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

Gaseous Organization - Week 17 (September 2 - September 8)

Gaseous Organization

Week 17

Welcome back to yet one more iteration of this online journal. I remember thinking a few months ago about how long it would take to get out of the single digit numbers. Guess time's moving faster than I thought, because here I am pushing my way up towards the 20 post mark.

Not bad.

Well, what can I say, I'm excited for Thailand. Things are falling into place...

Wait, I'm messing this post up here, talking about generalities rather than working in a focused chronological ordering of events.

Eh.

Whatever.

Yeah, Thailand's coming along. I was disappointed Tuesday to read a post on my Facebook by Stephanie M that linked to a CNN story on the political riots that are occurring in Thailand right now.

Awesome. Great timing.

Much of this week saw me a bit stressed as the whole Thailand party waffled between sticking with our original plan or modifying it and changing destinations. Hong Kong, Malaysia, Vietnam and the Phillipines were all suggested. We even voted on it. If I remember correctly, my vote was "Damn the torpedoes! Thailand or bust!" As it turns out, Thailand won through despite political turmoil. Besides, the two weeks between now and our departure should allow some time for the country to regulate.

Now all I have to worry about is Typhoid and Malaria.

The plan for the trip will likely run something like this:

Fly to Bangkok on the 21st
Muck about in the city for at least a day (22nd)
Check out the area around Bangkok (possibly 2 days)
Fly to Phuket or somewhere else on the Andaman coast
Check out the beaches, resorts and islands (3 or 4 days)
Head on home.

I'm really excited for this trip, so much more than I was a few weeks. I don't really know when it occurred, but my attitude switched at some point from mild interest to white knuckle anticipation. Makes me feel like I did right before I left for Japan.

The week itself was pretty good, with the exception of some troubling news on Friday and a number of nights where I slept quite poorly. I can't talk about the former for now, but sometime in the next few weeks I probably can. (edit: THIS IS NOTHING TO BE CONCERNED ABOUT. It just has to do with my job, nothing personal. I'm not in trouble or anything. Thanks to the people who expressed concern.)

Wednesday saw me taking a rather extended lunch break to travel down to Kichijoji and patronize what is (according to Sean) the largest Yodobashi Camera in Japan. I think he's probably right. This place made the one in Akihabara look...averaged size. I won't say small because that's a ridiculous statement to make.

Oh that reminds me. One of the things that kind of surprises me about places like Yodobashi camera is what I would vaguely describe as "shotgun inventory". Yodobashi Camera is, undoubtedly, an electronics store. And yet, the 2nd floor of the Kichijoji outlet has a full fledged cosmetics department.

Think about this for a second.

Imagine you walk into Futureshop. You're walking through the home theater section and then, all of a sudden, there's a place to stop and get a manicure.

This style of store is outside the western experience and seems to be echoed a number of the stores around Tokyo. Inventory seems to always be decided on an "appeal to everyone" kind of basis. There's few major stores I'd describe as truly specialty.

Back on track.

Umm, so I went to Yodobashi and picked up some extra stuff for the camera. Went on back to school and finished up the day and the rest of the week. Nothing particularly remarkable occurred. I started up running again, although took it pretty easy. My leg seems to be better now, but I'm still avoiding the stair running section of my jog.

Sunday, unfortunately, marked the ending of Zoey's tenure here in Japan. That meant that Saturday was PARTY TIME! It had been a couple of weeks since I'd been out in Shibuya, so I was really looking forward to this. I met Kevin in Shinjuku at 10pm. He had brought some stuff back from Fujiyoshida for me, including my Converse All-Stars, which were absolutely key for my enjoyment of the night. We also met Winny there a few minutes later. It was a bit rainy, but other than that, fine. I was quite exhausted though, and hungry, same condition as the Fujiyoshida delegation. This synergestic alignment of gastro-intestinal void was in our mutual interest to alleviate, so we went straight to Shibuya and the Elephant Cafe, which we'd tried to go to a fortnight ago and failed. This time though, everything went fine (meaning I hit the right button on the elevator) we got a table for 8, which turned out to be folly, but at the time seemed like plenty.

People started arriving at 11:30 and before long we had a huge crew. The guest of honor arrived at 12:30 and that brought our party size up to 12! The elephant room is a really great place, but it's just a little bit expensive considering the portion size.

We left at about 1:00. We spent a few minutes trying to figure out where to go. Ultimately the destination was decided to be the old standby, one more round for old time's sake...

Gas Panic

And this turned out to be an EXCELLENT idea

With a large enough group of people, Gas Panic is a ton of fun. It gives you the ability to build a space for yourselves on the dance floor. We had some great interactions with the usual rogue's gallery that calls Gas Panic home. The usual lecherous Gaijin were making their rounds, much to our group's amusement. We had a number of great episodes with a diminutive japanese woman who would link random people's hands together while dancing. A few japanese fellows were kind enough to hop into our circle and bust a few moves. The whole night was a ton of fun.

After Gas Panic, we took a short walk down the street to that other most quintessential of Japanese entertainment venues, Karaoke!

Lots of memorable duets were in the offing. I think the most memorable song was maybe Paint it Black, but that's always a hit. Hmmm...let me think. What was really good? Shin sang some Fallout Boy with Kev, that was pretty awesome. I sang 1979 again with Ryan. The capstone was definitely everyone belting out Anyway You Want It to finish the night. Fantastic!

The group headed home after the karaoke broke up. I said goodbye to Zoey on the train at Yoyogi station. I'm gonna miss her, she's a great friend and it'll be a shame to have one less cohort in Tokyo. We made it home a little after 7:30 AM. Kev had to take off at around 12 to meet a friend downtown. I stayed home and basically spent Sunday recovering, really nothing amazing.

Monday I was up pretty early, 6:00am. I met Sean at 8:50 in Tachikawa so he could help me out with my re-entry visa. No hitches there, nor with heading to Leopalace to get my internet renewed again. I stopped by Kichijoji again afterwards and picked up the camera bag pictured above. I'm pretty much all set for Thailand now, at least photography wise.

After that I met Melissa in Yokohama to do some more planning for the trip. We went to TGI Friday's for happy hour and that's pretty much it, a rather unremarkable weekend with the exception of Saturday night.

As you might have noticed from the shots above, I'm getting the hang of my camera still. The photo taken in Yokohama with the sun coming through the clouds is an example of what happens when you have the wrong White Balance set on your camera. I was taking pictures with it set to Fluorescent. This explains the pronounced blue tinge of the photo. Digital SLRs have a learning curve to my chagrin.

Well, that's all for this week. Next weekend should be interesting, as the fall weather is rolling in. I'll be sure to do more photography next week than I did this week.

'til next time.

Ian "Mello Yello" Cantello

Mariachi Uprising - Week 16 (August 26 - September 1)

Mariachi Uprising

Week 16

Hello again!

Well, another week of relative inactivity has passed by over on this side of the Pacific. As previously mentioned, I've been keeping it low-key in order to save up money for Thailand although the next two weekends promise to be a bit more exciting.

The week started out a little bit rough for me. After running too energetically (or recklessly) on Tuesday night I ended up with a pretty nasty calf strain in my right leg. I think this was a long time in coming as I've had repeated problems over the past couple months with this particular bundle of bone, sinew and tendon. Blame shall be targeted at running the stairs in the park, due to the sudden speeding up and slowing down that has to be done on the ascent and descent.

The upshot is I had to take a week off of running. I just ran again tonight (Tuesday) and made it slightly under my usual distance before I started getting some unusual sensations in my leg that prompted me to end the jog prematurely. It's still tingling a little bit now, but I'm hoping that that's not really a problem. We'll see tomorrow. (ed: Ice helped as it turns out)

Other than that the week ran pretty smoothly. I picked up two new movies for the lobby on Friday (Titanic and There Will Be Blood) and enjoyed the change from The Kingdom. Payday, woohoo! I also paid for my flight to Thailand on Friday which I may regret doing. More on that later.

The one major downside to this week was the sequence of major thunderstorms that rocked the city, especially Thursday night. Thursday may have been the worst storm I've seen here so far. Extremely heavy rain combined with near constant thunder for something like 8 hours. Friday contained a very random lightning strike that was within a kilometer of the house after about an hour of silence. Sounded like shotgun going off in the room. All and all terrible weather.

Saturday came and went peacefully without any wild and crazy goings-on in Tokyo. I selected my team for Fantasy Football in the afternoon with Sean. Turns out I either have a hidden talent for fantasy sports or I'm just extremely lucky because I jumped from 8th out of 13 to the coveted number one spot in our private league. Not bad, but probably won't be holding this position for long.

Sunday was unremarkable too. I had perhaps intended to go down to Ueno, but a combination of wanting to conserve money, ironic considering the purchase I made Monday, and the late hour at which I awoke resulted in me dropping my plans. Spent the afternoon reading my book, researching Universities and playing video games.

I can say though, that Monday was pretty interesting...and weird. This all started with the knowledge that Zoey, who I have mentioned multiple times on this blog, departs for colder pastures in the next couple weeks. Before she took off though, there's still a couple of things that had to be attended to. Checked off the list as it were. One of these was located in the the hive of wretched scum and villainy known as Akihabara.

We were going to a maid cafe.

And there was a decent sized group for it too. Myself, Melissa, Don, Zoey, Shinsuke, John (a fellow from a competing language school) and even Winny who took the bus down from Fujiyoshida for the occasion. We headed out to the @Home Cafe, which occupies four floors of a building in Akihabara. It was actually pretty difficult to get in considering the fact that we were there on a Monday afternoon at about 3. We had to line up on the exterior stairway for about forty minutes in sweltering Tokyo weather. That wasn't so much fun.

By the time we got in though we already had a pretty good idea of what was in store, which was a good thing because, well, to be quite frank, it was pretty fucked up. That's not to say it wasn't entertaining, it was just pretty...unusual.

description:

Well, first of all, everyone in there is wearing a french maid's uniform, in this case, white and brown. There's J-pop music blaring out the whole time you're in there, which was annoying at first but kind of faded into the background. The maid that took our order had very good English, which I think is a direct result of the number of foreigners that patronize these places. There were a couple of thugged-out chaps sitting at the entrance when we arrived that could not have looked more out of place.

We took our seats (Melissa and John were separate due to sitting limitations) and ordered up. A short while later, another maid returned with our orders. In the interim Don took the opportunity to get a picture taken with one of the maids, which was pretty awesome. I was the only one who had ordered something that required additional preparation (a blended coffee, as opposed to American coffee, which are the only two main types of hot coffee in Japan). I asked for 1 milk and 1 sugar and was completely surprised when the waitress mixed them into the coffee for me. After that, she had everyone else select a straw for their drink.

Then things got more surreal.

The maid had everyone form a heart shape with our hands before waving them back and forth in unison while saying "moe, moe, kyuuuuuuu." Moe translates to something like "love" or "sexy". I have no idea what Kyu means. But it was kind of...insane.

The two major sources of money in this place seemed to be the pictures with the maids and also playing bizarre little games with the maids. Think games along the lines of Rock em' Sock em' Robots. I had a profound sensation of "not getting this" the whole time I was there. We left after our allotted one hour was up with our member's cards in hand (pictured above). If I visit the place 2000 times my card gets updated to "The Legend" level. I think once was enough.

We headed out to Akihabara Yodobashi Camera, an absolutely massive branch of this national electronics retailer. We were all on the lookout for something. Melissa ended up with a pair of iPod speakers, Zoey with new ear buds, Caroline (who took John's place when he left) a set of headphones. Winny hunted for a camera but was ultimately unsuccessful. I, on the other hand, found what I was looking for. Canon's Digital Rebel XSi or, as it's known in Japan, a Canon Kiss X2. Very, very nice piece of photographic equipment, switchable lenses, everything. It makes me feel more professional just holding it. We'll see if that holds up in Thailand.

After Yodobashi it was off to dinner at a place I recommended to everyone: Fonda de la Madrugada. I know, I know, it's a repeat of dining locations, but when you have a craving for Mexican you MUST satisfy it. And damn, was it ever satisfied. That place is easily one of my favorite restaurants ever. Especially this time, because Don recommended a song off the soundtrack for Kill Bill vol. 2, "Malaguena Salerosa". It was a really impressive performance, the guitar especially. Huge applause from everyone at the restaurant. Great times had by all.

Headed home, did some grocery shopping, opened up my new camera and started taking a few shots. Nothing amazing, just testing right now. I'm really happy with it so far though.

A final note for this week, though it boils over into next week like a storm surge over a levy wall. Thailand is currently in the middle of some mild political upheaval. We're going to give it a couple of weeks to calm down, but if nothing changes there will be a sudden and abrupt change of plans in the coming weeks. The likelihood of us canceling plans is directly proportional to the amount of time protesters spend blockading airports. I'm not particularly interested in spending a week languishing in Bangkok International...so yeah. On the downside, I doubt I can do anything to un-request my vacation time now. Them's the breaks. Also, flight cancellations are expensive as it turns out. I'm hoping everything comes together, but unless the Prime Minister of Thailand acquiesces to the protesters demands, it's not likely.

That's it for this week. Next weekend is the big going away party for Zoey, so expect a lot of drunken reveling to be related in these storied...um...kilobytes?

yours, perplexed as per usual

Ian "Mello Yello" Cantello


P.S. Les, I emailed you concerning locations of interest in Thailand, but I'm not sure if your email blocked my address. I hope you got it!