Wednesday, October 31, 2012

One of the many ways my life has changed

The last three weeks have been pretty amazing, that's for sure. They've also been incredibly busy, and I'm only just starting to settle into some sort of new pattern- routine still feels like the wrong word!

I had four days to get acclimated to the time change and start to find my bearings before training started, and I used those days to get unpacked and meet up with most of my training group before the first day of training. We wandered around Shinjuku, went to the Seiseria's, which is an unusual chain in that it doesn't have a table charge, and did a dry run of the walk from the train station to our office so that we'd know how to get there.

Saturday the 13th was our first day of training, and since we had Sunday off, six of the eight of us rolled out to Karaoke, which is justifiably famous as a Thing To Do In Japan. What you need to know to make this story make sense is that the trains stop running some time around midnight, depending on the line, and don't start again until fiveish in the morning. So if you're going out, you are committed to going out. After two hours at a nomihodai, an all-you-can-drink flat charge bar, everybody suggested going out clubbing in Roppongi. I said I would go home while the trains still ran if everyone else went to a club, but the alternate suggestion to karaoke was floated, and I accepted, based on the best advice I received before I came here: accept every invitation for the first two weeks, even though you'll only feel like sleeping, because people will stop inviting you if you've never said yes. I just wasn't willing to do that for a club.

We rented a karaoke room and rocked our hearts out for hours. We came back to the Murder Lodge to crash, but my roommate and I just decided to wait up another half hour or hour or so until we could head home and sleep in pajamas with toothbrushes. We got home a little after twenty four hours since I had woken up, which if you know how much I love my sleep is quite a feat.

I am now a person who has karaoked all night. That is a thing that I have done. And it was wonderful!