Some Accomplishments

In this past week, some cool things have happened.

The first of which is at this famous gold foil making place (yeah, yeah, name to be inserted later) where we had a chance to have a 'gold sticking' experience. What this involved was using gold and silver foil about a micron thick (not kidding), tape, glue/lacquer, and a smooth lack jewelry box to create a design.

This craft essentially involved creating and manipulating negative space by using the tape as a medium and foil the colouring method. For some odd reason, Kirby was in my mind and the time, and was completely stuck there, so I had to draw a design of him. I didn't really think about how hard it'd be to make a round shape with tape and negative space, but it turned out pretty well.

http://photos-e.ak.facebook.com/photos-ak-sf2p/v335/159/64/1472430019/n1472430019_29348_3391.jpg

=~=~=

So on Friday night, a group of us went out to karaoke for some singing and nomihoudai. When you do nomihoudai, it is essentially all you can drink. The place we went to had an entrance plus nomihoudai fee of 3000 yen. And we can stay there for as long as we want. In this case, their closing time was 5am. We came in at 7pm.

o.o;

We had 10 hours of nonstop karaoke and free drinks. Thank god most of them were drunk because I suck at singing. XD I learned a couple of valuable lessons from that experience.

First, Lychee Orange cocktail is awesome. That was pretty much the only thing I really drank that night.

Second, just because it's a song that you might know, Karaoke changes things up sometimes by repeating a single line over and over and over again because it's the only part that most people know apparently, or changing the tempo of a song. It's mostly the English songs that this happen to because it's hard to sing English fast.

Third, they have probably a total of 5 different live shot videos that are used for more than one song. Any kind of song that deals with relationship automatically goes to this video of a guy that looks very similar to Carrot Top being denied by this girl walking her dog, stalks her and gives her a letter before running off, only to sit lonely on a beach before she comes to him, takes off his ear buds, and then proceeds to put one back into his ear and share the other one with herself.

It was okay the first time with "Oops, I did it again" but after showing up every 2 or 3 songs, it got really old, really fast. It had a brief jump in hilarity around 3am when the alcohol started setting in though.

I wonder how much does it pay to be a professional karaoke actor because I could've sworn I saw the same lady in other videos.

Concurrent with this adventure was the super scary typhoon that we were supposed to have that night. The main reason why most of us chose to stay was because since we thought that the city would completely shut down, we might as well stay rather than fighting our way back home walking because the trains were shut down (us hour-plus commuters have to think that way). Throughout the day, there were policemen blocking off roads in preparation and all that stuff. Other Japanese students were telling us that it's better off not to go at all, or leave really early because the scheduled attack was around 10pm.

We were all afraid and locked down inside the karaoke box drinking and singing our night away. The windows are blocked by boards to provide sound proofing and stuff. I was curious, so I slid the window open to see how bad it was outside.

http://photos-e.ak.facebook.com/photos-ak-sf2p/v335/159/64/1472430019/n1472430019_36196_1723.jpg

The incredible typhoon was laid waste to the city as you can see here with the biggest piece of destruction that we found the next morning.

http://photos-f.ak.facebook.com/photos-ak-sf2p/v335/159/64/1472430019/n1472430019_36205_3306.jpg

Thank god we stayed all night. Otherwise, we wouldn't even make to the station. >.>;

Moving on, I told my okaasan that I wasn't going to go home until Saturday night, after spending the day at Ossu Kannnon, and then going to my friend Cheesy Saltines' welcome party at her house. Even though my parents are both going to be at work, and my host brother is going to be at school, I still somehow felt obligated to stick with my original plan of staying out because I didn't want to surprise them out of the blue by changing up plans suddenly, which is kind of rude.

>.>

<.<

Okay, so I wasn't really being that thoughtful. I didn't want to climb the 10 minute mountain road that it takes for me to get home from the station.

The solution was obvious of course.

I would sleep on the subway. *cheers*

The Meijo line is the main subway that goes in a circle around the city. Since everything is automated, you slide your commuter pass/ticket into the entrance of a station, and when you slide it at the exit station, it makes note that you've completed your commute.

A slight loophole in this is that you can ride around as many times as you want, and not get charged for it unless you exit the station.

Here's the exact log from my journey with no changes besides names:

5:55 am (Nagoya Daigaku)

- Starting my journey of ~6 hours on a train b/c I essentially have nowhere else to go.

- Jump-stars and Candy Pills are going home to get stuff/sleep after 10 hrs of karaoke nomihoudai (lychee orange = good)

- Gonna carabineer my bag and all that for some modicum of safety

-Probably eat after a couple of rounds.

- how long those it actually take to get back to Nagoya Daigaku?

6:05 am (Ozone)

- Jump-stars and Candy Pills leaves

- I'm hungry

-Starting Jump Ultimate

6:06 (Heian-dori)

- 2 punk kids from Ozone gets off. They looked high.

6:16 (Sakae)

- Soo Many People this early

6:22 (Kanayama)

- Technically ends here, but goes to Yagoto

- prob change trains there

6:29 (Horita)

- Offed Game

- Sleepy, might sleep after all

6:39 (Yagoto-Yagoto Nisseki) [ed: this is where my writing starts to crap out]

- I wanna sleep

7:07 (Sakae)

- Just woke up

- AC right on top of me is cold

7:13 (Kanayama)

- train operator switches

- I can probably pull this off after all

7:38 (ゆがおか) [ed. yes, in Japanese because I couldn't remember English at the time]

- pasted Nagoya (#3)

8:25 (Nagoya)

- Not paying attention anymore

-just sleeping

9:13 (やがとう)

- Just woke up

- Not hungry much, but will be

- need to brush teeth and wash up

9:26 (なごやDome前やだ)

- Decided to hang out at Ozone for breakfast

- Actually need to use the restroom anyway

=~=~=

The ride took about 3:31 hrs/mins but I learned a lot of things and created a lot of questions from those things.

First off, why the fuck is there a rush at 6am in the morning on a Saturday?! It takes roughly 40-50 minutes to do a roundtrip on a train, so using an average, why do you need to be anywhere at 6:30ish in the morning? This doesn't include commuting on the other trains that go out into the outskirts of the city.

----well great, took me a week to get this far. Might as well post this and move on to more current events