"Strong heavy drunker"

Is what you become in Japan when you drink lots of beer and don't get drunk so quickly. I found this out last night at a pre-preparation party for a teaching session I'll be doing in a few weeks. The party with a group of local young businessmen and was fantastic fun, fortunately not reducing itself to the levels of "buresuto fesuchivaru" (say it very quickly) like previous parties with young officeworkers (where I would usually put on my most sour face and declare sexism bad). Despite everyone in the room being labelled "sukebe" (lewd person in Japanese), including myself (which made it an International Sukebe party), there was actually no sukebe-type behaviour displayed at all- my Victorian values remain unoffended and intact. And fortunately my head remained intact last night and this morning as I prepared for elementary school and kindergarten, and I didn't need the chainsaw we joked about last night to keep the kids in check...

Really, yesterday was a blip in a recent alcohol-free life. It seems like ages since the last lot of drinks, and hopefully it will be until the next. Wendy's birthday bash was hilarious last week thanks to everyone else's drinking and this weekend is the Naked Man festival which for me will be a sober event (I hope- last year I missed all the action having wandered off in a drunken daze).

Wendy lives in Ibara, which is rather far from Katsuyama, but Efi makes short work of such distances (provided the land is flat otherwise Efi refuses to do any work and just gargles away at the bottom of the hill) and pretty soon we were all gathering at Wendy's, organising the sleeping arrangements at Dave's place and heading to Fukuyama for a dinner in a very nice restaurant where we had to ask the waiter what to do with certain bits of food and at some point I seemed to have been put in/ taken charge (it must be the newly-straightened hair confusing people). So as Adam, Nickname Pending and I sat sober, them drinking fruit juice and water and me getting rather buzzed on approximately 15 cokes, Wendy made up for us all by having rather a lot of booze. Indeed, she ordered 4 drinks when the man came to take last orders. I salute her resolution. Or something. Perhaps I mean resolve? Hmm...

Anyway, after that we went on to a bar called Zappa which appeared to be really cool. And it was cool even though it became clear fairly early on that bar service was not their strong point (Adam and I ended up heading to 7-11 across the road for drinks instead- numerous times) and at some point a screaming Japanese harpie appeared with a suicidal girlfriend. Each time we returned from the combini something had changed and the harpie was by far the worst change. Although she was highly entertaining what with pushing people out of her way, screeching in your ear and then talking to you in what she claimed was Italian but which might actually have resembled Italian if it was spoken by Helen Keller. Or a duck.

The final change in the bar came with the music (and the fact that the Harpie took her miserable friend somewhere else) and for the last part of the evening a few of us danced a bit and it was, like, a bit good, right? Except it was actually the last part of the evening as when we all got back to Dave's, Nickname Pending and I continued talking until around 4:30 am by which time Nickname Pending had become Mother TeRachel and I was the poor and destitute in need of cheerios. It was almost bizarre enough to make me want a drink...

Valentine's day brightened up my off the wagon life and in fact may have pushed me under the wheels. In Japan it is done very differently. Women give chocolates to men- to male colleagues, to loved ones, to their bosses etc. And men do nothing. There is a special day in March called White Day where men are obliged to give women a dry cracker and a tissue or something similarly unspectacular, so I'm saving up all my kleenex to say thank you. I got lots of choclit from my conversation class, lots from Nao chan (including boozy chocolate- choc with brandy, with rum, with VODKA!) and I'd already bought myself a load when I was planning yet another loveless Valentine's Day (or VD as it's become known for being such an irritant).

And today was elementary school with the cutest kindergarten kids you've seen and the funniest students and the most witty teachers. And as promised in our conversation class after the last visit, I'd promised to show them how to make curry. They bought lots of gorgeous locally produced organic vegetables, and I contributed garlic and spices. It was the least I could do after making ichigo daifuku on the last visit. I still dream of those daifuku- not long now until they disappear from the shops...

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRGH!