Hey all,
Well I'm here to report on my weekend. Actually the only thing interesting to say is that I went out Friday night with Haley, my speaking partner Yasuyo, and her friend Haruka. We went to a restaurant and then karaoke. For the rest of the weekend, I didn't leave the house - busy studying for a test and writing a paper, which I turned in today. Pretty confident on both counts. But! I'm sure you want to hear more about the karaoke so...here goes!
We met up with Yasuyo-chan (靖代) and Haruka-chan (陽加) at Kansai Gaidai and then proceeded to Hirakata-eki (the area around the train station). Inside the station there was a restaurant that Yasuyo and Haruka really like - an omlette rice restaurant. I tried to explain that we don't really have omuraisu (what they call it) back in the States. Essentially what it is is a thin layer of egg wrapped around some rice. Don't ask me how they do it - i have no idea. Anyways, you put various sauces on the egg and the rice to change it up. When I tried it at the school cafeteria I didn't really like it, but here it was pretty good. Here's a pic:
Mine had a hamburger on top of it (yes I know) because I wanted to try what the Japanese thought was a hamburger. It was essentially just some ground beef, but it was fine. The name of this thing, however, was incredible - "hambaagaa suteeki hayashi saasu omuraisu" with "baata raisu" and I managed to say the whole thing only messing up once. For those of you who don't speak Engrish, that is "hamburger steak hayashi sauce omlette rice with butter rice (as opposed to 'ketchup rice')". So yeah. By the way, the restaurant was called "Pomme no ki" as in the French word for apple. However I don't know quite what they thought it meant because a large decorative sign was hung featuring the words "Pomme de Terre!" on it, which in English would be roughly equivalent to hanging a sign with the huge word "POTATO!" on it. It was kind of amusing, but Japanese people make such mistakes often enough with English, let alone French. We tried to explain it to Yasuyo and Haruka - it was a bit difficult. All of our conversations mostly centered around differences between America and Japan, and customs thereof. Try explaining using air quotes to a foreigner. I can't even quite explain that in English!
After we ate, we went to a nearby karaoke place on the fourth floor of some building (if they hadn't been guiding us, I would have never known it was there). This is the setup: there's a reception desk, everyone is dressed in office suits and the waiters are dressed in little tux-type things. For 600 yen per person you get an hour plus a soft drink of your choice. The lady hands you a slip with your room number on it, and like a motel you go and find the room. In the room there's couches lining the walls, a table in the middle, and a TV at the end. Our room for 4 people was kinda cramped, but at least it didn't smell of smoke like I feared it would. The waiter comes by in a few minutes to bring the drinks. The system for picking the songs is surprisingly advanced. Everything is wireless, except the mikes.(you'd think those'd be too) There is an approximately clipboard-sized box with a LCD screen on it that you can move around and use the stylus to select options. The menu is all in Japanese, of course, so they had to explain to us what stuff meant. You can search by artist or song title, and I think there were some more options too but I don't know what they did. You can input letters in English or Japanese using the stylus. The system can also give you scores at the end of a song, like a game.
So it was all great fun. I managed to find every song I wanted to find, which means that this system not only has popular songs, but also anime songs, which tend to be not as popular. It also has a good deal of English songs as well, but I didn't sing any English. If I do karaoke in Japan, you can bet that I'm going to be singing all Japanese songs, thank you very much. While you sing, the TV does a music video and lyrics for you (in Japanese, of course!). Thankfully I only sang songs I had already memorized. Next time I go, I'll find even more Japanese songs. Everyone had fun, including Haley. Here are some pics:
The one on the left is Yasuyo, the one on the right is Haruka.
Unfortunately the hour was up all to quickly and Haruka and Yasuyo left. Haley and I went to the Tsutaya (Books, movies and CDs) for a while....and I found my Newtype! Yay! so Exciting! I'll put pics of it later. Then we went home. Not too much of an adventure, but a little one.
Well that's all for now, folks. More updates as information warrants.
As always, don't forget to put comments/tags!
