There is ice skating on TV. It and the hunger are sending me to sleep. Yet, the pizza is on the way from Pizza Hut. Yummy. The sleepiness may be related to the heavy drinking bout on Friday night. The much anticipated (for the day I knew about it) Christmas Party turned into three successive parties. First off we went to a Meat Restaurant called Sakura. There we had a varied menu as repeated below:
1) Chicken Cream Soup
2) Raw Beef Salad (free intestinal worms?)
3) Beef Stew
4) Beef Steak and Fried Shrimp.
5) Tiramisu.
And much alcohol including beer, nihonshu (sake) and Syochu (whiskey). Then it was off to a local institution called Big Echo for a bout of karaoke. In Japan people usually sing one at a time and many do old songs called Enka. This puts a premium on performance not fun. So, they were a little disappointed until some of the teachers like Goto and Kuma got involved. Then followed Hey Jude by The Beatles and a few Mangled japanese titles. A second extra enkai ended up with a small bar and more Karaoke. My songs for the evening included "Black Dog" by Led Zeppelin, "Delilah" by Tom Jones (Well I did go to Uni in Wales) and numerous Beatles songs including "Hard Days Night." "Help" and "Hey Jude."
To be honest the night had begun with the hope of not getting drunk and ended up with me feeling the most drunk i've ever felt. So a bit of a failure there. Saturday was a bit zombiefied though a nice walk to Tsutaya to rent some dvds and to a bakery for lunch improved things somewhat. There followed a viewing of Terminator 2 and some lovely Yakiniku (Korean meat) with Chijimi (Korean pancake) for dinner with Natsumi. We followed up with ice cream and Japanese dramas on TV.
Sunday has not made me feel any less sleepy. The morning was spent watching Babel and vaguely writing a poem for my novel: The Death of Earnshot Magorincsun. Then for lunch I met a Japanese friend at a cafe called Habana. Maybe this should be Havana but Va does not exist in the Japanese syllabury. Not that the place has anything to do with Cuba. I ate pasta with a small salad, tomato soup, hot croissant and a hot milk tea. It was nice and quite cheap. Over these courses we talked about our partners, my lovely Natsumi and her Spanish boyfriend David. It was nice to talk to a Japanese person about their non-Japanese boyfriend. It will surely help me learn about Natsumi more and it helped her to know it wasn't just her boyfriend who thought some ways different to her.
It is also good to meet up with friends and talk about things, anything. It makes me think that I should catch up with the other teachers in my city more and also some old friends in other cities. Living in a big comfortable flat with a wonderful partner like Natsumi makes being lazy at home very easy.
Today Natsumi and I decided to have a fun road trip to Kanazawa for Boxing Day/Our Anniversary. There we'll go to a private onsen and see the sights of a city i've always wanted to visit. We also decided to see a bit of Paris next time we're in Europe, next summer.