Foreigners

Day before yesterday, I went with Olga and her boarding house Mom (Chie) to the International center (where we met Sasha, Tolia, and Jyun). They were having a "beginning of winter" party for the foreigners in town. (Quotations used because there's still a severe lack of snow here.) I found out that I'm one of like 4 Americans, including a guy who's lived here with his Japanese wife for over 15 years. I got "business cards" from like 10 middle school kids in exchange for talking English with them for a few minutes. I also met a woman named Julia from Hong Kong.

She was awesome; she, a girl from Romania who works at the local 7-11, and I started off the dancing when the rock band started playing in the corner. We tried to get a snake going, but it didn't work so well. We managed to get the middle school boys dancing, and one of 'em turned out to have some really nice moves including a couple of Russian things I know how to do and can't, thanks to my acting lessons of so long ago.

The rest of the time was spent talking to random people and snacking on sushi, sandwiches, and candy set out on all the tables. It turned out that there were a boat load of people from other Asian countries. A big boat, too. We of non-Asian countenances were few and far between.

As the event wound down around 2:30 (it had started at noon), Tolia, Olga, Jyun, another Japanese guy whose name I don't quite remember, and I decided to take our time and go for a walk. Chie, Olga's boarding house Mom, drove herself home, not wanting to deal with the weather. The rest of us ended up spending like an hour and a half sitting and chatting in the nearby MOO building's indoor park/greenhouse place before we decided to go drinking. I told them I was gonna have to head home due to lack of moneyage, but the guy whose name I don't quite remember offered to pay, so... I went.

It turned out that we were a bit early for the drinking places to open. The one we headed to opened at 5 PM, but we got there like 25 minutes early. We walked back past the international center to the one guy's car, which we rode to a parking garage across the street from the place we intended to go drinking at. The parking garage was awesome. Narrow, just like every parking lot I have seen in Japan, but when we got to the machine that gives you the tickets, it had an electric board showing which levels of the garage were full. How useful is that? :D

The place was called Wara Wara, which consisted, in Japanese, of the kanji for laughter twice. It was a nice place, with the table sunk into the floor like the yakiniku place I went to with the sadou girls after the gakusai. Olga didn't want to drink too much because Chie hates alcohol, so she, Jyun, and I started out sharing a bottle of sake. The one guy (who I'm gonna call Taka from here because I know his name started with Taka) had a cocktail, and Tolia had orange juice. I asked if he didn't like Alcohol, but got a vague, "I've drunk alcohol before," for an answer before Olga declared that she was "ashamed of him as a Russian." It was good fun; talk and food abounded.

Taste-O-Meter!

Tako: 4
At first, when Jyun asked me if I like tako I thought he meant the good old-fashioned Mexican taco. Tako is octopus, chopped up into little bits and marinated in something. The texture was ok, and the taste was a teensy bit reminiscent of like the food that "tasted a little bit like Hell" in Sapporo. Olga and Tolia didn't want any, but Jyun, Taka, and I chowed down.

Gyojya: 5
This was pretty much the Japanese version of a potsticker.

Deep Fried Chicken Cartilage: 5
Way tastier than it should have been. I never realized you could eat cartilage before; just goes to show what I know. I definitely need to try chicken skin on a stick.

The other stuff we ate was stuff like vegetables and sushi. Olga and I ate a lot of sushi, actually. There ended up being a second round of drinks as well; Olga refrained so that her breath wouldn't end up smelling of alcohol and Tolia had more orange juice. Taka said he wanted to "see me drunk" so he bought me a glass of whiskey; Jyun ordered a nice big bottle of warm sake, from which I also partook some. I didn't end up drunk, though.

From there I went home; I ended up playing board games online with Ozymandius, until I realized that it was time for me to take a bath and get to bed... so I did.

Skip Yesterday, it Was Boring. Here's Today.

Got up late this morning. Again. My sleep schedule is running about two hours late at the moment. I've been trying to fix it by getting up on time early, but I'm having alarm clock problems. So I got up just in time for a new class.

I had thought the Nihon Jijou schedule was being switched around for some reason, but it was actually a geography class. I showed up late because I'd been told it was in room 401, when it was really in 401A (meaning a different building altogether). When I got there, the teacher had copied maps of Kushiro to paper for us. He told us a little bit about Kushiro and its economics: Kushiro is the last place in Hokkaido with an undepleted coal mine; at one time, Kushiro brought in more fish than any other port in Japan, and it's still the best in Hokkaido but is now third in Japan; there are a crapload of paper mills; there are two ports, one on either side of the river mouth, with the north one being newer and bigger; Kushiro gets a lot of imports from New Orleans (oh snap, hurricane).

After that, he took us for a drive around town to show us some of the stuff he'd pointed out, officially making this the coolest Geography class ever. During the course of my explorations of Kushiro, I've found a couple of the spots mentioned for tourism; the first place we went to on the drive was another one, a short lighthouse overlooking the ocean. We went there because it was the best view of the port in town, not because it was a tourist spot. We could see both ports, a great deal of ocean, a great deal of town, and the breakers out in the bay. It was awesome, if cold and windy.

After that, we stayed in the car. He showed us a number of things, including a house in the oldest part of town that's been standing for like 100 years -- impressive with typhoons and earthquakes and all. We also saw a jinjya (Shinto shrine) that was dedicated to the gods of the sea. We then made our way to and all around both ports. We got to see some rather large piles of coal and wood chips. The former was awaiting shipment to Yokohama by boat, the latter to a paper plant to be turned into paper. The fishing boats had the kind of fish they go out for written in large letters on the sides of their cabins, and all around the fishing boats were the biggest seagulls I have ever seen. They're 2-3 times the size of Alaskan ones.

After we got back to the school, we discussed going to other places to check out other things in the future. Olga had a preference as to where to go, but I'm cool with going anywhere. We then broke off to go wherever; I went to the Gaiken room to do some kanji studying, then went to the koto class, then came home and wrote this. Yay!

Realizations of the Period

1) I think I'm gonna have to rotate my sleep schedule forward to fix it. Bah!
2) I really need a table.