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.