Pre-Tokyo - New Years Break 2005

Whoever told me that it would only snow in Osaka once over the winter was outright lying. It's freezing here tonight, 0 degrees right now, probably the coldest I remember feeling here. I know you're sitting there, scoffing at the fact that I'm complaining about 0 degrees when Canada is something like -46 degrees, but it's different here. Central heating apparently doesn't exist and I can feel the cold air coming through my thin window at night. Also, I still need to buy a jacket. This isn't what I expected, temperature-wise. You're probably going to hear me talk about this a lot over the next month as it gets colder, so brace yourself. Anyway, I have a lot to update you on and not a lot of time, so I'll get to that straight away.

I finished work last Tuesday, marking the beginning of New Years vacation. New Years is the big family holiday in Japan, like us and Christmas, so students probably wouldn't be coming to Nova anyway, so the whole company shuts down for a week. As I mentioned, I decided to go to Tokyo.

Actually, a lot of people went to Tokyo for New Years. It wasn't too bad since apparently a lot of the traffic is going in the other direction around New Years since people working there escape to their hometowns to be with their families. Also, everything kind of shuts down in Japan for the New Years era so Tokyo was kind of the best place to be in terms of things being open.

So Tuesday night, both of my roommates left for Tokyo (taking an overnight bus). It was great to have them gone and I decided to devote Wednesday to trying to clean up their filth around the apartment.

It wasn't easy. Wednesday came around and I worked solidly for a good few hours. I cleaned the living room by separating the garbage from the VHS tapes and vacuuming. They had been considerate enough to leave a sink full of not only their dirty dishes, but also the remnants of their last few meals, which was really nice to clean out. While trying to clean the sink, I found a little basket in the drain that was full of rotting little morsels of damp food that has been collecting for... I don't know, months? Years? I cleaned out some of the kitchen drawers and started to clean the stove, but one of the elements started shooting out sparks when I touched it with a cloth, so I decided to back away and write that area off. I also brought down seven or eight bags of garbage to the garbage chute. The garbage (almost exclusively provided by my roommates) had been piled up over the garbage can and flowed onto the floor. Yeah, our kitchen was really exciting.

Wednesday night I met up with Mark in Shinsaibashi for a bar that he had found, selling 200 yen ($2) drinks, which is shockingly low for Osaka. Afterwards we went and played darts with some locals in Balabushka's, I'm definitely not getting any better at this game. I ended up leaving to catch the last train home, but then biked back down. Mark and I literally bumped into a Japanese guy named Takashi on the street. He started talking to us and then took us to an izakaya (Japanese-style bar) and ended up footing the entire 3600 yen bill. His English wasn't very good, but he was really funny and made it clear that he wanted us to attend a party of his the following night, so we agreed to meet him the following evening at 7:30pm.

Thursday I bought my shinkansen (bullet train) ticket with Catherine, a girl from New Glasgow (Nova Scotia) who I had met Christmas Eve. Catherine and I were leaving for Tokyo the following day.

That evening, Takashi, Mark and I met up in the Umeda train station, where Takashi vaguely explained that we had to go buy 500 yen ($5) presents for other people at the party. We bought our little gifts and went to meet up with his friends. His friends could speak even less English and he didn't introduce us, just kind of motioned for us to go with them (three Japanese girls) and ran off in another direction. Through a lot of hand motions and repeated words, we learned from them that Takashi was helping to organize this end-of-year party at a Chinese restaurant for the hospital in which he works. We waited for about half an hour by the JR station before we got a call from Takashi saying the restaurant was ready.

We (the 5 of us and two other friends of Takashi) were the last table of people to arrive in the restaurant and were off to the side from the rest of them, who apparently all worked for the hospital. We paid something like $35 to sit down, which was a little alarming at first, but we got a lot of good Chinese food and unlimited beer.

A lot of things happened throughout the meal that we didn't understand. Mark and I knew that we were introduced as special guests, but didn't really understand what they were saying. Later on there was a big powerpoint trivia contest and one of the questions was about where Mark and I came from. I kind of cheated during the trivia by looking at other people's answers and my group ended up tying for first place, so to settle it we had a "Janken" (Japanese Rock-Paper-Scissors) match to settle it. I'm used to be really good at Rock-Paper-Scissors (seriously, predicting what people were going to choose used to be a talent of mine) but since I've come to Japan I've been thrown off and I lost really horribly. My group was very disappointed in me.

But, like I said, lots of weird things were going on that we didn't understand. They had everyone write down characters on pieces of paper, which were thrown into a plastic bag and never heard of again. I heard murmurings from the rest of our table about Elijah Wood and Anakin Skywalker - they were discussing who we looked like, I've gotten Elijah Wood from Japanese people before so I knew they meant me and Anakin for Mark. I replied "Lordo of the Ringsu Furodo" to which they clapped. Why do I get the loser character? Suddenly, the lights went out and really poppy music started playing. Takashi and a couple of other guys came out in monkey suits and started dancing. People clapped and they danced for song after song. The party-goers were loving it and they had obviously spent a good amount of time choreographing these elaborate dances. It was really great.

After the restaurant, everyone else headed to a club but I had to catch the train home, I had to get ready for Tokyo.