On Friday, Shiho-chan took us shopping on Osu-dori, which literally means Osu street--and a street it is. In fact, it's more like a maze of streets that begin at either the Osu Kannon shrine or the Kamimaezu subway station, explode into all directions and then trickle slowly into Otsu-dori, or one of Sakae's (downtown Nagoya) main roads. We were told later that Osu is popular with "gaijin and young people." Well, we are gaijin, and we are young people. Double trouble. And yes, we really liked it.
The streets of Osu, all 55 of them (or however many there are) are lined with shops that sell EVERYTHING from normal clothes to crazy, what-you'd-expect-in-Japan clothes (here is where we first met a pair of slouchy, fuzzy leopard-print pants which we have since seen almost everywhere we go) to home-goods shops to shops selling taiyaki to rice cracker-shops to Mexican restaurants to secondhand clothes to leather to--well, you get it. Seriously, if you want ANYTHING you can find it at Osu.
We started at a shop that sold kitschy American and Japanese toys, though we were mostly concerned with the huge table out front with the big basins full of pins. They were obviously donated by gaijin because they were all really old and covered in cheesy slogans ('RADIATE NOW, MUTATE LOVE') or either company-based (Neopets, Tyson's Chicken, Safeway) and just strange. Like I said, kitschy. And vintage, I guess? I'm sure a lot of those so-called young people would have scooped up a bunch of pins and attached them to, I don't know, wherever youngsters attach pins to nowadays. But we stayed classy and just took pictures with the fun ones.
From there we walked the rest of Osu-dori and then around it--we didn't really buy anything, just looked into a couple of stores, including one that had cardboard cutouts of NEWS wearing the store's clothes, and also one that had figurines from Dragon Quest (I mean, maybe I was sort of tempted to buy one of the Teeny Sanguines because they're so cute...but I didn't. I know you all just breathed a sigh of relief).
In fact, we saved all of our shopping time for Parco, which is apparently where all the cool Japanese kids go. At the same time, those kids must be rich, because Parco has really cute clothes but they are REALLY EXPENSIVE cute clothes. Then again, that's the reality of shopping in Japan....it ain't no Forever 21, guys. (Better quality, ridiculously high prices.)
But! But but but! We got to the top floor and it was all secondhand, AND they were having a winter clearance sale (or a 'winter bazar,' as it was so correctly displayed on the signs). As an example of how excited we were, a shirt previously priced at 3000 was on sale for 600. Which is basically goingfrom $30 to $6. WOAH. WOAH WOAH WOAH. My wallet lost ten pounds that day. It was definitely a successful shopping trip--cute clothes (and clothes fit for a grandpa in Gray's case).
Then Shiho-chan left to go to her part-time job, and we....went home. I think we were too burned out by all the excitingly cheap clothes in our hands. Story of our lives.
FORMAL INTRODUCTION OF 'WE'
Because I don't think I've done that yet?
'We' consists of Massiel, Gray and Rachael. We are all American, speak English, and lack the ability to not embarrass ourselves in public places. We spend too much money on the following things: meat and drinks. Massiel and I drool over the following things: idols (Japanese for me, Korean for her). Gray is a grandpa. Rachael is adorable and can fold maps. Oftentimes, because of this newfangled Japanese language that we all want to punch in the face, we forget how to speak English. Together, we make one competent person and have so far spent one day out of the two-ish weeks we've known each other apart. And only because we were all snowed in.
So yeah, that is 'we.'
SATURDAY
On Saturday, we had one mission: TO BUY STATIONARY. We met up pretty late that day, I can't remember why, but Massiel's host family was really excited about her leaving at night because they thought she was going clubbing. She told them she was just going to buy stationary. They were disappointed.
Anyway, I'd heard that there was a Loft department store in the NADYA Park building in Sakae. If you don't know what Loft is, it's basically where you go if you want colorful and cute things for your everyday life. Towels, rugs, slippers, carpets, toilet seat covers, cool imported shampoos, adorable stuffed animals, lunchboxes, utensils, hiking gear, etc.--and most importantly, stationary. There is a stationary FLOOR. YAY!--or so you think. Saturday does not have as happy an ending as you may believe.
This was the first time we were at Sakae station, which is impressively large, shiny and full of shops itself--in fact, let me just butt in here with a cultural note and explain that Japan doesn't have malls. Japan has shopping mazes. Usually they are streets, like Otsu-dori and Osu-dori and Hisaya-odori, or they are entire cities, like "I'm going to Sakae to shop today." The closest thing Japan has to malls are department stores, and even those don't count because they're not made of separate stores--each floor has its own specialty, and there are always the following in a department store: 1) a floor of restaurants, 2) a bookstore and 3) a supermarket in the basement. But Japan also takes its train stations, especially the bigger ones like Sakae and Nagoya, and makes them into giant shopping complexes. So you hear people say "I bought this in the Nagoya station subway" and everyone understands. /cultural note
So yeah, it was our first time at Sakae so we decided to check out Oasis 21, which is a bus terminal on glitter crack. It has won numerous design awards for being huge and....pretty, I guess. I don't know, but it has stores there too, including A POKEMON CENTER and A STUDIO GHIBLI STORE. I mean, only my childhood, no big deal. We proceeded to take tourist-y pictures of ourselves in the Pokemon center holding plushies of 3749375937th generation Pokemon. As I told Massiel, it doesn't matter that we don't know what their names are because they're all the same: Waterchu, Firechu and Grasschu.
Also at that point the shopkeeper hovered near us, unsure of what to say to a group of wild, giggling gaijin, and then just gave up and walked away. This will happen many times in the course of our stay here.
After we looked through the Studio Ghibli (actually I think it was like a television station goods store, but it had Studio Ghibli, sooo) and deemed everything a) adorable and b) expensive, we headed out of Oasis 21 into the now-dark city of Sakae...though when I say 'dark' I only mean that in regards to the sky. Sakae was lit up like no other, because this is Japan and they like to make their cities glow like absurdly large fireflies surrounded by the dark rice paddies of the countryside. Oh, you know that metaphor was fierce, don't even lie.
The building we wanted to go to was called NADYA Park, which stands for Nagoya Design Youth Amusement (I think--I'm not going to look it up, but if that's not it, it's something just as crazy), but I'd forgotten that so we instead chose to call it Nagoya and Dinosaur Yogurt Attack. Fitting, right? Anyway, so we'd asked the Oasis 21 tourist center for directions, but in the end we didn't follow them. Instead we followed all of the Loft shopping bags--can't miss 'em, they're bright yellow and say 'Loft' on them--coming from a certain direction. And we found it (and actually found a bunch of other CJS people on the way there; yay for Sakae!).
Here is where the story gets whack. (No really, there is no other word for it.)
We went into NADYA Park, saw Loft, got really excited--and then discovered we were really hungry. So we went to the directory to look up a restaurant, and the directory said (important key words: THE DIRECTORY SAID) that there was one on the 8th floor of the building. We took the central elevators up and only got to a bunch of offices, so we went back down. According to the directory, there were multiple sections of NADYA Park--offices, parking, retail, etc. So we decided to take the retail escalators in Loft. At the time, it was a good idea. Was it? No, because the escalators stopped at the 7th floor. We ended up trying another set of escalators (because THERE WERE MORE, FOR SOME REASON) and found a cafe that only sells omurice (omelette rice, which is rice wrapped in an omelette, basically), but we weren't really feeling it.
Finally, exhausted that we were getting so lost in what was basically the future/Tron Legacy in Japan, we asked the information desk where the restaurant was.
It no longer existed.
THEN WHY WAS IT ON THE DIRECTORY? Your guess is as good as mine. Nagoya Design Youth Amusement was not as amusing as we had expected.
Unfortunately, that whole ordeal had made us even more hungry than before, so we left NADYA Park and immediately found an Italian restaurant. It smelled like pizza! It smelled good! We went in!
It was the longest and most exhausting dinner EVER. First we couldn't figure out how to order because the waitress gave us a menu with individual pasta orders and then another for sets, but then she told us we couldn't order pasta alone, we had to order it with sets, but Gray is a vegetarian so she only wanted pizza, but we couldn't order the pizza alone like you could the pasta, you had to order the pizza in a set--
--So ordering took 30 minutes. Then we got our food and it was okay, not great, so we decided to add fondue to our line-up. The waitress said she had to check in the back (aka call the Emperor) to see if that was okay, and it turned out to be fine but we had to wait like another hour for the fondue to cook (we suspected they were driving to the wheat fields to get ingredients for the bread and/or milking the cow for the cheese). But when the fondue came it was delicious. We only had to wait three hours for it, no big deal.
At the end, when we paid, they gave us point cards.
Me: Hey look, we have point cards!
Massiel: ...But we're never coming back again.
We're not.
SUNDAY
Sunday it snoooooowed! We were supposed to go back to Sakae and NADYA Park, because we never actually went to Loft after the exhausting Italian dinner--the weather was supposed to take a turn for the worst (aka snow) and Massiel and Gray live out in the country, where snow actually affects how trains run, so they had to leave after we ate. It was obvious, though, that we weren't going anywhere on Sunday. It was snowing and it was sticking.
We hadn't started classes yet and I didn't really have much to do--plus I was really hungry (as usual)--so I went to the supermarket later in the day. By that time we'd gotten about 3 inches of snow, and it was still falling a little, so getting to the supermarket was kind of like trekking through Siberia--but I wasn't the only one on that perilous journey, so it was okay.
At this point, please listen to my woes about Japanese supermarkets. They are great, guys--unless you are looking for things to make pasta with (provided that pasta is not covered in fish egg sauce, which I actually don't mind except when I want, you know, American pasta). Japan sells one kind of cheese. One. They also sell about 2 kinds of butter, one kind of olive oil that costs about as much as your leg does and 3 kinds of tomato sauce. :( It wasn't too bad, though, and I managed to scrape together enough ingredients to make garlic shrimp pomodoro pasta. Yummy yummy snowy day food. And it was delicious! :)
MONDAY
More orientation. Why?
After that we went to Nagoya Castle on a CJS field trip. We were kind of ehhhh about it because we'd heard Japanese students would be coming, so it was like a kind of 'we can make friends!' thing, but it turned out to be a CJS-only field trip--meaning just exchange students. But we went along anyway and ended up staying for the whole time (we wanted to leave early to get to Sakae/Loft to finally buy stationary) because our tour guide was the cutest old lady in the universe and we couldn't just leave her like that. The castle was about as interesting as castles go. Not to say that the Nagoya castle isn't beautiful and has its own slice of history--and man do I LOVE my ancient Japanese history--but the tour lasted five hours. Enough said.
After the castle, we hopped on the subway to Sakae, made our way to NADYA Park, AND FINALLY BOUGHT STATIONARY YAAAAAY. We actually went floor-by-floor looking for the things we needed, as we'd made a 'Loft Masterlist' beforehand with all of the things we wanted to buy (among them a stuffed animal with long arms and legs--don't ask; IT'S CUTE), but oh man that stationary floor. They made quite a bit of business off us, let me tell you. (Although the planner I bought doesn't start until February, so I can't quite use it yet...um.) We already have plans to go back. OF COURSE.
After a successful run at Loft, we left to find food. The only criteria: something fried. Luckily, Freshness Burger came to us in all of their yummy hamburger and wonderfully-fried onion ring glory. It was a good dinner.
AND THEN KARAOKE.
It was honestly kind of a joke at first, because after we left Freshness Burger I brought up the idea of "practicing" for when we do real karaoke, but then everyone else was like YEAH LET'S DO IT! So we did. We found a Joy...Joy? Or a Joysound? I think it was a JoyJoy. From that you should deduce that there is a karaoke chain in Japan called "Joy" with two factions: JoyJoy and Joysound. We've been to both and like JoyJoy better--it's smaller, more cramped and just feels more like karaoke. If you know what I mean.
The first thing we had to do upon going into the lobby was writing down our names on the information sheet. That was all fun and games mainly because we had no idea what one part was, so I asked the cashier and he said to write down where we lived. Okay, Nagoya. Easy, right? NO BECAUSE I DIDN'T KNOW THE KANJI FOR IT. I can read it! I can read a lot of kanji! Writing it is a different story entirely. So we dithered at the front desk for like 15 minutes trying to fill out a sheet and one of the guys behind the counter had to hide his mouth behind his hand because he was laughing at us. I don't blame him, because I would have, too.
We signed up for an hour but ended up extending to 2 hours because IT WAS SO MUCH FUN. Just, epic renditions of everything all over the place. We did Ke$ha, Britney and then a beautiful (though painful, because we were screaming the entire thing and I had a sore throat) version of I Want it That Way--wherein a passerby actually stopped to look into our room. Because we were so loud and epic. I would have bowed had I seen him, but Rachael was the only one.
Massiel also did some K-pop songs (Sorry Sorry, Lucifer, Bolero, and some failed DBSK medleys) because she's cool and knew all the dances to them, like seriously how badass, if I were that coordinated I would know all of the Arashi dances. As it is, I can do a couple of hip thrusts and MatsuJun winks, and that's about it. We also did Arashi songs! Oh be still my heart. As a side note, the other day I was in the supermarket and they were playing Arashi's Happiness. I stood there and grinned like a fool. ♥
After karaoke, as my voice decided to go put itself through a shredder, we walked through a deserted Osu-dori (it was around 10 o'clock by that time but stores in Japan close really early) trying to find a subway station. In the end we had to ask some people walking through, who responded to my question IN ENGLISH although I'd asked it in Japanese. :( THANKS GUYS, ONLY TRYING TO PRACTICE YOUR LANGUAGE, NO BIG DEAL.
I got home at around 10:30 and had to walk up a steep hill in the pitch dark. It would be the first of many walking-home-in-the-pitch-dark encounters. To all those concerned, don't worry: I walk with a weapon--my keys. Or my umbrella. Whichever is handiest.
--
Okay, I'm tired and I have an essay to finish, so this is stopping point number 2. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, etc. next post--I promise I'll catch up. You know, someday. ;)
