Calculated Torrents - Week 18 (September 9 - September 15)

Calculated Torrents

Week 18

Four Months

As I type out this particular blog, I'm watching the highlights of the sumo match from the day. No idea who is winning, but it's pretty interesting...and here's a match with a gaijin sumo...and he lost...I'm not surprised.

Last week.

Well, the week was pretty typical. Felt slow but passed fast. Wednesday night I got bored after MSN crashed out on me, so I spent some of the night wandering around the park with my new camera trying to get a good picture of one of the many bats I've seen while out jogging around at night. Unfortunately, in about 45 minutes of walking around, I only saw one bat, and it only hung around for a few seconds before leaving the lamp I was standing beside. Oh well...

Went to Jonathan's on Saturday for lunch with Kayako and Sean. The news that I was talking about last week has to do with Sean. His position at Musashi-Koganei is being eliminated and he is shifting over to Toyoda school full time. This means that I'm also absorbing all of his classes into my schedule. Things are going to get a whole let busier for me a little while after I get home from Thailand. It's quite the change for me now, working with GEOS. With Sean off to his other school full time I'm down to one co-worker as opposed to the 80 or so I had working at Silver City. What an adjustment!

Saturday night involved my second trip down to Machida. I met Shin, Seth and Melissa there for another party hosted by one of the GEOS substitute teachers. It was an alright time. The dance floor died out for quite some time while we were there, that wasn't so good. Otherwise though, it was good fun. The biggest problem with it I found was that they were playing The Warriors on the projector for a few hours. I haven't seen the movie yet and I really want to, so I was pretty distracted for a while. The film geek rears its ugly head.

We left the party around 3:30 or so and proceeded to Karaoke until 5:00 AM. It was pretty fun, as always. I had a very interesting conversation with one of my students about the difference between gaijin-karaoke and japanese-karaoke. With foreigners everyone just sings along, cheering and making noise, ignoring the person who choose the song and whoever is actually on the mic. Conversely, the Japanese tend to be very respectful of whoever is singing. Everyone else is generally silent, either giving full attention to the person singing or looking for the next song to play.

Of course this isn't a hard and fast delineation between the behaviors of my original and adopted cultures. I have, however, had these differences correlated by a number of sources, both gaijin and japanese.

I was exhausted on the trian home that night (hell, I was exhausted before I left Koganei) and I unfortunately fell asleep on the train home. A kindly Japanese fellow was nice enough to wake me up when we got to Hachioji. I'd have hated to have ridden all the way back to Yokohama.

Sunday was another recovery day for me and as such was fairly unremarkable. There was an INSANELY heavy downpour in the early evening. Crazy. Psychotic. Mentally unbalanced even. Hardest rain I've ever seen. We'll see if this holds true though. I'm looking forward to Thursday of this week, because it looks as though we may get our first decent sized Typhoon then. As if waiting for Thailand wasn't enough!

During Sunday evening I also partook of one of Kirin Holdings Company, Limited. This particular concoction was their "Autumn Blend" (pictured above) which has recently appeared on store shelves. I was motivated to buy it because I figured it would provide me a nice segway into talking about the effect the seasons have on Japanese culture.

Just look at that segway. Smooooooooooooooth

As I have been informed by a number of other teachers and students (which they mainly do by appending "that's seasonal" to my enthousiastic description of a product I have discovered), many products are seasonal in Japan. Like the beer I drank on Sunday, Kayoko's favorite tea has switched to an autumn blend. Many of the products in stores now sport nice red japanese maple leafs which makes me feel a bit nostalgic. Apparently red maple leaves are heavily evocative of autumn in Japan too.

I'll be keeping an eye out for products that change over the year. I'm eager to see what winter brings. Sean give me an example a couple weeks back of different kinds of meat dumplings that are sold in convenience stores. During winter, they tend to stock much more in the way of "pizzaman" which is fairly similar to pizza pocket (I had one a few weeks ago). I'm kind of surprised that the seasons have such a major effect in Japan. I would have thought that Canada would be much more likely to develop a cultural fixation like this considering the wild swings in weather between seasons. Not so I guess.

Should make for some interesting shopping at the very least.

Monday brought more planning for Thailand. I met Melissa, Don and Seth in Shibuya to check out the UT store that we had stopped by a few weeks ago. After walking over to Harajuku and seeing all the sights (including the very edge of Yoyogi park) we met up with Ben at the Ometesando station and proceeded to head to our intended destination. Unfortunately we came away empty handed. They've switched their stock in order to accomodate autumn which means much less in the way of interesting t-shirts.

Damn it.

We walked all the way back to Shibuya and swung by American Apparel quickly. I might have bought something if Thailand wasn't loaming over me like a New York mugger, but hey, it is, so I didn't. We were sort of casually chatting about the trip the whole time, so it's not like the time was wasted.

We eventually ended up hoping a train out to a smaller suburb called Shimo-Kitazawa. It's a very hip place that's quite popular with those youthful uni kids and has a reputation for lots of live music and funky stores. We ate dinner at an excellent Vietnamese restaurant before moving over to a bar. It was a really interesting place, owned by a printing company. Tons of very cool pictures covered the walls and whatnot. Good place to just sit and talk for a while.

After a few drinks though I was starting to get pretty tired and started thinking about what I had to do when I got home. I bowed out at 9:00 and headed home, tired from the long walk and preoccupied with planning for the trip.

And that's pretty much it for last week. Really, things haven't been too excited for the past few weeks due to the upcoming trip. On that subject, let it be known that there will be no update next week as I will be somewhere in Bangkok. I'll try and get a double or triple post done the week that I return from overseas, but we'll see what happens.

As a final note, Winny found this last week. The second maid cafe they discuss, the @home Cafe, is the one we went to a couple weeks ago. I hope it's informative.

Until then, so long, and talk to you all again in a week!

Ian "Mello Yello" Cantello