We went to dinner with our housemates today

After numerous dodgings past in the hallways and muttered hellos and other random responses to Japanese questions (mine are always random. if someone talks at me in Japanese and it sounds like a question, I just say good and hope that they asked me how i'm doing that day) we've finally hung out with our housemates. Naoya and Shido live in rooms across the hall from us, but we've never really spent time with them. Bret usually has long conversations in Japanese with them, but I'm not really comfortable yet trying out my limited vocabulary and never know what to say when they don't understand me in English, so I generally just chicken out and avoid them :P

We went to a house-style restaurant, which is just a restaurant owned by and lived in by the operator. We had to take off our shoes and had a whole room to ourselves. The tables are very low and you sit cross-legged on cushions. The menus were in hirigana and katakana, and on neat little rows of paper vertically pinned to the walls with tacks. The table also had a grill in the center. Naoya and Shido ordered for us (we told them we eat just about anything) and got 'okonomiyaki' which is kind of like egg pancake batter with shredded cabbage, carrots, pickled ginger and your choice of meat. There was a bacon pancake batter and a shrimp batter, and we cooked them on our little grill. The table had oyster and soy sauce and also a thick, dark syrupy sauce. They were all pretty good. We also had yakisoba noodles after the pancakes. Sadly, I forgot to bring my camera, but the place was good and the owner was really nice, so we might go back and I'll take some pictures then. It was definitely an interesting dining experience.

When we got home we all kind of stood in the little communal area/hallway and Naoya offered us some cake from a local bakery. I offered to go get some plates and he said, "What, you want to eat it out here???" I did want to eat it out there, as Bret had been doing laundry all day and we'd hung up all our clothes and underthings all over the apartment (most Japanese apartments do not have dryers, just washers--but they do give you lots of poles to hang up your laundry outside your windows), in addition to it's general day to day messy-ness :P Their rooms are smaller, and they insisted we sit down and have cake in our room, so I quickly tore down all the drying clothes (which were by now dry anyways) and threw them in the closet and shut it. We only have one chair in our room, and though I offered it up, we all just sat on the floor cross-legged like we did in the restaurant. It was nice though, we had some tea and talked about films and music that we liked. Shido talked about liking Twin Peaks, and I asked him if he's seen David Lynch's other stuff, like 'Inland Empire' and Mulholland Drive. He said he loved them all and is a big fan of surrealist work, which was cool. His room is also awesome. It sort of looks like the inside of an Urban Outfitters store, but not as kitschy/tacky. He has deer antlers on his wall and everything is cream colored and there are a lot of fabric hangings--it really makes the small space look nice. 

I think we'll have at least a couple more outings with them before we move, they are very nice. They also suggested a lot of other places we could try for dinner and Shido is a fan of art so he knows all the local museums and things.