Korean food and more karaoke

It's Thursday and we have tomorrow off, so I decided to hang out with a group of friends I only up till now mainly only ate lunch with sometimes, with Christie in are group whom was a good contributor to the FB group before the trip began and Jordan who is the tallest guy on the program and then a couple friends I've hung out before with. We went to the Korean distract in Tokyo and walked around for a bit, it was interesting. We decided to get some Karaoke in before hand so we found an Uga karaoke place and sang a mix of Japanese and American songs, no karaoke outing is complete for me without Red Hot Chili Peppers song Snow.

In the place the was glowed to the black lights of a underwater scene, and on the little screen was a disturbing video of a panda pulling a microphone out of his ass, only in Japan. I also got a great drink that I wanted to get the last time I went to a Uga karaoke place.


We then went to a good Korean restaurant, and we got a lot of food. Cristie could speak and read some Korean, and knew from a friend how to cook, so she ordered us some good dishes. We got a thin seafood pancake with sauce, kimchi, I got some bibimbop,

and we got a hotpot full of beef that was good.


Christie also got us this pork dish, and she knew how to cook it perfectly, she even got complimented by some Koreans that could speak English sitting near us. We wrapped the pork in some lettuce and at it, and it was oishii (tasty).

We then walked for a bit and got some desert at a convenience store, and we ended up at the next station over, so instead of walking back, I took it to Shinjuku, which I would have had to do from the other one as well.

Argghh Midterms

So it's Wednesday, and I'm half-way through my midterms. I had my Marketing test on Monday, which turned out to be harder then he said they would be, and my Human Resources on Tuesday which I felt a bit better about. That one also turned out to be a lot more difficult, she said it was all open-ended questions, but they where long answer questions. Still I reviewed the ppts for the class so I knew everything on the test.

Today I went to eat with my friend Roy. We found a Mexican place by campus called Grill Cabana,


and I got myself a steak burrito, which was kinda on the small side compared to Qdoba. The food was good though, not much else to report on this day.

My Japanese Midterm will come next week broken into Kanji, reading, and listening the first day(which I did well on) and grammar the next. I also have a paper over the book we read in Ethnography due on Monday, that I'll finish over the weekend, but will find out that he is now throwing everything we just learned away and giving us a new viewpoint on modernization.

Star Trek!

Well Star Trek was finally out in Japan, and after hearing from a couple sources in the US, my brother and my Supervisor at the DLC Kevin, I decided to go see it. I went with a couple friends, Zach and Jim, and because it was the first of the month, the tickets were half-off. We went to Shinjuku and got out tickets. The show wasn't for a while, so we decided to grab a few beers before watching the movie to make the effects that much more thrilling. We found a nice sports bar where they had 200 yen beers, cheap, and we had fun chatting and drinking.

We then went to the theater when Zach says he spent all his money on the beers, good thing he already got his ticket, but I reminded him he had to pay to get to Shinjuku, so he kinda freaked for a minute, but I lent him some cash for the train. Went went to the theatre and it wasn't all that crowded since it was a foreign movie.

The screen was covered by a curtain

and they had a creepy intro video about not disturbing others during the movie.


The movie did not dissapoint, being an original ST fan I thought they were going to mess it up, which they did to a degree, but the movie overall was fantastic, I won't spoil it for you here if you haven't seen it yet, do it!

Night at karaoke

Friday came around and I met up with my friend Hiromi, and at first I was just going to go home since I had no cash, but she convinced me to go out and said she would loan me some money. At first it was just going to be a small group, but it grew tremendously very quickly, friends kept inviting other friends, and it's not the best idea to have this many people in a group seeing it's hard to find a place to hang out, we had almost 20 people. We found a karaoke place near campus that had a room big enough to fit all of us.

Alice in the background looks kinda scary. And there is a random cuckoo clock

We sang a mix of Japanese and American songs, and it was nice having everyone together singing. We then went out to find a place to eat, and on the way one of the people, Frank the Tank, who finds it necessary to drink before singing just ran off in front of us and we almost lost him.



The restaurant we went to couldn't seat all of us, and most of our group weren't hungry, so they went to the park to drink, which I found crazy since it was raining. So me, Hiromi, Candy and her boyfriend went to find a place to eat and eventually ended up back at the one restaurant. I had to leave though after eating to catch my last train.

I made a turtle!

So Wednesday finally hits and it is time for our next CIEE optional event. Today is a Wara class on making kame (turtles) out of the leftovers from the rice plants.

what we were making

We had to weave together the big straw pieces to form the head and outer shell.

We had to braid together three of them, and they asked if I had a sister or something because I was so quick and good at doing it. We then made the shell by checker boarding smaller pieces of straw together,

and then for the tail we used end pieces with the seeds.

My turtle turned out soo good, and I think they heard me comment to my friends that I wanted one of the smaller turtles like they had on display in the office, so they had me twist together two longer pieces again, that was harder to do, and they made me a small turlte to go with my bigger one ^_^

My finished turtles, they even gave us free gifts of little pre-made sandals.

I then went with my friends that also made turtles and we went to a small bar near the school and they got yakitori, grilled chicken on a stick, and I got okonomiyaki which is a bit harder to explain, it's a sorta cabbage and egg pancake, and it was good. After talking for a while and saying how awesome are turtles were, we went home.

Day at the arcade

Today I originally planned to do nothing after seeing sumo, but when my host family was heading out I decided to go with. They were just going to Shinyurigaoka, but when I decided to go, we went to the shopping area we went when I first came. We went to a Sizzlers, and it was good.

You order food there, and then you can go to the buffet. I made myself a nice taco salad, and they had pink lemonade which is rare in Japan. I ordered the lamb chops seeing they were about the same price as the burgers,

and they also had a chocolate fountain with banna cake, marshmellows, and bannanas.


After eating, we went upstairs and there I saw something awesome, it was a toy race car track with drifting toy car! SWEET!



My host family left to play with Alice, and I got to play around in the arcade. I first played Capcom vs. Tastunoko which plays like the new Street Fighter 4 game, but has popular Japanese characters thrown into the mix, and I played with Megaman and Gan-chan, a character from Alice's favorite show Yattaaman, and I was able to get to the boss before losing, it was fun. I also played some Tekken 6, Fate/Stay Night, the Gundam pod game, Guitar Freaks which is a lot harder than Guitar Hero even with only three button, and DDR. I also saw these guitars by the rhythm section.

Best part was there was a promotional special going on and most everything was half off gaming or buy one get two plays.

When I was about to play Taiko, my host family called so I went and met them and we went bowling again. The lanes were a bit slick so I didn't do as well, still managed though to score a Turkey and get a total of 157.

As for dinner that night, they made great spaghetti, and we had literal corn bread with our meal lol

SUMO!

Ok, I know I've gotten behind on my Blog so what I'm going to do now to not get too far behind is I'm going to update now on recent events and catch-up at the same time. Hopefully it works out. Oh and I added pics of my host family and of our place.

So now, on May 23, I had received tickets to see sumo wrestling. The original plan was for me to go with my host family, but my imouto (younger sister) got sick, and with the flu thing going around they didn't want to take any chances, so I was to go and meet up with Mayumi's mother at the stadium. After eating lunch and doing some other things, I set off around 3 for the hour long train ride. I tried to contact a friend since their was an extra ticket, but the only one to reply didn't wake up till really late, like 3, so she couldn't go. I had never gone to the station before, but was able to recognize it one getting on the Sobu line. I arrived and easily spooted the collosiem, but it was on the other side of the station, and with my luch I went the long way to arrive there. It's ok though, I saw an awesome mural along the stone wall were it elevated to the train tracks, and the whole wall was lined up with jitensha (bicycles). I knew I was at the right spot since I saw little sumo references everywhere, especially at the restaurants along the way, like the drawings on the signs or the little sumo ceramic figurines. Along the way I saw the Tokyo-Edo Museum which looked very interesting architectually, and a giant statue of monk ontop of a turtle.

I finally walked to the entrance of the stadium, and it was grand. There where flags everywhere and the building had some murals of sumo wrestlers. The tickets were all sold for the day, and I go in and am shown where my section is. I arrive and have trouble finding my seat, but Mayumi's mother was already there and lead me to my seat. They gave me a beer, they insisted on it, and everyone was chairing. I ended up in the nosebleed seats, right along the back and the tickets were still expensive. Luckily they had binoculars, but you could still see fine without them. The place was massive, like a basketball stadium. giants pictures of past sumo lined the back walls, the top seats where chairs, but the bottom section was all pillows that you could lay on. The Ring was in the center with a giant roof and Japanese Flag ontop. The sumo were so big and massive, and the fighting was fierce, but short like most matches were done in less than 30 sec. They would take forever prepping though, constantly returning to their corners and doing the sumo raising one leg and dropping back down, and throwing the salt. It was fun to watch, and during the final battles against the top players, two of the lower ranked sumos beat their Superior, and this is responded by the crowd with everyone throwing their pillows towards the stadium, I kid you not, it was hilarious. This happened during the final match and was a big upset.

After Sumo, I went out with her and some other relative friend, not really sure what he is, out to dinner. We ate Tempura at Shinjuku Eki. I had Sashimi (the raw fish without the rice) and tempura. We tried to talk, but ti was very difficult with me speaking little Japanese and barely able to understand them. I know a lot of words but grammar is my issue. They spoke very little English. Kinda makes me happy I can communicate with my host family though I would learn faster if I was absolutely forced to, but I told my family, I need to communicate. I came back home and my family was already in bed. They came out to say goodnight to me, and I soon went to bed myself.

It's late so pics to come tomorrow, just wanted to post for now :)