Friday beer in Opera Tokyo
By yennyotero. Tuesday, 15. April 2008, 13:25:39
Have you ever wondered how is a friday beer in other Opera office? I can tell you a bit about friday beer here in the Tokyo branch.
Ref: If you dont know what a friday beer is, please refer to Friday beer, Øverdahl, Espen Andre 2008.
Friday started as a relaxing day since lunch time. It was such a beautiful day in Tokyo so we decided to eat in the park. It was beautiful to walk next to the river and see all the cherry trees around.
Cherry trees are called "sakura" in japanese. When the spring starts announcing its arrival, sakura trees blossom with pink leaves that look like made from pink cotton. This is when sakura madness starts and everything has to do with "sakura". You will find sakura cakes, sakura lunch boxes, sakura ice cream, sakura hand cream, sakura perfume, sakura residences and even romantic songs about sakura. Something I dont yet understand, is why everyone needs to take a picture of the sakura trees every year and put it as a background on the keitai (mobile phone)... wasn't it good enough with pictures from last year?
Anyway, we went to a near park and in the way we stopped by a small store called "Creative Mama" where they specialize in food on the box.
Ordering food in Japan is a bit of a challenge because all menus are in Japanese (they could be in binary and it would be same as hard). Sometimes, even the prices are in japanese which makes it even more difficult to tell apart a main dish from a drink or half an hour of music.
So, my strategy to order food is to let everyone else order first and go for a recommendation or the best looking dish. When there is no one around, I fallback to the "I feel lucky" strategy which is to point and hope for something good to come... yes, life is exciting in Japan!!
After the hour lunch break (yes, that is the rule) it was nice to go back to work and wait for friday beer to start. Contrary to Oslo where friday beer religiously starts at 5 sharp (and there is even a countdown widget for it http://widgets.opera.com/widget/6640/), here it starts getting interesting at around 5:30 or 6pm and the consumption of alcohol is definitely lower.
To start, we needed something to place the snacks but, as we did not find the bowls, Hironobu-san showed his ability for origami and teached us how to make snack bowls out of sheets of paper and the peanuts had a new home. Then, we had interesting snacks as dried green peas or these cheese-bars looking sausages that tasted just like fiskeboller (not so yummi... ).
When the beer was over we went to the closest karaoke bar. I was super excited because it was going to be my first time in a real japanese karaoke bar! As expected (or as seen on Lost in Translation), they gave us a private room with a TV and a remote controlled system to select the songs... all songs were in a different tone and version than the original (at least the songs I could recognize) and they all had crappy homemade videos in the background.
Something I was not expecting was the huge selection of english songs that come in yellow pages-like books... they even had "Malagueña" (the same one as in Kill Bill ) or the latest hits of Juanes
. Singing "La camisa negra" felt almost like singing the Colombian national anthem... as close from home as I can get from the other side of the globe.
I was also surprised by the "all you can drink" strategy of karaoke bars. Maybe I should have expected it because of the entry fee (2500 yen) but I am still thinking of alcohol in nok, and I am not so sure they could keep the business running if they had to pay Norwegian prices for alcohol.
Differences from "friday beer" in Oslo
* Starts more at 5:30 than at 5 pm
* The ratio beer/employees is lower
* There are more unknown snacks in tokyo and more popcorn in Oslo
* There is music being played from an ipod
* There might be people playing with the Wii
* There are more girls
* If people get hungry, pizza may come. But beware, everything falls down from this pizza
* If people still hungry, they have dozens of small restaurants where you can get a complete meal for about 50nok (beer included)
* Tom may fall sleep
* You would see your colleagues sing. And some of them, as Tsukasa, can even sing well!
* You may see prince Torkjel singing "barbie girl" with Kaori... amazing!
* Conversations and jokes happen in Japanese and English at the same time
Ref: If you dont know what a friday beer is, please refer to Friday beer, Øverdahl, Espen Andre 2008.
Friday started as a relaxing day since lunch time. It was such a beautiful day in Tokyo so we decided to eat in the park. It was beautiful to walk next to the river and see all the cherry trees around.Cherry trees are called "sakura" in japanese. When the spring starts announcing its arrival, sakura trees blossom with pink leaves that look like made from pink cotton. This is when sakura madness starts and everything has to do with "sakura". You will find sakura cakes, sakura lunch boxes, sakura ice cream, sakura hand cream, sakura perfume, sakura residences and even romantic songs about sakura. Something I dont yet understand, is why everyone needs to take a picture of the sakura trees every year and put it as a background on the keitai (mobile phone)... wasn't it good enough with pictures from last year?
Anyway, we went to a near park and in the way we stopped by a small store called "Creative Mama" where they specialize in food on the box.
Ordering food in Japan is a bit of a challenge because all menus are in Japanese (they could be in binary and it would be same as hard). Sometimes, even the prices are in japanese which makes it even more difficult to tell apart a main dish from a drink or half an hour of music.
So, my strategy to order food is to let everyone else order first and go for a recommendation or the best looking dish. When there is no one around, I fallback to the "I feel lucky" strategy which is to point and hope for something good to come... yes, life is exciting in Japan!!
After the hour lunch break (yes, that is the rule) it was nice to go back to work and wait for friday beer to start. Contrary to Oslo where friday beer religiously starts at 5 sharp (and there is even a countdown widget for it http://widgets.opera.com/widget/6640/), here it starts getting interesting at around 5:30 or 6pm and the consumption of alcohol is definitely lower.
To start, we needed something to place the snacks but, as we did not find the bowls, Hironobu-san showed his ability for origami and teached us how to make snack bowls out of sheets of paper and the peanuts had a new home. Then, we had interesting snacks as dried green peas or these cheese-bars looking sausages that tasted just like fiskeboller (not so yummi... ).
When the beer was over we went to the closest karaoke bar. I was super excited because it was going to be my first time in a real japanese karaoke bar! As expected (or as seen on Lost in Translation), they gave us a private room with a TV and a remote controlled system to select the songs... all songs were in a different tone and version than the original (at least the songs I could recognize) and they all had crappy homemade videos in the background.
Something I was not expecting was the huge selection of english songs that come in yellow pages-like books... they even had "Malagueña" (the same one as in Kill Bill ) or the latest hits of Juanes
. Singing "La camisa negra" felt almost like singing the Colombian national anthem... as close from home as I can get from the other side of the globe.I was also surprised by the "all you can drink" strategy of karaoke bars. Maybe I should have expected it because of the entry fee (2500 yen) but I am still thinking of alcohol in nok, and I am not so sure they could keep the business running if they had to pay Norwegian prices for alcohol.
Differences from "friday beer" in Oslo
* Starts more at 5:30 than at 5 pm
* The ratio beer/employees is lower
* There are more unknown snacks in tokyo and more popcorn in Oslo
* There is music being played from an ipod
* There might be people playing with the Wii
* There are more girls
* If people get hungry, pizza may come. But beware, everything falls down from this pizza
* If people still hungry, they have dozens of small restaurants where you can get a complete meal for about 50nok (beer included)
* Tom may fall sleep
* You would see your colleagues sing. And some of them, as Tsukasa, can even sing well!
* You may see prince Torkjel singing "barbie girl" with Kaori... amazing!
* Conversations and jokes happen in Japanese and English at the same time
