Viva Italia

I had one of those real typical Japan nights last night. The kind of night they depicted so well in "Lost In Translation" - where you're running around pretty much aimlessly, meeting complete strangers and basically acting crazy. The night started normal - my buddy Heath McKenzie from Australia is leaving Japan on Monday for good, so I took him out for one last night of drinks and talking together. We ordered the nomihoudai menu (all you can drink) at a bar and started guzzling beers and eating fried food. Typical guy night. After we polished off about 6 rounds of beer, Heath had to take off to meet up with his Italian friends, who were leaving in the morning. We found them in Ichibancho (the covered mall area of Sendai) drinking wine and just basically being loud. There was Marco (the sports journalist), Lara (the kind of fat one), Alicia (the other kind of fat one), and Analisa (the tall one that Heath thinks is good looking). If you don't mind me generalizing about an entire continent of white people (and I know you don't), they were very typically European - very touchy-feely (especially when compared to most Japanese kids), willing to sacrifice everything like say packing before you have to leave the country in order to stay out and drink longer, and very, umm, whimsical and free-spirited (which basically means having no shame in public; combined with their accent this is how Europeans seem to trick Americans, particularly girls, into thinking they are automatically sophisticated and fascinating people). We drifted around downtown Sendai for like two hours while they hilariously stopped to ask pretty much any girls on the street where the dance clubs are. In these situations, since I look Japanese, I became the de facto translator for the group. At one point, we were surrounded by like ten Japanese girls, one of whom goes to some Cal State school called "Cal State Howell" or something. In other words, she went halfway around the world to go to a really shitty school. And then suddenly there was some Canadian guy from Vancouver that wandered through talking to me about how people from California know all the good bud comes from British Columbia and saying he was looking for Japanese girls to nail, and then one of the Japanese girls asked me to ask him "What his type is". Disgusting. I didn't ask, since I'm pretty sure his type was going to be something like "female and breathing". Meanwhile, the Italians kept wandering away to go to the bathroom or go into convenience stores or makeout (!). Keeping everyone moving in the same direction without losing an Italian was like trying to keep marbles from rolling off a table with one short leg. At about 3 in the morning, they finally gave up on finding a club and we went to Karaoke until 5 AM. I kept trying to leave, but they kept keeping me there to sing more mid-to-late-90s british pop music with them. Toward the end, everyone kept singing goodbye-themed songs and the tears started rolling. Except for me, since I'm still here for 6 months and I had just met the Italians like 3 hours earlier. Heath and I had a pretty solid goodbye though before I left to bike home. It's really too bad he's leaving now because we've been pretty good friends over the last couple months and always have a great time in class and when we go out. Sucks. Oh and by the way, all of this took place in below-freezing weather with a ridiculous wind blowing. Surprisingly, biking home at 5 AM half-drunk, dead-tired, and freezing cold was much easier than I thought it would be.

Today, the Sendai Fulbright Alumni Association is hosting a lunch in my honor at some restaurant downtown. While that sounds impressive, it really just means I'm eating lunch with like 10 senior citizens while awkwardly making meaningless conversation. There is nothing impressive about that. I imagine it'll kind of be like volunteering at a nursing home, just without the IVs and abusive nurses.