Tokyo is hot tonight
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
Today must have been the hottest I've experienced in the city, yet. It's only about as hot as Toronto was for the month before I left, but it's even more airless because of all the buildings. As Satoi-san pointed out at lunch time, the "urban heat island" here is fierce.
This afternoon's trudge through debugging the ongoing problems with the developer's environment was livened up when I was asked if I'd like to join the "young person's" gang that was forming among the EDS consultants at the office. It's very Japanese that they would make an 'official' team with a name out of a gaggle of coworkers who want to shoot pool or go bowling once a week. Only, once I'd agreed to join, they dropped the "young person's" name and called it the "under 40" gang. Bastards. ;)
Tonight Jon and I went over to the Nepalese restaurant I've been to every week since coming here, and then a suprisingly roomy little drinking that seems to have been modelled after Gaijin places. Both are immediately near the hotel. We then met with Chika and a group of her coworkers, and drank in a place that's hard to describe.
But here goes.
When I was first coming in on the bus from the airport, I was amazed at how the concept of zoning just doesn't seem to exist, here. This impression was heightened when I had my first look out the hotel window and noticed that one of the mixed business/apartment buildings a block from here had a miniature commercial driving range on top of it. And that most of the apartment buildings 'round Shibuya seem to have dodgy-looking cicsterns on top of them, often propped up with little more than some awkward poles.
Anyway, the place we went to had a small plaque on the wall out front. But it was otherwise unmarked, and located on the roof. But not on the roof of the building that was marked, or where you ascend the stairs. Instead, - at least as far as I could tell - it was atop an adjacent building. You climb the stairs, then climb an unlit final set of stairs to the roof, then cross a pallet to the next building in a way that I doubt I can properly explain (the two doors that open onto the pallet actually jam together if both are open simultaneously), pass through a small room that makes up the bar "proper" with a few seats among the liquor bottles and food, then round a blank bit of the top of the building and find yourself in a cozy space that could seat at best eight people. And there was regular wait staff service from the small structure you'd passed through.
So it was a good time. The gang we'd caught up with only had one real English speaker, so it was a bit of a crash course in Japanese. I made my most ambitious forays into Japenese yet, including "watashi wa san chu kan Nihon niru", which (I hope) means "I (watashi wa) have been in (niru, but it's complicated) Japan (Nihon) for three (san ... kan) weeks (chu)".