Equestrian Deviation - Week 4 (June 3rd to June 9th)

This post fueled by nikkuman, ramen and Asahi Super-Dry


Welcome back to the program.

Equestrian Deviation

Week 4

Quick recap. Last weekend ended with a somewhat beaten and exhausted Ian recovering from a night of wild festivities all over Tokyo. Thus, begins, the fourth week. As a note, I'll be skipping over any days during the work week that don't contain any particularly notable events.

Tuesday dawned with a nice new feeling for me. For the first time since starting this new job: I was really looking forward to getting into work and getting down to business. That having been said, this was a fairly unremarkable work week with a couple of exceptions.

I had to take care of quite a bit more paperwork this week then I had previous weeks. Fortunately I managed to keep up with my lesson planning, so ultimately no concern there. My routine at this point has been well established and I'm looking forward to the point where my lesson planning gets smooth enough that I can establish a week-long lead on planning. I'm nowhere near that point now though.

Wednesday was kind of unusual. It had been very humid for the last couple of days and that night, during my final lesson of the day, I was unfortunate enough to receive a pretty decent size nosebleed. At least it provided plenty of humor for my students while I tried to look serious with a piece of ripped up Kleenex jammed into my nostril. What can I say, I aim to please. On the downside my nose also started to bleed on the way home and I'm not yet in the habit of carrying around a package of tissues to wipe my hand on or, in this case, soak up blood. I ended up snorting like a coke-fiend for most of the 20 minute walk. Fun times. Oh, and it was raining.

Which is not unusual right now. It's rainy season for Tokyo, so it rains pretty much all the time. When it's not rainy it's oppressively humid and very warm. I prefer the rain myself. Except when I'm in a suit. Which is often. That's why they have dry cleaners.

Wednesday was also pretty impressive because I got called a gaijin for the first time while actually in earshot. By a four year old girl no less. AWESOME. The little tyke got a light tap on the chin from her mother for it but I don't really care. I find kids actually stare at me a lot. It's like I'm growing a scrotum out of the side of my head or something and the adults are all polite enough not to point and stare. Kids not so much. But it's kind of fun. I just smile and wave and they usually pretend like they weren't looking. Yep. I have light brown hair and blue eyes...unusual I know.

Rest of the week was pretty solid, nothing unusual happened. On Saturday my Newsweek article students didn't show up, which was kind of a drag because the article was quite interesting and fanned the flames of social justice in my heart. Did you know that the number of billionaires the world over has more then doubled in the past 5 years? Pretty insane, no?

But Saturday. Saturday was the start of a big-ish weekend. After work it was time for my welcome party at long last with the students from my school. We went to an izakaya which is sort of a Japanese fusion restaurant. Price of admission was $3000 yen a head, but it came with unlimited free drinks. Yeah. You read that last part right. Alcoholic Beverages. All you can drink. Mixed drinks, beer, whatever. As much as you want. I know, I thought it was insane too, but it made for a fun night. There were about 12 of us there including myself and the other two teachers from Musashi-Koganei. The food was excellent and varied. First dish was a sort of Japanese kim-chee that was very good, and cooked at the table on a gas burner of course. This is in addition to the nice salad and salty rice crackers that greeted us at the table when we sat down. After that it was, surprisingly enough, a large platter of nann bread and curry (made me think of you Kev). Finally we had some nice honey-garlic-ish chicken and some steamed vegetables. The very last dish we received were some noodles and a few raw eggs which one of Sean's student used to change the remnants of the kimchee into an entirely concoction. Very cool.

All of this food was interspersed with 4 beers and plenty of excellent if somewhat fragmentary conversation. Sean and I made a pact that by the end of the year I will make him a fan of the Montreal Canadians while he will make me a fan of Manchester United. I wouldn't mind getting a taste for soccer, it is after all the world's most popular sport. One of my students had been out surfing for the first time this year and was bright red with sun burn. I hope he's alright, because it looked like he might have some 3rd degree burns. I talked quite a bit to my students about movies and sports which was quite nice. It was also nice to be a little, teensy bit less formal around everyone. I think it was a great time for all. I also got complimented on how well I use chopsticks. That's pretty sweet. Thank you Manchu Wok and the dozens of discount of Chinese meals I had there while working at Famous Players Rideau.

I began the long march home around about 11:00. I was very philosophical (read: drunk) at this point, so it was a pretty fun walk with the exception of one thing. A block from my house I happened to look left at a rock wall and noticed a cat that was standing on top of a brick wall. Unfortunately, it looked like the cat might have run afoul of a car or scooter or something. the cat had a pretty wicked scratch on one of it's hind legs. I walked back to my house, hopped into my plain clothes, grabbed my Famous Players flash light (wow, Mo!) and headed out to find the cat again. I succeeded only to realize the utter futility of my situation: I don't know where the nearest animal hospital is and I don't speak the language and I think it would look pretty insane for me to stumble up to someone's house drunk with a bloodied feline.

*sigh*

So I turned around and went home. I feel pretty guilty about that cat. I hope it's okay. On the plus side, on closer inspection, it didn't seem as bad as I initially thought. Plus the cat was ambulatory, so as long as it kept itself in plain view, I'm sure someone helped it.

So other then that, it was a pretty great night.

Saturday was also a benchmark for two other things. The first is that it marked exactly one month of living in Japan! Woot! Betcha it feels like I've barely left, right? *insert trademark lopsided grin* The other is that it was the first time I got a student to renew their contract with the school! Granted, she was a shared student, but it felt pretty good.

Sunday dawned and I hopped out of bed with a purpose. A friend of Sean's, Gareth, had invited me to the Tokyo Racecourse along with Sean to partake in that most classic of British sports, horse racing. Sean had been talking about it all week and we had decided to dress up all classy like in our suits and really hit the track like Ocean's 11 or something.

I ironed up a shirt, threw on my best pink-and-black striped tie and started on my way to meeting my friends at the train station. It was very hot, maybe high twenties plus about 80% humidity. More maybe. I don't know. Enough that everywhere you looked it was hazy. I was sweating pretty badly in my suit.

I got off the train on the way to the racecourse and bounded up the steps in the station only to see my compatriots clad in what could only be described as T-shirts and shorts or jeans. Needless to say, I was surprised. But no problem. I was just cooking all afternoon. On the plus side, I didn't get any sunburn.

The Tokyo Racecourse is large. Very large. And very impressive. Maximum capacity is 223,000 people. This is of course pretty impressive because most of it is just on one side of the track. There's a sitting area in the middle of the track ring, but other then that, all on one side. Very cool. Also quite busy too. We got to betting right away. This was somewhat difficult, due to the fact that the betting forms were entirely in Japanese. Fortunately, Sean had printed out a translation from the web a couple of nights previously which was a great boon to our effort. I still managed to beat on the wrong horse though. On the plus side, I won! I made about 650 yen on top of my 1000 yen bet. The rest of the day didn't go as well for me. I kept the rest of my bets smaller, around 200 yen or so, with the exception of the 11th race, which was the last race of the Asian Mile Challenge. Pretty exciting. I bet a total of 1600 yen on the 11th race across a number of different horses. One of the ones with a smaller bet on it won, so that was pretty cool. Very very exciting.

My lunch was some onigirii and beer. Followed by more beer. I'd had three by the time we left the track at around 5, and the combination of extreme heat had already made me a little tipsy. Afterwards we went out for Korean BBQ which was awesome, but also came with about 2 or 3 more beers and some crazy milky Korean alcohol which I don't remember the name of. Dinner was, again, awesome! Cow tongue, grilled veggies, mmmmmmm very good, all topped off with a simple vanilla ice cream.

I'd consumed more than my usual amount of alcohol so by the time I was on the train home I was pretty ruined. I managed to stumble back to my apartment and pass out. A fantastic night all and all though. I had a ton of fun and great conversation with all the other teachers. An excellent night all around.

Monday dawned at around 8 for me. I had planned to roll onto the floor and get up early enough to head out for a bunch of sightseeing. But that didn't happen. Combination hangover/laziness/weekend led to three hours of hitting snooze and then getting out of bed at 11. I wasn't hurting too badly though, so I got dressed in my basketball shorts and Casino Royale T-shirt and went for a nice jog in some light rain. Very pretty. I pushed myself pretty hard and ran for about 20 minutes straight without stopping, which was nice. I rested a little bit towards the end and finished up my 1/2 hour before turning for home. I hope to be out jogging again tomorrow morning, but we'll see if I have the energy.

By the time I'd gotten home from the jog it was already well past 12. I had to do some laundry and I didn't want to leave the house before it was hanging, so I got that started and surfed the web for a while. By the time that was finished it was approaching 2. I finally got everything together and left the house at 2:30.

I had a couple of tasks to take care of. The first was getting my dry cleaning done. The former occupant of my apartment had left a number of ties at work, which was pretty awesome of him. I took those and a couple of my suit pants to the cleaners and went through the fairly simple process of getting my membership at the place. Membership also came with a bonus gift of a bottle of dish detergent, so I'm good in that department for a couple of months. It was about 3:00 now and it was time to get my haircut. I found a salon near the dry cleaners that was open (most of them were closed for some reason) and got my haircut. It was pretty nice atmosphere and the young woman cutting my hair was quite nice. Had kind of a Bohemian feel to it. (Damn, just started chewing my last piece of Canadian chewing gum. I'll miss you excel!). I had a conversation with her that was pretty fragmentary, although ultimately pretty good. We discussed a lot of music. She was a fan of Paris Hilton (ugh) but also a lot of techno and house, which was cool. Plus she knew the Foo Fighters. The PA system in the salon played Aqua - Dr. Jones and a song by New Order that I don't know while I was there. Pretty unusual tunes, put cool at least for the latter. I managed to avoid confusing her at all and was greatly aided by the directions my JET had written out: "Same style, 2 centimeters shorter". I ended up with pretty much the same haircut I had before, which is pretty cool, but I'm kind of bored of it at this point. This explains the picture of Daniel Radcliffe up top. I think I'm probably gonna print a couple of pictures and ask for that haircut next time I go. Opinions? I've already been told I look like Daniel Radcliffe a couple of times over here. The capstone to this experience was when the hairdresser asked me if my hair was dyed. When I responded no she told me that my hair was beautiful.

Not used to that.

Okay. 4 o'clock now, one 3000 yen haircut richer. Like I said, I had planned to hit the touristy spots but it was a little late in the day for me to do that now. I had a dinner I was supposed to attend in Yokohama at 7 but it was cancelled, so I didn't really have a reason to leave Musashi Koganei. I decided it wouldn't be a bad idea to explore a little bit south of the train tracks.

Musashi-Koganei has kind of a strange feel to it. At times when I was walking around it almost felt as though I was in a small town in rural Ontario. I know that sounds kind of insane looking at the density of it all, but it really is a small town as far as cities go in Japan. It's a pretty neat aspect of the town, and may I reiterate that I'm very, very happy to be living in this particular town.

I explored the South of my city quite a bit. I came across a river that I later learned was called the No River which sort of appears out of nowhere. It also had paths down along the River bed. I wandered around town a little bit more, explored a temple that I found (very peaceful) and eventually ended up walking with the ducks, butterflies and fish down near the river. Very weird thing to find in the middle of what is otherwise a very dense city. It made for a very, very nice walk though.

I'm gonna take a minute here to yell a little bit about something though. So far, and speaking through un-culture-shocked glasses at this point in time, Japanese neighbourhoods are a world apart from their North American counterparts. Yeah, Japanese yards are tiny, but they don't need to be large. It is very nice seeing all of these neatly ordered houses with their 5 feet stone walls. Not only that, but the small trees that almost everyone seems to be growing out of their yards are absolutely idyllic. This has brought me to a stunning realization.

Grass is fucking ugly.

No seriously, it really is. It's like having a giant bright green carpet. Who wants that? I'd much rather have an awesome little garden or some nice trees or a hedge or something. Lawns are a waste of space.

There, I said my piece.

I wandered back to the center of Koganei after walking along the river for about 20 minutes. I stopped off at a Graveyard on the way to look around. Very nice, but pretty similar to western ones, just closer packed (again, no grass). After that I made my way to Jonathan's. Very nice little restaurant specializing in American food. I had a Japanese dish though. I was very happy to order food in a proper restaurant for the first time by myself.

My timing for dinner (around 6) was fortuitous in that about 15 minutes after I got there the skies split asunder and started pouring rain. And I mean pouring. It was Blade Runner rain. I've never seen it rain that hard for so long. The storm lasted almost 2 hours and was very close by. No time between lightning strikes and thunder. I went out to get some video of the storm and soon thereafter made my way through the pelting rain to Seiyu. Nothing really remarkable there. I bought a handkerchief to mop up sweat and a folding chair to sit in that doesn't cause severe spinal injury like the stool I had been using thus far. It's quite comfortable (bounces) and only cost me 1500 yen. Very nice as Borat would say.

The oddest thing about Seiyu today was the music selection. In order, I received muzak versions of the following: BJ Thomas - Rain Drops Keep Falling on My Head, Hanson - MMMMBop, Nirvana - Smells Like Teen Spirit. In that order. Bizarre.

The rest of monday was very uneventful. I bought some Asahi super-dry on the way home and cleaned my apartment a little before heading to bed. Another week complete!

Note to everyone still reading. Photo requests are now open. Here's how it works: Post a comment on this post at the bottom detailing what you would like me to try and get a picture of. I'll do my best to get em' as soon as possible. Kinda like a scavenger hunt around a country, right?

Next Tuesday I'll hopefully have tales of a gigantic dance club. We'll see though.

Updating again soon.

Ian "Mello Yello" Cantello