KONNICHIWA!!! (Good-Bye Cheesesteaks, Hello Rice Balls)
After the insanity that was the month of June, I’ve finally made it to Tokyo and recovered from jet lag enough to paint the town red, which is exactly what my buddies and I did last night until around 7 this morning. That’s another story, though…
My last month in Philly was kind of a nightmare with finals and preparing for the big trip. However, my whole family drove up from Florida to help me move out of the ‘hood after meeting Sarah’s family in Virginia, which Sarah and I think was a lot of fun for both the Corbins and the Burnses, and hopefully it can happen again soon. My Mom, Dad and Claire went whitewater rafting on the Nantahala River in North Carolina on their way home, but I have yet to see photographic proof of Therese Corbin on this alleged “raft,” navigating said “river.”
I got to relax with Sarah and her family in DC/VA for a few days, which is always nice (I sleep like a rock in their cold, quiet basement, it’s the best), and then stayed up all night, too excited for sleep, before I left at 4:30 a.m. to catch my plane from DC to Chicago to Tokyo on July 2. In order to burn off my adrenaline and pass the time that night before the trip, I blew through Hemingway’s “A Moveable Feast,” which is all about the Latin Quarter in Paris where I lived and went nuts (and so did Hemingway, apparently); it only fired me up even more about getting the chance to go nuts all over Asia.
The 24-hour door-to-door trip was pretty much standard; bad airplane food and even worse movies, but I got a kick out of my neighbor on the flight from Chicago to Japan. He was an 18-year old Japanese kid named Elijah who had just finished his first year at Bob Jones University in South Carolina, so we swapped college stories for a few hours on the flight, with him telling me about southern food, dress codes, curfews, uniforms, and music listening options (classical only, NO jazz – I asked him 'What about the weather channel?' He looked confused...), while I merely skimmed the surface of my illustrious college career – I think his head might have exploded if I’d gone into too much detail. One of the very few things we could both relate to, however, is the universal truism that cornbread is delicious, regardless of one's national origin, race, color or creed.
When I arrived in Tokyo with five of my classmates who had joined me on the Chicago-Tokyo flight, we figured out how to find the bus into town and finally touched down in the Akasaka neighborhood of Minato-Ku, our new ward/borough, and trekked up the hill to our hotel, the “Weekly Mansion.” My roommate Will and I share one small room with a tiny kitchen, a bathroom and a nice little balcony that overlooks a construction site for what will eventually be another gigantic high-rise condominium. One interesting thing about the Weekly Mansion is that it is being occupied by a troupe of 6-foot Eastern European models, ranging in age from about 14 to 20 (of course they all look like they’re 25), so the guys in my MBA program are constantly picking their jaws up off the floor of the lobby, which has all of a sudden become the hot spot to hang out and have pre-game drinks, for some reason…
On my first night in Tokyo, I met up with most of my classmates and went out for sushi in our neighborhood, which easily has at least 500 restaurants, bars, karaoke clubs and 7-11s within a quarter-mile radius. I dined on octopus and raw scallop nigiri sushi - sorry Mom - which was amazing, and drank Asahi Super Dry beer, which is kind of a Japanese version of Heineken (and it’s very good). On our way home, I stopped into a giant, brightly and colorfully lit building with crazy music blaring inside and out – it was a pachinko parlor, and it was my first real taste of the sensory overload that is a huge part of just existing in Japan. Pachinko, from what I understand, is a game similar to playing a slot machine, but apparently it’s necessary to have hyper-fast music blasting in your ears and lights flashing in your face in order to concentrate on it. The place was jam-packed on a Monday night around 11 p.m., with a suited-up Japanese businessman glued to each of the hundreds of pachinko screens in the building.
So far, I’ve immensely enjoyed the food in Tokyo, and it’s relatively easy to find cheap food, despite the nightmare stories you read about the cost of living here. While there are plenty of places to eat very expensive meals, there are equally as many places to find good, inexpensive ones, and the 7-11 is where I eat around 75% of these surprisingly good meals. The 7-11 (pronounced “sey-boon-ee-ley-boon”) is an institution here, where you can find everything from packaged dress shirts to hundreds of DVD “films” (ahem) to Sake-in-a-Jar (Japanese Moonshine!!!) to complete Japanese-style lunches and dinners. I’ve been surviving mostly on buckwheat soba noodle sandwiches and rice balls, which are tennis ball-sized pyramids or discs of sushi rice wrapped in seaweed with some kind of fish salad, vegetable or fruit filling. I could, and I do, eat these things for breakfast, lunch and dinner, but it’s always a crapshoot as to what you’re going to get in the middle, because the packages are neither written in English nor Romanji (the Roman alphabet), so sometimes you get stuck with something nasty like kelp or okaka, which is dried, smoked fish that I think has already been chewed as a courtesy. Canned iced coffee is also really big here, and it can be found about every 10 steps on any street in one of Tokyo’s estimated 5.6 million vending machines (one for every 20 people); they also spit out sodas, hot or cold green tea, beers, sake, miso soup, cigarettes, batteries, “Pocari Sweat” (I’m going to man up and try it one of these days), DVD “films,” and certified pre-worn, um, unmentionables. I absolutely love it here, but I can’t say it’s not a weird place with things that can make even Florida State grads like me blush from time to time. Vending machines also play a big role in lots of restaurants and noodle bars - instead of ordering from a waitress, you just pick out a picture of what you want to eat or drink on the machine, insert your money, push a button, and the machine will either spit out your beer or give you a ticket, which you give to the waitress who then serves you your food.
One of the funniest things about Tokyo is the terrible English that you find attached to products like food, booze and clothes (check out www.engrish.com). I’m starting to collect pictures of products with these weird quasi-English sayings attached to them, like this ice cream vending machine at school – I see this stuff all over the place. Another cool thing about Tokyo is that it is extremely clean and safe. There are hundreds of bicycles lining the sidewalks on the way to school, and I've only seen a handful with locks on them. You could practically eat off of the floor of the subway, and public toilets are always spotless.
I spent a couple of hours wandering around the Harajuku neighborhood on Wednesday, which is packed with thousands of weirdly-dressed teenagers, and ended up in a four-story 100-yen store (think of an American Dollar Store on steroids); the 7-11 has almost everything you could ever need, but the 100-yen store has anything that you could ever imagine anyone buying, whether needed or not. Wednesday night, some of the guys and I went out for sake and karaoke, which is always fun, especially with my German classmate Dominik screaming "Roxanne" and "Kung-Fu Fighting" at the top of his lungs.
So that brings me to last night. I headed out with seven of my classmates to a happy hour at a bar called Gas Panic in Roppongi, Tokyo’s red light district, and eight hours later, Will and I prevailed as the only survivors, eventually ending up at McDonalds well after sunrise scarfing down Egg McMuffins. In case you’re curious, they’re just as gross over here as they are in the States, maybe even more so, but they saved our lives from what would have been much more devastating futsukayoi (hangovers). After school today, a couple of us hit up a noodle bar near school and finished off the rest of our futsukayoi - in Japan, the rule about making loud slurping noises when eating noodles is that it's very polite, which I am going to miss very much when I return to the States.
I’m going to try to spend as much of this weekend as possible just wandering around some of the big tourist areas like Shinjuku, Shibuya, Ginza or Asakusa; our school schedule during the week is ridiculous, so I have to get in my obligatory aimless wandering time on the weekends. I’ll try to post some good stories for next week's entry; I have a high school friend coming into town from the Air Force base in Okinawa, so we’ll probably hang out Saturday night, and I’m trying to get my class together to climb Mt. Fuji sometime very soon, so please stay tuned. Sayonara!
P.S. - Due to computer issues, I'm going to have to wait until sometime next week to post all of my pictures - I'll get them up asap.
My last month in Philly was kind of a nightmare with finals and preparing for the big trip. However, my whole family drove up from Florida to help me move out of the ‘hood after meeting Sarah’s family in Virginia, which Sarah and I think was a lot of fun for both the Corbins and the Burnses, and hopefully it can happen again soon. My Mom, Dad and Claire went whitewater rafting on the Nantahala River in North Carolina on their way home, but I have yet to see photographic proof of Therese Corbin on this alleged “raft,” navigating said “river.”
I got to relax with Sarah and her family in DC/VA for a few days, which is always nice (I sleep like a rock in their cold, quiet basement, it’s the best), and then stayed up all night, too excited for sleep, before I left at 4:30 a.m. to catch my plane from DC to Chicago to Tokyo on July 2. In order to burn off my adrenaline and pass the time that night before the trip, I blew through Hemingway’s “A Moveable Feast,” which is all about the Latin Quarter in Paris where I lived and went nuts (and so did Hemingway, apparently); it only fired me up even more about getting the chance to go nuts all over Asia.
The 24-hour door-to-door trip was pretty much standard; bad airplane food and even worse movies, but I got a kick out of my neighbor on the flight from Chicago to Japan. He was an 18-year old Japanese kid named Elijah who had just finished his first year at Bob Jones University in South Carolina, so we swapped college stories for a few hours on the flight, with him telling me about southern food, dress codes, curfews, uniforms, and music listening options (classical only, NO jazz – I asked him 'What about the weather channel?' He looked confused...), while I merely skimmed the surface of my illustrious college career – I think his head might have exploded if I’d gone into too much detail. One of the very few things we could both relate to, however, is the universal truism that cornbread is delicious, regardless of one's national origin, race, color or creed.
When I arrived in Tokyo with five of my classmates who had joined me on the Chicago-Tokyo flight, we figured out how to find the bus into town and finally touched down in the Akasaka neighborhood of Minato-Ku, our new ward/borough, and trekked up the hill to our hotel, the “Weekly Mansion.” My roommate Will and I share one small room with a tiny kitchen, a bathroom and a nice little balcony that overlooks a construction site for what will eventually be another gigantic high-rise condominium. One interesting thing about the Weekly Mansion is that it is being occupied by a troupe of 6-foot Eastern European models, ranging in age from about 14 to 20 (of course they all look like they’re 25), so the guys in my MBA program are constantly picking their jaws up off the floor of the lobby, which has all of a sudden become the hot spot to hang out and have pre-game drinks, for some reason…
On my first night in Tokyo, I met up with most of my classmates and went out for sushi in our neighborhood, which easily has at least 500 restaurants, bars, karaoke clubs and 7-11s within a quarter-mile radius. I dined on octopus and raw scallop nigiri sushi - sorry Mom - which was amazing, and drank Asahi Super Dry beer, which is kind of a Japanese version of Heineken (and it’s very good). On our way home, I stopped into a giant, brightly and colorfully lit building with crazy music blaring inside and out – it was a pachinko parlor, and it was my first real taste of the sensory overload that is a huge part of just existing in Japan. Pachinko, from what I understand, is a game similar to playing a slot machine, but apparently it’s necessary to have hyper-fast music blasting in your ears and lights flashing in your face in order to concentrate on it. The place was jam-packed on a Monday night around 11 p.m., with a suited-up Japanese businessman glued to each of the hundreds of pachinko screens in the building.
So far, I’ve immensely enjoyed the food in Tokyo, and it’s relatively easy to find cheap food, despite the nightmare stories you read about the cost of living here. While there are plenty of places to eat very expensive meals, there are equally as many places to find good, inexpensive ones, and the 7-11 is where I eat around 75% of these surprisingly good meals. The 7-11 (pronounced “sey-boon-ee-ley-boon”) is an institution here, where you can find everything from packaged dress shirts to hundreds of DVD “films” (ahem) to Sake-in-a-Jar (Japanese Moonshine!!!) to complete Japanese-style lunches and dinners. I’ve been surviving mostly on buckwheat soba noodle sandwiches and rice balls, which are tennis ball-sized pyramids or discs of sushi rice wrapped in seaweed with some kind of fish salad, vegetable or fruit filling. I could, and I do, eat these things for breakfast, lunch and dinner, but it’s always a crapshoot as to what you’re going to get in the middle, because the packages are neither written in English nor Romanji (the Roman alphabet), so sometimes you get stuck with something nasty like kelp or okaka, which is dried, smoked fish that I think has already been chewed as a courtesy. Canned iced coffee is also really big here, and it can be found about every 10 steps on any street in one of Tokyo’s estimated 5.6 million vending machines (one for every 20 people); they also spit out sodas, hot or cold green tea, beers, sake, miso soup, cigarettes, batteries, “Pocari Sweat” (I’m going to man up and try it one of these days), DVD “films,” and certified pre-worn, um, unmentionables. I absolutely love it here, but I can’t say it’s not a weird place with things that can make even Florida State grads like me blush from time to time. Vending machines also play a big role in lots of restaurants and noodle bars - instead of ordering from a waitress, you just pick out a picture of what you want to eat or drink on the machine, insert your money, push a button, and the machine will either spit out your beer or give you a ticket, which you give to the waitress who then serves you your food.
One of the funniest things about Tokyo is the terrible English that you find attached to products like food, booze and clothes (check out www.engrish.com). I’m starting to collect pictures of products with these weird quasi-English sayings attached to them, like this ice cream vending machine at school – I see this stuff all over the place. Another cool thing about Tokyo is that it is extremely clean and safe. There are hundreds of bicycles lining the sidewalks on the way to school, and I've only seen a handful with locks on them. You could practically eat off of the floor of the subway, and public toilets are always spotless.
I spent a couple of hours wandering around the Harajuku neighborhood on Wednesday, which is packed with thousands of weirdly-dressed teenagers, and ended up in a four-story 100-yen store (think of an American Dollar Store on steroids); the 7-11 has almost everything you could ever need, but the 100-yen store has anything that you could ever imagine anyone buying, whether needed or not. Wednesday night, some of the guys and I went out for sake and karaoke, which is always fun, especially with my German classmate Dominik screaming "Roxanne" and "Kung-Fu Fighting" at the top of his lungs.
So that brings me to last night. I headed out with seven of my classmates to a happy hour at a bar called Gas Panic in Roppongi, Tokyo’s red light district, and eight hours later, Will and I prevailed as the only survivors, eventually ending up at McDonalds well after sunrise scarfing down Egg McMuffins. In case you’re curious, they’re just as gross over here as they are in the States, maybe even more so, but they saved our lives from what would have been much more devastating futsukayoi (hangovers). After school today, a couple of us hit up a noodle bar near school and finished off the rest of our futsukayoi - in Japan, the rule about making loud slurping noises when eating noodles is that it's very polite, which I am going to miss very much when I return to the States.
I’m going to try to spend as much of this weekend as possible just wandering around some of the big tourist areas like Shinjuku, Shibuya, Ginza or Asakusa; our school schedule during the week is ridiculous, so I have to get in my obligatory aimless wandering time on the weekends. I’ll try to post some good stories for next week's entry; I have a high school friend coming into town from the Air Force base in Okinawa, so we’ll probably hang out Saturday night, and I’m trying to get my class together to climb Mt. Fuji sometime very soon, so please stay tuned. Sayonara!
P.S. - Due to computer issues, I'm going to have to wait until sometime next week to post all of my pictures - I'll get them up asap.
posted by corbinski at 1:25 PM
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