I've been asked before if i'm British, which i guess is not too strange a question.. apparently sometimes i have some sort of accent that people feel is British-ish (though i fail to hear it, but whatever), but still not too strange a question since i do have some British heritage.
But it totally weirds me out that anyone could confuse me for being any sort of Asian, because i don't look it at all. Still, the other night (Monday) S and i went to a club in Roppongi with a couple of our gal friends. It was a super nice club, with a pretty steep cover charge (at least it included 4 drink tickets though), but we ended up only using 1 ticket each. After having our first drink we went walking around and were accosted by lots of guys offering to buy us drinks ;) They were all pretty nice for the most part, would ask us if we spoke Japanese, then would offer to buy us drinks and start up some small talk. But I was really thrown off by the first guys, when we were talking one of them asked me, "Haafu?" (Are you half?) Haafu is the Japanese pronunciation for 'half', i.e. half-Japanese. I was really confused, and had to ask him a couple times to repeat what he said, just because i had to make sure that that was what he was actually asking me because i was like, why would he be asking me that? lol After i got confirmation from our friend that that was his actual question, i adamantly denied, then asked "Haafu mitai no??" (Do i look half?). Then he was all, oh well your Japanese is so umai (good) that i thought maybe you were. Haha, a nice compliment i guess, definitely a confidence booster, but he'd only heard me say a few sentences.. i still struggle with anything more than basic chit-chat. :p And still it's not the first time i've been asked if i'm half/part Japanese. It's just weird to me, lol.
Anyway, it was still a really fun night. Got to talk to some nice people and also got lots of free drinks. :D
Earlier that day we met up with some of our other friends at Keio University. We sat in on one of our friend's classes.. i understood next to nothing, haha. Did take down some notes though of kanji i didn't know from the slides. Then we met a few others after the class in the cafeteria (it was actually called "The Cafeteria", haha) for lunch, then left with a couple of them and headed out to huge park/playground thing.. i don't know how to describe it! It was 500 yen to get in, super cheap, and we were there for a good 2 hours or more going through each of these obstacle courses that they had. Some of them were kinda scary even for me, but there were a lot of really young kids there.. They would never open that kind of park in the U.S. for fear of lawsuits, but it was nice to find this kind of place with some old-fashioned wooden climbing equipment.
Ready for class at Keio!
Pondering hard
Delicious school food!
S with the guys in the cafeteria! I think they're doing "UW" in the back, lol
The famous arch of Keio
At "Field Athletics", that's what the place was called! In front of the map of the place
You can't really tell from the picture, but this was really high up! It was super scary because there was nothing to keep you from falling, lol.
It lost it's scariness after a while, so we all posed for a picture. :D
The pulley-buckets. We saw too many people tip over in the buckets, so we decided for the other crossing options..
Like the scary log bridge!
Then there were also these crazy logs suspended over the water that you could glide/pull yourself across on
Then we went to Ichi's house (on the left) and Sushi-kins (center) cooked some delicious food for us just like he used to do for us all the time last year at UW.
Had sooooo much fun yesterday too, met with a lot of old UW friends that we used to hang out with all the time but hadn't seen for over 6 months (some for almost a year), and it was sooooo awesome to see them again and hang out like old times. I'll post pictures and such about it tomorrow, because for now i'm going to try to take a little nap before we start getting ready to go out to Roppongi again (Ladies' Night at the club- ￥1000 cover and free drinks!!)
2 comments:
Isn't that funny. I don't think you look Japanese either. Sorta along the same lines. I went to Guam once with another American married to a Japanese. We went to the grocery store. I checked out before her and paid cash. And she went after me and used a credit card. The check out lady asked for ID and read her name. Japanese surname since she's married. Keep in mind my friend was very blond with blue eyes. The lady at the register said to her...are you half Japanese??? @_@ Our faces of shock. Also we were thinking...are you kidding me? I mean really? She said..do I like Japanese to you? I just said politely and fastly..."our husbands are Japanese" But man we laughed for the whole trip over that one. ; )
And I've been asked that myself like twice. And I don't look remotely Japanese or Asian either. I'm Italian American.
Haha, that's funny! And strange, especially if your friend is blonde with blue eyes.. i wonder if it's even possible for someone who's half-Japanese to have blue eyes?
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