 |
|
|
||||
How much sleep do you get each night? Apparently 7 hours is optimal. A Japanese study found that those who sleep eight hours a day had shorter lives than those who slept seven. Less than six will also give you a shorter life!
I met my host family for the first time on Friday. I was a little travel weary and not feeling so well, I believed, from eating something bad, and that my mum believed, was from partying too hard. At any rate, I was eager to meet my hosts and settle in for the month.
Kentaro (my host brother), his mum, and Rebecca (the liason with the school) were waiting for me at Izumigaoka station at 5:00 pm. I was actually half an hour late because of an unusual delay in the consistently punctual rail service which means there must have been an unpleasant accident. I phoned ahead when I knew I would be late and I received a warm welcome at the station when I arrived.
Me and the Kawamotos: Tomoko, Kotaro, Marilyn (the dog), Kentaro, William, Takefumi
Rebecca went her own way and Tomoko (the mum) and Kentaro took me back to their house in their Mazda MPV. We have an MPV in Canada and I immediately began to feel at home.
My host brother Kentaro, or "Ken", is really cool. Perhaps the coolest student at Poole. He is really into music, particularly rock, and is the lead singer of his band. He has lots of friends and introduces me to a different group every night. He has a big honda motorcycle that makes a lot of noise. The only uncool thing about him is the dorky uniform he has to wear at his part time job at Lawson (a convenience store).
His younger brother Kotaro, or "Kochan", is also really cool. Hey plays bass in his band and is also into rock music. Kochan gave up his room for me to stay in and I feel bad about displacing him, but hope I can one day return the favour.
The mum is incredibly nice and totally spoils me. She does my laundry, cooks delicious meals, and leaves notes with instructions (in English and Japanese) if she will be out. After six years of living on my own and taking care of myself its quite a readjustment - but not one that I would complain about!
The dad is relatively quiet. He works long hours like most Japanese employees and likes to unwind at the end of the day. He enjoys Chinese tea after dinner while reading the newspaper. He does all kinds of handiwork by himself including changing the oil in his car. He likes cars and has changed all the driver seats in the cars to Recaro seats. There is even a custom made Recaro seat on a wheeled office chair base in front of the computer in the living room!
The dog is huge and very friendly. I am not really a "dog person" but it is hard not to enjoy Marilyn's exuberant company. I have been warned that she likes tissues and I have seen her scoff one left unprotected.
They are the most generous, friendly, and welcoming family that one could hope to stay with.
Host-guest relationships are innately fragile as both parties enter an implicit agreement using expectations derived from differing histories. The cultural divide adds another degree of fragility to the situation. Though I am careful to behave well and pay extra attention to emotional feedback, there is always the possibility I will make a mistake and cause some kind of problem. I only hope I can be as good a guest as they are hosts.
In the first episode of Party Every Night, we left off with with Yokote, his friends, and me tearing up the reggae club. That night I stayed at Yokote's friend Kichi's place. Kichi I had met last year on another trip through Kansai with Yokote. In the morning, Yokote set off for Vietnam, Kichi headed for a friend's wedding in a neighbouring prefaecture, and I aimlessly returned to Dotombori to continue my adventure.
After the requisite convenience store breakfast and fix at the Internet cafe, I wandered to a nearby subway station to give Taizo a call and see if he might be coming to Osaka. When I phoned him from the payphone he was about 50 meters away in the Daimaru department store beside the station! I had to merely walk up the stairs, walk into the store, and there he was! The timing was even better than when I met Yokote.
After shopping with Taizo and his wife, his wife returned home and Tiazo and I went to an izakaya to drink with his funny university friends. Taizo, his two friends and I moved on to a darts bar where I conceded defeat in the practice round, then schooled the lot of them in the first real round winning 100 yen from each. Ok, I was really just lucky. It also helped that the good player was standing double the distance from dartboard and throwing each dart like a baseball.
We continued on to a batting centre. Knowing how difficult it is to strike a fast moving little white ball with a long heavy stick, I opted instead for something else. I timidly entered the table tennis cage where I was soundly humiliated by a noisy little machine spitting ping pong balls faster than bullets in a Jon Woo film.
Fortunately after that, we continued on to engage in one of my strong suits: partying. Having never been to a dance club in Umeda we decided to give that a try and consulted the lifestyle magazines in the nearest Lawson convenience store for names and locations of party spots. After finding one of the clubs we decided not to pay the 3500 yen cover charge to see a bunch of famous DJs from the UK of whom we had never before heard. Instead we went to the perennial favourite "Bar Isn't It".
Bar Isn't It, known to me and my (gaijin) friends as BII or "Isn't It" and to Japanese as "Izunto", is a chain of bar-come-dance-clubs across Japan. I know of BIIs in Tokyo, Osaka, and Kyoto. The formula is simple and successful: 1000 yen cover w/ 1D, 500 yen drinks, mixed music, and hokey decore. The bartenders are lively and foreigner friendly. Girls inevitably dance on the bar. And you are often treated to a little fire breathing pyrotechnics courtesy of one brave bartender. The alcohol flows until 5 am closing and is sometimes passed around in bottles or poured down the open mouths of eager patrons like a corrupt scene of a mother bird feeding its drunken offspring.
The crowd was strange that night. I suppose only the wierdos come out to dance on a Monday night or perhaps anyone with any sense spent 3500 yen to dance to the beats spun by imported UK talent on the other side of town. One young guy, his face frozen in an expression crossed between a wide smile and a grimace tried to introduce me to people he obviously did not know. One giant fellow danced mostly by walking forward, then plowing backwards, ass first through the crowd and occassionally stopping to give me a big high five with both hands. I danced up a storm and managed to make friends with everyone in the club getting bought drinks by the patrons, and offered shots by the bar.
At 5 am we turned in and, before heading home, grabbed a bite to eat with a businessman, originally from Shanghai, fluent in English, Mandarin, and Japanese. Impressive.
The next few days I stayed with Taizo and his wife Keiko's family. They fed, watered, and took very good care of me. I am lucky to have such good friends.
This concludes "Party Every Night" and it turned out to be only four consecutive nights which is not a new record for me but is, however, not typical. The next few days with Taizo were comparitively relaxing.
Stay tuned next time to hear all about my homestay family!
Changing your vodafone email address from the default 15 character crpytic alpha-numeric string is almost as difficult as just memorizing that string in the first place. First you have to go here.
Then click the button labelled 新規登録はこちら。 The button is kind of hidden in a graphic, so if you cannot read the Japanese it is not easy to notice.
From there, choose what type of customer you are from the dropdown list. There are three options, have a vodofone, have a prepaid phone, do not yet have a phone. So you choose ボーだフォン携帯電話を持ちのかた and continue.
Then you fill out a big long Japanese form where you must write your name in "Japanese", English characters are no good, and after pressing the continue button and confirming, you get presented with this wonderful image.
You are to use this image to navigate through a special browser on your phone from which you can receive a special randomly assigned password to log onto the website (using your regular computer).
However, it turns out that you do not need to use this password. Instead, you go to the vodafone website and choose "Vodafone live!" At the top left of the page there is an option オリジナルメール設定
After clicking that, you get a new page and scroll down to heading 1. パソコンからの設定 and click the オリジナルメール設定はこちら button to get a popup window at which point you can choose English to help you along.
Now you have to enter your phone number and a password that you were never told about. To get this password, you can click "Forgot your password?" to bring up a help screen. This screen instructs you to go back to the phone's browser for you to retrieve yet a different password to log in.
To retrieve this new password you need to know the four digit numeric password you gave the clerk when you originally signed up for the service and you need access to the phone based online system that you gained by following the steps in the beginning of this article.
It seems like Vodafone does not want you to use a personalized email address! But I beat the system and got one. You can send me emails and I will receive them whenever and wherever on my mobile phone. Try to keep them short! My shiny new personalized Vodafone email address is:
discowill AT k DOT vodafone DOT ne DOT jp
I reached the limit of Movable Type, or my web browser "Net Front", or the W3C standard for text input boxes, or something, when I hit save and a good page worth of my story was obliterated from my entry. I was finishing up "Party Every Night" on the painstakingly tiny keyboard of my zaurus PDA. Needless to say, I am a little angry. Technology is such a nuissance.
I will finish the story in a new entry next time I have access to a real computer.
I have a new phone in Japan. It's actually my old phone but I managed with great difficulty, and help from my friend, to reconnect it.
Number / 携帯番号: 090 4272 7906
Email / 携帯メール: y27afd73e29jwy3 AT k DOT vodafone DOT ne DOT jp
[UPDATE! Now: discowill AT k DOT vodafone DOT ne DOT jp]
Yes, I know that email address is completely ridiculous. It is the default address and I have not yet figured out how to change it.
Sorry for the lack of updates (if anyone is reading this). I have been without proper Internet access for a while. I am staying at a friend's house and his computer is broken! I am, however, well fed and well rested.
Last time we left off, I was looking for a place to rest after a tiring journey to Japan. My physiology is usually in a conflicting state of fatigue and hunger. One of those feelings is typically dominant and wins. This time hunger won and before I began looking for a capsule hotel and public bath, I decided to get a bite to eat.
I aimed for Yoshinoya, essentially Japan's answer to McDonald's, to enjoy their main dish: gyudon. Gyudon is thinly sliced cooked beef on a bowl of rice. It sounds really simple, and it is. It tastes good and the price is perhaps the best part.
Unfortunately, thanks to "mad cow" (and I was warned by my friend), Yoshinoya has stopped serving gyudon. They now serve "butadon" - thinly sliced cooked pork on a bowl of rice. Japan has banned North American beef for so long that it has become an expensive commodity. So imagine McDonald's cutting the hamburger and instead selling a ... burger made of ham. Or a "ham" burger if you will. And you might see my point if you are as sleepy reading this as I am writing.
I enjoyed my butadon in the company of a pair of drunk Japanese businessmen and then set off to find the capsule hotel that I recalled staying at last year. The hotel is in the heart of the clubbing and party district in Osaka and lo and behold, on a Friday night, whom do I bump into but four gaijin (foreigners) out looking for a party. They invited me to join them and, after putting up a token resistance, I entered their fellowship.
They were all English teachers at Nova. Two from Canada, one from the United States, and one from England. One of them, frustrated with the continuous company of English teachers, took a particular liking to me. The thing with English teachers in foreign (i.e. non-English) countries is that often their only qualification in life is that they speak English. If they could do another task well, they would do that at home instead of moving away to teach English.
This one particular friend I made, Michael, was so thrilled when he received his first affirmative response to the question "you know who Dostoevsky is right?" that he bought me drinks all night and offered to let me stay at his place! We were in the bar until about 7:00 am when the bartender politely suggested we finish.
The next day, after leaving Michael's place, I phoned one of my Japanese friends, Yokote, who said he would be in Osaka on the 1st. When I reached him, he was an hour away from Osaka and we agreed to meet. Perfect timing!
We poked around Shinsaibashi and Nihombashi until nightfall at which point we naturally headed for a dance club. We were in the mood for Hip Hop and Hip Hop we found. We went to a club called Azure after much searching and hesitation. Our efforts were well rewarded as the club was busy, but not crowded, the DJs amazing, and the floor populated with good dancers. Around 7:00 we turned in to stay at a nearby capsule hotel. The "5 hour pack" was only 2000 yen and the facilities great. We had to make sure to set our alarms!
The next day was filled with more poking around until we met up with Yokote's university tennis team friends. They told me that before, Yokote was only interested in tennis. Since he met me, he's only interested in clubbing! I apologized. We went to an izakaya and made merry, Japanese style, until the middle of the night. From then, more clubbing!
We settled on a club called Grand Cafe. I had actually been there last year on a less busy night. This night they were playing reggae and the place was rather packed. Now I do not know what happened, but the crowd was going absolutely crazy. In Japanese dance clubs, the clubs patronized mostly by locals as opposed to the foreigner oriented clubs such as the quizically named chain "Bar Isn't It", people arrange themselves almost in lines, all facing the DJ and, with varying degrees of rhythm, sway or bounce in time to the music. That is what it was like when we arrived, but when we left, the scene more closely resembled the pit at a Canadian rock concert with the partygoers crashing into each other, hugging, smiling and jumping all over. I like to think we, especially Yokotes energetic friends, had something to do with it.
Those guys sure know how to party! I was, to say the least, surprised to find out that none of them had ever been to a dance club before. Perhaps there is a natural relationship between tennis and partying. I think I have some more converts!