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japanese snacks and forgotten tickets, july 16 - 20, 2001
July 20, 2001 13:31
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--my first business trip--
--kurage--
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july 16th and 17th marked my first ever business trip, and i started it off with a bang, let me tell you. i wake up at 5:45, eat a leisurely breakfast and take a leisurely shower. get all spiffed up-khakis, tie, boots, etc., and wait for my coworker downstairs at precicesly 7:04 (we're to meet at 7:05). i am incredibly proud of my punctuality, as most of you probably are, given my past punctuality record...so last week i was trying to remember the japanese word for jellyfish. on at least three occassions i recall talking with my japanese colleauges about the food i ate at last week's korean sashimi place. each time i forgot the japanese word for jellyfish, and each time the english word jellyfish didn't suffice... so we finally politely gave up the conversation so no one would look too stupid. anyway, as i had little to do on friday, i finally decided to look it up. "sou da! kurage da!" i exclaimed, in a rather loud, booming voice. instantly, all my coworkers snapped their heads in my direction with a look of amused confusion. teehee, i thought. imagine sitting in a quiet office with one odd foreigner. everyone is busy with their work or busy avoiding it, and all of a sudden, the odd foriegner (in probably a funny accent) yells, 'aha! it's jellyfish!!!'. he then proceeds to lean back in his chair with a satisfied smile on his face. yeah well....incidentally, the characters for jellyfish are water and mother, water momma.... so we start walking towards the train station, and my coworker casually asks, you have your ticket, right? haha, i laugh. of course i have my ticket. what kind of idiot would go on a business trip without his shinkansen ticket....haha. .....
....
SHIT!!!!!!!!!!
i slapped my head in anger and apologized profusely in japanese and tell them that the ticket is right where i left it so i wouldn't forget it - in my desk drawer in the office. "alright, hurry up and get it", they say, so i run to my bike, haul ass to the office, run up the six flights of stairs and into the office, grab my ticket from the drawer, run back down the stairs before the guy who's always early could say 'huh?', and jet back to the dorm. did i mention that the average temperature right now in hanno is about 90 degrees? yeah well, i might as well have jumped in the salty water of the japan sea my clothes were so frigin soaked. my colleagues are laughing by now because they wanted me to take my time and not get hit by a truck or anything...anyway, all's well that ends well, right? well, we missed the first train, had to change our shinkansen tickets, and we ended up running into Akita Shindengen one minute before we were to give a rather important presentation. classic.
after the hectic morning and a leisurely tour of the facilities, i got to hang out and talk with the president of the company we were visiting for a while. his broken english was pretty good, and he asked me how hot his receptionists were. of course they were hot, as all japanese company president office assistants are. but what am i to say? if i agree, he will think i'm the standard american hornball over in japan just for the women...(hey, come on!!! i have different motives! more or less) and if i say no, then he'd think i was insulting his hot secretaries. or maybe he'd just think i was gay. anyway, i just laughed and said yes, they were very pretty. he didn't let it go at that, of course. 'especially the young one, right? blah blah blah blah...you like japanese women? blah blah blah blah ....'
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--the importance of alcohol--
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so i blink my eyes and we're at another location of yet another glorious nomikai. you will all be familiar with that word by the time i'm finished writing all these. nomikai = fabled japanese drinking party! ah....there were ten of us in total, so it took a while for the chick to bring out the tall frosty mugs of brew. there was an akward silence with people casually looking over their shoulder to see if the waitress had come yet. see, no one can touch the food in front of them until the party is officially started, that is until the toast is finished, and the toast can't start until the beer gets there. (and the toast can't start until all the participants of the party are there as well. i found that out last night, when as we were waiting for our train home, four of us went out for dinner and brew in tokyo. i went to the bathroom after they ordered four mugs and came back about two minutes later to see three eager japanese faces, patiently waiting to touch their tall, frosty, mugs of beer. teehee...) ha. a look of relief shone on everyone's faces when the chick finally came out, five mugs in each hand. after a toast, a cheer and applause, everyone began the enjoyable drinking, and eating, and being merry. oh what fun japanese companies are!
after a while, they brought out the japanese sake, cause you can't be anywhere with japanese head honchos and not drink sake. and the old ones drink it like water, i tell ya. even though it's the same ethanol we use to clean with in the lab. haha. i got a lot of compliments that night, apparently i'm the first foreigner a bunch of they guys could talk to comfortably. i don't see how you can NOT talk comfortably after that much sake, but whatever. i took it as a compliment...
given my past discussions, a lot of you are probably worried about me drinking too much. haha. it's not that often. right now, it has been maybe once a week. and like i said earlier, the purpose of japanese drinking parties are not to get piss drunk and not remember anything (though it is a natural byproduct on occasion). the purpose is to get pleasantly wasted and talk and bond with your coworkers and friends. drinking parties are when people's honne [what's really on their mind] comes out. it's a chance to bitch about things, change things, and make important decisions. it's interesting, there aren't many obnoxiously, loud, and violent japanese drunks, (maybe i just haven't frequented the right places yet...), but the drunken atmosphere in japan is a bit different than in the states.
[update: i was talking with my japanese friend a while ago about this and he told me that traditionally, being drunk has been thought as as being close to the gods. that is why sake is still very sacred and used in religious ceremonies in japan today. sake gives you the power to say things you normally wouldn't say, do things you normally wouldn't do, and in that it was always considered a good thing. though, of course, moderation was also thought a good thing as well
so this is getting long, but i can't let you go without telling you about japanese snacks. don't worry, this isn't another weird seafood story, a snack is basically an overpriced karaoke bar where you go to to....eat snacks. and sing horrible karaoke. so that night's nijikai we went to a snack where two lovely women in their mid 30s (not incredibly hot, more motherly than the standard 'hostess' counterparts) waited on us. my impression was that their job was to push in the numbers of the songs into the karaoke machine (cause we're all too drunk to get it right), fill our glasses with incredibly watered down whiskey (i swear-i drank three glasses of the stuff and nothing. i wouldn't be surprised if it was whiskey flavored water), and applaud after our incredibly tone deaf karaoke attempts. it was so funny. and the company picked up the tab, which i'm sure was about 200 bucks for an hour and a half of bad whiskey and karaoke for 5 people. we all had fun though. and i think that's what is important about snacks, it's not what you're drinking, eating, and singing, it's that you're having fun...
ok. enough for this week. it seems as though all i've been talking about is drinking. next week will be different. noah is in town and we're going to the beach for the weekend with the tsukuba crew. maybe there will be something interesting to talk about then. i apologize if this is boring. deal with it or ask me to take you off the list. bye!