Happy Tanjobi To Me!

Enough of radioactive earthquake talk. Let's go pre-quake, when all in Jappy was still happy. At the start of March, I was particularly happy, as (aside from having to confront the depressing fact that I am now TWENTY FOUR meaning that next year I will be half way through my twenties, meaning that old age is a stone's throw away) I had the chance to celebrate my birthday! I think it's fair to say that birthdays aren't as big a deal in Japan as they are in the UK, but, I thought, poo you Japan, I am gonna celebrate it and I am gonna bloody well celebrate it in style. The celebrations were not one, not two, not three, but FOUR FOLD. Go me.

Celebration 1 - Pre-birthday cinema. Two of my lovely Japanese lady friends took me to the cinema and for lunch on the weekend before my birthday, buying me a set of postcards by 18th-19th century Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai, paired with a sushi pen with the names of all of the sushi written on it (useful in so many ways...that's actuallly not supposed to be sarcastic) and a truly horrible egg sushi keyring, which I now have to use as I see them all the time. They already plagued my phone with the most effeminate, impractically shaped, loud ringy belly mobile phone strap I've ever seen in Japan, with a design surely aimed at Ann Widecombe or someone equally awful old-lady fashion-y, which refused to break for about 6 months and they have now done something just as tacky to my keys...will it ever end? We saw "Hereafter" with Matt Damon (incidentally now off screens in Japan due to the graphic tsunami seen - that scene was horribly realistic anyway, I didn't enjoy the film much to be honest). Then we went for lunch at an Italian restaurant, where I had the traditionally Italian sweet French crepe filled with dry salad...Nigella eat your heart out.

Celebration Number 2 - On the day celebrations. My boss text me as it turned midnight on my birthday and asked me what I was doing in the evening, so that she could bring me a present. I told me I would be in, and then she said that she would take me out instead. So, we went to an izakaya with her husband and another colleague of mine. I hadn't been there since my first month in Japan, so it was so nice to see how much I understood now compared to the last time! We ate an awful lot, drank some "local" beer, which turned out to be from miles and miles away and generally had a lovely old chinwag. They got me a mug with the Japanese flag on it and I also somehow wound up with the rest of a bottle of sweet potato shochu (a Japanese spirit) that we couldn't finish on the evening (still in the fridge a month later, I might add).

Celebration Number 3 - Party Time! My lovely ALT friends and I, who spend our whole lives sticking out like sore thumbs in our respective rural dwellings, came together in Tokyo, to stick out like two big fat sore hands. Present-wise, I got the biggest set of bright purple blankets off of my crazy friend, who somehow managed to smuggle them around without me noticing until she whipped out the biggest package I've ever seen...not quite sure how that happened, plus some manga, some funny sticker things that you can stick on your phone or material too that will make me look super-cool (as if I don't already) and a ticket to a football match. I got more than I got when I was at home in the UK!

In the way of celebrations, I managed (not without a large helping of fuss) to book a ridiculous bargain in the centre of Shibuya, one of the young fashionable night-out districts in Tokyo on a Saturday night. It was in the izakaya where everything on the menu is 270 yen, not sure if I've mentioned it before, but I love the place. It's a chain that always seems to be full. It has a computer menu which you use with a touch screen pen and also has an ENGLISH BUTTON! Woo! This particular branch is full of young people on Saturday night. It's the one near Tokyu Hands, if that helps anyone that knows Shibuya, but it probably doesn't because you are falling over those chains once every 3 steps there. Oh, it's the one by Outback Steak House. A pretty cool branch if you ask me. For 2,480 yen each (about 20 quid) we got 8 different types of food, including big nabes (huge Japanese broth type meals) and 2 hours all-you-can-drink. BARGAIN. We played silly animal and pointy drinking games, the rules I can't really recall and then some of us went out to Club Asia around the corner.

It was my first time there....main impression is that two people were sick on my leg in the space of about 10 seconds. I was literally mid-schock at the first sick episode and, before I'd had a chance to even tell my friend next to me what had happened, it was happening all over again. Apart from that, it was a club with a nice atmosphere, a lot of dancing, and, more than one room, allowing you to change when you got bored, or when you got sicked on. The night was called "Flash" and involved lots of Japanese people pretending to be cool and love electro and house music all night (including a lovely song in English that clearly only we understood, about needing the toilet) but then giving the biggest reaction of the night to the new cheesey K-Pop band Kara (see left). I ended the night with a kebab, a Japanese style breakfast, a sleep in a manga cafe and then a McDonald's and a Starbucks ham and cheese panini and painfully sweet sakura cherry blossom latte (I think I let out a groan at the sugary taste, when will I learn?). However, in my defence, it was my birthday and I did have two people's vomit on my favourite pair of jeans. Thank you friends for a wonderful evening in spite of various fusses and impracticalities!

Celebration Number 4 - More Food and Drink. Rather inconveniently scheduled on the evening after my big night out in Club Asia, i.e. on the same day that I'd been trapsing around Shibuya in sick jeans with a hangover, eating junk food, was a dinner and drinks with three Japanese friends in Tatebayashi. We went to my Taiwanese friend's Taiwanese restaurant. What I thought would be a simple and small affair, especially given that not a huge fuss is usually made in Japan for birthdays (just for things like choco chip pan and broken magnets), turned out to be truly one of my best evenings since being in Japan. My lovely lovely friends had invited more people (some that I knew, some that I didn't), making a total of 10 or so, I receieved gifts of handkerchief things (very common in Japan), a bath bomb from Lush which was shaped as a frog and turns into a prince when it goes in the water (yet to try it...sounds interesting to say the least) and, a VERY cool and for the first time since I've arrived in Japan, NOT tacky strap made of leather, and, indeed, made BY the friend that organised the party as he is a leather thing maker. I love it. Love love love. I am so cool now and I wear my phone so that it comes out of my pocket and everyone can see how cool I am. So lucky to be in Japan and not in the UK where doing that would lead my phone to get nicked as quick as the second sick episode followed the first. My Taiwanese friend gave us champagne and my friends had also had a cake made with my name on it. It was all just too nice for words, I actually didn't quite know how to react. I thought I was going to cry! But I didn't...that wouldn't have been too cool. I also got a two parcels sent to me, one from my friend at home with WINE GUMS and one from my parents with various chocolatey things and some money in my account from my family, which was spent on various clothes in Harajuku at Uniqlo and We Go a week before it was my birthday...so much for saving for travelling in South Korea in May :(. Everything I bought was on sale, and, what can I say, I'm weak. Embarrassingly, we had been studying birthdays in sixth grade at primary school, and in practice conversations I had been telling people my birthday at school. One of the teachers remembered and, on the day, had the kids sing happy birthday to me, and one of my kids from another school remembered from about three weeks before and that class sang to me the following day (the closest day that I was at that school). Lovely kids. Lovely friends. Lovely Japan. I may have had my ups and downs with living in Japan, but this was a week that truly made me sorry to know that I'm leaving in the summer.