What's wrong with this picture?

A closer look.

To clarify, this mall is called "La La Garden" and the restaurant is called "Steak Someday."

For fifteen bucks, this sake had BETTER be like jingle bell!


So i had my first day of work on Wednesday, and taught private English lessons to the following people:

*A former head of a pharmaceutical company's Quality Control and Animal Testing division.
*A depressed dentist in a Hawaiian shirt.
*Two bubbly girls with crushes on Hayden Christiansen.
*A housewife who explained to me the color and consistency of camel meat.
*An auto mechanic who told me that Sydney, Australia has "a lot of gay."

It's a pretty good deal, getting paid to talk to all these characters. I'm still afraid of kids' classes, though.


Wednesday night after work, I dragged my roommate to a bar I had passed on the street called The Lockup. It was in the basement of a building, and we had to walk through long blacklit corridors with fake stone walls while "scary" stuff lit up and made noise. At the end of all this was a door with no knob or handle, next to which was a sign in illegible Japanese. While a statue of a man in an electric chair buzzed and flashed behind me, and the alien-in-a-vat-of-toxic-waste to my left did the same, I pushed the door, pulled the door in every direction, and pounded on the door, all to no avail. We spent an awkwardly long time standing there trying to figure out what to do, and finally gave up.

Just as we turned around to leave, the door opened, and a smiling Japanese girl in a red vinyl outfit invited us to come in. I don't know whether she was screwing with us, or if we were failing to follow some instruction on that goddamn sign, but she had a TV monitor right there at her podium, from which she had been watching the whole thing.

Next, we were handcuffed and led down more low-ceilinged "rock" corridors to a jail cell with a low table. We took off our shoes, sat on the floor, ordered drinks and snacks, and were "locked in."

And that was The Lockup. Overall, it was pretty cool. Next time I'll come with more people, and a bottle of liquor with which to spike those weak-ass drinks.

The thing that weirded me out the most that night was not the atmosphere or the drinks or the curry powder they gave me with my french fries. The waitress in the red vinyl getup was taking our drink orders when we hit a communication barrier and she didn't know what Jen was talking about. At that moment, it was like someone flipped a switch, because the waitress's high-pitched cutesy Japanese serving voice suddenly switched to "Do you speak English?" in a low mature voice with an American accent. She wrote down Jen's order and switched back to a high, nasal "Shoushou machi kudasai!" ("one moment, please!") with a big, sarcastic grin.

I didn't like her one bit after that.