Lunar New Year

So...I did it! Thursday was our last day of our crappy intensive session and we were taken out for Mexican food and karaoke, and informed that we were given a bonus for the session! Woopee!

But that's not the reason I'm writing. Friday-Monday was Lunar New Year vacation! Woopee again! So Friday morning I headed for Incheon pretty early and got to Osaka around 3:30, took the OCAT bus to Namba and waited around to meet my friend from SMC, Cassie and her boyfriend Giordan. They took me to Umeda to Hep Five department store to look around and shop while we waited for her Japanese friends. We got to ride the 20-minute long ferris wheel on top of the store that went mind-numbingly slow.

Then we went to one of the little side streets, a shopping street with restaurants, karaoke bars, and game rooms. I tried my hand at the claw machines, but about 1200 yen ($12) later, nothing so I quit. I was so close, I tell you!

We met Cassie's friends Yukari, Yuko, and Yuki (trust me, even more confusing than it looks) and went to a cool little restaurant for drinks and dinner. This restaurant was full of nooks and crannies and you sit on the floor but the space under the table is sunken so you have somewhere to put your legs.

We paid about 400 yen a person to reserve the table and we had a 2 hour time limit to drink as much as we could for 1500 yen a person, plus we got some little assorted appetizers such as takoyaki (balls of squid) and raw tuna. Delicious. Cassie's friends were really fun and funny and we drank and ate and laughed. We moved on to another bar after that because it was Yuko's boyfriend, Yoshi's birthday. Along the way, we passed strange and interesting sights.

Yukari and I really deep down feel sorry for this octopus, which will become takoyaki one day.

And I met some friends of my own. The drinking Japanese raccoon brought us together.

And a dragon invites passersby to come sing karaoke.

More to drink, more to eat, more craziness.

Cassie, Yuki, me, Yuko and Yukari at the second restaurant.

We called it a night around midnight because we needed to catch the subway. Also everyone was pretty tired.

Saturday Cassie decided to call off work and come with me to Kyoto. We first headed to Kinkaku-ji, the Golden Temple. Uh...it was nice. I wasn't really all that taken with it, but it was cool to see.

While we were there, it snowed a little bit. It was pretty warm in Osaka but colder in Kyoto. We then shopped for a minute and then got on a bus, crowded, nay packed with people to go to Gion.
I had wanted to go to Gion because of reading "Memoirs of a Geisha." Gion was historically the geisha district, but has dropped off quite a bit. Now it is very rare to see any geisha unless you shell out a few hundred dollars. I guess I was expecting rows of old teahouses, but Gion is actually very modern and full of shops.

Cassie and I eventually found a street full of old teahouses, but unfortunately we didn't see any geisha.

Cassie and I at one end of the street.

We were hungry so we wandered into a restaurant, thinking they actually had food. It was a teahouse, however, and so we split a dessert of green tea and vanilla ice cream, wafers, and a lot of other stuff we mostly didn't know what it was.
But our waitress was really sweet and spoke English. I told her she was very pretty and she said so was I. Awww.

We then headed back to Osaka where Giordan had dinner waiting for us. I taught Cassie how to play kongi (Korean jacks) and we just mostly hung around and went to bed early. I watched several episodes of "Desperate Housewives" because Cassie had a bunch of tapes and I couldn't sleep. So I got my fix of American TV for the weekend.

To be continued in the next...