The Whole Erk Catalogue Tales of a Geek Abroad

When we last left off, I was stopping for a coffee before showing up late to the midyear ALT conference. Once we did arrive, I attended my seminar normally. At lunch, Jen and I met up with another group of ALTs and went out to the same place we'd stopped for coffee earlier, the Sendai Mediatech cafe.

It turns out that most of our friends are vegetarian, particularly in that lunch group. Being a vegetarian in Japan is a hard job: Japanese culture does not really allow for the idea that some people have specific strong eating preferences. In Japan, "can't eat" means "don't like to eat". I have no idea how they cope with allergies.

At the mediatech, there were three meal options: beef curry, meatball sandwich, and pasta. Only the pasta could be prepared without meat, so all the veggies in our group had the pasta after assurance that it would be meat-free. When their pastas did arrive, though, they clearly had some kind of meat in them. "What is this in the pasta," they asked. "It's fish!" replied the waiter, and assured them all there was no meat. Fish, you see, is so un-meat in Japan that a LOT of people can't understand how we could possible group the two together. They don't seem to make the "dead animal" connection.

Luckily (to some extent), the only vegetarian in our group who doesn't eat fish is Maria. Through the one Japanese person with us, we asked if they could make sure her pasta didn't have even fish in it. Just vegetables. The waiter then tried to take her fish pasta away, and we said it was fine, that one of the people waiting for a fish pasta could just have hers. That, I think, was what really confused him; I have no idea why, as five people were waiting for fish pasta and he had just brought two. Anyway, after a significant wait, he brought over six plates all of totally fish-free pasta. Even the JTE with us, who hadn't ordered a vegetarian pasta at all, got fish-free meat-free pasta. Specialised orders simply do not work here. Jen and I had beef curry, which was delicious and did not require anyone to think or keep track of separate orders. Whew.

After the seminar ended, we met up with eight of our friends (over the course of a few hours of people running off and rendez-vousing) over coffee, and then went bowling, ostensibly as a birthday celebration for me. Wee! It was a great time, and Jen got some awesome video that I shall upload in due time. I am a phenomenally bad bowler, though I managed to come in around the middle scoring bracket, as we are most of us very poor bowlers. Jen beat me! By about 3 points.

Bowling was excellent, and afterwards we headed off to an organic buffet (in Japnaese, a "viking style" restaurant). Since about half of our group was vegetarian again, we decided a buffet would be a great way to make sure they were satisfied without challenging the staff so much. Unfortunately, the restaurant would not allow reservations. When they arrived they assured us they had space for 10 people, and without asking us, took us in and placed us at two separate tables near each other. That was a little unfortunate! Dinner was still good, of course, and we had a great talk with the people at our table, but it would have been a lot nicer to sit together as a full group. Oh well! It barely detracted from the night as a whole.

At dinner, we tried to convince everyone that karaoke afterwards was a great idea. We did succeed in talking Chris and Yoshiko into coming with us; after the restaurant, we bumped into someone advertising a deal at a nearby karaoke bar. It seemed well appropriate for our situation, so Yoshiko spoke with him briefly and he took us to the place. He actually lead us there and booked our room right off the street; it was pretty cool! We got an hour of karaoke for 500 yen a piece (about 5 bucks), in a small and dingy little room. Fortunately, the sound of our merrimaking soon made the cramped little hole into a fun place, and we had a great time. Nobody had any particular skill at karaoke, which made it a lot better. Among the highlights of the night were Bohemian Rhapsody, Scatman (we have a video of that that I may upload a short segment of at some point; none of us new the scat well, so we just made silly noises. It rocked), and Hey Ya by Outkast, the song that got us all singing together. Karaoke is too fun.

The night was nicely capped off by us missing our train by 10 seconds. We waited around for the next one for about 45 minutes, interrupting our wait by shuttling a few stops south on a short-range train to wait in a different place. Good times.

I had a hell of a good birthday.