Friday was an interesting day..

It started out pretty quiet. I went to campus to go to a Japanese class but couldn't find it in the building. Since I was just going to see what the class was like and not neccesarily planning on taking it, this was no big deal.

I went into the Japanese tutor room to use one of the computers for the internet connection. I sent a few e-mails and studied vocab with smart.fm. I also did some kanji studying with Anki there as well. I pretty much did that and had lunch on campus until my class at 2:30.

For lunch I had a "豚みそ丼” which is a bowl of rice with some pork and miso I guess. It was very delicious. I found out that there is free hot green tea at that cafeteria. So I got that rather than buying a drink this time around.

After lunch I went to a convenience store to get something sweet. I picked this white bun thing at random since I wanted to try something potentially new. I think it was a kind of peanut butter and cream thing on the inside. I didn't like it very much. It had some strange taste to it. The cream kind of tasted like that you have in a tiramisu.



My 2:30 class went well. The teacher is nice. She went to Tokyo University, which is very impressive.

After class was done, I went home and it was already about 5:10. I cooked up some veggie curry that had some onion, potato, and carrot in it. It was fairly standard curry. I went to the TV lounge to wonder what the people on the screen are saying while I ate my curry. I met a Chinese guy whose name in Chinese is Jiang, in Japanese is Kyo, and in English is James. I like to refer to him as Kyo. He was a pretty friendly guy. He spoke Chinese, Japanese, and English all fairly fluently. He was better with Japanese than English. He said I spoke Japanese well for only studying it for two years in university. It was mostly my accent that was good. I still can only speak in very simple terms in Japanese.

Some of the American guys from the floor came in and said they were going to play beer pong. I explained the game to Kyo in Japanese since he didn't understand. I've actually never played beer pong, but have seen it on YouTube or whatever else. We ended up not playing.

Kyo said he was having a really hard time learning English. That trying to read English was so hard for him. I thought this was crazy since he can read effing Chinese. By comparison, I would think it would be so easy to read English once you can speak it. It sounded like he was having a hard time remembering vocab. So I hooked him up with Anki.

It soon got to be around 8:00. Anna was planning a Karaoke trip, so we all went to the meeting place. I invited Kyo to go with us. He accepted and came with. The group ended up being huge. It was about 25~30 people! We all went to this place to get drinks and a little food first. It had a long table with cushions. It was just big enough for our group. So it worked out.

The deal with this place was that everyone pays about $15.00 and you get unlimited drinks for 2 or 3 hours. But we all had to choose between drinking martinis and hard liquor or beer exclusively for some odd reason. We went with the martini choice since there were a lot more choices in that category.

The group on our way to the bar

At the drinking place

Kyo and I when we were sharing some sake

Kyo used his chopsticks in the weirdest manner I have ever seen. He says he had been doing it that way his whole life. It looked like it was a really difficult way to eat, but he made it work.

Kyo ended up being really useful that night. The people working at the place we were at were Chinese, so Kyo was our go to man for really communicating what we wanted.

We then soon went to Karaoke. The group thinned significantly at this point. The karaoke was fairly typical. The worst part is that many songs were just midi versions of the instruments of the actual song... This was most apparent when smells like teen spirit came up. Kurt Cobain is spinning in his grave after that.

Some random Japanese women came in and started flirt with the Kyles. I think they might have been prostitutes. But the guys didn't manage to pick them up, so I suppose maybe not.

No pictures of the Karaoke. I didn't really think to do that.

OK time to do laundry.