October 3: Catching Up
Hi all! Sorry about the blog drought. I hope I'm able to remember everything of note that's happened since I stopped, but I highly doubt that that's going to happen. >_<
On Monday, nothing much happened, or at least I can't remember much happening. I think it was probably another unremarkable day of paper-writing. On Tuesday, it was more of the same at work, but after work there was a welcome/farewell party for a couple of people who were leaving and joining our lab. It was hosted in Yokochuu, and as usual, there was lots of drinking and not much eating. The guy beside me that I was talking with started getting a little silly, and I think it was for the best that I had an excuse to leave at 9pm, as he showed no signs of stopping his liquor intake. I left with Kabutoya-san to go meet Dad and Linda at Yokochuu station, where Dad and Kabutoya-san had a short chat, and Dad gave Kabutoya-san some salmon and some booze, before we all got on the train and talked about travel, Canada and other things I can't remember. Kabutoya-san got off at Yokohama (where he lives), while Dad and Linda and I carried on to Shinagawa, where we transferred to the Yamanote line, which we rode until Yuurakuchou. We got off at Yuurakuchou and walked to Ginza Itchome where their (and my) accomodation was.
I dropped my bags, arranged a meeting time for the next day with Dad and Linda, and then went out to get a little food at the Sunkus nearby. I ended up getting a really good buttered pork donburi thing that was probably outrageously unhealthy (I mean, duh, it's buttered pork) but was nonetheless delicious (if sinfully so). I also had some Haagen-Dazs pumpkin ice cream, because I was officially on vacation budget! :D I ate it back in my hotel room and then went to bed after reading a bit of the Lonely Planet section on Tokyo.
On Wednesday I got up and ate a meat bun Dad had bought at the LAWSON Natural across from the hotel, along with a capuccino and some orange juice. I was again reminded why I don't drink orange juice in the morning, as my stomach felt quite horrid for the duration of the morning, until about 1, but at least it was being horrid in a mostly-ignorable way that didn't impact my enjoyment of the day for the most part.
Dad and Linda and I first (I think) went to Ueno, where we walked around Ameya-yokochou, which is an old shopping area full of small stores selling fish, golf clubs, army surplus, sunglasses, and anything between. I saw an Okinawan restaurant that I suggested for lunch, but Dad and Linda weren't too hot on the idea and we went to a more wafu place instead, where we got kaisen-don and some tempura and cold tofu which was pretty good.
After we had made about 3 passes through streets in the Ameya-yokochou area we moved onto Ueno park, where we went to the Tokyo National Museum to see an exhibit on ancient Japanese pottery, which, according to Jiuna, is actually ancient we-kidnapped-ancient-Koreans-and-made-them-teach-us pottery. The exhibit's wording did mention Korea, but didn't go into too much detail haha (surprise, surprise...). It was pretty cool to see 10,000 year old jars and stuff, and it was also pretty cool to see how they got better at making stuff over the course of several thousand years. Practice makes perfect, I guess. ;D They also had some of those haniwa things, which I always try to call Naniwa, who is one of my favourite StarCraft players haha. They're quite cool, and they had a bunch of them just sitting out behind a rope that said "don't go here". >_< I really hope that those ones were replicas or something, because noone should have that much faith in humanity... The haniwas were interesting, and more than a little eerie. It's kind of wierd to think that something has been wearing that ghostly half-smile for thousands and thousands of years, even when firmly beneath the ground. >_< After the pottery exhibit, we went and visited another exhibit that was kind of a hodgepodge of kimonos, painted screens, armor and swords. They were all incredibly beautiful, and I definitely did not want to be on the wrong end of one of the swords; they still looked rather deadly after several hundred years.
After Ueno, Dad and Linda went back to the hotel to rest their feet and I tromped up and down Chuuou street in the Ginza area, experiencing the unique sensation of being the worst-dressed and poorest person in a 5-kilometre radius haha. I didn't even bother going in any of the shops other than UniQlo, because I knew I couldn't afford without selling myself into slavery or something (which would totally defeat the point). I went back to the hotel and met up with Dad. Linda's feet were giving her trouble, so she didn't come with us. We took the Ginza line to Suehirochou, and I walked Dad down Chuuou street in Akihabara, pointing out my usual haunts. I took him inside and pointed out the Mushihimesama cabinets, so that he'd know what I was talking about. We didn't stay though. We took the Yamanote from Akihabara to Shinjuku, were we went to go see the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Offices, which probably have a significantly larger peak population than Port McNeill. >_< The buildings in the area around Shinjuku station were rather spectacular, to say the least. From there, Dad and I planned to try out Shinjuku San-chome for dinner, but a rather brightly-lit and bustling area caught our eye first, and we ended up wandering around in the vicinity of Yodobashi Camera, which is apparently home to a million billion restaurants. We hemmed and hawed, and eventually decided on a place called Wasabi-ya that turned out to be AMAAAAAZING!!! Oh my god was it ever good haha. The restaurant specialized in grilled skewers of various types, and something called "shitsumabushi" which is like a donburi and a make-your-own ochazuke (rice and goodies in tea/broth) in one. All the food was sooooo good and we sat at the bar and thus were able to watch all of it get made!
On a completely unrelated note, Emacs now has full control over my body, as I am continually hitting Ctrl-x Ctrl-s to try to save (which luckily actually accomplishes what I want haha) and Ctrl-k, which fortunately does nothing haha.
Dad and I spent a long time eating our dinner, so by the time we got back to Ginza, we just got some dessert at the convenience store and called it a night. We were also planning on going to Tsukiji fish market the next day, which necessitates getting up at an hour which shall not be named (hint: it starts with a 5, herp derp).
On Thursday, I got up at *bleep* o'clock in the morning and went up to Linda and Dad's suite for breakfast. We left pretty promptly afterwards, riding the Yuurakuchou line and then the Oedo line to get to Tsukiji fish market. I can't really describe what it was like here, but I will say that you take your life in your hands when you go there haha. It's very much an active commercially-focused operation, and there are little electric carts flying around at high speed all over the place. O_O They are very much uninterested in you, so you really have to keep your wits about you. Inside the market there were all manner of fish and shellfish, some that I didn't even know existed. We saw LOT of tuna as well. Tuna being cut with a bandsaw, tuna being cut with a longsword that was supposed to be a "knife", tuna being cut with a hatchet, you name it. After seeing just about every edible marine creature of the Pacific Ocean available for purchase (including some rather disturbing cockles/clams that were spurting bright red blood when being shelled, yikes), we retired to the outer part of the market, where I had one of the best kaisen-dons known to mankind. The ikura was completely unbelievable. I feel sorry for people who "don't like ikura", because honestly, they've probably never actually had it. >_< I think I've had ikura like that once or twice at Koko, and I can't recall any other times that have compared. If you are in Tokyo, and feel like getting up at *bleep* o'clock in the morning to try to get yourself dismembered by electric-powered killer go-kart-pickup-truck-chimaerae, then remember to get some ikura! ;D
After Tsukiji fish market, we took the Oedo line to Roppongi, where we went to Roppongi hills, and waited for it to open hahahaha. We went to the Mori Art Museum, which is on the 52nd or 53rd floor of the Mori tower in Roppongi Hills. There was also an observatory, where we got a good view of Tokyo in every direction, before going and seeing the exhibit, which happened to be on the 1960s Japanese-driven architectural movement known as "Metabolism". Metabolism is apparently all about Jetsons-esque megastructures that are fun to think about and laughably impractical for the most part. ;D It was quite an enjoyable exhibit, but it also makes me a little sad at how big we dreamed 50 years ago, and how little some of those dreams have been realized. Where's my green Mars, huh? D:< It's too bad that blowing people up is apparently too much fun for the people in charge that silly things like science can't catch a break /rant. >_<
In Roppongi we wandered a little bit around the complex, which is quite beautiful, although Dad was upset at their choice of colour in stones, which was indeed a little warm for the steel-and-glass skyscrapers they sat at the foot of. We ate Angus Beef curry (lol), which was quite good, and then moved onto Ikebukuro. We originally headed for Sunshine City, but upon getting there, were not inspired to go to any of the stuff they had, and so we went across the street to the Toyota showroom, where they had the world's worst racing games labelled as "safety simulators". Did you know that going down spiralling offramp in a Prius at 160km/h is a breeze? I didn't. The brakes were universally squishy and useless, until you got to the very end of its depressable range, where you would abruptly stop (without skidding, I might add). If those are their safety simulators, I'm a little worried about my future... D: At least I know where half the people in Richmond learned how to drive haha. ;D
After Ikebukuro, we went back to Ginza, where Dad took me to a nearby grocery store with the intention of stocking me up for after they left, but I proved unhelpful and exited with some senbei, an apple-pear and some peach juice. Stuff goes bad really fast in my room, so I didn't want to get too much, as I would hate to see it go to waste. After that, we went for dinner at Salala, which was amazing. We had a million different things which I can't remember, but the highlights for me were the flavour mixtures of soy and mustard that actually worked (!), the duck-that-tasted-like-beef (!!), and the fig tempura (!!!). I was quite happy to have eaten there, and it deserved all the praise Dad and Linda had been giving it throughout the weekend. After parting ways at Ginza-Itchome station, I went back to Shinagawa and then to Yokochuu and then back home.
Friday and Saturday I can honestly remember NOTHING about, which is a little wierd and disturbing. O_O I went to work, and I did stuff at work, but I can't remember a single thing about it, other than that I ate the apple-pear that I got from Dad and Linda on Friday night, and liked it so much that I went to the Yokosan and got another the next day haha.
On Sunday I got up and chatted with Mom and Jiuna, and then went to Tokyo for the day. I had informed Dad of my single-day weekend, and he and I had decided to meet up after he had hung around with Osamu for a while, but it turned out that he had misread his email, and that he was to meet Osamu at 17:30, not 12:30 as he had thought, and so I ended up joining them for dinner. Before that I got some quality time in Akiba, and fiiiiiinally got to stage 5 in Mushihimesama on the 1P side (at long last). I was certainly not expecting it, as I had been mediocre at ESP Galuda 2, and I had not even No-Missed stage 2, which I can often do. I held myself together for the most part on stage 3 and 4, which is apparently what counts, and then got brutally murdered by psychedelic-huded plane-sized moths at the beginning of stage 5. I didn't mind my total fail-out though, because I had to leave for Shibuya, and was happy enough with my beautiful new personal record of 57.8 million points and that nice little "Stage 5" marker next to the daily high score I set. For the record, the machine high score on Original MAX Mode is about 1.03 billion, so I've still got a ways to go hahahaha. I was also able to watch someone play S-power (the least commonly selected shot type, I use M-power), and rack up 101 million points before dying just before the end of the final boss. S-power deals extreme damage and has extremely high mobility, at the cost of only hitting things directly in front of you. As a result, he was quite entertaining to watch, because he was constantly rampaging around the screen getting all up in that bug-face and wrecking shit. Maybe I should give S-power a second chance haha...
At 17:30 I met up with Osamu, his wife, his son, Dad and Linda at the Hachiko statue in Shibuya, from which we walked to a yakitori place (haha, it turned out a little better than the last yakitori place I went to with Osamu lol). The food and conversation was good; we talked about travel and languages and Canadians and Americans and Japanese people, and ate skewers of various sorts along with ochazuke and cold tofu. We left at 8pm, in time for me to catch a train back to Yokochuu at Shinagawa. I missed a bus by a hair, but luckily the buses on Sunday run later than I thought (I'll have to take a picture of the schedule), so I wasn't out of luck. I killed time by eating Tenya and playing Project Diva before catching the next one back to my dorm.
This morning I got up and got to work on time, where I worked on my paper a bit more. My paper is complete at the moment, and is undergoing an accelerated editing process, as the deadline is on the 5th hahaha. Kabutoya-san said that normally, we would be at this stage 2 or 3 weeks ago, but there were obviously hitches in getting me going on my eventual research topic. In any case, apparently most of their co-ops only write one paper during their time here, so I think that means I'm doing alright haha. The paper is also bound for a domestic conference, which is, according to Kabutoya-san, "practice". Ouch haha. Maybe I shouldn't be blogging such defamatory things about a machine learning and datamining conference, but whatevs.
Lunch today looked bleak, but I noticed that one thing claimed to be Chinese, and had what looked like bok-choy in the window sample, so I decided on it. It turned out to look waaaaay better than the window sample, and it was actually quite delicious (and filling! Bonus!). I played handiball with my coworkers, which was great because it was only 2/3 to a side, as many of the usual culprits were absent, and no other projects were playing today. In the afternoon was more paper-editing, and I got a second draft out the door to Kabutoya-san before I left at about 6:35.
Dinner was ramen that was actually not that salty! They also had one of those silly obstacle-course shows on the TV in the dining hall, so I payed and unfortunately small amount of attention to what was probably the best dorm meal I've had in two months haha. D: I retired to my room to eat frozen grapefruit, and experienced the time-tested bachelor's trick of drinking milk right out of the carton. It's somehow... liberating. I feel like I know how Olivia Newton-John (an alter-ego of my mother, according to Japanese people) felt in Grease... or something. Do I have to wear leather and have big hair, now? How about I just stick to the milk thing...
Anyways, I've blogged for too long and am making less and less sense as time goes on, and have also passed the threshold where going to bed immediately will no longer count as "early", so I think I will stop for today, and see you all again a little sooner than last time (hopefully).
Night!
