まったくのアホみたいに

oh man something is wrong with me. so im supposed to pick up ari from narita in about an hour right? whoops, thats probably not gonna happen on time(；－＿－）
so i woke up a bit late and was killing time instead of getting myself and my apartment ready to leave. i needed to catch a 1300 train to meet up with ari in time. so, of course, i decide at 1230 that i really want to make some banana bread. for some reason. so i did, and actually finished about 5 to 1. only it takes at least 10 minutes to walk to the station... btw i lost my bike after i left it unlocked over an entire weekend at SATY. so i looked up train times on hyperdia, and it turns out there was another train leaving in 20 minutes that would be ok! success! i cleaned up a bit more and left. only to get to the station 2 minutes too late. oops. but! the station board said there was another train in 15 minutes! three trains in one hour? unheard of in takahagi! i got some food at the station kiosk and went to wait on the platform. i was listening to some high lows on my ipod, a great song called outdoor club. thats where the title of this entry comes from. its basically a guy remembering this time him and his girl went to the beach, and laughing at how ridiculous it was to go to the beach on a day when it looked like it was gonna rain. maybe my japanese is actually getting better if i actually understood the song? ill put the lyrics up and attempt to translate it on my other blog. (what? other blog?)

while listening to the high lows and feeling proud of myself for understanding it, and playing solitaire on my ipod simultaneously, AND sitting in a chair facing the northbound, in other words opposite, tracks, i felt a chilly breeze. shivering a bit in my light track jacket and t shirt, my concentration was broken enough to notice something behind me. turns out that breeze came from the train i was supposed to board pulling into the station. i stood up and turned around just as the doors closed and the third train in one hour left takahagi.

the weather got a bit colder, and i proceeded to wait. and wait. i started writing this as i finally boarded a train, over an hour after i first got to the station. ive still got almost 2 hours until i arrive in narita, and aris plane should be touching down right around... now. i hope he has my cell phone number, because i certainly dont have any way to contact him.

this is only the latest of many mistakes ive made this week. on tuesday, i had an enkai (work drinking party) with people from my board of education. thats where i got most of the grief that made me write my last blog entry. afterwards i wanted to relax a bit more by myself, so i went over to wild at heart, the one really cool bar in town. only it turns out tuesday that place isnt open. dammit. so i went to the indian place, had a beer, commiserated with the chef khari for a bit, but left as i was starting to nod off.

so last night was a similar pattern, but pay attention to the differences! i had another enkai, this time with a group of japanese teachers that i really like: nihei yatabe and kuramochi sensei from takahagi, shibuya and sakuyama sensei from akiyama, and suzuki sensei from matsuoka, all awesome english teachers. we had actual conversations! how awesome is that! i was having a great time, but unfortunately it had to end a bit early to give everyone a chance to catch trains home. i wasnt quite ready for my night to be over though. so when i saw onose sensei, a teacher in training that i worked with at takachu and later higashisho, i immediately sat down at his table and ordered a beer. i had to deal with another round of omg how are you so big type questions, but i think onose was commiserating with me there since hes a pretty big dude himself, aroundwise at least. ill have to go get some yakiniku with him sometime.

again though, i was starting to nod off a bit, and rightfully catching some slack for it. "oh bryan are you sleepy?" doh. i bowed out after my second beer, quite tired and quite plastered. ooh, but what happened to be quite close to the restaurant i had just left? the bar i had wanted to go to on tuesday! i decided to get one last drink. man the bartender there makes a strong gin lime. i was probably chatting a bit with the other customers, dont really remember, got halfway through my drink, and promptly fell asleep until 2am. as i regained consciousness, completely bewildered by the fact that it was 3 hours later than i last remembered, i overheard another patron say to his buddy, "is that the ALT?" (＿ ＿；)

i think sometime soon im going to have to tone down the partying. majorly. ive lived next to tokyo for 8 months but i keep going back to the same places: shinjuku, shibuya, and motherfucking roppongi, the expat epicenter of drunkeness. buut, this next week just happens to be spring break, ari is in town (ill get to the airport in about an hour) and the triumphant return to Ys Bar! i guess i will have to wait a bit longer before i cool down.

grr

Sometimes I think it would be better if I couldn't speak any Japanese. At least then it would save me from having the same exact conversation in Japanese over and over and over.


はい、すしは好きです。よく食べます。実は、最近アメリカにもすしは人気があります。

はいはい、箸使えます。子供の時から、アメリカの中華料理屋とか他のアジア系のレストランで使いました。

あ、靴は３０センチです。うん、ちょっと不便です。身長？身長は１９２センチです。そうそう、頭は気をつけなくてはいけません。

ううん、まだまだです。日本語は話せますが、大学を卒業したらたくさん忘れていました。今、漢字あまり読めません。

Sure, I like sushi. I eat it a lot! Actually, these days sushi is very popular in America as well!

Ah, yes, I can use chopsticks. Ever since I was a child I used them in Chinese or other Asian restaurants.

Oh, my shoes are 30cm. Yeah, it's kind of inconvenient. My height? I'm 192cm tall. Yeah, I have to watch my head.

Oh no, I still have a while to go. I can speak Japanese, but since graduating college I have forgotten a lot. Right now, I can't read very many kanji.


Every single enkai and every single elementary and kindergarten visit I rehash this conversation, perhaps mixed in with comments about the weather and "un, nihon wa naratteimasu." I can grin and bear it when I'm introduced to new people. After all, my job is just as much about cross cultural sharing as it is about teaching English to middle school kids. But man, when I have the exact same conversation with the exact same kindergarten principal 2 times in 3 months...

My other concern is that I may just be reinforcing most of the stereotypes Japanese people have about Americans. I can't help it if I'm bigger than all the other people in this country. And dammit, steak and hamburgers are tasty. At least I don't have a thing for guns...

I really want to work on making friends with Japanese people, at the very least so I can move beyond the small talk bullshit. Luckily there are some cool people in Takahagi, but I have to make more of an effort. I think most people here are too shy to actually call me up and do something, and for me its much easier to just call up one of the other JETs or my friends from America. So, I think I will have to make the effort myself to accomplish my goal.

i dont really remember weekends back in the states ever being like this. i think lately weekends have just been a huge production. all week long all of us ALTs are hard at work in our respective towns, pretty much without anything in the way of a social life, since there usually isnt more than one or two other people in the entire city that speaks english. so when the weekend and an opportunity to actually talk to someone comes around, you have to make the most of it. its 8 pm on a sunday night, and im writing this on my phone at a coco ichibanya curry place. i havent been home to my apartment in takahagi since i left for work on friday morning and i am fucking exhausted. i havent showered or shaved or cleaned up really at all since then. ive been through two double A battery chargers for my phone so far. again, i am a very tired individual. incidentally, coco's cheese curry is awesome. they even have a video game about this restaurant for PS2. and, it might not seem like it because the scale goes all the way to 10, but their curry is ridiculously spicy even at level 3. i routinely order a 3 out of 4 at the indian place in takahagi, but this is a whole other league. the scale goes up to 10, but to prove yourself you have to finish off a plate of level 5 before they let you go any higher. i wanted to try and challenge level 10 someday, but it looks like that isnt going to happen. level 3 was edible, but it was already at the point where all of the normal taste of the dish is just obliterated by spiciness. ill be ok without level 10, thank you.

speaking of gastrointestinal achievement, I ate at La Rochelle on friday night, which you may recognize as the restaurant of one Hiroyuki Sakai, better known as iron chef french! im no gourmet and ive certainly never paid 15000 yen for a meal before, but the food was amazing. the hot appetizer was foie gras with truffles, which takes care of 2 out of the 3 in the trifecta of the most expensive delicasies in the world. i went with 6 other JETs from ibaraki, kind of a random mix of people united by a desire to eat food prepared by an iron chef. of course, sakai wasnt actually there that night... but the food was still great. it was also fun to see everyone a bit out of their element and struggle to keep up the decorum suitable for such a classy place. i was definitely struggling too :) that night i went to vanilla in roppongi. roppongi is getting kind of old. i need to find something different to do with myself and the short time i have available in tokyo. woke up saturday, shopped and got some really ugly shoes in shinjuku, and finally got on a train back to ibaraki, just in time to catch the tail end of a st patricks day celebration at the drunken duck in mito.

the duck was crazy crowded, like tokyo levels. i think basically every foreigner in all of northern ibaraki was there. guiness and baileys flowed in great torrents to the amassed revelers, and unfortunately a bit too much went to a certain colleague of mine, so i ended up getting to ride along in a japanese ambulance to look after the guy. I've been in that position way too many times myself, to a lesser level of course, so I was happy to help out. also, japanese hospitals are apparently really cheap. an overnight stay for my buddy even without insurance was only about a hundred dollars. and i got to crash in a nice comfortable hospital bed for free too. woke up sunday (in the hospital) in time to go to the grocery store and get some beer and meat and go to a little birthday barbecue in a park in mito for Leo, then finally to coco's and now home finishing this on my laptop. I need to take it easier. spent way too much money over the past couple weekends going to tokyo and whatnot. It has been fun though.