Once again, had a very busy week in the office but also a fun week outside the office. My friend, Noriko, had a birthday dinner with some friends on Monday night and she invited me. We went to an Italian restaurant. The appetizers were really good, but the main course was kind of like Hamburger Helper. One of the guys in the finance tech group at work is leaving the company in a couple weeks, so he took us out for drinks after work on Friday. (Social activities like drinking are very much part of the work culture in Japan.) I'm still trying to figure out if I'm going to move here, so my company's real estate brokerage is taking me around to see some apartments next week. They do all the wheelin' and dealin' for you (because you need to speak Japanese, obviously). You just tell them what you need, what areas you're interested in, and how much you're willing to spend, and they go find you some places. I'm finally starting to get the hang of the food here, I think my stomach had some growing pains to go through. Everything you're used to in the West is very expensive here, like meat, cereal, orange juice, and canned or frozen vegetables like corn, peas, broccoli, green beans, and carrots. There is a lot of noodles and rice and funny little Asian vegetables like bits of seaweed and bamboo stalk and mushrooms and, for some reason, asparagus. My friend, Dudley, gave me the first season of Arrested Development on DVD before I left, which turned out to be greater than great because CNN and the Discovery Channel get really boring and monotonous (they've been talking about Pope stuff for a month now...next!). Last night I went to catch a flick at the local Virgin cinema near my apartment at Roppongi Hills. A very fru-fru, shi-shi, posh kind of cinema experience. Price of admission = 1800 yen, about $16.50. But hey when you're desperate for something else besides crazy Japanese game shows that you don't understand anyway. I ended up seeing National Treasure, which actually turned out better than I expected. Today I ventured to Ueno Park in north Tokyo, where there are many museums and old shrines dottings the park. It was a gorgeous day, so I mostly just walked around. I want to go back to see a couple of the museums at some point. I have some time. One month down, one to go. The week after next is Golden Week, where there are 4 national holidays in 7 days. One of those days, my friend Reiko is going to take me outside Tokyo to a town called Kamakura. Some guys from my office are getting together to go bowling one night, too. I also want to go see Joe Zawinul play at the Blue Note one night, he's a well known jazz fusion musician who once played with Miles Davis and helped buoy a lot of other great jazz musicians. I also just think it would be cool to see a jazz show in Tokyo.
