Where do I live?

It has been suggested rather frequently that I am in the city rather too often and that I almost live there. It is true that I spend maybe 7 out of 8 weekends away from my town and 5 or 6 of those will be in the city. And having a car makes it worse- now I can go midweek too! It is great having the freedom to get about more easily. On Friday night I was whizzing round narrow, bendy mountain roads to get to the city for Julia's belated-birthday-bash and making it into the city in under two hours (who needs the expressway!).

We were to meet at the "2005 Momotaroh Fantasy". This exotic-sounding feature is not so fantastic, but very pretty. They have installed a huge Christmas tree and plastic privet hedges outside of the entrance to Okayama station in an attempt to recreate an area of an 18th century park. If there was ever an emergency fairly light shortage Okayama could surely come to the rescue. Well, I met Adam and Julia's friend Junko at the Fantasy and when Julia arrived we headed off to meet Claire and Kana and to hit the karaoke salon where we were later joined by Dylan and Nancy. We belted out a variety of hits and shits, marvelled at everyone's singing and took lots of photos. And according to the machine we burnt approximately 11 calories per song, which led Claire and I to think that the machine wasn't quite working. Although the heat was cranked right up, so the sauna effect may have been working in our favour.

After karaoke we checked the alternatives- Red Moon and Desperadoes and finding both dead we stocked up on snacks (ie I bought a week's supply of chocolate) and we headed back to Julia's to watch Charlie's Angels. Despite being rather sleepy throughout the film we all managed to perk up once it was over and Dylan, Adam, Julia and I were up till maybe 3:00 chatting. Oops.

So on Saturday Adam and I both had things to do so we rose early, headed to the city and went our separate ways. He to Toys'R'Us and me to Fiona's for the car so I could ferry people to and from the orphanage. I began to get a bad feeling about this when the rendezvous time arrived and I was the only one of the three car drivers there, but soon Matt showed up and we were on our way. Only to go wrong when it turned out that I couldn't remember the way. And when we stopped to ask an old man where the orphanage was, none of us knew the Japanese word for orphanage, so I had to ask for the "house of the children who don't have parents". He was very helpful but must have been wondering why a car full of foreigners wanted to go to a house where the kids had no parents...

After ferrying people there my car got stuck in the car park and I couldn't escape to meet Busty and ended up helping set things up, doing last minute wrapping, checking, decorating with Ilana and helping sort the food and drinks. Rachel (nickname pending) had organised the whole deal and did a great job. John made a great Santa and Barbie an excellent Mrs Claus, and even though I knew she spoke amazing Japanese, it was still a shock when it came fluently from her mouth.

So with the orphanage over we set about having our last big night out before Christmas. Only it seemed everyone else had had the same idea. We had planned on going to Asian Kitchen, but it was full. Then we tried an Izakaya and it too was full. Fortunately we pretty quickly found an almost empty Chinese restaurant where Rachel and I ordered a tofu set meal forgetting for a moment that we were in Japan and that despite the lack of mention on meat on the menu it would almost surely be in the food. So we picked bits of tofu out and rubbed off the mince and it wasn't too bad. The conversation was good and the place was warm, and pretty soon we knew we'd made a mistake leaving early as we wandered the streets in search of a bar that would fit our group of 8 and later another group of 8. Having tried 5 places we ended up walking towards a sixth, fortuitously bumping into Justin who knew of a seventh and took us there. It was the Gorilla bar (although I don't think it was actually called that) and had a big gorilla stuck on the wall outside the windows on the fifth floor. And it was like a real bar. Spacious, busy (but not too crowded), no need to order food... So we stayed until people started to leave for their last trains and the remainder of us headed to Red Moon which was busier than ever. We didn't stop too long as Julia hadn't come out and Adam and I were staying at her place, so at midnight we left with Rachel and somehow managed to not get to bed until around 3:30.

And Sunday was a 9:30 start. Adam and I headed into the city, him for Christmas shopping, me to find the hall where Nao-chan's choral group was performing. Her group, the Tsukida chorus was taking part in a competition and performed 2 songs and after them the Katsuyama chorus performed with Sunami-san from the camera shop singing, and my Junior high's music teacher conducting. It was lovely music, and it would have been good to stop longer, but we had important things to do. Nao-chan and I headed for lunch at Cannery Row (excellent value) and then to the shops, although finding a parking space was like finding a room in Bethlehem. We eventually parked by the Red-Light district, paying 100 yen per 20 minutes (!!) So we rushed off, did our shopping and headed back home.

After the intial shock and worry, I was relieved to hear that the explosions in Hemel Hempstead (London) were accidental and went back to planning the week ahead. That included ANOTHER trip to the city last night where I did a spot more Christmas shopping and headed to dinner with Fiona only to bump into Amy (now officially Amy Tan) and Herb and Julia. And eventually dragging myself away, I wove the car around the mountains to find it -4 degrees in Ochiai at 10:45pm and snowing in Katsuyama. But it stopped about 1 minute later. But it was still more snow. It had snowed all day yesterday (and not settled) and it's supposed to snow every day until Sunday. D'oh. And I still have no snow tires...