maya gets a keitai and other stories from tokyo (catch-up post the third)
I'm not doing so well with keeping up with my livejournal entries here. Everytime I think I see the end of the catch-up posts in sight, more stuff happens to drag me away and I end up with days and days of backstory to write about. I really need to get this thing caught up to the present so I can switch to updating through frequent short entries rather than infrequent long entries. =P
So when last I wrote it was friday morning and I'd managed to sleep in all the way to 7:30 am. *GASP* I lazed around in bed on my laptop for a little while before heading into the shower, and then lazed around on the computer a little bit more. At about 9:45 I headed down to the am/pm around the corner (I live there, I swear), bought myself some plain meronpan for breakfast and sat myself down at the bottom of the stairs up to the dorm to wait for my designated nijonjin contingent to come meet me.
mmmm.. meronpan..
For those of you who don't remember, Mejiro had arranged to have three students come meet me on this day to help me do things to adjust to life in Tokyo. Of course, there was really only one thing that I wanted to help me better adjust, and that would be a keitai. Living in Tokyo without a cellphone has been a BITCH and a half. In such a huge city it's just about impossible to keep in touch with anyone unless you have one, and trying to coordinate things with Eric, who also didn't have one, was very hard (see the last entry for more on that one).
So yes. Keitai==FIRST priority.
Just before 10 am a Japanese girl poked her head around the door from the street and introduced herself as Yuka, the president of Mejiro's ICC (International Communication Club, I believe). She was followed by Hiromi, a Japanese guy who's name I didn't quite catch because.. well, he didn't speak too much.. and Jason. Hah. I was NOT expecting to see Jason. We never really talked when we were back at SFSU, but both of us pretty much flipped out and did the Japanese High School girl thing at seeing a familiar face and ended up ignoring the Japanese students almost completey for the first 15 minutes in favor of catching up with each other in really fast english that I'm sure none of the students could follow. Ooops. XD
Jason's been here a month, and had some interesting things to talk about. Like being jumped by four japanese police officers who admitted after he offered up his alien card that they had thought he looked like a terrorist (O.o;;;). The most interesting thing that I learned from him, though, was that contrary to what Ms. Bell and Yarabinec had tried to use against me last week, he is NOT living in the dorms. Actually, I found this out from Tsukuda-san two days earlier, but Jason confirmed it and we commiserated over the horridness of OIP together for a while there. Both of us ended up going the Leopalace route, yet I was the one who had to put up with Yarabinec's shit while hearing what a good boy Jason was for taking the dorms. Fuckers.
Anyway, the students took us first to Mizuho bank, where I was promptly turned down due to the lack of my actual alien card (it's going to be ready on 9/28, I have the temporary certificate now), lack of an inkan, and lack of living permanently nearby. They suggested another Mizuho, which also promptly turned me down. Defeated, we stopped back at everyone's favorite am/pm for drinks before going to Tokyo Station.
For those of you who have never been to Tokyo Station.. uh.. well.. yeah. I think MONSTEROUSLY GIGANTICALLY AMAZINGLY HUGE doesn't even begin to cover it. It's damned big. You could walk for miles and miles underground and never see the same spot twice. SO not kidding. I will have more on Tokyo Station later, since I've been there three times by this point. Anyway, thank god I had the Japanese students there to show me around, otherwise things could have been bad. Before actually heading down to the platform we stopped by the fare machine and got me a Suica card for ¥2000 (¥500 for the card, ¥1500 on the card). Which is a rechargeable plastic card that you can use on the all the JR lines in Tokyo.
For those who have never been to Tokyo, the public transportation system here is really complicated. There are several different companies that manage the various subway and train systems, and for each of them you have to pay separately based on distance. Sure makes me miss the flat rate fare of Muni, though the Tokyo system is MUCH nicer, cleaner, faster, and *gasp* runs on time. Anyway, you pay your fare before boarding based on where you want to go. I've gone most frequently to Takadanobaba to meet up with Eric and to transfer to the Seibu-shinjuku line to get to Mejiro. From Nihonbashi (one of the three stations near my dorm) on the Tozai subway line it costs ¥190 each way to do this. So, as you can see, transportation is expensive.
Anyway, the Suica card is pretty cool in that all you need to do when you go through the gates is wave it over this little sensor pad to get in. You don't even need to take it out of your wallet. Jason said that once he didn't even take his wallet out of his back pocket, he just turned his ass to the sensor and jumped a little and it registered. LOL. When you get on it deducts the minimum fare, and when you get off it deducts the rest based on how far you've traveled. It's really very convenient, which makes me sad that it's good only on JR and not the other lines like Tozai and Seibu-shinjuku that I will most likely be using much more frequently.
Anyway, Suica in hand, we took the JR Yamanote line (that's the one that just makes a big circle around Tokyo) to Shinjuku, and went to the nearest au store. YAY!
au is the student's cellphone company of choice here in Japan, as I'm sure many of you know first hand. They offer a really awesome student discount of 50% off most charges if you show them your student ID card when you sign up, so pretty much everyone going to school here uses au. We took a number and looked around the store for a bit at all the different phones. I absolutely fell in LOVE with one.. the W31T in turquoise which had everything but the kitchen sink thrown into the absolutely most gorgeous and sleek little casing (a lot of phones here are HUGE, bulky and ugly), but when I went up to ask for it I was told that it was not available with the student discount.. only A-series phones were. MEH. So I ended up with my second choice, which I'd seen online before. The A1404S by Sony Ericsson. It's a basic phone by Japanese standards, lacking those fancy extras like a built in denshi jishou and GPS guidance (at least, if there's GPS I haven't found it yet), but it's still pretty advanced compared to American phones. I was somewhat undecided between the green and the pink, but the store I was at ended up not actually having anymore green to sell, so that decided it for me. If they'd had the green I might have ended up with that one, but now that a few days have passed I can't imagine not having pink. XD
So, for those of you who asked, there it is. I love the little display on the front. It's really useful. It tells you exactly what's going on w/ your phone at all times without having to open it. Like, it lists your missed calls and how many of them you've missed, how many c-mails and emails you've received, etc. It also acts as a vewfiender for the camera if you want to point it at yourself. Here's another gratuitous shot:
I got the standard plan, which, after the discount, comes out to about ¥3500/month and includes something like a ¥2200 allowance on calls before I start being charged extra for them. I think that's up to about 150 minutes? Yeah, Japanese calling plans don't put much focus on actually talking since most people use their phones mostly for email and messaging and such.
After spending waaay too long in the store getting everything sorted out, the woman who was helping me told us to go away and come back in 30 minutes to pick it up. By this time it was almost 1 pm, so we opted to head over to the interestingly named Mylord building, where we went to a psudo-italian place called Pastel for lunch. It was actually pretty damned good. I had some weird chicken saboro spaghetti, which was spaghetti done up all Japanese style, orange juice, and a 'Purin Brulee' (aka creme brulee XD) for ¥1449, which really wasn't so bad for all that.
That'd be me and Hiromi at Pastel for lunch on Friday.
After lunch we headed back to the au store to pick up my phone. On the way there this professional looking guy in a shirt and tie tapped me on the shoulder and was like "Anou...." It took me a minute to register that it was actually ROCKY of all people. Rocky Gonzales, that is, from the Japanese department at SFSU. He graduated a year or so ago, but we took classes together before then. To say I was shocked would be quite the understatement. I had NO idea that he was in Tokyo, though Nick aparently did and had just forgotten to tell me. Anyway, he's here teaching english at Berlitz for the year, but was on his way to work so had to run after only just a second.
I was still in shock for a while after that, though getting my hands on my phone made it a little better. First thing I did was email my mom and Eric with my phone number and keitai mail, and then I spend the rest of the day playing around with the thing, with the help of Hiromi who has the same one in green.
Phone in hand, we got on the Seibu-shinjuku line and headed out toward Mejiro University for the first time. Well, for me it was the first time, everyone else had already been there. Mejiro's over in Nishi-tokyo, which is a lot more peaceful and residential than the other places I'd been spending time since I got here. The walk up to campus goes along a few very narrow streets, one of which runs next to some kind of a canal. It's nice. The campus itself is very small, but pretty. Lots of trees and stuff. We only really explored two buildings and the library when I was there, but it's all brand new and clean looking. And the view from the 9th floor of Building No. 10 is absolutely gorgeous!
We didn't really do much while there. Uzuo-san paraded Jason and I around to the various offices and introduced us as students from the university that Makino-sensei had studied at. A woman in the main office gave me a chikan alarm (a little heart keychain w/ a button in the middle, haven't tested out what it does when you press the button yet XD), and we met a very few students, but other than that it wasn't terribly eventful. The campus was mostly deserted since it's still summer here. Hiromi, the guy, Jason and I took a ton of pictures by the big Mejiro Daigaku sign at the main entrance like the huge dorks that we are, though. LOL.
I headed home at around 5:30, with instructions to come back to campus on 9/20 (that'd be today) at 3:30 for the first meeting of the ICC. I have no idea what all we're going to talk about, but I know that for halloween we're going to make jagabata and there's talk of a trip to Tokyo Disney or Disney Sea.
I got home at 6 pm to find that my cozy little haven had been invaded by Germany. Well, more like by two German girls... well, evil German she-bitches. No offense to the Germans out there (hi marlen!). I think rather than waste time in my catch-up post on them I'll dedicate an entry later on to the whole dorm situation and include several sections about THEM in there. =P
I didn't really have much to do after getting back from Mejiro. I went out briefly in the evening to forage for food. Ended up with some kakiage soba from a different soba-ya down the street. It was also very, very good. I also went up to the roof at about 10 pm to call my mom, and the guy from Ghana was there (I think his name's Isaac? No idea). I talked to him for a while about Tokyo and he gave me a hello kitty w/ electric guitar keitai strap for my phone. Sometime after I got back to my room I got really lonely and depressed. Eric was due to move into his dorm that day, and I'd asked him to phone or email me a soon as he did with his contact information if he had any, and to just let me know how things were. Of course, I didn't hear a thing from him all night. I assumed that there must be some kind of welcome party going on and went to bed.
Saturday was more of the same. I spent almost the whole day laying in my bunk alternating between starting at my computer and falling asleep. I was really, really lonely, and really, really bored. Didn't feel like going out and exploring on my own, and was concerned as to why I hadn't heard from Eric. See, I'm really used to being able to contact him whenever I want, so suddenly having no way to reach him was really hard. I think at about 4 pm or something I couldn't take it anymore and started searching online for his dorm in the hopes of finding a phone number. And I did. And they transfered me to another dorm, and that dorm phone managed to be located at a desk that Eric was JUST walking past when the phone rang.
I felt better after talking to him, and we arranged to meet up for dinner at 6:30ish. That took some doing on my part since he didn't want to give up his free dorm food and would have prefered going out after dinner, but I prevailed! We met up at Takadanbaba and went to the same Izakaya that Uzuo-san and Tsukuda-san had taken me to on my first day here. I'm amazed I managed to find the place! It's called Watamin-chi or something, it's SO cheap and pretty damned good. For dinner on Saturday Eric and I split like seven dishes ('cajun' chicken salad, jagabata, spring rolls, two sushi things, weird japanese lettuce/chicken pizza, and the included cabbage leaves in miso dip) along with seven HUGE drinks (4 for eric, 3 for me) for a total of ¥4326. Pretty good there. The drinks alone would have cost us more than that in San Francisco.
We stayed out catching up until about 10 or 10:30, I think, before both getting really tired and heading back home. I don't remember what I did here.
Oh, another thing that is somewhat related: When I called Eric at his dorm I mentioned being really lonely and bored and kinda got all emotional and apparently the Russian girl (Ivana?) overheard me because after i got off the phone she came over and invited me out on Monday. She said that her boyfriend was a boxing trainer and had invited her to this championship match, but she turned it down because she didn't have anyone to go with.
So now I should probably get ready to head over to Mejiro, since I really have no idea how long it's going to take me to get here and don't want to be late for this ICC thing. Eric's supposed to get his keitai today, so if the Mejiro thing doesn't end up with us all hanging out for the rest of the evening I might try and meet up with him. It'll definitely be a lot easier to coordinate this time! Coming up next: The SFSU invation and Maya's first ever experience with boxing! (Catch-up post the fourth)
So when last I wrote it was friday morning and I'd managed to sleep in all the way to 7:30 am. *GASP* I lazed around in bed on my laptop for a little while before heading into the shower, and then lazed around on the computer a little bit more. At about 9:45 I headed down to the am/pm around the corner (I live there, I swear), bought myself some plain meronpan for breakfast and sat myself down at the bottom of the stairs up to the dorm to wait for my designated nijonjin contingent to come meet me.
mmmm.. meronpan..
For those of you who don't remember, Mejiro had arranged to have three students come meet me on this day to help me do things to adjust to life in Tokyo. Of course, there was really only one thing that I wanted to help me better adjust, and that would be a keitai. Living in Tokyo without a cellphone has been a BITCH and a half. In such a huge city it's just about impossible to keep in touch with anyone unless you have one, and trying to coordinate things with Eric, who also didn't have one, was very hard (see the last entry for more on that one).
So yes. Keitai==FIRST priority.
Just before 10 am a Japanese girl poked her head around the door from the street and introduced herself as Yuka, the president of Mejiro's ICC (International Communication Club, I believe). She was followed by Hiromi, a Japanese guy who's name I didn't quite catch because.. well, he didn't speak too much.. and Jason. Hah. I was NOT expecting to see Jason. We never really talked when we were back at SFSU, but both of us pretty much flipped out and did the Japanese High School girl thing at seeing a familiar face and ended up ignoring the Japanese students almost completey for the first 15 minutes in favor of catching up with each other in really fast english that I'm sure none of the students could follow. Ooops. XD
Jason's been here a month, and had some interesting things to talk about. Like being jumped by four japanese police officers who admitted after he offered up his alien card that they had thought he looked like a terrorist (O.o;;;). The most interesting thing that I learned from him, though, was that contrary to what Ms. Bell and Yarabinec had tried to use against me last week, he is NOT living in the dorms. Actually, I found this out from Tsukuda-san two days earlier, but Jason confirmed it and we commiserated over the horridness of OIP together for a while there. Both of us ended up going the Leopalace route, yet I was the one who had to put up with Yarabinec's shit while hearing what a good boy Jason was for taking the dorms. Fuckers.
Anyway, the students took us first to Mizuho bank, where I was promptly turned down due to the lack of my actual alien card (it's going to be ready on 9/28, I have the temporary certificate now), lack of an inkan, and lack of living permanently nearby. They suggested another Mizuho, which also promptly turned me down. Defeated, we stopped back at everyone's favorite am/pm for drinks before going to Tokyo Station.
For those of you who have never been to Tokyo Station.. uh.. well.. yeah. I think MONSTEROUSLY GIGANTICALLY AMAZINGLY HUGE doesn't even begin to cover it. It's damned big. You could walk for miles and miles underground and never see the same spot twice. SO not kidding. I will have more on Tokyo Station later, since I've been there three times by this point. Anyway, thank god I had the Japanese students there to show me around, otherwise things could have been bad. Before actually heading down to the platform we stopped by the fare machine and got me a Suica card for ¥2000 (¥500 for the card, ¥1500 on the card). Which is a rechargeable plastic card that you can use on the all the JR lines in Tokyo.
For those who have never been to Tokyo, the public transportation system here is really complicated. There are several different companies that manage the various subway and train systems, and for each of them you have to pay separately based on distance. Sure makes me miss the flat rate fare of Muni, though the Tokyo system is MUCH nicer, cleaner, faster, and *gasp* runs on time. Anyway, you pay your fare before boarding based on where you want to go. I've gone most frequently to Takadanobaba to meet up with Eric and to transfer to the Seibu-shinjuku line to get to Mejiro. From Nihonbashi (one of the three stations near my dorm) on the Tozai subway line it costs ¥190 each way to do this. So, as you can see, transportation is expensive.
Anyway, the Suica card is pretty cool in that all you need to do when you go through the gates is wave it over this little sensor pad to get in. You don't even need to take it out of your wallet. Jason said that once he didn't even take his wallet out of his back pocket, he just turned his ass to the sensor and jumped a little and it registered. LOL. When you get on it deducts the minimum fare, and when you get off it deducts the rest based on how far you've traveled. It's really very convenient, which makes me sad that it's good only on JR and not the other lines like Tozai and Seibu-shinjuku that I will most likely be using much more frequently.
Anyway, Suica in hand, we took the JR Yamanote line (that's the one that just makes a big circle around Tokyo) to Shinjuku, and went to the nearest au store. YAY!
au is the student's cellphone company of choice here in Japan, as I'm sure many of you know first hand. They offer a really awesome student discount of 50% off most charges if you show them your student ID card when you sign up, so pretty much everyone going to school here uses au. We took a number and looked around the store for a bit at all the different phones. I absolutely fell in LOVE with one.. the W31T in turquoise which had everything but the kitchen sink thrown into the absolutely most gorgeous and sleek little casing (a lot of phones here are HUGE, bulky and ugly), but when I went up to ask for it I was told that it was not available with the student discount.. only A-series phones were. MEH. So I ended up with my second choice, which I'd seen online before. The A1404S by Sony Ericsson. It's a basic phone by Japanese standards, lacking those fancy extras like a built in denshi jishou and GPS guidance (at least, if there's GPS I haven't found it yet), but it's still pretty advanced compared to American phones. I was somewhat undecided between the green and the pink, but the store I was at ended up not actually having anymore green to sell, so that decided it for me. If they'd had the green I might have ended up with that one, but now that a few days have passed I can't imagine not having pink. XD
So, for those of you who asked, there it is. I love the little display on the front. It's really useful. It tells you exactly what's going on w/ your phone at all times without having to open it. Like, it lists your missed calls and how many of them you've missed, how many c-mails and emails you've received, etc. It also acts as a vewfiender for the camera if you want to point it at yourself. Here's another gratuitous shot:
I got the standard plan, which, after the discount, comes out to about ¥3500/month and includes something like a ¥2200 allowance on calls before I start being charged extra for them. I think that's up to about 150 minutes? Yeah, Japanese calling plans don't put much focus on actually talking since most people use their phones mostly for email and messaging and such.
After spending waaay too long in the store getting everything sorted out, the woman who was helping me told us to go away and come back in 30 minutes to pick it up. By this time it was almost 1 pm, so we opted to head over to the interestingly named Mylord building, where we went to a psudo-italian place called Pastel for lunch. It was actually pretty damned good. I had some weird chicken saboro spaghetti, which was spaghetti done up all Japanese style, orange juice, and a 'Purin Brulee' (aka creme brulee XD) for ¥1449, which really wasn't so bad for all that.
That'd be me and Hiromi at Pastel for lunch on Friday.
After lunch we headed back to the au store to pick up my phone. On the way there this professional looking guy in a shirt and tie tapped me on the shoulder and was like "Anou...." It took me a minute to register that it was actually ROCKY of all people. Rocky Gonzales, that is, from the Japanese department at SFSU. He graduated a year or so ago, but we took classes together before then. To say I was shocked would be quite the understatement. I had NO idea that he was in Tokyo, though Nick aparently did and had just forgotten to tell me. Anyway, he's here teaching english at Berlitz for the year, but was on his way to work so had to run after only just a second.
I was still in shock for a while after that, though getting my hands on my phone made it a little better. First thing I did was email my mom and Eric with my phone number and keitai mail, and then I spend the rest of the day playing around with the thing, with the help of Hiromi who has the same one in green.
Phone in hand, we got on the Seibu-shinjuku line and headed out toward Mejiro University for the first time. Well, for me it was the first time, everyone else had already been there. Mejiro's over in Nishi-tokyo, which is a lot more peaceful and residential than the other places I'd been spending time since I got here. The walk up to campus goes along a few very narrow streets, one of which runs next to some kind of a canal. It's nice. The campus itself is very small, but pretty. Lots of trees and stuff. We only really explored two buildings and the library when I was there, but it's all brand new and clean looking. And the view from the 9th floor of Building No. 10 is absolutely gorgeous!
We didn't really do much while there. Uzuo-san paraded Jason and I around to the various offices and introduced us as students from the university that Makino-sensei had studied at. A woman in the main office gave me a chikan alarm (a little heart keychain w/ a button in the middle, haven't tested out what it does when you press the button yet XD), and we met a very few students, but other than that it wasn't terribly eventful. The campus was mostly deserted since it's still summer here. Hiromi, the guy, Jason and I took a ton of pictures by the big Mejiro Daigaku sign at the main entrance like the huge dorks that we are, though. LOL.
I headed home at around 5:30, with instructions to come back to campus on 9/20 (that'd be today) at 3:30 for the first meeting of the ICC. I have no idea what all we're going to talk about, but I know that for halloween we're going to make jagabata and there's talk of a trip to Tokyo Disney or Disney Sea.
I got home at 6 pm to find that my cozy little haven had been invaded by Germany. Well, more like by two German girls... well, evil German she-bitches. No offense to the Germans out there (hi marlen!). I think rather than waste time in my catch-up post on them I'll dedicate an entry later on to the whole dorm situation and include several sections about THEM in there. =P
I didn't really have much to do after getting back from Mejiro. I went out briefly in the evening to forage for food. Ended up with some kakiage soba from a different soba-ya down the street. It was also very, very good. I also went up to the roof at about 10 pm to call my mom, and the guy from Ghana was there (I think his name's Isaac? No idea). I talked to him for a while about Tokyo and he gave me a hello kitty w/ electric guitar keitai strap for my phone. Sometime after I got back to my room I got really lonely and depressed. Eric was due to move into his dorm that day, and I'd asked him to phone or email me a soon as he did with his contact information if he had any, and to just let me know how things were. Of course, I didn't hear a thing from him all night. I assumed that there must be some kind of welcome party going on and went to bed.
Saturday was more of the same. I spent almost the whole day laying in my bunk alternating between starting at my computer and falling asleep. I was really, really lonely, and really, really bored. Didn't feel like going out and exploring on my own, and was concerned as to why I hadn't heard from Eric. See, I'm really used to being able to contact him whenever I want, so suddenly having no way to reach him was really hard. I think at about 4 pm or something I couldn't take it anymore and started searching online for his dorm in the hopes of finding a phone number. And I did. And they transfered me to another dorm, and that dorm phone managed to be located at a desk that Eric was JUST walking past when the phone rang.
I felt better after talking to him, and we arranged to meet up for dinner at 6:30ish. That took some doing on my part since he didn't want to give up his free dorm food and would have prefered going out after dinner, but I prevailed! We met up at Takadanbaba and went to the same Izakaya that Uzuo-san and Tsukuda-san had taken me to on my first day here. I'm amazed I managed to find the place! It's called Watamin-chi or something, it's SO cheap and pretty damned good. For dinner on Saturday Eric and I split like seven dishes ('cajun' chicken salad, jagabata, spring rolls, two sushi things, weird japanese lettuce/chicken pizza, and the included cabbage leaves in miso dip) along with seven HUGE drinks (4 for eric, 3 for me) for a total of ¥4326. Pretty good there. The drinks alone would have cost us more than that in San Francisco.
We stayed out catching up until about 10 or 10:30, I think, before both getting really tired and heading back home. I don't remember what I did here.
Oh, another thing that is somewhat related: When I called Eric at his dorm I mentioned being really lonely and bored and kinda got all emotional and apparently the Russian girl (Ivana?) overheard me because after i got off the phone she came over and invited me out on Monday. She said that her boyfriend was a boxing trainer and had invited her to this championship match, but she turned it down because she didn't have anyone to go with.
So now I should probably get ready to head over to Mejiro, since I really have no idea how long it's going to take me to get here and don't want to be late for this ICC thing. Eric's supposed to get his keitai today, so if the Mejiro thing doesn't end up with us all hanging out for the rest of the evening I might try and meet up with him. It'll definitely be a lot easier to coordinate this time! Coming up next: The SFSU invation and Maya's first ever experience with boxing! (Catch-up post the fourth)