The Pon

This week brought with it my friend Sam to visit me in Nagoya. Sam has featured in a couple of blogs so I wont bother with an introduction. He arrived Wednesday night and we went to a sushi place in Sakae to meet my friends Callie and Eri. After some lush sushi we headed to our favorite bar the Hub to get some drinking going.

After a few we headed to Club Wall in Sakae to see my friend Kana doing some hip hop dancing. Kana was the chick me and Callie met a few months ago dancing outside a skyscraper. Tonight she was going to be dancing with her mate on stage and I had been looking forward to this for quite a while as shes well good.

After getting lost for a few minutes we eventually found the place. It was an underground hip hop club, and on the stairs was a couple of Japanese guys, one of whom was a singer who went by the awesome name of “Sly Dog”. After chatting to him for a while we went inside. There was a DJ playing decent hip hop and after about 30 minutes the acts came on. First there was an MC, then Sly Dog took to the stage and sang a few songs which were well Boyz 2 Men esque, and after that there was another MC, this one by the name of Pon.

This guy was fricking nuts! Imagine if you will a 30 year old slightly overweight Japanese man wearing an outfit which looked like someone had vertically cut a red suit and a white suit in half, and put the 2 halfs together. Not only that but his act involved him half rapping, half randomly screaming at a high pitch. One of his songs involved him rapping over the YMCA song although for the chorus he tried to get everyone to sing “Y-M-C-Pon” (which I don’t need to tell you didn’t really work). Also when he got really hyped up, he stood on this stool on stage and after about 3 seconds went face first into the floor.

Needless to say after this spectacle Kana had to follow up with something pretty special. After Kana`s act was up (which was well good by the way), the club went back to the standard hip hop DJ and dancefloor mode. This gave me the chance to meet Pon and find out a bit more about his life. I found out he is a 30 year old salaryman by day and an MC by night. I still couldn’t really tell if his act was meant to be funny, but it was well worth the price of admission, that’s for sure.

The club closed at 3 but the first train was at 6, so me, Sam and Callie headed to Karaoke to sing our time away. After warbling our way through masses of quality songs including the 1979 German Eurovision entry “Moskau”;(http://www.youtube.com/watchv=jH8gtrD4_C4&feature=related) we said our goodbyes to Callie and headed back to my apartment.

The next couple of days were not particularly interesting although I did show Sam my favorite café, the Yeast Paradise and of course Osu.

On Saturday I had to go to work but left Sam to his own devices, so he could go to all the touristy places without me having to tag along. This included the castle, Atsuta Shrine and downtown Sakae.

After work I headed back to meet Sam. We were going to be meeting up with some of my friends and he was already an hour late so I decided to go without him and leave the apartment door open and my keys inside. This was a great plan until I remembered the downstairs door which requires a key to get inside, but not to get outside. Unfortunately I remembered this just as the door closed behind me, meaning I was locked out.

Being the only gaijin in my apartment block means Im regarded with suspicion anyway but now I had to skulk around in the lobby waiting for someone to come in so I could tail gate them in. I didn’t have to wait long and around 10 minutes later a middle aged woman came into the lobby. I made a faux attempt to look for my keys and she eyed me carefully. She wasn’t going to open it for the likes of me.

After what must have been a full minute it was obviously getting awkward for her as well, so she just got her own keys and opened the door. The door is an automatic sliding one which closes about 5 seconds after the person using the key opens it. I waited about 4 seconds (hoping she would be round the corner and halfway up the stairs by then), then I quickly jumped through the sliding door straight into her disapproving and slightly scared looking eyeline. I wished her a good evening then calmly walked up the stairs trying to not look too suspicious. She most probably then called the police, but I haven’t heard anything yet.

Anyway I got my key and got out of there. I met Sam, gave him my key and then headed into Sakae to meet Callie and her friends Emi and Sayaka. After meeting up with Sam a few minutes later we headed to a Yakitori restaurant nearby. Yakitori is a restaurant specializing in a kind of barbecued chicken, and is typically served with beer. We had some awesome food, including Yakitori sticks (kind of like a shish kebab), pork shish kebab, this barbecued chicken skin stuff, this fried pregnant fish thing (so its kind of like the taste of fish, together with the taste of fish eggs). This was quite tasty although I felt a bit weird eating a pregnant anything. Its just somehow….wrong.

Anyway we also got loads of Unagi dons, salads, Nabes, fried burdock, and more variations of fried or barbecued chicken. After the meal we headed to the Hub to meet some other people including my friend Neal, Japanese Bob, and Texas the MC. In addition to that we also met a few more of Callies friends. After a few drinks we eventually left and headed to the infamous ID café. ID is a place full of gaijin and the sleaziest kind at that. Whilst its not a regular for me, I do think it should be experienced at least once so I decided to give Sam that opportunity. The entrance for ID is 3000 yen but this brings with it 4 drink tickets.

At the door all the gaijin got padded down for knives while our Japanese compadres walked through freely. Once in we headed to the top floor which was a hip hop floor. ID has five floors although despite this it does tend to get ridiculously crowded. The hip hop floor was almost impossible to move on and the group quickly got separated. After thinking about trying to look through 5 floors of ridiculousness I decided it would be quicker to use mobiles. Altho no one can hear phones, text messaging is always an option. Eventually I managed to find Bob, and we set off to find the rest of the group. Slowly but surely we gathered them whilst drinking and dancing. By the time we had everyone back together there was only about 5 minutes of the club left (it opens at 11 and closes at 2).

On the dancefloor and later in the locker room, we met a load of other gaijin (some from Britain, France, Australia and America) who tagged along with us when we left the club. They were all kind of safe although we all went our separate ways when our crew decided to head to club Domina for some House/Techno. Domina wasn’t too packed, and the music was pretty good. After about an hour Neal realized he`d lost his keys so we ended up going on an epic journey round everywhere we had been that night to find them.

Having no luck, we headed back to Domina for the last 15 or so minutes. When it got to 5 we headed to Dennys to get some breakfast. Unfortunately it was too early for the breakfast menu to have started but Dennys being 24 hours meant that it wasn’t a huge problem. I got this massive salad with some fried shrimps which was an awesome end to the evening.

After that we went home and slept most of Sunday.

Ok that’s about it for this week. Next week Im going to a Korean style dinner party so expect a load of food pictures as usual. See you next time!

Peace out

Jack

The Domina

Ok the past 2 weeks have been relatively quiet although there were a few parties which were pretty cool. The first was at my school at ACC. The female students from one of my Saturday class along with Yoko, my boss had been organizing a nabe party (again with the nabe!) for most of last month. There would be all the teachers plus the women from my Saturday class, and a couple of other guests. All in all the party numbered around 12, and was about half Japanese, half gaijin.

The sheer amount of food was again astounding and there was far too much to go around. There were 2 Nabes, some sushi, some Octopus and tomato salad, some edamame, some tamago yaki, as well as an immense amount of cookies and sweet stuff for dessert. Oh yeah and cheese and crackers. Sweet!

Anyway I once again ate a ridiculous amount before rolling home in time for the last train.

The next night it was my friend Nahos birthday so we went to an Izakaya.　There I had some awesome fried chicken, salads, pizza, pasta and loads of other gourmet stuff which was really delicious.

After the conversation was flowing for a while I asked my friend Steven where he was from in New York and to my surprise said “Norwich” (although he pronounced it with 2 syllables instead of one vowel filled noise). Random, guess it must be fate or something…

The following Wednesday I went to Irago to see Ayae for a couple of days. Whilst there we visited a flower park, which actually only had one type of flower which was “Nanohana” (Rape). Anyway it was totally full of them and on a nice sunny day looked really beautiful.

The next day we went to neighboring Fukue to see the town halls exhibition of “Hina” (slightly creepy Japanese dolls). As I`ve mentioned before, it was dolls day recently and this exhibition was in celebration of that. There were lots of dolls (what did I expect?) and most were set up on small steps. Im not really sure what the significance of this is, but apparently its traditional to have them set up like this. The level of detail on some of them was immense with the princess dolls each wearing 12 kimonos. On the Friday I headed back to Nagoya.

This weekend was eventless, although I should mention that the sun came out and the wind died down a bit. This is awesome as it seems winter is finally coming to an end. Hopefully this will make me more motivated to go out and do blogworthy things!

The following week I headed to Irago to visit Ayae again. On the Thursday myself and Yusuke went to a nearby Karaoke box which was really awesome. Yusuke has a powerful voice which together with my rapping skills means we can execute formidable versions of Linkin Park songs. In addition to that I also got some Guns n Roses, Oasis and Arctic Monkeys tunes in which was sweet. I love Karaoke.

On Friday I came back to Nagoya to go to my friend Kawai`s Izakaya party. You may remember (but probably dont) him from a few months back. He`s the salaryman who organizes international get-togethers at Izakayas every 3 months or so. Anyway at the last one I met loads of cool people so I figured I`d go again.

We went to Yama-Chans which is a popular chain of Izakaya in Nagoya. The number in our party must have numbered around 30 and we got a huge room which was cool. As usual there was loads of dishes brought to our table as standard (Chicken wings, Chicken balls, and other varieties of fried Chicken). There was also a load of Sahimi, salads, Tofu dishes, and in addition to that I ordered some miso katsu (miso sauce covered fried pork) which is a Nagoyan specialty. After eating and drinking and chatting to loads of random people, we eventually left and went to an English pub, where I met my friend Michyo. After an hour or so more of drinking I had to leg it to the subway to get the last train home. I then had to walk 40 minutes to my home from the subway station as the buses had stopped running. I eventually got in around 1 and had to go straight to bed as I had to be up for work at 7 the next day.

After blagging my way through the next day of work I got home in time to get an hours sleep before having to head out again for my friends Rich`s and Steven`s birthdays. We started at the Bottom Line Jazz club where one of my friends students was going to be singing with a 14 piece band. The band was really awesome and over the next 3 hours there was a variety of singers coming on stage to sing with them. Most of the singers were fairly mediocre, but there were a couple with really awesome voices who had no Japanese accent at all when singing. In the intermission we met the singer that my friend Raul was teaching and she was well diva which was pretty funny.

They played a variety of Blues, Jazz, Funk and Motown, highlights being Average White Bands Pick Up the Pieces and Randy Crawfords Street Life. The venue was pretty big and had 2 tiers. We were standing on the top floor looking down, and it was pretty interesting seeing how a Japanese Jazz crowd reacts. They were pretty much inanimate just sitting at their tables and occasionally clapping along. Jazz is absolutely huge in Japan but apparently dancing to it isn`t. On the top tier though there were enough of us gaijin to get a bit of a party going which was cool.

After the Jazz club we met with a few more friends and were numbering around 11 now. We went to the overpriced and sleazy gaijin bar “Mybar” which was ok although overpriced and errr sleazy.

After that we headed to a club called Domina where there was a drum n bass night on. For the past 6 months Ive been trying to find drum n bass in Nagoya, and so was well pleased when my friend Callie said she found one. After stopping off at a combini for some naan based snacks we headed to the club. When we got in there, we were given a free glowstick and CD and the first few people managed to blag a free T shirt as well. The club was small (although average for Japanese standards) and underground. The music was pretty overpowering and initially quite jungley and breakcorey. Also in places they were playing Gabba which was a bit weird. The club wasn`t empty but it certainly wasn`t packed although the total lack of any apparent advertising is possibly the reason for this.

After dancing for a few hours, pretty much all my friends went home via taxis although I decided to stay as I liked the music and also I couldn’t really afford a taxi all the way out to Nisshin. Callie`s housemate Carl was still there so I hung out with him the rest of the night. Around 3 this female DJ named Ayumi came on and totally smashed it playing some really heavy tunes. As the hours rolled on people started to disappear from the dancefloor although most didn’t leave. At the back there were some tables and chairs and loads of people were just sleeping there, in spite of the ridiculously aggressive beats in the background.

At 4 another DJ came on although by this time it was just me and Carl on the dancefloor. To my surprise he was actually playing some really good quality drum and bass so it was a bit of a shame there was just us 2 to dance to it. Eventually the clock struck 5 and we left to head to the subway (via a combini of course). On the way we met DJ Ayumi so had a bit of a chat with her, and she was really safe.

I got home around 7 and despite my best efforts could not sleep. I had necked a couple of red bulls back at the club to keep my legs from collapsing beneath me which seemed like a good idea at the time but I now regret. As I am writing this now I have only had an hours sleep and after that hectic night still feel pretty wired. Tonight may have to be an early one. Hmmm…

Ok that’s about it for these 2 weeks. Sorry Ive been a bit slack in writing this but I figured I should wait until I actually did something before I put anything online. This week my friend Sam is going to visit Nagoya so Im thinking that should be cool.

That’s it for now, See Yall!!!

Jack