Boy, what a busy day! We got up and walked to a shopping center nearby. There's this thing they do at most stores if you're there at the precise time that they open, and today we experienced it. The employees hold the doors open and welcome you, and then everyone in the store bows at the exact same time. Very strange, but kind of cool. We found a bakery inside and helped ourselves to some delicious breakfast...doughnuts and pastry, yum. Most of their doughnuts are plain with sugar on the outside, sometimes chocolate sprinkles...but the filled ones don't have jelly in them, but some kind of bean paste. A little weird, but again, also good.
After that, we went shopping, yay. Japan has so much weird stuff you can buy. From Japanglish written in colorful letters on just about everything to talking and moving piggy banks, and anything in between. We didn't actually buy much, but it was fun to just walk around and look at/play with stuff. Here were some of our better finds:
A kitten that grabs your change (you may have to enable pop-ups to get the video to play)
Lunch was some teriyaki sticks and some sort of meat/veggie dish. I recognized most of the food in mine. There was some sort of weird purple cabbage-looking thing with a rubbery texture and not much taste...my guess is some kind of mushroom. We also bought this fruit called a loquat. It's light orange and tastes kind of plum/peach/pear/citrus-ish. Delicious. But don't eat the seeds, because they turn into cyanide in your digestive system! Here's what they look like:
After lunch we kind of hung around the hotel and relaxed for a bit before we went off to train at the Honbu (Bujinkan Dojo). I'm not really planning on going to too many classes, but I wanted to go to one with the grandmaster just to say that I did. Also, Bobby was being tested for his godan (fifth degree black belt) rank tonight, and I wanted to be there to support him. The easiest way for me to do that was to be a student during the class so that I could watch him test at the end. Bobby passed, despite his nervousness, and we went out to celebrate with a couple of the other buyu (another term for students of the Bujinkan).
We first went to this “American Style” bar/restaurant, whose food was actually pretty accurate representations of our food. Bobby had a hamburger & fries, and I had an omelette. The only real difference in the food was the size. Americans like things big, and Japanese like them small, apparently. (No double entendre there, I promise.) I ordered my own food today, both at lunch and here at supper, which was really awkward and involved a lot of pointing at pictures and nodding. I will never understand Japanese. At one point, this drunken black guy comes up to us and starts talking about race, commenting over and over how black people never go back to Africa to help other black people and they never help each other out in America, but that white people do all the helping because they have the money... I kind of didn't want to get into that with him, so I nodded and smiled until he left us alone. Harmless, really, but kind of weird. So, if white people are relatively rare in Japan, particularly right now because of the earthquake, then black people are even more rare. I've seen maybe a dozen or so other white people (mostly inside the dojo), but only like four black people. At this point I've gotten used to the fact that I'm in Japan, so when I see a non-Japanese person, I notice. That's all.
After food, we went with the group from the dojo to a karaoke bar. Now, karaoke is different here in Japan. What you do is you rent out a little room with your friends, and there's the whole karaoke setup inside where you control it yourselves and you only sing to each other. You order drinks and stuff from this little electronic menu and they come in and bring them to you, so you don't have to disturb your singing. They have these huge books with songs in English, Japanese, and I think the other language was Korean. When they go on the screen, they all have the katakana and the native language (if not a Japanese song) words going along at the same time. There are maybe ten cheesy/weird videos going on in the background, usually involving a boy in the woods looking depressed and a girl on a beach looking off into the distance. They're quite amusing. The whole experience was rather fun, if not what I'm used to.
Now it's about 2:00 AM, and I should probably get some sleep. Bobby has already crashed, as he's going to a bunch of classes at the Honbu tomorrow. I don't think I'll be joining him this time, as I do have homework to do.
*Edit: at maybe 4:00 AM there was another small earthquake tremor, probably an aftershock, because it was much less intense than the first one and didn't even wake up Bobby. Kind of hard to get used to.
*Edit: at maybe 4:00 AM there was another small earthquake tremor, probably an aftershock, because it was much less intense than the first one and didn't even wake up Bobby. Kind of hard to get used to.
The karaoke bar reminds me of when Scarlet Johanssen and Bill Murray sang karaoke in Lost in Translation. Did you sing American songs, or were there some Japanese ones as well?
ReplyDeleteWell, Bobby and I sang American songs, as did most of our group, but some of the people we were with knew enough Japanese to sing Japanese songs. Even if there was a Japanese song that I wanted to sing, I'd have to know how to read Japanese, because the karaoke isn't in romanji (English letters for Japanese words)...and I know nothing of either of the three Japanese alphabets.
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