I don't feel all that bad for not posting this past week. It was the second week of my big two-week summer vacation, and having spent the first week going to festivals and the like, I made the educated decision to spend the second week partying like a rockstar.
Needless to say, I soon found myself in a black hole of terrible sleeping habits from which it has been impossible to return.

Of the memory soup left over from last week, these are the tidbits of life that float to the surface:
Chilling on Tom's Tokyo balcony and looking out over all the roofs.
Dancing and chanting with a crowd of Japanese strangers in the techno room of Club Vanilla.
Drinking at an izakaya (look it up) with Adam, his friend Nate, and two random 40-year-old Japanese guys we picked up on the street.
Watching a middle-aged, Scottish coworker of mine stage a drunken revolution against Japanese waitstaff.
Lots and lots of early morning trains home.

That's really about it.

When I was out drinking with aforementioned 40-year-old sketchy dudes, I asked them to order us food, and the waitress came back with some meat on sticks. But this is Japan, and if there's one thing the Japanese love to do, it's to pull the Gross Card on some unsuspecting foreigners. That said, the four meats presented to us were:
Chicken Skin
Heart
Liver
Chicken Hamburg (whatever that is)
But I was hungry, goddamnit, and if you ignored the textures it wasn't all THAT bad. So I ate like 3/4 of all the food on the table, organ meats included. And then I got really sick for about a day. And then I swore never to eat organ meats again.
The End.

Anyway, my first day back at work started out pretty awful. My very first class was a "Mini Kids" lesson, meaning "dance and sing at some babies and their moms." I wouldn't have had a problem doing that, except today only ONE baby/mom duo showed up. I had to spend half an hour desperately dancing and singing at one kid, who made it quite obvious that she wanted nothing to do with me. To top it all off, I didn't know the words to any of the songs, and was sweating profusely the whole time.

Awful.

But it got better. Fast-forward two hours, and I now have two 5-year-old boys fanning me with their books, one giving me a shoulder massage, and the fourth blowing on my face for lack of things to fan me with. That class was pretty cool. We mostly just ran around yelling about cookies, ice cream, sandwiches, etc (for some reason, the vocabulary word "pancakes" was the only one they could never remember). At one point, they discovered the stuffed velcro monkeys in the corner of the room and decided to attach them all to my arms, screaming with delight as I lumbered around like some big monkey-monster.

Question: How can you get a small Japanese child to stop systematically lining up his crayons and organizing his belongings, and have him move onto the next activity?
Answer: You cannot.

As for today's adult classes, they were the most boring people imaginable, across the board, and I was very glad when the forced-conversation portion of my day was over.

Now for the lying-on-the-couch portion of the day.

It's hot in here, where are Hitoki, Tatsuya, Satoshi, and Kousuke when I need them?
GOD, JAPANESE CHILDREN ARE CUTE.