Day 5: Friday, Aug 27, 2004: Wacky Japanese Fish, part I Today, Saturday, is a cool, humid day. The misty rain is on again, off again. I've got a huge amount of backlogged work to do for Gemini, so I won't be straying too far from the hotel today. Perhaps tomorrow, too. the wind from last night's dinner with the Gemini KK office crew was taken out of my sails this morning. Yesterday, Tsurumi-san helped me ask a few questions at the Sailor cleaning/laundry shop across the street. The important question was how long would it take. The answer was that things dropped off before 10am would be done that day, otherwise done tomorrow. Good. I went to be pretty late last night, so I slept in until about 10. At a bit past 11, I brought my laundry over to the Sailor. There I found out that they don't do socks & underwear. Drat, I was hoping I'd avoid the "how to use the Japanese washing machine and buying laundry detergent" problem. Oh well. The shock came after I'd paid for everything and got my pickup receipt. The lady points to the calendar. My mental response was mostly "Oh !@#$!". My mouth said "Wakarimasen." (I should've said "Gomen nasai, watashiwa wakarimasen" (I'm sorry, I don't understand.), but the negative verb is good enough.) A gentleman behind me in line translated, "Some of the items will be ready on Tuesday the 31st, other rest on Wednesday the 1st. With a "arigato gozoimas" to the lady and a small bow to the man, I left. I have a meeting in Shibuya at 9:30am on Tuesday. !@#&@#^$#*! I can be fairly flexible clothes-wise on Monday. But Tuesday is the most formal meeting I have for my entire trip. If they aren't ready for pickup by opening time on Tuesday (8am), I ... um ... need to get creative. ---- Back to Friday. Lunch was again at a place very close to the hotel. Tsurumi-san recommended it for its tempura. Just about anything can be tasty when dipped in batter and deep fried, but if a Japanese person says that the tempura here is very good, then you should pay attention. The place is very small, bowling alley narrow and not very deep. It has seven (eight?) seats, total. They're all lined up along the galley kitchen, bar-style. At the end near the door is a television, tuned to a talk show. Next to it are the woks with oil used for the tempura. The fry master is a gentleman in his fifties, busy at work and with words to the other customers. Tsurumi-san reminds me about taking pictures. Doh! Y'all wouldn't have much to look at if it weren't for his reminders. I'd already eaten a couple of shrimp, the sweet potato, and some of the rice, but everything else was still pretty well composed. At the top left, clockwise: black tea (sen-cha green tea that has been toasted to make it black), grated radish & soy sauce, pickled vegies, pickled cukes and black&white translucent fish skins, the remaining tempura (long shrimp and two fish filets), rice, miso soup with nori (seaweed) and tofu. The fish skins looked really cool: I don't think my photo of just the pickles does them justice. They were mild compared to the light vinegar, so they ended up being there more for looks than for taste. The talk show was pretty hilarious. Two of the guests were Japanese body builders. They were hugely buff. A young woman helped demonstrate their strength when they took the Charles Atlas both- arms-flexing-massive-biceps pose while she hung from one of their arms and lifted her feet off the ground. The studio audience gasped and applauded. I giggled: every day, these guys are probably doing several reps of weights 4 or 5 times her weight. Later, the body builders competed in a game with the other guests on the show: a pair of ballerinas (one perhaps 10-12 years old, the other perhaps 20-25) and a mid-20s couple in street clothes. Each team had two attempts to score points by kicking an extra-wide slipper at targets. The team would stand side-by-side and each put a foot into the slipper (as if the slipper was what held them together for a summer picnic 3-legged race). A couple of meters away were 3 nets (with various scores) on a wall, together with targets on the floor underneath the nets. Final score: bodybuilders with 150, ballerinas with 22, unknown couple with 2. Apparently my giggles weren't very subtle. (Hey, the place *is* very small.) At supper, Tsurumi-san told me that everyone else in the restaurant was stared at me a couple of times, wondering why the hell I was laughing. Oops. Gomen nasai. This was a very friendly place. Tsurumi-san helped quite a bit, of course, but even without the translation it felt like a small family diner. Tsurumi-san took a photo of me with the chef, and I took a photo of the entire length of the restaurant. Before I left, the chef gave me a copy of the sumo wrestling standings. It's a large white piece of paper with a bizillion names on it. (He was very polite when he told me that I was holding the paper 90 degrees the wrong way, oops. :-) Tsurumi-san explained that the names on the top (reading right to left in each of the two columns) are the ones with the best records. As you go down and the size gets smaller, the wrestlers' records are worse. The bottom corner (slightly bigger kanji) has the names of referees, other officials, etc. ---- I decided that my mood (and productivity, if I ever stop procrastinating and start to get some real work done) would be helped by caffiene. I haven't been having all that much, lately. Not that I've been a 2-quart-per-day coffee drinker before coming here. But the small iced green tea that I had during my walkabout wasn't enough. So I decided to try an iced coffee. Boss brand is very intriguing. I think it's the pipe. {shrug} I need to get better photos of the parking thing. It isn't a ramp: there are winches & steel cables that operate the automobile elevators to move the cars around. I haven't seen one yet in operation. But I'm very curious. I also found a simple 2-car elevator about 2 blocks from the hotel. I'll try to remember to grab a photo of it. Oh, also not far from here is a parking ramp (2 levels, not 3, I think, but still a bona fide multi-level ramp) for bicycles. The blurry train was my attempt to show how packed the train was that I took to get home last night at 11pm. By the time I was off and got my camera out, it had started moving. But it was indeed packed. Use your imagination. The "Ghana" ad caught my eye in a subway station last night. The original large image is clear, but the one I prepared is barely big enough to read "milk chocolate" on the bar in the lower right corner. Odd name for chocolate, but it does sound just fine spoken in Japanese.