Weekend July 13-14

Weekend
Ramen Museum
Saturday, we headed for Yokohama for some trip planning in August... We went into some random university's library and got kicked out... haha s'alright. At least we have our night bus tickets booked. After that, we headed for the Ramen museum since it wasn't too far... It was pretty cool, could've been bigger. Inside the ramen museum was a recreation of... old school japan I guess. It seemed like we were outside on the streets at night with many ramen shops around. We didn't try the ramen though, they were a bit expensive. One of our travelling buddies has an authentic ramen shop near his apartment so we decided to eat there instead. Before we went we thought we would check out a garden at some station.. but turns out it was closed.. :( The ramen was really salty as warned by my friend, we had many cups of cold and refreshing water afterwards. It was great actually! The soup was really rich and I don't think I've had such great ramen before! =D

The guys that made the awesome ramen

Odawara Castle
On Thursday, we went to see Odawara Castle. It wasn’t what we
expected, wasn’t as grand as we thought it would be… The trip was a
bit expensive too. Oh well. Haha. Got a few pictures and lounged
around on the bench things on the top floor of the castle for
approximately 1 hr to get our money’s worth. XD Again, I marveled at
all of the cute souvenirs you can purchase – special souvenir hello
kitty pens are available at every touristy spot you can think of in
Japan. They’re quite expensive though – averages to about 7 – 8 bucks
CAD per piece. We all got ourselves 100 yen ice cream instead. There
were a few shrines and other spots in the area but we didn’t really
feel like seeing them so we headed for Shibuya, Tokyo – a 76 min train
ride worth 1400yen. This castle certainly punched a hole in our
wallets.

Odawara Castle

Tokyo
Compared to the quiet, serene, foresty area of Odawara, Shibuya was
its complete opposite. Crowded, loud, buildings at every corner, sales
people yelling in your ears, advertisers, and flashing lights. It was
around 5pm when we arrived and everyone has just gotten off work. We
had no idea what to do so we walked around and window shopped mostly.
We visited Shibuya 109 a huge department store filled with clothes
shops for women and girls. It’s not uncommon to see sales employees
dressed extravagantly in the specialized type clothing of the shop
that they work in. It’s also not uncommon to see them yelling into
cones to amplify their voices to advertise their shop. I noticed that
this one sales girl was nearly losing her voice. But she still kept
going! This reminds me of the lunch lady at my cafeteria at work. She
would say the same phrase over and over again (arigatou gozaimashita
onegaiitashimasu!!!) with the same enthusiasm everyday at lunch,
pausing only to help another employee having trouble with returning
their plates… I admire her, to some extent. Haha…
We were all getting tired I guess, we didn’t have a normal lunch, just
made a quick stop at the convenience store in Odawara before heading
to Tokyo. After walking around a bit we had a quick dinner at …
Yoshinoya I think. It is one of the very common and popular Japanese
chain restaurants that sell relatively cheap meals. It’s typical for a
Japanese restaurant to be crowded and small. We sat the the counter
and the employees were in front of us quickly preparing meals as
customers come in every minute to get their dinner.
After dinner we felt unsatisfied at how little we accomplished that
day so we decided to head for some karaoke. Karaoke is everywhere in
Japan. It’s probably more common than Starbucks here. Groups with more
than 5 people have discount and it’s 300 yen per half hour, that’s
around 4 CAD. We stayed for about 1.5 hrs and left satisfied.. I
think. Although I think we could’ve stayed a bit longer. One of the
conclusions I made ages ago and just confirmed again last night is I
cannot sing unfortunately. It was fun nevertheless. Headed home on a
crowded train and fell into a deep sleep.

Hustle and bustle in the world's busiest intersection

Garbage, Farewells, Heat, New weekends

Garbage:

It drives me crazy. It's just so much separating the garbage :( and I feel guilty for not doing it properly. Just recently I found the schedule for the types of garbage collected everyday...  Oh well. I don't have much garbage anyways.

Farewells:
There has been big changes in our company this July... change in directors, half the people on our floor moved to different floors... and new people have moved in... currently I'm being very stubborn about it, depressed that my fave co-workers are going to the third floor and I won't be able to talk to them as often as I would have if they were still sitting across from me.. I've only known them for 1 month, but they've been the most enthusiastic, kind people I've ever met! The ones that talked to me the most actually.. Anyways I know it wont be the same anymore but I'm sure the new group members will be great as well... Yesterday, we had a farewell party at a chinese restaurant. One thing I realized about japanese people is that they like their gyoza and fried things. lol.

Heat:
Tsuyu, "raining season" in Japan, apparently from the month of June till mid July, was not what I expected. I barely rained, and it's never cold. Wow lol. Always humid. I was silly to think that Japan rainy season would be the same as vancouver rain. I swear it only rained like... maybe I dont know but never three days in a row or something. It just rained really hard for the whole night and the next day it would be super humid... Right now it's ..  really hot. :S I don't remember feeling such heat in such a long time... my advil and other food things are melting Noooooo...

New weekends:
Sooo, in efforts to reduce energy consumption, we're going to start having our weekends on wednesdays and thursdays instead of Saturday, and sunday. I'm not sure how I will survive this. I'll probably forget one of these days and go to work on wednesday or thur and realize when i get to work.. Fail. This will go on till the end of september gahh.

Tomorrow I'm going for a BBQ party at a park just outside my dormitory, and then a cooking party right after. We're going to make pasta and tiramisu, STOKED!

Ikebukuro, supervisor's place, life. 1 month anniversary in Japan lol

Weather: humid and hot

Well, days are moving along. Really quickly. I don't know where the time goes. I'm wondering if I'm being productive at work... Everything's a blur @_@. After I get back from japanese lessons, work or some event after work, I'm pooped, make dinner, pig out, internet, shower, and that's it! Weekends I go out but they go by really quickly too. :( I've been here for a month now, wahoo, it's my 1 month anniversary with Japan commemorating our first meeting. :)


It's what happens when I leave my blog for a while, I forget what I want to say. It's probably not too interesting anyways. Ikebukuro. Not bad. It's called Sunshine city but unforutnately it was raining that day. Still okay. We went up Sunshine 60, a building that has 60 levels. I loved the elevator ride up to the top floor. It was like we were in some mini planetarium! moving at... 600m/s or something like that @_@ forgot. Walked around, did some sightseeing. We also went to Namjatown, an amusement part in a shopping center. It was amazing. I could spend the whole day there ( i think) There's a lot to see and do especially if you speak japanese, there's all these areas you can go to and solve some puzzle... Saw some people going around to stations and doing other various activities. Went into this haunted house for 600 yen. Not sure if it was worth it but it was a new experience anyhow. Different from the type of haunted houses you see in Fright night. You go around with this scary skull like thing, take pictures at stations and you walk through dark hallways... Things pop up at you.. Much less scarier than the ones at fright night actually. XD There was also this area for desserts and another area with GYOZA tons and tons of gyoza everywhere. Apparently that's where all the top gyoza chefs make their gyoza. haha pretty neat. Both Namjatown and Sunshine 60 is a good place for couples to hang out ;). We went back to sunshine 60 at night to see the night view and there were soo many couples. We even spotted a couple making out on one of the couches with heart pillows... Moving on..
At night we were hungry, the guys wanted to check out an izakaya, found one we wanted to go, waited 40 min but they didn't give us a table (while the other people did, was it because our group was big? but stilll!) We left pissed and found a nice okonmiyaki place nearby. The waitress was kind and we had free vanilla icecream :D.

On sunday I was invited to my supervisor's place. His wife made us some good food and I learned how to play a popular game called Hanafuda. My supervisor remembered how much I loved matcha so he even got matcha warabi for us all to eat. How kind. Too kind. How can I repay him :( Oh good thing i bought that ice wine from the liquor store downtown before I arrived. They really liked the ice wine. The bottle was wayy too small though. There were 6 of us and all of us only had like... two gulps of it. eh.

The end. I feel exhausted. I didn't have a good sleep last night, couldn't fall asleep and slept around 2 ish... woke up at 5:30am thinking it was 5:30PM.. I was like "omg f** I missed a whole days of work" I think this is a symptom of post traumatic stress disorder from sleeping in and being 2 hrs late for work two weeks ago...

I was going to add photos but blogspot wont let me. Oh well. I guess I'll have to live with a chunk of text.

Valleyball, Mosquitoes, mail

Hello! Happy Friday!

Today, I had a somewhat productive day at work.. but I get restless sometimes because I'm constantly staring at the screen @_@. Afterwork, I joined the valleyball game, and it turns out it was the final game for "season 1". And we won! haha although it's mostly my supervisor and the other coworkers getting all the points, I just stand there and get in the way ... seriously lol. So we took a group photo and apparently we're going to have a party next week and there will be food! (yes!)

I;m going to talk about last night... Last night was a nightmare. 4am in the morning, my arms were itching all over... I thought that I was getting an allergic reaction to some food I ate at maybe the all you can eat rice place... When I opened the light.. I see these red patches on my arms... and they are bites. I was afraid they were some type of bug that got into my room.. but the culprit appeared right in front of my face. A mosquito!!! ARGH. I cant believe it feasted on my whole body and I wasn't aware of it. I always hear the mosquito buzzing in my ears in vancouver, and this time I couldn't hear it at all... So on my right arm I have three bites, my left arm has two, under my jaw there's another bite and another is on my toe... When I killed the stupid thing, I only saw a little blood so it makes me wonder if there was another around.. So that makes 7 bites from ONE mosquito... wtfudgeeeeeeee.. *rage* Yeah I hope they heal soon, but really it sucks :(. I'm never opening my window again.. just sticking with the AC even if it costs me.

Finally I just wanted to talk about the mailing system briefly. Actually I dont know much about it but it's pretty annoying sometimes. Like for my bank card I had to wait for it to be delivered and I had to sign something. I guess it's because it's important... Anyway my point is, I missed the first time it was delivered so instead of going to a 7-11 to pick it up like in Canada, I go on the internets and tell them what time I'm available to have the letter/package delivered to me... convienient? Maybe.. sometimes not really because it's normally a range between 2 or 3 hours so you never knwo when it's going to come.... Thus any plans you have, will just have to wait. But yeah! I got to choose when my fridge was delivered and Natsuko told me the time range that her package was going to arrive at my place too. :) Not sure if it's the same in vancouver/canada.. I've only really mailed letters.

That's about it for today. Tomorrow is Saturday so I get to go out. We're planning to head out to ikebukuro.. and do some sight seeing. On Sunday, at 6pm is my supervisor's "invitation" party. Hahah. Love how he named it the invitation party. Before then I think I might just do some local shopping at yokosukachuo station or stay at home and surf the web and do other dormly chores... My room is getting quite messy. Anyway. It's going to be a great weekend! updates soon.

Matcha treat for today!

From Lawson's.

Dinner in Yokosuka, and arcade

Today, after work, I met up with a few japan co-op friends, went out for dinner and walked around a bit.
Sooo full. We ate at a restaurant called Yayoiken and it had all you can eat rice. I chose a dish with ...fried meat and ... an egg... etc. Lol. I dont think I would go again. I have rice all the time =_=.

All you can eat rice at Yayoiken

matcha cakes from candy land.

After dinner, we were all full and it was still 8 pm so we walked around for a bit. I wanted to go to my favourite candy shop near the station so I can get my chewy candy for work.. haha (to keep myself awake in the mornings/after lunch). I also bought myself another one of those mini cookies (like yesterday's matcha cookies, this time it's chocolate). Finally, another item to add to my matcha collection, matcha cakes! they're all packaged and neat, nto that great tasting in my opinion tho. Only 198 yen for 6.

okashi no machioka - candy!!!!!

Arcade
While walking around I wanted to check out an arcade because they're everywhere. the one we went to was about... 5 floors?! first two were game machines where you try to grab prizes.. with the grabbing thingy. hahah. Yeah... most of them were 100 yen, but it seems impossible to win anything. We saw a guy testing the machine, and one of the co-ops i was with (who was also here last year) told us that they do that so it's impossible to win anything lol. What's the pointttt!!! ARgh. The next floor was more of a casino floor, you buy tokens and you try to win more tokens... There was horse racing, slot machines, and coin pushing machines... and mario party!!! it was awesome. The next floor was an arcade, where most people were... the games were pretty cool. One game you actually have cards.. and yeah not going into details because I don't really know but it was awesome.

Mario party - win!

TONsss of one piece prizes

Calorie mate?! how random can they get? X_X

Monday, June 13 2011
Backtrack. So this day, a lot of my coworkers finished their important presentations etc. so we went to celebrate at an izakaya at yokosukachuo station. Before that.... I had to go home and wait for my bank card.... (i dont understand why they cant just leave it in my mail box =_=) Anyways, when i got it, i forgot that I needed keys... the thing is with my dorm, there are 2 doors I have to pass before I get to my own room... and those doors lock automatically... sooo basically I was locked out of the second door... and I had nothing but the stupid bank card. I had to wait for someone to come back so I can get back to my room. (where everything is!!!) I thought I would be locked out for at least 2 hrs because I dont really hear anyone come home till 9 or something. But I was lucky and someone came back and I only had to wait around half an hour.
The izakaya was awesome... old fashioned, traditional! The company paid for my drinks ( i didnt know that until afterwards..) but I had some pretty cool drinks lol. I had this strawberry... soju? not sure supervisor said it was a korean drink. Then I had a matcha milk alcoholic drink, then a coffee jelly drink yummy. hahah. Before I came I actually had udon, and there wasnt much to eat anyways. My supervisor brought me around the room and I met a few people from a different floor in our office. I already forgot most of their names.. all except one or two .. one of them told me he would lend me his rice cooker from the US. lol!

Kyoto, Harajuku, Kamakura

お久しぶりです！！！！
It's been a while! I've been busy exploring Japan... After work I'm normally tired or it's already really late. I stay after work sometimes to play a "valleyball" and on Tuesdays I go for Japanese lessons from 6 - 7:30pm. Sooo I get back at 8, eat, shower and it's already time to sleeepp!! (and some facebook.. haha)

Japanese lessons - they're great, wish there was maybe at least 2 classes a week but oh well. The sensei's really nice, and it's good conversational practice. There's about 5 or less people the last two times I went... It varies. sometimes people don't come. But yeahh I didn't do my homework last week but borrowed my friend's which had the answers XD so I just answered questions that day with his answers lol. But no more! because I bought the textbook which was 2600 freaking yen. agh. This book better be helpful.. and I better read it and make good use of it =_=. I just got my reimbursement money though. So I took out 100 bucks and went to the grocery store and bought myself some treats!!!!! wahahha! I wanted to buy everything but I restricted myself. So that's where all my money goes!! Anyway I have decided to blog about what matcha things I find and buy. :D Because I love matcha! all things matcha!!!! I'll see if I get tired of it after 7 months..

Also, I don't know why I'm so bad with directions... why am I so directionally challenged?  I got lost going to my japanese class yesterday too... Made a wrong turn, but found it in the end. At least it didnt take me an hour to find this time. Yeah... And when I was coming back from Kyoto, I had to bus back alone from shinyokohama station... I had trouble understanding the station attendant... and he sounded annoyed cus I didn't understand what he was saying... so I ended up asking this old guy and he brought me to a station that I knew (he was going to the same station). :) so Daijoubu!!!! I really need to get used to it though, one of these days I'm going to go shopping alone, far away from my own station.. and I better know how to get back. *sigh*

Kyoto:
So I went there for an Open House, where I walk around and talk with researchers about their research. Haha. You know, one of those poster sessions. The topics were pretty interesting, and I knew what some of them were actually talking about because I learned them in school! 8D yey. and some of that psychology material came up too. Yeahhh, only catch about this trip was I have to make a presentation about it tomorrow. Anyway, as you may or may not know, Kyoto is THE place for matcha things!!! I wasn't there for long but my supervisor fufilled my wish of having matcha icecream there. We went to this well known restaurant/cafe and had a nice meal with matcha chocolate, matcha ice cream, and matcha jelly. It was deeelicous! Also it was my first time riding the shinkansen so it was pretty exciting for me. It felt like I was on the plane! Too bad I didn't get a window seat... Also Kyoto is the place to see Maiko and maybe Geisha :D There's this street my supervisor brought me to and told me that if we're lucky we might see Maiko-san. haha.. We didn't but what I did see were lots of photographers. Im pretty sure they were searching for Maiko-san too!! But the street was kinda old fashioned and nice. I took a video but it didn't turn out as nice as I wanted it to be.. Also, my supervisor really wanted to eat at a restaurant by the river side.. so we did!! There were two types of set meals.. One was 60 CAD, the other set was >30 CAD. I of course got the latter and my supervisor the former.. He was one happy kid =/ haha. It was a nice experience. Most of the food was fish related and pretty delicious.



omiyage
Love omiyage! In Japan, they have a tradition of giving coworkers etc, a gift from somewhere if they went some place far... (I think). Yeah, so for example, my supervisor, another coworker and I went to Kyoto so we pitched in to get omiyage for the rest of our team. Omiyage is most often food items. We brought back (more like my other coworker..) green tea pocky and matcha flavoured dango!!! Can't wait to go back in August.. The manager of our group, I don't know where he went but he gave each of us a longgggggggg shinkansen chocolate cookies thingies.. ahhh so good. It's sooo cute too.




Harajuku, Kamakura
Sooo Saturday! Went to tokyo again - this time Harajuku, fashion district! There were sooo many clothing storesss I wanted to shop soo bad but I didn't get my money yet and all of us were pretty close to being broke haha... So just went window shopping... In the morning wholy crap.. It was raining cats and dogs!!!!!!! I was using an umbrella but it's useless!!! It's so windy the rain rains sideways anyways! why not just run outside without anything! I was soaked... but dried up quickly surprisingly.. Maybe because it was humid.. Oh that day we also went to see the imperial palace.. It actually wasn't that cool. But next time we'll actually go in. Didnt go on cus there was a fee and one of us had to leave... Yeahh.

                          Kamakura - Daibutsu!
Ohhh and one of my friend knew a Japanese friend who knew another friend who was performing at some place in tokyo.. so we went. It was pretty awesome. 500 yen for a drink and entrance because we knew someone.. otherwise it's 3500 yen. At first I thought it was weird.. the woman was singing about fish and meat.. it was pretty hilarious... Then after her, there was this huggee group of people who came up to the stage and sang various ENGLISH songs, such as Where's the Love. I filmed a few of them.. not sure if I should post, dont even have a video editor.. =/ heh.

Kamakura, was great! There's so much to see... temples everywhere and the great Daibutsu!! I got to wash my money.. apparently if you wash your money there, it doubles... pretty neat experience. Also there was a lot of holy water hand washing haha.. WE're probably going to go again.. not enough time in one day to see everything...

Harajuku!

Mini-concert

Matcha cookies I bought today, they're pretty goooodd

Other junk food I bought from the supermarket in celebration of my salary and reimbursement money

Caramel corn - vanilla flavoured, RAMUNE drink 88 yen!, coffee jelly 98 yen!

Tonight's dinner, broccoli, other veggies, udon, canned eel(?).
I found worms in my broccoli, I was grossed out... but of course I only had the ones without the worms!

Yummy, coffee jelly. Same price and packaging as the pudding I had the first week. Both are good, depends on my mood

slept in

So today, I slept in.
I probably was woken up by my ipod + cellphone at 7am but I probably reset it unconsciously. SIGH.
I woke up at 9:37am and I freaked out.. Quickly tried to find my supervisor's office number but couldn't find it so I tried his cellphone. Didnt pick up, he was doing a presentation. Then I tried searching for the office number again and found it in my binder... Thank goodness, and one of my coworkers picked up and I told him that I slept in and will be there asap. Should I invest in a better alarm clock!? arugh. Anywho, when I got to the office I felt kinda bad. It was 11am by then. But they said it was okay... I insisted on staying later than 5:30 though. I really have a whole lot of reading to do so I can code soon. :S yeah. Another thing I wanted to say is, my coworkers are crazy! They work till really late every day Im pretty sure. When I left at 7:30pm today, most of my team was still there. I'm not sure if it's the same everyday since today was different they were at a 3 hour presentation from 3-6. But yeah. They're pretty hardcore. :S There was also a practice presentation in english today so I was able to understand it. Research is pretty cool. I'm not sure if the researching companies in canada/vancouver work the same way, but if I really am going into research, then I hope I can do something along the lines of machine learning, because it's a vast and interesting field. Computer vision rocks! but it's difficult. :S And If i want to take a machine learning class at ubc it means taking an extra math and stats course.. Ahh and graduating later. I still have time to think...

After I got home today, I made myself some rice again so I can finish up my left over curry. It didnt burn this time but I dont think I cooked it for long enough. I was hungry... And also, I think it's inevitable that rice will stick to the pot. Whatevs. dont have the money to buy one. Speaking of money, my supervisor told me I'm going to get my plane ticket money, bus money, money on the train from narita airport to my dorm on the first day, and my part salary for May on June 15. Wahhoo. Exciting. I'll have lots of spending money. :D Travel!!
Then on the 20th I'm getting my June salary. Yup. There's also going to be many parties this month. (drinking parties) because everyone's celebrating finishing their presentations and such. I'm also invited to my supervisor's party.. he didnt know what type of party to name it so he named it "invitation party" lol. funnay. But yah, I still have that ice wine so I hope it's sufficient.

Kyoto tomorrow!!! I'm going to get reimbursed for the shinkansen and hotel money as well. Sweet. Free trip to Kyoto, but only for 2 days. My supervisor said we will visit some temple there on Thursday if we have time, then the conference on Friday. He told me to talk to as many exhibitionists as I can and write a report on all of them! (well not all but, as many as I can). YAP going to get my laundry, shower, wash dishes and sleep asap. Dont want myself sleeping in again. Grr.

Bess