Written: Monday, June 22, 7:11 pm
Friday my work day was quite normal, except that by 8pm I decided that I was going home. As such, I was on the train back by 8:40ish and by 9:00pm I was back at Juso! I then proceeded to go to the Ramen shop across from the trains station, 十三ラーメン, and ordered one of their nice ramen bowls. The FREAKING BIG bowl with a LOT of pork, noodles, and a lot of other things was 820 yen! I was so happy eating that bowl, you have no idea. To give you an idea, that was my dinner Saturday and Sunday as well. I know, there are other things to eat in Japan, but every night as I thought of that delicious bowl of noodles I just couldn’t stop myself. Talk about self-control…
Anyway, Saturday I woke up at around 11ish and had lunch at the sushi place down the street where the sushi just goes around. It’s called Kaiten-Sushi (回転すし） literally rotating sushi. It was quite good. After lunch I just went back to my room and wrote and re-wrote my essays for the HBS 2+2 application. At around 9pm I decided that I was tired of rewriting essays and watching TV and headed to dinner (ramen).
I must say, though, that Japanese TV is quite interesting. I don’t know if the ~15 channels I get are representative of what people like to watch in Japan, but I’ve seen a couple of funny things. There’s 2 channels that are just there to sell you things, and these two women were talking about this ‘massager’ that would be perfect for your neck, the back of your EAR (yes… my ears are quite tense) and as she used it she would exclaim how good it felt. I don’t know if they were trying to kid anyone, but that was no massager. At least not for the body parts they were saying.
Anyway, something else that was quite interesting was watching Terminator in Japanese. All I could think the whole time was like: “There’s NO WAY that girl knows Japanese. And Arnold Schwarzenegger, he also doesn’t know Japanese, come on.” I thought it was funnier than anything else.
After going to dinner Saturday, at around 11pm, I headed to the train station to go to Umeda Station, where I was meeting a friend to go out to a bar. At around midnight we headed to the bar. Something I have to say is, in Japan you either go to bars early, and miss out the fun, or go at around midnight and stay all night. The trains stop running at around midnight, so what a lot of people do is go at midnight and take the first morning train back. And yes, that’s what I did. The first train back was at 5am. :s
So we went to the bar, and this is something about Japanese bars, they are probably twice as big as my apartment, and that’s not too big. You walk in and immediately everyone knows you’re there, and you know who is there. No mystery, and no way to hide. Anyway, I had a few drinks and met a couple of people. I actually met two people from Perú! Who would have thought, I came all around the world to Japan and I find Spanish-speaking people. It was nice to just speak Spanish when even in America I don’t get to speak it all that often.
At around 4:30am a few people I met, my friend, and I headed out to get some food. It was a good ‘after partying’ meal. It went on until about 5:45am, when we decided to head to the train station. It was funny to see all the people that were migrating to the train station at that time. You could see these girls/women wearing their fabulous dresses and with their make-up messed up. It was great. Also, according to my friend JKim, in Tokyo when she went out she saw that at around 5am one of the employees in one of the food places was waking up a bunch of people who had fallen asleep there while eating. Awesome, right?
I finally got home at around 6:30am and then showered and got to bed by 7am. Woke up at 1pm, had something from the ‘conbini’ and then edited my essays a bit more. After that I had dinner (ramen once again, they were good, believe me) and then at around 6pm I couldn’t wait any longer and fell asleep… I woke up at 11pm and then just went made a few calls (through Skype, of course) and got some midnight snack from the conbini. That conbini is so convenient, oh yeah, I wish we had those in all corners in Boston. They are pretty awesome. America should replace Dunkin Donuts by Mister Donuts, and 711 by Family Mart and Lawson.
Anyway, I finally went back to sleep at round 2am and woke up at 7:40am cause I had to be in lab by 9:15am. I got to lab by 9am, which was nice. In lab today I confirmed that no, I don’t understand scientific papers presented in Japanese, and yes, I am now the official mopper here. When it was time to clean the lab I basically just went and picked up the mop and started mopping, cause that’s what I do best.
I then did some cell passage, sent in my essays for criticism, and then went to lunch. Lunch was good, and cheap. I then prepared some samples for an SDS Page Gel, ran the gel and did silver staining on it. Now there is another beautiful gel on my post-doc’s lab notebook as proof of the hard work I do in lab. It’s actually the first time I do something useful in three weeks, I think.
Now I’m hungry, it’s 8:15pm, and I’m wondering if I should just go home and get dinner close to home. This might result in my dinner being ramen again, haha… we’ll see. 😀
Okay, that’s my weekend report. There are probably a couple of things missing from my weekend reflections, but that’s alright. Next weekend is the Kyoto trip! That should be awesome.
-Omar
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