Well... I'm Hungry!

     So the first issue that needs to be brought up now that I’ve been in Japan for this long is: the food is delicious, but NOT. FULFILLING. Goodness gracious, I’ve been so hungry the past two days because all of the portions I get are so small compared to American ones but still cost MORE. I’m luckily if I spend less than $5 here for dinner, and when I’m done I still need more to eat. To save my money for other things, though, I have to watch out. Tonight was probably the first meal that I’ve eaten that I’ve felt even partially fulfilled, and that was 450 yen worth of spaghetti and a 105 yen piece of bread (to roughly calculate yen to dollar, move the decimal over two places), both from the 7-11 that’s on the way back to the DK House. Hopefully I’ll be able to pay a flat fee at the cafeteria at Sophia for all I can eat… otherwise, expect me to be 30 pounds lighter when I get back. One thing I can’t wait for in returning home already? Seconds.

     The other things that’s bothersome about the food situation here is the lack of drink. I’ve probably been somewhere in the vicinity of being almost on the verge of being officially dehydrated because you don’t really get much to drink for meals. I usually drink about two full glasses of something with every meal (milk, which is probably the most common for me for lunch and dinner, by the way, hardly exists here), but here you get a really small glass of green tea, and then a really small glass of water when you ask for it. When I got some melon soda with my lunch two days ago, the “medium” size (they had “medium” and “large”) was probably the amount of liquid in one of those mini-soda can things. Jen told me that an effect of this lack of hydration is why, I quote, “Japanese people don’t sweat in the summer.” WHAT!? I’ll be looking out for that one. It sounds ridiculous to me, but after not having anything to drink for the past few days, I’m less reluctant to believe it.

     By the way, it’s extremely hard to find a trash can anywhere here. I think it this was something I had marveled at before… the country being so clean but there being absolutely no trashcans anywhere. Today I walked the 15 minutes from the DK House to the station with a plastic container from lunch trying to find a trashcan to dump it in, but it wasn’t until after I bought my ticket and made my way inside the train station that I found one. But anyway, onto the days’ events:

Friday, March 28^th

     After a long night of dragging bedding around for what seemed like an hour and crashing right afterwards, I… well, woke up and wrote the end of the other day’s post. But then probably went and showered so that I was ready to do what I had to the rest of the day.

     Showering is another issue that I’ve been confronted with every day since even before I got my towels. Wait, I don’t think I mentioned that I didn’t bring towels. But I didn’t! They take up too much space! And I didn’t get towels until I got the bedding, so yes, I was a little grungy that whooole day of walking around. But not as grungy as you think…! I was able to wash myself somewhat, and while I’d like to tell you the whole story, I’m not going to be able to because 1) it should have been in the last post, and 2) it’s on the podcast! After I’m done with this post I’ll be sure to upload the podcast somehow so you can hear the complete bathroom situation the first day. But on with the current situation!

     Luckily I’ve been able to go to the showers without being confronted by another person, but soon enough I’m going to be… and hopefully I’ve been doing everything right. The first time I went to shower I walked the wrong way, and that’s kind of embarrassing because when you walk downstairs towards the showers you have the dining area doors directly in front of you. So, anyone that saw me coming down the stairs for the showers also saw me walk the wrong way down the hall that also has windows to the dining area and thus turn around to walk the other way. I made it, though, and have never made that mistake again. Other mistakes may be happening, but I’m not sure. First, I really don’t think that the Japanese have specific shower shoes. If I recall correctly from my time at the building that I stayed in with USHSD in 2004, you take your slippers off in the first room and walk into the shower room. After being in a college dorm with a communal bathroom once already in my life, I really don’t trust walking into those showers barefoot, especially since we have other residents who aren’t Japanese (not saying that some of them wouldn’t be as disgusting as some of us, but I’m inclined to think that the scale is tipped somewhat in their favor). That being said, I’ve been using my shower shoes, just waiting for someone to be weirded out that I’m using SANDALS in the SHOWER. Goodness.

     

(As I mentioned last post, you have to wear sandals/slippers everywhere in Japan. They do it in schools, you have separate ones for the house and for the bathroom, etc., so they’re pretty sacred. By the way, the sandals I bought in Shibuya? They cost me $26 because my feet are about TWO TIMES the size of a normal Japanese person.)

     

The second thing about the shower is, I don’t know when to get naked. I’m pretty sure you do it in the first room, bring in your towel to the shower, and then return to the communal room to put on your fresh clothes, but I don’t know. I don’t know about you all, but I think it’s less embarrassing to bring your underwear with you and come out seeing everyone else naked in the communal room than to come out naked and see everyone with their underwear on in the communal room. But that’s just me.

     

No, really! On with the day’s events! Jen was gone with Dan at Sophia to exercise and look around, so Natalie and I did some running around. Basically we went to find lunch and wound up getting turned around right outside our dorm and ended up back at the supermarket we were at the day before. Not knowing how we did that, we just went with it and got some snacks and drink rations from the supermarket because we both were feeling the arid state of the Japanese body. I chose three Japanese drinks to get: Calpis (yes, that’s almost “cow piss”), a milky-looking water drink? (a guy Natalie and I met today and I were trying to describe it but were at a loss for words… it says “Calpis Water” and “Happy Refresh” on the bottle… I think I’ll go with the “Happy Refresh”), Mitsuri Cider (I haven’t had it in a few years, but I think I remember liking it…), and Aquarius, a sports drink.

     

We dropped our stuff off back at the DK House and continued on our journey to find lunch, and it wasn’t until about 2:30-3:00 that we finally stumbled in a mall to eat. This mall, significantly closer to the DK House and to the station itself, was in fact the EXACT same mall as the one that we got bedding from earlier, which made Natalie angry and me laugh. They didn’t have as snazzy bedding choices as what we had picked, though, so the other play was justified.

     

Anyway, we ate fast food ramen at the bottom of the mall and ran into a bit of a bind. The Japanese separate their trash into plastic bottles, plastic-other-things, paper, burnable-other, and aluminum, and are especially hardcore about doing this in Warabi, according to S. Uzuki-san. Now, Natalie is lucky that she is already a rather light eater, but not when it comes to throwing away ramen. She had a looot of broth left over, and since broth isn’t even the throw-away category of burnable-other (that’s my term, not theirs... you know, in case you thought that was a really clever category), we didn’t know what to do with it, and, unlike eating at Makkudonarudo, we couldn’t just wait for someone else to get up and throw away their trash (yes, we did that), so we stood over by the trash can muttering English and looking at the signs really close up until one of the employees told us to put our dishes on this metal tray. Crisis averted. But oh! That reminds me! In case you like to judge restaurants by the quality of their napkins (I’m looking at you and that baseball place, PJC!), Japanese napkins (and, erg, Japanese toilet paper) are all, if you will, “one-ply”.

     

So yeah, we got lunch and PILLOWS (woooooo! That REALLY completes the bedding situation) and headed back to Donkey Kong. There we sat around waiting for Jen to get back (which wasn’t very long). And we blogged. And blogged. And Jen got back. And we still blogged. And then it was something like 9:30 when we decided we’d better get up and find food before we all starved. Ended up we went to around where the station is and found a place to eat called “Sukiya”. Here we all at curry instead of their advertised gyuu-niku-like dish that had a ton of mayonnaise on top of something, but so much mayonnaise that I didn’t know what was under it. The curry wasn’t too exciting, and once we found out that the pillow mall was closed early on Friday (… beats me), we just headed home to blog more, and the rest is history that you’ve already read (me falling asleep at the computer and writing nonsense). So I really DIDN’T write the end of the other day’s post on Friday! Shows how much you all were paying attention… jeez.

     

Before I move on to Saturday, I wanted to display some pictures of the BEAUUUTIFUL scenery of Warabi city, which I actually haven't finished photographing, so they'll just be added bonuses from now on. First, check out the wild beavers that roam the streets*. Fierce!!! Secondly, this is the bustling Friday-night nightlife that I was talking about when I was comparing Shibuya to Warabi. Maybe I was exaggerating a little when I said Shibuya was that much better**, especially when you can experience places like "Club Tira" that prominently display prehistoric creatures outside of their nightclub***.

* It says "Beaver Reform Studio" and "Housedoctor"... during the day you can see old ladies making quilts inside.
** This is, in fact, what Warabi city looks like anywhere that's not close to the train station. There, as I said, lies Pachinko Land.
*** And they may exist inside, too!!!

(the font changes here for some reason... sorry if you can't read it as well, but if you click "view" on your toolbar, go to "text size" and click "large" or something, you should be able to read it alright)

Saturday, March 29^th

     Saturday began with me waking up and getting on g-chat, per-usual, and Jen and Natalie proclaiming that there's a festival going on outside, not per-usual. Hey look! A possibly-orange tree! Okay, okay, before I go on, I have to explain that I totally forgot to bring out my camera for the festival, so until I say so, you're looking at Natalie's lovely photos of things like us, trees, more trees, and... hey! Is that a Sapporo beer can!?!? Oh jeez, come on, Ma, I'm sorry! It was a festival! Plus, I'm hatachi, which is the special words they say for twenty, which is the legal drinking age, plus I got it from a vending machine! How cool is that!? Well, I'll tell you: not as cool as TAKO-YAKI!!! Oh, wait, wait, lemme zoom out a little bit... ahhh, yes, that's it. Check out the mayonnaise on the three balls in the back; though I was scared about eating the mayonnaise on the other dish, this wasn't too much and actually tasted really awesome with what's inside the tako-yaki balls. Oh, wait... man, there's something with this zoom... Woooo! Octopus inside dough balls? KILLIN'.

     You know what's even MORE killin'? The butt-biting bug. I'm not kidding. The little sucker that is promoting the action of "biting butts" so that Japanese children will be less shy (and maybe even bite other childrens' butts!?) is even on bags of cotton candy at a small city festival. Check out this video for a sample of what it can do. Did you see that? They got MARRIED. Guess I know what I gotta do now when I'm at the club!

     Now back to the more serious stuff. Here're some extra pictures of m--- what the heck is that doing there still.... Okay, much better. We all wanted pictures like that in front of the cherry blossoms, so here's one of Jen and also one of Natalie (oh, I actually took that one). Here's also an idea of how the festival was set up. On the left there were a bunch of booths with people cooking things like tako-yaki (by the way, "tako" is octopus and "yaki" means fried), skewered chicken and pork, mini-okonomiyaki (a Japanese "pancake" which really isn't like a pancake at all... who would put mayonnaise on a pancake anyway???), candy, and our desert of choice, the choco-banana (that's "chocolate banana" in English). Natalie and Jen got chocolate while I diverged from the name and got strawberry. In the back of the first picture of the bananas there's a green one, which I think to be "green tea", but I decided to stick with the strawberry until the next festival.
*Here come all my photos again sans a few at the end of Shinjuku! Yay!
     After we were finished with the festival, the sannin (did I mention that already? that's what Jen, Natalie, and I are calling ourselves... sannin means "three people") traveled to the station to hop on a train in Shinjuku, which is a district three? stops previous to Shibuya (it's where our train started going backwards last time). But first, we thought it would be a good idea to take a picture of this car in Warabi city. It's so packed here and around here that this is how people have to fit their car in front of their houses. There's no room on ANY side of that car.

     Arriving at Shinjuku we had a whole lot of time to explore, so we went to some hyaku-en shops ("100 yen") and then to a huge arcade (yes!). Before grabbing Teresa from the station we explored the arcade and found this game, which many of you will find to be unbelievably cool in an arcade. For those who don't know, "Typing of the Dead" is a version of the popular arcade shooter "House of the Dead", expect instead of shooting dead things like zombies by aiming with plastic guns, the player is forced to shoot by typing in a displayed word on the screen. Luckily for our players Jen and Natalie, the words were in Japanese as well as romanji (alphabetized pronunciations of Japanese words, i.e., "tako-yaki", in place of characters). But, when they got to the boss who asks you to choose between three answers, the whole things was just in Japanese... so they were pretty much screwed. I played Taiko Drum Master some more and then we went to get Teresa at the station.

     We ended up back at the arcade to do "purikura". Purikura is one of the most popular activities of Japanese youth, and involves going into a photo booth with a handful of your friends, taking a handful of silly pictures, and then editing them with frilly objects and text. Afterwards, you print them out in sheets of really tiny photos to stick everywhere imaginable! The pictures are really nice quality and decorating them can be pretty fun, so I can see why it's popular (you're going to have to wait to see the pictures since they are only hardcopies). One hilarious (and possibly disturbing) thing is that men cannot go upstairs to the purikura floor unless accompanied by a female. Hm.

     The last three things about the arcade that need mentioning: one, they have BeatMania, two, they have DrumMania (think rock band drums with a hi-hat button and where the foot pedal isn't a bar, but is displayed like a button with an oversized foot on it on the screen... it made me fail basic, which wasn't all TOO basic in the first place), and three, I was told that Taiko Drum Master is my ticket to attracting those of the opposite sex. Supposedly as I was grooving out I had some fans gazing at me (that's Teresa in that picture, not a fan). Cha-ching! And you thought that my 200-yen in that machine per two songs was a waste.......
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Yeah, 200-yen. Practically $2. Arcades are crazy expensive. At home I wouldn't think twice about paying four quarters for a game of even the latest DDR, but here I spend 200-yen on one game of Taiko Drum Master (even BEFORE I was told I could pick up chicks). There's a big problem with yen: the first bill is 1,000-yen. So, anything under that and you're paying dollar amounts with 500- and 100-en coins. As humans used to the quarter being the most circulated large-valued coin, we here are finding it hard to conserve these things, not only because everything's costing us plenty of money, but also because we're just using COINS, which we hate carrying around in the first place! 400-en for a box of six tako-yaki for lunch? No problem! Only FIVE DOLLARS. I can get a super value meal for that, and I usually just settle for double cheese and water for lunch to save me money!
     To continue with Shinjuku, here're some pictures so you can contrast the daytime streets with the same streets in the nighttime. Similar sized crowds to Shibuya, yeah? People crossing the street in such masses still awe me. I couldn't imagine how cold I'd be if I were driving a bus in this city (fun fact, all of you bus enthusiasts, is that the Japanese buses have signs to enter on the BACK of the bus and not the front, so when someone comes through the back doors and they're Japanese, don't get too upset!).
     We scoured the city some more, checking out even more hyaku-en shops (I got a hanger for my suit, a basket for my shower stuff, and a cup) and the "sketchy" part of Shijuku, which features many "host bars" (you pay for a pretty female or male to sit there and talk with you while you drink) and even a part that is nothing but love hotels (use your imagination, or look it up on Google). Hey, we even saw an embarrassed young Japanese lady running to or from a love hotel in a robe! What was under that robe? Prob'ly nothin'.
     Before we left we happened by this place where there were street performers... mostly singers (such as "Silent Sprout" and "Sad Sad World") that had shows they were advertising. One guy looked like he was setting up for a magic show, so we stopped for a minute and watched. He was AMAZING. He did some work with a crystal ball that made it seem like it was weightless (think David Bowie in "The Labyrinth"), bent a fork in weird ways WITH HIS MIND, and then did some absolutely astonishing tricks with two sticks with a string attached in the middle and some rubber hourglass-looking things (Natalie called it "Diablo). After the show we took pictures with him and he gave Natalie and me separate halves of his fork. Then, we went and sat around after spending some quality time with some BIDETS!!!
     One of my fondest memories of the first time I went to Japan in 2002 was sitting on these really fancy toilets called "bidets". You won't believe me that they're awesome, but don't knock it 'til you try it, folks, 'cause sitting on a toilet seat that warms right up is oh so nice. And it sprays you partially clean if you want it to. It's all up to you... spray, no spray, warm, or not warm... it even has a deodorizer built in!!! I think I had been to that EXACT one, too... or at least it gave me memories of a place just like it with soothing music and an excellent relaxing experience.
      The ride home was pretty unpleasant since we caught the train so late. We were really packed in the train, and since I take up two Japanese people and my backpack with items in it takes up one more, I was taking up a loooot of space.

      I want to get to bed sometime before 1am, so I'll end this now and post about yesterday tomorrow. Thanks for getting through it, and thanks for all of the comments on the last one. Keep 'em comin'!

Until next time...!