スキャンダラス.アーカイブ.９月２６日

Yay, now I have stable, fast internet access in a semi-convenient place. Turns out that I can bring my computer to the Keio lab and plug into their blazingly fast T1 lines. Man I miss broadband. And what's even better about this whole thing is that I don't have to use those wacky keyboards that they have on the laptops in the lab. I mean like most laptop keyboards aren’t already messed up enough, they've got to start moving around buttons and making it so when you try to delete you end up in the middle of the last paragraph you typed.

I guess this means I have to start updating again. Damn. Umm, today was the first day of real school at Keio, so now I have some sort of idea what my life in Japan is going to be like. Let's say that whereas at JLI I was the witty, inept guy on the left side of the class, now I'm the quiet, uncreative, above average guy on the right.

So yeah, now it’s time to (hopefully) briefly go over the last month. Quick, must think of the date for the last thing I did, ummm...

The Adventures of La/ost Weekend

Part 1

I think that the problem with last weekend was that it started on Tuesday of last week when a friend from JLI (Brian) happened to be in my neighborhood so we went out to eat at this yakitori place. For those of you keeping track at home, yakitori literally translated means, and I know this sounds weird, "fried chicken".

So yeah, this is where it gets wacky. Let's compare what we said, and what the shop owner understood. What we said: "Give me yakitori please" What the shop owner thought we said: "Give me yakitori, meatballs, chicken heart, and chicken liver. Oh wait, could you add on a whole skewer composed only of chicken skin please. Yeah, and charge me $10 for it if you could."

Different no? Needless to say we were so revolted by the fact that we actually ate all of that that we had to go to a "family" restaurant across the street and get real, greasy-like-my-forehead fried chicken. I'm not even going to get into how much everything came to.

Part 2

Nay two days later we decided to go out for a go-away dinner for Knight since he was leaving to go to his real college in Kyoto. We wandered around (and got lost in) Shibuya looking for a really good place to eat until coming to the conclusion that what we really wanted was Shakey's Pizza, which I might add, happened to be right behind us.

I never thought I would like a pizza composed solely of bell peppers and shrimp, but hey, I never thought I would update this site either so there you go.

Part 3

Here it’s time for Mom and Dad to close your eyes and just skip ahead to the next section. It's now Friday and my new Keio friends and I have just finished our first week in our new apartments. Furthermore, Friday happened to be the day of the two-hour-long harassment lecture, which, after the placement test the day before, should have come with a warning label saying "may cause acute alcoholism".

To celebrate the end of our first week, these friends and I decided to try and make the happy hour at some Irish Pub in Shibuya. We got there around 6:15 in the evening. Now happy hour is from 5-7 over here. Seeing this, the two British girls in our group came to the conclusion that it would simply not do to drink at a normal pace if the bar was closing in 45 minutes. We started off with a round of double gin and tonics. By the time we were done with those it was around 6:45, which, if you do the math leaves 15 more minutes of happy hour.

Thus to make the most of our time, we ordered another round of double gin and tonics. If the rate of drinking remains constant, that makes 2 double gin and tonics in about an hour, man I love calculus. Another equation,

Two double gin and tonics/h does not equal “good at fooseball”.

What, you thought I was done? At this point one of my friends became quite hungry. However, we ended up at a place that primarily served mixed drinks with a bunch of appetizers. Ultimately we ended up ordering eight plates of random appetizers as well as another round of drinks. I got this "interesting" blue drink because I am gay. Before that drink I had managed to feel fairly decent, but now I think I had had a little too much to drink.

After that we went to another restaurant for more food and managed to order something like five bottles of sake for seven people.

Then we went home and hung out in my room where we watched my TV and one of my friends vomited on my toilet.

The End.

Part 4

Saturday. Previously I had made plans with Brian to go to Shibuya with him and my friend Dan, as well as a friend of Brian's, her friend, her tutor, and her tutor's friend. We went karaoke and I ended up singing "Let's Dance" by David Bowie as the last song of the evening. Before that, I attempted on my part to sing "Sobakasu" by Judy and Mary, which was a dai-shippai. If you’re a man, don't ever even bother looking in the mirror and mouthing the words to that song. It's fast, it's in Japanese, and it's in this painfully high girly voice. None of these are my specialty.

After that we went to Harajuku where I bought super-spiffy red shoes (actually there's a story to go with this, for the past day and a half my shoes had been saturated by the rain and thus the cause of much discomfort. When I bought my new shoes it came to my attention that my old shoes had gigantic cracks in the bottom of them). Then we went out for pasta and went home. At this point I decided against going with my new Keio buddies to celebrate one of their birthdays on Sunday.

Part 5

Monday was a holiday so Brian, Dan and I decided to go back to a katsu place we had eaten at in Shibuya. Apparently it was everyone-understand-the-gaijin day because although usually we can be as vulgar as we want to, today I got called on it.

It was a quiet day at the restaurant; only two tables were sat including us. Thus, the cooks had a lot of time on their hands to watch. We are in the middle of a discussion about meeting up with Brian's friends again to wish the other Dan good-bye on Thursday (he's going several hours up North for the rest of his time in Japan).

Everyone is waiting for me to finish my cabbage so that we can pay the bill so I take some and put it in Brian's bowl so that he would stop complaining and start helping. Then Dan, being a dork, takes his miso soup and pours it into the cabbage, drawing the attention of the staff for my big show.

So then Brian turns to me and says "so where are all your Japanese friends huh" like the punk that he is, to which I say "hold on a sec" and start looking in my pockets for the only answer I could give to that question. So my middle finger flies up from out of my pocket, but as opposed to the absolute silence that should accompany it, my finger is greeted to a great big "da-pon" of laughter from the cooks. Then I went and hid under the table until my suicide knife came back from the knife shop.

previous entry - next entry