Hi-C Party

Tonight was the Hi-C party. Hi-C stands for Hosei International Club. There were rumours flying around that these people were weird. But since all things japanese are a bit weird I didn't pay much attention to the warning. But you heard it here, these people were weird. Probably among the strangest I have met in Japan. It was pretty awesome. Some of the people inthe club were normal, but overall. Just weird. For instance, some guy named Ayumi was wearing big baggy clothes with work boots. With a black yankees cap and a diamond encrusted razor blade for a necklace. True story, I'm not making it up.

Japanese people can also not hold their liqour at all. A bunch of guys were trying to drink as many beers as possible,(side note, this event was at the bottom of the school in the cafeteria...Baylor this is not), and after two they were already well mashed. And they loved to just say random bad words in english that made no sense. So just imagine about 15 foreigners with about 30-40 japanese people in the basement of a school in tokyo with about 10 rando drunk japanese students trying to say bad words in english.

These people would ask me for my number and I would give away my email address like every 10 minutes. And the thing is, they actually call/email you here. I got an email right after the party as I was walking home from one girl saying the party was fun and we should talk again. Oh, the joys of living in a friendly culture.

And speaking of friendly, tonight on the train on the way home was get friendly time. After we transferred trains to the express train (an express train only stops at a few of the stops in between stations) people came from all over to join us in the train. It was seriously the most packed I have ever been. I was with two guys, Quentin from Jean Moulin III Uni in France and Daniel from Reading Uni in UK. We basically were all smooshed into the space where one person would normally occupy. Then the train stopped in the middle of the trip for about 2 minutes and Daniel was convninced we were going to die packed tight. At this moment I realised that there was a women in between me and the man next to me. At one point, Daniel thought his phone was vibrating but it was the man two people away from him. We all definately were a lot closer than any of us ever thought or rather wanted.

As a boring sidenote, I got my alien registration card today. Basically this is my sole mode of ID now. I don't have to carry my Passport and all that around anymore, not that I did before. The odds of a cop stopping you for anything is slim to none. I think the police here are just around for decoration. I also got my Japanese National Health Insurance registration. All the europeans were complaining on how expensive the insurance is, whereas I was amazed how cheap it was. Oh the joys of socialised healthcare and progressive society.

Yesterday I had to go in for a health checkup for all Hosei students. It's just like a physical with an X-ray. When the doctor was explaning the xray to me, I got some Japanese mixed around and I thought he told me that I had tuberculousis. Finally I got it that he was just saying my lungs were healthy and free of problems. Probably a good reason to continue working hard at the Japanese. I found out that in general I am healthy and good to go. All that walking and rice is paying off.

And I will end with the mandatory "Tokyo is so expensive" complaining. Tokyo is so expensive. It really takes a while to figure out how to save money and where to go to save money. When you just get in the country, I guess it's way to easy to spend as much money as you do. Hopefully this next month, I can figure out more ways of saving money and getting a part time job. I found an article about prices in Tokyo the other day and it was pretty good. Apparently Tokyo isn't as bad as it once was. But kansas city this is not. Getting something under 100 yen (about 90 cents) is pretty rare. Everything here is individually packed and bought seperately. (which adds to the waste problem as well) There is no such thing as a 12 pack of pop and only once I saw a 6 pack of beer. So if anyone hears about any ways of saving some money in tokyo, even a dollar here and there, share the wealth. litterally.

Ladies' Night

I probably should wait and post every couple of days, but it's a lot of typing to do in one sitting. So I'll just post littler ones everyday.

Today the only class I had was at 3pm, so I got to sleep for a long time. It was pretty nice. I think I slept off all the jetlag + nights till 6 am. One thing I will definately not miss is this dumb road outside of the dorm. It is never quiet, and tonight is construction night...again. Apparently they are tearing up the sidewalks and putting in new ones. They do look quite nice, but still. For a country always talking about the lack of resources, they sure do use a lot of useless crap.

Today's class was Japanese 3b. Basically we just talked about how to describe first impressions. So we had to show pictures of friends or family and let people say what they thought about them. Not too mind-straining.

I did get an email about possibly doing a russian course here. It will probably be super hard, but I'm really hoping it can work out so I can continue learning russian and be in a situation where I can't use english at all. So we'll see about that tomorrow.

After class I went back to the girl's flat because I was going to go with them later to "Ladies' Night" at Tokyo Dome. Apparently everything would be half price for ladies. I was going to go just to hang out and be the sole male in the group. Some of the girls ended up going on the huge roller coaster they have. Apparently it was worth the 1000 yen. (side note, we later found out ladies' night had very specific hours and they were too late, since the roller coaster should have cost only 500 yen) After the roller coaster they of course had to get ice cream, so we went to the basken robbins there. It was quite good after tasting only chocolate that tasted like sugar.

That's about it for the adventure today. Here are some pictures. once again, horrible layout. sorry.









This is the view from the 5th or 6th or 10th floor of Hosei. (I can't remember where I took it) The big black tower is the Japanese Self Defense Force. (their pseudo-army) To the left of that, the sort of empire state looking building, is the Diet. (the Japanese Parliment)






This is the big ferris wheel at Tokyo Dome with the roller coaster that goes through it. I realise it's sideways, I just can't figure out how to put it the right side up.




These are the girls I went with tonight and hang out with quite often. In the middle is the Ladies' Night sign at Tokyo Dome. From the left is Harriet (from Sheffield University in UK), Rachel, Nichole (from Truman State, my midwest connection over here in Tokyo), Erin (also from Sheffield in the UK), Kate (from sheffield in the UK, although she is actually going to Meiji University rather than Hosei) and Holly (from Reading University in UK).



This is Rachel at Bubba Gump's in Tokyo Dome. It's completley Forrest Gump themed. I'm not sure if they have those in the US, but I thought it was funny. The food there looked really good. Hamburgers, ribs, shrimp and such. Rachel and I said we would have to be going there sometime when we feel homesick for fatty salty fried things.

I'm old

Another year another birthday I guess. Except this year I am was in Tokyo so that makes it a bit more exciting. I went to classes as usual, and in each one someone commented how it was my birthday so I was a bit of a celebrity for the day. Rachel made me signs and she put them outside my class but I didn't know about them so I missed them. Thanks anyway Rachel. Maybe if I was a bit more observant...

Yesterday's classes were Japanese 4 and Japanese 3b. Japanese 4 was pretty hard, but that is good. It will mean more learning. Japanese 3b was also good, I really like the teacher. She reminds me of my high school Japanese teachers. She also teaches the Japanese culture class.

After class I went to meet up with Rachel. So I was following Holly, a girl from the UK who lives in Rachel's place. Just to give you an example about how funny japanese people can be.. Holly and I were walking back and this girl just says "Elena" to Holly. and Holly says "no, holly". (elena is a russian girl also doing the exchange program) this girl then jsut asks Holly who she is and where she is from. Then she asks Holly for her phone number and email. And later that night Holly got an email from her new friend. We were laughing about it later because we were thinking that if you just randomly went up to someone in the US or UK and asked them for their phone number you would get a strange look if not a swift kick. But Japan is so friendly that it doesn't matter.

So later Rachel, Holly and I went to Denny's for dinner. It was quite memorable. I had wanted to go to denny's hoping to get some sort of greasy american food. The denny's here looked exactly liked a Denny's in Miami but all the food was very japanese. It was pretty funny to get chopsticks in a Denny's wrapper. I found a club sandwhich though and got that. But it definately was not a club sandwhich. Some sort of Japanese club creation. Good though. And they even had vinegar to put your fries in. So that was exciting.

After dinner I decided I should make some sort of liqour purchase since I was 21 and would do that in America. But since they don't card here it wasn't as much fun getting to show the employee your ID and proving you are 21. I'm also kind of bummed about being 21 now because next time we go to the clubs or pubs it will be completley legal in both countries. The Brits were making fun of me when I was talking about being 21 and how rediculous it is that the US age is 21. I just reminded them that the US is the illegitimate child of the UK, so all out messed up policies are somewhat to be blamed on King George and his taxes on tea.

We were going to have a roof party at the girl's flat. But all of the guys had work to do and then when it came time to go up to the roof, everyone was too tired to climb the stairs. So we sat around and talked for a while. It felt like a bad lifetime movie at times when I was the only guy and they were talking about girly things.

I took the last train back to the dorms and it was packed tight. It was the busiest I have ever seen the train. I basically couldn't move to even grab onto a handle. I'll be sure not to do that again.

This morning I didn't have class till 13:30. So i let myself sleep in quite a while. Then I went to the train station with Atilla. He's an exchange student from Italy. He's absolutely hilarious. He came here without knowing any Japanese at all. Pretty brave. Since we were hungry we stopped in at a cheap little place called "Matsuya". It's really good food for almost nothing. Something incredibly rare in Tokyo. When you get in what you are supposed to do is choose what you want out of a vending machine and it dispenses a ticket. You sit down at a table and the waitress picks up the ticket and brings you back your food later after they make it. Atilla looked like he knew what he was doing so I didn't offer to help. He had ordered Natto so I was kind of wondering if he knew what he was doing. Natto is fermanted soybeans that pretty much smells like trash. It doesn't taste all that bad but the smell is awful. Plus the beans are all stringy and chewy. It's a really healthy food though, but awful. Atilla said that Natto was ok becuase he "could wait". I assumed he meant he wasn't all that hungry anyway. So I was finished and when I asked him if he was ready to go, he said "i have to wait". He thought he had ordered something else and the natto was the appetizer. So he had ate the natto to be polite and was just waiting to get the real meal. For anyone that has ever had natto you can find the humor in this. The waitress at the resturaunt was so impressed that Atilla had ordered natto. Later on when I told him that is all he ordered he cursed the "nattos" and vowed revenge on them.

The class today was Families and Sexulalities in Japan. Today's class was about the conventional stereotpical japanese family. It was pretty interesting how things change over the course of time. The idea of marrying for love was a new idea introduced during world war II time. Just like after the love marriage became the typical in western society, family roles began to change in society. After the lecture, we divided into groups and figured out what presentations we would present in the class. Atilla and I were assigned "Sexual Minorities in Japan" and "Heterosexual marriages". Atilla said that he wanted to add homosexual marriage to be fair in "360 thinking". And then he had another idea that we could sing "Sexual Healing" by Marvin Gaye on karaoke for our presentation. He is certainly a charachter. I feel that everytime I hang out with him I will have a story.

Then I had Japanese culture and headed back here and ate dinner and all that.

I should add that today when I went to get my jeans from the drying line, they were as stiff as a board. They seriously didn't even move when I shook them. Welcome to the world without a dryer.

Here are some pictures. I know the layout will be awful, but I just can't figure out how to make it better.

This is at the Christon Cafe. They had all these little windows with relics inside. Rachel and I posing by the priest's suit.
























This is still at the Christon Cafe. From the left, there is me, Yosuke (the guy whose birthday was the 25th), daniel (from reading university in the UK), and I'm not sure what that guys name is although he can speak spanish, and Pei. I'm not sure if that is how you spell it or if that is his actual name.(you see how observant I am) He is from Taiwan but is studying in Korea.


























This is Yosuke and I right before the cake came out. Almost all of the japanese students commented on my good times shirt. They really liked it and thought it was a good shirt for a party. All I could think was what Jerri Blank would do.
























I'm sure they would kill me if they knew I put this up. But this is (from the right) Erin and Harriet. Both from Sheffield Uni in the UK. This was at the Karaoke club last saturday. Just to give you an idea of what a Karaoke booth looks like. This was the only picture that really turned out.





























This is my bed. As you can see (since I folded it back) it is just a thin futon on wooden grating. It's quite the Japanese bed I have been told. Better than that dumb pillow though...
























This is the view outside my balcony. Not so pictureque. haha. Cars are always on this dumb street all hours of the night. The speed limit is supposed to be 40 kph but I'm pretty sure no one follows that.






















This is the main shrine entrance at Yasukuni Jinja. That shrine I was talking about before that has enshrined class A war criminals and is quite controversial.
























This is also at Yasukuni Jinja. (Jinja means shrine) This is a memorial to some type of ship blown up. I didn't get a chance to read it closer, but everyone who died has their name on the marble slab.























This was the weird man I talked about earlier at Akihabara. that is right, that is a man underneath that tight leather man-kini. I can go back and get his number if you want me to Mama Jade.





Someday I will figure out how to better put pictures on here. until then, it will take forever and it will be ugly I guess.

Salsa and Hail Mary

Saturday night I went to a Salsa club in Roppongi. Roppongi is the party town of Tokyo. There are lots of foreigners there so it feels like home. We got to the salsa club early because apparently they did free salsa lessons before hand. All the salsa lessons in the world couldn't help most of us but oh well. The club was pretty small and covered in very stereotypical mexican/cuban decorations. The people that worked there were cuban so it felt like Texas again hearing people speak spanish. After the lessons the club started playing all this mexican rap. I'm not sure where salsa is exaclty from but I didn't think it was from Mexico. Then the mexican rap would include some american rap with a salsa remix. All in all it was a pretty funny experience. There were also a few creepy old men there that kept on asking the girls to dance...

After the salsa club we went to another club in Roppongi called club 911. Mainly because it had free cover charge. When we got in, we figured out why. It was packed full of people. You basically couldn't move. When we finally got out of the club about 20 minutes later, the bouncer told us to go to another club across the street. Roppongi kind of felt like 6th street on Austin after that. People kept on yelling out "free cover" or the prices for their drinks.

We ended up going to a pretty nice karaoke club after that. I forgot to mention that the whole night there were two japanese girls from Hosei that were showing us around. And they had heard how I sang the Kinki Kids (a terrible Japanese pop group like the backstreet boys) last week, and wanted me to sing it again. Of course I did an encore. Karaoke lasted until 5 am and we caught the first train back. I ended up having to show one of the british guys that had come with us how to get back to his stop on the train. It felt pretty good considering it was the first time I had actually enough knowledge to get myself back to my stop and also able to tell someone else how to navigate the trains.

Then last night was a birthday party for a guy named Yousuke and they found out it was my birthday today so they included me in on the festivities. We went to this place called "Christon Cafe" in Shinjuku. It was this resturaunt that was modeled after a traditional European church. In the middle of the big open space they had a huge golden altar with statues of the madonna, Jesus and the saints. In the opening corridor there were greek icons on the walls and chairs with naked ladies on them. The japanese concept of church is a bit skewed I'm guessing..haha. Where we sat it kind of felt like a mueseum because they had little spaces in the wall covered by glass and relics inside. They were pretty random too. On one side of the wall they had (in order in different spaces in the wall) a saint, a painting of Jesus, a disco ball, a statue of the madonna, a statue of jesus and a huge diamond. This is Rachel and I next to a priests outfit I guess.


We had this lavish meal of hors d'oeuvre like plates. It was all really good. Although most of the time we had no idea what it was. It was supposed to be european, mainly Italian, but that was debatable. One really good thing we had was a pizza with slices of salmon on top. It sounds terrible, but it was actually really good.

After the meal me and Yousuke had a surprise of 2 massive, extravagant cakes. They weren't really too terribly large but for japanese sizes, they were huge. Plus they had fresh fruit all around them. Something you never see a lot of in Tokyo.
There was some type of posh candy thing on top that I couldn't figure out. If you can see it (and read japanese) it says my name in the corner.

After the birthday party some people were going out again but a lot of us decided to go back and sleep since most of us had been out all weekend and had school today. Which I have later on today...