Happy Birthday, Mr. Fool.

My classes started this week, and I'm so dead.

Yes, it's all in Japanese. And at the end of every lesson we have to submit comments, so that they know we paid attention. And paying attention to five hours of lesson-grade Japanese... gets kind of expensive. Especially with my sleeping habits, or rather lack thereof. So I'm kind of pooched last couple of days. Add a measure of not-so-common cold, and... I was none too shiny, let me tell you.

Also, last week was my birthday. I thought I would have a small party in an izakaya. It turned out a "small party" became an overstatement, and three of us ended up eating nabe and cake and watching Sasuke. I got some very nice presents (thanks everyone, really!), but I was pretty much blown away by one in particular, consisting only of words. Best birthday present ever, especially considering it had no substance whatsoever. Thank you, you know who you are. Everyone else, you most likely don't, and won't.

As for the obligatory Japan weirdness: pre-printed envelopes. Sometimes you get those: for instance, a company might send you an envelope addressed to themselves, so you can give them a reply easily. Nothing weird yet, eh? I'm sure things work like that everywhere. Everywhere that mail and printing exist, that is. However, because of Japan's politeness rules, things take a sharp turn towards weird: after the company name, there is a character 行 that means "for", but it is kind of self-effacing (when said by them), or rude (when said by you). Basically, but not quite, "for the humble Acme". All Japanese cross that character out, and write two other ones: 御中, so that the address says "for the honoured Acme". However, even stranger is you get an envelope that needs to be self-addressed, for example for the university to notify me of my having passed (or not) the entrance exam. There's a blank for your name, and "for honoured Mr/Mrs" character 様 there (different from the ones above, because you're not a company). You need to fill in your name, cross off the polite 様 "for", and put in the humble 行 "for". When they send it back to you, they will cross off the (now rude) "for" that you wrote in, and re-correct again to 様, so that the envelope you finally receive would read something like

MATH Amadan 様 行 様.

So Japanese.

Personal Room

After a year and a half in Tokyo, it finally happened: I missed the last train.

Back home, it was never an issue. One bitched about how long one might have to wait until the next night tram, but it does come eventually (except when it doesn't, but that's a completely different story). Waiting for 22 minutes might look like an eternity when your feet hurt and you have thin soles and it's snowing, but it's not really all that long.

In Tokyo, everything stops around midnight, and it doesn't budge until five hours later. And while back home I might have chosen to walk if I didn't feel like gambling for a night tram (or, when I moved, I might just have walked home), it's not an option here: my home is nowhere near walking distance from, well, anything.

What happened was this: I went to milonga with a friend (last one [milonga, not friend], as it turns out, as she ships out to Dominican Republic in a couple of days. "See you in two years", she said, but... "then, who alive, who dead", as my people are wont to say). Milongas are rather famous for starting late and ending later still, and it holds true even in Tokyo (except for the previous one, where suddenly everyone went home at 22-23h - what's up with that?), and... well, not much to tell really, the first sentence tells it all. I got stuck in Ikebukuro at thirty past midnight.

Now, I evaluated my options, which I all knew only theoretically by now. I could take a cab. It would get me home, and cost me quite a bit. That was the usual recourse for my tango friend, but she was always all grumbly about how much money she ends up wasting on it.

Also, there are hotels all over Tokyo, in a variety of flavours. In order of decreasing price and increasing sleaziness: There's real hotels, which cost real money. There's love hotels, but I guess it's strange if you don't have company. And there's capsule hotels, where (I am told) you can hear a roomful of strangers snore.

Another option was, I could crash in a karaoke box; but I didn't really want to sing, and karaoke boxes are kind of loud. Normally you don't hear other people singing, but only because there's someone in your own box yelling his or her heart out. (Actually, most people I went with sing very very well; only some actually yell. Details.) If you're not singing, the bloody karaoke machine still insists on playing loud music by itself. (I learned that when I went to karaoke with a friend, and we were trying to have a conversation. We quickly gave up and just sang.) And if you manage to turn that down, you start hearing people yelling their hearts out in the neighbouring boxes. Not really a place I would go to spend a restful night; but it's an option. A lot of karaoke places have a night rate, where you pay a fixed amount for the six or so hours past the point of no return; it's not that cheap, but if you like karaoke, it's a nice enough option.

Then there are manga cafes, or internet cafes - most offer both, to be clear, so these are largely synonyms. You rent a cubicle, kind of like in a internet cafe most of my readers are used to, and there's a computer you can use. That's where the similarity stops, because in a western internet cafe you can't normally borrow a comic book, and they don't normally work 24/7. They also have a night rate, so you can rent your cubicle and just crash until your train starts rolling.

Anyway, as all this was going through my head, fighting for dominance in my mind's arena, I noticed a sign fortuitously just in front of me: Personal Rooms, in B1 (first floor underground). The terms of use were also posted, and... it's a kind of internet cafe. Why didn't they just say so? And they had a "night course" for ¥2000, which I thought was pretty decent for renting a room for up to twelve hours (10pm-10am). You could even borrow a DVD. Each customer even gets one "joke goods" for free. Huh. So, in I went.

The thing I should have realised was this: There were about 25 shelves crammed into a small reception room, with the composition as follows: 3 shelves of manga, 1 shelf of foreign movies, 1 shelf of domestic movies; and the rest was occupied by... another kind of cinematography. Mostly domestic, but one shelf was again reserved for countries where blonditude does not necessarily come from a bottle.
(I like blonditude, and I don't care that it's not a word. It sounds way better than blondness. Blonditude. Blonditude. Or perhaps, blondosity, for certain people.) Next to the counter window which was at the right height for two bellies to converse face-to-face (one has to love the Japanese penchant for privacy), the wall sported the menu of "joke goods", most of which were in an amusing cylindrical shape.

At the time I registered (or rather, shown my ticket bought at the automatic ticket selling machine to the belly behind the counter), I was given the choice of a reclining mat or a massage chair. Now massage chairs are supposed to be good for relaxing, but since I wanted to at least try to sleep (insomnia still going strong), I was definitely more inclined to recline, and declined a massage chair. I ordered a wake-up call, since the rates for oversleeping are draconian when compared to what I paid for the whole night (¥500 for 30 minutes).

I was then shown to my personal room. (Actually, I was shown the door to the half-metre wide corridor where the rooms were. I entered and locked the door behind me, then spent the next five minutes trying to kick back on the reclining mat (since 80% of the width of the room were taken by the mat, leaving just about a foot width of "passageway". Above one's knees there are a DVD player, a keyboard, and a huge LCD TV; and next to one's elbow there's a phone, an ashtray and two (!) boxes of wipes. In case of any sudden leakages. The room stank a bit, but luckily only of old tobacco (one of rare opportunities for me to put luck and tobacco in the same sentence).

All in all, a minor adventure was had. It's cheap, and it could have been much worse. For instance, if I was a woman, I suppose.

In closing, two words: Doomsday sucks. If you ever find yourself in a situation where you have a choice between porn and Doomsday, pick porn. Seriously. Porn is way more believable and has a way better plot.

Plum Blossom

I probably said this before already, but Tokyo is, apparently, the city with the most restaurants per capita in the world. It's almost as if eating at home is a strange experience to be savoured occasionally. On every street, every corner, there is a restaurant or ten. The sheer choice makes it hard to pick. There's a cuisine for every palate, and also cuisine for every wallet.

It is hard to say whether I am blessed or cursed to have a good friend who is a gourmet, because it increases the number of times I go to the restaurants for people endowed with thicker wallets than mine. However, today was not one of those days. Today it was my fault.

Last year, as my faithful followers surely remember, when I was visiting Nikko with some friends, I was talked into going to a yuba restaurant, and it was a fateful day. It was love at first taste, even if I still have trouble with the name. But I had to wait for almost a year before I would have an opportunity to have shoujin ryouri ("devotion food") again.

I had a vegetarian phase, long ago, but in the end I went back to meat. There's something deeply delicious in, for instance, yakitori or hirekatsu, and it would be very difficult to give it up again. But let me tell you, those monks knew their food: even without meat (okay, maybe with an occasional rabbit scam), they led a full culinary life.

Anyway, the point is, the food was great. Superduperamazing. I loved every bit of it, even though some people would say it had no meat. It had meat: crab, scallop and fish. To those people who don't think that is meat... Why haven't you failed biology?

I wanted the course with more yuba, which was incidentally discounted this month. Yay! However, they would only make it for at least two people, so J sacrificed himself at my altar of yuba. Em went for a bit less extravagant and more tofu-oriented course.

The restaurant itself was very strange. You know how in some izakaya each party gets their own room? Well, you probably don't. But it is so. Those rooms are often quite small, just big enough so that the allotted number of people can squeeze around the table. There's hardly a place to put a bag; or rather, there wouldn't be, if they didn't have boxes under the seats in which you can pack your things. This one was similar, in a way that Zastava 750 (or for you international visitors, Mini Morris) is similar to a Cadillac stretch limo. It was three metres by four, at least, with a definite tang of hotelicity and a strong suggestion of apartmenthood. Even the corridor between the rooms was un-Japanese in its spaciousness. I felt a bit lost at first, until the food started coming, and then nothing mattered any more.

There are some pictures at the usual place. I'm very near my quota, and if I want to upload anything else, I will have to take something down.

Fortunately for me, I rarely want to upload photos. Today, you were lucky.

Chocolate Sparkling

I just got another drink-related surprise. The co-op store at my campus just got a new addition to its shelves: "Chocolate Sparkling", "new combination of soda & chocolate flavor", "Soda & Chocolate W チョコレートフレーバー" ("Soda & Chocolate Double Chocolate Flavour"... Excuse me? Double what?!?). With pieces of chocolate drawn floating about the bottle, and a disclaimer that it does not use chocolate (the ingredients are, predictably, sugar, soda water and flavouring - I almost kind of miss the "1% fruit content" thing). The drink colour is amazingly non-evocative of chocolate pale yellow. I wonder what it does remind me of...

In the meantime, my lil brother has gone back home. I know I didn't tell you that he even came here, but... some deductive reasoning, please? Anyway, he's been here for a month. When he came here, he was all happy about being able to wander around Japan for a whole month. Already starting with the following day, the tune changed: now he was moaning how he only had a month! It's fantastic how you can present the same fact with two completely opposite meanings, right? Anyway, it got worse with his departure date growing close. Apparently he's been four times to Odaiba, because he really liked some overpass or something.

My mother got addicted to kuzu powder and matcha. I started typing how people will get hooked on weirdest things, then remembered I have difficulties walking past a シュークリーム without getting one. To each his own, I guess.

The Basket Case

Yesterday I went to my second basketball game ever. The first one was 22 years ago. So you might say it was somewhat a new experience for me. J asked a bunch of people, but ultimately only Em and (anagramatic) me went along. Apparently, it was her first, despite having fuzzy feelings about basketball. We cheered for the home team (Toyota Alvark), booed the Mitsubishi Diamond Dolphins (actually, only J did - apparently, Em and me are too Japanised already), ate overpriced bad hotdog and overpriced bad minidonuts, concluded Cola was average, and found my favourite cheerleader and Em's favourite player (although, "I liked him better when he was too far to see clearly"). Afterwards, we pigged out on tempura. Good times.

Anyway, what I thought was the silliest name ever (exacerbated by Japanese pronunciation - "arubaruku"), actually has a reason. I know I usually say "just #$% Google it", or "Wikipedia knows"; but since most of you can't read ja.wikipedia.org, the origin of the name is apparently the arabic word meaning "lightning strike" (and boy, they are fast!); and also, Al-V-ark serves as an Arabic-French-English wordplay for "The Victory Ark". Stilly, but hey.

Also, as someone pointed out, I owe you a school-related update, even though almost every one of the three people reading this blog already know. I passed my scary entrance exam, and I'll be starting my Master Course classes in April. I guess the teachers were properly wowed. Till then, I'll be attending the fun Intensive Japanese Course once again. Yay!

I moved. If you have the old address, ask for the new one.