My friends Amul and Helen are out of here next week. They were s'posed to be going to Tokyo where Amul was going to set up a music production business, but his father passed away over Christmas in a "but we just saw him in October and he was blindingly healthy" shock horror, and now Tokyo is off and London via Delhi is on.
They didn't really want a good riddance party but it was forced upon them and turned out to be the mother of all parties... the highlights were dancing on the bar and smashing an inordinate of glasses, girl vs girl fightclub, deciding that the middle of the street was a great place for a nap, and drinks that were on fire.
This was all brilliant until the vodka pixies punished us by stealing Louise's bag (along with her house keys, car keys, wallet, and most importantly, her Lancome Juicy Tube lipgloss), and hiding it in a secret place where we would never find it. It was the next morning though that we really suffered - this is us praying for the bag's safe return and/or death:
And then angels appeared from the sky disguised as golden Chinese New Year pigs and miraculously magicked the bag and all its contents up from the carcasses of rainbows! Hooray!
Louise has learned an important lesson from all this and is now ACTUALLY teetotal... whereas I am making a downpayment on my binge drinking guilt by having my wisdom teeth ripped out of my head on Friday.
The emporor of Japan thinks that Okinawa is the best place in the whole of Japan which is why Okinawa gets cherry blossom first. Not only that, but it is apparently the best cherry blossom in the WHOLE WORLD. Yeah yeah yeah, it's still just stupid flowers on stupid trees, isn't it?
Anyway, we got a three day weekend just so everyone could go and look at it. Me, my Japanese teacher, her husband, and their friends drove three hours to go to the Sakura Festival. The tradition is that everyone walks around, admiring the sakura and pondering the profundity of the cycle of life. For me though, it was about eating sakura icecream, devouring sakura candy floss, and trying to win a Wii on the sideshow game stalls. All I really managed to achieve was a sakura tongue though.
We used the sugar rush to run up a big mountain to see the view. It's a good view isn't it? Behind me is a mysterious military building covered in satellites with big barbed wire fences - I was too afraid to photograph it in case android marines evaporated me with modified AK47s.
Part of the cycle of life is that as the sakura blossom, the oldest students at my school leave (and die, eventually). They cancelled all the lessons to give them a party and the teachers had to get up on stage and sing songs for them. I sang SMAP's Arigato with another teacher. Trust me. This is the version you want to see. You do NOT under any circumstances need to see our version.
The gym has been knocked down so the students built a stage outside. Here is the cycle of life again, showing the inevitable and endless path of yin falling to yang falling to yin to infinity.
I'm not sure where these girls fit into the cycle of life, but it just goes to show that sloppy white socks are still de rigeur this season.
