Sunday June 1, 1997
Well, it's Sunday now, but let me start with Saturday's activities. We arrived in Shinjuku at around 11:30am, and having read about the area in my Tokyo guide book on the train ride there, we knew what we watned to see. We started off on the west side of the station - the high-rise center of Tokyo. First, the Shinjuku Centre Building, where we went to the 51st floor to their viewing gallery, and happened to land ourselves in a calligraphy display. This was of particular interest to me since I think I'll be taking some calligraphy lessons soon. The view from up there was spectacular. Unfortunately, it wasn't a very pleasant day, so the sky was overcast. Ah well, the next time it's blue, I'll go back.
Next was the Shinjuku Sumimoto building, which has a hollow centre. This is *very* cool. Since it's a skyrise, the hollow centre lends an interesting atmosphere to the building. They call it "a building that's actually a city", but I don't know why. Anyways, we went up to the 51st floor to its viewing gallery, which was even cooler than the last building.
Now it was time to got to the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Offices - which are definitely singular (for lack of any other word). They are pretty new - the architecture is truly odd. And they are extremely tall. Until recently, it was Japan's tallest building. So, we went to its viewing gallery (am I sensing a pattern here?) which was even better than the other 2 - you could see everywhere!
Last stop before lunch was the Shinjuku NS Building which has this humungous (and I MEAN humungous) pendulum clock. It's in the Guiness Book of World REcord as being the largest. Anyways, it's very, very cool. AND, it's powered by water! There's a wishing well at the bottom.
Lunch was good... Japanese. I had udon, and it was great. 800 yen though ($9)
On the East side of Shinjuku was this huge TV screen. Tons of people. It's a shopping area, and also supposedly very close to Tokyo's red light district. But after living at 44.5 Ladouceur, nothing scares me. There's a good bookstore there on the East Side with a selection of English books. And, we found postcards! These were the first ones I've seen since I got here! Sheesh.
Next we went to Akihabara (Electronic City) because Jason wanted a discman. So we wandered around the place, and he found a pretty awesome player. Set him bac approx 200 yen ($240)
Then we took our walk to the Imperial Palace. At this point, my feet are hurting just a tad.. It took about an hour to get there. Unfortunately, most of the park around the palace was already closed because it was late. But we could still see some pretty great stuff. We entered through some beautiful huge gates. Very old. Very big. Then we walked along the moat, which is large. And they built it to look like fjords which makes it really cool. We walked along there for a very long time (this is a huge palace!) and got to where we could see the palace itself. It was getting dark. I'll have to go back there during the day and really explore.
We then headed to Ginza to eat. We found a place that was in the style of an English pub. It was incredibly cheap! Plus, their food was good!
So now that it was about 9 or so, we decided that we should go to Rappongi, where we've heard that the nitelife is pretty good. Woooohaa. This place is NOT like your everyday Tokyo. First of all, the streets are 60% foreigners. Foreigners and Japanese are pretty much just there to pick-up. People were putting pamphlets in your hands advertising their disco. Scantily clad foreign women were stopping elderly Japanese men and showing them brochures of nude women. Others were calling out "Young, beautiful girls, over here". This place was definitely crazy! I mean, I'd seen slimy in Jakarta, but I was NOT expecting to find it in Tokyo!
Jason and I had originally planned on finding a good club, but after we heard about the prices (often > 4,000 yen ($50) and saw the type of area this was, we decided to skip it. So we went home to Hino where I finally got to sleep!!
Today we got up late and made it out by 2 or so. First stop was the temple right close to my house where the Buddha statue is. I climbed up and sat in his lap so that Jason could take a picture, but that probably wasn't such a good idea. Anyways, there's more to that place than I'd known! It's beautiful in there! There's a temple with a pond and statues...
We walked to the park near the amusement park, which was a bit of a hike. We found a path that went up into the mountain foliage, so we took it. Wow, it goes on forever! Actually, there's a zoo in this park, but we didn't go in there because we weren't so interested.
We went to the temple near the Asakawa (which means "shallow river", not "morning river" like I'd originally thought) - the one I went to last week. It was still cool. Anyways, that was the weekend with Jason, it was great to have company for awhile!
I can't believe that I've already been working for 2 weeks! That's crazy. Oh! I found out that I'm insulting people at work because I wear my shoes! At least that's what Jason says. I *did* notice that everyone wears slippers around the office, but I didn't know that I should be as well! I'll have to find out about that.
pictures from this weekend here
11pm
Right now I'm looking at Jason who is lying on my floor (dead) because he didn't know that ATMs close at 5 here. Ha ha.
Monday June 2, 1997: 7:40am
Something just blew up in my hot water heater for my shower. Now I'm a bit worried...
7:40pm
Well, I'm still alive and I even had hot water! What a bonus!
Mmmmm... I had pizza for dinner tonighht and it was really good. I found it frozen in the store, and it's just small enough to fit into my oven.
Right now there is the strangest game show on - there's a guy dressed up as a tomato playing air hockey against 2 teenage girls. Very strange. Oh, actually, it's a tomato tag-team. Right now I'm gonna try out some yoga,then maybe catch some zzz's.
Tuesday June 3, 1997: 10:30pm
I had a long, interesting day today! 9:15am found me waiting at the Hachioji tube station with Hidaka-san and Hirabayashi-san for the train to Hirooka. BUSINESS TRIP!!
I sat beside Hidaka-san, actually, Hirabayashi-san sat in the smoking car, while we were in the non-smoker's. I got the window seat :-) It's neat, we just went right through the mountains, no goiing around them, thankyou very much. It wasn't such a nice day out, but the view was still pretty spectacular.
Hidaka-san and I talked the whole way up *in Japanese*. Coolness. I got to use many of my new vocabulary words. I hope I learn a lot during my year here!
Anyways, we got to Hirooka at noon, and I met Mr. Ueda, the president. He's a very, very nice man! He speaks English really well. I had to make a speech to the Hirooka ESD group. I wish they would tell me about these things ahead of time! I gave such a terrible intro with so many "ummm"'s. Oh well.
So at 1 or meeting started. This was with the rest of the Banff team - about 4 other guys. We started off (OK - THEY started off, I didn't understand too much) talking about the scanner. I guess I'll find out tomorrow what exactly it was that they were talking about. At about 3 we took a break, and Hirabayashi-san took me to talk to Jeff (Geoff??), the Waterloo Co-op working for ESD Hirooka. So while the rest of the guys continued on with the meeting, I got a tour from Jeff. I think it's spelt Geoff though. Well, I'm covering my bases here.
He took me to see HuaYue, and there I met Simon, Go, Renato, Keith, Dan, and probably some other guys, but I can't remember. Anyways, there's a lot of them! We went for a break together - 8 gaijin! That's insane! Oh, it was lots of fun talking to those guys - it sounds like they're having fun! Well, we breaked for about an hour, and then Geoff took me to see the English teacher there, and I asked some things for frans. Then we hung out at Jeff's desk for another hour, just chattin'. At this point it was about 5:30, so I thought I would let Geoff do his work and check up on that meeting. But they weren't done so I decided to go check out how HuaYue was doing, and I stayed talking for almost an hour. When I went back to chekc on the meeting, they were all gone! Argh! So I went back to Geoff's desk, and sure enough, they were there. I guess they'd finished the meeting about 20 mins earlier. Sumimasen!!
Ueda-san's office is non-existent. He's the president, yet he just has a larger desk at the end of the large work room. That's fabulous!
Wednesday June 4, 1997: 8:20am
Ducks in the ricepaddies! Cool.
8:25am
I swear I have seen the same businessman bike by me 3 times today - twice on my run and once on my way to work.
5:20pm
Chewing MangoSteen gum. How random.
10:15pm
Well, I only got home about 10 mins ago. So much for catching up on some sleep. I guess tomorrow will be another one of those sluggish days then. Actually, I was extremely productive today. I finally passed the 500 page mark, so now I just want to get that book over and done with! I have a goal to finish it by Friday, but I'm not sure how plausible that is!
This mangosteen gum REALLY tastes like mangostten. Amazing!
Oh! I found out that I get payed EXTRA for my business trip to Hirooka!! I said "WHY?", and Hirabayashi-san said "Because we have to have the trouble of going" Wow, this is incredible. It's about 3,500 yen ($40) that I get, but since I got to the local train station after 9pm, I get another 1,500 yen ($20) on top of that. Hey, and I even really enjoyed my trip up. I hope I get to do this much, much more often!
At about 5:30 Hirabayashi-san and I left the office to go and meet the calligraphy teacher. At first I was quite hesitant because I was very afraid taht it would be very expensive. Anyways, the teacher's name is Kitagawa-san. She is very nice. And this was my first experience with a traditional Japanese household. I had to take off my shoes and switch them for slippers... I had Japanese tea... I even tried some Japanese sweets (oh, it was so tough..) which were pretty interesting. One was wrapped in a banana leaf, and was some kind of mooshy white stuff with a brown filling. I have *no clue* what this was, but it was pretty good. And the other stuff was really awesome too. Salty. Kind of a cracker but almost like a really flavourful rice cake. She gave me tons to take home with me!!
Anyways, she and her husband are very good friends with Hirabayashi-san. So we chatted for an hour and a bit. Then, the first lesson began.
So I have to sit seiza, ie. Japanese style, which is on my knees, sitting on my feet. This, as you can imagine, puts your feet to sleep pretty damn quickly. So I lasted about 20 mins before I had to change positions. So we spent about 2 hours doing calligraphy. This is pretty cool stuff. First, she taugh me the names of al the materials although I've already forgotten them. In English, there's the brush, the ink, the mat (which you put the paper on to paint), a paperweight, and there's 2 other things that I could use at home to make my own ink.
Next was the teaching me how to actually write something. First was the stroke across. I did about a page of those (4 or 5 per page), and it's harder than it seems. You have to hold the brush in a certain way and move your arm very calculating-like. It's all very slow and deliberate. Supposedly, it's quite spiritual. It takes a lot of concentration. Next was the down stroke, and after a page of those we did the first kanji, ue. So everything must be perfect. It has to be proportional, and centered, and the lines have to be the right thickness and have the right hooks... The second kanji was shita, and it was kinda tough! And then, she asked me if I knew my name. Well, yeah, I do, but I suck. So I gave it a shot, but because I was a bit nervous, I did it fast and barely used any of the techniques that she'd just taught me. It looked very,very bad. So she gave it a try and it took her a few tries to get one to her liking, but it was reallly nice. My name's pretty hard to write.
She told me that I could come over anytime to just hang out. She said she could teach me how to cook Japanese food. Cool! I just might take her up on these offers because it's my chance to get to know a Japanese family. And a really cool one at that.
Well, we only left their place at 9 or so, so I got home late. I've decided to stick with the lessons, but I don't know the price yet.
Thursday June 5, 1997
Today was a beautiful day! Very sunny - and clear enough to see Fuji! It was dang hot though... even at 6:30am. I think that's insane!
Actually, I saw something kind of interesting on my run - two birds on some rocks in the river. And they both had their wings spread out wide, as though they were stretching, or praying. But it seemed strange because they were standing upright, like humans. I watched them for awhile.
Well, I got something disturbing in the mail today... 2 pamphlets to order girls. Yeah, that's exactly what I mean. OK, it's set up like those Columbia House booklets - there's a picture of a young girl in a very provocative pose, and below the pic is a description and an order number, such as S-8 or something. Now not only does this disgust me, but it also saddens me. These girls are young - between 15 and 22. It's very sad.
Friday June 6, 1997: 6:40am
Well, it's just started to rain - could this be the start of the tsuyu (rainy season)? Good thing that I got up super early today and already finished my run!
Of course, my throat is a bit sore, I think I may be catching a cold.
Saturday June 7, 1997: 9:30am
I can't believe I said that I "thought" I might be catching a cold. Right now, barely 24 hours later, I am up to my knees in kleenex and halls wrappers and I can't smell a damn thing. ARGH! That's the last time I use my AC when I sleep! Anyways, yesterday did end up being rainy, but it wasn't so bad. I got caught in a *real* downpoar on my way home. Actually, I was very close to being home - maybe 4 minutes. PLUS, I had an umbrella. But believe me, a brollie doesn't help much in THIS rain - now I understand what they were saying about me being far from work in the tsuyu. By the time I got home my pants were soaked from the knees down.
Everyone bikes holding their brollies. I'm going to have to learn how to do that.
And I finally got my registration card! Now I can get a bank account - and maybe have a phone.
Next Episode -->
<-- Last Episode