total beginners there, either, which was also good. I think the makeup was that C was the only foreign guy there for the lesson and there were two other foreign women besides me. They taught us a few steps, none of which ended up being relevant at all for the actual swing night, heh.
One funny thing -- so as you rotate between partners, as you come up to a new partner you both say "onegaishimasu", which means "please!" and as you leave you say "arigatou", which is thank you. Kind of useful to know -- when I asked people to dance later I was just like "onegaishimasu!" which was funny.
As for the real dance... at the start I met a couple of the other people there who spoke English -- a really talkative half-Japanese lady who we'll call P, who was really nice and determined to make sure I met people and danced a lot, and her (American) husband J, they had been at the lesson. Another American woman, T, who told me she's been here as an English teacher with Berlitz for like 22 years. And in general the male-female ratio was actually pretty much 50-50. It wasn't a huge crowd, maybe 40-50ish people, but it did totally fill up the room.
I danced with C a bunch of times, I asked a few people to dance, I got asked to dance by a few people (mostly taller guys). Randomly ended up dancing with a guy who spoke totally fluent English, he happened to be from the Phillippines and is a software engineer and a pretty nice guy. And then a REALLY bizarre thing happened -- P, in her "I'm getting you to dance with every guy here" stage, introduced me to a random Japanese guy who she said spoke fluent English...
...so I danced with him, and after we were chatting, I asked where he learned English and he told me he went to grad school in America. I asked where. He said Pittsburgh. I said "You're kidding! I went to college in Pittsburgh..." "Where?" "Carnegie Mellon." "What? That's where I went!" "Uhhhh... when?" "I was there from 1997 to 1999." "I graduated in 1998!" "No way!" Anyway, it turns out he did environmental engineering of some sort -- probly EPP? and HOW BIZARRE IS THAT? We talked a bit about campus and Pittsburgh, he said he hasn't gone back since graduating, basically. Weird.
I danced with the instructor from the day's lesson. He complimented me on my Japanese and on my frame, so I guess that was good. I also did dance with Shawn the organizer, when he played a "westy" song and I was like "do you know West Coast swing?" and he's like "well... no... but I'll dance this one with you if you want..." but I think I was too stiff. I'm always a ballroom dancer pretending to do swing, I swear.
The very last dance of the night I finally danced with the other white guy there, who was very tall, wore glasses, and from the accent I am guessing is British of some sort.
I felt sort of awkward through the night anyway, in that "I don't really know the protocol here for asking people to dance" sort of way, which was a little sad. But I guess it went okay overall, infact a lot better than expected, really, I didn't sit out THAT many songs. Also, the place got really warm, and I noticed a lot of people brought changes of t-shirts and whatnot, and a lot of the guys had neck towels... the bathrooms there didn't have towels either, so I think next time if I go back I have to come prepared, heh.
C and I walked back to Tamagawa Station together but it turns out that he was going to go the opposite way to Yokohama and I was going to Shibuya so... we kind of parted ways there when I had to run for my train. I'll have to send him a message sometime -- it really was fun to go dancing with him and I'm glad he dragged me.
Now the funny thing is, we had been following one of the guys from Swing down as we walked to the station. And I'd kind of said an "otsukaresama" to that guy as we passed him, since I'd danced with him a few times during the night. But it turned out that we were on the same train, so when we transferred to the tokkyu at Jiyuugaoka, I went up and started talking to him. Turns out he's from Korea and has been working in Japan for a few months, studying Japanese, and he said that today was his first day and probably last day at this swing place, because next month his company wants him to return to Korea. Doh!
Anyway, we rode the train back together as far as Ikebukuro. It was really kind of funky talking to him since his native language is Korean and he speaks no English, and I am of course vice versa, so we were talking in Japanese together. I think that might have been one of the first times I actually held an extended conversation in Japanese with another non-native speaker where it was our only common language. He was really nice, and told me about how there's a big swing dance scene in Korea. I told him that he was a really strong lead, and we talked about the differences between dancing in different countries. Fortunately, a lot of the dancing vocabulary in Japanese is kind of just borrowed from English. Unfortunately, when we got to Ikebukuro, it was THEN that he kind of asked if he could have my mail address, and there just wasn't time before getting off the train. I'm a little sad, I guess I could have taken the initiative there, though on the other hand I suppose if he's leaving the country in a few weeks then it doesn't really matter anyway.
Anyway, fun. Got back to Akabane at 10:40pm, ran into Yokado to get "dinner" and some other groceries; apparently by that point they've taken most of the prepared food off the shelves though. I got croquettes and yakitamago though and that was more than good enough for me.
I can't believe I'm saying this, but I think I will probly go back to the swing dance place next month. I don't even like swing dancing, at least not compared to ballroom. But it's really good exercise and it makes me happy to be dancing again, and hopefully I can meet some new people, maybe talk to that CMU guy again, stuff like that. We'll see.
For now, my feet are really going to fall off, though. Yikes. 20 miles of biking in two days and then 3 hours of swing dancing make Deanna something something.
So, this afternoon we met up in Shibuya, since we'd agreed to go get coffee or something beforehand and I knew there were like ninety thousand coffeeshops in Shibuya, as well as it being a terminus for the Tokyu Toyoko line, which goes to Tamagawa, which is where the Fujimi Kaikan was with the dance floor.
C turned out to be a really nice guy, I'm not sure we have much in common, but he seems to be one of those people who is absolutely impossible to faze, always smiling no matter what. After walking around Shibuya for a while we did find a Starbucks with an open table and sat down there for a while and drank chai and talked about German board games.
Went to Tamagawa in time for the lesson before the swing dance. It turns out to be run by a guy named Shawn who's kind of crazy and had even gotten a big fake pompadour wig for the sake of the dance -- it was "Rockabilly Night". There were a few people totally dressed up in 50's gear, though most didn't bother. I wore a circle skirt and a polo shirt, which I thought looked somewhat appropriate, although it turned out my skirt went up a little higher than expected when spun around... ah well.
The lesson went okay, there were like 4 more women than men so we had to keep rotating out, which sort of sucked... there were no real total beginners there, either, which was also good. I think the makeup was that C was the only foreign guy there for the lesson and there were two other foreign women besides me. They taught us a few steps, none of which ended up being relevant at all for the actual swing night, heh.
One funny thing -- so as you rotate between partners, as you come up to a new partner you both say "onegaishimasu", which means "please!" and as you leave you say "arigatou", which is thank you. Kind of useful to know -- when I asked people to dance later I was just like "onegaishimasu!" which was funny.
As for the real dance... at the start I met a couple of the other people there who spoke English -- a really talkative half-Japanese lady who we'll call P, who was really nice and determined to make sure I met people and danced a lot, and her (American) husband J, they had been at the lesson. Another American woman, T, who told me she's been here as an English teacher with Berlitz for like 22 years. And in general the male-female ratio was actually pretty much 50-50. It wasn't a huge crowd, maybe 40-50ish people, but it did totally fill up the room.
I danced with C a bunch of times, I asked a few people to dance, I got asked to dance by a few people (mostly taller guys). Randomly ended up dancing with a guy who spoke totally fluent English, he happened to be from the Phillippines and is a software engineer and a pretty nice guy. And then a REALLY bizarre thing happened -- P, in her "I'm getting you to dance with every guy here" stage, introduced me to a random Japanese guy who she said spoke fluent English...
...so I danced with him, and after we were chatting, I asked where he learned English and he told me he went to grad school in America. I asked where. He said Pittsburgh. I said "You're kidding! I went to college in Pittsburgh..." "Where?" "Carnegie Mellon." "What? That's where I went!" "Uhhhh... when?" "I was there from 1997 to 1999." "I graduated in 1998!" "No way!" Anyway, it turns out he did environmental engineering of some sort -- probly EPP? and HOW BIZARRE IS THAT? We talked a bit about campus and Pittsburgh, he said he hasn't gone back since graduating, basically. Weird.
I danced with the instructor from the day's lesson. He complimented me on my Japanese and on my frame, so I guess that was good. I also did dance with Shawn the organizer, when he played a "westy" song and I was like "do you know West Coast swing?" and he's like "well... no... but I'll dance this one with you if you want..." but I think I was too stiff. I'm always a ballroom dancer pretending to do swing, I swear.
The very last dance of the night I finally danced with the other white guy there, who was very tall, wore glasses, and from the accent I am guessing is British of some sort.
I felt sort of awkward through the night anyway, in that "I don't really know the protocol here for asking people to dance" sort of way, which was a little sad. But I guess it went okay overall, infact a lot better than expected, really, I didn't sit out THAT many songs. Also, the place got really warm, and I noticed a lot of people brought changes of t-shirts and whatnot, and a lot of the guys had neck towels... the bathrooms there didn't have towels either, so I think next time if I go back I have to come prepared, heh.
C and I walked back to Tamagawa Station together but it turns out that he was going to go the opposite way to Yokohama and I was going to Shibuya so... we kind of parted ways there when I had to run for my train. I'll have to send him a message sometime -- it really was fun to go dancing with him and I'm glad he dragged me.
Now the funny thing is, we had been following one of the guys from Swing down as we walked to the station. And I'd kind of said an "otsukaresama" to that guy as we passed him, since I'd danced with him a few times during the night. But it turned out that we were on the same train, so when we transferred to the tokkyu at Jiyuugaoka, I went up and started talking to him. Turns out he's from Korea and has been working in Japan for a few months, studying Japanese, and he said that today was his first day and probably last day at this swing place, because next month his company wants him to return to Korea. Doh!
Anyway, we rode the train back together as far as Ikebukuro. It was really kind of funky talking to him since his native language is Korean and he speaks no English, and I am of course vice versa, so we were talking in Japanese together. I think that might have been one of the first times I actually held an extended conversation in Japanese with another non-native speaker where it was our only common language. He was really nice, and told me about how there's a big swing dance scene in Korea. I told him that he was a really strong lead, and we talked about the differences between dancing in different countries. Fortunately, a lot of the dancing vocabulary in Japanese is kind of just borrowed from English. Unfortunately, when we got to Ikebukuro, it was THEN that he kind of asked if he could have my mail address, and there just wasn't time before getting off the train. I'm a little sad, I guess I could have taken the initiative there, though on the other hand I suppose if he's leaving the country in a few weeks then it doesn't really matter anyway.
Anyway, fun. Got back to Akabane at 10:40pm, ran into Yokado to get "dinner" and some other groceries; apparently by that point they've taken most of the prepared food off the shelves though. I got croquettes and yakitamago though and that was more than good enough for me.
I can't believe I'm saying this, but I think I will probly go back to the swing dance place next month. I don't even like swing dancing, at least not compared to ballroom. But it's really good exercise and it makes me happy to be dancing again, and hopefully I can meet some new people, maybe talk to that CMU guy again, stuff like that. We'll see.
For now, my feet are really going to fall off, though. Yikes. 20 miles of biking in two days and then 3 hours of swing dancing make Deanna something something.