Skip to main content

Birthday Celebrations!

My friends, L-R around the circle: Rachael, me, Matt, Sayaka, Laura, Mari, Asami, Kacey, and Saya.

On January 29th I celebrated my first Japanese birthday!  It was a great time.  I went out with a bunch of friends to our favorite Izakaya (Japanese-style bar).  We ordered delicious food, including pizza chicken skewers and ice cream with warm sweet potato and caramel sauce.  I tried some strawberry plum wine and light plum wine, the latter of which I enjoyed a bit more.  After dinner we went and sang a ton of bad karaoke, including American, Japanese, and Korean pop songs.  What can I say?  We're a multi-cultural crowd, which apparently means we're equal-opportunity for awful music.

Here's Matt with Sayaka, an English teacher at his main school (Nagamori Minami).  It was her birthday on January 21st, so the party was 1/4 for her!


To the right, Rachael and I begin to look like sisters!  Her birthday was January 10th, so 1/4 of the party was hers....

Laura and Mari cheese it up to the left.  By the way, Mari's birthday was January 9th, so 1/4 of the party was hers.  The final 1/4 was mine, natch.  One full party!


Laura drank a few giant jugs of plum wine and she handled it like a pro, while I drank most of one medium glass and half of a big one (Matt took the rest) and was decidedly tipsy.  The proof of the size of those cups is to the right.  You can see Laura's giant one in front with her body-less hand, and Rachael's also rocking a giant glass in the back there.


The requisite picture of Matt and me during the celebration.   In the first one we took, he looks like he's trying to escape... this one seems like we like each other.  Which we do.  A lot.  Really.

I greatly enjoyed my birthday celebrations.  It was a real treat to be in Japan, with people from two countries sitting at the same table, partaking of the same food, speaking in Japanglish, and getting along like gangbusters.  Definitely something to remember.


My real birthday is the 30th, so we spent the next day doing special things in the kitchen, since one of my favorite things to do is cook.  I made special buckwheat pancakes with pure maple syrup for breakfast/lunch, and for dinner we made gluten-free pizza!  No kidding.  Check out our tiny mail-slot fish grill!  We made awesome pizza crusts with our patented "flip and crisp" technique.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Some Funnies

As our first year (6 months, really) draws to a close, I think it's important to display the winners of this year's worst (as in best) English sentences. Coming in third place is a very silly dialoge written by some third-years at my school.  Another ALT discovered this and thankfully showed me.  It's obvious what they're trying for but they really miss the mark: A: Hello. B: Hello.  This is H.  May I speak to T please? A: This is T. B: Great!  I'm going to prikura (sic).  Can you come to porice (sic) office at midnight? A: Yes!  Of course!  That sounds fun!  Do you want me to bring anything? B: Sure.  Could you bring some monneys (sic)? A: Yes.  Thank you for inviting me.  I'm so bad!  See you! B: You're welcome.  Fuck you! Second place is two sentences that can be taken as a pair or as stand-alone awesomeness.  These were written by one of my third year students when we had a unit on debates: A: ...

A Return to Japan, 2015

Several years ago we had the opportunity to take some good friends of ours, Bo and Liz, to Japan. I'm going to focus on the new things we did and then link to previous blog posts for reference to the things we repeated from our time living in Japan. The trip started out awesome and then kind of fell into a bad place for me and Matt, unfortunately. I chalk it up to our inability to tell Bo and Liz when we wanted to do something different from what they wanted to do, and Matt's desire to be a good guide in the country as he was the only fluent Japanese speaker. He felt a lot of responsibility and then got really tired and very stressed out, which in turn made me very stressed out. I say this not as a rebuke of our friends, who had no way to know how we were feeling since we didn't communicate, but as a gentle suggestion to anyone who travels with friends. Say how you feel and don't be passive aggressive about it. Own up to your limitations and ask for what you need. Your ...

Enter: Germany

We stopped in Munich to visit my good friend Martina who studied abroad in America during high school.  Munich is an unbelievably beautiful and clean city, full of spectacular architecture and interesting places to visit.  The surrounding area is made up of rolling hills dappled with stupendous castles.  Martina and her man Christian were the best hosts ever, taking us all over and dealing with us in their space for almost three weeks! The first main tourist site we visited was Hohenschwangau, home of two castles.  The first we saw was Schloss Neuschwanstein, built by Ludwig II.  It was never really completed, especially inside, as the King went bankrupt during the process.  He was removed from the throne and thrown in prison, where he managed to talk his way out for a solitary walk where he drowned himself.  It's a tale befitting such a sight and such a life.  The castle itself, shown below from an onlooking bridge, is an impressive white ...