(Day 17) Hell! Are You All Right?

And…off I go again, scooting away from Tokyo on the bullet train. I’m starting to think I really fit in while waiting in line to board and just sauntering over to my seat like I’ve done it a million times before. What ever shakes my can, right? Shizuoka, here I come.


My sack of train station food.

It was raining that morning as we headed out of Shinagawa towards Yokohama.



Arriving in Shizuoka after about an hour, I boarded the local Tokaido line that would bring me to my destination of Fujieda.



All the obachans on the train gave me and my giant backpack the stink-eye since I, the giant foreign ogre, took up a bit more space than I should be allowed. Oh well. They’ll get over it.

The station at Fujieda was really new and small, so I found Tanya immediately. Tanya and I had only met once previously, for about five minutes, and now she was welcoming me into her apartment as a houseguest for three days. At this point, we didn’t even know if we’d get along, much less like one another, so let’s hope I don’t annoy her too much.

Her apartment was extremely spacious as far I understand of Japanese apartments, so let’s take a tour.


Here is her living/computer/TV room, also now known as my bedroom for the next three nights.


This is the kitchen/dining room.


More of the kitchen/dining room. Lots of slash rooms in Japan.

Tanya had to go teach an English class, but when she returned, it was time for our first exploit together – dinner. She suggested a kaitenzushi restaurant (sushi travels by you on a conveyor belt) and I thought it sounded like a novel idea.


Oh funnest ever!

The restaurant was huge and the selection was quite varied. Since I’m still a relative newcomer to sushi, I played it safe with kappa (cucumber) maki, beef and corn maki (ha ha), and other non-dangerous delacacies.



The general price for each plate was 105 yen – I would usually put back about six smaller plates and then two dessert plates. Ohhh…I’m full just thinking about it.

The really neat part was if you wanted something and didn’t want to wait for it to come around on the conveyor belt, each table had their own computer and you could select what you wanted and it would send the order to the kitchen. Then kitchen then would send your plates out on the mini bullet train to your table.




This is Tanya! We chatted it up good – you know I can yap forever.


I ate this delicious mousse pudding for dessert…along with crepes.

Fully stuffed, we then headed to the local Daiso (100 yen shop) to shop…



…and do some purikura! Tanya’s first shot went a little something like this:


Yes, I think we are getting along quite fine indeed. It’s only because we are two very awesome people.

We stayed and shopped until they shut the place down…I like cheap goods, even if they are useless to me (like Halloween masks and a ‘Hello Kitty’ stamp). Determined to getting the party train moving, we brought it next to Yako Pub – a pub owned by a karate sensei (yes, I run in these kinds of circles in Japan). The place looked authentic…and sketch. Let’s go inside!



Inside, there were a few of the stereotypical old drunkards and everyone spoke Japanese only. Eek! This is maybe not a place for two lovely young women. We sat ourselves down though and made do. I ended up ordering a shochu Calpis sour.


Those people at the table beside us were Japanese people speaking English.



After sucking our drinks down, we were jazzed-up for some more excitement…an excellent recipe for karaoke. We drove on over to the local Shidax Please! and attempted to ask for one hour. This doesn’t sound that like difficult of a request to make at a karaoke place, but the guy at the counter would not simply give us a room. He proceeded to talk at us for 10 minutes in Japanese about signing up for the Shidax card and get a lower price. This was after I told him that we do not understand Japanese (in Japanese, of course). Tanya and I looked at each other completely bewildered that this nerdy little dude would not even budge an inch in attempting to understand what we wanted. Exasperated beyond belief, I finally told him that anything was fine in Japanese and he finally shut up…and made Tanya sign up for the Shidax card. Lame.



The only good thing about this Shidax was that it was the only place I went in Japan for karaoke that had the NEWS music videos when I picked their song!! I love NEWS.


YamaPi


Can I read that? Yes! It says, “sunahama ni omoi o egaku no sa, tsunai na mama onaji no haba”


Ah, Ryo-chan! Chuushite!
”Sunao na mama tsutaeru kara, shio kaze ni negai o takusu no sa” (I hate it when karaoke lyrics are wrong.)



When we finished, the nerdy guy was gone and the girl just rang us through without any hassle…and we left without a Shidax card.

Our throats (and wallets) exhausted, we decided that we should possibly head home and see what kind of interesting fun we could cook up there. Tanya had bought a new kind of Suntory beer draft and offered me one; I usually don’t drink beer because I hate the taste, but I wanted to try a Japanese beer – “For relaxing times, make it Suntory times”. This one promised a ‘lively and crispy' taste.


Umai! Finally a good beer! It was all kinds of refreshing.

As Tanya and I sipped our beers and chatted, amazing things happened – we achieved truth and enlightenment. Hence, the beer became known to us as ‘the beer of truth and enlightenment.’ How fitting. This savory draft prompted us to speak increasingly freely about world issues and politics (or something like that…I don’t really remember.)

Tomorrow we will climb a mountain and see the sprawling city and ocean before us. Glorious Japan!