We got a late start to the day on our first morning in Tokyo, the bustle of the last few days finally catching up with us. Once conscious, we realized we were again faced with the most confusing Japanese meal of the day: breakfast.
After some Googling to the sound of grumbling stomachs we settled on a restaurant called Bubby's, the Japanese sister of a restaurant in Tribeca. With all the accoutrements of a diner, from the pies in a glass box to Wild Horses playing from the speakers, I felt like I was back in the US--so much so that I began speaking to the waitress in English as though she could understand me. Martin had to remind me that we were in Japan, which was hard to remember as we devoured our sourcream pancakes and my somewhat suspicious sausage.
Satisfied, we headed to Meguro--the district of Tokyo where the MLC Language Center and our private Japanese lesson was to be held. The reason we're in Japan in the first place is that Martin's work will pay for his flight and his housing in a foreign country if he takes a language course there. We picked Japan because it's somewhere neither of us ever thought we'd go.
Once we arrived at MLC, we were greeted by the entire office as though we were old friends. The receptionist took one look at us and asked "Martin-san and Sylvia-san?" We nodded, at which point every woman in the office stood up excitedly to greet us. We filled out quick questionnaires and then settled into a small room with our teacher, a very friendly woman named Numa who seemed genuinely entertained by us.
Our lesson, conducted using a workbook called "Survival Japanese Course," was four and a half hours long. In the first two hours, we learned all kinds of interesting things. For instance, Japanese has three distinct alphabets--one is with kanji lettering, for words that have Chinese origins, another is phonetic, for children to use and for foreign words, and the last is the traditional Japanese alphabet.
Around hour three, I started to lose it. Everything became hysterically funny, from my own disastrous pronunciation to trying to learn different tenses in a language that was gibberish two hours ago. I took frequent coffee breaks which resulted in frequent bathroom breaks, which in turn resulted in my observation that some Japanese bathrooms have knit coverings on the toilet seats. Overall, though, Martin became very good at basic Japanese, I drank a lot of coffee, and Numa had a great time with us.
For dinner, Numa recommended a restaurant across the street, so we ate there before heading back to our apartment. I stayed to rest and Martin went to the Intercontinental to pick up his friend Abe, who joined us for our part of the journey in Tokyo.
Once Abe was settled in, the three of us got ready to go out and took the subway to Shibuya, a popular nighttime area for the younger set in Tokyo. We crossed the famous Shibuya Crossing, an intersection at which people simultaneously cross on six different crosswalks in different directions, making for a pretty impressive, if hectic experience.
Our destination was Maiddreamin', a basement restaurant designed like a pastel Super Mario in which subpar food is served to you by girls dressed up in maid outfits, who occasionally burst into choreographed song and dance (video coming once I get it from Abe).
I ordered pancakes and one of the maids decorated it in a "cute" way, giggling as she drew a cat in chocolate on my pancakes. After she finished, she pointed at the dish and with the other hand over her mouth said "cute, cat, cute, cat" over and over in broken English as the chocolate melted.
We really felt as though we were in a different world, where baby voices are supposed to be attractive and giggling at cats is supposed to be charming. We finished our food and decided to call it a night, heading back to the apartment.
After some Googling to the sound of grumbling stomachs we settled on a restaurant called Bubby's, the Japanese sister of a restaurant in Tribeca. With all the accoutrements of a diner, from the pies in a glass box to Wild Horses playing from the speakers, I felt like I was back in the US--so much so that I began speaking to the waitress in English as though she could understand me. Martin had to remind me that we were in Japan, which was hard to remember as we devoured our sourcream pancakes and my somewhat suspicious sausage.
Satisfied, we headed to Meguro--the district of Tokyo where the MLC Language Center and our private Japanese lesson was to be held. The reason we're in Japan in the first place is that Martin's work will pay for his flight and his housing in a foreign country if he takes a language course there. We picked Japan because it's somewhere neither of us ever thought we'd go.
Once we arrived at MLC, we were greeted by the entire office as though we were old friends. The receptionist took one look at us and asked "Martin-san and Sylvia-san?" We nodded, at which point every woman in the office stood up excitedly to greet us. We filled out quick questionnaires and then settled into a small room with our teacher, a very friendly woman named Numa who seemed genuinely entertained by us.
Our lesson, conducted using a workbook called "Survival Japanese Course," was four and a half hours long. In the first two hours, we learned all kinds of interesting things. For instance, Japanese has three distinct alphabets--one is with kanji lettering, for words that have Chinese origins, another is phonetic, for children to use and for foreign words, and the last is the traditional Japanese alphabet.
Around hour three, I started to lose it. Everything became hysterically funny, from my own disastrous pronunciation to trying to learn different tenses in a language that was gibberish two hours ago. I took frequent coffee breaks which resulted in frequent bathroom breaks, which in turn resulted in my observation that some Japanese bathrooms have knit coverings on the toilet seats. Overall, though, Martin became very good at basic Japanese, I drank a lot of coffee, and Numa had a great time with us.
For dinner, Numa recommended a restaurant across the street, so we ate there before heading back to our apartment. I stayed to rest and Martin went to the Intercontinental to pick up his friend Abe, who joined us for our part of the journey in Tokyo.
Our destination was Maiddreamin', a basement restaurant designed like a pastel Super Mario in which subpar food is served to you by girls dressed up in maid outfits, who occasionally burst into choreographed song and dance (video coming once I get it from Abe).
Martin at Maiddreamin'
I ordered pancakes and one of the maids decorated it in a "cute" way, giggling as she drew a cat in chocolate on my pancakes. After she finished, she pointed at the dish and with the other hand over her mouth said "cute, cat, cute, cat" over and over in broken English as the chocolate melted.
We really felt as though we were in a different world, where baby voices are supposed to be attractive and giggling at cats is supposed to be charming. We finished our food and decided to call it a night, heading back to the apartment.
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