Alcohol

I went out last Saturday with all of the teachers from Handa for a Sayonara party. This cool Canadian guy named Matt is leaving. We went to some Japanese restaurant/bar in Kanayama and for a mere 2500 yen, it was all-you-can-eat and drink. The Japanese staff at Handa had made reservations and I think there were about 15 people in our party. The food (outside of the yakitori which was delicous) wasn't great but we drank more than enough booze to compensate for that. We put down so much beer that there was hardly any table space available for the empty beer mugs (I'm not bragging; its important to the story). Amy, Carmen, their new roommate Corey Mudge (nobody likes her and we call her Mudge behind her back), and I arrived at around 8:30pm and we were cut off at 10pm. In that hour and a half I managed to get absolutely blasted. There was a karoke set in the room with us so we turned it on and started to belt out the classics.

Anyway, at some point someone threw some noodles across the room (it may have been me) and we all got into a food fight. In the confusion, someone (maybe me again) jumped onto one of our two tables and caused the whole thing to come crashing down. I broke so many damned glasses in the fall that the Japanese waiters and most of my coworkers spent the next 15 minutes working together to clean it all up. The restaurant charged everyone in our party an extra 500 yen for all the damage I caused. I don't remember cutting myself then, but I woke up the next day with a giant chunk of my thumb missing. I'm going to have a nasty scar. I guess it happens.

At some point in the night my roommate Tom left the restaurant and went swimming in the Nagoya River. Picture the Charles River in Boston but with all of the water gone and motor oil in its place. Not the cleanest place to take a dip. He also neglected to take his shoes with him when he left the restaurant, lost his glasses and digital camera, and ruined everything in his backpack when he went for a swim. I found him the next day in Kyowa with two black and completely worn-out socks, stinking like I couldn't even begin to describe. He couldn't get rid of the smell even after multiple showers.

I slept that night in Matt's Kanayama apartment with Amy and the next day went to work completely drunk. I thought I could sober up in the two hours I had before work but my first lesson was a mess. I couldn't sit still for a minute without readjusting myself, I was wobbly, and I had to keep closing my eyes but the girl I had in the lesson has a crush on me and didn't notice. She probably just thought I was flirting with her. This same girl admitted that her dream was to marry a foreigner. She then blushed like crazy and peeked at me from behind her hands. That's so cute that I want to run and hide.