Bloodsucking Varmints

Please allow me to begin this post with an irate, whiny rhetorical question: how are there so many damn mosquitoes still alive this time of year? And how do they keep getting into my room so easily? Actually, I can guess the answer to the first question: it hasn't been consistently cold enough. And I'm on an island. An island that gets huge bouts of rain.

As for the second, I'm pretty sure that's attributable to poor window design--and to the fact that only half of one of my windows has a bug-screen. (Yes, half of one of them. With two windows, that means 3/4ths the window-space in my room are unprotected.) I get a lot of mosquito bites--enough that at first I was concerned they might be caused by, e.g., fleas or ticks. But, when I pay attention, I see mosquitoes sneaking onto my flesh (or hear them buzzing near my face in the dark) so often that I'm still willing to give them credit.

Though, I often seem to get several bites somewhat near each other, which is supposedly symptomatic of ticks or other parasites.

Maybe I'm thinking too narrowly. The mosquitoes could be teaming up with ticks.

What's the kanji for "bug repellant"?

With that out of the way, let me tell you a little about last weekend. Friday, several of my friends expressed the thought that going to see a fishmarket in the morning would be fun. I was hard-pressed to disagree, because, heck, what is there not to like about seeing a bunch of giant, dead fish at an obscenely early hour of the morning?

Thus the following plan was hatched: meet downtown, go drinking, take a train to the Tsukiji district, stay there until 3:30 AM, then visit the biggest fishmarket in the world. Yes, you need to be there that early to get in: they only allow 140 visitors in at a time. Surprisingly popular, considering that it's just... fish being sold. REALLY REALLY EARLY. Did I mention that it happens early in the morning? It happens pretty early in the morning, if you didn't catch that.

Anyhow, I actually missed out on the "go drinking" part of the plan, but I followed along gamely enough with the remainder of it. I should probably start using names so I can stop referring to people as "the French girl" or "the Swiss guy", etc. Said French girl's name is Claudia, and the party consisted of her, her boyfriend Ackeem (recently arrived in Japan. Also, I bet $10 that his name is spelled differently than my guess right there), one of her Japanese friends named Mami, and me. We'd attempted to conscript some of the other post-TEFL trainees, but they thought they had more important things to do, like sleeping, so they hung out only for the drinking part of it.

(Shibuya, in case you've forgotten what it looks like.)

Sometime around 12 AM, the night found us wandering around looking for a restaurant; more specifically, Ackeem wanted to find a place that served udon noodles, which proved to be surprisingly difficult, when you think about the fact that we were, you know, in Japan. (I should add that we wanted to find an affordable place. That's probably what made it most difficult. Also, it being late at night narrowed options a little, though not as much as it would in some cities (*cough Portland cough*).) This is one of the places we considered but rejected because we didn't want to wait for a table to free up:

From 10-30-10

So back to wandering. Our method for finding restaurants mainly consisted of querying nearby helpful people for their opinions, something made possible only because we were traveling with Claudia's friend, Mami. A quick word about traveling with a Japanese native: it's really, really convenient for us Westerners. It simplifies everything, even if that individual is not necessarily very experienced with Tokyo in particular, as was the case here. It almost feels like "cheating", actually, because you can have that person take care of (mostly) everything, and it becomes easy to stop paying careful attention to the other people and the language around you. But it's really nice. It's different from traveling with a Westerner who speaks Japanese, since there's greater fluidity of communication and a more facile rapport. This strikes me as unfortunate, for the sake of inter-cultural relations, but it's hard to compete with the shared set of experiences and understanding that two natives have in common.

Mami herself is great, since she is very sweet and patient, and she puts up with a lot of my silly questions about Japanese culture and language. She isn't shy about asking for help from passers-by, either; and thus it was we ended up hanging out near a street-side takoyaki (fried octopus dumpling) vendor, watching him work.

I'm pretty sure she was originally asking him for a good noodle place that would be open at this hour, but we seemed to end up hanging out longer than I'd expected. He was very friendly, and chatted with Mami while preparing a set of takoyaki and two okonimyaki. ("Fish pancakes".) He encouraged us to "help" with flipping the dumplings and the okonomiyaki. I couldn't really follow any of the conversation, and Mami didn't give us translations too often, but I did learn that he'd been doing this job for 40 years (!), and that he visited the fish market-our intended destination-every weekend to buy octopus. (I think.) He also asked questions to/about us through Mami, and told us to have a nice time in Japan. Here's a somewhat blurry shot of the okonomiyaki, soon after the batter has been poured out:

Here it is after having cooked for a while, plus the new batch of dumplings. You can see Claudia's hand as she helps flip them over.

Sadly, I didn't take any photos of the end results, but they looked pretty similar, only garnished. They were also quite good! I believe he only charged us for the okonomiyaki, and gave us several takoyaki gratis, which I thought very kind of him.

Thas settled the food issue. Our final destination for the night was a manga kissa, a sort of internet cafe with manga to read and DVDs to watch. Another passer-by directed us to one several blocks away, and he even went so far as to walk with us on the way there, as a guide. More surprising (to me) kindness! Maybe the people here are just very helpful, given the opportunity; or maybe Mami is just especially good at chatting with strangers.

"The space for relaxation you've been looking for!"

In a manga kissa, you rent a private "room" (more like a cubicle) with a TV, computer, and/or couch. My cubicle (the same kind that the others took) was basically a big cushion with a computer. This photo doesn't quite do it justice, but:

It pretty much was just about that small.

I think it was around 2:00 AM when we arrived, so we didn't have that long to wait. I just messed around on the internet (and struggled with a Japanese keyboard) for the duration.

3:30 AM came along and, noting that the weather had gone from a mildly unpleasant "ehhh" to a chilly downpour, we hailed a taxi-cab. Around 4:00 AMish, we got there, and we began waiting in line. In the rain. Fortunately, it wasn't too long before they let us inside and issued us these neon green jersey things: they were required for visitors to identify them as such.

And then we waited more. It didn't "open" until 5, I believe.

This was me wondering what I was doing there at 4:25 AM:

Actually, I don't really have any reason to complain about this being "early" when it was really "late" in the sense of having stayed up the entire night. And given my sleep schedule tendencies, that isn't too unusual anyway.

But eventually, release! Dodging past fork-lifts piloted by impatient workers (they weren't actually fork-lifts, but they were of the same nature, I'm pretty sure) and huddling 'neath umbrellas, we visitors made our way to the tuna auction house:

The visitors stood in this crowded little railed-off passage through the middle of the warehouse, looking both ways. Both directions looked about the same: frozen, giant tuna corpses being inspected and prodded with picks. Yep.

Here we are. (Visitors).

A few of these tuna hadn't been "scalped" or whatever, and their heads had been cut off instead. I have no idea why that was or what it meant. But I photographed it for whatever morbid reason.

Moooore fish.

Wait, something exciting is happening! A bell is ringing! People are gathering around someone who's starting to call out in the immediately recognizable tones of an auctioneer. And people are apparently bidding!

This happened several more times in different parts of the house. I captured a little bit of the sound:

fish auc.mp3

And then we were hustled out, and that was that.

I have to say, I was a little disappointed. I'd been expecting to see more kinds of fish and sea fauna sold, and I'd been envisioning something more like a gritty marketplace than a warehouse. I'm sure something like that exists elsewhere in the place, but it wasn't what we sightseers were exposed to.

We stopped for sushi afterward (how can you not, when you're that close to a giant fish market?), but this post is already long enough, and that could be a tale in of itself.

Graduated Like a Cylinder

Woooo. Class is done, finally. I'm a bona fide certified TEFL instructor now. Or I will be tomorrow, technically, but it's already been settled by tonight. We went out to celebrate at a nearby restaurant afterward. It almost made up for the fact that it's been friggin' freezing and raining like a mrhrhrmgmgph all day long.

What's been happening in the meantime? I dunno, I've been pretty busy finishing up lesson plans and stuff. Let's see, this actually happened a while ago, but I went to a nice little "British Indian" cafe close to where I live. I'm not 100% what makes it British Indian as opposed to just Indian, except that they served a green salad and fruit with the lunch special curry, and they had some kind of special European tea set you could order. I had a green curry that was really pretty decent, with nan (also pretty decent).

The price wasn't so terrible either, though I'm not sure I'd want to deal with how much it would be if it wasn't lunch.

Wandering around in that same general area, I found this weird, um, thing. It looks like it could be a doorbell, but the doorbell is right beside it, so who knows. In any case, it reminds me of a cartoonified Cthulhu head, particularly like one that a Walla Walla friend of mine has painted on her car.

Last night, I finally realized that a shop I'd been so far dismissing as simply for knick-knacks and toys is really the 100-yen shop people kept mentioning in Harajuku. It's pretty big, and multileveled, and it's a little bit heavenly to be able to buy things for 105 yen ($1.21, includes tax) that I've seen elsewhere selling for three times as much. Seriously. Well, maybe two and a half times as much, but still ridiculous. They sell FOOOOOD there too (albeit not a lot of it), so this may be my new favorite "grocery" outlet, now.

This is the interior on the top floor; I happened to catch some guy rounding the corner by accident as I took this shot. I wonder what he thought.

Here's a view from the stairs into the bottom floor, where most of the food and kitchen supplies are:

Next, jump forward to the restaurant for the TEFL graduation celebration.

Some of the food we ordered. (Unfortunately, as usual, most of it was meat-ed. But I had some seafood-y things and a few other items. They weren't half bad, though hardly gourmet dining by any stretch.)

Annnnnddd I'm pretty tired, I don't have it in me to write a lot more right now. (What I've written so far in this post feels a little "stale" and overly wordy to me already. Best to quit while you're ahead. Or... not behind.)

Wildly Addicting Crêpes

My neighborhood sports about 5 different crêpe shops (or "crêperies", if you prefer. Actually, you'd probably prefer I stop being pretentious by spelling it with an "ê", regardless of what we call the places that sell the things, but, tough) scattered about, and they make a fantastic variety of fantastic-tasting crêpes. I'd already tried out these delicious morsels not too long after my initial arrival, but over the last few days the urge to eat more of them seems to be continually building–which is not so good for either waists or bank accounts. (Each crêpe costs from 350-500 yen, or $4.31-$6.15 USD.) But they're SOOOOO GOOD. My favorite variety of the moment is made with ice cream—or gelato, as the case may be—rather than whipped cream alone. I just devoured the following a few hours ago:

It was made with vanilla gelato (which you can see atop) and warm cinnamon-and-sugar'd apples below. (Much like apple pie.) Ooshii deshita! ("It was delicious!") And the pancake-y part, that is, the actual "crêpe" bit, was light and pleasantly textured. Superb-ful!

Last night, or maybe it was the night before that, I had some kind of chocolate ice-cream crêpe with I-don't-remember-what-else on it. This picture was taken after I'd gnawed on it a little, so it looks kinda less appetizing, but you get the idea:

So that's been my decadence, of late.

Last Saturday, I had my first actual experience with teaching, along with my first one-on-one the Friday before. The one-on-one meeting went alright: as I've mentioned before, it was mostly intended to be for assessing the student's level and educational desires/needs. I cut the meeting a little shorter than we were supposed to, though, since I kind of ran out of things to bring up, and by that point I'd already acquired enough information to start planning for a new lesson. It looks as though I will be focusing mostly on pronunciation, encouraging conversational fluency, and teaching some idiomatic English expressions–especially of the type that might come up in formal and informal business situations. My next meeting is tomorrow, and I'm still pretty unprepared, I'm afraid: while I kinda know what I'm aiming for, I'm still not sure about what to do, lesson-wise. Just drilling vocab phrases doesn't sound terribly exciting or effective, and it seems like the sort of thing a student could just look into on his/her own. I dunno.

But, you probably want to hear about how my lesson on Saturday went. The answer is: better than I expected. Our instructing took place at a Filipino community center, which offers free (I think) English lessons to Filipinos and whomever else wants them.

The class was divided into two main groups: Filipino adults and Japanese children. (Probably some were part Japanese, part Filipino.) I and the French TEFL trainee taught the adults, while the other trainees worked with the children. The teaching space was a little awkward, because it was a large rectangular room that we had to share with other "class" in session. Here, see for yourself. I'm sitting roughly in the center. Here's the right half of the room...

... And here's the left half:

Not even a partition to block sound. Ah well. It kind of worked.

Anyhow, we taught two at a time (one teacher on each half of the room) for about 45 minutes each. My lesson came later in the evening, with the adult students. They all spoke pretty competent English, so at first I was worried that my planned lessons would be too easy for them: but my lesson focused a lot on reading, and it turned out that was an area that did seem to need a little more help. (Side gripe: we trainees were given essentially no information whatsoever about the classes we would be teaching, aside from the vague categories of "low level" for the children and "intermediate" for the adults. Nothing about class-size, or any more concrete details about how their language sills. That made it kind of hard to design a lesson plan.)

Curiously, I didn't get near as nervous as I did for my first teaching practice, the one where other trainees were my "class." I was able to relax and flow with it a little more, though I still made a number of mistakes. I'm also a little unsure about whether my lesson plans are exactly conforming to TEFL International's standards, because they seem to be quite rigid in their expectations: there's a definite formula to follow, with particular components of the lesson which ABSOLUTELY MUST BE THERE. We shall see when I get feedback from the TEFL instructors tomorrow.

Urm, well, aside from that, here, have some more pictures!

Nifty window design:

A rather long corridor/tunnel/hallway under Tokyo station:

A small lounge / resting area in a shopping/commerce center near the station.

A very similar building as the last, looking downward into two different areas:

Yet more Tokyo at night:

This is Shin-Koiwa, the part of Tokyo that the community center's in:

Walking back from the community center, after teaching (kinda cruddy photos, beware):

Whoops, okay, time to resume narration for a bit. The "mastermind" behind this teaching-English-to-the-community plan is a lady who owns a bar in Shin-Koiwa; after the lesson was complete, we all trundled back to said bar, where we were treated to some genuine Philippine food. (There was essentially nothing vegetarian, *le sigh*, so I just kind of took dishes and picked around the meat. Ooh, though there was this delicious, meatless, sweet sticky-rice dessert. And earlier in the day, fried bananas. 'Course, they were probably marinated in kitten's blood and then fried in hippopotamus fat, or whatever it is you carnivores do to such things.) It was a cozy, noisy, very familial environment; kind of oddly comforting, even though half the time the conversation was in incomprehensible Tagalog.

My photos from inside are pretty lousy, I'm afraid:

... And then they started the karaoke machine, which was slightly less horrifying than you might expect. Those who sang actually had really pretty decent voices.

As a questionable bonus to you, here's some mostly indistinguishable "ambient" noise that I recorded on my phone during a short part of this. (I believe that's the guy sitting in a black shirt in the first photo, that you hear singing.)

shinkoiwa.mp3

Updating Like an Updater Does

(Like a lazy updater does, to be precise).

Well, it's Friday again, but this time my Friday's noticeably less busy, and I actually have a bit of spare time for a breather, so I might as well get a post up in this bizniz.

Speaking of that last Friday, here's a quick summary of the evening. As I mentioned before, I went out with the other TEFL trainees for a night of pub-crawling, more or less. We met in Shibuya around 7:30 pm right outside the train station, and lemme tell ya, it was plenty crowded on a Friday night—and there was no shortage of foreigners out and about, for that matter. Shibuya's one of the nightlife centers of Tokyo, and it sports tons of restaurants, pubs, clubs, and stores. While waiting others to arrive at our meeting spot, I tried to snag a photo or two of the crowd surrounding the station:

I think it's pretty safe to call that "jam-packed" with people. It's also quite a sight to see when the lights change and pedestrians flood across the wide crosswalks; alas, I don't have any photos of that.

I don't remember if I've said much about the other members of the class yet; but if I have, just bear with me as I repeat myself a bit. There are four students in the class, aside from me, two Americans, one guy from Switzerland, and one girl from France. Two of them brought housemates along, one of whom was from England and the other from Spain. Everyone spoke English, which was kind of reassuring/relaxing but regrettably, only one of us could really speak Japanese. (The British housemate, in case you were wondering which.)

The Brit was also the most experienced with the area, having lived in Tokyo a good sight longer than the rest of us (not that that was too difficult of an accomplishment; not one of us had been there much longer than a week, by that point). So, he set out determinedly through the crowd, presumably guiding us toward a fabulous locale of unspeakable wonder, untold delight, and unrelenting thrills, while the others followed along somewhat bemusedly. (Well, okay, I was somewhat bemused. Maybe I'm projecting that onto the others, however.)

So far, so good. We paused briefly in our journey whilst our courageous leader conferred with his first mate (something to do with a shop or pub having closed very recently; I was unsure if this was our original destination or simply an incidental diversion), then we forged onward.

Of course, once we reached our fabled haven, it turned out that it wasn't going to open for about an hour or so. So, just like any other respectful, considerate, and well-mannered foreigners would have done, we bought canned beer from a convenience store across the street and stood outside it, smoking cigarettes, drinking, and conversing loudly. I think we gave the local populace a pretty sterling image of Westerners.

(For the sake of accuracy, I note here I did not drink any beer (because I still hate it), and only three members of the group did any smoking. But it's the principle of the thing.)

So here's us, doin' our collective thang. (Representin' for Europe and the U.S.!)

It was super classy.

Eventually the pub opened up, and we wandered back across the street and up the stairs in search of more brew. The stairs, I might add, had some very cool graffiti on them:

The bar was loud (as bars often are) and small (as locales in Tokyo often are), but it had a kind of nice atmosphere... somehow. A lot of U.S. music celebrities had passed through the bar, and they had signed memorabilia here and there. I was slightly concerned that I was damaging my ears, and I probably was, but mreh, what'cha gonna do?

At some point the group tired of that scene (a bit mercifully, I might add, for the sake of aural health), and we went roving again.

This was a fun advertisement that looks almost like it's painted onto the street, but it's actually a light projection: in the second photo you can see someone's shadow partially blocking it out.

The next bar played heavy metal and techno remixes of pop-rock songs, but at least it was at a tolerable volume. I ordered a pineapple juice—which was freakin' expensive, I might add: 500¥ for a thin, ice-filled glass. ... Which translates to... holy crap, $6.16 USD? Really? Yeah really. And yet, it was still cheaper than the "real" drinks. Yeesh.

Thirst apparently still unslaked, we eventually went questing for another pub; though this time our fearless British navigator apparently had no specific destination in mind, so we flailed about pretty randomly for a while, trying a few different venues but rejecting them due to cover-charges.

At one point, one of the other TEFL trainees wanted a photo taken of her, and while she was posing, doing the stereotypical Japanese "peace-sign-for-photos" thing, several nearby Japanese jumped abruptly into the shot and posed with her. It was kind of awesome and kind of hilarious.

Then, wandering again...

This was one of the places we considered; but it had a hefty cover charge, so we decided against.

It was getting pretty late into the night by this point, and murmurs of hunger began to be heard in the ranks. We came across a 270 yen restaurant, where every dish and drink costs 270 yen ($3.33); and seeing that they served alcoholic beverages as well, it didn't take much persuading for the group to amble on in. (Plus tax, they end up charging 284 yen for each item, but whatever.)

Check it out, you ordered via little menu-machines that were at each table.

Of course, what they don't tell you (or maybe they do, but none of us could read Kanji well enough to figure it out. Though, two of the group had been here before so they probably knew and neglected to warn us) is that you're also charged an extra 284 yen for each diner, simply for entering the restaurant. So even if you only order one thing, you're paying 568¥ = $7.00 for a crappy little item worth probably a quarter of that. Live and learn, I guess.

So, it was pretty near 12:00am by then, and the last train of the night left at 12:15am, or something; it became pretty obvious that we weren't going to make it back. There had been earlier discussion on this point, taking about whether we would have enough time to get to the station or not, but everyone was apparently feeling pretty crazy, since no one had pressed the issue earlier. The Swiss trainee cheerfully reminded us that we only had to wait until 5am for the trains to start running again, so we just needed to kill time until then. (Actually, he tried to persuade all of us to go on an impromptu expedition to Mt. Fuji once they started running again. "We can sleep on the train, come on, it'll be great!"). Strangely, everyone else was a little less enamored with the suggestion than he.

Here's a picture that actually includes me for one. I think this was around 1am?

Okay, this post is running way too long, let's cut it short. I and two of the other members who lived nearby-ish eventually decided to abandon the other poor souls: we walked back to our own places. Speaking of, remember when I got lost on my way back from buying an adapter, way back whenever? That turned out to have been an advantage, because it made me that much more familiar with the Shibuya area; once I figured out where I was, I made my way back to Harajuku with no trouble at all. Later, I heard that the remaining trainees had gone back to a bar visited previously, and they fell asleep there. So... things worked out, I guess.

Let me add, finally, that the crowd-size was strikingly reduced by this hour, 2am-ish. Witness the comparative emptiness of the following street shots.

This one especially. Remember the first photo in this blog? How crowded it was? A little hard to tell in the following blurry photo, but this is the exact same area, later in the night (and taken from across the street looking back). It felt like a ghost-town by comparison.

One final (final final) thing, I walked past a bike-parking area that looked at once cool and creepy at night. I think this photo captured some of the atmosphere pretty well, actually: