Only 3 weekends left

The very first time I heard about "all-you-can-drink karaoke" my initial thought was "wow, that sounds dangerous." On Friday night, Aditi and I set out to prove that it is, indeed, dangerous. Even more so when the only drink you can figure out how to communicate to the Japanese staff is "whiskey." After two hours and a few more drinks than was probably a good idea, we stepped out into the streets of Shibuya and struck up a conversation with a group of Americans. Two of them happened to speak Chinese, and one of them went to the very same study abroad program in Beijing that I attended, but two years later. It was a pretty crazy coincidence. Saturday morning I woke up on Aditi's floor (having stayed out past the last train) and felt surprisingly healthy, although I think that Aditi was in worse shape since she had matched me in drinks but weighs 50 lbs less. I had some time to kill before going to see fireworks at 5:30, so I went to Ebisu to see the photography museum. There was a visiting exhibition on the most influential photographs of the year with lots of lengthy English descriptions. After the photography museum I went to see the parasite museum, which is devoted to everything that can possibly live inside of the human body. It was free, but had essentially no English, so I don't think that I learned very much. At 5:30 I met my co-worker at Tachikawa station which is located west of Tokyo on the Chuo line. We walked about a half an hour to a park where there was going to be a fireworks display. It was insanely crowded; the sort of crowded that in America you might expect only at a outdoor music festival. Cell phones didn't work, and it was difficult to move around. It took us 2 hours to find his friends that we were looking for, and we only managed to sit down about 5 minutes before the show started. After the show ended it seemed like the entire park got up to leave at the same time, and I panicked about making it onto a train so I also left immediately. I did, fortunately, make it home after battling with crowds the entire way. I would say that the whole experience was not worth it (they were just fireworks!) except that most of the spectators were wearing Kimono and Yukata, which was fun to see. It seems that every woman in Japan owns a Kimono and wears it only to see fireworks. They're pretty, but there is also something to say for woman's clothing that allows one to take steps longer than one foot. Sunday I was planning to visit Hakone with Charles and Aditi, but Aditi ended up having to go to lab so she cancelled. Instead I went to Odaiba, which is this enormous man-made island in the middle of Tokyo bay. One of the major attractions is the "Toyota Megaweb" which is showcase of Toyota cars. You can climb in to just about every Toyota car currently available and see what it feels like, and there are also rides and activities. That was pretty fun in and of itself, but there was also a cheerleading competition going on all day outside. I only had a little time to spend on the rest of the island, where I saw a replica of the statue of liberty and some enormous shopping malls. At 7:00 I met Yuka for dinner in Shinjuku with some of her coworkers. We ate at a restaurant that I never could have found by myself, and even if I had I couldn't have eaten at because there were no pictures on the menu. It specialized in food from Kyushu, the major southern island in Japan. I got to eat raw horse meat! Yuka's coworker asked me how we refer to horse meat in English, and I said "horse meat." I guess that there is no need to have a word for something that we don't eat in the English-speaking world.