Coming and Going

Well, now that all my shopping is done it's right back to normal I guess.

On Wednesday Sere and I met up with J in Asakusa for some shopping and the like, and that was nice, we got to walk around and eat delicious senbei and get rained on a bit. We tried, rather unsuccessfully, to find the Miyazaki shop we had been to before in 2003, but as you can guess we had no luck. Afterwards, Sere and I went up to Moriya to meet Greg, but of course, my phone way dying, and, Sere and I missed like every single train imagineable trying to get there. We got out of Ueno a bit late, then caught the Tsukuba Express, which was fast, but then we missed our train to Minami Moriya by a matter of seconds thanks to me going to the wrong platform and Sere not being able to move fast enough to make up for it. But we had delicious kaiten sushi, gorged ourselves, and I bought the most amazing fur jacket thingie ever, which is mega pimp and rocks.

We had a great time drinking shochu and listening to music and joking around. Sere really enjoyed it, and of course, we missed our train on the way home cause I had to go pee and I AGAIN went down the wrong escalator and as such missed our train by moments, thusly making us have to catch a taxi home from Shin Matsudo.

Friday was Rob's last day at Nova. For his last lesson he wore the beer costume he's wearing in my MySpace photo. Well, technically his last lesson was a free, so that was no big deal, and I imagine it was fun teaching like that. All the same again, it's weird that he came and went in the time I've been here, and that I will be here much longer now after he leaves. I'm trying to remember what I did after work on Friday...AH! I remember now.

On Wednesday, Sinhae called me cause she was in Japan on business, and by business I mean that she works for a theme park in Seoul and got to come here and go to all the major theme parks to see how they're different from hers. Such hard work, as you can imagine. Anyway, she called and we made plans to meet up in Shinjuku after I finished work on Friday and she finished spending the day at Disney Sea. How does she do it? I just couldn't handle the stress.

So I finish work, hop on the mass transit system, and make my way to the Shinjuku east exit, where, remarkably enough, Sere was already waiting for me. Sinhae arrived shortly afterwards, and we went to Wara Wara where we enjoyed many drinks, took many photos, and had an all around great time catching up. Sinhae is just the sweetest thing on Earth, so it was really good to see her. I'm definitely going to make plans to go see her in May as part of my nonstop travel extravaganza.

But, then, of course, on the way home, the Joban rapid is late, and then the local in Matsudo is of course late (thanks jumper, wheover you were), and then the taxi queue at Shin Matsudo is 40 meters long, so Sere and I try to walk up the street to hail a cab, and the fuckers slow down and point to the taxi queue. Ugh. So we get back in line, wait until 2am for a taxi and finally make it home for me to go to bed and get up early for work the next day. Sweet.

Saturday was Dave's birthday dinner in Ueno and Sere's last night here, so we all went to TGI Friday's and enjoyed wonderful traditional North American food, i.e. massive burgers and every conceivable form of fried potato. When we finished eating and the guys got ready to go to their allnighter, Ty, Sere, J and I made our way home.

This leads to an entire other set of stories, so I'll wrap this one up and start a new one.