mokudekiru

These are all things I previously thought I hated, or at least would never really enjoy. So, I can thank Pittsburgh for my newfound enjoyment of these things.

1. The World Cup
I don’t watch sports, as a general rule…so the World Cup wasn’t even on my radar. I thought I would remain immune, and I did — but after weeks of being in a lab full of Brazilians and Dutch, even I could not resist the World Cup Vortex. The tipping point was going to a bar to watch the US/Ghana game (where we were eliminated) — somehow, being surrounded by everyone ridiculously shouting “Freedom!!” when we scored opened up a spot in my heart for the rest of the World Cup. I continued to follow along, and even though the teams I rooted for almost always lost, I was soon watching games midday, texting my friend Nick play-by-play updates during the Germany game, and, by the end of it all, even sort of understanding what offsides are. Crazy. Oh, and the whole internet picking up on the vuvuzela meme didn’t hurt, either.

Paul had to be consumed, after all he did.

Lots of orange at Silky’s for the final, aanvalluh!! Twas sort of tragic in that bar afterwards.

2. Naps
I spent the year I lived in Japan training myself to wake up milliseconds after my alarm went off and leap out of bed, to maximize the amount of sleep I was able to get before the 7:19 AM train. Unfortunately, that backfired and made me super-sensitive to all alarms that ruined a lot of potentially good nights of sleep early on in college. By my second year, I had regained the ability to wake up only in reaction to my own alarm, and still get up immediately, without waking to anyone else’s alarms. Which got me thinking, despite never having been a napper (except for in cases of being extremely sick), maybe I could also train myself to be able to nap.

And, after some effort this summer, I successfully conquered the nap! I still need to work on a couple of skills, like falling asleep faster, and setting my alarm for the actual time I want to wake up… but I am nap-capable on a basic level now.

Nap ground zero.

3. Frats
Despite going to a school with looots of greek life (or perhaps BECAUSE I go to such a school) I generally don’t hang out at frats. As a result, I pretty much maintain all the typical frats/frat-boy stereotypes in my head. But, since an average Friday night in Pittsburgh would go something like this, we ended up spending a lot of time at the frat:
1. Mikesh throws a party
2. Everyone shows up to party
3. Hang out for a while, until Mikesh’s roommate kicks us out
4. Everyone has to go home, but WAIT, Chris invites us to the frat he lives in
5. Since the frat is right across the street from where we all live, there’s no reason not to go!
6. Fratting ensues.
Lather rinse and repeat many a weekend.

As it turns out, the frat wasn’t bad — it was even relatively clean (especially the last few weeks we were here). And the final night, it was revealed that many fratters were, in fact, of Montreal fans, and we spent an hour abusing the sound system with our Skeletal Lamping dance party. of Montreal-digging frat people, who knew?

Side complaint-about-Pittsburgh: of Montreal reminds me how much I cannot wait to see them for the fourth time, at Pygmalion 2010 in September. This thought also reminds me how non-existent the Pittsburgh music scene was. There were exactly zero shows I was interested in there all summer. Thumbs down.

But the frat doesn’t get an A+ in my book, for there was definitely a dealbreaker: The DEATHFAN. Fans without fronts should not be ANYWHERE, they DEFINITELY shouldn’t be run at parties… even really hot ones, unless it’s the kind of party where everyone sits quietly and far away from the deathfan (these types of parties are unlikely to occur at frats).

4. Truck food
As I complained last time, Pittsburgh food leaves something to be desired. You guys told me that I should learn to love what pgh is actually good at instead of the lack of Chinatown-level eats. The solution was basically truck food.

I don’t really like the one-and-only truck back home, so I was reluctant about the CMU trucks at first… until I realized they all served ethnic food. CMU has 2 thai, 2 chinese, 1 indian, and one middle eastern truck, all over in a row by the track (Here’s the exact location of the CMU trucks if you need help finding them). All of them require cash, every meal costs $4-$5, and most importantly, thai iced tea is available for $1!! I think the middle eastern and one of the thai trucks are my favorites. Yes, the trucks are junky, but delicious, and as far as Pittsburgh goes they’re almost the best asian food you’re gonna get anyway, so why not? The Pitt ones are 2 indian and 1 thai, but they’re a bit far if you’re working at CMU (over near the Cathedral of Learning).

Also, unrelated, but if you like wings… apparently Pittsburgh has a place for you to get cheap wings any day of the week. I’m not sure why “wing nights” are such a thing, but I’m not complaining.

5. Dorm Life
Like anyone past week 1 or so of freshman year of college, I hate living in dorms. Who wants to share a room with someone, anyway? However I think for the purposes of this year’s REU, it was a necessary evil that resulted in a lot more friendships than I would have had otherwise. (Sharing rooms was still not ideal — we all managed to live near each other AND befriend each other last year, while having our own rooms…) It felt a little bit first-week-freshman-year-ish at first, which feels really odd when you’re not a freshman, but it was worth it overall for the ability to meet people from my program and all the other research groups around. And most importantly, without dorm, The Fort would have never been able to exist:

6. American Karaoke
Due to living in Japan, I have been skeptical for many years about “karaoke” as it exists in this country, and have often karaoke-snobbed at people who think that the definition of karaoke involves singing in front of people you don’t know. Seriously? That’s not even real karaoke, I say. Small cramped rooms, iced oolong tea, Mr. Children and Arashi songs are the real staples of karaoke, clearly. Oh, and NEVER HAVING TO SEE ANYONE YOU DON’T KNOW. Real karaoke clearly wasn’t going to happen in Pittsburgh. However, I actually lost my American karaoke virginity in DC, at a sorta Japan-themed bar because word on the street was that they were a) Japanese, b) had karaoke, and c) didn’t card. All were true, but as the place was quite crowded, we barely got a chance to sing one song, because instead of just competing among your friend group for a turn, you must compete among every group in the bar for a turn. I also went to a place in Shadyside back in Pittsburgh and went early enough to actually sing a few different songs. Still enjoyable though.

I think American karaoke is actually less embarrassing than real karaoke. Yes, you are singing in front of people you don’t know, but at least for me, that means I care about their opinion less than the reaction of my close friends. Furthermore, this is taking place in a bar, which means 99% of the people there will be either a) drunk and not paying any attention to you or b) drunk and happily singing along to your musical selection too, and therefore also not paying any attention to you. Either way, there’s not a lot of judgemental vibes going on.

However, the connection between alcohol and American karaoke is annoying, problematic, and unnecessary. Many of my friends in Pittsburgh were under 21, and it is completely ridiculous that they couldn’t come and sing “Take On Me” with me just because karaoke was taking place in a bar. Karaoke is practically Japan’s official pasttime for children and teenagers. Come on now.

DC Ameraoke

So yes, Pittsburgh has clearly changed me greatly as a person, but hopefully my friends and family will still recognize me. As of today, Pittsburgh is over and I have moved on my next adventure: Philly, a week’s worth of clothes, electronics, and NO PLANS.

When hanging out with a bunch of girls in Kobe, Sannomiya is the place to be. It has all your shopping/karaoke/movie/shrine/purikura/train needs (with both Hankyu and JR, the two major lines, meeting at Sannomiya) and an ample supply of stylish Kobe girls (and the occasional boy) in just the right population density for the place to feel lively, exciting, and fun, but not overcrowded or claustrophobic.

Here’s the drill:

1) Get up in the morning, eat food, get dressed up real cute and do your hair and makeup.
2) Head to Sannomiya. Meet your friends at some designated place, especially in front of the nikuman (dumpling) stand inside the station.
3) Food, Karaoke, Shopping, Purikura, and optionally more food, in any order you please (but Purikura cannot be first)
4) Lather, rinse, and repeat with different friends all week!

Since I’m back in Kobe for just over 2 weeks, I was part of pretty much non-stop Sannomiya hangouts with girls from high school. Here’s a few pictures of the three non-spontaneous (aka planned) hangouts I arranged in Sannomiya:

12/30/09: Nanjo Karaoke

Yuka and I wanted to go karaoke-ing with someone, so we contacted Misaki, a friend from high school and a fellow Porno Graffiti fan who I went to Karaoke with at the very last weekend or so of my year abroad. She said she was already going karaoke-ing with Machiko (another close friend of mine) and that we could just join in. A number of other girls from our class at Nanjo but who I’d never really talked to before were also coming. Oh well, better late than never…goes for making new friends from high school?

Tera-chan, Yuki, Misaki

Mari, Machiko, Yoko

We met up, and proceeded to karaoke for 5 hours. FIVE HOURS. This was the third day I was in Japan, and probably the most fun AND soul-crushing event I have experienced so far on this trip. Fun because it’s karaoke, and karaoke is, well, fun… the soul-crushing part was when I realized that I don’t know a single Japanese song that came out after May 2007 well enough to sing it. I keep up with new Mr. Children albums, but I don’t listen to them fanatically enough to sing, and I am completely obvlivious to the mainstream Japanese music. When you live here, keeping up means simply watching tv sometimes, which happens completely naturally in every household I have lived in here. But to suddenly be thrown into a 5-hour karaoke session with a knowledge of pop music from 2007, it’s almost like knowing nothing all over again. I worked 10 months to absorb as much j-pop as I could, and all for nothing!?

Eventually I realized that I could still fall back on all the songs I used to know, even if they elicited a 「懐かしい」every time I sang them. Karaoke SUCCESS. Except for one thing: Yuka couldn’t come. She had an errand to run at the beginning, and apparently you can’t have people come in once you’ve started free-time karaoke (when you don’t decide on a length of time beforehand). So that was kind of :( because it meant I never got to karaoke with Yuka during this trip.

Machiko & Mo

Karaoke was followed by purikura (and running into Furo/Aika like I mentioned in a previous post):

Then we moved onto a restaurant called アジアジア (AsiAsia in English… I guess?) where we partook in tabe-nomi-houdai (all you can eat & drink) for a fixed price. Many delicious things were ordered, many conversations were had about several people’s non-boyfriend-but-person-with-whom-we-can’t-totally-say-nothing-is-going-on. The restaurant was loud and boisterous. I had a hard time following the quiet secretive conversations going on. I learned here that Japanese drinks are really small and taste sweet. But I had a good time and certainly more than replenished all the calories lost during marathon karaoke and induced karaoke stress. On the way home I talked to Mari and Machiko in a much more audible setting (inside the train) and had a fab time.

Waiting in a really narrow stairwell to get into the restaurant

1/04/10: Hatsumode

Martha, the exchange student that went to my former high school in America last year, saw via my facebook status that I was in Japan. Hmmm… wait a minute, SHE also lives here, I realized (once she commented on my status). Though she’s more friends with my little brother’s crowd, we’ve met a few times back home and she invited me on a little Sannomiya hangout of her own on the 4th. I was busy during the early afternoon moving from Yuka’s house to Noriko’s house, so I did that while she and her friends saw a movie, and afterwards I joined them for 2010 初詣 (hatsumode) at Ikuta Shrine, but not before running into my friend Ryo for the second time in Sannomiya this trip.

I instructed them to meet me by the butt statue (and just like all other Kobe natives, they seemed slightly unsure of what I was talking about here). Martha & friends were a bit late and so I stood and watched this kid play guitar for a few minutes. He was good! However, in the picture below, note the girl in the pink hat’s outfit. Almost everyone wears shorts, boots, and tights in winter here, or shorts, boots, and over-the-knee-socks. This girl’s socks aren’t even knee-high!

Off to Ikuta Shrine! Even though you’re supposed to go on New Years Day ideally, it was still this crowded on January 4th! Waited in line for about 15 minutes!

We also got our fortunes. Mine was pretty decent. It had little things about each part of our life — apparently I am going to lose all my money on a vacation… pretty much is coming true!

Martha and friends! We then proceeded to eat random festival-like things around the shrine (taiyaki included!), take purikura (which I do not have on my computer), and go eat monjya-yaki (sort of like a less awesome, more Tokyo-y version of Okonomiyaki).

Afterwards, I had to return home to the Uetani household, for the first time in 3 years. We briefly spoke about how I should take a bus back instead of a train. Martha’s friends said “we’ll walk you to your bus!” because they’re nice, but it was a little embarrassing because I had to be like “well I’m not sure where my bus is, but I vaguely feel like it’s in that direction” and as I approached it “no, this isn’t right, I think we have to go down that staircase” etc. etc. It was like trying to follow instructions you remember from a dream, where you’re continually comparing what you see in front of you to an image in your mind and trying to resolve the difference into some logical course of action. Anyway, I managed to find the right bus as I knew I would, but not without worrying my friends with my hazy memory of what I was doing. I made it home, fyi.

1/06/10: Sweets Paradise

Or, alternatively, the reunion of Knitting Club. Machiko and Mari from orchestra club are two of the friends I keep up with the most (letters & packages & emails & the occasional mixi message). The first week I was in Japan, Mari happened to be in San Francisco with her family. Machiko came to karaoke as mentioned above, but since the three of us spent endless hours knitting things in random fast food restaurants, classrooms, and shopping centers in high school, it seemed fitting for the three of us to meet up again. Mika, a girl from my art class the first quarter or so I was here, also joined us (which was good because otherwise I wouldn’t have had time to see her) and Mari arranged most of it. Originally I suggested we go to Sweets Harbor in Harborland, which I went to once long ago with my first sister. But apparently it’s closed for good now, and instead we went to Sweets Paradise, effectively a sweets buffet located in Sannomiya.

Mari and Mika

Mo and Machiko

However, with all-you-can-eat cake and pie and ice cream and more, there is significant danger that one might uhh… overeat. Indeed, after Sweets Paradise I was completely un-hungry for the next eight hours or so. Whoops.

Festive and delicious

After gorging ourselves on sugar and whipped cream, we proceeded onto the purikura. We managed to get them all sent to Machiko’s phone, and she sent them on to the rest of us. We shopped for a while and then Machiko had to go home. More shopping ensued until Mika had to go too. Mari though, is living by herself (rare for Japanese college students, who mostly live at home) and she had nothing else going on that day –> freedom! And by freedom, I of course mean KARAOKE! Time to break out the Mr. Children, Porno Graffitti, and random Johnny’s songs I can sing with gusto (a vast majority of which are Arashi songs), of course. There was some occasional Seishun Amigo and Sakuranbo going on as well.

Followed by more shopping. Did my homage to Toyku Hands (a store with a level of awesomeness second only to Loft), and to the bookstore where I spent a long time in the celebrity photo book section (there were a disproportionate amount of Mizushima Hiro books, fyi). Eventually we decided we could stand to eat again, and headed over to ポムの樹 (pomu no ki) the omu-rice chain that I fell in love with 3 years ago. Omu-rice was hence checked off the to-eat-in-Japan list. Mari and I had a good heart-to-heart and I took one of the last buses home around 10, when all the stores in Sannomiya are closing anyway.

All in all, a good day’s asobi, and the purikura to prove it: