dr4b | tadaima

I'm back from Kobe!

In short:
10pm-6am: riding bus to Osaka
6am-7am: making my way to Koshien for lack of anything better to do on a Sunday morning in Osaka
7am-8am: wandering around Koshien seeing the new renovations, eating breakfast at McDonald's
8am-9am: making my way to Skymark Stadium in Kobe
9am-11am: mostly, sitting by myself out in the FUCKING COLD waiting for the gates to open
11am-11:30am: sitting with other people I knew in the FUCKING COLD waiting for the gates to open
11:30am-1pm: being pissed off that I couldn't actually wander around the rest of the stadium
1pm-4pm: dodging rain, watching the Fighters lose 11-3, seeing Tuffy Rhodes hit his 450th, 451st, 452nd career home runs in Japan, jinxing Mamoru Kishida for pitching 5 perfect innings, etc
4pm-5:30pm: making my way to Shin-Kobe station, changing my shinkansen ticket, buying omiyage and bento, etc
5:45pm-8:30pm: shinkansen, mostly sleeping, aside from the start where I nearly killed myself with a Gaijin Trap Bento

etc. I've been cropping pictures and youtubing (including a video of Brian Sweeney juggling some baseballs. And yeah, I said hi to him. We talked about the fucking cold weather and about him getting shoved back in the rotation.)

Yeah, so I talked to a few people around me when waiting in line, but mostly was alone for a very long time. Didn't see any of the Osaka fans or Nagoya fans I know, but eventually ran into a bunch of my friends... who are from HOKKAIDO! Seriously. Naomi who met me in Sendai last year, and Nori and Mine who met me at various points that I can't remember exactly, and we sat together along with Keiji (who is also from Tokyo but showed up after gates opened). Everybody was really nice, but it rained for half the game and that sucked too :(

ugh, I need to sleep.

but hey, now I have actually seen a game in every single regularly-used pro baseball stadium in Japan (I'm not counting the ones that are used once or twice a year). well, now there's the new Hiroshima stadium, but I'm going there in June, dammit. So every pro stadium as of when I started my quest to go to them all back in the 2006 season.

I kind of wonder what the proper protocol is for giving out omiyage at school tomorrow. I bought two boxes of individual-wrapped kawara-sembei, more than enough for every teacher, I think...

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If there's an OL-type person in the office, you can probably give it to them to pass out to everybody sometime during the day. That's what we do in my office, at least. Hand it to the part-timer. But since it's your first time, you might want to just after the morning meeting go around and hand them to everyone in person. Could be a decent way to talk to the teachers there that you haven't talked to much yet.

We don't. I was debating giving it to the head teacher guy. But going around in person might be nice, or I might ask the English teachers what to do. When our art teacher got back from Korea a week or two ago he gave people omiyage in person in the afternoon, but Korea is a much bigger deal...

Either way you do it, they'll probably just be surprised (in a good way) that you got them stuff.

I found a song yesterday with some pretty cool harmonies. Here's a video of the exact show I was watching last night.

Quite surprised, yeah.

Hm, interesting song. Might be too high for me to sing her part, but I could try...

Hee! Tell me more about these "Gaijin Trap Bento".
... I need to know what to look out for when I visit Japan next year. ;)

It's a sukiyaki bento. It has a heating unit. The idea is you don't open the box at all but pull on this one string which rips open the heating unit and leave it for 5 minutes to steam hot inside the box.

I didn't get the memo, so I opened the box, wondered why it was so cold, wondered what the hell was under the food box, found the heating unit, pulled the string to open it, and BAM! hot steam erupted and kind of burned two of my fingers. Only mildly though, you can't even SEE the burns, but damn does it hurt when anything touches it. I spent half the trip back with my hand against a cold bottle of soda.

Also, without the box as a container for the steam the bento doesn't really cook very well.

Fortunately, it was tasty regardless of being heated up. And next time I will know how it works, I want to try it again sometime.

You know, I didn't notice that part of your post, but a hotel I stayed at once with a food vending machine sold those and I had a curry one for dinner that night. I probably would have done the same thing but there were directions written all around the machine.

I'm thankful for the memo! :D I will search my food for strings before opening (especially on trains).

Hey there! Sorry, I'm really backlogged on my LJ blogs. Are you still with GEOS? What do your students think of having a Gaijin whose so into Japanese baseball?

Nope, not with GEOS. Officially quit last August, was supposed to be there until December, then they downsized some schools in October and I got cut around then (my old school actually JUST closed, from what I hear). I went home to the US for the winter to spend a few months with my dad before he died of cancer, then came back here in Feb/March... got a job at the start of April as an ALT at a public junior high school in Tokyo. It is QUITE different, and actually a lot harder in a lot of ways, which is funny because everyone says how going from eikaiwa to ALT jobs is supposed to be a piece of cake. I suppose the good part is that I have my evenings free and Saturday-Sunday weekends like normal people, but the bad part is I have to wake up at 6am every day.

At GEOS, though, my students loved hearing my baseball stories. I was going on trips every weekend and bringing back omiyage, plus that every week there'd be new photos of me with various baseball players or in various parks that I'd post on the wall. So far, I have not been making that big a deal of it at the JHS, especially since, for whatever reason, I am working at one of the like, 5% of schools in Japan that does NOT have a baseball club. Seriously.

I'm trying to plan a trip back to Sapporo in August during summer vacation, I hope.

When is summer break in August again? We'll actually be back in Sapporo in late August to visit friends and family. Though I suppose the break is during Obon, and we won't be there then..

My summer break is actually all of August, except a few days to help kids with speech contests and whatnot.

I forget what week/weekend I was planning to go up there though. Is that the only place in Japan you're visiting when you come?

Well, Asahikawa, Sapporo, and Otaru, so only in Hokkaido. When we go to Japan now, it's to visit the in-laws (Asahikawa) and friends (Sapporo, Otaru), not really for sight-seeing.

tadaima

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