The 'Life on Earth' party kicked off the other night with a bo-nen-kai in an izakaya with 25 or so of my colleagues. Great food and horrendous quantities of drink - a nomihodai - drink as much as you like, and we did. It's now the following afternoon and a few details are coming swimming back through the nabe-like cloud of unknowingness.We started on beer but quickly moved on to sake. I can remember boring the pants off my table mates with the 'what to do when alone in the Sahara desert at night when attacked by wild dogs - nowhere to run too, baby, nowhere to hide' story. (Stand your ground). I remember shouting 'Pavarotti lives!' several times during an amazing performance by one of my Japanese colleagues. I'm pretty sure I told at least one of my colleagues that I loved them and would like to be in a relationship with them if I weren't heterosexual (this was to a very lovable gay man). By this time we were in another barn-like bar, which was a bit like being in a ship's cabin, and we were on double Scotches, or at least I was.
I ended up in a karaoke box with a couple of my Japanese friends, and got frustrated with the song selector box thing, which I couldn't understand as it was all in Japanese. (I wanted to sing 'Because the night').
This led to a 2-hour dressing-down, along the lines of:
You are in Japan. We like you, and want to help you, but you have to make an effort to understand Japanese.
This took two hours, and I ended up getting home at 6.30 this morning. I'm now off to another party...
