It's our last week of class before winter break starts, and our teachers set up a group trip to Asakusa with the 5B class. We met up at some inlet of Tokyo harbor and took a ferry up to Asakusa, where we played tourists and went around trying to interview the various people working the food stands around the temples. The first guy was a dick and said he was busy, even though he wasn't doing anything and there weren't any customers in sight, so we shrugged it off and reshaped our approach to disguise the interview as innocuous conversation wedged between purchases of snacks at the food stands. The following interviews came off without a hitch, and we were actually a bit surprised by how long some of those food stands had been in business (several generations, even). After expiring our compulsory time in the tourist trap, we moved back to school, where I attended Dr. Shek's Chinese religions class before rounding up the CSU kids for our Bounenkai (end of the year party) in Shinjuku.
The nomikai was pretty standard, except that there were a few of the Japanese students who had been chosen to study at various CSU campuses. I met one of the guys who'd be going to Sacramento, but he seemed to be more interested in Katy than myself. After the nomikai, Kazaoka-sensei, who had her share to drink, haggled with one of the guys rounding up karaoke customers outside of the izakaya, and we got a good sized group of people willing to throw down. The guy led us on what seemed like a ten minute walk all the way to kabukicho, where he ushered us into a karaoke bar called 747. It was an interesting place, with corriders that seemed to be themed after a sulfur mine. But it was relatively clean and didn't reek of cigarettes, so I'm not one to complain.
It's our last week of class before winter break starts, and our teachers set up a group trip to Asakusa with the 5B class. We met up at some inlet of Tokyo harbor and took a ferry up to Asakusa, where we played tourists and went around trying to interview the various people working the food stands around the temples. The first guy was a dick and said he was busy, even though he wasn't doing anything and there weren't any customers in sight, so we shrugged it off and reshaped our approach to disguise the interview as innocuous conversation wedged between purchases of snacks at the food stands. The following interviews came off without a hitch, and we were actually a bit surprised by how long some of those food stands had been in business (several generations, even). After expiring our compulsory time in the tourist trap, we moved back to school, where I attended Dr. Shek's Chinese religions class before rounding up the CSU kids for our Bounenkai (end of the year party) in Shinjuku.
The nomikai was pretty standard, except that there were a few of the Japanese students who had been chosen to study at various CSU campuses. I met one of the guys who'd be going to Sacramento, but he seemed to be more interested in Katy than myself. After the nomikai, Kazaoka-sensei, who had her share to drink, haggled with one of the guys rounding up karaoke customers outside of the izakaya, and we got a good sized group of people willing to throw down. The guy led us on what seemed like a ten minute walk all the way to kabukicho, where he ushered us into a karaoke bar called 747. It was an interesting place, with corriders that seemed to be themed after a sulfur mine. But it was relatively clean and didn't reek of cigarettes, so I'm not one to complain.
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