Life of a Foreign Hachikin: Speak-easys and birthday bashes~

Lady legs in cool stockings abound.

My polaroids make everything so much cooler. <3

Saturday started off busy and ended up busy. I woke up at 9 to start cooking for S-Ono's girls-day-in luncheon. I made some pumpkin soup and started baking the dessert for De-'s birthday. At 11AM, S-Ono came by to pick up me, De-, Panda, and Bee and we all drove down to her house, followed closely by Sea. This luncheon was the most delicious and filling meal I've had in a long time. We sat around, chatted, and stuffed ourselves full of pumpkin soup, minestrone, bread, spinach and yogurt, pasta salad, miso soup, cookies, brownies, banana bread, and cakes. After, we were introduced to the beautiful game "Dodgebe" by S-Ono's children. It was actually a pretty fun game, but was hard to play in our small playing area. After lunch and games, a few of us went over to the Akishiminkaikan to see my photo that won in the contest! It was rather exciting to see if up, even though this was only a small contest.

After being dropped off back at my house, the cleaning and cooking frenzy began. For the first time I had some helpers that could run around and do some chores for me while I finished baking and putting things away (it was soooo nice!!). We all got ready at about 6PM and waited for the others to arrive. For the first time ever all the foreigners arrived long before the Japanese people got here, but even so the party was great as soon as most of the east-side dream team had assembled. Nearly everyone had dressed up in the Party's theme: 1920's speak-easy. There was lots of black and white, fringe, and feathers, as well as suspenders and adorable hats and beads. I was really happy and rather impressed that most everyone tried!! De- made a couple of different Gin drinks, which were surprisingly yummy, considering I'm not the hugest fan of Gin. Kei and Tomo showed up around 8PM and most of De-'s co-workers showed up around that time too. There was even a baby!! De-'s co-workers were really nice and brought lots of food and even tried to dress up too! Buchou even came! I was way too excited about that and kept calling him Buchou, which only made him laugh, hehe. I even got a picture with him. Matto's friend Mal came and I terrorized him at the end of the night with my feather band by continually put it on his head and calling him adorable.

At one point, I told some of the women from De-'s company that I liked the one guy that had come (Kei) because I wasn't sure how to say "I think he's cute and wish we could hang out more" and they took it upon themselves to grab him and forced us to henpai and drink beer (way more beer than I wanted...) over and over again. I found out that he likes baseball (the Cubs, in fact) and likes art to a certain extent, and the fact that he's a fireman in training (and works out on his off days lol) and is still in school for it until the end of the year. Julie had found out from him that he thinks I'm cute but he's bad at texting so I guess that means I need to try harder? Dunno. I need to stop getting all work-up over being perfect at Japanese and just try to communicate and have fun. I get too stressed out over not knowing what to say... I just need to talk. Anyway! The night ended with me falling through the gap between my door and the outside (I wanted to harrass Australia and Matto, and so went out yelling about Australia getting me peanuts and then just went down), cleaning up the millions of beer cans all over my kitchen, and getting everyone a place to sleep that ended up staying (Juri, Panda, Mall, Matto, Australia, and Sea). De- had ended up getting a Daiko home, and all her co-workers managed to get home too. Kei and Tomo went home because Tomo had to get back to Susaki in order to take De- out on a bike-ride the next day and Kei wanted to keep him company (although we all said he could stay).

Despite the hangover (due to too much beer henpai) it was an awesome night, awesome party, and I can't wait to have another in December~ :)