3 posts tagged “nights on the town”

My apologies in advance for the lengthiness of this post. I had briefly debated posting before class last Friday, but not too much had happened between Tuesday afternoon and Friday morning, so it didn’t seem worth the effort. But then the weekend turned out a little crazy, and suddenly this post is ridiculously long. Not much I can do about it now, though.

 

 

Tuesday, July 15^th

After I posted my last entry from the computer lab, I studied for the kanji test and then went to class as usual. The kanji test was easier than I’d expected. Also, our Tuesday teacher, Saitou-sensei, turned out to be a very fun teacher as well. This was the first time I’d had her, but it seems that some of the Koreans have had her as a teacher before. Something about her attitude and the way she conducted the class seemed to get everyone to loosen up a little, and people began to talk to each other more. It’s like the class bonded a little. It was a good feeling.

 

I left straight for the subway station after class with Sean and Shaunte and the rest of the people going to see Wicked. I had thought that the show was fairly close by, but it wasn’t. It was in Shiodome, which is pretty close to the bay. We had to transfer trains three times to get there. The show started at 6:30pm, and we got there around 6. I was about to die of hunger, so I ran over to McDonalds to grab a bite to eat before the show. I tried the shrimp burger, and it was delicious. Much better than I had expected.

 

As for the show, it was all kinds of amazing. I’ve seen many musicals live, but this wasn’t one of them. I was familiar with most of the music and had a vague notion of the story, but that was about it. I was really impressed. The singers were top-class, the acting was good, and the technical production of the show was just hands-down amazing. The costumes, the make-up, the lighting, the sets… all of them were SO good. It was interesting seeing a musical in Japanese. Aside from the fact that of course there were a lot of words I didn’t know, the actors’ speech and singing was very clear, so the stuff that I did know was easy to understand. It also helped that it was all in formal Japanese, which I’m more used to hearing because that’s what you use in the classroom. I find listening to and processing informal Japanese a lot more difficult, so I was glad they used formal in the show. I managed to grasp the general gist of what was happening, and luckily Sean has seen the show 6 times (in English), so his explanation of the story helped fill in some of the gaps.

 

Afterwards, we tried to find out if they were selling CDs of the Japanese version of the musical, but it turns out those aren’t going on sale until next week, for some reason. Sean said he’ll probably go back just to buy the CD because he really wants one.

 

We got back on the subway and headed home. Luckily, this time, Shaunte and I only had to change trains twice. Still, we got back very close to curfew. We pulled into our stop at 10:40pm, and then we still had to walk from the station to the dorm. It made me a little jittery. Yeah, if we showed up 5-10 minutes late, I’m fairly sure the dorm mother would still let us in, but I don’t want to test that theory and find out that I’m wrong.

 

 

Wednesday, July 16^th

Today, starting at 11:30am, they were selling yukatas (summer kimonos, made of thinner and cheaper fabric) at school for cheaper than you’ll find them pretty much anywhere else—¥4000 for women and ¥6000 for men. That price includes the obi, obi ties, wooden geta sandals, and a purse for women, so it’s a very, very good deal. I figured I should take advantage of it, so I got there right at 11:30 to make sure I got first choice. The good news was that unlike many stores, which carry only one size, they also had longer yukatas for taller women. The bad news was that tall women only had 4 different designs to choose from, while they had many, many designs and colors for the regular size yukatas. I’d really been hoping for a green or purple one, but I could only choose from red, pink, dark blue, and black. I ended up going with the dark blue one because I figured it was the one that would look best on me. I was a little bummed out about not being able to get the kind of design and color I’d been wanting, but I did realize that it’s great to actually find a yukata long enough for me. I don’t know how to wear it yet (because I don’t know how to tie the obi), but there’s a special session for that next Wednesday before school which I plan to attend.

 

Other than that, there’s not too much to say about today. Having Fujimura for class was fun, as usual. There was a funny moment when Evan complimented his new shoes and he did a slightly girlish pose for the class to show them off. He also admitted to always being very nervous before class starts. I’m guessing he hasn’t been teaching for all that long. He is only 25, after all. I think it’s adorable, though.

 

After class, I walked back to the main building to go home with Shaunte and Cat like I always do, but they weren’t there. When I asked Lane, he said they’d already taken off. He said they were planning to go to some indie concert with him later that night, and he invited me to come as well. However, I hate both indie rock and Japanese bands, so the combination of the two was entirely unappealing to me. I stopped by Tokyu Hands to buy more flashcards and then headed straight home. It’s been a disappointingly boring night because I don’t really have anything to do but homework and studying.

 

 

Thursday, July 17^th

I had no reason to be at school early today, so I wasn’t planning to leave until around noon, but Cat and Shaunte came to get me around 11:30am. Lucky that they did, because it turned out that the subway line we usually take to school had broken down. We had to take the Yurakucho line to Ikebukuro and then transfer to the Fukutoshin (the line we usually take), which was running fine between Ikebukuro and Shibuya. It didn’t end up costing us that much extra time, but we ended up picking up chien mei shou, which are little forms to turn into your boss/teacher that legitimize the delay and say how late you’re allowed to be. In our case, we could’ve been 60 minutes late, according to the forms. It seems it was no minor problem.

 

We had Takahashi for class again. We did the usual kanji and grammar and such, and then we had to write another in-class composition. This time she assigned us the topic (something about our childhood, a memory or something like that) so I found it a little bit easier to do, I guess because I’m more used to working within constraints and restrictions.

 

After class, Evan and I were invited by several of the Koreans to a nomikai, which is basically Japanese for “to meet for drinks”. At first, they wanted us to meet them in Shibuya at 7pm, but when Evan and I explained that we’d like to have dinner first and that there wasn’t enough time for us to go back home, eat, and then make it to Shibuya by 7, we decided to all go to dinner as a group.

 

Evan said that he really wanted to eat some good Korean food, so Sang Mook (who was the main organizer of the entire shindig) took us to a Korean barbeque place in Shibuya. He also did all the ordering for us. I’ve gotten used to not knowing what I’m eating and being fine with that, but when the waiters brought out plates of decidedly-not-meat-looking red spirally things and said it was pork, Evan couldn’t resist the urge to ask Un Young what part of the pig it was. When she rubbed her belly and I realized we were looking at pig intestines, I got a little queasy. When they later followed up the pork with a plate of chicken, I told Evan, “Please don’t ask them what part of the chicken this is.”

 

The food was really good though, aside from the pig intestines, which weren’t really disgusting, but they didn’t really have much flavor and were very chewy. Putting sauce on it helped a little, but the chewiness just wasn’t my thing, so I didn’t end up eating a lot of them. The chicken and beef were delicious, however. Truly some of the best meat I’ve had.

 

After dinner, we headed to a bar Evan likes to call “his” bar because it’s where he likes to take people anytime they’re going for a drink. It’s a kind of hole-in-the-wall place whose main attraction is the fact that during happy hour (6-9pm every day), all drinks are ¥500. Beer, cocktails, shots… everything is ¥500. That also includes these half-liter glasses of real Paulaner (German) beer. Evan highly recommended the latter, so for the first round, everybody got one of those.

 

Both at dinner and at the bar, I spent a lot of time talking to the Koreans, especially Ji Young, who sits next to me in class and seems to find me very interesting. It was good practice because they speak very little English, so we have to speak Japanese to communicate. Also, unlike with the Japanese girls at the dorm, we use mostly formal Japanese, which, again, I tend to find much easier to understand. When they brought us the Paulaner at the bar, I also discovered that Un Young studied German in high school and has been to Munich (where I lived in Germany) and the Netherlands before. It’s moments like this—when you find yourself sharing broken German with a Korean in the middle of Tokyo—that you fully realize that you can never predict where life will take you.

 

We also spent quite a bit of time playing the “game” of guess-each-other’s-ages. This can be tricky when you’re dealing with Asians, but I guess I’ve learned to notice the little clues. I managed to correctly guess that Mi Hee is 22 and Un Young and He Jin are both 24. I guessed that Ji Young is 35, and it turns out she’s 38, so I was close. I already knew that Sang Mook is 30. The only one I was totally off on was Hee Jeon. I guessed that she was 25 and it turns out she’s actually 30 as well. Most of them knew I’m 20, but Ji Young said that when she first met me, she’d thought I’m about 32. Seriously?! Do I look that old?! It’s a bit disconcerting.

 

I left the bar a little before everyone else did because I still had curfew to worry about. I headed for the subway station as quickly as possible. When I got to my track, I had a choice between a local train that was about to depart and an express train. I figured that the express train would be the best choice because it would allow me to skip 7 stops. However, I didn’t realize that the express train was going to sit in Shibuya station for another 15 minutes before departing. When we didn’t roll into Ikebukuro until 10:45pm, I got really jittery. We made it to my stop at 10:48, after which I jogged back to the dorm. I made it in the door at 10:55. Close, but safe.

 

 

Friday, July 18^th

I went to school early today to join the school newspaper club. The school offers a few co-curricular classes having to do with various aspects of Japanese culture. Many of them sound interesting, but I can’t join most of the classes I wanted to because they’re for Level 3 students and above. I ended up deciding to go to the newspaper co-curricular “class” because Takahashi-sensei and Fujimura-sensei are the two teachers who run it, and Takahashi-sensei encouraged me to join because they need a design person.

 

We didn’t do a whole lot today. Co-curricular classes are always from 12:30-1:15pm, and in 45 minutes you can’t really get that much done. We mostly did introductions, where we said what we were interested in doing. The newspaper articles consist mostly of reports about school events and interviews with the teachers. However, they also encourage us to go beyond the school and write articles about things we see, do, or eat. Towards the end, they split us up into groups of 3, and every group is supposed to come up with some event to go to together and write an article about. I was put in a group with two Korean students I hadn’t met before. The girl and I really want to go to an omatsuri (a traditional festival) but the boy complained that they’re usually far and that there’s too many people. We didn’t manage to decide on something, but that turned out to be okay. Most of the groups couldn’t decide, so we’re supposed to research things we want to do and then get back with the same group next Friday and decide.

 

After that, I had my regular Friday class with our horrible Friday teacher. Everyone hates Imi-sensei, and yesterday at the nomikai it had been suggested a couple of times that we all call in sick today, but everyone still showed up to class.

 

Only one notable thing happened. During the 15-minute break at 3pm, I was called down to meet with Takahashi-sensei. It turns out that one of the Chinese boys and I were chosen to represent our class in the school speech contest on July 31^st. We’d had to read the speeches that we wrote in class last Thursday to the class on Monday and Tuesday, and everybody had rated each other’s speeches. I’m fairly sure that that was mostly bullshit, though, and that the teachers decided on their own who they wanted to have represent our class. Takahashi-sensei explained quite bluntly that one of the reasons the Chinese kid and I were chosen was because we’re not Korean. It’s true that the Korean students’ speeches earlier this week were boring and all sounded the same. Takahashi-sensei told me, “You’re from the Netherlands. Most of us have never met a Dutch person before. You should give a speech about that. I’m sure everyone would love to know more about the Netherlands.” The same thing had happened to Yana (who is from Bulgaria) earlier this week, which was why I wasn’t really all that surprised that I was chosen. I had kind of been expecting it. That doesn’t mean I actually want to do it, though. Public speaking is one of my worst nightmares. I can’t even give speeches in English, let alone in a language I still only barely have a grasp of. Unfortunately, there wasn’t really a way to say no. I thought about arguing that every other class has only one representative, so she should just have the Chinese kid represent our class by himself, but on the other hand, I honestly think that he’s one of the dumbest kids in our class, and I’d feel guilty and angry if he represented us alone. That doesn’t mean that I’m happy to give this speech, though. Aside from my stage fright, the fact that I have to memorize it and can’t use note cards at all is going to be a problem. I don’t know what I’m going to do.

 

After class, I went back to the main building to look for Shaunte and Cat, but just like on Wednesday, they’d taken off without waiting for me or saying a word at all. It honestly kind of upset me. At least when I went to the nomikai yesterday, I had Sean give them the message since he passes by the main building on the way to the train station. Is it weird that I expect my friends to tell me when they’re not going to stick around and go home with me like usual? Am I expecting too much? Sometimes I just don’t know anymore.

 

I ended up walking to the station with Evan, Tyler, Robyn, Brad & co. Robyn, Brad, and Miguel wanted to go bar-hopping in Shibuya and invited me along, but my top priority was to go home and take a shower. Since I didn’t get back until 10:55pm last night and we can only shower before 11, I hadn’t gotten to shower at all, and since it’s been an average of 34°C and humid every day this week, I felt positively disgusting. So, instead, I got on the subway with Evan, who rides the same line as I do, only his stop is further. We talked about various things. He says he might go hiking next weekend with the Koreans, and he invited me to join them. That would be really exciting. I love hiking.

 

Once home, I had a pretty lamesauce night of reading, making kanji flashcards, playing PSP, and feeling bored. Shaunte and Cat were there when I walked into the dining room for dinner, but they left shortly after we all took showers. I guess they’re out for the whole night again.

 

 

Saturday, July 19^th & Sunday, July 20^th

I woke up in time for breakfast and then went back to bed for a little while. When I got up again around 9am, Shaunte and Cat still weren’t back. Rather than sitting around and waiting for them and feeling lamesauce again, I figured I should go do something by myself.  I ended up going to Shibuya, to walk around a little and take a few pictures. There weren’t really that many people around, which is pretty unusual for Shibuya. But then, stores in Japan often tend to open later than we’re used to in the West. It seems that many of the stores there don’t open until 11am or noon, and I was there at 10:30. When it opened at 12pm, I headed into the Mandarake there again. Since I didn’t have to worry about making Shaunte and Cat wait on me again, I took my time to explore the store, to try to find the things some of my friends back home want me to bring back for them. I didn’t really have any luck, but I do feel like I understand the set-up and layout of the store better.

 

I was back at the dorm by 2:30pm. Shaunte and Cat still weren’t back. I was surprised, because Evan was having a shindig at his house at 6pm and I’d told them yesterday they were invited. In order to get there by 6, we needed to leave here by 5:30pm at the very latest. I’d told them that. And yet the hours passed and they still didn’t return. I’m not upset that I wasn’t invited. We don’t have to do everything together, and I knew they were meeting up with a college friend. But I’m still a little bit upset that they didn’t really mention much about it to me—what they were doing, how long they’d be out… I was honestly kind of worried that something had happened to them, but I had no way of contacting them.

 

I ended up running into them just as I was walking to the station at 5:20pm. They said they still planned to go to Evan’s shindig, but they wanted to go and shower and change first. So, I ended up heading for Evan’s place by myself. He was going to be waiting at his station at 6pm, but he said that he wasn’t sticking around for too long to wait for people. I didn’t remember the way to his house and I didn’t have his cell phone number, so I didn’t want to risk being late and getting to the station and not finding him there.

 

I’d timed it perfectly, though, and made it to his stop at 5:57pm, a couple of minutes before he got there himself. Unfortunately, my timeliness ended up being rather unnecessary. Part of the reason Evan had had this shindig at his house was because he wanted the Koreans from our class to come so he could cook for them. 4 of the girls had promised to come. However, he hadn’t thought to get any of their cell phone numbers, so when they didn’t show up around 6pm, we waited. And waited. And waited. At 7, he finally decided to call Sang Mook, who then called the girls and told them to call Evan. They said they were on their way. They had thought that Evan had said 7 instead of 6. Still, by the time they showed up, it was almost 8. We had waited at the station for 2 hours. It was a little frustrating, because I hadn’t eaten lunch and was starving. It also just generally always pisses me off when people don’t have the decency to show up to someone’s place on time, without letting the other person know they’ll be late.

 

Evan had made us Mexican haystacks, which are basically taco fillings on top of steamed rice. Delicious. Since there were considerably fewer people than he’d been expecting, Evan invited some of his old high school friends. (He went to an international high school here, and it seems that many of his former classmates are here for the summer. They all seem to still live in the same neighborhood, too.) I felt vaguely awkward, between Evan’s old friends and the Koreans who were there because they love Evan. I was a little reliever when Cat and Shaunte showed up around 9:30~10pm, and Tyler showed up a little afterwards. Brad and Miguel had planned to come but ended up not being able to make it after all. No one knew what had happened to Kevin. We’d all thought he was coming, but he doesn’t have a phone, so we couldn’t call him.

 

Around 11:30pm, we headed to Shibuya to go clubbing. The Korean girls really wanted to go dancing with Evan, and the rest of us were up for it as well. Evan’s high school friends didn’t go, so it was me, Evan, Shaunte, Cat, Tyler, and the Korean girls: Gyeon Mi, He Jin, Hee Jeon, and Mi Hee. Hee Jeon had suggested that we go to Club Atom, which is the club we’d tried to go to for my birthday last weekend, where they have different music in different floors, including a techno floor. The techno floor was half the reason why I agreed to go. I love dancing in general, and yes, I can dance to hip hop, but I’m just sick of hip hop clubs and grinding and the overall sleaziness of it all. Besides, if I wanted to go to a hip hop club, I’d just go in the U.S. To me, the whole appeal of clubbing in Tokyo is the fact that they actually have big clubs that don’t just play hip hop. You won’t find those in Houston or Pittsburgh.

 

I didn’t remember how to find my way to or around the club district of Shibuya, but Cat said she knew where Club Atom was, so she led us there. When we got there, there wasn’t a sign that said “Club Atom” anywhere, so I was a bit alarmed, but Cat seemed sure this was the place. Hee Jeon had told us that cover would be ¥1000 if we got there before midnight but ¥2000 after. Since it was around 12:30pm, we all expected to pay ¥2000, which was what they charged us, so the price seemed right. However, when we went inside, we were met with blaring loud hip hop music, when the hip hop floor at Club Atom is supposed to be the top floor. We started looking for the stairs, but found none. Evan asked a guy at the bar how to get to the other floors. He laughed at us and said that this was all there was. I realized then that I had been right to be alarmed earlier—we were at the wrong club, and all they had here was hip hop.

 

I was angry, frustrated, and upset. I had had my heart so set on dancing to techno tonight that I had a hard time accepting that I would have to put up with hip hop. The worst part was that there was nothing I could do about it. Even if I left and tried to find Club Atom, I didn’t have the money to pay for cover again, and clubs are not the kind of place where you can ask for a refund. I was pissed off that I’d paid the equivalent of $20 for a place that I didn’t want to be at, especially when I can get into most hip hop clubs in the States for free. But I was stuck. It was after 12:30am, so the subway was no longer running, and even if I’d managed to find the money to pay for a cab (which could’ve easily cost me $100), I’d still be locked out of the dorm until 6am. It was the first time since I got here that I was genuinely unhappy to be here and wished myself away—and it didn’t really have anything to do with Tokyo itself, but it was the frustration of the trains not running and the fucking ridiculous curfew rules of my dorm, which was quickly followed by a wave of homesickness. The prospect of having to spend 5 whole hours at a place I vehemently didn’t want to be at just killed me. I love Tokyo otherwise, but at least this sort of shitty situation would never happen to me in the States.

 

The other reason I got really upset was because it was soon clear that although this hadn’t been anyone’s first choice club, ultimately, all the others were still fine with this. Even if we’d gone to Club Atom, chances were, most of them would’ve ended up spending most of their time on the hip hop floor, so they didn’t have much trouble accepting this other environment. When it sank in that I was the only one feeling miserable, I felt lonelier than I’ve felt since I got here. I also admit to being genuinely pissed at Cat for leading us to the wrong place, much moreso than she deserved. Yeah, it was stupid to lead us into a club without paying attention to the signs, but everyone makes mistakes. Unfortunately, I still had enough alcohol in my system at that point (I’d had 5 or 6 beers at Evan’s place earlier) that the rage built up quickly and made me feel like she had lied to us, especially when I noticed that she was just fine with this club, too. There were also small seeds of jealousy, because she and Shaunte have been to The Womb, an all-techno club, twice. When I’m the one whose musical passion in life is electronica, why was I the only one who hadn’t been to a techno club?!

 

When I realized that my emotions were quickly spinning out of control, I ran outside for a breather. They had a locker area with a bench near the entrance where I ended up sitting for probably a good half hour trying to gain control of myself again. I did my best to shake the vague sense of homesickness but ended up crying a little bit. When I finally felt like the wave of emotions had mostly passed, I went to the bathroom to freshen up a bit. I told myself I’d be fine. The crying had killed my buzz, so I told myself that I just needed a drink. As long as I wasn’t sober, I could try to forget that I was someplace I didn’t want to be, dance, and make the best of it.

 

I went to the bar to cash in my drink voucher for a Tequila Sunrise. The cover charge had included a coupon for one free drink. Some clubs really water down their drinks, but this one was pretty well-made, and I could feel the alcohol start to take effect almost right away. I went and found my friends, who were dancing in a circle near the side. I sat down to finish my drink, just observing the club and watching people dance.

 

To be fair, it wasn’t a terrible club. It was a definite improvement over Gas Panic. They actually had space for a dance floor as well as a stage and a visible DJ booth where you could make requests. More of the people, guys included, seemed to be here to dance/party and not just to hook up. On the bad side, the fact that they had a stage meant that they had go-go dancers, in stripper outfits, doing sleazy things like pretending to whip each other and whatnot. It was one of the most tasteless things I’ve seen. The music also wasn’t spectacular. They played quite a few older hip hop songs that kind of stopped being cool a couple of years ago.

 

At any rate, point being, I was just watching people dance in front of me, not really consciously thinking too hard about anything in particular, when all of a sudden, I started crying again. It didn’t take long for one of the Korean girls to notice and to bring it to everyone else’s attention, and before I knew it, I was causing a scene. This was not at all my intention, but for some reason, I just could not stop crying. I’m aware that alcohol sometimes has that effect, but it had never happened to me before personally, so it was a pretty bizarre experience.

 

A short while after I finished my drink, I managed to calm down. I tried to dance a bit with the others and make sure that I wasn’t spoiling anyone’s night. I honestly didn’t mean to be a brat, but I guess a lot of frustrations were coming to the surface—not just from the club and not being able to go home, but from this entire past week… being forced into the speech contest, getting ditched/left behind by Cat and Shaunte several times, somehow never being able to hold onto money for very long here despite my best efforts to budget all my expenditures carefully, and just generally enjoying myself less than I have been. I don’t know. I’ve just been less happy than I usually am.

 

Sometime later, I had another drink, this time without the negative side effects. I got into the dancing a little more. Ironically, while I was starting to feel better and better, it seemed as though the others were enjoying themselves less and less. There was something weird about this club. People just weren’t really mingling very much. They were dancing in their own little groups or just standing by the side watching and drinking. The guys seemed to be more into the go-go dancers than anyone else. Many of the girls looked bored, but when Tyler (who was making quite an effort to pick up Japanese girls) offered to buy them drinks (which often girls will accept, because hey, it’s a free drink), none of them wanted anything. It was weird. It was like the party never really got started.

 

Around 3am, Evan suggested that we all go to karaoke for an hour. Everyone agreed that we were much more likely to have a good time there, so we all left the club. Many karaoke places charge extra between 2 and 5am, but Evan knew of a place that’s ¥1000 an hour regardless of the time of day, drinks included, so we went there. It was actually a pretty cool place. They had a good selection of English, Japanese, and Korean songs, so everyone was happy. I tried singing a couple of Japanese songs. It didn’t work as well in practice as it did in my head, but then, I was perhaps a little less sober than is optimal for karaoke. Evan and I also sang Incubus’ “Drive” together, which is probably one of my all-time favorite karaoke songs.

 

By the time we left the karaoke place, it was around 4:30am. There was brief talk of going to Gas Panic, since there was no cover, but everyone was getting tired. The Korean girls ended up going home together because one of them has an apartment nearby. The rest of us went to First Kitchen, a McDonald’s-esque place whose main appeal was that they were serving breakfast burgers (though they charged a whopping 15% extra between 2 and 5am—pretty scandalous, but no one was in the mood to argue). We all got food and sat down and talked.

 

I remembered from the first time we’d gone clubbing that the first Fukutoshin leaves Shibuya at exactly 5:20am, so around 5, we headed for the station. We timed it really well, because by the time everyone had used the restrooms there and walked down to the track, the first train rolled in. It was a local train, so it was a 20~25-minute ride to our stop (an express does it in 15 minutes) during which I almost fell asleep a couple of times. The walk from the station to the dorm was tough, too. Luckily, our dorm mother’s mother-in-law happened to be outside taking a stroll when we got there, so she let us into the building. Once in my room, I barely had the energy to change into my pajamas before collapsing in bed.

 

I didn’t bother setting an alarm clock because normally I can’t sleep for very long after drinking alcohol. 4, 5 hours at most and I’m wide awake. To my surprise, I slept until 2pm. Cat sleeps for a long time, while Shaunte is the same as me, so the first thing I did was check whether Shaunte was up yet. She didn’t seem to be, though. I ate lunch, washed my face, and then went back to my room to play PSP for a while, expecting Shaunte to come knocking on my door when she was up like she usually does.

 

Before I knew it, it was around 6pm or so, and Shaunte had never come knocking. I went out into the hall and noticed that Cat’s slippers were no longer outside her door. When I went downstairs to check the name sign board, I saw that not only were Shaunte and Cat gone, but they had put up the forms that we have to fill out when we want to stay out all night.

 

So once again, they had left me without saying a word about where they were going, my one pet peeve. I don’t care if you don’t want me along, but at least freaking tell me that you’re leaving so that I know I should make my own plans or something. Not that I have that many options, given that I have no phone and no one else’s numbers… I once again wondered if it was a mistake not to get a cell phone. I hadn’t thought it would matter because the first couple of weeks, it seemed like Shaunte and Cat and I were going to do most things together. But if they’re going to continue leaving me behind, I’m going to need a phone so I can try to make some of my own plans with other people. Is it still worth it, though? We’re now down to less than four weeks.

 

At any rate, given that it was already after 6pm, it wasn’t really worth it to go out anymore. I was pissed, because it’s a three-day weekend, so the last thing I wanted was to be hanging around the dorm feeling lamesauce again. What else was there to do, though?

 

It seems that some of the emotions of last night carried over into today. I feel moody, lonely, and a tad bit homesick. I still don’t want to leave Tokyo, but I miss people. I miss the people I know care about me. I miss knowing who I can turn to when I’ve had a bad day and need to talk to someone about it—and, hell, having the means to talk to them. This isolation is driving me nuts. I half debated walking to a pay phone and trying to call somebody, but it’s so expensive, you can barely have a conversation. Maybe I should get a cell phone, so I can at least e-mail people.

 

This is not turning out to be a very good weekend.

 

 

Monday, July 21^st

As I mentioned, it’s a three-day weekend. July 20^th is called 「海の日」 (Ocean Day) and is, for some reason, considered a national holiday. Since the 20^th was a Sunday, everyone gets the following Monday (i.e. today) off. No class, and most people have off work.

 

I woke up at 7:30am, only to discover that holidays are apparently like Sundays, and the dorm mother doesn’t cook for us. This was slightly inconvenient because I was starving, and the suupaa doesn’t open until 9am. The Japanese really aren’t morning people, I guess. Everything opens so late.

 

Today was also the last day of the International Lesbian & Gay Film Festival—the one we’d tried to see a movie at two Fridays ago, but it was sold out. Shaunte had asked me to go see one of the movies with her before it ended, so I’d flipped through the booklet and decided that the showing I was most interested in was a selection of 6 different Asian short films about homosexuality that were being screened at 11:30am in a theater in Aoyama (near Shibuya). Given the fact that I wanted to make sure I had enough time to find the cinema and that I still needed to buy tickets, that meant leaving the dorm between 9:30 and 10am. I had put a note outside Shaunte’s door to that effect last night. Cat’s slippers were already outside her door at 7:30, so I guessed they had gotten back around 6am. Still, I knew that the chances of Shaunte being energetic enough to go with me, after three nights of staying out all night, were slim, but I had still wanted to give her the option. I waited until 9:50am and then headed out on my own. Being alone has never stopped me from doing anything, it just sucks when you’ve gotten used to having company.

 

The theater turned out to be really easy to find because it was right on Aoyama-dori near the Omotesando intersection, so I’d been to the area before. There was already a long line when I got there, but I didn’t have any trouble buying tickets at the door. A couple of months ago, mom and I had talked about the sharp rise in the price of movie tickets in the U.S. since we’d first moved there. We complained about having to pay $8, $9 for a regular evening ticket these days. Well, I’m never going to complain about the price of movie tickets in the U.S. again. Movie tickets in Japan cost an average of ¥1500. I was there for the first showing of the day, and I still paid ¥1550.

 

I ran into Brad and Miguel in the lobby, although that was not a huge surprise. I’d known that they wanted to catch several of the movies. I just hadn’t known they were planning to go to this particular one. We all sat together and made friends with this Australian kid called Daniel who was there by himself.

 

The films were very, very good. I thought it was definitely worth going, and even worth the expensive movie ticket. I had picked this showing because A) it seemed like something unusual that I probably wouldn’t ever have the opportunity to see anywhere else, and B) from the pictures and the descriptions in the booklet, the short films all seemed very artsy. They really were very artsy, and they were all very good. At least, none of them were 100% outright bad. Even if the story or the acting weren’t always superb, the cinematography usually made up for it.

 

There was one that I really didn’t like. It was about a guy who goes to these (implied) orgy parties and gets high and sleeps around. It was just awkward and not very compelling, even though the cinematography and music were good. It was the only one that didn’t have English subtitles or wasn’t in English, but I don’t know that understanding what was being said would’ve made me enjoy it more. Then there was one about two guys who have a one-night stand that I didn’t enjoy too much, mostly because the younger guy’s acting wasn’t 100% convincing, and the older guy’s acting was fine, but his character just gave me the creeps. The ones I did really enjoy were a very intense one about a mother slowly admitting to herself that her son is gay (though very cryptically and poetically, with some great one-liners); a cute Spanish one that was included because it was written & directed by a Singaporean, about a boy catching his parents having a threesome with his uncle and how he relives that experience when his little sister asks him what sex is; and a very poetic Taiwanese film about a boy knowing most of his life that something’s wrong with him and then, when a new guy joins his class at school, slowly beginning to realize that he might be gay. That last one was actually 38 minutes, but the others were all less than 15 minutes long. It’s amazing how much more some directors can say with a 15-minute film than others do in an entire feature-length movie.

 

Brad and Miguel were also going to the movie after this showing, so we parted ways. Rather than heading straight home, I decided to walk around the area for a bit. In particular, I wanted to look for a specific souvenir shop. My cousin Annemarieke was here for 6 months doing an architecture exchange program several years ago, so I’d asked her for tips on places to go, and among a host of things, she had mentioned that one of the best and cheapest souvenir shops is located on the Omotesando. Since I was there anyway, I figured I should try to look for it.

 

I think I managed to find the store she was talking about. It wasn’t cheap cheap. You might be able to find cheaper things at Don Quixote or a ¥100 shop. However, the stuff they sell truly looks like good quality, so given the fact that you are actually buying something genuinely nice, it’s not expensive. I didn’t end up buying anything yet, but I made a mental inventory of the place, so I can come back later. To my aggravation, among other things, they sell yukatas and kimonos—with yukatas for tall people, too. They even have them in a size taller than at school, as well. And what’s worse? They have them in the shade of purple that I’d been wanting, and their designs in general are a lot nicer than the ones I’d had to choose from last week. And the yukatas themselves are only ¥3700. It’s true that yes, the school did have a slightly better deal because the ¥4000 I paid included the obi, obi ties, geta sandals (which don’t fit me), and a purse. But had I known that for a little more, I could get the color and design I wanted, I would’ve held off. I really regretted settling for something I’d known I wasn’t 100% happy with, and I seriously debated buying the purple yukata and giving the dark blue one I’d bought to my sister. In the end, I decided not to do it… yet. I’ll go to the yukata-wearing class on Wednesday and see how the blue one looks on me, and if I decide that I don’t like it, I can always go back and buy the purple one.

 

After I finished browsing the store, I headed back toward the Shibuya subway station. I had almost made it to the Omotesando and Aoyama-dori intersection when an Asian girl coming the other way suddenly stopped in the middle of the pavement and pointed and gaped at me. I couldn’t really see her face because it was hidden behind a pair of big sunglasses, so confused as to why this Asian girl was pointing at me, I slowed my walk as I approached her. Only when I came closer did I recognize her: it was So Hyung, a girl who’s in my Communication Design class at CMU. We’re not really friends, but she’s the same year as me, so we’ve had most classes together since Freshman year and I guess we know each other pretty well. It was the most random encounter of my life. It was one of those things where, if I’d left the souvenir shop 5 minutes later, or if she’d been looking the other way, we’d probably never have seen each other and never been aware of the fact that we’re both in Tokyo. Turns out she’s just here traveling and being a tourist. She’s leaving in 2 days. Still, talk about really strange coincidences.

 

I took the subway and made it back to the dorm around 2:30pm. I did homework, took a nap for about an hour, went to the suupaa to buy food for dinner (and more green tea ice cream—yummy!), and hung out with Shaunte in her room for a while. Cat had disappeared again, this time without even telling Shaunte where she was going. Shaunte said that Cat could very well be out all night again, but she herself was tired of partying. She’s done with that for a while. We talked about both making lists of the things we still want to do in Tokyo before we leave sometime within the next few days. Touristy things. If Shaunte’s game, then maybe I don’t need a phone after all.

 

I also rewrote my speech for the speech contest. I was lying on my bed writing when everything shook for maybe 10, 15 seconds. Distracted by the epic sentence I was composing in my head, I simply attributed it to a large passing truck or something of that nature. It was only later, when I stopped by Shaunte’s room again for a little while and she asked, “Did you feel the earthquake?” that I put 2 and 2 together. I know it sounds crazy, but I’d never experienced an earthquake before, so I’d secretly been hoping that I’d get to while I’m here, and I was a little disappointed that it was so short and anti-climactic. I suppose I should be glad no damage was done, though.

 

I have a test tomorrow, so I studied a little, though less than I probably should. I just don’t feel motivated. I’m pretty exhausted from my crazy and emotional weekend. I guess I’ll just try to cram in some studying in the morning.

 

 

Tuesday, July 22^nd

Today, things are pretty much back to normal. Class as usual, though I don’t know how much time the test is going to take up. They didn’t give us any hints as to what the format is going to be like, so I’m not sure what to expect.

 

I’m at school early to use the computer lab again. I just skimmed over this entry again before posting, and I realized it’s sure been an interesting week. Between eating pig intestines, having my first bout of homesickness, and my first earthquake, I guess a lot’s happened. Let’s hope this coming week is just as eventful.

A couple of people e-mailed me to let me know that there was something wrong with my post last time. The text was getting cut off in weird ways. I’m not sure what happened. The Internet café I went to didn’t have Word, so when I tried to copy-paste my entry from their imitation Word program, things went haywire. I was able to fix it the next day, though, by re-c&ping the post from the school computer lab. Hopefully everyone’s been able to read it just fine since then.

 

 

Wednesday, July 9^th

As I mentioned in my last post, today was the first day of the official school term. After I left the computer lab, I had to go to the school office to find out my classroom. The school has grown so much over the past couple of years that they haven’t been able to find a new facility that’s big enough for all their classes yet, and as a result, they are now spread out over three buildings. Two of them belong entirely to KCP, and the third is a single floor above a Chinese restaurant near the second building that they bought. Up until now, all the group sessions had been held in the main building. We weren’t even aware of the existence of the other buildings until we walked past them on our way to the entrance ceremony on Monday. They’re less than a 5-minute walk away.

 

Unfortunately, we all ended up being spread out all over the place. Evan, Caslyn and I are in the same class, in the Chinese restaurant building. The rest of my former groupmates—Kevin, Tyler, Yana, Kelcy, Robyn, etc.—are in the second building, while Shaunte and Cat are in the main building. I can’t remember if I mentioned this earlier, but Shaunte and Cat were placed into Level 1.5. They had tried to test into Level 2, but apparently they didn’t make the cut. I thought it must be frustrating for them because they’ve been studying Japanese for 2 years, and now they’re being forced to do a lot of beginner stuff again, but they don’t seem to care too much.

 

My class seems pretty cool, even if I’m still frustrated and worried that I’m not going to learn enough. I really like our teacher, Fujimura-sensei. He’s gentle, slightly soft-spoken, and very young—according to Evan, he’s only 25. When we went around to do self-introductions and I said that I like video games, he asked me what kind of games I like, so I told him RPG games. Then, during the break, he came up to me and asked me if I’d played the DragonQuest games, because those are his favorites. You can’t go wrong with a teacher who plays video games. <3 We have him twice a week, on Mondays and Wednesdays. On all the other days, we have different teachers. KCP’s philosophy is that it’s good to have several different teachers so that you can get used to hearing different people’s Japanese. I can understand that, but I still miss having one teacher whom you get to know really well. I wouldn’t mind having Fujimura-sensei all the time.

 

As for the rest of the class, with the exception of Evan and Caslyn and I, and 3 Chinese and Malaysian students, they’re all Korean. They’re all fairly old, too. It seems that most of them are already done with college, and Koreans don’t even start college until they’re 20, so that means that many of them are 24, 25 at the youngest. Aside from that, they’re just kind of your typical Koreans. They’re very cliqueish, sticking closely together and only speaking Korean. Honestly, it’s like CMU all over again.

 

The actual class passed by pretty quickly. We did more housekeeping stuff than actually learning much, but we did go over enough grammar to be assigned homework and everything. After class, I went and met up with Shaunte and Cat, and we ended up going straight home, where we ate dinner, showered, and did homework.

 

 

Thursday, July 10^th

We ended up coming to school early again to use the lab, which was finally open today. Today was the first time when I finally felt like I was able to get caught up on all my e-mails and such. One of the frustrations of being able to access the Internet so infrequently…

 

Takahashi-sensei was our teacher today. We only have her once a week, but she is considered the teacher in charge of our class. I guess that’s nice, considering Evan and I have had her off and on since the first day of group sessions, so we know her and she knows us pretty well. She is pretty strict, but she’s funny and nice. I don’t dislike her by any means, but I still wish we could have Fujimura all the time. I like him!

 

We did quite a lot in class today—dictation, grammar, conversation practice, and an in-class composition. The school speech contest (one of the school’s biggest traditions) is on July 31^st, and apparently we were expected to write pretty much the entire speech in class today. We did quite a lot of essays and compositions at CMU, but that was almost always on your own time, when you could use a dictionary and work at your own pace. Having to come up with a composition during class, without being able to use any reference materials, and with a fixed time limit, was pretty tough. I didn’t feel all that great about my speech—but then, I suppose that might be a good thing, since I don’t want to be chosen for the speech contest.

 

After class, Shaunte, Cat and I went with another group of kids to Freshness Burger, a Japanese hamburger franchise. I wasn’t hungry, so I just had an iced green tea latte while the others all ate burgers. Several of them were still hungry after that, so we walked to a taco place. While we were waiting for the others to eat their tacos, Shaunte and I walked to a place called BookMart, which sells used books, CDs, DVDs, and video games for very cheap. Books, especially, were very cheap; only ¥100-¥200 for most of them. I bought one manga.

 

Then we finally went home, where it was dinnertime—yes, Shaunte and Cat still had dinner, even after their burgers and tacos. Ironically, today’s dinner consisted of hamburger and fries. Ha!

 

 

Friday, July 11^th

Maybe I’m just being fussy because it’s Friday and I didn’t want to be in class, but today’s teacher almost drove me up the wall. Our Friday teacher, Iki-sensei, is so boring and slow that it just gets annoying after a while. We were given a seating chart today, and Evan and I spent much of the class making eye-gouging faces and such across the room at each other. What a frustratingly boring teacher.

 

I was also impatient because today’s the third day we’ve spent on freaking noun modification, which was like beginning-second-semester stuff, so I was hoping we’d move on to the next chapter, but apparently we still needed to beat this topic to death. *insert eye-gouging face*

 

When class was finally over, I met up with the rest of my former groupmates. Brad wanted to go see a movie. This weekend & next weekend, Tokyo is hosting the International Lesbian & Gay Film Festival, and one of the participating theaters is in Shinjuku, pretty close to our school. Tonight was the first night, and Brad wanted to go right after class to see if there were still tickets for the first movie. Unfortunately, they were already sold out. The only movie in the film festival that sounded interesting to me was playing at 8:45pm tonight (which would be a problem with curfew), and was only being shown in Korean with Japanese subtitles. Hopefully it’ll be released on DVD in the US with English subtitles or something…

 

Cat and Shaunte and a new kid, Pat, joined us, and we ended up going to happy hour at Shakey’s Pizza. ¥300 each for beer and cocktails is a pretty good deal. We didn’t order any actual food, so afterwards, we had dinner at the Japanese version of a food court, which consisted mostly of noodle and curry places. Shaunte, Cat, Tyler, Kelcy, Caslyn and I ate at a delicious udon place. It was cheap food but I really enjoyed it.

 

After that, our group split up. Shaunte and Cat returned to the dorm to get changed because they’re going clubbing again tonight. The rest of us walked around nighttime Shinjuku for a while, taking pictures and enjoying a two-person band that was giving a performance in the street. Then Tyler and Robyn went home. The rest of us—Brad, Miguel, Kelcy, Caslyn, Yana and I—ended up going to a bar called Hub, The English Pub, where we just hung out and talked for a while. Around 9:30pm, the girls headed for the subway, and I returned to the dorm on my own.

 

 

Saturday, July 12^th & Sunday, July 13^th

Like most weekend, I woke up around 7am, had breakfast, and spent the rest of the morning hanging out in my room by myself, since Cat and Shaunte were passed out after partying all night. Shaunte was up fairly early, though, so we ended up going to Ikebukuro, where we spent a couple of hours exploring Kinokuniya, a massive bookstore. I bought another manga and a dictionary. We were never required to have a dictionary for class at CMU, and it was never really necessary. On the few occasions when I needed one, I just used the Internet. Unfortunately, since that resource isn’t available to me here, and since the teachers love giving us homework with words we haven’t seen before, I realized I could no longer go without one. It’s a good purchase, though.

 

Back at the dorm again, we showered, ate dinner, and got ready to go out for my big birthday shindig, which always takes us girls a couple of hours. As most of you hopefully already know, I was turning 20 on the 13^th. 20 happens to be a special age in Japan. They even have a special name for it: 「はたち」 (hatachi). It’s considered the coming-of-age as well as being the official legal drinking age. So, we planned to party it up in style. We were meeting the others in Shibuya at 9pm, which really meant that everyone was expected to be there at 9:30.

 

The group ended up consisting of me, Cat, Shaunte, Yana, Kelcy, Caslyn, Robyn, and Kevin. Evan met us in Shibuya but left, since he couldn’t stay out all night with us. After he left, the search began for a nomihodai place. Nomihodai is Japanese for “all-you-can-drink”, where you pay 1-2 thousand yen per hour—usually 2 hours max—during which time you can order whatever drinks you want. It’s generally a better deal than going to a bar and paying for individual drinks, especially in a part of town like Shibuya, where bars are extremely pricey. In our case, the nomihodai also ended up including some pretty good food. It’s always nice to have something to snack on while you’re drinking. At midnight, when I officially turned 20, they brought out a plate of cakes and such, courtesy of the place we were at. (I can’t really call it a bar, but I’m not sure what else to call it.)

 

Afterwards, the plan was to go to Club Atom, a club with different music on each floor, including a techno/trance floor, which is where I really wanted to go. Unfortunately, by the time we got there, some of us got sick, and the bouncers at the door wouldn’t let drunk people in. In the end, we ended up crashing at a love hotel. (These are hotels where, instead of paying a fixed rate for one night, you only pay for the amount of time that you spent there. They’re very common here.) A few people ended up going to Gas Panic (the club we went to last weekend that I really didn’t enjoy) while the rest of us basically just passed out in various parts of the hotel room. It’s unfortunate that the night didn’t go as planned, and that I never got to dance, but everyone did end up with interesting stories to tell. I suppose that’s something.

 

In the morning, we took the subway home and then passed out again as soon as we got to the dorm. I slept on and off until around 5pm. I had one of the worse hangovers I’ve ever had, characterized mainly by this vague layer of nausea that was intense enough to make doing anything uncomfortable, but not intense enough to force me to throw up, which also meant that the nausea wouldn’t go away, either. It was frustrating to spend my actual birthday debilitated in this way. When I finally managed to throw up, I felt like a whole new person. The nausea was gone and my energy returned. I showered and got ready to go out again.

 

Today’s party was a lot more tame. Along with the Japanese girls from our dorm, we had okonomiyaki for dinner at a small restaurant in Kaname-cho. Okonomiyaki are Japanese egg pancakes which you cook yourself on a hot plate in front of you, similar to teppanyaki. Okonomiyaki doesn’t really exist commonly in the States, though, and this was my first time being able to enjoy it. It was actually funny because when the girls had first proposed going out for dinner for my birthday, since it’s a Sunday and our meal plan doesn’t include food on Sunday, I had thought about suggesting okonomiyaki, but I had no idea if it’s expensive, so I didn’t end up saying anything. Then Mariya and Ayako actually ended up proposing it. Unfortunately, I don’t know Japanese for, “You read my mind.”

 

The okonomiyaki place we went to was all-you-can-eat, in the sense that you pay for a set amount of time (in our case, I think it was 1.5-2 hours), and during that time you can order as much as you like. You had to fill out these little order forms with the ingredients you wanted for your pancake, and then they’d bring it to you in a bowl, and it was up to you to cook the pancake. Mariya and Ayako ended up doing most of the cooking for the group. It worked more efficiently that way, and Shaunte and Cat and I had no clue what to do, anyway. It’s more complicated than it might seem because the egg batter is a lot more runny than flour-based pancake batter, so you actually have to first arrange the ingredients (minus the egg) in a circle and then pour the egg in the middle so it doesn’t run all over the plate.

 

As for the taste, it’s hard to describe. The pancakes themselves are hearty, with vegetables, meat, tofu, and/or fish, but they coat them with this syrup that tastes fairly sweet and tangy. The combination of sweet and hearty is not something I’m really used to, so I can’t say it’s the most delicious thing I’ve ever eaten. I think it’s something you grow to enjoy once you’ve had it a few times and you’re kind of used to it. This time, everything was still too new, and my taste buds weren’t sure how to react. I tried as many different pancakes as I could, but I didn’t end up eating a whole lot because I was still a little afraid to upset my stomach.

 

After our time at the restaurant was up, we returned to the dorm, where the girls unveiled the cake they’d gotten me. Actually, I think they just bought the basic cake, and then a couple of the girls made the icing and then put cherries and other decorations on top. It was really sweet. <3 They lit up 20 candles and sang Happy Birthday (in English). I blew out all 20 candles in one go, and then we ate the cake. I guess some birthday traditions don’t change, no matter where you go.

 

I’d luckily had the foresight to do my homework Saturday morning, so I had a free night tonight. I went back to my room and just lay on my bed and reflected for a while. Turning 20 is a little scary. I’ve spent most of my conscious life writing a 1 in front of my age, and now there’s going to be a 2 there. I’m running out of excuses to act like a child. Soon I’ll have to go out into the real world and deal with jobs and such. They say the best years are yet to come, but I don’t know. It’s scary.

 

I guess I’m also feeling a little melancholy because I’m nearing the halfway mark of my stay here in Tokyo, and I’m scared that from now on, things are going to go by pretty fast. I’ve gotten very used to life here, to the extent that it’s often hard to imagine that there was any other kind of life before this, and that it will have to end at some point in the not-so-distant future. It’s already easy to forget that things weren’t always this way. Is that what it means to feel like you’re at home in a place? I don’t really know, because I’ve spent most of my life not knowing what to consider home. At any rate, I’m happy here, and I don’t want to leave.

 

But, I digress. Birthdays are not the time to feel blue. I think I’m going to read for a while and then hit the sack.

 

 

Monday, July 14^th

Monday meant another Fujimura day. Hooray! I also enjoyed class more today because we started a new chapter. The material isn’t really new to me, but at least we’ve moved on from noun modification, and I enjoyed the examples we used. We were going over constructing sentences with 「＿＿＿とき、＿＿＿。」 and we ended up using 「お酒を飲みます。」 (“I drink liquor”) for the second part of almost all our example sentences. 「学校が休みのとき、お酒を飲みます。」 (“On school holidays, I drink liquor.”) 「雨が降っているとき、お酒を飲みます。」 (“When it’s raining, I drink liquor.”) Fujimura-sensei was like, “Wow, you guys love to drink, don’t you?” Hee hee.

 

Other than that, nothing too exciting happened. After class, Shaunte and I walked to Citi Bank so she could use the ATM, and then we went straight home. I need to study for a bit longer than usual tonight because I have a kanji test tomorrow. We have to know the ~25 characters we learned this past week, as well as all of the ones they cover in Level 1. You’d think that, since I already know about 300 kanji, it’d be a breeze, but our kanji textbook is retarded in the order that it has you learn the kanji. They covered some characters in Level 1 that I would never expect beginners to need to know, so there’s actually some new characters that I need to learn, too. I suppose it’s good that I’m still learning new characters, but on the other hand, I feel sorry for the students who are forced to learn how to write 「飛行機」 (airplane) before they learn how to write 「男」 (man) and 「女」 (woman).

 

 

Tuesday, July 15^th

I came to school early again to use the lab. After this, I’m either going to an extra conversation practice session, or studying for the kanji test.

 

Today should be a little more exciting than usual, though, because after school I’m going with Shaunte, Sean, Alex, and two other people I don’t know to see the musical Wicked. Yes, it’s going to be all in Japanese, but it should be fun nonetheless, and it’ll be a good test of our understanding. It’s also one of the few musicals I haven’t seen live, although I’m familiar with the music. I’m really excited!

Saturday, July 5^th~Sunday, July 6^th

Shortly after my last post, which I’d made from an Internet café in Ikebukuro, Shaunte and I returned to the dorm, where Cat was finally up. We ate dinner and planned our night out. We were meeting up with Alex, Robert, and Tim at a hip hop club in Shibuya called Gas Panic. Girls being girls, we took a while to get ready. I think we left the dorm around 9:30pm. Once we got to Shibuya, though, we had to wait a good hour or so for Alex & co. to get there. Luckily the club was easy enough to find. We got there around 11:30pm.

 

The club was extremely small. There wasn’t even a real dance floor because all the space was taken up by the bar and a couple of separate tables with bar stools. As usual, foreigners didn’t get carded, and there wasn’t a cover charge because they expected you to be buying their expensive drinks all night. Basically, every time one of the bartenders saw you empty-handed, they would come up to you and force you to buy another drink, or else they said you had to leave. The trick was to buy a beer and hold on to the bottle long after it was empty.

 

The music was surprisingly good. It was mostly R&B and hip hop, with reggae and other random stuff like Daft Punk mixed in. I enjoyed it more than I usually enjoy the music at hip hop clubs back home. As a whole, though, I don’t like hip hop clubs, mainly because the guys are sleazy (and often not even all that attractive) and are just there to try to get into girls’ pants. It seemed to be even worse at this club because there wasn’t really much room to dance, so the majority of the people there weren’t actually dancing at all. It frustrated me because if I go to a club, I go there to dance. Not to hook up, and not to make conversation, either. It’s not like you can actually hear anything anybody says in there because the music is so loud.

 

Still, because of our curfew, once we stayed out past 11pm, we had to stay out until at least 6am, and dancing for that long is beyond my ability, so I still ended up having to spend a fair amount of time making conversation. I got to practice my Japanese but only a little, because almost everyone in the club spoke English. (It was a very multiracial club—Africans/African Americans, Westerners, and Asians.) The only halfway decent guy in the entire place was a Spanish exchange student at Sophia University. He was amiable and funny and a good dancer, but I only got to hang out with him for a little while before he said he should go back to his friends. The other guys just seemed to grow sleazier as the night wore on. We ended up escaping the club earlier than we’d planned—around 4:45am—because things were getting too crazy in there.

 

Because the sun rises so early here, it was bright as day when we came outside. We ended up having to wait until 5:20am to catch the first subway back. (The trains and subways here don’t run between ~1am and 5:30am.) Then we had to camp out in front of the dorm for about a half hour waiting for Utsugi-san to open it back up. Cat said she’d had a blast and Shaunte seemed to have enjoyed herself a lot as well, but I’m not sure if I would’ve called this night fun. If I do go clubbing again, I’d much rather go to a techno club, where you can be as crazy as you want to be and not every guy is trying to get into your pants. Once we were allowed back inside, everyone went straight to bed.

 

I woke up around 11am but spent most of the day lounging around my room. Shaunte came and hung out for a while. We went to OK!, the big supermarket that’s right by our dorm. I bought myself some snacks and spent a good amount of time investigating prices, since my mom is curious whether everything really is so much more expensive here.

 

The answer is yes and no. Overall, things are expensive, and sizes/portions/quantities are smaller than in America. In many ways, it’s comparable to Europe. I think it’d be possible to survive even on a slightly meager budget, though, if you know where/how to find good bargains, budget your spending carefully, and maybe change your diet a little. I already mentioned how nearly all fruits are expensive here. So, if I were to live here, I’d probably end up having to eat less fruit and more vegetables. Meat is expensive but fish is quite cheap, so I’d probably end up eating more fish than meat (which I don’t really have a problem with anyway, since I’m not a big meat-eater anymore).

 

As another example, a typical breakfast for me at home is bread with some sort of condiment like jam, peanut butter, or Nutella. Bread, to my surprise, isn’t all that expensive (it doesn’t seem to be all that popular here, so I had thought it might be pricey), but condiments are. They were charging ¥330 for a small thing of peanut butter or Nutella (about half the size of the regular size of these in the States). So, if I were to live here, I would maybe only do bread and condiments on weekends, and just do breakfast bentos on weekdays.

 

Aside from that, the general rule seems to be that American/Western brands are extremely expensive. I needed to buy laundry detergent, and I discovered an incredible gap in prices between the American brands (eg. Downy), which cost about ¥980 for the smallest-size bottle, and the Japanese brands, which cost about ¥230 for the smallest-size bottle. Tea, too, was cheap overall, except for Western brands like Pickwick, so no Earl Grey tea for me. Snacks and candy are slightly expensive overall in the sense that you don’t get a lot (size-wise) for what you pay, but again, it’s more affordable to buy domestic brands. They had a lot of different kinds of Kit Kat with coatings and flavors, including a green tea kind that looked extremely tasty, but for ¥320 for a small box, it wasn’t worth it to me.

 

After our trip to the suupaa, we went back to the dorm and chilled some more. No one had the energy to do anything after our long night out. I think we all ended up crashing pretty early.

 

 

Monday, July 7^th

It’s Tanabata in Japan today, which is essentially a cultural holiday, though not generally an official one. They have a lot of omatsuri (festivals) in the very suburbs and smaller towns, though nothing special seems to be going on in the city. The main Tanabata tradition is that you write a wish in a small strip of paper and tie it to a stick of bamboo. They told us that we’ll get to do so in class on Wednesday. I’m actually glad for the delay because I don’t know what to wish for yet.

 

We didn’t have any sort of class today, but we did have to come to school for an official entrance ceremony. The group sessions we had up until now were to prepare us for the official school term, which starts on Wednesday. Today, we walked to a big building and were ushered into a large auditorium for a welcoming ceremony both for us and for the Asian students who have been arriving in the past week and who will be starting school with us on Wednesday.

 

It was a very long ceremony because everything that was first said in Japanese was then translated into Korean, Chinese, and English, making everything last 3 times as long as it needed to. The only interesting/cool part of the ceremony was that they had some former students come up and give speeches demonstrating how much they learned in one term. It was pretty impressive.

 

Afterwards, we were free to go for the day. Cat, Shaunte, Lane and I decided to go to Ikebukuro for some shopping because Cat wanted to buy sandals. We ended up walking around the street-side shops and most of the Sunshine City mall as well. Most of the stores in Sunshine City were having massive sales. I ended up buying a colorful shirt on sale at a massive girls’ fashion store called Alta. Clothing is fairly expensive, but bargain hunting is definitely possible. The shirts on sale that I looked at were ¥500-¥1000 each, and the shoes that Cat bought cost her ¥1050, which is comparable to what I pay for such things back in the States.

 

We had lunch at McDonald’s, which is more expensive than in the States but also tastes better. It’s hard to explain, but McDonald’s here is actually good, and eating there isn’t something that’s looked down on in the way it kind of is looked down on back home. They also have a lot of burgers that don’t exist in the States. This wasn’t my first time encountering such a thing, because in the Netherlands they have/had the McKroket and McRib, but it was still interesting. The most notable difference is the existence of the MegaMac, which is basically a BigMac with 4 hamburger patties instead of 2. Since it’s only ¥50 more for a MegaMac and since I figured that that’s something I needed to experience while I’m here, that’s what I got. It was pretty good, although they didn’t put enough sauce on it to match the amount of meat you get. If I do go to McDonald’s again before I leave, I think I’ll try the ebi (shrimp) burger.

 

Back at the dorm, Shaunte and I spent most of the night hanging out while Cat spent most of it texting and calling people. She’s become a lot more withdrawn since she got a phone. I still can’t decide if I should get one or not. If I do get one, I should do it soon, or it won’t be worth it anymore. ¥5900 isn’t very much, and for ¥300 off your prepaid time, you get unlimited texts and e-mails for a month. It’d be nice to be able to e-mail my friends and family more frequently. I miss feeling connected to the people I care about back home. Aside from that, though, I don’t really miss the Internet and cell phones all that much. I never liked phones to begin with, which is part of the reason why I feel like it might not be worth it.

 

 

Tuesday, July 8^th

We had to be at school at 9am today for orientation, which ended up being a lot of Tanaka-san repeating things he’d already told us before (attendance rules, etc.) but that he now needed to reiterate because of the new students. It was one of the most boring 3-hour sits of my life. Afterwards, they had lunch for us, which was nice, and we got to socialize and meet the new kids, but it was also kind of awkward because all the teachers came around to talk to us (in Japanese), which always makes me a little uncomfortable because I can’t help feeling like they’re judging us even outside the classroom like this.

 

After that, we finally got to hear which level we’ll be placed in. I ended up being placed in level 2 with all of my other groupmates. Seeing who got placed in level 3, though, I knew that I don’t really belong with them either. We got our textbooks, and going through the lessons, I figured out that I should essentially be in Level 2.5—which doesn’t exist. Level 2 is covering lessons 22 through 29, which all cover things we already did last semester at CMU. However, Level 3 starts at lesson 38. The lessons I actually need are lessons 30 through 37. But there’s no class for that.

 

I really don’t know what to do. I can’t really ask them to create a class just for me, but at the same time, I don’t want to not learn anything new, at least as far as grammar goes. I know I’ll learn a lot regardless in terms of vocabulary and conversational ability (and confidence in general), and I want to. But I don’t want to not learn any new grammar because then I’m worried that I’m not even going to place out of a single semester back home, and then this will all have kind of been a waste. I mean, it’s a great experience and all, but if I don’t get out of at least 1 semester, I’ll never have enough time to finish my minor. For the umpteenth time, I’m extremely frustrated that CMU’s Japanese program is so grammar- and writing-focused.

 

Anyway, after we got our books and such, we were free to go. Shaunte and Sean and I ended up going to the post office and then to Tokyu Hands, one of the biggest department stores. We bought note cards and other school supplies, and I also bought a few more gifts for people back home, as well as postcards. If you want one, be sure to e-mail me your address. I can always go back for more when I run out.

 

 

Wednesday, July 9^th

Today being the first official day of class, I don’t have to be at school until 1pm. From now on, class starts at 1:30pm and lasts until 4:45pm. The morning classes (9:00am-12:15pm) are only for the advanced levels, which is kind of a bummer because I feel morning classes would be more convenient. You go to class and then have the rest of the day to do what you want to do. We don’t have a choice, though.

 

I came to school early to try to use the computer lab. Unfortunately, it wasn't open today, so I'm at an Internet café again. I have a couple of important e-mails to send out. Up until now, the computer lab hasn’t been open every day, but starting tomorrow, it should be open 10am-4pm every day. I’ll probably end up coming to school early every few days from now on to use the lab, so I don’t spend all my money by going to Internet cafés.