The Week

You knew it would end up being the title of a post sometime. Imagination doesn't last forever, you know.

I don't think I've had a week this busy, at least not this year. And I'm not getting any younger, much like most people I know, but still.

Monday: "Let's celebrate that guy in BDD, he's been here a month, so let's go out and eat loads of fancy things and talk and be merry"-night with the Company, as I call it.
Tuesday: "Let's take those two foreign guys in BDD to a place where they serve noodles, only it's not the usual noodle-place"-night.
Wednesday: "Let's let the foreigner who's never seen a gym before avoid working out by having him fill out forms for over an hour, until the gym closes"-night. I swear, it's harder to join a gym than it is to get accepted as a foreign national in this country, and Lord knows that takes a fair share of paperwork.
Thursday: "Let's measure everything about the foreigner who's never seen a gym before and explain to him that he needs to gain three pounds of fat, that should screw with his perception of what a gym is!"-night. Of course, they said I needed to put on eight or nine pounds of muscle-mass too, but that's nowhere near as funny. Also, I burn 1977 kilocalories on a day in which I do nothing. Don't ask me how they do it, they just know. Probably just by looking at you for two minutes, or something.
Friday: "Let's have a party at a club really-really far away from everything and make sure the foreigner almost gets lost getting there"-night. Ok, the blame for that has to fall on the Canadian ice hockey club hosting the party for the 200+ people, but yeah.
Saturday: "Let's play tennis, then eat something at a really expensive place in Shinagawa"-day-and-night. With the Company. And fun it was.
Sunday: "Hmm, it's been busy this week at work as well as in my spare time, so let's relax by walking for 238 frikkin' miles through Tokyo"-day. Yotsuya to Aoyama to Roppongi to Tokyo Tower to Hamamatsu-chou. And no, I had no idea where that was, either. Still don't, come to think of it.

So yeah. I've also seen a match or two of the premier league of Japanese floorball. The team is Shooting Stars, and I have two and a half friends on there (the half since I don't know him that well), which I suppose makes me a groupie of a male team of indoor-hockey-people. It's not bad. I even got one of the fastest shots ever, on camera. And this at a time when Shooting have only two players (excluding the goalie) on the field, compared to the opponents, who have four! Talk about a different level.


Oh, and upon crossing a, well, crossing, in Shirokanedai, I saw a tv-show being shot, starring none other than (someone I've recently been informed may very well be-) Kamenashi-san of something-fame. They were just there, filming their hearts out and keeping us from crossing the street and eventually getting almost-lost on the way to the club on Friday night, so I figured they deserved to have their picture taken.

New Topic Goodness! When I was here four years ago, doing the round-trip thing of basically all of Japan (bar Okinawa) with someone who goes by the name of Da Pete, we had access to the Lonely Planet range of guidebooks, specifically the one about Japan. This because we felt it would suit our needs far more than one of outer Mongolia. We may have been wrong, but that's the way it was. Anyway, in it, we discovered such memorable pieces of advice as "A man is wise to climb Fuji-san once, a fool to do it twice" and "Tokyo Tower just isn't worth the effort". Both of which turn out to be true, at least to some extent. If I only had one week in Tokyo, I certainly wouldn't want to spend all of it waiting in line to get to go up to the top of a tower built expressly to top the Eiffel Tower on some far-off continent, but since I'm here for a while, I figured it was about time. Besides, you get to go in an elevator! Who wouldn't pay 1420 yen for that pleasure, I ask you?!

In closing, I offer this picture, as proof that things here might not be quite like things elsewhere. I don't really know what they use their old hair-driers for in Sweden, but I'm pretty sure it's not for keeping the plants for freezing. In summer, with outdoor temperatures approaching 5 billion degrees. Celsius, no less!


The question of the day was just posed by someone close to me. "Do nomads have an address?" Do they? And if so, do they fill in their change-of-address-forms as promptly as the rest of us? See you next week.