TheLeong.com

It’s already Wednesday night? The weeks seem to pass by pretty quickly. This is both good and bad. Good because work seems to go by fairly painlessly in the long-run, but bad because leisure and weekend time goes by just as quick. I’m also starting to realize that I’m not getting anything done in the long-run. Not that there’s anything pressing at the moment to actually get done.

Last weekend was pretty fun. Mueller and Hoyt flew into Tokyo for the weekend, so I met up with them Saturday night after work. Met in Shibuya at Hachiko, a place which always reminds me just how many foreigners are in Tokyo compared to Chiba. It was good to see some friends from the US, especially ones I haven’t hung out with in a long time. For one reason or another, March seems to be the time to visit Japan, because I have a lot of people coming this month. Unfortunately, it’s times like this that the virtual inability to take days off from work really starts to be a pain. But anyways, I met up with the guys and we went to the Starbucks overlooking Scramble Crossing to hang out. Had fun talking about people we went to high school with, the ridiculous number of people who are (getting) married now, and also trying to think of the most obscure people we could name.

After a lot of loitering, it was time to find somewhere in Shibya to go, so we started walking around looking for a deal and/or a guy on the street with a menu to bargain with. No go, but I accidentally found the Shibuya location of The Lockup, a chain of bar/pubs that are themed on an old school jail or a cave, with dark “cells” for tables, waitresses dressed in cop outfits, and monsters running around with plastic knives. Every once in a while, the monsters are released and “attack” the place, which is funny at least for the first few minutes. Almost immediately after sitting down, there was a monster attack, so it was a pretty entertaining way to start. A lot of the drinks at Lockup are also themed on jails, science experiments, zombies, and random stuff like that. I had no idea what any of the super weird ones were, but we ordered the 電気ショック (Electric Shock), which didn’t have ingredients listed on the menu, but just said it was a “super strong house cocktail.” How bad can it be, right? After we ordered them, the waitress again warned us that it was really strong. Seriously, can’t be that bad, right? Uhh… After they brought the drinks to our table and poured them from the graduated cylinder into the plastic beaker acting as a class, we realized they weren’t kidding. What was listed as the house cocktail ended up being a glass of everclear with 2 ice cubes and a lemon wedge. If a drink ever deserved to be called an Electric Shock, this was it.

After Lockup, searched around for a cheap all-night karaoke place, but unfortunately nothing was as cheap as I was hoping to be able, even after bargaining. Ended up at one of the Shibuya UtaHiro’s, and it was pretty good but not great and not as good as the Chiba UtaHiro I’m used to. My main complaint was that the remote controller and search computer were more ghetto than the current one’s, so it was a little more of a pain to use and didn’t have an English feature for the other guys to use. Overall, it was a good night. After we finished karaoke at 5AM, stopped by McDonalds for the greatest Egg McMuffin I have ever eaten. I was starving after not eating dinner the night before, and random fried foods at Lockup didn’t constitute a meal.

Mueller and Hoyt wanted to go to the Tsukiji fish market, especially since we were already/still up that early, when the market is usually at it’s peak. Sounded like a good idea, and I wanted to eat some of the awesome sushi from near there. I think the market is still open to the public, but just the auction part is now closed to tourists. Either way it didn’t matter, since after we got to Tsukiji Station, completely exhausted from an all-nighter, the station attendant told me the market was closed on Sundays. Ugh. Said goodbye to the guys and headed home, sleeping the entire way back and even sleeping past my station. It was only 1 station past though, so it was an easy backtrack. Slept til the afternoon.

The weather on Monday was amazing; almost 70 degrees Fahrenheit! Rented a bike and rode to D2 to buy some apartment supplies and grabbed lunch at Gusto, which has been renovated since the last time I was there a few months ago. Unfortunately, it’s been remodeled into more of a cafe, so while the interior is nice, the menu is different and they don’t have the Gusto Burger anymore, one of the decent non-fast-food burgers I had found around here. Oh well.

You know how in some video games like Final Fantasy, you spend a lot of time just walking around on a map? Well that’s not really just some creation of video game programmers; it’s because that’s what life in Japan is really like. I guess they added the random battles to make it a bit more interesting, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I got attacked by a Pokemon walking around here somewhere. But anyway, I walked around what seemed like a lot today, and I never really even left the general area. This was only partially because I got lost. I even made a map, thanks to Google Maps:

1. Started at the Keio Plaza Hotel after eating the huge buffet lunch.
2. Walked to the other side of the station, having the go around the station, and went to a movie theatre to watch the Kamen Rider Kabuto movie, God Speed Love (link). Yes, it is nerdy, but it was fun, so shut up. That was my only plan for this excursion, but I decided to do more as you can see here:
3. Went to the nearby Isetan department store to scope it out for work. It’s a pretty ritzy place.
4. Decided I would walk to Takashimaya Times Square, partially to scope it out for work and partially because I wanted to shop for more useless crap. Unfortunately, they close at 8:30PM, so I just missed it. Walk down more of that area, but everything is already closing up (all the big stores and buildings).
5. Began side quest to find a coin laundrymat, so I can clean my clothes without having to pay the ridiculous hotel laundry service prices (like 500 yen per shirt). Walked past the Times Square area and ended up somehow a bit lost. It also started to rain big time, so I had to buy an umbrella. I apparently walked all the way to JR Yoyogi Station. Since it was raining, I decided to just take the Yamanote Line back to Shinjuku station.
6. Got off at Shinjuku Station; familiar territory again.
7. Walked all over in the general direction of a laundry place I found online, and finally found one in some apartment complex. GOAL. I’ll probably head there tomorrow and do laundry. It says for residents of this huge apartment complex only, but I’m sure they won’t catch me.
8. Walked back to the hotel; not too far away.

Yes, after mapping this all out, I see that I should have just walked from point 5 to point 7, but it was raining and I didn’t know exactly how far away I was, so it was worth the 210 yen and the extra walking. I suppose. I have no idea how far I walked this afternoon/evening, but as you can see it was a lot. I blame this on not having a cell phone. If I had one, I could have used NaviWalk and it would have been much easier.

If my life really were a video game, it would be horribly boring.

I must have been wrong about the jetlag, because I think I actually have some. I was absolutely exhausted last night, and went to sleep around 11. Got up around 5AM, and stayed up since I couldn’t go back to bed. Decided to start off my day. I’m pretty sure this is jetlag rather than just my sleep schedule being off, because usually there’s no way I would even operate with just 5 hours of sleep, unless absolutely necessary. I spent pretty much the entire day in the Ooimachi (大井町) area of town, which is south of Shinagawa. Why did I go there? Because I knew there was a group of department stores, and it would be a good place to start my work research. Actually doing the work, I feel like some kind of spy or detective, which sounds retarded but is actually kind of fun. I have to snap pictures of the store displays and product selections, without anyone seeing, of course, and then I was talking to a store manager today and two other employees trying to get some basic information about the whole baby bottle issue I’m researching. Kind of cool, plus I think my Japanese is kind of coming back to me. Too bad my reading level can be compared to “retarded 3rd grader with a dead eye.”

I got back from Ooimachi on the Rinkai Line, which isn’t a JR line per say, but is connected to the Saikyo Line. Confused? There was even a sign in Japanese that said “Rinkai Line is not a JR Line,” meaning that even Japanese people must get confused. If the natives don’t get the difference, I certainly shouldn’t be expected to. One sweet thing about the Rinkai Ooimachi Station, however, was that there were 3 computers set up with internet. 100 yen (about a buck) for 10 minutes of usage, right there in the station. Talk about handy, especially for people like me who have no keitai because of stupid stricter laws requiring foreigners to have their alien cards to get a cell phone. Grr. But I really liked having the internet computers there, not because I really had anything important to look up, but just because it’s so convenient. I checked e-mail, Facebook, and that was pretty much it. Again, a great idea.

Since I don’t have a whole lot to talk about today, I will go on a bit of a tangent about Japanese TV. Everyone probably knows that it is, in a word, ridiculous. This is probably one of the reasons I like it and would want to work in it, because some of the most ridiculous ideas ever are made into TV shows. Let’s not even go into some of the really crazy shows, that most Americans see some evidence of in Iron Chef and MXC. The weirdest one was last year when I saw the show where they challenged guys to drink as much beer as possible, then they timed them peeing in the bathroom to see “who can pee for the longest?” Crazy, right? And you thought American late-night TV was bad. Whenever I’ve been in the hotel, at night and in the mornings, I’ve watched mainly news shows. Japanese news shows show the exact same clips and stories all day long, at least from what I’ve noticed. All channels, all day, and sometimes for several days in a row, will show the exact same stories, exact same footage, and related information about the “biggest stories.” Maybe it’s just that this is normal and I don’t watch news shows in the states enough. This whole week the biggest things have been a girl who died in a pool drain in Saitama, and the new flyweight boxing champion Kameda Koki.

I don’t watch a lot of boxing, but I don’t need any boxing knowledge to tell you that this kid (he is 19) is a major tool. He and his two brothers are famous in Japan I guess, training under their boxer father to be boxers themselves. Kameda Koki won the championship the other night, by a 2-1 decision against some equally tooly looking skinny guy from Brazil or somewhere in South America. I didn’t watch the match, but I hear that Kameda was pretty much getting owned the entire match, even getting knocked down twice. How did he win? I don’t know, but I’ll bet it was some kind of underhanded bribery. I’m not going to speculate, since I don’t know (or care) about boxing, but I just wanted to spend this time on my blog to reiterate that Kameda Koki is a tool. After winning, he was crying, weeping, and and generally being a poor winner on stage, acting like a little kid who just successfully stuck all 64 crayons up his nose. The next day, he’s on a pretty much every news show, with many of them having him there for a live interview. Instead of being respectful to the adults and everyone watching him, this little snot now has an even bigger ego, wearing reflective sunglasses and a silk shirt in every interview. Most of his answers are 1 or 2 words only, and he doesn’t have much to say except “I’m going to get stronger.” If I were interviewing this kid, I would have punched him in the face if he refused to take off the glasses and talk like a grown up. I don’t know why he pisses me off so much, he just does. If you look up a picture of him (here I did it for you), you can see that he’s just a little snot whose dad paid off the officials so that he would win and not have to cry in the corner all year.

Back to TV. Another thing you see a LOT of on Japanese TV is shows with people eating. I noticed this the first night I got here, when there was at least 2 hours of consecutive shows like these. These aren’t cooking shows, food review shows, or anything about the history of the food really. They’re just shows that feature people eating. Anything. They don’t even have to be celebrities, they’re just the random hosts of the shows who go around eating at restaurants. Sometimes it’s actually something interesting, like a restaurant that has a giant parfait, or maybe a giant bowl of noodles, but usually it’s just watching people eating and hearing them exclaim “oh man this is good.” Does that sound boring and retarded? Well it is, and I guarantee that Japanese TV stations air at least 10 hours of people eating a week. The two hosts are usually a girl who acts like she is 12, and a guy with a kansai accent who says “waaaaaa” a lot.

I haven’t watched much of childrens programming, but I caught the beginning of some show this morning before I left the hotel. It apparently stars the former sumo star Konishiki, but I guess since retiring from the sport he has been downgraded into a crappy Barney-type character. Showing you this picture will do a lot more than me trying to explain it:

Finalized the schedule for my baby bottle business trip. Booked and company paid for flight and hotel this morning. Here’s the info:

Aug 1: arrive in Japan
Aug 14: go back to the US

Hotel: Keio Plaza in Shinjuku, Tokyo (link)

Hoo-ah!