of boys, snow, panic and success
The week began rather well with a hastily arranged "date" with a guy I met on Mixi, who is ridiculously skinny, has great earrings, and quite lovely sideburns, a rare treat in Japanese men. Oh yeah, and he's a guitarist in a rock band, so keeping with the theme there... We hung out in Shibuya on Monday, conducting a quite challenging conversation about horror movies in Starbucks on the Shibuya station crossing. It's difficult to talk about horror when you don't know the Japanese for words like possession, ghost, exorcism, psychic and slasher. Then we had a beer in a 300yen bar I know and had 45 minutes of heavy metal geekery. Then we went to karaoke for an hour to get out of the freezing cold. I've always considered karaoke boxes to be the perfect place to hide out and snog for a hour, but that's just me apparently. I've never been to karaoke on a "date", and I've never been to karaoke with anyone who can actually sing, so that was a double whammy of firsts. When he started singing an Exile song and actually managed to hit the high notes I think my mouth hung open agog.
When we came out of karaoke, the freezing temperature had brought some pretty heavy snow with it, so we raced down the street and ended up heading into the first warm looking entrance-way we found, which quite fortunately happened to be the entrance to The Lock-Up, a prison-themed izakaya restaurant I've been to before, where we were handcuffed together (not quite appropriate for a first date, ne) and marched to a dimly lit cell. The restaurant plays heavy metal, has oddly named food and drink, and once an hour scares the crap out of it patrons when the staff don horror character outfits and run about in the dark slamming cell doors and glaring menacingly about. It was quite a change from the thoroughly pleasant organic-vegan-macrobiotic izakaya I'd been to the day before.
We ended up in my favourite rock bar just down the road, where the cute staff always recognize me and start making devil horns gestures. I think the night I staggered in with Satan and proceeded to play darts while chatting people up the week before Halloween left quite an impression.
(Me and Satan in a lift which looks like a doorway to hell,
but is actually the easiest way to find some heavy metal in Shibuya)
Anyway, it turned out, contrary to the website, that Monday night is not heavy metal night. Instead I was subjected to Pulp and numerous other things NOT heavy metal. There was even a Backstreet Boys video on the TV behind the bar, so we sat about and randomly insulted members of said boy band.
So, it was a pretty good night, though I'm not sure it's gonna go anywhere, and my brain was frazzled after speaking Japanese for 5 hours.
On the way home the snow continued to fall in huge soggy chunks, so I had a excited Chelsey on the phone, who may have been padding about outside her apartment barefoot in the snow (she's from Texas and gets quite excited about cold weather and white stuff). Or maybe I imagined that bit. Here's a picture of the first and only snow of 2010 near my house:
(The snow's actually a bit rubbish isn't it? It was gone the next morning.)
So, having awoken to the disappointment of not being snowed in and unable to go to work, I "jacked-in" to the web (to coin a Neuromancer term which daily seems more and more appropriate) to find the Australian branch of the global behemoth that is my English Language Korporation had gone bankrupt. Cue much internal flailing and panic until I realized that if I do become homeless when the Korporation finally sinks beneath the waves, it will probably be a very very good thing. More on that at a later date. There are plans afoot... all of which involve money sadly.
So, off to work and a day of tense, whispered conversations about how to get out before the inevitable capsizing, whilst maintaining shiny happy faces for the paying customers. Things were made even more tense when I returned home to find the results of my Japanese exam waiting in the postbox. As I was pretty certain of having cocked the whole thing up I was more than a little gobsmacked upon opening the letter to find a big shiny "PASSED" printed on the paper. I actually jumped up and down, spun around a bit, did a little dance and then phoned my mum in England, because there's no one easier to impress than your mum. It averaged out at a 75% pass mark, which is very respectable. Kanji and vocabulary were the strong points, followed by listening and then grammar and reading. It must have been the reading section that pulled me through the third section, as I fail to believe that I actually have a competent grasp of Japanese grammar. So on to the next exam, which requires a knowledge of 1000 kanji, 6000 words and more ridiculous grammar. I think I should start now.
It was a good week last week, so I shall endeavor to fill you in with more adventures later...
When we came out of karaoke, the freezing temperature had brought some pretty heavy snow with it, so we raced down the street and ended up heading into the first warm looking entrance-way we found, which quite fortunately happened to be the entrance to The Lock-Up, a prison-themed izakaya restaurant I've been to before, where we were handcuffed together (not quite appropriate for a first date, ne) and marched to a dimly lit cell. The restaurant plays heavy metal, has oddly named food and drink, and once an hour scares the crap out of it patrons when the staff don horror character outfits and run about in the dark slamming cell doors and glaring menacingly about. It was quite a change from the thoroughly pleasant organic-vegan-macrobiotic izakaya I'd been to the day before.
We ended up in my favourite rock bar just down the road, where the cute staff always recognize me and start making devil horns gestures. I think the night I staggered in with Satan and proceeded to play darts while chatting people up the week before Halloween left quite an impression.
(Me and Satan in a lift which looks like a doorway to hell,
but is actually the easiest way to find some heavy metal in Shibuya)
Anyway, it turned out, contrary to the website, that Monday night is not heavy metal night. Instead I was subjected to Pulp and numerous other things NOT heavy metal. There was even a Backstreet Boys video on the TV behind the bar, so we sat about and randomly insulted members of said boy band.
So, it was a pretty good night, though I'm not sure it's gonna go anywhere, and my brain was frazzled after speaking Japanese for 5 hours.
On the way home the snow continued to fall in huge soggy chunks, so I had a excited Chelsey on the phone, who may have been padding about outside her apartment barefoot in the snow (she's from Texas and gets quite excited about cold weather and white stuff). Or maybe I imagined that bit. Here's a picture of the first and only snow of 2010 near my house:
(The snow's actually a bit rubbish isn't it? It was gone the next morning.)
So, having awoken to the disappointment of not being snowed in and unable to go to work, I "jacked-in" to the web (to coin a Neuromancer term which daily seems more and more appropriate) to find the Australian branch of the global behemoth that is my English Language Korporation had gone bankrupt. Cue much internal flailing and panic until I realized that if I do become homeless when the Korporation finally sinks beneath the waves, it will probably be a very very good thing. More on that at a later date. There are plans afoot... all of which involve money sadly.
So, off to work and a day of tense, whispered conversations about how to get out before the inevitable capsizing, whilst maintaining shiny happy faces for the paying customers. Things were made even more tense when I returned home to find the results of my Japanese exam waiting in the postbox. As I was pretty certain of having cocked the whole thing up I was more than a little gobsmacked upon opening the letter to find a big shiny "PASSED" printed on the paper. I actually jumped up and down, spun around a bit, did a little dance and then phoned my mum in England, because there's no one easier to impress than your mum. It averaged out at a 75% pass mark, which is very respectable. Kanji and vocabulary were the strong points, followed by listening and then grammar and reading. It must have been the reading section that pulled me through the third section, as I fail to believe that I actually have a competent grasp of Japanese grammar. So on to the next exam, which requires a knowledge of 1000 kanji, 6000 words and more ridiculous grammar. I think I should start now.
It was a good week last week, so I shall endeavor to fill you in with more adventures later...