Here's to you, anonymous!

I was supposed to be a member of Team Zissou from "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou". I think we should all try to be a little more like Bill Murray, am I right? I even had the black gun leg belt thing too. It's too bad my efforts were wasted because nobody had any clue who I was. That's life in the fast lane.
More soon about my fun weekend!

Karaoke Halloween Hamburger

Friday night I went out to karaoke with some work people to practice songs for an upcoming music c.d. we'll be recording. The songs are for elementary school kids and cover such topics as fruit, liking fruit, animals, liking animals and so on. On top of that I sang some old favorites and drank my share of watered down gin and tonics.

Saturday I went shopping for my Halloween costume. I was disappointed in myself for purchasing a costume in a bag, but that's life when you don't care enough to shop around for weeks to put together a badass costume like this.



Later hung out with some new crazy friends, Koji and Junko.

Sunday got taken out for a mouth fulla hamburg steak at Tokyo Kitchen. I will dub this as highlight of my weekend. Hamburg steak is a popular dish here, and it usually consists of a hamburger and a carbohydrate thrown on a plate with some gravy, like this:

(Thanks Japan, I'll go to my local truck stop at home and get the same deal for $3.)

Normally I would never eat such a thing because to me a burger without a bun is lame, and gravy is the sauce for people who just can't do any better. But this place is a special place and the burger was so importantly delicious that it was covered in cheese in its own special dish, I received an extra piece of silverware to eat it and was warned about 7 times by 4 different staff members that it was hot and to be careful. Wow.

Also got some paintsyn done but not as much as I shoulda. The exhibition opens in a week, and I have some work to do.

Read this, Japan.

Festival Time

Hi readers. Today is test day at school, and I am sitting around for about 8 hours with nothing to do. Thusly, I will fill you in on what's been doin'.

Last Friday night was a huge drinking party at work. You might recall my recent pledge to lay off the hooch, but it was for the greater good of building a strong foundation between my peers. (It was a retarded idea which led to lid-flipping, and I totally barfed. )

The rest of the weekend was filled with Nagoya Matsuri. This festival was big and great. I ate festival food, saw weird stuff and ate more food. More pictures to come, here are a choice few to wet your whistle.







The remainder of my day will be filled with wandering around the school library (they have the entire Beatrix Potter Tales-I sure missed that dumbass Jemima Puddleduck) and making flash cards. The proficiency test is only a few months away and to save myself some embarrassment, I need to get on the study ball.

3 day weekend

Three day weekends are good, like finding $5 in last Winter's coat, those extra few Hot Tamales at the bottom of the box, or updating Wickipedia. We spent this 3 day weekend enjoying random Japanese construction. For example:

On Saturday we went to a real fake Italian village! Initially it looked like they modeled it after Venice, but they had a statue of Michelangelo's David and a Monty Python poster. Oh well. Although mostly a glorified shopping mall, the Italian Mura had good food.





Afterwards we took to the seas on a ferry. Almost getting blown into the water at least 17 times, we docked and kissed the land.



Sundays are always good for a barbecue, especially by a big pointless tower in the middle of nowhere. And we managed to teach some Japanese folks how to toss around the old pigskin. How's that for internationalization?

138 tower.

Quincy, random friendly girl, Willster, Katester, tiny fishy.

Monday was a trip to the museum to check out some history. The recent exhibition was about Ise Shrine and pilgrimages to said shrine. I didn't understand most of it, but there were fun pictures of people dressed up like animals. Check out this neat garden!



Recently I've been trying to lay off the sauce. Besides my lack of expendable budget, it's time I cut back. I'm no spring chicken anymore, and besides, what has binge drinking ever done for me? (Anyone with an answer to that, keep it to yourself.)

"Eflerwannerseyeryooouufucks,"

said Shane MacGowan as he took the stage. The Pogues show was awesome. I've never seen people get that excited at a live show in Japan. It was a sweaty, happy romp which will not soon be forgotten.


This is the only picture I took before I got yelled at by a fat security guard with glasses.

This past weekend, as the weekends prior, flew by. Some highlights:

Friday- Drinking party

Saturday- Work all day, drinks with Irish ambassador, 4:00 a.m. squid snacks

Sunday- Matsuri and party at friend's house with pot pie

And now for some whining! I rarely bitch about work on this blog, but I'm lettin 'er loose. It has recently come to my attention that I am slowly starting to dislike my job. As many of you know, I have been put into the "tape recorder" position dreaded by so many English teachers. I am literally repeating vocabulary words and dialogue ad nauseam to the point where even I'm bored in class. It's like that movie Groundhog Day except I don't get to impress everyone by knowing all the answers on Jeopardy.

I have created a graph which shows the proportionate job dissatisfaction to my consumption.


And it's not that my ideas of what we could be doing in class are better than the teacher's, it's just hard for me to stay excited about book work. But I know people who have done this job far longer than I have and still keep on truckin'.

Enough complainins, I'm going to The Pogues in a few hours. Report on that soon. Oooo, maybe I'll make a graph about Shane MacGowan's progressive drunkeness throughout the show!