alcatraz m.d. and mvps

wow what a busy couple of days. after a pretty mundane friday I spent most of saturday on campus studying and hanging out with Jake, then met up with Mark and his friend Blair to go to the tokyo metropolitan symphony. now I don't usually listen to classical music, but there's something about seeing it in person. it's something I can go see and let my mind wander. this means that sometimes I don't pay attention to the music as much as I should, but it's good for thinking. Jake's dad is one of the producers for the show so we got the tickets for free, major thanks to them both. unfortunately jake couldn't make it to the concert, he was supposed to go with his host mom but something happened and she couldn't go and he had given us the map so he didn't know how to make it to the concert hall. oops. the concert was good tho, our seats were actually stored in a closet until we got there. but they were free so we couldn't complain. the second set was the right of spring, from fantasia. yes, from fantasia, it's pretty good in concert. on the way back mark and his lady friend has some sort of issues, she had decided that morning that she wanted to stay the night at mark's host family's house and wasn't gonna let any sort of logic, reason, or mark saying no, that's not okay get in her way. blah.

sunday! sunday we went out to chichibu, which is a small mountain town in western saitama, actually the same place my host family last summer took me to get out of the city. the plan was to got o a small pottery workshop, ride an old river boat, and take a gondola to the top of a mountain and look around a bit. the pottery lesson was really fun. the sensei was really funny and had some awesome jokes that he's probably told over a hundred times each. lots of time to practice. unfortunately most of us had no idea how to do the whole pottery thing and most of them turned out terrible. the teacher really liked what I made tho, just a simple vase, but probably just because so many people were having such a hard time. after he glazes and bakes everything he'll ship it to TIU so we can all either show to or hide it from our host family.

unfortunately we spent way too much time there and didn't have enough time for the boat ride, but it was lunch time anyway so we just went to a soumen shop. soumen is this weird type of restaurant the japanese invented to make dinnertime more fun. you have a long chute, traditionally made from split bamboo, a basket at one end, and people with noodles at the other. the people running the show put noodles in the tubes and wash them down towards the hungry customers with a splash of water, and your job is to try to catch as many noodles as you can when they reach you. you dunk them in broth and eat them and laugh at your silly friends trying to catch noodles with chopsticks. the basket is there to catch the noodles that you miss, and you're allowed to eat them when you're done with the ones you caught. but you must do so in the utmost shame. mmmmm, delicious shame. afterwards we took a gondola up to the top of a mountain and walked around the forest a little bit. we saw huge mountains between the clouds in the distance, bigger spiders hanging out near the trail, and a pretty nifty shrine on top of the mountain.

monday was a japanese holiday so me and risa went to a museum in ueno and saw a show on mayans, incas, and aztecs and hung out in the park for a while. tuesday me jake and courtney were drinking beer outside the game center and 2 high school girls came up and asked to take pictures with us. pretty random, none of us had been approached by random locals before. so we talked to them for a bit then went and took purikura with them. pretty random but hopefully they'll walk up to other random foreigners and be friendly now.

so another busy busy wednesday this week, this time it was sports day at TIU. a bunch of the TIU and JSP kids came out and had our choice of basketball or volleyball for the day. after making a few friends I played volleyball for a few hours. the levels of play between people were pretty spread out but it averaged out to pretty much even. lots of laughing, lots of silly mistakes, lots of fun. after an hour or so we took a break and people started breaking out of the mold of the days activities. some of the guys decided to play some weird soccer/volleyball variant that I decided to take part in. the special rule of the game was that if you screwed up 3 times you had to go stand on the baseline underneath the basketball net bend over, and hope everyone else misses your ass with the volleyball. this is what happens when guys come up with new games. after that we played volleyball a bit more, but threw in the whole getting balls thrown at your butt when you lose, but on a team level. we played one game to 5 then 2 games to ten before we all had had enough of that.

after this the PA's gathered everyone together and named the 5 MVP's of the day so they could award us with free TIU t-shirts, and I was one of them! after a bit of childish running around the gymnasium we all decided it was time for a few games of dodgeball. japanese dodgeball is a bit different from american dodgeball I guess. i've played probably ten or so different dodgeball variations in america tho, so I don't know what we were basing the comparison on. but in japan you play on the volleyball court and you only ever use one ball. when you get out you go to the other team's side of the court and you get to keep playing outside the court. if you get someone out from the outside you get to go back in and try to survive a bit longer. me being the long armed beast that I am was always getting passed the ball from my teammates when I was on the outside and was a major target when I was on the inside. but I tried to pass the ball around a lot so the tiny japanese girls on the team had to try their arm at throwing.

after a towelless shower (i didn't quite prepare well enough) I went out and got my handy dandy super duper keitai! (japanese for cellphone) so now I can start making real friends and getting a hold of them to go do things. after that a bunch of us from the sports thing went out to karaoke and got a little tipsy. i'm finally starting to come around to karaoke and i'm pretty sure all the drunken yelling is slowly training my vocal cords to be more musically adept. hopefully. the only problem is finding songs that I actually know. american songs are few and far between, especially if you want to sing something actually good.

yesterday I met satoe, david, chika, and chika's new boyfriend in shibuya for dinner and drinks. we went to this theme restaurant called alcatraz m.d. yeah it was themed like a psycho insane hospital complete with hot nurses in full costume, dead bodies in the walls and floors, prison cells for booths, pretty disgusting themed food and drinks that were actually pretty damn tasty, and since we were lucky enough to go on someone's birthday there was a ten minute skit with an escaped inmate running around scaring the patrons while the nurses randomly fired cap guns into people's booths. the mood was complete with flashing lights and creepy sound effects and all.