Sake is nasty stuff

Time for a rather long post. Yesterday was my first day at Diamond City. All I knew about DC was that it was a shopping mall a fair way across Hiroshima. My instructions to get there were to take the streetcar to Hiroshima Station, and then take a free shuttle bus from stop 27 at Hiroshima Station to Diamond City. The part that nobody mentioned was that the shuttle bus only starts running at 9:45am on weekends, and my shift started at 10:00am. I sat out front the station waiting and getting increasingly worried, and ended up walking into the Nova DC office 1 minute before my first class began, with no clue where things were in the office. I through things together and got through the day relatively well though. The kid's classes are interesting. I had junior classes today and yesterday. The one yesterday only had 2 kids - a boy who was really smart and could do everything really quickly, and a girl that cried the entire time because she's scared of new people. The one today had 7 kids, and was much busier and went much faster.
Anyway, upon the conclusion of work yesterday I came home and at 8pm we headed out for our farewell dinner for Jeremy who's leaving Japan. It cost 3000 yen per person, which is $25 or so, but it was all you could eat/all you could drink for 2 hours. It started with a barbecue of chicken, quail eggs, cabbage and a few other things. After that, it was just dish upon dish of whatever we ordered. I was still eating after most of the others had gotten full, and it seemed they kept ordering weirder and weirder things for me. I had a ton of sashimi (because people told me it was expensive and I should eat as much as I could), lamb, pork, lots of chicken, bacon salad, a bowl of rice, weird cheese balls, deep-fried squid, octopus tentacles and probably a few other things I can't remember. I had three beer, but then we cracked into the sake, and that's what did me in. I don't remeber how much I had exactly, but by the time we left the restaurant, we were all in rough shape.



Next we headed to this bar and ended up dancing and talking for another couple of hours. The funny thing is that the next day when we were all sober and discussing things, we realized that signs would indicate it was a gay bar. We realized looking at pictures that all the girls were from our party, and it put the two random japanese guys that followed us all over town once we left in a different light. At the time, I thought they were just being friendly...

Next we headed to a karaoke bar, but it was already after 1am, and I had to work the next day, and after my near lateness the first day of work, I decided to part ways at this point and head home. It was probably a wise decision, because pretty much all of us were still in bad shape in the morning. I think it's the first time that I've gone to bed drunk, and still been somewhat drunk when I woke up 8 hours later. I had a killer stomach ache all morning, but by the time I got to work and taught a couple classes I was feeling much better.

Diamond City

It's hard to capture that sheer massiveness of the place with pictures. There is a floor above this one that I couldn't even get a picture of with the others.

A restaurant menu - japanese style. I love how visual they are here. Just about every restaurant has pictures of every dish in their menu, and a lot of them actually have physical displays of all the dishes. Instead of a food court, Diamond City has an entire mini food mall inside the larger mall. They have 5 or 6 full restaurants, a bunch of different food vendors and shops, and a big grocery store all grouped together. I'll take more pictures of the mall as time passes, but hopefully this is enough to give you a quick impression.

Since I've settled into a bit of routine now, I'll probably have fewer posts about my day-to-day activies, and instead talk more about random observations and comments on the culture and people I encounter. I'll still keep people posted on any interesting goings on with me as well though.

-Richard