Kill Bill!
(full rewrite from my original post to tell the story better)
During my first month in Japan I tried to find some people to practice Japanese with. At one of my many post work trips to the internet cafe, I signed up for a local language exchange website. After some back and forth conversation, I had both a meeting with a language exchange partner and a movie date for the same day in Yokohama. Conveniently I was working at Yokohama Nova, which reduced the amount of travel needed.
In the morning I met my language exchange partner. She was a housewife looking to improve her English as a hobby. We hung out at Starbucks and talked for a while. Things went well and we set up a future meeting.
Next stop was working at Yokohama Nova. One of my lessons had two giggly teenage girls. In the lesson they asked me what kind of girls I liked. Since Nova has some very strict rules about interacting with students and there were supervisors teaching in the next cubicle, I tried to avoid the question. I like to think that I was able to avoid the question casually and look professional while doing it. In reality I probably blushed and stammered.
After work I met up with my date at Yokohama station. She was a university student who was both very outgoing and very good at English. We started out by getting conveyor sushi in the station. We ate really good sushi and I even spoke Japanese a few times. Things were going well! When we finished dinner, my date took me to a discount movie ticket store that was a few minutes away from the theater. I didn’t know such a thing existed, and am not exactly sure the economics behind it, but any chance to avoid paying 1800 yen for a movie is a good thing.
A few days earlier I was in the Voice open conversation room at Kawasaki Nova. We were talking about movies and I mentioned that I was going to take a new female friend to see Kill Bill. At that point, my students explicitly warned me not to do that because Kill Bill was a terrible date movie. They said it was violent and cruel and we would have nothing to talk about after the movie. I explained that when I was talking about Kill Bill, my date said she was excited to see it because Lucy Liu was in the movie.
Apparently the date thought since Lucy Liu was in Charlie’s Angels that Kill Bill would be similar to Charlie’s Angels. I think it was during the first knife fight in the movie where she started to feel uncomfortable. By the end of the movie when The Bride was hacking her way through The Crazy 88s like a human blender, my date had resorted to covering her eyes and peeking from time to time. On the way back to the station we really didn’t have a lot to talk about and the walk back was awkward and mostly silent. I sent her a text later apologizing for the bloody movie and asking if she would like to hang out again sometime. I never heard from her again.
5 years of being off the market does not help someone who has little to no skill with the opposite sex at all. Also, when someone tells you strongly that a movie is NOT a good date movie you should really take the time to listen. They just might be right.
Drinking in Japan 