I didn't update last week due to a Japanese midterm I was studying for. Apologies.
As per usual my weeknights have been pretty bleh. So let's skip straight to the juicy weekend material.
Weekend 1: What we have here is a weekend of nigh perfect weather. This my be one of the few ones left as we are getting into the rainy season and it just breached 80 degrees during last week. I was determined to make the most of it. Sirobara dominated my Saturday, but nothing too exciting happened this time. Sunday, however, I went for an outing in the park for a intercultural event my local community center was hosting. The day was themed around a scavenger hunt of local emergency relief locations (actually more fun than it sounds). We were split into teams of around 5 people and given a set of questions and a list of locations. The questions were really easy if you found the location. For example, we had to record the name of a museum we passed by.
The tricky part was twofold: 1, there was a location where we were given any questions to answer. We were just told to memorize it and we would be quizzed later. Due to my cheatin...err..quick thinking, I took photographs of everything for later review. We managed to get 100% on this one. The second difficult part was the time limit of 90 minutes. Every minute over or under was points off our score. Trouble was we weren't told that the time limit was 90 minutes. We were simply told that it existed and not to hurry too much. Long story short (too late) my team took 5th place out of around 16 teams and were rewarded with a flashlight each. I have no idea what the grandprize was as none of the winning team opened their's then. The other prizes were handed out to everyone in the top 5, 7th place (lucky number 7) and second to last place (a sort of well, at least you weren't those guys prize). Sucked to be in 6th place.
After the scavenger hunt people were invited to an all you can drink yakiniku (think bbq chicken shishkabob) restaurant to celebrate another successful year. God I love chicken. Here I ended up having several weird conversations with my drunk hosts including the finer points civil law. It took me about 5 minutes to figure out what we were discussing. One of my limited vocabulary doesn't tend to know the Japanese words for tort and district court of the top of one's head. However, I don't think I embarrassed myself too much once I got the gist of the conversation.
Weekend 2: We (shirobara) again went out drinking. And when I drink, I drink a lot...of orange juice...and tea. Which brings me to the topic of the sexist bathrooms present at our usual dive. The is no boy's room. There's a girl's room and a unisex toilet. This means that not only are us guys jockeying for position with our own sex, but also the opposite one when attempting to relieve ourselves or puke in private. One may argue that girls take longer in the bathroom and thus could use the extra option. Additionally, the male constitution has evolved an ability to "hold it" while those of the female persuasion seemed to have given it a skip. However, my clients (my bladder and those of my fellow members of the unfair sex) will seek to prove that it is for these very reasons that we should be afforded our own private bathroom. Firstly, us men, on average, down more beverage than girls do. Be it a point of pride or a matter of weight ratios (insert Holy Grail reference here), we make sure our livers are put in there places (or, in my case, whatever part of the body absorbs vitamin C). Our famous skill of waiting it out is not a failsafe, but rather the default mode. That is too say, when we gotta go, we gotta go. Just ask Tycho Brahe (a scientist whose bladder exploded while waiting to be excused from the table). Therefore ladies, it is not just a matter of convenieve for us men, our lives are on the line when we are forced to wait.
The next day we went to Sweets Paradise. Imagine, if you will, a typical buffet. Fairly low quality food, but a metric ton of it. There were about 50 different dishes to choose from. There was spaghetti, Japanese curry, some sandwiches. That's 4. The rest were sweets. I'm surprised I got out of the restaurant before having a diabetic attack. I can't even begin to describe have the things I ate. I tried to sample one of everything that looked good, but in the end my strength deserted me (heh).
There was also a drink bar with my favorite Japanese soda, Calpis. This frothy white beverage may leave residue on the upper lip akin to that of a milk mustache. This is colloquially known as being pis faced or pised for short. Along with the drinks there were a number of additives including peach flavoring. Thus, I would like to introduce the world to Peach Pis (working title until I can come up with something ruder).
To top off the weekend I scored…a goal…in soccer. Yeah, after Sweets Paradise we wanted to burn of at least a few of those stubborn calories. Most of the players were amateurs (myself included), but there seemed to be one person there who could juggle the ball with his feet. From this I extrapolated that he had played on a team at some point in his life. With some fancy footwork he could bring down the staunchest opponent. And by that I mean bash them in the head with the ball. He took out one of the female players and nearly myself using the tactic (to be fair they were accidents, I think). The game itself was really fun. It's been forever since I played and getting back into it was very refreshing.
So there you have my two weekends in a nutshell. See you next week.
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