The Night Out

Ok thanks for making it over here, I hope you`ll all agree its much better over here than myspace.

Anyway Ive had a really busy week so Ill get to it.

Friday I bought a digital camera, thus the reason for the blog move.

Saturday was the Nagoya Matsuri (festival) which I was really looking forward to. This was basically a procession of various acts including baton twirlers, marching bands, floats, and loads of people in traditional dress.

One of the highpoints of this had to be the marching band who were performing various traditional tunes, and then without warning burst into Eye of the Tiger! Awesome!

In addition to this, there were some really awesome battle re-enactments with some samurai sword fights, mass battles and lots of ridiculously over the top deaths. The whole thing looked well good anyway.

I should also say that this day was particulary of note as I discovered a new dish. I figured that as it was a festival, there would be loads of awesome street food and I was right. When I got off the subway into Central Park (a park in the err, centre), the whole place was completely full of vendors. I decided to do a circle to try and find something Id never had or even heard of before. Luckily I found OmSoba which is, as you may have guessed an ommelette stuffed with fried Soba noodles, as well as meat and vegetables and covered in okonomi sauce and mayonnaise. This was really tasty, although I don’t know if it was just cos it was a new dish or cos it was some ancient secret recipe………..hmm, maybe I should try and find that stall again……

Anyway, after the festival I headed home to get some food and then headed out again. It was Tracy (one of the other teachers) birthdays and she was having a night out. We started in a sports bar called Shooters. (By we I mean about 25 other people!). There were people from Japan as well as lots of different countries including America, Australia, Canada (always with the Canadians!), and even Peru. Everyone was pretty safe and there were lots of people who had only been there a month which was good to know. I was however the only British person which to my surprise meant I was actually a little bit cool. It seems the whole Cool Britannia thing is still going strong thanks to The Office and Radiohead, and lots of people wanted to chat to me which was nice.

Shooters is like an American style sports bar on the second floor of a tower building just outside Sakae. It was full of Gaijin as well as a number of lairy (well, by Japanese standards) baseball fans. Saturday night was a big game for the Nagoya Dragons as they were in the end of season playoffs. Im not sure if Ive really emphasized enough how important baseball is in this city. Nagoya is often called the Manchester of Japan. If that’s true then the Dragons are the Man United. Last season they won the league beating their rivals the Tokyo Giants (who I guess are the Chelsea). This season they havent been so lucky, just losing to the Giants but theres some big championship thing going on anyway and theyre doing pretty well.

Ok enough about baseball. Anyway it was cool to be in a bar again hearing cheering sports fans (the Dragons totally cleaned up!). Having said that, it was a shame they showed this instead of the England Estonia game, also on that night.

Another thing I should mention about this bar is that instead of paying for your drinks individually, you have to have a tab, and pay afterwards. This isnt unusual in Japan, but in a bar of this size it didn’t really work too well. It was difficult to get drinks since the waiters and waitresses were always running over the place, but never in our direction. Anyways eventually I got to drinking.

After this bar we headed to ID café which is the biggest club in Nagoya. On the way we walked past some office building skyscraper which had some people hanging round outside it. As we got closer I realised that there were loads of little crews gathered round boom boxes, and body popping / break dancing. This was pretty surreal, it felt kind of like 1980s New York (or how I imagine 1980s New York) but totally awesome!

The club was expensive (around 15 quid) although that came with 4 free drinks so it kind of evened out. It was pretty huge though, about the size of Fabric in London but spread over 6 floors. I didn’t check out all of them since I didn’t want to lose my friends (I didn’t have anyones phone number!). The floors I did visit though were a techno floor, an R&B floor, a chillout floor, and a reggae dancehall floor. This one was totally packed so we spent most of our time there. Again this club seemed to be more than 50% gaijin but everyone seemed pretty friendly. I met this one bloke who used to be a teacher but is now a bartender by night and a priest by day. I think that’s possibly the coolest combination of careers Ive ever heard of.

Everyone got pretty wasted from the 4 free drinks and then some, and we left the club at closing time (which was the ridiculously early 1am!!). It didn’t matter though cos that was when the fun started. Since the last trains run at about midnight, everyone who was still with us (about 13 by this point) had to pull an all nighter til the trains started again at 6. Since it was Traceys birthday, she decided (as did everyone else) that the best idea was go to an all you can drink 24 hour Karaoke bar (Because when is that not a good idea!!!).

This was awesome. Ive always loved Japanese Karaoke, but doing it when ur wasted is awesome because you THINK you sound the bollocks. We managed to get a room which was big enough, and the drink flowed, as did the music (although having said that, lots of people did decide to pass out). Throughout the night people kept coming into our booth staying for a song then leaving (Tracey has been here 6 years so she knows loads of people!). Most were really safe although there was one fat Australian woman who cancelled everyones songs and set up like 5 for her. Eventually after some arguing she left. Still even with that incident, it was still really really cool!

Anyway after screaming my way through Stairway to Heaven and hearing numerous versions of The Pretenders` “Brass in Pocket”, it was finally 6am and time to leave. The trip home was pretty much without incident although I did manage to fall asleep on the train. I was woken up by the conducter at the end of the line and had to get a train going the other way, back to Hongo (near where I live) although luckily this was only 1 stop away.

The next morning I felt pretty horrible so I didn’t do much. In fact this whole week I havent really done much since my hours have been cut at the school. It sucks, but for the moment Im just doing Saturdays. In a couple of weeks Ill be doing another week of full time work but until then Ill have to be minding the pennys. That said I did receive my first pay packet this week which was awesome!

O yeh I almost forgot, Wednesday was pretty cool. Since Ive been here over a month my hair has gotten pretty long so I decided I had to get it cut. With my extremely limited Japanese this has been something Ive been dreading, but it had to be done. I had been scouting places this week to try and find somewhere cheap but everywhere is over the 25 quid mark. Luckily on the internet I found this old mans barbershop which was nice and cheap.
Before I left I got some key phrases from Ayae to help me order what I want, (namely “Short here”, and “Not-too-short here”). The barbershop was a bit of a trek but I found it in the end. When I got in there, a kindly old lady invited me to a chair and I tried to remember the phrases Id been given. Having forgotten them, the lady gave me a picture card of different lengths of hair and I pointed to the one I wanted. It’s a shame they didn’t have plasticised versions of different hairstyles in the windows, otherwise I could of taken her outside and pointed like a restaurant!

Anyway I was left with a pretty ok haircut, a bit longer than I wanted but given the circumstances I was very relieved.

That evening, Ayaes friend upstairs (not God; she`s got a mate who lives in the appartment above us) was having a party. This wasn’t a western style party of drinking your own body weight, falling over and breaking stuff, this was a food party!

Ayaes class mates have these from time to time. Basically the organiser buys loads of food, makes dishes (with the help of the guests) and then at the end everyone splits the cost of the ingredients. This particular party was a sushi party. I met some really cool people here although when you get Japanese girls together chatting Japanese to each other, it is impossible to keep up, theyre like anime characters or something!

The food here was awesome!

In addition to the many different sushi ingredients (raw tuna, crab, shrimp and salmon as well as loads of vegetables), there was also lots of salad and 2 home made pizzas, which were proper tasty. Although I found it impossible to chat Japanese, one of the girls was a huge football fan so she put on the big international game that night (not England v Russia, Japan v Egypt of course!!). This took the edge off as it was actually a pretty decent game to watch with 5 goals (Japan won 4-1).

After the main course Ayae went to a convenience store with one of her friends to buy some more food. This was of course all a set up since Ayaes friends had actually planned a surprise birthday party for her (shes 22 this Saturday). As soon as she was outside they got a cake out with candles and had me sign a card, and of course prepared lots of tea. The big surprise thing went a little dodgy, but still she was proper chuffed and I got to eat loads of cake. Awesome.

Ok, that’s about it for this week, thanks for reading, and Ill hopefully write something next week!!

Thanks again yo!!!!!

Jack








P.S Apologies for my shaky camera work, I had to hold it above everyones heads to get shots so found it difficult to get the framing right.

P.P.S Im gonna put all the other photos on Facebook for anyone whos interested.