Last night after work I joined a couple of students for dinner and drinks in Tarumi. We went to a small Italian restaurant near the station that nobody had been to before – one of the students had walked by it many times, so decided to reserve some seats there. At first when we arrived the place was empty, but it started to fill up after about 8 pm.
I really liked the atmosphere at first, but unfortunately there were little problems that started popping up. For example, during the evening the workers were always dropping things. I probably didn’t even notice the first couple of times, but probably over the whole evening they dropped 8-10 dishes. After the first five dishes dropped I started to wait for the next ones, and each time they dropped I had to laugh to myself. For my own amusement I imagined that for tonight the workers were undercover policemen or something. Who drops that many dishes? Or who hires people that drop that many dishes?
Seemingly oblivious to this my dinner companions talked about various topics and we mainly stuck to English. They really got into speaking English together, and that was good news. Two of them were a little nervous, however, so it did get quiet sometimes. Which made the noise of crashing entrees even more dramatic.
Near the middle of our meal one guy started trying to repair some broken equipment, and he kept banging on some piece of metal behind the bar. Over and over he banged on it, so loud that we couldn’t hear each other talking. This lasted for a solid five minutes. He was completely unconcerned with our comfort and satisfaction, and probably will be wondering later why his restaurant is not so busy.
Anyway, the food was pretty good, and the dinner companions even better, so we managed to have a good time of it anyway. I’m hoping that we’ll have a chance to go somewhere else in the future – maybe somewhere quieter.
