Each Coming Night

Today I showed up on the doorstep of the Aoba-ku Yakusho (Ward office) to pick up my newly minted Alien Registration Card literally minutes before they dropped the steel curtain and closed up shop. This card is actually a real ID card - made of plastic, was produced with printing technology, and features a hologram of some famous building; as well it should since it took them an entire month to make it! It's nice to have my card now because that means when I'm arrested, I can prove I belong here and won't be detained for not carrying my passport. And I even made it easier on the cops - unlike my school ID where I'm doing my own rendition of "Blue Steel", the picture on my registration card was taken early in the morning and I hadn't shaved or done anything to my lopsided-from-sleeping hair. So it looks like my very own "Fulbrighter arrested for domestic violence" mug shot.

Tonight, I went out with Anh (the Vietnamese girl I met the other day) and we ended up eating tonkatsu and drinking beer. The tonkatsu was a bit disappointing - the meat was tough and the sauce was a bit thin. But I'm glad that we went because I haven't had tonkatsu in a long time, and though we first said that anything would be fine like polite Japanese kiddies should, it turns out we both actually wanted to eat tonkatsu anway. That was just the first in a line of many things we ended up having in common; our conversation over dinner was really nice, and we both admitted that when we first saw each other we felt like we had met somewhere, sometime in the past. After dinner, we went for a nice stroll along the river and headed home when it was too cold to stay outside anymore.