1. Our newfound friends
Walking home from Sangubashi station with Matt, a Californian who lives in the same building as us, we started to ascending the stairs before we heard a mighty roar of “Whazzzzup!” Trampling back down we meet a bunch of crazy Japanese people and start chatting. We had told them we were from South Africa they asked where out accents were. Most of my students think I’m from the States or the UK when they first met me, they wouldn’t the first clue about accents. So when someone picks up that we don’t have a South African accent, as much as I tried to put one on, you assume their English level is quite high and indeed it was. They had just returned from the States where they had been studying and said that Japanese people were boring and they wanted some westerners to talk to. The proposal for Karaoke was put forth and without a second though I ran upstairs and pulled Em out of bed screaming “Karaoke emergency!”
All of us were crammed into a little both in Shinjuku and as soon as someone told Alexander how to use the electronic song chooser, he was off. His line up included Wish by NIN, Footloose and he did backup vocals for Shisei (one of the guys we met) on Calafornication. Emily sung, with uncanny passion, Like a Virgin. The hour was up pretty quickly and Alexander was tremendously disappointed as there were at least another 10 songs he had keyed into the machine that would disappear forever and he was really looking forward to Oops I did it again.
2. The best meal in Japan
It was late and we were with the guys from our apartment block, looking for somewhere still open to get a bite to eat. Most places had closed or were closing soon, so we were happy when we found a restaurant that was open from 1600 until 2500. Peering inside all we could see were tables with hotplates in the middle of them. It's called Okonomiyaki and you get a bowl of raw food (ours was corn, cabbage and some other stuff) all held together with a raw egg. You are expected to fry it yourself on the hotplate like a pancake, but we had no idea what the hell we were doing, so we pulled the confused gaijin (alien/ foreigner) approach and our friendly waiter helped us out… well that’s a little underestimation, our friendly waiter cooked the entire meal for us, although Alexander made an effort to pick up some of the tricks and managed to flip it and cut it into little pieces (which isn’t as easy as it sounds) with guidance from the waiter of course. Alexander tried to talk to the waiter, but seeing as O genki desu ka (Are you happy?) is all he can say, and Hai, genki desu (Yes, I’m happy) is the only thing he can understand, the conversation ran dry pretty quickly. After it’s cooked you add Okonomiyaki sauce, mayonnaise and dried seaweed, cut it into little pieces and eat it. Man it was good.
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