Surreal Sabatical

Last weekend was insane.

Friday night after my college Japanese class (which I just realized I haven't mentioned before now), I went out for dinner with my friends, as we sometimes do. The class is taught by Japanese students of Bunkyo University who want to be Japanese language teachers in the future. Thus, the class is very cheap and a lot of ALTs around Northeast Saitama do it. Due to the sheer amount of people going to dinner with us that night, I ended up sitting with the Japanese student-teachers and having a long, and very strange conversation that covered topics as simple as conversational English, and as weird as Katahira-san's interest in The Klaxons. It was a blast.

You'd think the weekend would stop there, but then if that's the case, you haven't properly learned the order of the days in a week. Saturday, I attended a 4-person combined birthday bash in Tokyo. The location was (and here's the best part) a Texas-themed bar, complete with live country music, line dancing, and chili fries that are topped with CheezWhiz, as if it were some kind of delicacy. Listen: You haven't lived till you've been taught to line dance by a Japanese woman to the soothing strings of a Japanese man singing "All My Exes Live in Texas". His Southern accent was perfect! I mean, perfect! And don't get me started on the roughly 8 dollar price for a bottle of their "imported beer"--Coors Light!

By the way, Sunday comes after Saturday. We had Monday off for Health and Sports Day (despite what you may think, the Japanese love holidays), so once again, we were off to have fun. We ended up doing Karaoke in a town a few stops away called Kasukabe. Not so fun fact: A famous comic book author living in Kasukabe was found dead in Gunma prefecture recently when he went hiking and fell off a cliff while trying to take a picture. Going to Kasukabe to have fun just seemed sort of wrong to me at the time, but that didn't stop me from having a great time. We sang, drank, and we were merry. You'd think that at the end of this, I'd be too tired to do anything, but Marisa and I were in such high spirits that we decided to watch a pirated copy of Zombieland (look, I miss American movies).

And Monday I slept.