A Weekend of Legend

Captain's log:

So this weekend involved me not following through on my stated objective of saving money. Thursday night involved going out and grabbing food at a convenience store, Julia, Rika, and I decided to split a bottle of sochu (20% liqour-thingy), and going to a park to hang out/play soccer. Rain ended the soccer, so we went to an Izakaya (Japanese style bar/restaurant), had a lot of fish, I got a free gin & tonic, and much festivities. Barely made the last train.

The real fun, however, didn't get going until friday. We all went to Sannomiya for dinner and karaoke. Dinner was awesome, everyone splits the check, and every item on the menu is ￥280 (about $2.80), which still ended up being about $15 a person (there were about 12 of us). We go to karaoke, and some people first dick around with rap songs and whatnot, I heard someone mention Frank Sinatra, and I immediately put New York, New York in the queue. Within about 20 seconds of singing I hear "holy shit," and my tipsy ego skyrocketed. Since no one wanted to go after me, I sang Part of Your World afterwards. I didn't really like it because the timing on the words was funny. Eventually our full crew of 20 some-odd people arrive and most of us get progressively drunker and drunker, leading to extreme awesomeness. I ended up singing/yelling the night away and eventually collapsed from exhaustion on one of the benches in the room and fell asleep around 3 or 4 in the morning. We were woken up at about 5 or 6 because we had to leave.

We get Mcdonalds for breakfast, I am shocked they had mcgriddles, so I order one. I'm holding onto it by the wrapper, because I thought it was a small bag-like device. Well I am proved wrong by it opening and my delicious bundle of mcgriddle falls onto the sidewalk. Robert starts laughing at me and I stare at it for a good while trying to wrap my brain around what just happened. Then I yell "No! You're not going to win this, God!" And I pick it up off the sidewalk and eat it along with my pride.

The rest of the day was fairly uneventful, it was my host-niece's birthday (or yesterday was, I dunno), and we went to hang out with them. We ordered sushi for dinner, which is NOT what you want when you have nausea. Thankfully this didn't end poorly.

Today was also uneventful, went shopping at hung out with friends, I bought socks.

I've found the dating thing is much different here. In a good way. If you came here, you'd notice a lot of fairly unattractive dudes with smoking hot girlfriends. Basically if you have the courage to talk to a girl, you are a made man. Also, dating is a lot less stressful here. There's no need to be low-key and sneaky, you don't have to drag things out and be like "well they did this, so they must like me, so I'll do this really subtle thing and sorta show that I like them." There's none of that dating "game" nonsense that I so loathe in America. Here, it's basically "I like you, let's date," "ok." And that's that. There are some subtleties, because you can't be that direct at first, that's creepy wherever you are. You text a lot (calling plans suck), and shamelessly flirt every chance you get. Japanese folk LOVE emoticons. And usually depending on how many/what kind they use give you a pretty good idea. Such as the smiley face with hearts for eyes.... And yes, I've gotten that already ;P

And on that note, it's really hard to budget your time between three girls.