July 2: Cooking Party!
Today was my final Saturday off until October, as I will get Wednesday and Thursday off in lieu of weekends for the summer, to help NTT distribute its power usage more evenly.
In the morning I ironed a shirt and did a bit more research on FLET'S Hikari Internet plans, as well as looking up and recording some Internet connection setup Japanese. Ironing the shirt took forever; I hope I get a little better at it as I do it more. >_< I got up relatively early, but the Yokosan isn't open until 10am, so my research and ironing was partly to kill time until I could get myself some breakfast.
For breakfast I had some potato tempura and some potato korokke. A nice, balanced meal haha. >_< I wish the Yokosan would put their non-fried food in a refrigerated location! Maybe one of these days I'll just try it anyways... I mean honestly they probably aren't poisoning ALL of their customers, right? Anyways, I ate my korokke at the bus stop waiting for my ride to Yokochuu. At Yokochuu I thought about buying more towels, but the Limited Express for Takasago (stops in Shinagawa) was going to come really soon, so I decided to do that at another time. I need more towels because the heat and humidity mean that towels get jankey really quickly because they take forever to dry out. I have used one of my towels just twice since washing and it already has that smell that says "I have been too wet for too long". D:< Because I don't want to spend all my time doing laundry loads consisting of one towel and a pair of socks, I will need to buy some more at some point. My ride to Shinagawa was uneventful, and so was the Yamanote ride to Shinjuku.
Shinjuku station is really, really huge. Oh my god is it ever huge. >_< I did a fair bit of walking today, and it was almost entirely inside Shinjuku station haha. I had looked up which exits I wanted this time, and I still had trouble finding my way. I eventually found an exit that was labelled "West" in some way, and popped out into the sunshine. I walked over to Yodobashi Camera and promptly went up to the 7th floor to see if I could have gotten a better deal on an iron there. Nope! I'm happy to report that my Sofbank iron is still the cheapest I've seen (other than super sketch looking travel irons for like, 400円.
After looking at the iron prices, I went down to the headphones floor and tried on headphones that I had no intention of buying haha. I still prefer my bedroom slippers (beyerdynamic DT 990s, courtesy of the ever lovely Jiuna) to any of the ones I tried on today, but admittedly it was a bit of a flawed experiment, as I was using my music player to test those headphones, and I usually wear my bedroom slippers plugged into my DAC at my computer. Oh well, I am perfectly comfortable being blissfully ignorant in this case haha.
Mostly my fake shopping was a stall tactic to avoid going to confront the real purpose of my trip to Yodobashi Camera. >_< I was scared shitless of trying to contract an Internet connection; I had somehow got it into my head that if I conjugated a single verb wrong that I would receive a mysterious 800000円 bill the next day and then be deported to Jakarta or something.
Of course, that isn't how it went down, and by 2 minutes in I was using pictures to explain to the salesperson that I live on the second floor of a 4-storey building. Of course, 2 minutes after that when I pull out my memo pad to recall some vocabulary, the salesperson saw the English and then said something like "Ah, please wait while I English Representative" and came back 20 seconds later with a fluent (though with a "Hello Monkey Morning!" accent) English-speaking representative from Waseda University (holy shit!).
Needless to say things were a little less crazy and fun after that, but proceeded much, much faster. >_< Oh well. My Internet connection will apparently commence on the 8th, after I receive my modem etc. (which I will connect myeslf) on the 6th. I made sure that the plan I am getting is unlimited upload/download, as the other plan I was looking at, FLET'S Light starts charging you for data after 200MB, up to a maximum of like 7000円 at 1.2GB. Uhh, yea--NO. D:< My connection is actually going to cost about 2000円 less than I expected to pay. I also apparently get a 10000円 coupon or something for Yodobashi Camera once my connection starts up! That "helps" offset the fact that I will have to pay a 8000円 cancellation fee when I terminate my service prior to their 2-year lower limit. I am open to suggestions of what I should buy, if I actually am getting a 10000円 coupon, that is (and if I don't get deported for conjugating a verb wrong before Waseda-san showed up)! Waseda-san's name was actually Yuma ?Itobe?, and apparently Yuma is a very uncommon name that also stands (perhaps only among his friend group) for Young Unidentified Mysterious Animal, which he told me as we were killing time while the original representative was phoning in my contract or something (or alerting the Department of Foreign Affairs to my erroneous conjugation!).
After getting all my Internet business sorted out I set out to find a (very) late lunch. I decided to try to find Shinjuku Ni-choume, which is apparently the largest gay village in Tokyo, as Davie Street is full of great places to eat, and because it also might yield a good place to get my hair cut, which have not yet found over here haha. It's a bit of a walk from Shinjuku station in the opposite direction from Yodobashi Camera (and you have to find the right exit!!! D:<), and is also mostly off the main drag, but I did end up finding it. It didn't seem nearly as happy and lively as Davie, but that may change after 12AM, as each building appeared to have about 7 bars in it. There were a bunch of restaurants, but I went into a bookstore and asked the cashier what his recommendation would be for lunch, and he said that he doesn't eat lunch around here, which seemed rather significant to me, as, y'know, HE WORKS IN THE MIDDLE OF A BUNCH OF RESTAURANTS. >_> I decided that was a decent warning, and went and got a bagel in the station. I do have a hard time believing that they're ALL bad, but I will hold off on trying any until I have enough Japanese knowledge to extricate myself in the case that I realize that my current location is more intended for cruising than eating. D:
I went back from Shinjuku to Shinagawa and tried to call Bessie (another Co-op) for details to the cooking party I had been invited to by Kurauchi-san (a coworker). I didn't reach her, and thus had to try again once in Yokochuu. She told me to get on a local train and ride for one stop to get to something-something (?Keiretsu?) University and then call her when I got there. I did so, but every time I called her I got some mysterious message from Softmap in keigo (polite verb forms) that I didn't understand. Ugh. I waited and kept calling for about 20~25 minutes until I got a call from a different number. It was Bessie and her phone had died, which probably caused a lot of trouble as she had probably kept my number on said phone. Luckily in Japan portable battery-powered chargers are quite common, and as I found out once I got to the party after Kurauchi-san came to meet me at the station that that was how the problem was solved.
The cooking party was quite a lot of fun! There were a lot of foreigners there; a Sri Lankan guy, a Taiwanese guy (both of whom have been in Japan for 5 years if I recall correctly) and Bessie and myself out of only 11 people. All the people there were really friendly, and the party turned out to have the impromptu theme of "English" (gee, I wonder where that came from haha). This meant that all the people present basically shared English words and translations around while we chopped and washed and cooked. The party was held at a community centre that has rentable kitchens that come with like 3 islands with burners and sinks. At one point Bessie tried to practice her Japanese or something by asking me "カナダで彼女がいますか？" (Do you have a girlfriend in Canada?) while we were sitting around talking with a group of them. I am pleased to report that they were rather surprised by my answer haha. >:D
The cooking party was lovely, and the food was quite good. We had octopus and salmon salad with "cold spaghetti", which means two things: spaghetti with boccinci, tomatoes and basil, and "wafu-men" which had oroshi, straw mushrooms and shiso with some shoyuu-dashi-katsuo chimaerasauce. We also had "tiramisu" which was made in cups with crumbled cookies of some sort rather than lady fingers. Bessie also made an "hakujin omlette" (she's Chinese) out of the leftover egg whites that she refused to chug (and we were so persuasive!). It was really fun and the food was quite good, but unfortunately we ran out of time (a community centre staff person was literally watching us clean up haha) and I couldn't eat as much as I wanted. A decent bit of the food ended up going to waste as we didn't have any way to transport it. D: Next time I will bring tupperwares! Oh wait I don't have any. >_<
After the cooking party I walked back to the train station and rode the train to Yokochuu with one of the people from the party, and somehow ended up explaining the locations of the provinces and territories of Canada, their collective names (eg. the Prairies, the Maritimes), as well as some of the biomes present in Canada to her. >_< I have no idea how I always end up being Encyclopaedia Margarinica, but the recipients of my babbling always seem to enjoy it at least haha.
I came back to my dorm and started writing this blog, which has taken a surpisingly long time, and now I will be tired tomorrow whether I go to bed right this second or not (which I will still do, regardless).
Night!
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