Week in Review pt. 1 (of 3)

So, I could talk about how I've been really bad about posting, and that I'm sorry that I fell off
the post-map for a while, but that would make me one step closer to this guy:
http://xkcd.com/621/ - so lets just move on. Also, this last week has been pretty crazy, so I
tell you story. Lets start on last Saturday (Sept. 4th), shall we?

Sept. 4th, Sunday

A while ago, Winston and I were looking for a place to play Go - Japansese board game, simplest game in the world, hardest game in the world, check it out - and we were told about a Go center/parlor type place in Kisarazu. (One train stop north of Kimitsu - about 9min on the train) Well, about 3 or 4 weeks ago, we finally made it out there to check it out, and it was pretty much everything I expected it to be. You know how in movies and what-not (I'm sure they actually exist, but I've never seen it) there are parks with chess sets on tables, and old men sitting around playing chess? It was basically the same thing in Kisarazu, except it was indoors- imagine a really really tiny food-court type area, except there was no food, just board games and old men. Awesome.

Well, Saturdays are the most popular day to show up and all kinds of people show up. Winston and I are close to the worst players in the place, (and I'm significantly worse than Winston - he
beats me pretty consistently) and this Sunday was particularly bruising to the ego.

(Hahaha, I make linguistic joke: in Japanese, they call "Go" "igo" - pronounced "ego" with a
slightly elongated "e" sound. Linguistic side note: all syllables in Japanese get equal length -
as opposed to English, where we rush through the unaccented syllables- so vowel sounds, and
double vowel sounds get the same "presence" as the more common constonant-vowel combination. eg: a, i, u, e, o are the vowel syllables and can be used alone, and they have the same "Weight" as syllables like ko, sa, to, me, ru, etc.)

Right, my igo ego: first I played some old man, who I think was one of the better players in the
place. My first hint was the huge handicap I got - one interesting aspect in Go is that the
ranking system between players is pretty clear, and to make fair games against disparate level
players, you get handicaps. Then we started playing...it was rough. We actually just ended the
game without counting up points because he thrashed me so hard. *sigh* So my next game was
against a mom (o-kasan) of one of the kids at the center. She wrecked me, too. Deflating,
definitely, but it was ok, because after the game we talked for about 30 minutes.

Talking to people is always a fun thing for me now that my Japanese is "good" (relative term!)
enough to actually say things. Also, most Japanese people have some level of English ability, and
many of them are eager to have someone to practice their English with. So most conversations
turn into some form of language exchange: they speak English until they come up against something they can't express in English, and I do the same thing in Japanese. It can be really fun if both people are pretty laid back about the whole language barrier thing, but its a different kind of satisfaction than actually having conversations with a stranger. I try to treat it like a big
game.

After that, I played one more game against a kid. He was 12, and he destroyed me too. Go is a
super complicated game, how can a kid who hasn't even mastered algebra be that good at this game? Seriously, he had trouble counting up the points at the end of the game, but he was still able to get way more of them than me! Grrrrr. Winston suffered a similar fate against the 12 year old kid's younger brother. After that, we decided to call it quits for the day.

To recover from out sound thrashing, we headed up to Chiba for dinner and drinks with out Chiba friends: Merdith, Ewen, and Joe. The three of them had their sports day that Saturday, so they were ready for some R&R. Merdith, Winston, and I went to a yakitori (kind of like marinated shishkebobs) place and dug in while waiting for Ewen to finish with his teacher's party and for Joe to wake up from his after-work nap.

After the first round of beer, we decided to start in on the sake. We don't really know much
about sake, so we asked the waitress for a recommendation, and, without telling us what we
ordered, she brought us this totally delicious bottle of cold sake. Now, I'm not really a fan of
alcohol harder than wine - and really, I stick to beer most of the time- but this sake was
amazing. I was sure that the house had brought us some riddiculously priced sake, and so (only
after ordering a 2nd bottle, of course) we asked how much we were really spending, answer: 500
yen = 5$. Hot Damn. We drank a lot of sake that night. It was awesome and wonderfully laid-back. We just kicked it in this small, very Japanese restaurant talking, relaxing and drinking sake. At one point, a pair of Japanese dudes came over to us and asks to take pictures of us, because we are just that cool. Ewen showed up at the restaurant, and being the crazy Scottsman he is, immediately picked up the drinking pace.

Afterwards, we met Joe at the train station and went out to another bar and hung out for a little
while. I borrowed someone's longboard outside the bar and spend probably a good 15-20 minutes just cruising around the block. I forgot how much I enjoyed longboarding; it was wonderfully nostalgic, and it was a really nice board, too. I miss my longboard. I suppose its not really mine anymore, though. Last I heard, Sonia had given it to her RA at SOU, so I know it at least has a good home. I'm a big fan of the notion that that board was bought in CA, broken in in WA, and now resides in OR. (I'm also a big fan of acronyms this morning, apparently)


We missed the last train out of Chiba, so we ended up taking a Taxi back to Yotsukaido, which is
where Merdith and Ewen live, but Joe, being the crazy(er) American he is, decided to stay out in
Chiba all night. So we get back to Yotsukaido and pass out at around 3am.