Jeff in Japan

My Crazy Weekend

Introduction:
Yes, like the title says, my weekend was certainly crazy. I have a new apartment too. Witness:





It is Tuesday now, and I hope I remember enough of it to convey the extent of the craziness. It started on Friday; a good day to start, if I may say so. I finally managed to get in touch with the other Canadians in Tokyo on the co-op Japan program; so naturally, we arranged to get together for a good time. The proposed meeting place was a club called the Gas Panic (cheekily spelled Gaspanic inside) in Roppongi, the foreigner district of Tokyo. They were to watch the NBA game beforehand, and I, after getting off work at 8 or 9 PM would meet them at 10:00.

Roppongi, Friday:
Well, I arrived in Roppongi (Witness: Tower), at about 10:00 on the nose, and I had to find a payphone in order to call those Canadians. The atmosphere was way different than in the morning when I was there to go to the Chinese Embassy. It reminded me of Granville St. In the day, it’s business as usual, but at night, the streets are flooded with Jamaicans in white suits trying to hustle you inside whichever enterprise they represent. I asked some guy where a phone was in Japanese, but he didn’t understand Japanese, so I tried English, but that didn’t work either. So I resigned myself to finding a payphone without assistance. I found one in short time, and called up my friends, who were waiting at a nearby McDonalds. I met up with them there, where we caught up a little on how things were in Japan, and waited for others to arrive. At 11:00, with a group of 4 Canadians (and only 1 Caucasian in the lot of them) we headed to the GasPanic. Cover was free at said club; the caveat being that you are required to be holding a drink at all times. While on paper this theory is sound, in practice the only thing it accomplishes is that drinks get much warmer than they usually would, as the rate of consumption of an individual beverage decreases. At about 1:30, we got a call from a few more Canadians who were arriving, increasing our total party size to 7. At this point we took a hiatus from the club and headed to a local 7-11 to buy beers on the cheap before returning to the elevated cost structure of the club.



In Japan, they let you drink on the street, which totally weirded me out. I felt like a real hooligan. Anyway, me being the only white guy (and one of the 2 guys with a girlfriend), Clem recruited me to help him find chicks. I insisted that I was a natural chick magnet not because I’m white, but because I’m actually just a cool guy! (Nobody bought it.) At one point, I had a group of about 6 girls talking to me. Clem couldn’t get a girl. Even Billy, this skinny little dude, was able to pick up some girl, but not Clem. Man, it was pretty hilarious, to see him trying so hard. He tried things like telling girls I was his brother, and he was half white, or that he was actually Hawaiian. Clearly, none of these strategies worked. That night, I met a nice girl. Hanae-san was her name. I talked to her for a while, since she was supposed to meet her friends, and they weren’t there. She told me that she broke up with her boyfriend 3 weeks prior because he was cheating on her with a Korean girl, so she was sad. Man, I felt bad for her. Anyway, she eventually found her friends, at like 3:00AM, so that was cool. Though at about that time, we Canadians were discussing going to the Tsukiji fish market (famous for the sushi fresh from the ocean). It’s only open like 4:00AM till 9:00AM, so we had to catch the first train at 5:00 to get there. We invited Hanae-san and her friends to come along for breakfast, since they had never been to the fish market (it being a pretty touristy thing).



A few of them came with us, namely Hanae and her friend Taka. We got to the fish market tired and hungry. The most famous sushi shop, Daiwa Sushi, had a lineup from here till doomsday,



so we asked a local fisherman his recommended spot, and he pointed out a smaller spot close by, and there wasn’t a lineup there! Score! So we went to that place, and the sushi chef was pretty friendly.



He couldn’t speak any English though, so I did my best to talk to him in Japanese. The sushi was excellent, particularly the O-Toro, which is the most expensive… Though really it was all pretty delicious. After breakfast, Hanae and Taka had to take off to Kyoto, so they left for their train. We Canadians stuck around a little longer, looking at the little shops and stuff, then went back home. I got home at around 8:00AM and felt like death. I then slept until 2:30.

Saturday:
I woke up at 2:30. I took a shower. I went to the store. I was buying curtains and other essentials. I got what I needed. I came home. Now I have curtains and a frying pan. I love my gas stove. I went back to sleep.

Sunday: Game Day:
I woke up close to 12:00 today, after getting a good night’s sleep. The futon is surprisingly comfortable, but my pillow is too high for my liking, it hurts my neck a bit. I am contemplating buying an expensive orthopedic pillow that I’ll take back to Canada. I wanted one for a long time... Maybe as a birthday present to myself. Anyway, I planned to go to Akihabara to the Sporting Goods district to buy a medicine ball. “How expensive can they be?” I thought, maybe $20 or $30 bucks. I eventually found my way there using the poor quality map in the back of the Lonely Planet guide. There were mostly ski and board shops there, which would be cool if that’s what I were looking for (maybe I’ll come back), but as for medicine balls, I only found one shop that carried any. And the heaviest was 5kg (roughly a 12lb’er) and they wanted $100 for it!! I was outraged, and I left. I figured I would buy stuff on Amazon.co.jp later. (But I checked and it is also outrageously expensive on the internet… Sigh…) Anyway, I stopped by Electric Town on my back to Ooi, and picked up a cool little anime figure (of a hot girl, naturally, and on sale too!) and continued on. I picked up a little bit of a snack on the way to the office in the form of some gyoza. I met up with Takeshi-san there at about 4:30, and we hung out a bit waiting for some more people. Shortly after 5:00 we took off to Roppongi again (my third time). We got to the “Tokyo Sports Café” where we had to pay $40 cover. >(



We found out though, that the NHL game was rescheduled to midnight because of the World Cup. So we had some time to kill. We went to the FIFA store and bought some team Japan merchandise (I got an official towel, the cheering implement of choice.) Then we went to an okonomiyaki restaurant where I experienced okonomiyaki. It was really tasty, but you have to cook it yourself! (Jerks! What are we paying them for?)



Then when we finished eating we went back to the Sports Café. We had a little bit of time left before the game started, and there were a bunch of guys making a lot of noise cheering loudly and stuff. Takeshi-san went to join them. He was definitely the most enthusiastic of our group. He bought a Japan cape to go along with his towel. I wasn’t quite so into it as he was, but I was cheering nonetheless, and the Japanese TV cameras picked up on me, and asked me for an interview! I thought it was pretty cool! I answered the questions in Japanese, and everybody burst out cheering when I was like “Nihon no sa-ca- chi-mu ga dai suki desu!” That was exciting.



Then as the game was going the place was so hot and packed, it was crazy! It was unfortunately not a very good game though, Japan and Croatia tied 0-0. Oh well… The place emptied out, and we pulled up some chairs to watch the Stanley Cup. It wasn’t without challenge though. The people at the Sports Café kept flipping off the hockey and putting on more soccer, presumably hoping I would leave so they could fill the little void between me and the hockey TV with soccer fans. Anyway, about the time of the opening face-off this girl started talking to me. And she was pretty annoying too. She wouldn’t leave me alone. She kept following me everywhere. And showing me pictures of her cats. Holy Shit! Don’t show me pictures of your fucking cats when I’m watching the fucking Stanley Cup Playoffs fuck! And it wasn’t like I was talking to her either, I didn’t even try to speak Japanese to her! It was all English. She asked me for my email address, so I gave her my gmail… I don’t have access to that account right now anyway… :P Oh well… And because the Stanley Cup got rescheduled, we missed the last train, and were required to stay there until 5:00AM Monday morning… We eventually got out of there and went back home. Me feeling like death again. I got to sleep at about 6:30. I woke up again at about 11:00, enough time to get to work.

Monday:
Of course the guys who stayed out all night were all fucked up that morning. I wasn’t sure I could do much work that day, but as it turned out, I didn’t have to. I came in at the crack of noon. Matsumoto-san and Ito-san took me out to get my Gaijin card that day. And then after lunch I had an extended meeting with Isi-san and Gotanda-san. We started off going over the feature requests from the sound designers in regards to the midi sequencing system. Then we had a bunch of tandems and talked about various things like lighting techniques, going to University, mathematicians’ names and how Japanese people can’t pronounce English words… It was cool. I also did some laundry that day. I brought a giant sack from home, filled with all my dirty clothes, and was a little worried about the quality of the wash from the laundrymat machines. So I just washed my socks and underwear, but they seem okay. Maybe I’ll do my shirts too. Unfortunately at this point it was quite late due to that little palaver, so I postponed the shirt washing until another day.

And as I conclude this episode of my adventures, I have a stack of dirty shirts and one new clean towel.

And as always:
Till next time, keep your stick on the ice.

And this week's random photo:

posted by Jeff Sipko @ 21:25