On Saturday morning Kuniko went off to work and left me to deal with my hangover. Actually it was nice to rest up at home and do nothing for a couple of hours. I used Kuniko’s train pass to get to Kobe to buy tickets for Star Trek later on, and then came home and went back to sleep for a while. When Kuniko got back in the afternoon she joined me and we both got in some Z’s before going back out to Kobe for the evening.<\/p>\n
The purpose of the night on the town was to see a coworker friend of Kuniko’s playing at a club in Sannomiya. Since the show didn’t start until 9:30, we killed time by seeing Star Trek at a local theater (and we really liked the movie) and then had a couple of drinks at the Belgian beer place. It was about 9:20 when we arrived at the place, which turned out to be a restaurant called Papa’s Bistro.<\/p>\n
It was a fairly small place, and all the seats were taken when we arrived. We managed to make it up to the band to say hello to Kuniko’s coworker. He was the only Japanese member of “Beergarden” – the other members were foreign guys – mostly in their 30’s and 40’s. We said hello and good luck, and then went back to watch the show. <\/p>\n
As it turns out, the best part of the show was before the band even started. As they warmed up, more and more foreigners came into the place, and it was apparent that everyone knew each other, and Kuniko was by far the youngest person in the restaurant. Not only did the place fill up with foreigners, but a lot of older Japanese women – some dressed in way too skimpy outfits. These cougars walked around hugging all the foreign guys (I guess the women were regulars as well) and it made for quite a scene. <\/p>\n
I’ve made a point to avoid the “gaijin bars” in Japan because of the customers they attract – and this was a great example. Some of these foreign guys were in their 50’s and 60’s, and to me they seemed to be still holding on to this party culture that a lot of (most?) foreigners embrace when they come to Japan. I don’t know any of these people, and a lot of my views are probably biased, but I can safely say that it was not my scene. For her part, Kuniko was pretty shocked to see this particular social situation… like me, she doesn’t spend a lot of time in foreigner bars. <\/p>\n
The band started up and they did a mix of covers and original material, mainly popular rock songs. Kuniko’s teacher friend was playing bass, and he did a few vocals too. Overall the band was pretty good, but we only stayed for the first part of the set and then headed back. I think the sight of old Japanese ladies in cocktail dresses chasing around middle aged foreigners was a little too much for us. <\/p>\n
This middle aged foreigner made it to Okubo by midnight, and after a little shopping we headed home and right to bed. No wild parties for us tonight.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
On Saturday morning Kuniko went off to work and left me to deal with my hangover. Actually it was nice to rest up at home and do nothing for a couple of hours. I used Kuniko’s train pass to get to Kobe to buy tickets for Star Trek later on, and then came home and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1588","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pOpl7-pC","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1588","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1588"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1588\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}