Friday, June 4-Saturday, June 5

On May 30, I had ￥2500 left. On May 31, I was paid for 11 days of work, reimbursed for my plane ticket, and given my entire travel expenses from the dorm to work and back for the duration of my stay. I could finally afford to do something besides sit around in the dorm. Everyone else had plans to go to Tokyo on Saturday, but I wanted to play Go on Saturday, so I was trying to find someone to go on Sunday (yeah, yeah, a Go pun. You can't really avoid them. Get over it) so I wouldn't have to figure out the trains by myself for my first visit there. It turns out I didn't have to.

To begin Friday night, we went to get yakiniku (焼き (yaki) - to bake or grill; 肉 (niku) - meat. Not terribly creative). Someone told us about some place a few minutes away that was pretty cheap, so we went. We mostly just had regular pork and beef, but we had some beef tongue.

It worked out to about ￥1500 per person. We'll probably go back.

For the rest of the night, we went back to the dorm and played Super Smash Brothers 64. Someone had the great idea (read: awful) of playing 2v2 with the losers taking a shot at the end of the round. During this time, one of the Japanese residents came in and joined us. To make a long story short, the other guys drank a lot more than I did and were too hung over on Saturday to go to Tokyo, so they decided to go on Sunday instead. やった！

On Saturday, I went with two of them to eat lunch at Yokosuka Chuou. We had some Korean style spicy ramen. After lunch, they stayed around there, and I took the train towards the Keikyuu Kurihama station to play Go. When the train came to a stop at the wrong station, I knew something was amiss.

Some of the regular train lines (as in, non-express type) split at times. Part of the train will continue on the normal route, and part of the train will branch off to another area. The branch is usually only a few stations, and at the end of the line, it waits for a few minutes before going back in the opposite direction. If you're in the wrong section of the train at one of these branches, you have to get off and transfer to another train. I did not know this. Fortunately, it only took me about 30 minutes to get everything straightened out, and since the fare is only determined by your entry and exit points, it didn't cost me anything extra.

I made it to the Go club and played for 4 or 5 hours (it's ￥1000 for no matter how long you stay). I played mostly teaching games with the same guy from last time, but at the end, he had me play against someone who he said was also around 1 dan. It was really intense. I did really badly in the opening and was behind for most of the game, but I was able to start a really big fight that lasted for a large part of the game. In Go, black has the advantage of having the first turn, so white is given 6.5 points at the end for compensation (the number varies a little in different places). I won by 4.5 points. It was a great game. Afterwards, we took the train one stop over to YRP Nobi and walked to his house so he could drive me home.