Last week, I finally got to meet the last of the teacher's I'll be working with, and I also got to spend a little time at my Junior High School where I'll be spending most of my time starting this week. Mostly, I spent the time working with our Junior High speech contest entrants. It was a lot of fun, and once again, I felt like I was doing work. Which in this case is a very good thing. After weeks of enduring the Board of Education version of 'The Breakfast Club', I was more than pleased to do something.
On Friday, the BoE threw us a welcome party. This was my first experience with the cultural phenomenon of nomikai/enkai（飲み会/宴会）, or the company drinking party. It's a time when you can relax and get to know your co-workers. Everyone is permitted to cut loose--B-U-T only on the condition that you never speak of it again. There's a strong separation of work and personal life in Japan, and that's reflected in the nomikai.
At any rate, it was a blast. I laughed so hard I cried. Multiple times. There was also a great part in the conversation where we discovered that our boss is a big fan of reading. When Marisa and I told him that we're Murakami Haruki fans, he asked us if we'd read his new novel, 1Q84. Of course we hadn't, because it had only just come out in Japan. We had talked about it previously and concluded that neither of us had the confidence to even try it. Our boss on the other hand, kept encouraging us to read it, and really enthusiastically at that. He told us how easy it is to read, and how there are only 5 or 6 characters, and that their names are... etc. He started to tell us about all sorts of novels that he likes. Turns out that he's a big fan of Stephen King.
The next day, Team Satte met up with good ol' Stephanie from Kurihashi in Akihabara. Akihabara is the electronics/nerd mecca of Tokyo, but that day, I only had one objective. To get a dangly charm for my cellphone. It's so naked without one. Somehow or other, I succeeded. Along the way, I helped Marisa get an electronic dictionary (one much better than mine), and had my picture taken with a Solid Snake statue inside Super Potato, a retro video game store. I'll post that once Stephanie sends me the picture.
From Akihabara, we moved on to Shibuya, hungry for American food. Yes, we were on a mission. A mission for burgers. There's a small, gourmet burger shop called Pakutchi in the middle of Shibuya which, in order to get around the portion constraints of Japanese buns and patties, stacks the burgers a foot high. Even for 980 yen though, it's not quite filling. Incredibly delicious though.
After that, we wandered around Shibuya for a little bit. I was a little disappointed to find that love hotels don't really look all that crazy from the outside. It's really only the rooms that are themed, and you can't see them from the street. A little later, I struggled to buy some shoes measured in "centimeters", whatever those are. After estimating my size and trying on a few pairs, I thought I had the right ones. I think I'm going to go back next weekend and return them for a size larger.
Soon after, we bid farewell to Joe and hit the karaoke. Great fun. The lights were synched to the music and when they dimmed, the walls lit up with images of some sort of amazon woman surrounded by dolphins. There might be a picture of that somewhere too. I'll get back to you.
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