The Two Best Days In A Week

"There aren't enough days in the weekend."

Rod Schmidt

You know what? Now I've understood the significance of Fridays. To working people, it is the gayiest day in a week. So, the worst thing ever to happen is making it through the work week only to be sick on a Saturday. That is just too much to take. I guess I'll be super damn emo if that ever happens lol! Three weeks have passed since I started working and all three weekends were packed with wonderful activities. The first one coincidentally fell on my birthday and I went for the MSAJ hanami gathering in Yoyogi Park. 

For the second weekend, Saturday was filled with the visit to Ueno Zoo. 

Sky Bus Tokyo, a red double-decker bus that takes tourists around the city.

On Sunday, I was supposed to join Kai Cung and the rest for a Thai lunch buffet in Marunouchi, Tokyo. They have been there before and from the photos I saw, it seems to be a decent place for good Thai food. I already began to make a long list of food I'm gonna eat even before we headed out.

We came to the restaurant and guess what? The staff standing in front of the restaurant told us that the offer had ended in March. No more lunch buffet anymore. Not giving up, we decided to walk to another branch in Yurakucho. This time, it was the crowd that made us decided to forget about it. There were easily more than thirty people ahead of us and it was already two plus. Our stomachs were already growling like mad, so waiting is not an option.

Super potong stim, but no choice. Wanna emo also no mood already because we were just too hungry to do that haha! We returned to the earlier restaurant and ordered a course meal instead.

Bangkok Kitchen. A visit after my first time in Ginza branch almost two years ago.

Love the restaurant's ambiance very much.

Fresh shrimp in spicy sauce (kung chae nampla), golden spring rolls filled with mixed vegetables (paoh peay sai pak), fish pancake (tod man pla),   
golden bean curd filled with mince shrimps (thung ngun yuang).



Spicy avocado salad (sengwa avocado).



Spicy shrimp soup (tom yam kung).



Stir fried seafood with yellow curry powder and steamed rice (khaow seafood pad phong karee).



Tapioca with coconut milk dessert.



The four of us who went for the lunch. I'm on the reflection on the mirror, just in case you see only three people haha!



The leaves are starting to grow their shoots as spring is here. In a few months' time, the trees would be fully dressed up.



Tokyo Station under renovation. By the end of this year, it will open as Tokyo Station Hotel.

This weekend, the plan was going to see tulips in Showa Kinen Park in Tachikawa, Tokyo. However, due to the poor weather and timing, we cancelled the plan. In replacement, the destination was Roppongi, to see a movie. 

Watching movie in Japan can be considered a luxury. Unlike in Malaysia, where one ticket costs only around RM 10 (correct me if I'm wrong; long time didn't see movies already lol!), here it costs at least 1,500 yen (RM 60). You tell me, how-lar wanna watch movie every week, right? It'll be a different case if I print money notes lol! Therefore, watching movie in Japan is like an annual event to me haha! I can't remember what's the last movie I watched here, which indirectly tells you how long it has been since my last visit to a cinema in Japan.

Had our early lunch at Soup Stock Tokyo.

A great place to enjoy nutritious yet delicious soup.

 Onion and chicken curry and onion cream potage soup set.

One big difference between the movie goers in Japan and Malaysia is that in Japan, the audience will never head to the exit door until the whole thing has finished. They will wait until the credits part has come to an end. Probably they wanna make sure that they make full use of the ticket since it costs a bomb to see movies here. So, whenever you see people standing up when the credits start to show up, you can almost certainly tell that those are confirmed gaijin haha!

We saw James Cameroon's Titanic in 3D, which came out early this month. My last time watching this movie was 15 years ago, when I was only a ten-year-old boy. Back then, what I understood was a huge ship called Titanic hit an iceberg and sank into the ocean. Fifteen years later, watching the movie was a totally different experience. Now that I've learned and experienced what love is, I guess I appreciate the movie even more.

Toho Cinemas in Roppongi Hills.

The ticket that costs 2,200 yen as it's a 3D movie.

Here, we get to bring back the 3D glasses.

That's how "Titanic" is written in Japanese. It's pronounced as "Taitanikku" lol!

Reminders to the audiences inside the cinema.

Still sempat to camwhore before movie starts.

Overall, the movie was great. Hmmm, I wonder if I even need to mention it here? We were so immersed with the movie that we didn't realised it ran for three hours! I didn't remember the details from the movie I watch in 1997. What I remember was that my parents asked me to close both of my eyes during one scene in middle of the movie. I didn't asked for the reason and just closed my eyes. Haha, damn stupid, right? I'm pretty sure you guys know which scene I'm refering to, right? You guys better don't act stupid like me when I was ten haha!

Anyway, it seems that several nice additions have been included into the opening and closing parts. Some real footage of the sinken ship during a recent exploration into the seabed of the Atlantic Ocean by Mr Cameroon himself appeared in the opening scenes. And according to Kai Cung, the ending part where Rose drops the blue ocean diamond has been changed. Not sure about that though.

A nice park looking down from the Roppongi Hills.

Talking about Titanic, the most memorable and my favourite quote would be by Rose, when a staff asked for her name upon arriving in New York. "What's your name, miss?" "Dawson, Rose Dawson." It just shows how much she loved Jack and how she just knew that if he were still alive they would eventually get married and have a life together. 

Lovely and very touching.

The First Step To Becoming An Engineer

"Work beautifully"

Higurashi Kaoru Chief

Uchida Human Development Co., Ltd.

The phrase above has nothing to do with putting up make-up to make yourself look beautiful at your working place. Speaking of which, I'm neither a fan of woman putting up excessive make-ups which conversely make them look kinda scary sometimes haha!

That two words above we taught to us, which refer to the appearance you portray when you work; the way you communicate with another person, your sitting posture while you are working on your assignment, the enthusiasm you show when you are in the process of completing a task, etc. If you apply the right way accordingly, they will certainly look beautiful.

Homemade breakfast - croquette in between English muffin with lettuce and mayonnaise. Hot Milo drink to go along with the two muffins.

Three weeks has come and gone and it's just another five days to go before I get my first paycheque in my life. Just thinking about it already gives me a sense of excitement. However, when I think about my house rent, electrical, water and gas bills, that is not a happy story at all haha!

Anyway, I shall start from where I stop the last time I blogged about my training. There are several phases which will end in early June and I am currently in the second phase - the longest one (3 weeks). In this second phase, we learn about the foundations of information technology, fundamental business knowledge, foundations on computer, network and database. Before this phase began, we sat for a diagnostic test to measure our level of knowledge on those topics. At the same time, we will also sit for a test at the end of each topic. Feels like going back to school sometimes haha!

Tokyo station at eight in the morning. All four escalators were set to ascend to the ground floor. I have not found out 
how should one gets to the platform if he wants to descend lol!

Classes starts at nine and end at five, and we will spend another thirty minutes writing the daily reports. One hour of lunch break plus ten-minute break every one hour or so are given through the course. The first "culture shock" I got in the early stage was how strict the chief (that's what we call our facilitators) regarding punctuality. If the time is 10:39 and a ten-minute break follows after that, we will have to return by 10:49, not 10:50, which most of us will usually do, round it to the nearest minute.

But well, this is Japan and that is how things work. Not even a single minute is left wasted.

The crossing that I take every morning to the training place.

There are 47 employees in total, coming from nine different companies - all IT related ones for this phase of training. Out of the 47, only two of them are non-Japanese; and you guess it correctly, the two are from my company. Joining me is Samitha from Sri Lanka and the two of us are some sort like the odd ones out.

I talked to some of them from other companies and they told me they don't have a single non-Japanese workers in their company. Now I understand the way they perceive us; as if we are aliens lol! I was quite astonished by that fact, but at the same time grateful to myself because there is a great mixture of Japanese and non-Japanese workers in my company. Damn rojak and muhibah I tell you.

During the casual chat, I also heard scary stories about other companies, that require their new employees to go to their company in the morning before heading to the training place. Guess what they were made to do at the company? I'm pretty sure you will be super surprised. They were asked to clean the staircase, one step by one step, with pieces of cloths. This is damn shocking and scary. I am not sure if this is a kisah benar or cerita rekaan semata-mata where they just made up just to spice up our days though haha!

Tokyo Station at six in the evening. Renovation work to turn this building into Tokyo Station Hotel will be completed by the end of this year.

During the first few days, everyone seemed to be damn serious. Even between my group members, they talked to each other using honorific language (keigo). I understand in some ways it is a good practice before we enter the real business world, but sometimes I just feel that using the keigo just create a huge gap in between us.

To me personally, using keigo among friends makes me feel uncomfortable. However, as this is the culture here, I guess we just need to remember a popular Malay idiom - "masuk dapur memasak, masuk bilik tidur menguap" (do as the Romans do). If you'd realised it, I have actually modified the Malay version and made my very own idiom haha!

However, after some time, everyone began to get loose and became more cincai. We can now talk crappy stuff without really feeling the pressure to use keigo everytime we have conversations. We do silly stuff, for example by bowing to each other as much as ninety degrees, in a sarcastic way lol! And one of my group members gave me a new nickname, Karubi =.=

There is this Thai restaurant - Aroyna Tabeta near Tokyo Station which is popular among the Japanese.

Fried bitter melon and egg, fried minced pork and salty egg, spicy pork curry.

Everyday at the beginning of the lectures, someone will be assigned to be the ketua kelas. His job is pretty simple, just like what a class monitor usually do - ask everyone to stand up and wish the facilitators ohayou gozaimasu (good morning) or yoroshiku onegaishimasu (I'm counting on your teachings), and close it with arigato gozaimashita (thank you) at the end of every sessions.

After two weeks, I was requested to be the class monitor last Friday haha! That reminds me to my time in Primary One when I used to be the assistant class monitor. It seems that my promotion from an assistant class monitor to becoming a class monitor took me 18 years. And that only lasted for a day lol!

Had a nice dinner on a Friday night at Gyoza-no Osho (餃子の王将). Gyoza with fried rice and fried chicken set meal.

The day will start of with a 3-minute speech. During the first week, a couple of individuals will volunteer to go in front and talk about a pre-determined topic for three minutes, and then receive feedback and comments from the floor. After a week, the presentation was done within the group members. My group came out with a good idea in deciding who will present on a certain day. Everyone will write out their main points into a paper and place it on our group table every morning. We will then vote by pointing to the article we would like to hear the most at the same moment. The one with the most votes will give a speech on that day.

During the first day, I did something different from the rest. It's not really a big deal actually; I only use a blue paper to write my points. That made everyone went "woooahh" when they saw it haha! All the others five decided to choose mine and I was the only odd one pointing to another article. Damn awkward haha! And the end of the speech session, the chief took my article and showed it to the whole classroom. That was the day I became even more well-known in the classroom haha!

That blue piece of paper is what that launched me to stardom lol!

At the end of week one, the chief made a surprising announcement. We would change groups. Just when we started to get used with our group members, we would have to change seats and get new group members. That came as a huge surprise; reminds me of the reality game show "Survivor" when there was one season where the tribe members got switched that ultimately changed the dynamic of the game.

There was one evening after our training when I was walking to the train station that we talked about our abilities to speak foreign languages. My colleague, Suzuki then asked me to teach her some Malay phrases. Usually when we learn a new language, the first phrase we will learn would me "I love you". So I told her in Malay, it's "Saya suka kamu.".

She misheard that and said, "Saya suka kamo". Just in case you don't know, kamo (鴨) in Japanese means duck haha wtf!

Waiting for trains after work at Akihabara Station.

The train interval is about two minutes but the sea of human just never subside. However, luckily that the Japanese are the world's most civilised people 
that they don't push but line up properly. 

After three weeks of taking trains to work, I have learned a few tricks and lessons. The trains will be usually more packed on Monday morning than other days. Monday blues which made everyone woke up late I guess. To avoid the crowd, it is either you go out thirty minutes earlier or later.  I usually follow the former because it is just too risky to go out at the last moment.

Talking about the craziness of the trains here, there was one morning when the train I took was super crowded. I don't know what words should I use to describe it but pokoknya it is super crowded. Not enough with that, the train suddenly came to stationary in between two stations for more than five minutes because apparently there was some accident in one of the stations.

This can be considered quite a spacious coach. So you can imagine how much worse it is in the morning.

A lady who was standing less than one centimeters right in front of me seemed to be suffocated. She was totally squeezed in between the commuters very tightly. She took off her mask and asked me if I could make some space for her. I tried my best to step back to give her some breathing space but there were simply no room for me to move back. She then started to cry, in the super packed train. Damn dramatic. She got down at the very next station and I also saw another lady who seemed to almost lost her consciousness and being helped out of the train.

Crazy stuff I tell you. I wonder if I'll turn crazy one day seeing all these crazy things almost everyday haha!

Pretzel from Auntie Annes. Suzuki brought me to get these at the stall at the basement of Tokyo Station.

And on last Friday evening, after the end of our training, we returned to our company in Akihabara as they prepared a welcoming party for the new employees. The people there were super nice and friendly but most importantly, crazy haha! There was this senpai one year my senior who asked me, "So, where does Calvin Klein come from?" I told her I'm not sure where that brand originated from, but she was actually asking where I came from lol! I tried to correct her and told her my name's not Calvin Klein. "No, no. I'll call you CK1 from now on," was her reply lol!

This senior can really talk crap because when I said I come from Taiping, everyone but her gave me a clueless look. In less than 0.38 seconds, she responded by saying, "Yeaaaahh! I know that place! It's a very warm place, isn't it?"

With Mr Kumo (which means clouds in Japanese lol!), Samitha and his Sri Lankan senior, Suzuki and another senior (pic credit: Ishizuka-san).

I was like, "A-B-U-T-H-E-N?!" haha wtf!

However, not everyone were as smart as her. Some weren't sure where Malaysia is located but yet they still die die wanted to show that they know it. These kiasu people wanna appear smart; so they gave me some landmarks that they "thought" is found in Malaysia. "Merlion" and "Bali island" were two of them. The most amazing one however, was "Jakarta"! I was like how on earth can the capital of Indonesia to be located in Malaysia!!!

My tiramisu birthday cake that Kai Cung bought for me on my birthday eve. I only ate it three days later lol!

The conversation then shifted to topics about Sri Lanka and one of my Sinhalese senior told us a tale about elephant. In Sri Lanka, it is believed that if a person runs vertically through a running elephant, his lifespan will become longer. It actually makes sense because come and think about it, it is almost certain that that person will lose his life at that very moment if he ever attempts doing that. But if he successfully runs through the elephant, then he will live on which indirectly makes his lifespan longer. Correct or not?

There were more endless stories to tell but I guess I shall stop for now. Our guru besar a.k.a. Mr CEO ended up a little drunk but he still made it a point to send the three of us to the elevator. Just one last word, pardon me for having the elephant story to abruptly end this entry haha!