This will quite possibly be the greatest day of my life...you never know, could happen.
I wrote that several days ago.
Last day of work before Golden Week Break!!! And I'm off!!! I do not have to talk to any children for an entire week. I do not have to try and get some sort of response from a Junior High kid for an entire week. I do not have to try and think of interesting conversation topics for an adult class that can last an hour and a half for an entire week! Thank God Almighty, He is good and He made REST.
I haven't actually gone to sleep today. Today just sort of magically turned tomorrow and so yesterday is just sort of today. I'm heading out really soon with my camera to capture Kita-Narashino waking up on the dawn of Golden Week. It's beautiful out. A bunch of us went out to Karaoke "tonight". We were obnoxious and sang really loud and consumed copious amounts of Japanese beer and really aweful Japanese cigarettes, but we had our own room, so we didn't need to worry about offending anyone. It was great fun. We even made new friends. Two guys from New York, I'll probably see them later as one of them lives just down the main drag from me. I've put some wash in the machine, which will be fixed sometime after Golden Week (the latch on the lid is brokened, a couple of weeks ago my clothes were trapped in the machine for quite some time until I could, by the Grace fo God and a lot of prayer, finally pry the lid open to release my clothing from its tyrannical oppression by put on it by the washing machine). I'm heading out now, as I said, with my camera at like 6:30 am after grabbing a bit of rice, to see what I can capture. I had written, sarcastically, that April 28th would be the best day of my life, it wasn't, not by a long shot. But the night between the 28th and the 29th turned out quite nicely.
It's the dawn of a full week with nothing to do but explore and chill. How fabulous.
I'll update again soon.
Later:
You're probably wondering what the Karaoke experience is like here. Well, it was quite different from back home. There are different places, but the one we went to sort of looks like a bad stucco neighbourhood casino. You pay a flat rate for the room and get all you can drink, and can even update to food as well. We headed into a small, very bright, long and narrow room. It's bench seating all around like some bad 70's lounge with table in the middle and a giant and I mean GIANT television at the one end. We turned off most of the lights and the guys were frantically entering numbers immediately. You have a huge remote that enters the numbers that you get from the catalogue. So may I rail for the moment about the song choices. There was like practically a whole page of Mariah Carey and like 1 song for the Police. That's the end of the rant. There was actually a surprising number of really great stuff. I guess I was just surprised at the amount that the sucky people had, and then like 2 songs from a fun band. There was some Clash, some Ben Folds!, some Yeah Yeahs, and we even had a rousing version of Skid Row's "18 & life". It was wonderful to see so many people from many corners of the earth brought together by this anthem of youth...I'm being sefecious (yes, I know that's spelled wrong, that's the point). The other song that brought everyone together, which surprised me, was "Killing Me Softly" the old school version by Roberta Flack, not the Fugees version although we added in some Fugee-esque little bits in here and there. We had to steal the mic from one of the guys on pretty much every single song. At least he could sing, it would be really bad if he was aweful and wouldn't give up the mic. The other fun bit was that there's two mics so it wasn't just one person standing up there, and they weren't directional so they picked up practically everything anyone was saying in the room. Did I mention it was loud and obnoxious? We sang till we had had enough, we paid up and went down the street to Jonathan's. It's a like a Denny's, it's a diner but don't let the fact that its open at 4 am and called Jonathan's fool you. They serve octopus. We started to walk home, with me and the two guys from New York saying good-bye to everyone as they left the group as we lived the furthest out. Then I left them at the corner by their building and headed home.
