17 06 2004
Hisashiburi (it's been a long time)
My updates have been infrequent of late, as work, study and socialising is occupying the bulk of my time. On Sunday I went to Suizenji park with some friends - a famous Japanese-style park & shrine. We ate soumen - thin white noodles, served in water with some icecubes. You take some noodles out of the bowl with your chopsticks, dip it in a soy-sauce-esque sauce, and then eat them. Good in the hot weather! A few days ago I went out to a European restaurant with the other teacher and some mutual friends. One of the guys there works at a bar in the city and he's known the other teacher since school. He's a good bloke. We mainly ate pizzas - fairly small and thin for the $12 a pop that they cost, but we're in Japan - so it's take it or leave it as far as that goes. They also had some nice salads, olives, etc. (I'm forever referring to the other teacher as "the other teacher" since it's not really my place to be plastering people's names on the net - but since this is a cumbersome affair I'm going to start calling him OT from now on) Last night I went over to OT's place after work. He'd cooked up some good spaghetti and we watched "the last samurai" and "kill bill 1" on his gorgeous HDTV home studio. The last samurai was a pretty fun movie, and it was good to watch KB1 again, now that I've seen KB2. My Japanese is slowly improving, though perhaps not at the rate it should be. This is because often I wake up shortly before work starts, and it's difficult to study in the evening, either due to other commitments or just because I'm too tired to be bothered. The good side is that I'm becoming more comfortable listening to others speak, and I'm less shy about speaking as well (even if what I can say is fairly limited). The English level of some of the friends I've made varies from very proficient (due to study abroad, etc) to almost non-existent. A few days ago I went to an Indian restaurant with OT. It's the first time I've had Indian food since I arrived in Japan, and it was a welcome meal. The curries were pretty good, if a little less exciting than the ones from the Indian restaurants back home - though it's not for lack of variety, with things like spinach curries being available (they're good!). On the other hand, the garlic nan they served there was the best I've ever tasted, ditto their pappadums. I definitely want to go back there again. After we'd eaten we went to a bar - the one the above-mentioned bartender works at. They employ a magician every couple of weeks and at one point the magician came over and started showing us tricks. It wasn't the first time I've been shown magic tricks in Japan. A few weeks ago, while walking down the main shopping street with some people from my school, two Japanese guys stopped us on the street and started trying to show us magic tricks. The first guy held a sponge clasped in his hand in the shape of a ball - sort of like a rectangular sponge being compressed into a different shape. After demonstrating its shape to us (never letting it leave his clenched fist), he rolled it around in his hands and "magically" it transformed into a rectangular sponge. Then the other guy showed us his trick. He held a wand-like thing in his hand, and after waving it about for a bit, he turned it into a scarf. At least that trick had some semblance of impressiveness to it. One of the co-workers I was with at the time was really surprised that we'd been accosted like this, because throughout her entire life in Japan, that's never happened to her before. Perhaps there's some sort of magical "show me magic" aura to me. Because a couple of days later in a restaurant, a different bunch of Japanese people started showing me magic tricks again. The highlight of this second performance was a guy with a rope. After waving it about for a bit, he made it transform into a scarf like the guy had on the previous occasion. But he did so in a way that it was painfully obviously the rope had been wrapped around the scarf prior. Barely able to contain my astonishment at this fellow's prowess, I mumbled "jouzu" to him, which basically means "you're skilled". Anyway, back to the magician at the bar. He was actually good. In fact, he was great - I've never seen such amazing sleight of hand tricks from across the table. He was making cards change size, magically push themselves out of a deck, lemons appear under cups, etc. It was really cool.