16/11 Basketball and homemade okonomiyaki

Time to catch up with the blogging again! It's been a pretty eventful week and I am now chewing on some salty biscuit coated with sugar that tastes like chocolate while trying to get into blogging mode.

So! On Sunday the 16th a week ago, A and I got up pretty early to go root for K's basketball game. We went to Nakano and met up with a couple of the other JLSPers and some volunteers and started heading to the sports hall where the game was held. As per usual, going to new places always mean that you have to be lost first, but luckily we made it in time in the end!

I knew that Slam Dunk was a huge hit in Japan when it was serialized, but it wasn't until we started talking about it (some volunteers and I) that I was told that just about everyone read it when it was running. Just a fun little fact I wanted to drop while I'm on the basket topic. :D We've been starting to make references to it a little now and then.

The club K was in wasn't related to his school/university at all (as would be in a lot of cases when it comes to club activities in Japan I think), so everyone plays when they have time to. I have no idea if you have the same kind of obligation in joining club practices/activities in a shakaijin (社会人) club as with the school-bound clubs. Anyway, the K's team (it was called Twenty-Two, so I'll just refer it as TT from now on) was going against a team which seemed to consist of high school students, which they probably weren't but there was still quite an age gap between the two teams. ^^; I noticed that when it goes bad for TT, it goes quite bad, but as soon as they score a couple of points they get with the flow. They weren't really stable as a team I think, and in the end they lost with 30 points to the shrimps. :<>. Oh well!

Taken just right before TT scored a basket, turning the game over to 19-18! The lead sadly didn't last very long... There was another game going on on the other half of the hall, with two girls teams in fact, that would've been interesting to watch as well. :D

Later we went to lunch and K treated everyone to drinks as an apology for making us wake up so early to watch a game his team didn't win. XD; Wow. It's usually the other way around isn't it? But putting winning or losing aside, it was fun experiencing yet another side of Japanese life. Going to watch a friend's game and having fun makes me feel a bit more like a part of the society. I haven't had to seriously think about blending in or not yet, because I know I'll be gone after three months anyway. So I've never bothered trying to adapt to certain things, but once I return to Sweden I think I'll notice the changes I've gone through. Though because I am Asian, sometimes I've wished that I looked obviously non-Asian so I could get away with things easier. Like when I'm not able to make myself understood when I'm trying to say that I need a plastic bag when I buy groceries. I just don't want to seem stupid while people think I'm Japanese. On the other hand it'd be frustrating to always have the fact following you around that people assume you don't understand a single word of the language just because you obviously look like a foreigner. E's getting pretty sick of it and I feel frustrated just hearing what people say to her everytime she has a conversation with them. Urgh.

Getting back to topic, we split up after lunch and A and I headed home. After taking a rest, we met up at her place and she showed me how to make Okonomiyaki! Man was it awesome! :D It was so good and not difficult to make at all! Well, that is putting away the fact that I've already forgotten how to make it, but I think I'll be able to recreate it once I freshen my memory up with the pictures I took. Mm~