Hanging out in Japan
I'm at Marijn's house in Belgium now, but this post was written earlier today when I didn't have internet access:
I’m sitting in the airport in London, waiting for my flight to Brussels. It’s morning here, which is good, because I slept through almost all of my flight here, having woken up in Tokyo roughly 24 hours earlier. I’d like to think that might mean that I’ll be well adjusted to the time zone here, but that’s extremely unlikely. I have no real way to predict how my body will take to being here.
Japan was pretty good. Very expensive, but it was just a few days. After the tournament on Sunday, Saito arranged a giant drinking party with all the Americans and over 50 Japanese players. It was at some place where you pay about $45 to get in, and then they bring you food and drinks--probably a reasonable deal if you drink a lot and eat meat-they let me pay half because I couldn’t have much. When that closed, we went down some stairs to the same thing with less food for another $20ish. I They brought me a salad, which I ate, and then people next to me asked me if I wanted more, and I told them I wanted all they could get me, and amused them by eating all the salad they scrounged up.
Everyone was in a good mood, and I had some good conversations with American and Japanese players, and quite a bit of sake. From there, we went to karaoke, where we had 4-5 rooms. I tried to find rooms with a good number of Americans, because it gets a little less interesting when they’re just singing Japanese songs, after awhile. While wandering between rooms, I accidentally found a group of wotc people in another room, and they invited me in, and then I brought other Americans there.
At around 5am, that place closed and we hung out in the street for awhile working out plans for the next day, and who was going to stay up. I was going with bk and Alex West, who wanted to go to sleep, so I didn’t get to go with the group that was going dinering from there. We went back to the hotel we had been staying at and planned to meet Saito there at 1pm so that he could take up to Tokyo (we were in Yokohama).
When we got to our hotel, we hadn’t booked another night because we thought we’d probably be going to Tokyo that night, and they said they didn’t have a room for us. We paused, and really had no backup plan for how to deal with that situation. Eventually, we asked the people at the desk if there was anywhere else nearby they knew of that we could stay for a few hours. It turns out there was, and it was closer than our hotel room in that hotel. Across the walkway immediately out the front door, about 10 feet away, there was an internet café that charged by the hour, or 5 or 8 hour blocks overnight, and had little padded cubicles with a tv and a computer that were just big enough to sleep in. They also had showers. They also had walls and walls of magna, dvds, porn, and probably other stuff, but I was just there for sleeping and showering. It was cheaper than getting a room for 3 would have been, and way more amusing. I didn’t sleep that well, but I probably wouldn’t have slept that well through bk’s snoring anyway.
Saito met us at 1 and we decided to get some food. That we harder than we might have predicted. We had 2 vegetarians, 1 person who refused to eat sushi, and one person who refused to eat tempura, and somehow, that put us really low on options. We went to a mall and wandered around several restaurants before finding something, but the thing we found worked out well for me, and I got some Korean style fried rice.
After that we randomly wandered into a clothing store on our way out of the mall, where most of us (myself included) bought some things (mostly shirts-I got a hoodie after debating a choosing against a pair of pants-I was disappointed that I couldn’t find a shirt I wanted. I’m a little too picky). From there, Alex and bk left to meet up with Robin from Madison who was randomly in Tokyo, and the rest of us went to a store that was somehow holding a Monday PTQ because it was a holiday in Japan. The PTQ only had 38 players, and by the time we got there, the finals were being played. We drafted, and I lost, which I kind of expected, even though I was optimistic after sweeping the first round (teams were me, Yuuta Takahashi, the Japanese faerie master, and Ricky, a Portuguese dealer against Saito, Kibler, and a Japanese guy I didn’t know).
After that we went out for sushi and then hot springs. Hot springs closed at 11pm, and then Saito took us to some random store that he wanted to show us, where I bought a shirt and a carton of juice. From there we went back to his place to drop off Ricky and Kibler to sleep, and Saito, another Japanese guy, and I went to meet up with a bunch of Japanese guys for more karaoke. They were happy to see me, but Saito was frustrated about something about the way the people at the karaoke place we treating him and sounded like he was thinking about leaving. I tried to figure out what was going on, but was mostly herded around by a group of 3-4 Japanese guys, who ultimately told me everything would be fine, and I shouldn’t worry about Saito, and I’d be leaving at 5am, and I should go karaoke. Ok.
They humored me in one of the 3 rooms we had, and we did mostly English songs. I sang Help, I’ve Just Seen a Face, Her Majesty, Eleanor Rigby, Smells like Team Spirit, Beat It, and We are the Champions with various Japanese guys. Someone in another room had a cube that I would have been interested in looking at, but I was lead away from that room, which was fine.
After that we said our goodbyes, I was further encouraged to come back for GP Sendai, and we went back to Saito’s house, where I slept on the floor for a few hours before heading to the airport.
I’m sitting in the airport in London, waiting for my flight to Brussels. It’s morning here, which is good, because I slept through almost all of my flight here, having woken up in Tokyo roughly 24 hours earlier. I’d like to think that might mean that I’ll be well adjusted to the time zone here, but that’s extremely unlikely. I have no real way to predict how my body will take to being here.
Japan was pretty good. Very expensive, but it was just a few days. After the tournament on Sunday, Saito arranged a giant drinking party with all the Americans and over 50 Japanese players. It was at some place where you pay about $45 to get in, and then they bring you food and drinks--probably a reasonable deal if you drink a lot and eat meat-they let me pay half because I couldn’t have much. When that closed, we went down some stairs to the same thing with less food for another $20ish. I They brought me a salad, which I ate, and then people next to me asked me if I wanted more, and I told them I wanted all they could get me, and amused them by eating all the salad they scrounged up.
Everyone was in a good mood, and I had some good conversations with American and Japanese players, and quite a bit of sake. From there, we went to karaoke, where we had 4-5 rooms. I tried to find rooms with a good number of Americans, because it gets a little less interesting when they’re just singing Japanese songs, after awhile. While wandering between rooms, I accidentally found a group of wotc people in another room, and they invited me in, and then I brought other Americans there.
At around 5am, that place closed and we hung out in the street for awhile working out plans for the next day, and who was going to stay up. I was going with bk and Alex West, who wanted to go to sleep, so I didn’t get to go with the group that was going dinering from there. We went back to the hotel we had been staying at and planned to meet Saito there at 1pm so that he could take up to Tokyo (we were in Yokohama).
When we got to our hotel, we hadn’t booked another night because we thought we’d probably be going to Tokyo that night, and they said they didn’t have a room for us. We paused, and really had no backup plan for how to deal with that situation. Eventually, we asked the people at the desk if there was anywhere else nearby they knew of that we could stay for a few hours. It turns out there was, and it was closer than our hotel room in that hotel. Across the walkway immediately out the front door, about 10 feet away, there was an internet café that charged by the hour, or 5 or 8 hour blocks overnight, and had little padded cubicles with a tv and a computer that were just big enough to sleep in. They also had showers. They also had walls and walls of magna, dvds, porn, and probably other stuff, but I was just there for sleeping and showering. It was cheaper than getting a room for 3 would have been, and way more amusing. I didn’t sleep that well, but I probably wouldn’t have slept that well through bk’s snoring anyway.
Saito met us at 1 and we decided to get some food. That we harder than we might have predicted. We had 2 vegetarians, 1 person who refused to eat sushi, and one person who refused to eat tempura, and somehow, that put us really low on options. We went to a mall and wandered around several restaurants before finding something, but the thing we found worked out well for me, and I got some Korean style fried rice.
After that we randomly wandered into a clothing store on our way out of the mall, where most of us (myself included) bought some things (mostly shirts-I got a hoodie after debating a choosing against a pair of pants-I was disappointed that I couldn’t find a shirt I wanted. I’m a little too picky). From there, Alex and bk left to meet up with Robin from Madison who was randomly in Tokyo, and the rest of us went to a store that was somehow holding a Monday PTQ because it was a holiday in Japan. The PTQ only had 38 players, and by the time we got there, the finals were being played. We drafted, and I lost, which I kind of expected, even though I was optimistic after sweeping the first round (teams were me, Yuuta Takahashi, the Japanese faerie master, and Ricky, a Portuguese dealer against Saito, Kibler, and a Japanese guy I didn’t know).
After that we went out for sushi and then hot springs. Hot springs closed at 11pm, and then Saito took us to some random store that he wanted to show us, where I bought a shirt and a carton of juice. From there we went back to his place to drop off Ricky and Kibler to sleep, and Saito, another Japanese guy, and I went to meet up with a bunch of Japanese guys for more karaoke. They were happy to see me, but Saito was frustrated about something about the way the people at the karaoke place we treating him and sounded like he was thinking about leaving. I tried to figure out what was going on, but was mostly herded around by a group of 3-4 Japanese guys, who ultimately told me everything would be fine, and I shouldn’t worry about Saito, and I’d be leaving at 5am, and I should go karaoke. Ok.
They humored me in one of the 3 rooms we had, and we did mostly English songs. I sang Help, I’ve Just Seen a Face, Her Majesty, Eleanor Rigby, Smells like Team Spirit, Beat It, and We are the Champions with various Japanese guys. Someone in another room had a cube that I would have been interested in looking at, but I was lead away from that room, which was fine.
After that we said our goodbyes, I was further encouraged to come back for GP Sendai, and we went back to Saito’s house, where I slept on the floor for a few hours before heading to the airport.