weekend

After spending a portion of my evening (post overdue apartment cleaning) reading other people's blogs, I decided I should try to update mine.

Last night Hylton and I headed to Chiba, the capital city of our prefecture, for gaijin karaoke. Bethann, an American ALT who has been working here about a year longer than us, invited us to go out with some of her friends. With some exception the group ended up being a hodgepodge of native English speakers and their Japanese significant others. It was fun to meet some new people, fellow English teachers and Japanese friends alike. One guy named Alex was half Dutch and half English, and had spent a good portion of his childhood in Bavaria, so I got to speak a bit of German with him. This somehow made me feel a little bit better about my first grade Japanese, even though my mind had a hard time going back from Japanese and English to get to my German. At the end of the night some more people showed up, and one of them ended up having just finished a three year stint in Hamburg, so we also talked a bit... it was pretty funny that in this random group of people three of us had some experience in Germany. Maybe this seems like a strange thing to relate, but as my year in Germany was such a significant experience for me, recalling it, as I spoke to these two new people in Japan, was a really obvious reminder of just how quickly time passes.

The karaoke place we ended up going to was pretty dingy and strange, but had enough Japanese patrons to mean it couldn't be all that bad. Once the lights were out in our little room you could hardly notice the lingering scent of cigarettes and middle age dissatisfaction, though after my one and only one trip to the bathroom upstairs I was able to clearly envision the old, senile bag lady that must have decorated the place. Things in Japan are generally so clean and orderly that stuff really sticks out when it's not. Anyhow, my first time doing karaoke was pretty fun, though I think Hylton was dissatisfied with the music quality. I can see how karaoke is so big in Japanese culture as a stress release, but I don't think it could really be that for me. Some notable highlights of the experience for me was Alex (who was at least as tone deaf as me) and I shouting out "Komm gib mir deine Hand," which of course is the German translation of the Beatles "I Just Wanna Hold your Hand," and Hylton's rendition of Bjork's "It's Oh So Quiet" that he artfully screamed at the appropriate sections.

It wasn't a very long evening out as the last train home left at 11:50, but I got to meet some new people which, if I am lucky, is a good thing. On the train home I talked to Chi-na (pronounced not like the large nation helping horribly pollute this side of the earth, but chi as in "harness your chi"), a Japanese girl who amazingly spent two years studying in San Jose (California, that is). Hopefully I'll run into her again.

On Friday night I had the pleasure of going out to dinner with four of my female coworkers from Nango Elementary. I was really touched that they made the effort to set up something with me. All four of them are in their twenties... with Hiroyama-sensei being just one year older than me. They have all been very nice to me and talked to me before at school, but as I am only there one afternoon a week it was nice to have an opportunity to sit down and chat in an informal setting. Iwasawa-sensei picked me up at the 7-11 that is about a seven minute walk away from my apartment. We picked up Natori-sensei on the way, and then headed to a restaurant in Togane named Totte, which apparently means something close to "drunkard." It was a small, pretty little space, very much what you think of when you think "traditional Japanese eating place." Ebata-sensei and Hiroyama-sensei arrived shortly thereafter, and we spent the next few hours eating, drinking and communicating in a mixture of English and Japanese. Natori-sensei had bought an English conversation book earlier in the day for the event, and we had a good time laughing over some of it's contents (which were presented in both English and Japanese), gems like: "I wish you'd move to Siberia," and "I want to go to a tropical island with you." The language barrier was frustrating at times but we mostly made out alright, and I really hope they had a good enough time that they'd want to do something like that again. They seemed like they joked around with one another more than I have seen a lot of Japanese people do around me, and having them be around my age made our conversations a little more personal and relatable. At the same time, though, I sometimes had a hard time deciphering if questions I was asking were too personal. So I mostly didn't bring up stuff that might be weird to talk about with coworkers that you don't know very well.



I am not really sure if the food had been prearranged or if that was just what you got on that specific night, but all we had to do were order drinks and different food dishes would just show up at our table every now and then. I ate oyster for the first time (made palatable with quantities of melted cheese over the shell), and also had some raw flesh which I hesitate to call sashimi as I am still unclear on exactly what sort of raw meat falls into that category. Anyhow, the food was well-prepared and varied, and I also had the pleasure of an alcoholic drink based on milk and matcha, which is a kind of powdered green tea.



I guess it is good that I do get this feeling, but after fun nights like that I get frustrated that I won't be spending enough time here to really be able to cultivate relationships with people. I guess that is how it is, and I have known this all along, but now as I finally feel I am meeting some people and hopefully establishing friendships it dawns on me that my time here is about half up. If we are able to travel in Japan as much as we want then we'll be here a bit longer, but... still. Hylton counters this disappointment by saying that it is more important to keep pushing yourself out of your comfort zone and that the time before you really settle in a place is the time where you really grow the most as a person. I think this is true, it is just sometimes tough to swallow the realization that we won't get to enjoy that settling period here.